For most of my life, I assumed other people understood the Bible better than I did. I assumed pastors, scholars, and people who had spent years studying Greek and Hebrew knew things I didn't.
I had questions, but I knew better than to ask them. So most of the time, I just kept quiet. I didn't have the words to explain why I felt the way I did.
Recently, I got tired of being quiet.
I wanted to know whether the answers I'd been given were actually coming from the passages themselves or from the way those passages had been interpreted and taught to me.
At some point, I realized the way I was looking for answers wasn't working for me.
I still started with a question, but instead of immediately looking for verses that seemed to answer it, I backed up and looked at the larger topic. Then I found the passages most often used in that discussion and read them in context. Sometimes that meant reading a chapter. Sometimes it meant reading several chapters. Occasionally it meant reading an entire book.
As I read, I tried to set my question aside for a while and focus on understanding the passage itself. Who was writing it? Who was it written to? What was happening at the time? What was the author trying to communicate, and what response was he hoping for from the people reading it?
Only after I felt like I understood the passage would I come back and ask whether it answered the question I had started with.
In this case, the question was simple:
Does the Bible actually teach that all marriages, in all places and for all time, are supposed to be between one man and one woman?
So I started at the beginning.
Genesis: A Story or a Definition?
When this discussion comes up, Genesis is almost always the first place people turn. The reasoning seems simple enough: Adam was a man, Eve was a woman, and therefore God's design for marriage must be one man and one woman.
The first thing that surprised me was realizing that Genesis is a creation story. It's explaining where humanity came from, why people need companionship, and why two people become "one flesh." As I read it, it felt more like it was telling a story than trying to define what marriage is supposed to be.
In Genesis 1, God creates humanity and says, "male and female he created them." In Genesis 2, the story becomes more detailed. Growing up, I was taught that God created a man, said it was not good for the man to be alone, and then took one of his ribs to create the woman.
But when I went back and read the passage more carefully, I discovered there was much more to these verses than I had ever been taught.
I learned that even something as familiar as the "rib" story isn't as straightforward as I assumed. Some scholars argue the Hebrew word is better understood as "side," and others point out that the word often translated as "man" may refer more broadly to a human being until the creation of male and female.
I'm not saying those interpretations are correct. What surprised me was discovering that there were interpretations at all. I had never been told there was more than one way to read these passages.
Most importantly, nowhere in these chapters did I find the sentence, "Marriage can only be between one man and one woman." What I found was the story of the first man and the first woman.
Maybe that story is intended to define every future marriage. Maybe it isn't. But those are two different claims, and I don't think we should automatically treat them as though they're the same.
Then I kept reading.
The Scriptures that begin with Adam and Eve go on to tell stories of Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon, and others who had multiple wives. Whether those relationships reflected God's idea of marriage is a separate discussion. I'm simply saying that once I kept reading, I realized the Bible's story of marriage was more complicated than the version I had grown up hearing.
Genesis didn't really answer the question for me.
If anything, it left me with another question:
Are we reading a story about what happened at the beginning of creation, or are we reading a description of what marriage is supposed to look like?
Matthew 19 & Mark 10
As I continued reading, the next passages I kept seeing referenced in this discussion were Matthew 19 and Mark 10. Since these are passages where Jesus is speaking, I honestly thought this was where I would get a clear answer.
So I went back and read the entire conversation instead of focusing only on the verses that are usually quoted. That's when something stood out to me that I had read many times before but never really stopped to consider.
The first thing I noticed was that nobody was asking Jesus about who should marry. They were asking Him about divorce.
That may seem like a small detail, but I think it changes the conversation significantly.
Jesus answers their question by pointing them back to Genesis. If Genesis is telling the story of the first marriage, then it makes sense that Jesus would refer back to it while discussing marriage and divorce. But that also raised another question for me.
If someone asked me whether they should get divorced and I responded by talking about my husband and me, I wouldn't expect anyone listening to conclude that I had just defined what every marriage should look like. I would simply be using a marriage they already knew as an example while making a point about commitment.
As I thought about that, I began to wonder if Jesus might be doing something similar.
Was He trying to define every marriage for all people and all time? Or was He answering the question He had been asked by pointing back to a marriage story that everyone listening would have known?
I don't know the answer.
What I do know is that when I read Matthew 19 and Mark 10 in their full context, they felt much more like conversations about divorce than attempts to define marriage itself.
That left me asking a different question than the one I started with:
Am I asking these passages to answer a question they were never meant to answer?
Or maybe an even better question:
Am I trying to force a passage to give me an answer that isn't actually there?
Romans 1
After Matthew and Mark, the next passage I kept seeing referenced was Romans 1. The more I read it, the more I realized how important context and history are when trying to understand a passage.
For years, I had always heard Romans 1 quoted, usually beginning around verses 26 and 27. So this time I backed up. Actually, I just read the whole chapter.
One of the first things I noticed was that Paul starts somewhere completely different than I expected. Before he ever talks about same-sex relations, he's talking about people turning away from God and worshiping other things instead. Then he says, "For this reason, God gave them over..."
That made me stop.
For what reason?
The answer Paul gives is idolatry.
At that point, I realized I needed to slow down. The more I read, the more I felt like I was missing part of the picture. Paul wasn't writing a theology textbook. He was writing a letter to real people living in a specific place and time. This is one of those places where changing my approach made a real difference.
Because the more I read, the more I realized I was asking a first-century letter to answer a twenty-first century question.
Now, I also know what some people will be thinking.
"If Paul is condemning same-sex relations, then the discussion is over."
Honestly, I understand why someone would say that. That's exactly why I spent so much time studying this passage.
There's no question that Paul talks about same-sex relations. I didn't skip those verses or try to explain them away. But the more I studied the history, culture, and context, the less convinced I became that Paul was describing the kind of lifelong, loving, committed relationship that people are debating today.
That doesn't mean I suddenly found my answer. It means I realized I still didn't have the clear answer I was looking for, and that this passage deserved more than a quick reading or a simple conclusion.
So I kept reading.
I read Romans 2.
Almost immediately, Paul turns his attention to the person passing judgment on someone else. It didn't answer the question I was asking, but it did leave me wondering:
Would we be a little less judgmental if Romans 2 came before Romans 1?
1 Corinthians 6 & 7
By the time I got to 1 Corinthians 6 and 7, I had already learned that context matters. What I wasn't prepared for was how differently Bible translations handled the passage.
One of the first things I noticed was how differently various Bible translations handled the passage. The NIV said one thing. The RSV said something different. The SBL Study Bible said something different again.
These weren't small wording differences. They reflected very different understandings of the same verse.
That surprised me.
Seeing those differences made me realize something I had never paid much attention to before. Every English Bible represents a series of translation decisions, and sometimes those decisions are more complicated than I had assumed.
As I started digging deeper, I learned that much of the discussion centers around two Greek words: malakoi and arsenokoitai. One literally means "soft." The other appears to be a combination of the Greek words for "male" and "bed."
What stood out to me wasn't the Greek itself.
It was the fact that scholars still debate what these words mean.
Then I discovered something else that completely caught me off guard.
The word "homosexual" didn't even exist when Paul wrote this letter. The term wasn't coined until 1868 and didn't enter the English language until decades later.
That made me stop and think.
If Paul didn't write the word "homosexual," then someone had to decide that it was the best modern English word to use when translating these ancient Greek words.
And if that's what Paul meant, I found myself wondering why he said it in such an unusual way.
If Paul meant what we mean by "homosexual" today, why did he use such an unusual word?
For me, the biggest takeaway wasn't that one translation was right and another was wrong.
It was realizing that the passage was far more complicated than I had always been told.
Conclusion
As I continued reading, I found passages that discussed honoring marriage, purity, self-control, and sexual immorality—often in the context of adultery, lust, dominance, and exploitation. Those are important topics, but I never found the kind of discussion I expected to find. I couldn't find a passage that clearly defined marriage the way we often talk about it today: two people who love one another, commit themselves to one another, and build a life together.
So where did I land?
Honestly, I didn't find the clear answer I was hoping to find.
After reading the passages that keep getting quoted, I wasn't able to find a passage that clearly says marriage can only be between one man and one woman.
So can I confidently say that the Bible teaches that all marriages, in all places and for all time, can only be between one man and one woman?
My answer is no.
For years, something about these passages never sat right with me. Not because I didn't believe in God or reject the Bible. I just wasn't sure these verses were saying what I had always been told they were saying. The problem was that I didn't know what to do with that feeling. I wasn't a pastor, a Bible scholar, or someone who knew Greek or Hebrew, so I assumed I wasn't qualified to ask questions.
Sometimes it felt like the moment I asked one, the response wasn't an answer. It was a look. The kind of look that says, "Who do you think you are to question this?" For a long time, that was enough to keep me quiet.
This journey started when I finally gave myself permission to ask those questions. I gave myself permission to read the passages for myself, learn the history and context behind them, and approach them with an open mind. I wasn't trying to prove anyone wrong. I genuinely wanted to understand what they were saying.
What I discovered wasn't the clear answer I thought I was looking for. What I found was a better understanding of why those explanations never sat right with me in the first place.
I don't know where my journey goes from here. What I do know is that my core beliefs haven't changed. If anything, they've become more important to me. What has changed is how I approach them.
What does my faith look like?
It looks like...
...being willing to ask questions.
...keeping an open mind.
...being willing to change my mind.
...admitting when I'm wrong.
But most importantly, my faith is not about having all the answers.
It's about finding peace in the journey.