A workable method for reading the Bible on your own already exists, and it fits on an index card. Dr. Luke Bobo calls it SCAR: sit with the text, study its context, analyze how it is written, and ask what redemptive remedy God offers for the human condition the passage reveals. Knowing the four letters is the easy part. This guide is about the harder part, which is doing them often enough that they become the way you read.
The guide trains three practices. You repeat each one every time you open a passage until you no longer have to think about it. You can work through it alone over a week or two, or with a group across two or three meetings. The training text throughout is Mark 1, the chapter Bobo himself uses as his example. Near the end comes a harder passage, Malachi 1:1-5, to test whether the habits hold when the text pushes back.
Bobo trained as an electrical engineer before he studied divinity, and he chose an acronym because engineers rely on them. The point of an acronym is that you can carry it into a room without the book. That is the goal here too.
Before you read anything: write down what you already think
Take a sheet of paper. Without opening your Bible, write one sentence that answers this: What is Mark 1 about? If you have never read it, write what you would guess from the gospel stories you have heard. Fold the paper and put it away. You will come back to it at the end.
This step matters because of something Bobo says about repeated reading: “if you read it repeatedly, you may find that what you thought you knew, you really don’t know.” Most of us carry summaries of passages that came from sermons, songs or memory rather than from the page. The folded sentence is a record of your summary before the text has had a chance to correct it.
If you are leading a group, have everyone do this privately. Nobody reads their sentence aloud yet. Lisa Fields observed in her conversation with Bobo that people who have been in church a long time often stay silent about what they do not understand, because “they’re scared to ask because they feel like they should know.” A guide on interpretation should not open by putting anyone on the spot.
The four moves and why their order matters
Bobo calls SCAR a disciplined, stepwise approach. The steps are not a menu. Each one prepares the next.
- Sit. Read the passage many times, with a pencil, writing down questions as they come.
- Context. First the literary setting, meaning the passages around it. Then the cultural and historical setting: politics, philosophy, education, social customs, the marketplace.
- Analyze. Look closely at words, sentence structure, figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and hyperbole, and the shape of the passage.
- Redemptive remedy. Name the human condition the passage exposes, then ask what God offers for it.
The order follows the historical-grammatical instinct of reading what the author meant before deciding what it means for you. Bobo describes the context step as an attempt to step into the first audience’s world: “I want to transport myself back to that time to reenter that space and time to understand how the first audience understood what the author was saying.” Only after that does the last letter ask about your life. If you jump to R, you have often skipped the reading that would have kept your application honest.
The three practices below put those four moves into motion. Each practice is small enough to repeat with every passage you study.
Practice one: the slow read with a question log
Bobo’s first instruction requires no training at all: “Sit with the text and just read it and read it, and read it and read it.” For Mark 1, he suggests at least 20 readings. He mentions that his friend Robert Smith told seminary students to read the chapter 50 times. Twenty readings of a 45-verse chapter is not a single sitting, so spread them out.
Here is how to do it.
- Divide the readings across several days, perhaps three or four a day. Read aloud at least once a day. Hearing the text slows you down.
- Keep a page titled Questions beside you. Bobo’s purpose for the pencil is “to interrogate the text.” Write only questions, not answers. Why does Mark begin where he does? Who is this person, and why does that detail appear here? What happened just before this scene?
- After every fifth reading, draw a line across the page. You will be able to see which questions came early and which only appeared later.
- Do not open a commentary, study note or search engine yet. That restraint is the next practice.
Look at your page after the readings are done. The questions below the later lines are usually the most interesting, because they come from noticing rather than from first confusion. If a reading felt dull, note which one. Dull readings are often where the mind stops supplying the familiar summary and starts seeing the actual words.
Start with the first verse, which reads: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). After a dozen readings, ask what Mark seems to mean by calling this a beginning, and whether the rest of the chapter gives you any clues.
Practice two: text first, tools second
The second habit is about restraint. Bobo puts it bluntly: “our tendency is once we sit down with the Bible, is reach for a Bible dictionary or a commentary before we’ve allowed the Bible to speak to us personally.” He values those tools and recommends maps, reputable commentaries and good Bible dictionaries. He simply puts them second. A reader who has spent time in the passage is better able to notice when a reference book gets something wrong, which he says can happen.
Once your question log is full, take it through the context and analysis steps in this sequence.
- Read the neighbors. For Mark 1, Bobo reads Mark 2 to see how it shapes his questions about the first chapter. Do the same. Mark beside each question on your log whether Mark 2 helped, complicated it, or said nothing.
- Pick one world question. Choose a single question about customs, geography or the political situation. Look it up in a Bible dictionary or atlas. If you also search online, Bobo’s rule is to compare what you find with printed resources, because on the internet, as he warns, everyone’s an expert and some of what is posted is not biblically sound.
- Compare translations. Keep the King James Version as your main text and set two or three others beside it. Bobo recommends owning several translations because, as he says, “we don’t want to give translators the benefit of the doubt.” Where they differ, write down what the difference is. You are not trying to crown a winner. You are learning where translators had to make choices.
- Use the microscope. In Bobo’s words, “I’m going to get out my microscope and analyze words.” Choose one verse. Mark its key words, any figure of speech and any repetition. Look for patterns, including what Bobo calls chiasmus, a structure in which ideas are stated and then echoed in reverse order. You do not need the term to notice the pattern.
Only now turn to R. Bobo says “God’s word addresses every human condition,” and his question for the final step is “what remedy does God address or offer for that human condition?” Write two short lines: the condition you see in Mark 1, and what God offers in response. Let these come from the chapter itself. If you cannot yet write them with confidence, that is useful information. It tells you which earlier step needs more time.
Practice three: test it out loud
Bobo locates the greatest danger at the end of the process: “Most of the heresy occurs in the application.” He builds three safeguards into his method, and the third practice turns them into a routine you run before trusting a conclusion.
Pray before you start and before you conclude. Bobo’s counsel is to “never rely on your own intellect or knowledge to interpret the Bible,” because “we come to the Bible as a foreigner.” Parts of Scripture were written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, inside customs that are not ours. Asking for the Holy Spirit’s guidance is an admission that you are a guest in the text.
Check your reading against the long conversation. If your conclusion is far from how believers read the passage a hundred or a thousand years ago, Bobo says you need to seriously question both your interpretation and your application. In practice, read one reputable commentary or historical source on your passage and note where it agrees or disagrees with you. A new reading may still be right, but its newness calls for more care.
Say it to another believer. Bobo has found that “one of the things I find that helps critical thinking is for people to think out loud or to speak out loud.” He describes what happens next: “as they hear themselves talking, they may say, that sounds right, or maybe I need to rethink what I just said.” So explain your R lines to someone who has walked with Scripture longer than you, such as a pastor, a mature friend or a group member. Ask them one direct question: Where do you think I might be wrong?
Lisa Fields describes this as a kind of peer review for ordinary believers, and her counsel is short: “Be open to being wrong, and be open to be challenged.” She also warns that “studying done in isolation can be problematic when you get into difficult passages.” Reading for yourself is the goal. Reading by yourself is the risk.
For groups: give each person two minutes to say their R lines aloud without interruption. Then let others ask questions before anyone offers an alternative. Anyone may pass. The aim is to hear a reading tested, not to judge the person who offered it.
A harder passage: Malachi 1:1-5
Once the three practices feel familiar with Mark 1, try them on a text that resists. Bobo describes struggling with Malachi 1:1-5, where the Lord says, “I loved Jacob, And I hated Esau” (Malachi 1:2-3). He did not guess, and he did not give up. He called a former professor, who helped him read the word in context. Bobo’s summary of what he learned is direct: “Hate in that particular passage means to not choose.”
He links it to Jesus’ saying in Luke 14:26 about hating father and mother. He does not read that as permission for vindictive feeling. In his words, “Christ wants to be first place, so I need to love less mom and dad.”
Run all three practices on Malachi 1:1-5 before you accept or reject that reading. Read it many times and log your questions. Then read the rest of the chapter, and look up who Edom was. Compare how several translations handle verses 2 and 3. Finally, test your conclusion aloud with someone else. Keep in mind that Paul quotes this passage in Romans 9, and Christians differ on how that chapter relates to election and free will. Bobo’s point here concerns the meaning of the word in Malachi’s setting. Note where your own questions lead into that larger debate, and treat it as a conversation faithful readers are still having rather than something one passage settles.
Questions for conversation
These work for a group or for personal reflection. None of them has an expected answer.
- Which of your later questions on Mark 1 would you never have asked after one reading? What made it visible?
- When you held back from commentaries, what did you notice about your own impulses? Was the restraint freeing, frustrating, or both?
- Where did two translations differ in a way that changed how you understood a verse? How would you decide between them?
- Bobo locates most error in application. Think of a verse you have heard applied in a way that later seemed wrong to you. Which SCAR step was skipped?
- Of the three safeguards, which do you naturally avoid? What would it take to make it part of your routine rather than an occasional step?
- After working through Malachi 1:1-5, how confident are you in your conclusion? What evidence would change your mind?
Back to your first sentence
Unfold the paper from the beginning. Read your sentence about Mark 1 next to your R lines and your question log. Did the chapter confirm your summary, sharpen it, or replace it? Write a second sentence underneath the first, and leave both visible.
Then choose the next passage you will study, and decide now when your readings will happen, which book of context you will use after the readings are finished, and whom you will ask to hear your conclusion. The habit is built in that ordinary planning: slow reading with a pencil, tools in their proper place, and a conclusion you are willing to say aloud to someone who might disagree.