Alastair Roberts, explaining why he traded in his obsessive reading of a certain brand of political theology for deep immersion in the gospels:

I determined to go completely cold turkey on the political theology. I stopped reading it. I stopped thinking about it. I stopped arguing about it. In its place, I steeped myself in the Gospels, reading and meditating upon them. And I prayed. […]

It was not long until I experienced a significant change; the appeal of the political theology largely dissipated. While I could make seemingly scriptural arguments for it, so much of the spirit of the politics I had been getting into was alien to the spirit of the Gospels. Reading the Gospels deeply and out of delight in them, rather than as fodder for political argument, was like leaving a thick miasma and breathing fresh air.

Part of the shift I experienced was a shift in my posture towards scripture, which led to changes in my hearing of scripture. When I was chiefly animated by political positions and debates, my approach to scripture became increasingly subservient to those. I had been “listening for” things that seemed to back up my positions. I knew all the prooftexts. I could defend my position “from” scripture too: I knew how to counter all sorts of biblical arguments against my position. […]

When I stepped back, the arguments, debates, and ideology no longer mediated my relationship with the text. I started to read it on its own terms; I started listening to it, rather than listening for things that served interests and concerns I was bringing to it. As I did, I began to feel the grain of the text and to learn to move with it. Biblical statements ceased to be brute facts to be marshalled into an extrabiblical system.

Among other things, I started paying more attention to the manner of the text and its unifying movements of thought. While I could incorporate abstract biblical verses into my former political system, I discovered that it was more difficult to honestly account for the ways the Bible itself held everything together – what it prioritized, what it said, how it said it, what it didn’t say, what it downplayed. Had the biblical authors truly believed what I had believed, they would have written very different books, with a very different animating spirit to them. And while many of my former beliefs weren’t straightforwardly wrong (although some certainly were), the spirit that animated them was, producing distortions that twisted everything.

The second to last sentence deserves serious reflection: “Had the biblical authors truly believed what I had believed, they would have written very different books, with a very different animating spirit to them.” We could change it into the form of a question, which would be a very searching question indeed: Do my beliefs about X (ostensibly drawn from Scripture) actually breathe the same air as Holy Scripture? Or we could ask: Would Paul and James and John and Peter (et al.) see the fit between their writings and the beliefs I’m espousing? Obviously, describing the “animating spirit” of a text can be a tricky business, and it’s not always a straightforward endeavor to say whether this or that biblical writer might endorse my beliefs about X. Nevertheless, I do think these sorts of questions can be useful for the person honestly trying to read with the grain of Scripture.