Sunday, January 25, 2026
Father Richard Rohr encourages us to read the Bible seeking an inner experience instead of authoritative answers:
The amazing wonder of the biblical revelation is that God is very different than we thought and much better than we feared. To paraphrase what evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote about the universe, “God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.” [1] God is not bad news but, in fact, overwhelmingly comforting and good news.
This is what Walter Brueggemann, in Theology of the Old Testament, calls a “credo of five adjectives” that continually recurs in the Hebrew Scriptures: This God that Israel—and Jesus—discovered is consistently seen to be “merciful, gracious, faithful, forgiving, and steadfast in love.” [2]
It’s taken us a long time to even consider that could be true. The only people who really know it to be true for themselves are those who sincerely seek, pray, and often suffer. Outside of inner experience, those are just five more pious words. Outside of our own inner experience of this kind of God, most religion will remain merely ritualistic, moralistic, and doctrinaire.
If we believe in inspiration, and trust that the Spirit was guiding the Bible’s listening and writing—but, like all things human, “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), we will allow ourselves to be led. We will trust that there is a development of crucial divine wisdom inside this anthology of books we call the Bible. Woven amidst these developing ideas are what I have called the “Great Themes of Scripture.”
When we get to the Risen Jesus, there’s nothing to be afraid of in God. Jesus’s very breath is identified with forgiveness and the Divine Shalom (John 20:20–23). If the Risen Jesus is the final revelation of the nature of God’s heart, then we live in a safe and loving universe. But it’s not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus. It’s that we are growing up as we move through the biblical texts and deepen our experience. God doesn’t change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change. If we stay with the text and tend to our inner life with God, our capacity for God will increase and deepen. If we read the Bible merely searching for certain conclusions so we can quickly reassure our “false self,” our spiritual growth will just stop. We will also become a rather toxic person for ourselves and others.
Just as the Bible takes us through many stages of consciousness and salvation history, it takes us individually a long time to move beyond our need to be dualistic, judgmental, accusatory, fearful, blaming, egocentric, and earning-oriented. The text in travail mirrors and charts our own human travail and illustrates all these stages from within the Bible. It offers both the mature and immature responses to almost everything—and we have to learn how to recognize the difference.
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Many Voices; One Text
Monday, January 26, 2026
Authors Jennifer Garcia Bashaw and Aaron Higashi highlight that the Bible includes stories from many voices across different times and cultures:
When considering the Bible, it’s important to keep in mind that it is a multivocal text. To be multivocal simply means that something is composed of many different voices or perspectives. The books that make up the Bible, and the texts that were edited together to make up the books of the Bible, were written in different times, in different places, by different people, in different genres, with different theologies. These differences are easy to recognize when you know to look for them. The voice of a tenth-century BCE court history, for instance, is different from the voice of a sixth-century BCE piece of wisdom literature, which is also different from the voice of a late first-century CE gospel. Just as a quilt is made of many different sections, or an anthology is made of many different essays, the Bible is a collection of independent things. [1]
Spiritual writer Carl McColman describes how recognizing multiple voices in the Bible allows us to center those voices that communicate God’s love, mercy, and justice:
A mystical reading of the Bible sees it as a conversation with many voices chiming in. Unfortunately, some of those voices are racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, or comfortable with the authoritarian exercise of power. But other voices also present in the Bible seek to challenge all of the above, promoting a world where privilege is dismantled, nonviolence is an ethical mandate, and compassion is the guiding principle for both individual behavior and social norms. Learning to read the Bible like a mystic includes learning to recognize all those different voices and discern which ones primarily function as “bad” examples and which ones are truly there to inspire us and draw us closer to God. When we read the Bible to connect with those compassionate and just voices, it is not only the Bible that is saved, but we ourselves also become more whole. [2]
Reading Bible like a mystic allows us to enter into transformative reading:
If you long for a deeper, more mystical relationship with the unnameable mystery we call God, then read the Bible like a mystic: like someone whose life has been illuminated and transformed by immersion in the very heart of divine love. Read from the heart of compassionate love, not from fear or any anxious need to please, placate, or control.
If you want to have a meaningful relationship with the wisdom teachings of Jesus, especially to have those teachings liberated from all the ways that institutional religious Christianity has distorted, misunderstood, or weaponized those teachings in the service of power and authority, then read the Bible like a mystic, for a mystical reading of Scripture can be a way for you to reconnect with the uncreated light that shines at the heart of those ancient words of wisdom and love. [3]
