A man in Dr. Luke Bobo’s Sunday school class once came to him privately and admitted that he did not know God the way Bobo did. Bobo heard that confession as a warning sign about how churches handle the Bible. Any believer can learn to interpret Scripture soundly. It takes patience, a method you can repeat, and other believers who will check your work. Bobo wrote a lay person’s guide to biblical interpretation to put those things within reach of people like that man.
What keeps ordinary believers from reading for themselves?
Bobo names the assumption directly: “so many people in the pews think the person standing up preaching is the professional Bible interpreter.” On that view, the congregation receives a reading. The pastor does the interpretive work, and everyone else consumes the result.
He wrote for the people that view leaves out: the Sunday school teacher, the deacon, the church leader, and anyone who wants a companion while working through the Bible. His aim is personal: “I want my friend and others to know our God deeply.” Careful study, in his account, is one of the main ways that knowing happens. The goal is a deeper relationship with God, and method serves it.
Lisa Fields identifies what keeps the professional model in place. People who have attended church for years often feel they should already understand how to interpret Scripture, so they never ask. In her words, “they’re scared to ask because they feel like they should know. And so that shame keeps them still in the dark.”
Bobo sharpened the point. Shame, he said, is “almost like a gag order on a person.” For someone raised in church, “pride and shame would prevent that person from speaking up and saying, I really don’t know.”
That explains why the problem lasts. Many believers who feel locked out of interpretation manage demanding work and complicated families every day. What stops them is the belief that not knowing is a failure. Once that belief settles in, the one thing that would help, an honest question, feels like an admission of guilt.
The sense that interpretation belongs to someone else can have a cultural edge too. Fields observes that most hermeneutics books are written by white men, and that in communities where many have heard Christianity called a white man’s religion, a guide written by a Black author helps answer that suspicion. Bobo said he had never thought of it that way, and he urged African American writers and scholars to add to what sits on seminary shelves. The concern is the same one in another form: the tools for reading Scripture should feel like they belong to the people using them.
A method a lay reader can repeat
Bobo trained as an electrical engineer before he studied divinity, and he jokes that engineering is notorious for acronyms. So he gave lay readers one to remember: SCAR. The letters stand for sitting with the text, studying its context, analyzing it closely, and asking what redemptive remedy God offers. Each step answers the worry that ordinary readers are unequipped.
Sit with it long enough to be surprised
The first step requires no training. “Sit with the text and just read it and read it, and read it and read it.” For the first chapter of Mark, Bobo suggests at least 20 readings. A friend of his who teaches seminary students tells them to read a chapter 50 times.
Repetition exposes what familiarity hides. As Bobo explains, “if you read it repeatedly, you may find that what you thought you knew, you really don’t know.” This turns the shame Fields described on its head. The person who has heard a passage preached for years starts with familiarity, and repeated reading lets that familiarity crack open so the reader sees what the sermons skipped.
Bobo also tells readers to keep paper and a pencil nearby and write down their questions, “in other words, to interrogate the text.” In his method, questions are the work itself.
Read the neighbors, then the world
Context comes in two kinds. Literary context means reading what surrounds a passage; studying Mark 1, Bobo reads Mark 2 to see how it shapes his questions. Cultural and historical context means asking about the politics, philosophy, education, social customs and marketplace of the time. His summary: “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.”
Bobo calls SCAR disciplined and stepwise because readers tend to skip ahead: “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 maps, reputable commentaries and good Bible dictionaries, and he puts them after time spent with the text, partly because a commentary or dictionary can be wrong. A reader who has gone through the passage twenty times is better placed to notice. He also recommends owning several translations, a word-for-word one like the King James Version alongside the NIV and a paraphrase like the Message, and comparing them to see where translators made choices. Online material should be checked against printed resources, since some of it is not biblically sound.
Look closely at how it is written
Analysis is the third step: “I’m going to get out my microscope and analyze words.” Bobo examines sentence structure, metaphors, similes, hyperbole and the overall shape of a passage. One pattern he looks for is chiasmus, an inverted parallelism in which ideas are stated and then mirrored in reverse order. A reader can spot it without knowing the name. Slowing down is enough.
Ask what God offers for the problem the text names
The last step reflects Bobo’s conviction that Scripture is meant to be lived. “God’s word addresses every human condition,” he says, and any passage will expose part of that condition. The question then becomes “what remedy does God address or offer for that human condition?” Reading well should lead somewhere in a person’s life.
What stops everyone from making the Bible say what they want?
This is the strongest objection. If anyone can interpret Scripture, private readings could multiply without limit, and church history has its share of confident readings that went badly wrong.
Bobo takes the danger seriously. Fields recalled a professor who said most errors happen in application, and Bobo agreed: “Most of the heresy occurs in the application.” He built three safeguards into his method for that reason.
The first is prayer for the Holy Spirit’s guidance, grounded in humility about distance. “So we come to the Bible as a foreigner,” he says. Parts of Scripture were written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, inside customs that are not ours. A foreigner can come to know a place well by remembering they are a guest in it. That posture keeps a reader from treating a first impression as the meaning.
The second is the long history of interpretation. If his reading lands far from what believers concluded a hundred or a thousand years ago, Bobo says he needs to seriously question both his interpretation and his application. Novelty calls for caution.
The third is the body of Christ, and Bobo’s own example shows it at work. Studying Malachi 1:1-5, he struggled with the passage where God says he loved Jacob and hated Esau. He called a former Old Testament professor for help. Bobo’s understanding, from that conversation, is that hate in this passage means to not choose, and he compares it to Jesus’ saying in Luke 14:26 about hating father and mother, which he reads as a call to put Christ first. Readers can weigh that interpretation on its merits. The method is the point here: a scholar who wrote a guide to interpretation hit a hard word, and he asked someone who knew more.
Asking for help belongs to interpretation at every level. Fields compares it to scholarly peer review, where work is examined by others before it is trusted. Ordinary believers can practice their own version with pastors, leaders, professors and people who have studied the Word longer. Her counsel: “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.”
Bobo goes further. He worries about people who say they do not need the church, and says “I think those folks are maybe a few steps away from a slippery slope or heresy.” His answer to the objection, then, is to read for yourself without reading by yourself. A church of readers who hold one another accountable is the real alternative to the professional model.
A church where people can think out loud
If that is the alternative, church gatherings need to give people room to talk. Bobo’s doctorate is in rabbinic andragogy, the study of how rabbis taught adults, with a focus on the second-century Rabbi Akiva. From that work and his own teaching, he notes that adults want to see how a lesson applies right away, and that “kids don’t bring any life experience to the table, but adults do bring life experience to the table.” He has also found that “one of the things I find that helps critical thinking is for people to think out loud or to speak out loud.” Hearing themselves explain a passage, people notice when something sounds right and when they need to reconsider.
Fields draws the implication. Much church teaching leaves no space for interaction, and so it leaves little room for critical thought. She recalls learning most in seminary and college through back-and-forth exchanges with professors. Churches that want adults to think more deeply about Scripture, she suggests, should make spaces where people can respond to what is taught and engage it.
Luke’s account of the Bereans shows what that kind of listening looks like. Hearing Paul teach, they were commended this way: “These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). The passage is narrative, so it describes rather than commands, and it should not be stretched into a full method. Still, Luke presents their response as noble. They welcomed an apostle’s teaching eagerly and checked it against the Scriptures themselves, and the two went together.
That is the picture Bobo and Fields point toward. The preacher still preaches, and the scholar still studies. Around them sits a congregation that reads slowly, asks questions without embarrassment, compares notes, and tests what it hears. The man in Bobo’s Sunday school class needed permission to treat his questions as the beginning of knowing God. A church that gives its people that permission has given them the Bible back.
Quick answers
Can I trust what I find online about a passage? Use it carefully. Bobo insists on comparing internet material with printed resources, because on the internet everyone’s an expert and some sources are not biblically sound.
Why compare translations if I already love one? Bobo groups translations into three categories: formal equivalent versions such as the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version, which stay close to word for word; dynamic equivalent versions such as the NIV and the Holman Christian Standard Bible; and paraphrases such as the Living Bible and the Message, which work mostly sentence by sentence. Reading across them shows where translators had to make choices you would otherwise never see.
What should a teacher do differently with adults? Bobo recommends some of the same tools that work with children, like show and tell. He once brought mustard seeds to a lesson on the parable, and he took a class to an archaeology museum to see ancient lamps. Adults also need lessons tied to their workplaces, homes and neighborhoods.
