It started with a TikTok comment.
One short clip from a much longer piece on Jesus, specifically his radical, upside-down teaching in the Beatitudes, sparked a conversation about which sacred text is more trustworthy: the Bible or the Qur’an.
That conversation became a portal. Not into a fight about which book is better, but into a deeper question: What do we even mean when we call something the Word of God?
For many of us, especially those raised in traditions steeped in Biblicism, the Bible was treated like a divine dictation. Perfect. Inerrant. Dropped from heaven. We were taught to wield it like a weapon or consult it like a manual. But is that what it is? Is that how Jesus treated it? Is that how the early church saw it?
This post explores the complex history of the Bible, including its edits, redactions, translations, and canonization. It wrestles with why the Bible is not the Word of God, and how Jesus, God’s undergirding wisdom made flesh, is.
And most importantly, it asks how all of this helps us stay human.
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The Whole Story
It all started with a TikTok comment thread.
For those of you reading this on Substack, here’s how We Can Stay Human works. First, I write a longer piece. Then I record myself reading what I wrote. After that, I pull short clips from the video and share them on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube.
For those of you watching one of those short clips right now, maybe on your phone or passed along by a friend, what you’re seeing is just a fragment. Each clip comes from a full-length piece. The full video lives on YouTube. The full writing and embedded video lives on Substack at wecanstayhuman.com. One of these clips from a post called Jesus on the Terrorist Watchlist sparked a discussion on the nature of the Bible.
The original piece explored the Beatitudes. How Jesus blessed the poor and the grieving and the peacemakers. How those words upended the world of the powerful. How his message still threatens empire.
The Word of God?
After one of those clip went live, someone left a comment. They said, “Why don’t you read the Quran instead? It’s never been changed or corrupted. The Bible has.” That’s what set this post in motion, because baked into that comment is a certain definition. A specific idea about what makes a sacred text sacred.
What Makes A Text The Word of God?
From their perspective, the Quran is the real Word of God because it is original. Untouched. Unedited. Exactly as it was given. And the Bible? Too many authors. Too many edits. Too many contradictions. Too human to be holy.
But what if the human fingerprints on the Bible’s pages are not flaws to be hidden, but invitations to look closer? What if breath and dust and contradiction are the very signs that something sacred is trying to speak?
My final comment in our discussion, at least as of this writing, echoed this idea, “Here’s the fundamental difference. You’re looking for a book that falls from heaven, and I love getting lost in one that explores what it means to be human.”
Now to be honest, I understand why he thought he made a good argument. I’m guessing he’s raised it on a countless number of other posts and people have wanted to debate the merits of his claim. After all, for a lot of Christians, especially those shaped by modern evangelicalism, the Bible is treated almost exactly how Muslims talk about the Quran.
The Popular Take on the Bible As the Word of God
It’s held up as perfect. Flawless. Direct from God. They use words like inerrant, infallible, inspired, authoritative. It becomes something sealed. Settled. A divine rulebook that cannot be questioned. They say it’s “God’s Word” and assume that means it’s exactly what God wanted to say, down to the punctuation.
And it gets even messier.
Some people don’t just treat the Bible like a single book. They treat it like a divine Mad Lib. They’ll take one verse from here. Another from way over there. A third from some completely different genre or time or context. Then they string them together like pearls on a necklace and call it truth.
They ignore the history behind each text. The cultural setting. The literary form. The nuance of translation. The poetic or political weight. The distance between a psalm of lament, a proverb of wisdom, a prophetic oracle, and an apocalyptic vision.
They mash it all together and call it a life lesson. A how-to guide. A rulebook. Or maybe they give it a cute acronym like, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” Or say it’s “God’s Owner’s Manual for the Human Life.”
But the Bible was never meant to be a manual. Humans are not machines that break down if you don’t follow the instructions. It’s a collection of songs and stories, laments and laws, dreams and genealogies. And each part speaks in its own voice. To its own people. In its own moment.
When we flatten all that into a single, shrink-wrapped message, we strip it of its power. We turn poetry into programming. We replace awe with answers.
This popular oversimplification and misuse of the Bible is what’s often called Biblicism. It treats the Bible not as a collection of sacred stories told through human experience, but as a kind of divine Wikipedia entry, always accurate, always final, and always speaking for God.
But here’s the thing. That’s not how the Bible describes itself. That’s not how Jesus treated the scripture he had access to. And that’s not how the Early Church read the letters and stories that ultimately became the New Testament either. So let’s take a breath and step back. Let’s talk about what the Bible actually is and where it came from. Unless we do that, we’ll never know how to read it and read it well.
What is the Bible?
To start, that voice in my TikTok comments arguing about the validity of the Quran was right in saying that the Bible is not a single book, but a library. It includes poetry, law codes, folk tales, apocalypse, song lyrics, family trees, and political protest. It contains contradictions. It speaks with multiple voices. It has been edited, redacted, translated, misquoted, mistranslated, and retranslated again.
This fluidity is especially true of the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible, what Christians often call the Old Testament, achieved far greater textual stability over time. By the early medieval period, Jewish scribes were meticulously preserving each word, down to the letter count. But even the Hebrew scriptures had variation in earlier centuries, as shown in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek Septuagint. So while the Quran was standardized in 650 CE and held in one consistent form since, both Testaments of the Bible reflects a long, human process of remembering, editing, preserving, and passing on stories that still pulse with divine breath.
Editing the Bible
Now when I say edited, I mean it. St. Augustine, one of the Early Church Fathers, said the first thing you need to do when working with sacred manuscripts was “fix your texts.” In his day, he didn’t pretend all copies of a book or letter were pristine. He knew copies carried differences. He compared versions. He weighed variant readings. He sometimes corrected or preferred one reading over another. He dealt in the messy work of restoring texts, tending to the wounds of history so the pages would speak more truly. In that sense, “fixing the text” was not an act of claiming perfection. It was a humble gesture toward truth, an attempt to let the most faithful voice emerge through the sediment of transmission.
And what Augustine was doing (comparing manuscripts, weighing variant readings, discerning which version rang truest) was an early form of what we now call textual criticism.
Textual Criticism
It’s not about criticizing the Bible in the way we use that word casually. It’s about paying attention. It’s about love and labor and listening. It’s about sitting with the differences between texts and asking which version most likely reflects the original voice. Not the cleanest. Not the easiest. But the most faithful to the breath and bones of the moment it first came to life. That work continues today.
Scholars still gather fragments and scrolls and codices. They line up copies across centuries. They study shifts in language, spelling, syntax. They examine where a phrase might have been added, softened, harmonized, or edited out of discomfort.
And here are a few of the guiding insights:
First, the harder reading is often the more accurate one. Because humans tend to smooth things over. We correct awkward sentences. We resolve tensions. We try to make things make sense. So when a line feels jagged or unresolved, that may be exactly how it was first spoken.
Second, shorter readings are often preferred. Because over time, scribes tend to add. They explain. They clarify. They harmonize. So when one manuscript has extra details and another keeps it lean, the shorter one may be closer to the source.
Third, context matters. A reading that fits the voice, style, and setting of the original author is more likely to be authentic. Textual criticism isn’t just about grammar or vocabulary. It’s about rhythm and resonance, what belongs and what feels forced.
All of this means that textual criticism assumes that scribes were not infallible, but also not careless. It respects their work. It honors the long journey of the text. It does not worship a perfect manuscript that never existed. It listens for the heartbeat beneath the edits.
So, if what you’re looking for is a Bible that dropped down from heaven, untouched and unedited, if you need it to be God whispering word-for-word into the ears of human scribes, or divine ink appearing on scrolls as if by magic, then everything we’ve named so far, while true, will feel inconvenient because the Bible is not the book you want it to be.
The edits. The contradictions. The fingerprints of human history. It might all feels like a threat to your trust in the text. But that’s because you’re asking the Bible to be something it never claimed to be. Moreover, that is not how Jesus or how most of the Church throughout history has approached the words passed down from generation to generation. Rather this is how modern Christians have misrepresented their own sacred text.
A Brief History of Biblicism
This contortion of what the Bible is has seeds in the European Reformation five hundred plus years ago. While the Reformers introduced sola scriptura, the idea that scripture alone holds final authority, something they used in their arguments with Caltholicism, it wasn’t yet the rigid Biblicism we often see today. Martin Luther and John Calvin still wrestled with texts. Luther suggested that the Book of James shouldn’t be in the canon. They knew the Bible had been shaped by history, translation, and human hands. For them, inspiration meant the Spirit spoke through the text, not that it came down flawless and fixed.
But then something changed. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, as science advanced and secularism gained ground, a new anxiety took hold in the church. Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to challenge Genesis. Historical scholarship questioned authorship. Psychology reframed the soul. In response, popular Christianity doubled down.
They didn’t just say the Bible was inspired. They said it was inerrant: without error in fact or detail, from cover to cover. It was a reaction rooted in fear. A way to cling to certainty in a world that felt like it was slipping away. A way to build a fortress out of sacred text and use it to defend against doubt. But in doing so, they told a different story about what the Bible is. They turned the Bible into something it never claims to be.
The Word Logos of God
So if the Bible isn’t the Word of God, if it is not a divine download, not a cosmic dictation, then what is it? Let’s go back to the beginning. Not Genesis, the first book of the Bible, but the Gospel According to John, who opens, “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God.”
That phrase, the Word. is not referring to a book. It’s not talking about scripture. It’s talking about something much deeper, much older, much more alive.
The Greek word used here is Logos. And Logos is not just a synonym for speech. It’s a loaded, philosophical word. In Greek thought, Logos was the animating principle of the cosmos. The logic behind creation. The pattern beneath the planets. The wisdom that holds everything together. In Asia, the same idea is often called the Tao.
John takes that idea and says, “Yes. That.” That wisdom. That order. That living current of truth that flows through all things, THAT is the Word of God. Then he goes on to argue that the Word took on flesh. It became a person. It walked and wept and welcomed and wondered. It was born, in Jesus.
So the Word of God isn’t a book. The Word of God is an undergirding wisdom that’s always been there. But as part of a broader self-revelation, and invitation into a way of being in the world that resonates with the deep pattern of creation, a way that dances with the stars and soil, that listens to the rhythms of wind and breath, and that moves in harmony with all that is, it took on a body. A human one. One that sweat and bled and broke and loved.
The Bible: Words About the Word
So what is the Bible? The Bible is words about the Word. Words trying to make sense of that wisdom that put on flesh. Trying to remember its stories. Trying to pass on a voice that echoes, often faintly, throughout eternity. Trying to point toward the divine wisdom made touchable in Jesus.
The Book of Hebrews opens with this same movement. It says, “In many times and in many ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets. But now, in these days, God has spoken through the Son.” The message has a mouth. The truth has a heartbeat.
And even if you don’t believe Jesus is divine, the idea still lands. In the Quran, Jesus is called prophet, teacher, Messiah. Even for those who follow Christ consciousness, or admire Jesus as revolutionary wisdom, the point remains: something eternal was embodied in him.
Jesus becomes the clearest window we have into what it means to be human and divine at once. And the Bible becomes a set of signposts, metaphors, and breadcrumbs, not meant to be worshiped, but followed. A path of words about and leading us to the Word.
That is how Jesus used the Hebrew Bible. Jesus didn’t quote the text like it was a legal code etched in stone. He wrestled with it. He reframed it. That was not rejection. That was revelation. Jesus showed us that sacredness isn’t found in static perfection. It lives in the ongoing conversation. Between Spirit and soul. Between the Word and the world. Between breath and body.
How the Bible Formed
The idea of words about the Word also helps make sense why various books were included in the Bible and others weren’t. The formation of the Bible took time. The writings we now call the New Testament didn’t drop from the sky. They emerged from community. From memory. From messy, embodied life.
There were letters written to churches, stories passed down about Jesus, reflections on what his life, death, and resurrection meant. Some of those writings were copied, shared, and read aloud in gatherings. Others faded into obscurity. What stuck, the texts that endured, were the ones that helped people make sense of the Word made flesh. They helped communities remember. They sparked conversation. They kept pointing people back to Jesus, the embodiment of the undergirding wisdom of all things, walking in sandals and speaking in parables.
This process wasn’t decided by a single council. Despite popular imagination, the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE did notgather bishops together to vote books in or out of the Bible. Nicaea was convened to settle the Arian controversy: was Jesus fully divine, or was he something less than God? The debate centered around two Greek word homoousios or homoiousios: was the Son of the same substance as the Father or just a similar substance? That’s where creeds were formed, not the canon.
The canon, the list of books that make up the New Testament, formed more organically. Church communities held onto the writings that helped them follow the way of Jesus. They read them in worship. They passed them down. They weighed their resonance with the story they knew deep in their bones. Over time, a shared sense emerged: these are the texts that give life. These are the ones that tell the truth.
Books Excluded from the Bible
Others were set aside. Not by suppression, but by discernment. One example comes from the Gnostics. Gnosticism was a broad, diverse set of spiritual movements that flourished in the first few centuries. The word gnosis means knowledge, and the Gnostics pursued a secret or hidden knowledge that would lead to salvation, usually through escaping the material world. In contrast, the Jesus story said that salvation was found not in escaping the world, but in embracing it. Not in fleeing the body, but in God taking on flesh. Christianity was shaped by pistis (faith, trust, relationship) not by spiritual elitism. So the Gnostic writings didn’t fit. They didn’t breathe the same Spirit. They didn’t invite the same kind of faith. They spoke of a different God, a different humanity, a different story.
The canon, then, is not a power move. It’s not a master list enforced by threat. It’s a collection of voices that kept giving life. Words that stayed alive in worship. Words that helped people follow Jesus. Words about the Word.
The Bible and Power
But we should also be honest. Power did come into the picture. While the earliest formation of the canon was largely organic, driven by lived faith, community resonance, and the desire to follow the way of Jesus, what happened after those texts were named was something different.
By the time Christianity became entangled with empire, the Bible was no longer just a collection of stories that gave life. It became a tool that could be used to maintain order. To silence dissent. To justify conquest. To control.
The shift began when Constantine embraced Christianity and church leaders gained influence within imperial structures. From there, theology hardened into orthodoxy. Councils were convened not just to discern truth, but to enforce it. And the same texts that once stirred the soul were now used to cement power.
So yes, while the canon itself wasn’t assembled as a conspiracy to control the masses, later generations did use it that way. Scripture became a boundary line. A weapon. A way to declare who was in and who was out. And that legacy is still with us.
This is important to name. Because some of the skepticism, some of the suspicion and rejection of the Bible, isn’t paranoia. It’s memory. It’s resistance to the ways sacred text was co-opted by empire, by patriarchy, by whiteness, by colonization. But again, that misuse is not the Bible’s origin story. It’s what happens when a living library gets frozen in the grip of fear and control.
Our Task When Reading the Bible
So our work today is not to defend every use of the Bible, but to go back to it’s original use. It’s to listen for the breath still moving within it. It’s to disentangle sacred wisdom from systems of domination. It’s to remember that the Word was never meant to rule from a throne. It came washing feet, breaking bread, and telling stories that turned the world upside down.
And that means if we want to read the Bible and read it well, we need to start with the Word. The Logos. The undergirding wisdom that holds all things together. And the place we see that wisdom most clearly is in the Word made flesh: Jesus. Not just a man from Nazareth, but a living window into the deep pattern of creation. The heartbeat beneath every sacred text. The voice echoing from the first word of Genesis to the final vision of Revelation.
The Essence of Undergirding Wisdom
Jesus shows us that God does not remain distant. God dwells among us. Not just in temples or cathedrals, not just with the pure and the pious, but with the overlooked and cast aside. That’s who Jesus touched. That’s who he wept with, laughed with, and lifted up.
He told stories not to create walls, but to open doors. He shattered hierarchy and welcomed children. He saw women in a world that made them invisible. He crossed borders drawn by religion, culture, and empire and said, you are loved, you are seen, you belong.
His life reveals a God who would rather die than stop loving. A love that refuses to dominate. A love that enters our hells to bring us home.
That’s the center. That’s the interpretive key. The life of Jesus is how we come to understand the undergirding wisdom. And if we begin there, if we let his presence and parables and posture shape how we read, then we can return to the rest of scripture with new eyes.
Reading the Bible
We can ask of any passage, how does this reflect the wisdom revealed in Jesus? Does this point me toward grace, compassion, belonging? Does this serve as words about the Word?
And when a text doesn’t line up, when it sounds more like fear than love, more like control than liberation, more like punishment than presence, then maybe that’s a moment to pause. To wrestle. To dig deeper. To wonder what’s happening in the human layers of that story. Because staying human means refusing to let fear be the final voice.
At its best, the Bible helps us do just that. It helps us remember. It helps us return to the wisdom that runs through all things. It gives language and story and rhythm to what our souls already know.
The Word is not frozen in print. The Word is alive. And the Bible is one way the Word still speaks.
Not to make us more certain, but to make us more human.
Not to settle every question, but to stir a better kind of hunger.
Not to build walls, but to build wells and tables.
Because in the end, the Bible is not an escape plan. It’s a call to presence. A call to love. A call to remember what it means to be fully alive.
An invitation and a guide to help us stay human.
Practices To Embrace the Undergirding Wisdom
This week I am offering three practices that will help you embrace the undergirding wisdom, the Logos, the Word that the Bible points us towards. Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation reflection, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, I have something for you.