The 4 Stages of Reading the Bible (And Why Most People Never Get Past Stage 2)

Most of us were handed one way to read the Bible. And honestly? It worked. For a while. But if you've hit a wall where the Bible feels stale, or your theology started cracking under the weight of real questions, you're probably not broken. You just might be stuck in stage one or two.In this video I'm walking through four stages I think we all move through when we engage Scripture. Stage one is devotional. It's the open-eyed, life-is-fresh, underlining-verses phase. Beautiful. But it has a drop-off. Stage two is systematic. You want to know what you believe and why, so you start proof-texting your way to certainty. The problem is that systematic theology can shut your brain off or make you read things into the text that aren't there. Stage three is the stage of questions, where your theology starts to fail you and the cracks get interesting. And stage four? That's the "why didn't anyone tell me this" moment. Welcome to academia. Welcome to the Deuteronomists. Welcome to a bigger, stranger, more honest Bible than the one you grew up with.