If you have studied a passage carefully and it still bothers you, that does not by itself mean you misread it, and it does not mean the Bible has failed. It may mean you have moved from one kind of problem to another. Esau McCaulley draws the line plainly. Some difficulties are interpretive: more study can close them. Others are theological: you understand the passage correctly, and it collides with your picture of God. The second kind is a normal part of reading Scripture seriously. Demanding that it feel resolved may be the wrong goal.
What kind of problem are you actually having?
The word “bothers” covers very different situations. A passage can bother you because you have mistaken what kind of writing it is. It can bother you because you have applied a promise to people it was never addressed to. Or it can bother you because you have read it rightly and dislike what it says. These call for different responses, and treating them as one problem is where much confusion begins.
Genre is the first trap. Proverbs describe how the world generally works; they are not contracts. Proverbs 22:6 reads, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” A parent who did exactly that and watched a child walk away may feel the verse has lied. But that parent has read a proverb as a guarantee. The grief is real, and the fault lies in the reading.
The Psalms work differently again. They are prayers, and part of their purpose is honesty before God. A psalmist asking for his enemies’ destruction is telling God about his own experience, not instructing the reader. McCaulley adds that the Christian hears such cries in light of how God finally answers them, by sending his Son to die for the sins of the world.
Covenant confusion is the second trap. 2 Chronicles 7:14 says, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” The promise was spoken to Israel, within a covenant that tied obedience to blessings like crops and food. McCaulley warns against applying it directly to the United States or treating it as a formula for material reward. In the new covenant, he argues, what the Christian receives is Jesus, the Spirit and a transformed life. Peter himself still expected the older pattern when he asked what the disciples would get for leaving everything (Matthew 19:27).
Treating description as command is the third trap. The patriarchs had multiple wives, and David did too, so someone might conclude the Bible approves. Yet the narratives almost always show competition, division and suffering in those households. The lesson is that God was gracious to people despite their sin. That frees the reader from defending what the text never defends. As McCaulley puts the point, you can call Abraham’s deception about his wife in Egypt wicked and still see God’s mercy toward him.
All three cases share a structure. The discomfort comes from a premise the reader brought, and examining the premise often makes the discomfort go away.
Have you studied it, or only reacted to it?
Before concluding that you face a theological problem, McCaulley asks an uncomfortable diagnostic question: have I studied this passage, or have I simply memed it? The cycle he describes is familiar. A passage bothers you. You move on. A year later it bothers you again, you find an online post naming the same complaint, and that feels like confirmation.
Against that cycle stand scholars who spend their careers on the history, language and world of these texts, and roughly two thousand years of Christian reflection on them. The useful questions are specific. Have you opened a commentary and read what two or three scholars say? Have you looked at how the church handled the issue? Have you read a whole book on it? McCaulley is pointed about people who think they have found an objection no one ever considered, as if no one had ever thought about the problem of evil or suffering.
A feeling that a passage has no answer shows only that you have not found one yet. Only study can tell you whether an answer exists.
What if you understand it and it still bothers you?
Suppose the reading is correct. You know what the passage says, and that is exactly what troubles you. McCaulley calls this good news, because “that means you’re doing theology.”
Over years of reading, a Christian forms some picture of who God is, who Jesus is and what the church should be doing. Passages then get ordered by that picture. When one seems to violate it, you are recognizing a conflict between a text and your theology. That act of comparison is systematic theology, whether or not you would use the term.
Many readers assume that a lingering objection proves either their own failure or the Bible’s. That is a false choice. A third explanation is available: the friction shows you are holding the text and your understanding of God side by side and refusing to let either one quietly win.
Should understanding feel like relief?
Underneath the original question sits an assumption: if I truly understood a passage, it would stop bothering me. For certain texts, McCaulley rejects that premise.
He names two. One is the conquest narratives and the slaughter of the Canaanites. The other is Genesis 22, where Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac and is stopped at the last moment. Facing passages like these, he asks himself, “is this the kind of problem that God actually wants me to solve?” He does not think any reading removes the deep unease. What remains, in his words: “I may understand this text enough to be able to continue to function as a Christian, but it doesn’t mean that this question is answered to my satisfaction.” And: “sometimes what it means to be a Christian is to live in that tension.”
Understanding and emotional satisfaction are separate outcomes, and you can reach the first without the second. Measure success by the second alone and you will judge yourself a failure at something no careful reader fully achieves. Every theological system meets this. A strong Calvinist finds verses that seem to make human choice decisive. A strong Arminian finds verses that stress God’s sovereignty. A committed Baptist finds passages that give pause. McCaulley’s conclusion: “no one’s construction of the data accounts for every single verse in a way that’s completely emotionally satisfying.”
Isn’t this just a way to protect faith from any evidence?
This is the strongest objection. If every troubling passage can be parked as tension to live with, nothing could ever count against a belief. A view that no evidence can touch is not humble. It is closed.
McCaulley’s position avoids that trap in two ways.
First, it has a limit. He compares theology to a puzzle. Rarely does every piece fit, and two or three usually sit off to the side. But when too many pieces are off the board, he says, “your theology is actually whacked.” You may “have real theological error, and that you constructed an account of God that actually doesn’t do justice to the scriptures.” A few unplaced pieces are expected. A pile of them is evidence that the picture is wrong and must be rearranged.
Second, he applies the standard to himself. Though fairly confident in what he holds, he adds, “I’m always willing to understand that I might be wrong.” A view that names the conditions for its own revision is not sealed off from evidence. It declines to let one piece of evidence carry more weight than it can bear.
Part of the objection survives. No one can say exactly how many unfitted pieces are too many; judgment is involved, and honest readers will draw the line in different places. Even so, one anomaly and fifty anomalies are different situations, even if no one can say whether the line falls at eleven or twelve.
What goes wrong when one verse rules everything?
McCaulley’s name for the opposite error is “the Lord of the Rings theology,” letting one verse rule them all. A passage you cannot understand becomes the hinge of your whole faith, and because it will not resolve, you conclude you cannot go on. He calls that myopic, because “we are not understanding our limitations as human beings.”
The mistake is one of weighting. A single unresolved passage is treated as if it outweighed everything else you know. McCaulley reverses the question: “is there enough evidence in my own life, in the life of the church and in the scripture themselves for me to continue to trust God?” Even in the hardest passages, he says, the unease rarely outweighs “the confidence that I have, that the tomb was empty on the third day.”
The resurrection does not explain the conquest narratives. Its role in the argument is to supply a reason to trust God that does not wait on every hard passage being settled first. So it is honest to land where McCaulley does: “I may never understand this passage, but that doesn’t mean that God hasn’t shown me enough information to trust him.”
How does reading the whole canon change a hard verse?
The alternative is to read canonically, putting passages in conversation and asking “what best combination or interpretation of all of these passages accounts for all of the data?” McCaulley demonstrates with 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, where Paul tells women to keep silent in the churches. He grants that Paul says this. But in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul discusses how women should be dressed when they pray or prophesy, which assumes they are doing so. McCaulley therefore argues that chapter 14 addresses a particular situation, likely tied to the weighing of prophecies, and offers several possible historical scenarios. He then widens the lens to women prophesying in Acts and to figures such as Phoebe and Priscilla.
Readers who weigh these same texts reach different conclusions. Complementarians hold that some leadership or teaching roles are reserved for men; egalitarians hold that women are called to every level of leadership. Jude 3 Project deliberately takes no house position on the question, which is why the example matters here for its method. McCaulley tests a reading against the surrounding letter, then the wider New Testament, and commits to revising if he meets “something that gives a better account” of the data. Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, that habit keeps one verse from swallowing the rest. He promises only that such steps reduce confusion and give enough evidence to keep going, a smaller promise than many readers want, and a more believable one.
Where does the real difficulty lie?
McCaulley ends with an inversion that changes what the original question is about: “the real struggle for being a Christian is not the things that I don’t understand about the Bible. It’s the things that I do.” He names what Scripture makes clear: loving God, loving your neighbor, serving him and living a holy life by the Spirit’s power. When the hard texts overwhelm you, he says, think about what you understand.
That corrects a quiet distortion. A reader can spend years circling the conquest narratives while the plain command to love an enemy goes unpracticed. The unresolved passages still deserve study. They give no license to postpone the clear ones, and the clear ones are often the harder test.