One of the reasons I took religion classes in college was that I sensed a real weakness in my own spiritual and religious upbringing. As a Unitarian Universalist, I had read many of the texts of world religions, but my background with the Bible was weak. My parents and my church regarded it as oppressive and just stayed away from it. This meant that I was forced to rely on what other people said the Bible was about. And very often those folks hadn’t read the Bible in any depth either. They relied on what their pastor said it was about.

In divinity school, it was more difficult to take old and new testament courses simply because there were folks who knew the Bible backward and forward. And these were students.

Nevertheless, reading the Bible and reading commentaries on each verse was far more revealing than I expected. I learned the Bible wasn’t simple the oppressive text that I had heard it was. The 22nd and 23rd psalms are some of the most beautiful and timely poems ever written. And the book of Ruth has verses that are so compelling they are read at many weddings:

Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.
Where you die, I will die–there I will be buried.

Ruth 1:16

And then there’s Paul’s letter to the Romans (18-32), which concerns itself with natural and unnatural acts, some of which appear to be male homogenital. It’s one of those verses thrown around while condemning homosexuality.

With some study of Greek, it’s clear that Paul didn’t mean “natural” in terms of nature and the laws of nature. Paul uses “natural” to mean consistent or ordinary. So when Paul says that “women exchanged natural relations for unnatural and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for each other,” he’s saying that these folks were engaging in practices that were not the ones they usually performed. They were outside their everyday experience. That certainly isn’t a condemnation.

John Buehrens, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Assocation, reflects on the larger issues in Why Religious Liberals Should Read the Bible:

You also can’t be spiritually mature or wise by simply rejecting the Bible as oppressive. The oppressive uses of the Bible are real, but unless you learn to understand that there are other readings possible, the Bible will, indeed, simply continue to be a source of oppression for you, and not a source of inspiration, liberation, creation, and even exultation as you understand it anew for yourself, at a deeper and less literal level.

For resources to start, I suggest a Revised Standard Edition of the Bible,
Who Wrote the Bible?, a very readable guide to the pentateuch (the first five books of the old testament) and Who Wrote the New Testament?, which is an equally compelling guide to the NT.