What If We Taught Them How to Look?
I still don’t love the word deconstruction when we’re talking about faith.
Maybe that’s because I was never interested in destroying my faith. I wasn’t trying to bulldoze Jesus and walk away from the pile of burning rubble. I just wanted to know what was true. And not the version of truth that contained a nugget of Jesus surrounded by layers of human rules, assumptions, fear, culture, and things nobody seemed particularly interested in letting me examine too closely.
I wanted the whole truth.
So maybe disentanglement is a better word for what happened to me. Although, if I’m honest, there were parts of the building that absolutely needed to come down.
I think those of us who are GenX have had some serious reckoning moments with the faith of the 70s and 80s. That faith foundation was often shaped more by rules, and pride, and prosperity given through rules and pride. Some of us eventually discovered that the foundation needed more than a cosmetic remodel. We tore things down. We busted pieces of that foundation to smithereens. And then we did the much slower work of going back to the “Master Architect” ourselves.
The strange thing was that Jesus was still there. He had always been the main point. It was everything we had built around him that had gotten jacked up.
One of the stranger parts of rebuilding faith has been discovering how much I was told what to believe without being taught how to examine why I believed it. There were things I could question and things I apparently couldn’t. Some passages I could study; others were better left to someone “more knowledgeable.” There were pastors and teachers and authors who had already done the hard work, and somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that my job was mostly to listen carefully, take good notes, and believe them.
And maybe this is one of the reasons reconstruction can feel so disorienting. You aren’t only revisiting what you believe. You’re learning, sometimes for the first time, how to learn.
Which brings me, as these things so often do lately, back to seminary.
I’m taking a Women in Biblical Perspectives class right now, and one of our texts is an older book on studying Scripture by Kay Arthur. If you were an evangelical woman anytime around the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s, there’s a decent chance her name sounds familiar.
I’ll confess something mildly embarrassing. I judged the book before I read it. It’s old. Really old, at least by textbook standards. Surely, I thought, we have come up with something newer and shinier by now.
Turns out, Past Stacy was a little full of herself.
It also turns out I am actually appreciating this book in ways I certainly didn't expect. The language may feel dated, but observation, interpretation, word studies, concordances, lexicons, dictionaries, and cross-referencing Scripture are not dated ideas.
This week we reached the chapter about studying biblical words and languages.
Greek and Hebrew.
Two words that have historically made me want to hand the Bible to somebody with more degrees than I have and tell them to report back.
As I read about concordances, something began to bother me. I realized I had never actually been taught how to use one. I knew what a Strong’s Concordance was. We owned one. I knew it was enormous and heavy and full of tiny print.
I also knew it as an instrument of punishment.
When I got in trouble as a teenager, I would be given the number of weeks I was to be grounded and then handed the concordance. Whatever my offense was, I was supposed to find the corresponding word, all variations, and write out every verse listed under it.
Lied? Look up lying, lie, liar, lies.
Disobeyed? Find obedience, obey, disobey, disobedience.
You get the idea. I came to hate that book. (I’m tempted to go back and count how many entries related to lying are in Strong’s, but teenage Stacy would probably like us to leave that particular wound alone.)
Even writing that now makes me cry.
Because something that was designed to help me explore Scripture became associated with shame and punishment instead. A tool meant to open the Bible became one more thing telling me that Scripture was primarily there to correct me when I was bad.
And there’s a deep grief in realizing that.
I wonder sometimes where my curiosity might have taken me if those tools had been introduced differently. What if someone had sat beside teenage me and said, “Do you know what this enormous book can help you discover?” What if biblical languages had been presented not as the territory of scholars and pastors, but as another way ordinary believers could learn to listen more carefully?
Here’s what surprised me most about that chapter. I didn’t come away thinking, I should learn Greek. I came away thinking, Wait. I’m allowed to do this.
I’m allowed to look closer.
I’m allowed to ask why a translator chose one English word instead of another.
I can look at how a word is used elsewhere in Scripture.
I can compare translations.
I can use a lexicon.
I can read scholars who disagree with one another.
I can ask difficult questions and keep digging.
And none of that threatens Scripture. If anything, it takes Scripture more seriously.
I’m not arguing, “Forget pastors, teachers, scholars, historical Christianity. I can figure everything out myself.”
What I am saying is that I don’t want to replace one kind of arrogance with another. I need pastors. I need teachers. I need scholars who know Greek and Hebrew far better than I ever will. I need two thousand years of Christians who have wrestled with these texts before me.
But their knowledge doesn’t excuse me from engaging Scripture myself.
Good teachers shouldn’t make us dependent on their conclusions. They should make us better students.
What does all of this mean when I break it down, and this next layer of my faith is being reconstructed? It means that I’m learning new practices. I’m learning to study in ways I was never taught, and in ways that make every part of the Word more accessible. Here are just a few that have come about over the past several years.
Read more than one translation. Not because one is secretly bad, but because noticing where translations differ often shows you what's happening in the original language. (FYI – in my growing-up years, anything but KJV was heresy. It took me a long while to get an NIV, then an ESV, then the CSB – which is my current translation of choice. Don’t even get me started on having a copy of The Message on my shelf…ANATHEMA!)
Learn how to use a concordance and lexicon. Not simply Googling “What does this Greek word really mean?” which can take us into some delightfully weird corners of the internet.
Read people who disagree with you. Not because every interpretation is equally valid, but because assumptions are difficult to recognize when everyone in the room shares them. And you should be able to clearly argue not only your point of view, but one that you disagree with – know why you disagree and be able to speak that to someone else.
Ask questions before rushing toward answers. Who wrote this? To whom? Why? What came before it? What comes after? What would the original hearers have understood?
Let Scripture challenge the system you inherited. Instead of making Scripture fit the conclusion you were handed.
Reconstruction has made me less interested in finding someone who will simply tell me the answer and more interested in learning how they reached it. Maybe this is where some of the redemption lives for me. I can’t go backward and give teenage Stacy a different introduction to Scripture. I can’t remove the fear or legalism from the foundation she was handed.
But I can decide what I hand to the people coming behind me.
Instead of: “Here is what Christians believe.”
Also give them: “Here’s how we study.”
Instead of: “Don’t ask that.”
Give them: “That’s a really good question. Let’s see what we can find.”
Instead of: fearing disagreement
Maybe: “Here are several faithful Christians who understand this passage differently. Let’s look at why.”
I want my grandson, and bonus grandnieces and nephews, the women I lead, and the young adults I get to walk alongside to know that curiosity isn’t rebellion. Questions aren’t the enemy of faith. Learning how to examine Scripture carefully isn’t disrespectful to the teachers who came before us. When done humbly, it is part of loving God with our minds.
I’m still rebuilding.
Apparently, there are more pages in the “Architect’s” plans than I realized, and every so often God hands me another one and says, “You might want to look at this.” This week it looked like a decades-old Bible study book, a chapter on Greek and Hebrew tools, and a Strong’s Concordance I thought I had left safely buried somewhere in the 1980s.
And somehow, even here, God is redeeming things. The tools that once felt like barriers are becoming invitations.
Look closer.
Ask the question.
Learn how to use the tools.
Listen to wise teachers, but don’t surrender your responsibility to know the Word for yourself.
Keep Jesus as the cornerstone.
And when we hand the plans to the generations coming behind us, maybe we don’t only tell them what the building is supposed to look like.
Maybe we teach them how to read the plans.
Photo by Edi Libedinsky on Unsplash
