We like to pretend the core ideas of the faith are more palatable or workable within our modern rationalistic approach to Scripture than the stuff we want to call "too weird" because of our own intellectual sensibilities. The truth is they are not. So we come up with interpretations to eliminate the weirdness of the biblical worldview that makes us uncomfortable. Problem solved!

When biblical material touches on the natural world, we can legitimately use the tools of science. Sometimes that shows us - no shock here - that biblical writers didn't know as much as we now know about the natural world - but God knew that when he picked them, so that alone tells us that "doing science" that would satisfy a 21st century - and beyond - audience wasn't what God was interested in with respect to the enterprise of producing Scripture for posterity.

Angels can fail because God allows them to make decisions and they are lesser beings than the perfect God. They can go astray, but the task is legitimate. God never tells they aren't allowed to instruct people - "just shut up and babysit them".

Rebellion against God results in being cast out of his service. God doesn't run the affairs of the spiritual world or our world with rebels on his payroll. They are cast to the Underworld (in the case of the Eden rebel), or a special place in the Underworld (e.g., the offenders of Genesis 6:1-4, who are, to quote Peter and Jude, "kept in chains of gloomy darkness" or "sent to Tartarus"). There are more divine rebels than that in the Bible, but hopefully that scratches the surface enough.

Scholarship aimed at truly understanding what the biblical writers meant often does not filter down into the church and through the pulpit to folks who show up on Sunday. I think that's just wrong, but scholars rarely make any effort to decipher their own scholarly work for people outside the ivory tower.

We think "reading the Bible in context" means thinking about the handful of verses before and after the verses we're looking at on the page. That isn't the case. While that's important, context is so much wider than a handful of verses.

If you don't have the worldview of the people who produced the Bible - under inspiration no less, - you can't understand what they were trying to communicate in many respects. Biblical people weren't modern people. That's self-evident no matter how much we try to deny it.