Wrestling With The Word For The World We Actually Live In
About This Website
Leaning on the Rock is a collaboration of people who believe in God and who understand that belief comes in many forms. We are not a denomination. We are not a theological school of thought. We are a community of people willing to sit with hard questions long enough to actually examine them.
This website exists to create a space where spirituality is studied and discussed in the context of the contemporary world. We bring historical context, original language study in Greek and Hebrew, interpretive scholarship, and careful intellectual inquiry into conversation with the questions people are actually living with right now.
Our goal is never to tell you what to think. Our goal is to get you thinking, and to keep the conversation going from there.
If you do not agree with a post, please comment on it in a respectful way to present your point. We believe that dialogue is the real way to demonstrate your view.
What We Believe
About the Word
We do not come to Scripture with all the answers. We come with our questions, our doubts, and our deep need for something that holds. We believe the Bible is the living Word of God — not a rulebook to master, but a river to wade into. Like Jacob at the ford of Jabbok, we wrestle with the text until it blesses us.
We read it slowly. We sit with the tension. We let hard passages stay hard, because we trust that the God who breathed them knows exactly what He is doing. What we find, every time, is that the Word does not move away from our struggle. It meets us there.
Wrestling with
the Word
We call our approach Wrestling with the Word. The name is intentional.
Jacob wrestled with God through the night and walked away with a limp and a new name. He did not walk away with easy answers. He walked away knowing something he did not know before he stepped into the ring. That is the kind of engagement we are after here.
Traditional interpretations deserve to be examined. Translations deserve scrutiny. The history of a text, the culture it was written in, and the specific words the original writers chose in Greek or Hebrew … all of that changes what a passage means and what it asks of us. When we do that work carefully and without agenda, we often find that Scripture has far more to say to us than the familiar version allowed.
That is a good thing. That is not doubt. That is faith doing its real work.
What We Bring
to the Table
Every post at Leaning on the Rock is built around a specific text or passage. We go deep on one to three scriptures rather than skating across the surface of many. We ask what the original language actually says, not just what a translation renders. We place the text inside its historical and cultural moment. We ask what a first-century reader would have heard when these words were spoken, before centuries of interpretation settled on top of them.
Then we ask: what does this mean for where you are right now?
The goal is not academic. The goal is practical. Scripture was written to people facing real problems, real fear, real grief, real questions about how to live. It still speaks to those things. Wrestling with the Word is how we find out what it is actually saying.
How We Want
to Engage
This is a respectful space. Disagreement is welcome here. Doubt is welcome here. Hard questions are welcome here. What is not welcome is contempt, for the text, for the tradition, or for the people in this conversation who see things differently than you do.
We expect the dialogue to be robust. We expect people to push back. We expect to be challenged, and we expect to challenge. That is the whole point. You cannot learn more than you already know if you never step into the ring.
We hope to bring you new ideas, forgotten history, honest challenge, and genuine dialogue. We hope that by the time you close the tab, something is sitting differently than it was when you opened it.
Come wrestle with us.