The Bible is wonderfully honest about the care its difficult passages demand: Scripture can be misunderstood, so faithful reading requires patience, context, and humility.
The Bible does not pretend that everything in it is easy to understand.
Peter says so himself.
Near the end of his second letter, Peter speaks about Paul and his letters. He acknowledges that Paul writes about things that can be difficult to understand—and then adds a sobering warning:
“There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.”
—2 Peter 3:16, RSV-CE
That is quite a statement.
Peter does not say that Paul’s letters are impossible to understand. He says some things are hard to understand. And he warns us that Scripture can be twisted when it is handled carelessly.
That ought to make us slow down.
We live in a world of quick answers. Someone posts a Bible verse online, and within seconds another person has explained exactly what it means. A verse is pulled from a chapter and a chapter from a book; before long, an entire theology rests on a sentence that may never have been intended to stand alone.
But Scripture deserves better than that.
Peter’s warning gives us the posture: humility. Paul’s background shows us the method: read an author within the world that formed his language, arguments, and assumptions.
Consider Paul
The New Testament tells us something important about the man whose letters make up so much of it: Paul was a Pharisee.
Acts tells us that Paul identified himself as a Pharisee. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul describes himself as a Hebrew of Hebrews and says that “as to the law” he was a Pharisee. In Galatians, Paul describes his former life in Judaism and his extraordinary zeal for the traditions of his ancestors.
These details matter.
They matter because Paul did not wake up one morning and become a Christian theologian with no background. He was formed within Judaism. He knew the Scriptures of Israel. He knew the Law. He knew the traditions. He knew the arguments. He knew how his fellow Jews understood the covenant, the promises, the Messiah, and the Law.
Then Paul encountered the risen Christ, and everything changed—but his Jewish formation did not disappear. It became part of the way he understood and proclaimed Christ.
When we read Paul, then, we need to read him as Paul—not as a twenty-first-century American Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, secular philosopher, or social-media commentator. We need to hear the apostle in his own world.
That is harder work.
And that is precisely the point.
When Paul writes about the Law, grace, faith, justification, Abraham, circumcision, the flesh, the Spirit, the covenant, or the promises of God, we cannot simply assume that those words carry exactly the same meaning they carry in our modern conversations.
Paul is arguing with ideas.
He is answering questions.
He is addressing real communities with real problems.
And he is doing all of this as a Jewish Pharisee who has come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and the fulfillment of God’s promises.
Context matters.
History matters.
Language matters.
The whole of Scripture matters.
And, perhaps most importantly, the Church’s way of reading Scripture matters.
This is why I have become increasingly convinced that Catholics need to learn not simply to read the Bible, but to read it well.
Peter’s warning should make us humble.
The danger is not merely that we might misunderstand a difficult passage, but that we might do so with absolute confidence.
That is a dangerous combination.
A person can take a perfectly true sentence from Scripture and use it to communicate something Scripture never intended to say.
That is how biblical arguments become endless.
One person has a verse.
Another person has another verse.
Both insist, “The Bible says…”
And sometimes both have failed to ask the more important question:
What is the Bible actually saying here?
Reading Scripture well requires patience.
It requires us to read the verse in its paragraph, the paragraph in its chapter, the chapter in its book, and the book within the whole story of Scripture.
And Catholics believe that this whole story has a living context: the community in which Scripture was received, preserved, proclaimed, and interpreted—the Church.
So slow down in three ways:
- Read the immediate context.
- Recover the historical setting.
- Listen within the whole of Scripture and the Church’s living tradition.
These habits do not weaken confidence in the Bible; they discipline that confidence with reverence.
This does not mean Catholics are afraid of the Bible.
Quite the opposite.
It means we take the Bible seriously enough to approach it carefully.
We do not need to be frightened by difficult passages. We need to be humble before them.
Peter had walked with Jesus.
Peter was an apostle.
Peter knew Paul.
And Peter still said that some things Paul wrote were hard to understand.
Maybe we should listen to him.
Maybe the next time we encounter a difficult passage of Scripture, instead of immediately asking, “How can I use this verse to prove my point?” we should ask:
- What is happening here?
- Who wrote it?
- To whom was it written?
- What problem was being addressed?
- What did these words mean in their original setting?
- How does this passage fit within the rest of Scripture?
- And how has the Church understood it?
Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do with Scripture is slow down, because the Bible is not ammunition for winning arguments. It is the Word of God, and if we truly believe that, we ought to handle it with reverence.
Peter’s warning is not an invitation to stay away from difficult passages.
It is an invitation to approach them with humility.
Read deeply. Read carefully. Read the whole story. And never be ashamed to admit that sometimes Scripture requires us to slow down before we speak.
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