Peter DeHaan

Peter DeHaan is an American Christian author and Bible teacher who writes for readers tired of churchgoing as a habit and hungry for something more honest.

His self-description cuts straight to the point: he writes “about biblical Christianity to confront a status quo faith and live a life that matters,” seeking a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices. That phrase, “made-up traditions,” is doing real work. It signals a writer who isn’t interested in defending institutions, only in reading the text. He identifies as a lifetime student of the Bible, and the body of work bears that out: his books return again and again to what the original writers actually said, rather than what centuries of commentary have decided they meant.

DeHaan founded ABibleADay.com, a platform built around the discipline of daily Scripture reading, and his publishing imprint is Rock Rooster Books. His blog covers territory ranging from Bible character sketches and church attendance reflections to reviews of books and films, and his tag cloud reads like a map of his preoccupations: community, denominations, unity, love, prayer, the Holy Spirit, money, and the persistent question of what it actually means to follow Jesus inside, and often outside, organised religious life. His “52 Churches” series, which includes both a narrative account and a companion workbook, grew directly from his practice of visiting different congregations, attending worship across traditions and denominations rather than settling into one comfortable pew.

His Bible study books are his most sustained work. Matthew Bible Study takes the first Gospel as a bridge between Old Testament Judaism and New Testament Christianity, working through 40 lessons that trace Jesus’s family tree, ministry, miracles, and resurrection. The audiobook edition makes the material accessible beyond the printed page. Revelation Bible Study, published in January 2025 by Rock Rooster Books under its current title (it was previously titled A New Heaven and a New Earth), takes direct aim at a familiar failure mode in Revelation commentary: the compulsion to decode prophecy as a timeline of current events. DeHaan doesn’t do that. He asks readers to receive the book as “a glorious mystery,” focused on the triumph of good over evil and the assurance that God holds what’s coming. 200 Old Testament Sinners and Saints brings the same character-level attention to the Hebrew Bible, sketching figures who are morally complicated and human in ways that tidy Sunday school versions tend to sand off.

What threads these projects together is an approach to the Bible that is devotional without being sentimental, and critical without being academic in the technical sense. DeHaan’s short-chapter format and application questions suggest a reader who might be sitting with a passage at a kitchen table rather than in a seminary library. The books work for individuals, but they’re designed for small groups too, which means the implicit community is one of inquiry rather than instruction.

There’s something genuinely worth noticing in what DeHaan is doing, and it runs across traditions much wider than evangelical Christianity. The impulse to strip away accumulated religious habit and return to a founding text is as old as the Reformation, but it’s also present in Buddhist reform movements, in the Sufi poets’ distrust of clerical formalism, in the Jewish tradition of argument with the text itself. DeHaan’s version is Protestant and plainspoken. But the longing underneath it, the desire to encounter the sacred directly rather than through a curated inheritance of interpretation, is one that seekers from many traditions will recognise.

His website, peterdehaan.com, hosts his full archive of posts and links to his book catalogue, his newsletter, and his blog, which he has maintained long enough that the post archive alone functions as a record of his development as a thinker. He’s an author still actively publishing, still writing toward an audience he clearly respects enough not to talk down to.