How We Read · The Lineage Behind the Site

The lineage behind the readings on this site

If you have spent most of your reading life in modern American evangelicalism, some of what is on this site will sound new. The cosmic temple. The divine council. The image of God as vocation rather than rational substance. The patriarchal narratives as honest about flawed image-bearers rather than as a parade of spiritual heroes. The first eleven chapters of Genesis as a literary-theological argument rather than a chronicle. The covenant family commissioned for the sake of the nations. The careful distinction between what the text says and what later traditions have said about the text.

These are not new readings. They are old readings, partially lost in the Western tradition’s Reformation-era pivots, and recovered (often slowly, often piecemeal) over the last hundred and fifty years. The site is not progressive theology, and it is not a fashionable rejection of historic Christianity. It is a deliberate attempt to read Scripture in line with how the church has read it across most of its long history, with particular attention to the Eastern, ancient Near Eastern, and Second Temple Jewish contexts that the biblical writers themselves were operating inside.

This page traces the lineage. If a reading on this site feels unfamiliar, this is the place to come to see who has been saying versions of it across the centuries.

The Jewish soil and Second Temple context

The Hebrew Bible was written by Jewish writers, in Jewish languages, in Jewish contexts, for Jewish communities and the wider audiences they hoped to reach. The earliest readings of Genesis and the Pentateuch are Jewish readings, and they have continued unbroken for more than two millennia. Several of those readings have been preserved in:

The Targums. Aramaic translations and paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible from the late Second Temple period through the early medieval era. The Targums often preserve interpretive moves the Masoretic text leaves implicit, including divine council language and creation theology that the Christian tradition would later partially lose.
Bereshit Rabbah (compiled around the fifth century CE). The classical rabbinic midrash on Genesis. Bereshit Rabbah 8:1, on the original androgynous adam who was split into the gendered pair, is the source for the framework on this site about the vocabulary of humanity.
The Talmud (Babylonian and Jerusalem, fourth to sixth centuries CE). Preserves a wide range of readings. Berakhot 61a echoes the Bereshit Rabbah reading of the splitting.
Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE to 50 CE). A Hellenistic Jewish philosopher whose Genesis commentaries kept the universal-and-priestly readings of adam in conversation with Greek philosophical categories.
The Mishnah (compiled around 200 CE), the foundational rabbinic legal text, preserving the priestly and covenantal frameworks that the Pentateuch establishes.

The Jewish reading tradition is not a single voice; it is a centuries-long conversation. But many of the readings the modern Christian tradition is treating as novel (the cosmos as God’s temple, the gendered pair as mutually defining, the patriarchs as morally compromised, the prophetic critique of empire) have been quietly preserved in Jewish reading streams the whole time.

The early church fathers

The first four centuries of the Christian church produced a body of biblical reading that many modern American evangelicals have never been introduced to. The patristic tradition is broad, contested, and uneven, but a number of the readings on this site have direct or near-direct patristic witnesses.

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130 to 202). His Against Heresies makes a careful image/likeness distinction (the image is the structural endowment, the likeness is the vocational growth) and develops a theology of recapitulation in which Christ as the second Adam restores what the first Adam compromised. The frameworks on this site that treat the image of God as vocation, and that see Christ as the true image into which we are being conformed, are working in territory Irenaeus opened. He also reads the cosmos as God’s house and creation as the arena of God’s redeeming work.
Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296 to 373). On the Incarnation names the incarnation as the act by which Christ restores the image of God in humanity. The framework that treats the image of God as a vocation Christ has perfectly fulfilled, into which we are being formed, has Athanasius’s fingerprints on it.
Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 to 395). On the Making of Man argues that humanity was created as universal-and-undifferentiated before being divided into the gendered pair. The framework on this site about the vocabulary of humanity (ha-adam as the earth creature before ish/ishah arrive together) has Gregory as one of its most articulate Christian witnesses. His broader argument that the image of God is borne equally by men and women, and that the sex distinction is in some sense secondary to the species, was not the dominant Western reading after Augustine, but it has held in the Eastern tradition all along.
Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306 to 373). His Hymns on Paradise read Eden explicitly as the inner sanctuary of the cosmic temple. The framework on this site about the garden as sanctuary has its strongest premodern voice in Ephrem.
John Chrysostom (c. 347 to 407). His sermons on Lazarus and the rich man, his homilies on the Sodom narrative, and his commentaries on the Pauline epistles develop a stinging theology of wealth, hospitality, and the responsibilities of the Christian community to the poor. The framework on this site about abundance vs. scarcity, and the reading of Sodom’s sin as injustice and indifference rather than as an abstract sexual category, both have Chrysostom in their genealogy.
Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430). Augustine is the most influential figure in Western Christian theology and the one with whom this site most often respectfully disagrees. The doctrine of original sin in its developed form is largely his; the site reads Genesis 3 with attention to what Augustine added to the text rather than what the text itself says. But Augustine on the literal sense of Genesis (his De Genesi ad Litteram), on creation, on time, and on the cupiditas vs. caritas distinction (lust vs. love as the disordered vs. ordered loves) gives this site real material to work with.
Justin Martyr (c. 100 to 165). An early Christian apologist who preserved divine council language at points where later patristic readers had begun to collapse it into the Trinity. The framework on divine council has thinner premodern Christian witnesses than the others; Justin is one of them.
Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 to 662). A late patristic figure whose work on cosmic Christology, the unity of creation, and the participation of the cosmos in Christ’s redemptive work feeds the cosmic-temple framework directly. Maximus is the patristic theologian who most clearly articulated the cosmos-as-sanctuary theology this site develops.

The patristic tradition is not uniform, and reading any one church father against another can produce contradictions. But the practice of reading the Hebrew Bible in light of its ancient context, of reading Genesis as theological argument, of treating the image of God as vocation, of seeing the church as a continuation of Israel’s covenant calling, of reading the Eucharist as participation in the cosmic temple, all of these are at home in the first four centuries of Christian theology.

The medieval and mystical streams

The medieval tradition is wider than the popular Western imagination remembers. Two streams matter for the readings on this site.

The Eastern Orthodox tradition preserved much of the patristic reading after the Western and Eastern churches went their separate ways. The cosmic-temple language, the iconographic understanding of the image of God, the priestly framing of human vocation, theosis (deification) as the end of human formation, all have been continuously held in the Eastern church across the centuries. American evangelicals who first encounter John Walton’s cosmic-temple framework or N.T. Wright’s emphasis on creation-as-temple often experience it as new; Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians have been hearing versions of it in their liturgy every Sunday for over a thousand years.
The mystical and contemplative streams of medieval Western theology. Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and many others preserved theological readings that emphasized the participatory, embodied, and creational character of biblical theology. They are not always tidy. They are often deeply attentive to Scripture in ways that complement the Eastern stream and that the Reformation-era theologies sometimes lost track of.
Anselm of Canterbury (1033 to 1109). Best known for Cur Deus Homo and the satisfaction theory of atonement, but also a careful reader of Genesis and a theologian whose work cannot be reduced to its later Reformation popularizations.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 to 1274). His treatment of natural law, of the image of God as connected to rationality and relationality, and of creation as ordered by divine wisdom is more nuanced than the popular Reformed critique sometimes allows. The site does not work explicitly within Thomistic categories, but Aquinas’s careful Aristotelian reading of human nature is a reference point for later thinking.

The medieval period was not, as the Reformation-era polemics sometimes suggested, a uniform fall from biblical theology. It was a wide and conflicted tradition with many threads, several of which preserve readings that the modern recovery is now naming again.

The Reformation and its alternative voices

The Reformation produced the theological frameworks that have most shaped modern American evangelical reading: justification by faith alone, the authority of Scripture, the priesthood of all believers, the radical critique of medieval ecclesial corruption. The site does not reject these emphases. Where the site differs from the dominant Reformation-and-after Western tradition is in how it treats the details of the biblical text and in which streams of the Reformation it draws on most.

The Reformation was not monolithic. Beyond the Magisterial Reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli), there were:

The Anabaptist tradition (Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, Menno Simons, the Hutterites, the Mennonites, the Brethren). Often treated as heretics by both Catholic and Magisterial Reformation parties, the Anabaptists preserved a cruciform reading of Scripture, an emphasis on embodied discipleship, a refusal to identify the church with the empire, and a strong commitment to the Sermon on the Mount as the shape of Christian life. Many of the post-evangelical readings on this site, especially the cruciform readings of empire and the careful attention to the violent texts of the Hebrew Bible, are at home in the Anabaptist stream.
John Calvin himself, more nuanced on a number of points than later Reformed theology has read him to be. His own Genesis commentary is often closer to the literary-theological readings on this site than the Calvinism that bears his name.
The English Puritans and the Pietists, in different ways, preserved reading practices (slow attention to text, devotional engagement with Scripture, attention to communal practice) that carry forward into the modern recovery.

The site is not a Reformation-era project, but it is not a rejection of the Reformation either. It works alongside several Reformation streams and disagrees, sometimes substantively, with others.

The modern recovery

The last hundred and fifty years have produced a remarkable retrieval of premodern reading practices, fed by archaeological discovery, comparative religious studies, careful Hebrew and Greek work, the recovery of Jewish reading traditions, and the broader revaluation of patristic theology. A short list of the modern figures most directly behind the site’s voice:

Karl Barth (1886 to 1968). The Church Dogmatics, especially the doctrine of creation in volume III/1, redirects Western theology back toward the covenant-and-creation framework that runs through the patristic and medieval tradition. Barth’s reading of the image of God as relational (“man and woman as the basic structure of being human”) is the Western 20th-century recovery of what Gregory of Nyssa held all along. Barth on election in Christ, on the freedom of God’s grace, and on the covenant as the inner basis of creation, all sit underneath a number of the site’s frameworks.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 to 1945). Creation and Fall (1933) reads Genesis 1 to 3 with careful attention to the literary structure and the relational dimensions of the image. Bonhoeffer’s work on costly grace, on the church under empire, and on the cruciform shape of Christian discipleship all feeds into the site’s lane.
Jürgen Moltmann (1926 to 2024). The Crucified God, Theology of Hope, and his ecological-creational works expand the modern theological imagination toward a creation-and-covenant framework that aligns deeply with the patristic and Eastern tradition.
Walter Brueggemann (1933 to 2025). The most sustained modern Old Testament voice on the prophetic imagination, the theology of generosity, and the reading of Israel’s story as a contest between alternative and dominant consciousnesses.
N.T. Wright (b. 1948). The most influential modern New Testament scholar working in the recovery of Second Temple Jewish context for Paul and the Gospels. Wright’s framing of the gospel as the climax of Israel’s story, of justification as covenant faithfulness, and of resurrection as the inauguration of new creation, is the modern restatement of what much of the patristic tradition had assumed all along.
Marty Solomon (Bema), Tim Mackie (BibleProject), John Walton (cosmic-temple cosmology), Michael Heiser (divine council), Phyllis Trible (rhetorical criticism), J. Richard Middleton (image of God in ANE context), Carmen Joy Imes (the meaning of the divine name), Sandra Richter (the Old Testament macro-narrative), and others. The contemporary voices most explicitly named on this site.

The Paul-within-Judaism lane

One commitment running through this site deserves to be named explicitly. The standard Western Christian reading of Paul (sometimes called the Lutheran reading) treats him as a converted Jew who recognized Judaism’s bankruptcy and announced grace by faith as the alternative. The site does not read Paul that way.

The site reads Paul within the contemporary scholarly lane sometimes called Paul Within Judaism. The lane has been developed across two generations of careful work: Krister Stendahl‘s 1963 essay arguing that the Lutheran introspective conscience was a modern projection onto a first-century apostle whose actual question was Jewish-Gentile relations; E.P. Sanders‘s 1977 Paul and Palestinian Judaism, which demolished the caricature of Second Temple Judaism as a religion of works-righteousness; James D.G. Dunn‘s argument that the works of the law in Paul’s contested texts refers specifically to Jewish covenantal identity markers (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath, festivals); N.T. Wright‘s comprehensive treatment of Paul as a Jewish thinker working out the implications of Israel’s Messiah; and the more recent work of Mark Nanos, Pamela Eisenbaum, Paula Fredriksen, and Magnus Zetterholm, who argue that Paul remained a practicing Jew his entire life and that his critique of the works of the law applies to Gentile attempts to enter the covenant through Jewish identity markers, not to Jewish observance itself.

On this reading: Paul writes as a Jew, not as a former Jew. Acts 10’s vision is about people, not food (Peter himself interprets it that way at Acts 10:28). The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) settles that Gentile believers do not need to become Jews, but it does not require Jewish believers to abandon Torah. The Hebrew Bible’s covenant practices (Sabbath, festivals, food laws, circumcision) remain in force for Jewish believers in Messiah. Gentile believers enter the family of Abraham through pistis (faithful allegiance) in Israel’s Messiah without requirement of Jewish observance. Both Jews and Gentiles practice pistis through embodied faithfulness in their respective tradition-spaces. The whole later Christian supersessionist tradition (the claim that the church has replaced Israel) is, on this framework, a misreading of Paul that did real historical damage culminating in Christianity’s long persecution of Jews.

The popular-level pastoral voice for this lane on this site is Marty Solomon (Bema podcast); the conceptual bridge that makes the position pastorally legible is Matthew Bates‘s recovery of pistis as allegiance. See the Paul Within Judaism framework page for the developed argument and the gospel allegiance framework for the Bates-and-Wright pistis-as-loyalty work. Both pages develop the framework chapter-by-chapter as it shows up in Acts, Romans, Galatians, and the rest of the New Testament.

This commitment does not require the reader to agree with the framework to use the site; the site continues to draw on the broader Reformation tradition, the patristic tradition, and the modern recovery generally. But it does mean that where the supersessionist reading and the Paul-within-Judaism reading diverge, the site reads with the Paul-within-Judaism lane.

The modern recovery is not a creation of the post-evangelical movement. It draws on archaeology (the Mesopotamian flood narratives, the Ugaritic texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls), on careful philological work, on the broad ecumenical conversation across Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish scholars, and on the patient labor of scholars across multiple generations. The site is downstream of all of it.

What this site sits on top of

To name it plainly: the readings on returntothe.bible are recoveries, not inventions. The framework that reads Genesis 1 as the inauguration of God’s cosmic temple has roots in Maximus the Confessor, gestation in Ephrem the Syrian, and modern articulation in John Walton. The framework that reads the image of God as vocation rather than rational substance has roots in Irenaeus and Athanasius, articulation in Gregory of Nyssa, recovery in Karl Barth, and modern restatement in J. Richard Middleton. The framework that reads the adam of Genesis 2 as universal-and-undifferentiated before the splitting has roots in Bereshit Rabbah, articulation in Gregory of Nyssa, and modern restatement in Phyllis Trible. The framework that reads Sodom’s sin as injustice and predatory violation rather than as a generic sexual category has its strongest premodern voice in John Chrysostom and Ezekiel 16:49. None of this is new.

What the site is doing is taking older readings, often recovered or articulated by modern scholarship, and putting them in conversation with the chapter-by-chapter text of Scripture in language that lay readers can follow. The lane is post-evangelical, but the lineage is Christian-and-Jewish-and-broad. If a reading here feels unfamiliar, it is most likely because it has been kept alive in streams of the church that the modern American evangelical tradition does not always travel through, not because it is the latest theological fashion.

The Bible is older than the modern church’s debates about how to read it. So is the church’s reading of it. The site is trying to read along with that longer tradition, not against it.