There’s an entire industry cranking out versions of the Bible that are supposed to make it more readable; I’ve even seen a Bible that looks like Teen magazine. The assumption is that today’s Christians find the Bible to be a tough read. So I’m not one to guilt anyone about never having read the Bible.

But I have read it – or, at least, I have heard most of it. You see, over the centuries, we’ve developed a way of reading tiny chunks of the Bible each week in church. If you attend church every week for three years, you’ll have heard most of the Bible read – certainly all the most important parts. And this is the best way to do it, because everything in the Bible was intended to be read out loud in a community, not alone in the privacy of one’s bedroom.

You may occasionally hear someone refer to himself as a “Bible-believing Christian.” Does this mean believing that every word of the Bible is historical fact, or that all the assumptions it makes are true? A lot of people think so; but I don’t think many of those people have actually read the Bible. And if they have, I’m not sure they were paying close attention.

While we do consider the Bible to be the ultimate source of wisdom for Christians, there are lots of things in it that we don’t believe in anymore. We have abolished slavery. Men don’t have multiple wives, and we’re working hard to give women the same rights and respect as men. We don’t think it’s OK to massacre entire populations so we can take their land. No, God does not change, but human ideas about God do and should.

As Christians, we assert that the Bible contains everything we need in order to be in a healthy relationship with God. But that’s not to say it can’t be misused. When we act as if God wrote the Bible, in English, word for word, we’re missing the point. The Bible is a history of different people’s ideas about God. It’s not edited into a neat theological treatise. Our job as Christians is to listen closely and discern, as a community, what we think God is like. Sometimes we learn more from one wrong idea than we could from ten right ideas. Or, as my wise friend Katrina once said, “Not all Scripture is created equal.”