During the past several weeks (now meeting virtually due to the current coronavirus pandemic), my husband and I have participated in a small group at our church devoted to thinking through our ideas about the Bible—what it is, the relationship between its divine and human origins, and how to read it well. Our pastor explained the reason for the topic choice candidly: the Bible is something many in our community are struggling with—what to make of this book we’d been taught all our lives was divine, but no longer knew quite what to do with.

Put another way, most of us have experienced firsthand that the paradigm we’d inherited for what the Bible is—a clear and detailed revelation of God’s character and will for our lives—doesn’t seem to match our experiences of reading the Bible for ourselves. While we had all experienced God’s presence and work through Scripture, we had also experienced much in Scripture that did more to confuse us than to clarify our understanding of God’s will and character. The more we read, the more questions we have, not answers. If God’s purpose in Scripture is to make His character and will clear, why does that purpose not seem to be often accomplished in our lives, as believers who deeply wanted to know God?

And most of us are also weary and suspicious of the way the Bible is used in our culture to support particular agendas. If the Bible is as clear a revelation as we’ve been taught, why does it seem so easy for others to manipulate and use its contents to reinforce wildly different agendas?

But for each of us, knowing what wasn’t adding up about what we’d been taught isn’t enough. We want to know how to read our Bibles again, how to celebrate and be nourished by the sacred texts that had long been at the center of our faith.

But where to start?

Thankfully, we found as we started this conversation together, there are many who are journeying through similar questions. We are living in a time when there are many people asking these questions, people with the courage to ask hard questions about what they’d been taught, and with the generosity to share their hard-won knowledge and wisdom to others. We don’t have to walk alone on our journeys with Scripture. And for those, like me, who have been taught to silence our questions and doubts about what we’ve found in between the pages of our Bibles, that is no small thing. Just to know that our questions about Scripture are not crazy, or wrong, or a sign that we lack faith.

I think that’s where I’d start if someone asked me what I’ve found helpful in my own journey with Scripture. I am not an “expert” on the Bible, or theology, and I never will be. My journey of encountering God through Scripture is far from over, and I still have endless questions. I think (I hope) I always will. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned in my years of wrestling with Scripture and the teachings of our faith is that questions are good, not problems to be swept under the rug or reduced to simplistic “answers.” For me, it’s in embracing those questions, instead of running from them, that the adventure begins.

As someone who’s long loved literature, it’s freeing to realize that I have permission to encounter the Bible, too, as literature—divinely inspired literature—but literature nevertheless. Because, interestingly enough, I was never taught many of the “rules” about literature that had been stifling my experience of Scripture. For example, those who study literature would never suggest that the genre of fiction or poetry must be interpreted “literally” in order to offer something profoundly true about our world.

What if, in a noble desire to reverence Scripture, I’d been taught to reduce it to our set of expectations for what is true and valuable, rather than God’s? What if we’ve unintentionally made the diversity of genre, perspectives, and contexts in Scripture a problem rather than a gift?

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, in her beautifully written spiritual memoir Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, suggests that, at least for her, Christians’ typical attitude toward Scripture was one that long repelled her from being attracted to Christianity. She writes that “they appeared to . . . bring the Bible into a conversation to stop the conversation, not deepen it. ‘The Bible says’ always seemed to me like a mantra that invited everyone to put his or her brain on hold. . . ‘Jesus is the answer’ seemed to me then and now like a tree without a root. Answers come after questions, not before.”

What if “deepening the conversation” is as much the purpose of Scripture as offering answers? Maybe, like all great literature, the Bible cannot be reduced to a simplistic set or rules or answers. Instead, it seems to draw us into a world that bewilders, fascinates, and draws from our souls questions that matter. And if what we seek is God, wouldn’t that be what we’d expect? Not a set of rules, clichés, or pat answers, but something that invites us into mystery and wonder?

There’s an frequently quoted section from Rainier Marie Rilke that seems particularly appropriate to this journey we find ourselves in as we adventure back into Scripture again, perhaps encountering it as if for the first time:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Monica La Rose