Reading faithfully is necessary, and it is still not enough by itself, because faithfulness does not erase where you are standing when you read. The text says what it says. Every reader brings a location to it, and a circle of readers who share one location will share the same blind spots. Dennis Edwards, a New Testament professor and longtime pastor, argues that the remedy is reading inside a Christian community that stretches across centuries, countries, generations and the whole body of believers. That wider circle tightens your hold on Scripture by showing you more of what is already there.
“Read with diverse voices” can sound like a slogan. Edwards makes a more specific argument, and its parts hold up better than the slogan does.
Location Shapes Attention, Not Meaning
The problem with a narrow circle is location. Edwards states the principle plainly: “Our station in life is always a factor in whatever we’re doing.” He made the point about preaching, but it reaches every reader. Your schedule, your money, your history and your standing in society shape which questions feel urgent when you open the text.
His example is concrete. A person working two jobs while the church asks for committee service and Bible study attendance has less time to spare than someone with financial stability. In his words, “The status that we have in society, privilege, if you will, is a factor in everything.” The claim concerns attention and access. The Bible keeps one meaning for every social class.
That distinction keeps the argument honest. Location governs what you notice, what you skip and what you assume a passage must be about. When everyone you read with shares your location, nobody in the room is positioned to catch what all of you miss.
Distance From the Text and Nearness to It
Edwards holds two things together that readers often pull apart. The first is distance. The Bible is an ancient library, written in its own world over many years, and he warns against treating it like a novel bought at the store and assigned whatever meaning comes to mind. His example is Jesus’s command to go into all the world. “What’s all the world to somebody in the first century?” The original hearers pictured the world very differently from us, and respecting that difference is part of reading well.
The second is nearness. Edwards points to Paul’s words to Timothy:
“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).
Scripture has a purpose, and the Spirit who inspired it wants readers to understand what it teaches about God. Edwards describes his own posture this way: “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 who believes the Spirit is at work in them could conclude that they need no one else. Edwards draws the opposite conclusion, and his beliefs fit together. The Spirit is given to the whole church. If the Spirit is at work in believers elsewhere and in earlier centuries, then listening to them is one way of listening to the Spirit.
His own formation shows how a narrow circle protects itself. As a young Christian he heard someone say the Bible should be taken seriously rather than literally. “I admit I was offended,” he said. He had been raised in a setting that taught everything must be read literally, and he notes that some circles treat literal as if every passage were a command, when some passages describe events rather than prescribe behavior. Over time he saw that this habit failed to respect the different kinds of writing in Scripture. When Isaiah says the trees will clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12), nobody thinks trees have hands.
The mechanism matters more than the specific issue. A closed circle teaches its members to hear an outside reading as an attack on the Bible itself, so offense becomes the first response and correction never gets a hearing. Edwards grew because he stayed with the discomfort long enough to test the outside claim against the text.
Who Has Been Allowed to Explain the Bible
The question also runs through institutions. Whoever gets trained, published and platformed to explain the Bible shapes what millions of people assume it means.
Edwards offers one data point from his own life. He says that he became the first African American graduate in biblical studies with a PhD from Catholic University in Washington, DC, and that he earned it while working hard and raising four children, without the money to study abroad and finish quickly. A first like that says something about who had been in the room interpreting Scripture at that level.
He describes a second pattern in publishing. He has seen books by people of color written largely to white readers, as if the main task were to help that audience understand and change its thinking. He respects that work, but in Might from the Margins he chose to write for his own community instead. He also names the experience of white Christians speaking for Black believers and offering to empower them. His reply: “No, we already have power. We have power that comes from the gospel.” He wants believers on the margins to stop waiting for white people to put them in leadership positions and to take up the work together.
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, who interviewed him, added a pastor’s observation from her own ministry: that apologetics resources are rarely created for Black congregations, and the people who make them rarely come to those churches to equip them. Taken together, these remarks describe a pattern in who writes, who is addressed and who is served. The conversation does not go further into seminary faculties or denominational structures, and it offers no statistics. The claim stands on testimony from people inside the work.
Edwards also resists treating “the margins” as one voice. His list of those society pushes aside includes women, people of color, immigrants and people with physical disabilities. Their experiences differ, and so do their questions of the text. Black readers differ among themselves too. Edwards himself came up in a strict literalist setting he later outgrew, and he spent about thirty years pastoring in New York, Washington, DC and Minneapolis. A wider circle means more than adding one demographic. It means letting many locations, inside and outside your own community, speak to the same passage.
Hardship Has Never Excused Shallow Reading
One way the circle narrows is from the inside. Fields asked whether a preaching style that stays among abstract theological concepts reflects a comfortable congregation: “I think sometimes focusing on theological concepts is a part of privilege.” Edwards agreed that our place in society shapes what we get to spend time on, then rejected the conclusion that struggling people should be spared serious theology.
His evidence is historical. The early Christians who received the apostles’ letters were mostly ordinary people, some enslaved, some farmers, some in service work. As Edwards puts it, they were people who “were not necessarily privileged people,” yet the apostles wrote demanding theology to them. He then turns to his African American forebears, “people who are coming out of slavery, who took it as a privilege to be able to read and write.” He treats their hunger to read God’s word for themselves as an inheritance: “I feel like I owe it to my forebearers to do the best I can to steward the education that I’ve been blessed to have.”
Here the narrowing works through self-assessment. A reader who assumes serious interpretation belongs to seminaries and suburban study groups has accepted someone else’s map of who counts. Edwards’s forebears refused that map. “But I would like to think that God will reward our efforts to learn more about him regardless of our place in society.”
He names a newer narrowing as well. Many young preachers, he observes, model themselves after television figures with large followings, and he urges them to love the people actually in front of them. A feed of a thousand clips from the same few famous teachers is still a small circle.
A Circle That Spans Time, Place and Generation
Edwards’s proposal is specific. “Part of the interpretive process that I advocate in the book is allowing biblical interpretation to be done in the context of Christian community.” He wants that community to stretch across both time and geography. “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.”
Believers from earlier centuries check the habits of the present moment. Believers in other countries check the habits of your own nation. He extends the circle inside a single congregation too: “I need my older saints. I need the younger saints. I need the men and the women.” And then: “I need a variety of us to help shape our practices and our beliefs and our convictions.”
Paul’s picture of the church fits this logic:
“And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12:21).
Paul is addressing spiritual gifts and division in Corinth, so applying the verse to Bible reading is an extension of his point. A body that listens to only one kind of member is missing parts.
Edwards also locates a payoff that a lecture cannot supply. “Sometimes the application of those things is not gonna come from the pulpit. It’s gonna come from us in relationship with other sisters and brothers.” Readers who live differently show you the text being obeyed in situations you have never faced: “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.”
Acts 8:30–31 narrates a scene that fits. Philip hears an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah and asks, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” The man answers, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Acts describes this event without making it a rule for every reader. It still pictures a sincere, capable reader, holding the right text, helped by someone who stood in a different place.
Is This Relativism With Better Manners?
This is the strongest objection. If every location shapes reading, does every reading become equally valid?
Edwards rejects that conclusion. He can hold disagreement: “I can tolerate an awful lot of difference and disagreement.” He also says, “I tend to think that truth wins out in the end.” Wider reading assumes there is a truth worth getting closer to. A relativist has no reason to consult anyone, since every view would already be as good as any other. Edwards consults others because some readings are better than others and he wants his own corrected.
His summary is precise: “Because none of us has like this premium on the truth alone.” Your tradition may be right about a great deal and still need correction at points it cannot see from inside.
Reading widely also has a real limit. It will not settle every disputed passage. Faithful Christians in every culture still disagree on secondary questions, and a global circle will surface those disagreements. Edwards models how to hear a reading you reject. He affirms that the Hebrew Scriptures anticipate a fulfillment in Christ, and he acknowledges that his Jewish friends read them differently. Hearing that reading clarifies why he holds his own.
The Witness at Stake
Edwards connects all of this to how the church is seen. Reflecting on 1 Peter, he argued that “the best apologetic for the Christian faith is healthy Christian community.” The verse often cited for defending the faith reads:
“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15).
Edwards affirms that believers must be ready to answer, and he notes how much weight the letter places on the way Christians live among their neighbors.
Narrow reading does its quietest damage here. Groups that read only with themselves learn to treat other believers as opponents instead of members of the same body, and the habit spills from the study table into public life. Edwards said of the church in the United States, “I think it’s hard for people to see Jesus in our division.” Choosing who you read the Bible with is a choice about which parts of Christ’s body you believe you need, and the world watches how that choice turns out.