When Scripture Has Been Used to Hurt You

Recovering the Heart of the Epistles in a World of Spiritual Wounds

What image comes to mind when you think about God?

Is He like Santa Claus, dressed in red, with a big bag of gifts slung over His shoulder, ready to satisfy your every whim? Or is He more like a policeman, dark uniform, baton in hand, waiting to punish you for every little mistake you make?

I must admit, I always saw God more as the policeman type.

It probably came from my upbringing. My parents were very strict and firmly believed in “spare the rod, spoil the child.” And in my church, God was portrayed as a big, Holy God who stood at the ready to punish any form of sin. The result was that I was very afraid of God. I didn’t do the things other teenagers did. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t party. Not because I was especially holy, but because I was so afraid that God would see me and zap me with lightning.

It’s true that the way we are raised affects our perception of God, and that perception is not always a faithful reflection of who God actually is. Our human tendency is to swing from one extreme to the other. God is either Santa Claus or the strict policeman. Either an indulgent grandfather who tolerates anything or a stern enforcer waiting to catch you slipping.

Neither picture looks like Jesus.

And it is not only our upbringing that shapes the way we see God. Sometimes it is the way Scripture itself has been used in our lives. A verse quoted to silence us in our grief. An epistle of Paul was wielded against us in a relationship that was anything but Christlike. A passage used to keep us small, compliant, quiet. If that’s your story, if certain Bible verses make you flinch, hear this before we go any further: healing is possible. Many believers slowly rediscover that beneath the misuse, there is still a faithful God who has not abandoned them — a God whose Word, rightly read, was always meant to set them free. That is the journey I want to walk with you in this post.

When Sacred Words Become Sources of Fear

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd developed a framework called Betrayal Trauma Theory. Her research describes something we instinctively know but rarely have words for: harm cuts deepest when it comes through the people and systems we were supposed to trust most.

That is why church hurt is not simply a theological disagreement. When a pastor, parent, spouse, or community uses Scripture to wound you, the place that was supposed to be your sanctuary becomes the place you brace against. Your spiritual home becomes a source of fear. And the questions start to swirl: The people who taught me about God hurt me. The Bible was supposed to heal me, but why does it feel like a weapon now? If they represented God, can I trust God? Was I wrong to feel hurt?

These questions are not signs of rebellion. They are the honest cries of a soul trying to make sense of what should never have happened. Spiritual abuse wounds so deeply because it combines betrayal with sacred trust.

The Fear and Shame That Were Never the Gospel

Christian psychologist Diane Langberg, who has spent more than fifty years working with trauma survivors, names the lingering effects of fear-based, authoritarian religious environments — chronic shame, anxiety around certain passages, hypervigilance toward leaders, difficulty trusting your own discernment, and fear of asking honest questions.

One of the most important findings of this research is that people often continue experiencing fear long after they have intellectually rejected the harmful teaching. You may already know in your mind that a teaching was unhealthy, and your body may still respond with panic, guilt, or shame. That is not a sign of weak faith. It is a sign that you were genuinely hurt, and your body remembers.

And here is the good news: the God of Scripture cares for the whole person. Healing is not only spiritual; it is embodied. The Lord who formed you, body and soul, is also the One who restores.

Modern psychology helps us see why this matters by distinguishing two experiences that often get tangled together. Guilt says, I did something wrong. Shame says, I am wrong. The gospel makes space for the first, healthy conviction, which draws us toward the kindness of God. But shame, the deep belief that you are fundamentally defective, does not come from the heart of Jesus.

Yet so much misused Scripture trades in shame: “Good Christians don’t question leadership.” “Your doubt means rebellion.” “Your emotions are sinful.” “Suffering proves your holiness, stay where you are.” Read without a pastoral context, the epistles can be twisted to train people out of their God-given conscience, boundaries, and discernment. That is not formation. That is erasure.

When Your Picture of God Gets Distorted

Remember the policeman God of my childhood? That is exactly what attachment research helps us understand. We often experience God through the patterns set by the spiritual authorities in our lives. When those authorities were harsh, unpredictable, or controlling, our hearts absorbed that picture. Instead of imagining God as secure love, we begin to imagine Him as surveillance. Instead of grace, we feel constant evaluation.

Sometimes people are not rejecting God Himself. They are trying to recover from distorted pictures of Him.

And many of us carry more than a distorted picture; we carry what researchers call moral injury, the disorientation that comes when our deepest spiritual convictions are violated by the very systems meant to embody them. “I thought the church was supposed to protect people. I thought Scripture was about love. I thought leaders were supposed to look like Jesus.” That grief deserves to be named honestly, not rushed past with a verse or a platitude. If your faith is in a wilderness season, it may not be because you have walked away from Jesus. It may be because you are finally walking away from a god who never looked like Jesus in the first place.

And that is holy work.

The Epistles Themselves Saw This Coming

Here is what is so remarkable, and what gives me real hope as we open the letters of the New Testament: the apostles themselves anticipated that Scripture could be twisted. The first Christians were not naive about misuse. They knew. Peter says it plainly:

“There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.”

— 2 Peter 3:16, NRSV

Notice what Peter is doing. He is not protecting Scripture from us. He is protecting us from distorted readings of Scripture. Misuse of the Bible is not a modern problem. It is a danger that the New Testament itself named from the beginning.

The Bible itself warns us that Scripture can be twisted.

That means when you sense something is off about how a passage is being used — when an interpretation produces fear instead of freedom, control instead of Christlikeness, then your hesitation is legitimate.

Witnesses from the Letters Themselves

As we read the epistles in their original pastoral context, we discover that the apostles were already pushing back against the kind of distortion many of us have suffered under.

Paul refuses to manipulate.

“We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:2

Paul rejects manipulation and cunning as a betrayal of the gospel itself. Faithful teaching does not need to manipulate.

Maturity, not blind compliance, is the goal.

“We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery.”

— Ephesians 4:14

Paul’s solution to manipulation is not silence or unquestioning trust. It is maturity, “speaking the truth in love.” Truth and love stay together.

Christ sets people free.

“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

— Galatians 5:1

Any interpretation that consistently produces fear, domination, or spiritual captivity should cause us to pause and ask: Is this reflecting the heart of the gospel?

Test everything.

“Test everything; hold fast to what is good.”

— 1 Thessalonians 5:21

Paul expects believers to discern, evaluate, and weigh. Healthy faith is not passive compliance.

Leadership is an example, not domination.

“Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock.”

— 1 Peter 5:3

Peter directly confronts authoritarian leadership. The shepherd’s posture is not one of domination. It is the example of Jesus.

What You May Need to Recover From

Many people do not need to recover from Scripture itself. They need to recover from the ways Scripture was misused against them.

Healing often begins when we learn to separate things that have been wrongly fused together:

• God from abusive leadership

• Scripture from harmful interpretation

• Christ from controlling systems

• Faith from fear

• Belonging from compliance

These distinctions are not acts of rebellion against the Bible. They are acts of faithfulness to the Author of the Bible — the One whose character is the lens through which all of Scripture must be read.

An Encouraging Word, If You Need It Today

If a verse has been used to wound you, please hear this: that verse, in the hands of someone who loved you the way Jesus loves you, would not have produced the fruit it produced in your life. Galatians tells us that the Spirit grows love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. When teaching produces the opposite: fear, hiddenness, self-erasure, chronic shame, we are right to ask whether it came from the Spirit at all.

You are allowed to grieve and take time. You are allowed to read the Bible slowly, in safer company, with people who handle it the way you would handle a wound, with care and reverence. And you are allowed to come back to Scripture. Not because someone is forcing you. But because, underneath the layers of misuse, there is still a Voice calling you beloved long before anyone ever taught you to be afraid.

Faithful interpretation moves people toward truth, maturity, dignity, love, and Christlikeness — not fear, control, and shame.

Neither Santa Claus Nor a Policeman

The God who meets us in Jesus is neither Santa Claus nor a policeman. He is not an indulgent grandfather who tolerates everything because nothing really matters. He is not a stern enforcer waiting for you to slip so He can zap you with lightning.

He is the God who put on flesh and walked toward sinners, sat with outcasts, defended the shamed, and refused to wield Scripture as a weapon against the weary. That God is good.

And as you heal, you will discover that the epistles, read as intended, are letters of love and formation, written to draw us to God.

Letters meant to root you. Not chain you.

You are deeply loved. Go live like it.

Continue the Journey

Read — Slowly revisit one of the epistles mentioned in this post, in a translation that feels gentle (try the NRSV or the CEB). Read it like a letter, not a lecture.

Reflect — Where in your life has Scripture produced fear rather than freedom? What might it look like to bring that wound honestly to Jesus today?

Download — Grab the free 7-day Scripture journey, From Fear to Faith, at samanthachambo.com. A gentle on-ramp back to the Word.

Share — If this post resonated with something true for you, send it to one person who needs to hear that they are not alone.

Sources

Psychological sources referenced in this post:

Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Langberg, Diane. Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church. Brazos Press, 2020.

Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Scribner, 1994. See also Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War (Beacon Press, 2012).

Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Gotham Books, 2012.

Hall, Todd W., and M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall. Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation. IVP Academic, 2021.

samanthachambo.com • Living Loved