So what are these "Better Ways to Read the Bible"?
Orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and why Christian history matters with Ryan Self
Public Theology is based on the work of Zach W. Lambert, Pastor of Restore, an inclusive church in Austin, Texas. He and his wife, Amy Lambert, contribute to and moderate this account. Zach’s first book, Better Ways to Read the Bible, will release on August 12, 2025, and is available to preorder today.
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Today we are sharing an interview between Zach and our real life friend Ryan Self of
(which is not boring). Please read the excerpt below then hop over to his article to read the rest. And don’t forget to subscribe to his publication!Thanks, Ryan, for sharing this piece with us! We hope you all enjoy.
📖 Zach Lambert talks about "Better Ways to Read the Bible"
By Ryan Self
I’ve been blessed to call Zach Lambert my pastor and friend for almost two years now. Zach is the lead pastor at Restore Austin, which he helped found about a decade ago. On top of being a dad to two young sons, a husband, a prolific Substacker—all while pursuing of a Doctorate of Ministry at Duke University—he somehow found the time to write a new book, “Better Ways to Read the Bible.”
I was thrilled to get my hands on an early copy and read it within a matter of days. Zach has a deep knowledge and love of Scripture, even though he’s personally seen it used to cause harm. With the vast knowledge of a scholar and the skill of an experienced communicator, he walks readers through the harmful lenses that too many have encountered when reading the Bible. He then introduces more helpful lenses that Christians have used to deepen their faith in life-giving ways.
I recently got a chance to talk with Zach about his new book. That conversation is below.
Transcript lightly edited for clarity.
Ryan: Some might read the title, “Better ways to read the Bible,” and think that you're advocating for a radically new or even unorthodox way to read the Bible. But you're actually delving deep into Christian tradition to explain the helpful lenses. You also explain how some of the harmful lenses have been introduced more recently. Can you talk about that?
Zach: I think what I am trying to do is all under the umbrella of traditional orthodoxy when it comes to biblical interpretation. And it's really a reclamation of something in a lot of spaces, something very old. Augustine talked a lot about a Jesus-centered lens for biblical interpretation. I engage with him a little bit in the book. Obviously, that's a kind of traditional church father.
I think any time you are attempting to do something with a publisher that is connected to marketing, there's the risk of something coming across in a way that is sometimes not helpful. I had a conversation with someone about the subtitle, “Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing.” And they were like, “So you're saying the Bible is a weapon of harm?” And I said, “Well, my desired subtitle was, “Transforming Something that Sometimes gets Turned into a Weapon of Healing,” but that was vetoed by the marketing department of the publisher. So a little bit of it was just like we're having some semantic conversations when it comes to titles and things like that.
But as you alluded to, once you dig into the actual book, it really is an attempt to reclaim some of the more beautiful ways of engaging with the text. One of the easier ones to point out, and how new it is, is the apocalypse lens. I talk a lot about what I call “Left Behind Theology,” and it's this relatively new invention in the grander scheme of Christian tradition. The kind of literalist interpretation of revelation that we assign modern meaning to is really not that old.
I tell this fascinating little story in the book about how it first originated. John Nelson Darby—according to quite a few people—essentially stole this entire biblical outlook from a teenage girl in rural Scotland who was prophesying in a tent meeting and said, “This is what revelation means.” I did enough research to know there's no way of knowing that for certain, but he was definitely at the tent meeting. She did share that. But that kind of stuff is really fascinating. That's only a couple hundred years old.
Even the version of inerrancy that we're familiar with was not codified until the 70s. There's always been this understanding of God's inspiration and God's involvement, how God inspires things through human authors. And that's been an ongoing, robust dialogue throughout 2,000 years of Christian history.
But the specific kind of inerrancy movement that was again codified in ‘78 with the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is incredibly new. I'm not saying that like it's bad because it's new or it's good because it's old. I think that's a fallacy. But I am trying to say the Christian tradition is a lot bigger and more robust than we often give it credit for.
I often describe it like, if you come out of fundamentalist Christian spaces, it's like you were in a dark basement. And you were convinced by the other people in the basement that that's all there was, that that is what Christianity is, just that dark basement. And if you leave the basement, you are leaving Christianity. But what so many of us have discovered is that you walk up the stairs, open the basement door and you find this huge house with lots and lots of rooms. You see that the Christian tradition is so much bigger and more beautiful than we've understood for 2,000 years. And we've gotten things wrong. We've gotten things right, but we don't have to go and invent something new. We can actually reclaim something old.
Playing off that idea a little bit, can you talk about the tension between holding firm to core beliefs about the Bible while also letting go of the harmful beliefs or lenses? How do you discern between what's harmful and what's helpful?
Yeah, that is the question. I think we have to start with this understanding that we are all making those decisions all the time. We have to push back on this idea that some people just read the Bible black and white, and they're not doing interpretation. It just is what it is, because that's a lot of the tradition that I came out of. It's like, there's only one way, and it's this way that I'm presenting you.
I think most of us just intellectually and intuitively, if we've lived long enough and engaged with scripture, engaged in a broader tradition, we know that there are different ways of coming to different conclusions. The question is, what are the criteria that you're using to make those decisions? What I'm offering in the book is my attempt to say, after 15 years of pastoring, here are the handful of really harmful criteria that I've seen used to do biblical interpretation. And then here are some much more helpful criteria.
One of the healthy lenses I talke about is this lens of fruitfulness. And we talk about this in our church at Restore all the time: that Jesus said, “You'll know my followers by their fruit.” And that Fruit of the Spirit we know from Galatians is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
We should be constantly asking, “Are my beliefs and my behaviors promoting love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, etc, in me and in the world around me?” And if the answer is no, that should at least cause us to pause and reevaluate some things to say, “Well, that's the work of the Spirit, and if the Spirit of Christ is not eliciting that fruit, then something is wrong.”
What I do in the book is say we should apply that to our Bible interpretation, too. Are these interpretations leading us to love, joy, peace, patience, etc.? And if they're not, it should at least cause us to reevaluate some things, because that is what Jesus said we should be known by as followers of Christ.
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Hi Zach. I pre-ordered your book and while back. Today as I was reading Notes and comments about it, it actually was delivered on my doorstep! That is pretty cool considering I live in Melbourne Australia. I really appreciate your social and biblical commentary, and am very much looking forward to reading your book now I have it.
i wanna yell about how excited i am right now for your book!!!! (and yes, a little bit of that is just adhd brain doing its thing 🤣 but srsly tho)