Difficult Passages

Every pastor runs into the same question: the congregant who asks, reasonably, what do you make of this passage? — and the question is real, the passage is hard, and the answer deserves more than a Sunday-school platitude. Difficult Passages is the reference I wanted to hand someone in that moment. Each entry lays out the difficulty as plainly as possible, then maps the three to five major historical responses Christians have given, each with its strengths, its weaknesses, and a reading list to go deeper. No single answer is pushed as the right one; the goal is to show the terrain honestly so a reader can think for themselves.

The site is also an example of the kind of research work AI makes possible for a parish pastor without a seminary library down the hall. The initial corpus — 38 entries spanning Genesis through Revelation, including textual-critical problems like the Two Jeremiahs, moral problems like the Canaanite conquest, and theological problems like the cry of dereliction — was drafted through a collaborative process with Claude, then checked, edited, and cross-referenced against the standard commentaries and scholarly literature. It is the sort of reference book that used to require a research budget and a team. Now a pastor with a laptop and a careful eye can build it.