Does It Matter Who You Read the Bible With

Everyone opens the Bible from somewhere: a home church, a generation, a country, a work schedule. The practice in these pages answers what to do with that fact. Read the same passage with believers who stand somewhere different from you, on purpose and more than once, and let them show you what your own circle skips. The text stays the same. Your view of it gets wider.

You can work through the guide alone over a week, one section a day. A group can cover it in two sessions of about an hour each. The first session ends after the Scripture work and the test. The second is built around the practice, which needs a few days of preparation between meetings. The material draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Dennis Edwards, who teaches New Testament at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago and served as a pastor for about 30 years.

Start with the room where you learned

Before reading anything, take ten minutes with a pen. This first step is private. Nobody in a group has to share what they write, and a leader should say so out loud before anyone starts. Keep the page for the final step.

• Where did you first learn to read the Bible, and who taught you?
• Which three or four passages did that community return to most?
• Which kinds of passages did you rarely hear taught?
• When you picture someone explaining the Bible well, what age are they, what do they sound like, and where do they live?
• Whose explanations of Scripture reach you most often now: a pastor, a podcast, a feed, a parent?

Most people find that their answers point to a small circle. The people in it may have taught you faithfully, and every reader carries a lens. Edwards puts the principle simply when he says that our “station in life is always a factor in whatever we’re doing.” He gives an ordinary example: someone working two jobs has less time for committees and Bible study than someone with financial stability. Location shapes attention. The inventory you just made is a rough map of yours.

Two disciples on one road

Read Luke 24:13-35 slowly, aloud if you can. If you are in a group, have two people read it in turns.

Then look closely before deciding what it means. Who is walking? What are they talking about before Jesus joins them? What does Jesus do with the Scriptures? Verse 27 reads in the KJV: “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” When does their understanding arrive, and what do they do with it? Verse 32 tells you: “And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?”

Be careful about what this passage does and does not do. It is narrative. It describes an event; it does not command any method of group Bible study. Jesus is not a peer offering his perspective. He is the risen Lord explaining his own Scriptures. So this text cannot prove that reading in community is required.

It does show two things worth noticing. First, the disciples understood Scripture in conversation, and their first response was to say it to each other and then go find the others. Second, the reading had a center. Edwards points to this same scene when he explains why Jesus is the center of the Bible: Luke tells us Jesus explained, starting with Moses and the prophets, the things concerning himself. That matters for this guide. A wider reading circle exists to help believers see Christ in the text more clearly than any one group sees him alone.

What Edwards adds

Edwards holds two convictions that might seem to pull against each other. He says: “I respect my distance from the text in terms of time, but I also respect my nearness to the text because the same Holy Spirit who helped to write this text is working in me.”

A reader could take the second half of that sentence as permission to read alone. If the Spirit is working in me, why would I need anyone else? Edwards does not spell out how his nearness to the text connects to reading with others, so what follows is this guide’s inference. If the Spirit who inspired Scripture works in present readers, he works in more than one, and he worked in readers before us. Edwards’s own stated habits fit that reading: “So I want to know what sisters and brothers have been thinking about this text in the past. I also want to know what sisters and brothers outside of the states think about these texts, because our social location matters.” Then he brings it inside a single church: “I need my older saints. I need the younger saints. I need the men and the women.”

Notice where he expects the payoff to show up. He says that “the application of those things is not gonna come from the pulpit” and locates it in relationships between believers. Reading with others lets you watch the text being obeyed in lives unlike yours. In his words, “applications of those texts become clearer because I can see that other people are living in a way that they are applying these texts that might speak to me.”

He also says something practical about his own short book on the Bible: “my encouragement is for people to get a partner or two or a few and work through the book together, because I think it’ll prompt some questions.” A good partner asks you questions you would never have asked yourself.

A test before you go wider

Here is the strongest objection to everything above. If every reader stands somewhere, does every reading become equally valid? Is listening widely just a polite way of giving up on truth?

Edwards does not accept that. “I can tolerate an awful lot of difference and disagreement,” he says, and he also says, “I tend to think that truth wins out in the end.” Wide reading only makes sense if some readings are better than others. A person who thinks every view is equally good has no reason to consult anyone. Edwards consults others because he wants his own reading corrected. His reason is modest: “Because none of us has like this premium on the truth alone.”

That has a cost, and he names it from his own life. As a young believer he heard someone say the Bible should be taken seriously rather than literally. “I admit I was offended,” he says. He had been taught to read everything literally, and only over time did he see that this ignored the different kinds of writing in Scripture, such as poetry where trees clap their hands. Correction from outside your circle often feels like an attack before it feels like help.

So before the practice, try this. Write down one statement about the Bible that you have heard and that bothered you. Then answer two questions on paper. Is it bothering you because it contradicts what the text says, or because it contradicts what you were taught the text says? What would you need to check in the passage itself to tell the difference? You may end up rejecting the statement. That is allowed. The goal is to reject it for reasons found in the text.

The practice: one passage, three tables

This exercise takes about a week. A group should start it at the end of the first session and report back in the second.

1. Choose one short passage that your group thinks it already understands. Luke 24:13-35 works. So does any passage you hear often.
2. Write your own reading first. In three or four sentences, say what the passage says and what it asks of a reader. Do this before consulting anyone, so you have something honest to compare against.
3. Find a voice from an earlier century. Read a sermon, commentary or devotional writing on the passage by a Christian who lived at least a hundred years ago. A pastor or librarian can help you locate one.
4. Find a voice from outside your country. Read or listen to a sermon or commentary from a believer in another nation, or ask a Christian who grew up elsewhere what the passage means to them.
5. Find a voice from another generation in your own church. Ask someone at least twenty years older or younger than you to read the passage and tell you what they notice. Ask the same two questions you answered in step 2.
6. Compare. Make three short lists: where all four readings agree, where someone noticed something you missed, and where someone reads it differently than you do.
7. Test the differences against the text. For each disagreement, go back to the passage and its surrounding verses. Which reading accounts for more of what the passage actually says? Sometimes you will change your mind. Sometimes you will hold your view more clearly than before.

A word for anyone leading a group. Spread the three voices across different members, and let people choose which one they take. Do not appoint the one member whose background differs from the majority to be the group’s source of diversity. In the conversation, Lisa Fields suggested that “I think sometimes focusing on theological concepts is a part of privilege.” Edwards agreed that position shapes what people get to think about, then pointed to early Christians, many enslaved or doing farm and service work, who received demanding theology. Edwards said he hopes “God will reward our efforts to learn more about him regardless of our place in society.” Apply that to step 5: the older retiree and the young parent working two jobs are both readers, and both are worth asking.

Questions for discussion

1. In the practice, which of the three voices showed you the most, and was it the one you expected?
2. This guide suggested that the Spirit’s work in you is a reason to read with others. Do you find that inference convincing? What would weaken it?
3. Pick one disagreement from your comparison lists. Can you restate the other reading so fairly that someone who holds it would agree with your summary? What did that take?
4. Did any voice show you a passage being obeyed in a life unlike yours? What did you see that an explanation alone would not have given you?
5. The two disciples at Emmaus went straight back to tell the others. What does your group currently do with what it learns, and who outside the group ever hears it?
6. When does listening to another reading sharpen your convictions, and when should it change them? How would you tell which is happening?

Keeping it going

Choose one rhythm you will keep for the next three months. You might read one older Christian voice each month on whatever passage your church is studying. You might ask one person from a different generation to read with you every few weeks. A group might rotate who brings an outside voice to each meeting.

Then return to the page you wrote at the start. Read your answer about who explains the Bible to you now, and notice how alike those voices are. Write the answer again as you hope it will read in a year, with the names or kinds of voices you intend to add. Keep the question under the whole exercise somewhere you will see it: which members of Christ’s body have you been reading without?