Your Beliefs Do Not Come From God or From the Bible

You believe something because that is the interpretation you have chosen, or were given, or both.

Dear Christian,

Your beliefs do not come from God.

They don’t even come from the Bible.

They come from your interpretation of the Bible.

Actually, to be even more precise…

…they come from influences that shaped you (and continue to shape you) such as family, culture, personality, and yes, to some extent, reading ancient literature identified as sacred and inspired.

But hear me out: reading anything—the Bible included—demands that you (the subject) make interpretive decisions about what you’re reading (the object).

There’s no such thing as the unaffected, pure transference of information from “black shapes on a white page” to the neuropathways in your brain. (That sentence is worth a re-read)

You may truly believe that your beliefs come straight from God (via His Word), but it doesn’t work that way.

It cannot work that way.

For starters, every word you read is a choice that someone before you made. And their choice sits on top of a previous person’s choice. And so on it goes—who knows how far back or how many times.

This does not make the words you read inherently lack credibility. I’m not saying the translations are doomed for unreliability. I’m just needing you to appreciate that you’re reading a translation of

a translation of

a translation of

a translation.

And at each step along the way, choices had to be made.

Interpretive choices.

The point to be made here is the need for awareness to the fact that you are not, and cannot be, reading a pure, unfiltered account of the mind of God.

In addition to the interpretative choices that translators made before you, when you read the Bible, you too are making real time translation decisions in your own mind. And that process is affected by all manner of things:

• the context of your upbringing;

• your emotional well-being;

• your personality (what you focus on versus what you ignore/repress);

• what you recall from being taught about this idea or that word from some previous mentor;

• your presuppositions about who God is and what the Bible is,

and so on (just to name a few).

Can you see what this all means?

Every time you read the Bible, you are doing acts of interpretation—on top of other people’s acts of interpretation.

You read,

you interpret,

you attempt to understand,

then you formulate a belief.

Voila, your belief is based on your INTERPRETATION of the text (not on “the text itself,” and certainly not on “What God said”).

But listen to me, dear reader, there’s nothing wrong with you believing a certain thing. Go for it! We all do it.

But where it gets wrong (and by “wrong” I mean, inconsistent with what is Real), is when you assert that your belief comes straight from God through reading the Bible.

When you fail to appreciate the layers of interpretation happening between “words on page” and “beliefs formed in mind,” you make not just a fool of yourself, but you make a god of yourself.

Now, of course, some interpretations are better than others.

But that’s a discussion for a different day.

For today, it is enough to simply know that you do not believe something because “that is what the Bible says that God says.”

You believe something because that is the interpretation you have chosen, or were given, or both.

Knowing the distinction between these two attitudes is key.

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The above post originally appeared in a carousel of ten graphics on Instagram. I posted it last week and it went on to become the second most engaged piece of content I’ve ever posted on that platform.

If you enjoyed this read, and are on IG, consider liking and/or sharing it!

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