I spent nearly a decade preaching the Bible and somewhere in there I was also, without fully realizing it, preaching a set of assumptions about the Bible that I had never actually examined. They came with the tradition. They were baked into my education. Nobody handed them to me as a package and said here is what you will believe about Scripture. They just accumulated over years of Sunday school and classes and sermons and small group discussions until they felt less like assumptions and more like the air I breathed.
Unlearning them has been one of the more disorienting and ultimately freeing experiences of my theological life. And it wasn’t because I love the Bible less than I used to. It was because I finally started taking it seriously on its own terms instead of the terms I was handed.
These are the five that did the most damage and took the longest to see clearly:
1. The Bible Wasn’t Written to You
This is the one that changes everything e…