Beware what you believe.

That's right. Beware what you believe, lest it blind you to the truth.

None of us are a blank slate, we all believe lots of different things, and this affects how we interpret the Bible, historical evidence, everything. For example, I was once listening to a sermon, and a possible interpretation of the passage (I can't remember the one) was that Paul could have lost his salvation, but this was ruled out on the basis that the rest of Bible teaches you can't loose your salvation. This rather irked my Arminian sensibilities as I could think of various passages, such as Hebrews 6, that many Christians would interpret to say that you could loose your salvation. So what's going on?

We're confusing our belief system, which (hopefully) we've based on scripture with what the Bible actually teaches. Whenever we interpret a passage we only consider possibilities that fit within our system. Is this wrong? Not necessarily. It's good practise to interpret confusing passages in the light of the more obvious ones, which hopefully form the basis of our belief system. However we should be aware that we're doing this. We should acknowledge that other Christians have come to different conclusions, also based on scripture, and we should (I say this to myself) try to understand why they believe what they do and their methodolgy for doing so. This may change what we believe. It may not. But at the very least it should widen the possible ways a given text could be understood. And this may allow us to arrive at a more accurate interpretation, even if this challenges our nice, neat, pre-existing, beliefs.