“I love you,” she said, “I just don’t love what you’re doing. I mean, I love you, but I hate your sin.”
The “sin” she was talking about was me, as a woman, being a music pastor.
Meanwhile, she was the Sunday school superintendent and got to oversee male Sunday school teachers.
I went to college to become a church musician. I focused on music, church history, and undergraduate theology. I studied piano, organ, singing, choral directing, music composition, worship leading, and devotional writing. I worked on public speaking and took the honors leadership track to learn what it takes to lead in evangelical Christianity.
I was thoroughly trained and equipped for this position, and yet I was still “wrong” for being made in a woman’s body.
It would have been okay if I held the title of “organist,” but the title of pastor was, apparently, sacred and exclusive to men.
It was okay for me to sing in church, but not to speak. All because of two sets of verses: 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12, which state that the author (traditionally attributed to Paul) didn’t allow women to speak in church. Bible-purists take this literally, for all women, ignoring the complex context surrounding these verses.
In many evangelical circles you’re taught that the Bible is God’s actual words: infallible, inerrant, perfect, useful for every kind of teaching. Some will go so far as to say you don’t need anything else to understand life—everything you need is within the pages of the Bible. And you are not to question what the Bible says; you are to take it at face value. Literally. Women must remain silent and not have authority over men.
I find this view very confusing and contradictory. I mean, I certainly love the Bible—but not in the way they mean. I’m sure I’ll be called a heretic for this, but it won’t be the first time I’ve been ostracized for my beliefs, even when I considered myself conservative.
How can we say that God wrote the Bible when Paul explicitly says he wrote it? “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand” (Galatians 6:11).
The Bible was written by people (with the exception of the Ten Commandments, which the story says God literally wrote on tablets of stone in Exodus).
What the Bible actually is, is a collection of writings from different people groups across different ages. These writings show how particular communities experienced and understood God.
One of my favorite examples of this is the story of Noah and the ark.
In seminary, we had to choose a text and build a case about whether that text was literal or allegorical. At the time, I would have taken Noah’s ark as a literal story. But the Bible isn’t a modern history book—it’s more like an oral history. That means a Bible story may be a story told to offer wisdom (like “the boy who cried wolf”), not a journalistic report.
Around the same time period as the Noah story, there were several different Mesopotamian flood myths. They all had similar themes: an angry god or gods destroyed the earth with a flood, and the hero of the story built a boat to survive. You’ll find these stories in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Epic of Atra-Hasis, and the Sumerian Epic of Ziusudra. In Greek mythology, Zeus sends a flood and the hero and his wife survive in a wooden chest. There are similar stories in Hinduism and Mandaeism as well. In many of these stories, the gods are angry at humanity.
So what made the story of Noah’s ark different?
Noah’s ark takes the shared flood motif and spins it to show that Israel’s God is not just another angry, fickle deity. Noah is saved, and God puts a rainbow in the sky as a sign of a promise: never again will God destroy the earth by flood, showing that God is not angry with his people.
Whether or not someone reads it as strict history, it certainly functions as an epic reworking of a common ancient story to show that the Israelites viewed God differently than the surrounding cultures viewed their gods.
The challenge of the Bible, then, isn’t to try to apply all of it literally, but to discern what parts of the text are wisdom stories, what parts are poetry, what parts are law codes, letters, laments, etc.—and how each of those genres speaks to us. Jesus himself spoke in parables and stories, so why would we not expect something similar throughout the rest of Scripture?
But wait, there’s more.
The Bible wasn’t just handed to us by God as a leather-bound, complete edition. It evolved over years of community life in ancient Israel and the early church. The source material is complex—we have bits and pieces of manuscripts that don’t always add up neatly to a complete whole. Some of the sources and manuscripts are contradictory. Why? Because scribes made copies of copies, by hand.
There was no single, complete “master copy” to check their work against. They just copied the last copy they had. They made errors. They made word choices. They made their own adaptations. So if the source material sometimes contradicts itself, how can we say that the Bible is absolutely inerrant? If we know the scribes made mistakes, how can we insist there aren’t any?
Take some of the harshest lines about women. Many biblical scholars argue that the most restrictive passages—especially in 1 Timothy, and even a couple of debated verses in 1 Corinthians—may not reflect Paul’s own voice at all. The Pastoral Epistles are widely seen as written later in Paul’s name, which means the “women be silent” lines in 1 Corinthians were not a command made by Paul. If that’s true, then the verses that make women “less than” would be reflecting later church politics and patriarchy more than the heart of the gospel itself.
Modern-day translators also have a hard job. They want to be “true” to the text as much as possible, but there is still a lot of leeway in their translations. You might be surprised to learn that there is also a bit of biased marketing involved in Bible translation.
New translations of the Bible are always created with a particular audience or market in mind. Translation committees and publishers know the theology and expectations of the people they’re serving. And the wording of passages—especially controversial or “clobber” passages—is often shaped by those expectations. Basically, the difficult verses tend to get translated in ways that relate to the established theology of the denomination or group who is most likely to buy that Bible version.
Then there are other adaptations of the Bible over time. For example, the English word homosexual does not show up in a major Bible translation until 1946, in the Revised Standard Version. Before that, translators used other English words for the tricky Greek terms in those verses—things like “sodomites” or “abusers of themselves with mankind.” Many scholars argue that those ancient words referred to exploitative or abusive sexual practices—sex used as power over another—rather than mutual, loving same-sex relationships as we understand them today. But the introduction of the modern word homosexual into the text created a passage that was used to exclude certain people from church life, rather than love and include them.
So when someone tells me, “I love you, but I hate your sin,” while using this complicated, human, shaped-and-reshaped library of texts as a weapon—especially against women in ministry—I can’t help but ask:
Is the problem really me?
Or is it how we’ve chosen to read, translate, and wield the Bible?
Those hurtful words didn’t change my theology and they certainly didn’t make me repent. What they did do was chip away at my sense of worth and drive an unbridgeable wedge between that Sunday school superintendent and me. Because if we’re really trying to be true to the Bible’s deepest pulse, we won’t use it to squeeze people into our tiny boxes of “right” and “wrong.” We’ll stay open to how other communities and individuals actually encounter God, even when it doesn’t look like us.
And that, to me, is the beauty of the Bible. We don’t know God because He dropped a perfect rulebook out of the sky. We know God because generation after generation of people, from wildly different cultures and contexts, met something Holy and tried to name it. We get to listen in on all the different ways they experienced Him.
So if my call, my body, or my voice don’t fit someone’s narrow reading of Scripture, that doesn’t make me less called, less loved, or less faithful. It just means their view of God is too small—and I’m no longer willing to shrink my life to fit it.