Permission Granted--Take the Bible into Your Own Hands

Jennifer Bird

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780664260408
• eBook ISBN: 9781611645705
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Millions of people around the world look to the Bible as a source of encouragement and faith formation, a reminder that God is love and is in control, and a guide to living one's life the way God desires. But this treasured book has also been misused and manipulated by many, placed on a pedestal of untouchability, and protected from questioning and honest engagement. In Permission Granted, Jennifer Grace Bird encourages people of faith to explore the texts on their own, freed from long-held myths and misconceptions; experience the Bible anew; and appreciate this holy book for what it isâ€"not what we think it should be.

With the sensitivity of one who has discovered this freedom herself, Bird invites readers to engage what the Bible really says about twelve key issues, including sin, sex, and the role of women.

1

What the Bible Is and Is Not

As we begin the discussion about what the Bible is and is not, take a few moments to take stock of your own view of the Bible. Is it a source of inspiration? Is it the mouthpiece of God, through which you and your faith community hear what God has to say to you? Is it something you read for daily devotion?

Similarly, take a moment to think about the nature of the Bible. Reflect on the words that you choose to use to describe it and what they mean. For instance, if you say every word is inspired by God, do you mean that the Bible is inerrant and infallible? Or was it inspired in a more general sense, in that the wisdom it contains was written by people greatly inspired?

Have you ever seen the bumper sticker that says, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”? Of course, while I am sure not everyone reading this book will think of the Bible in this way, I do think it is helpful to understand where someone who does is coming from. Grasping why some people believe with all their being that the Bible is inerrant and infallible can be quite enlightening.

Let’s begin with that word inerrant. Inerrant simply means “free from error.” Using this word to describe the Bible is usually a way to say something about its trustworthiness. A person who uses this word typically believes that God inspired absolutely everything within the Bible. Thus, every word on every page, every promise and command is intended and relevant for the believer reading it today. The level of trust in this way of thinking is difficult to describe adequately; you trust God, so you trust that God carefully directed how the Bible was made, at every step along the way.

What’s in a Name?

The names that I am using to refer to the two testaments in the Christian Bible might be new to you. I would like to explain what they mean and why I make this choice.

If you approach the Bible from a Christian perspective, you will most likely think of it as having two testaments: the Old and the New. (You might also think of it as including the Apocrypha, but that is another matter.) The thing is, the books in the “Old Testament” make up the entire Bible for Jews. Thus it is a bit disrespectful to refer to the primary set of Jewish sacred writings with a label that implies that something newer and better has come along. So, out of respect for the fact that Christians and Jews both read that first testament, I prefer not to call it the “Old Testament.”

But finding a way to refer to that testament respectfully gets a bit tricky. The Jewish Bible and the Christian Old Testament use all the same books, but in different orders. The Jewish Bible groups and orders them by genre: the Torah (first five books), the Prophets, and the Writings. Using the first letter of the Hebrew words for each section, we get the acronym T.N.K., pronounced Tanak. But since the Tanak and the Old Testament have a slightly different ordering of the books, they tell different overall stories. From this perspective, then, they are not exactly the same thing.

Some people make the suggestion that the two testaments be referred to as the First and the Second Testaments. I like that this suggestion honors the historical development, without implying that the Christian tradition has replaced Judaism.

Finally, some suggest that we call it the “Hebrew Bible” as a way to refer to the language it was written in, originally (although a small portion was written in Aramaic).

I hope that you can begin to see how complicated this matter is! For ease or convenience, I prefer to call it the “Hebrew Bible.”

When it comes to the New Testament we still have a bit of a labeling issue. If I had gone with “First Testament” for the Hebrew Bible, we could call this the Second Testament. But I did not in this case. Similarly, some people suggest calling it the Newer Testament, or the Christian Testament. Now, this last one is not entirely accurate, since both testaments in the Christian Bible are “Christian,” strictly speaking. All these concerns noted, I will refer to the New Testament as the “Newer Testament.”

If you are wondering why some people make such a big deal out of labels or names, consider how powerful our words and language are. Think about the time people put into choosing names for their children. Even nicknames that we give to one another matter and have meaning. The adage “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is not entirely true. Ask anyone who has been verbally bullied. Words can wound. Words can also give life. Our language and the ways we choose to talk about something do have power and do matter to us.

This is why I am careful about how I refer to the contents of Bible, which has been cherished by millions of people around the world, over many centuries. I hope you will join me in being similarly thoughtful about the way you choose to talk about it.

One final caveat on names and labels: The first time I heard someone call the scriptures “writings” or even, brace yourself, “texts,” I was so shocked I didn’t hear another word of that lecture. How dare he be so casual with the Bible! However, there is nothing wrong with calling the books of the Bible “texts” or “writings,” since that is precisely what they are. When I use these labels, I do not mean to offend, and I assure you that I take these scriptures quite seriously.

This perspective usually goes hand-in-hand with the idea that the Bible is as perfect as God is perfect. If you pause to consider the implications of this belief, the stakes are quite high for a person defending the Bible’s inerrancy. Saying the Bible isn’t perfect may feel tantamount to challenging who God is, and if you are going to question that, where does the questioning stop? It feels like an all-or-nothing gig.

This is how I saw things at one point, so I can empathize with this conviction. The first time someone I respected challenged the Bible’s inerrancy, this thing called a “slippery slope” suddenly became very real to me. As you can imagine, that level of questioning does not appeal to a person who believes that “all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16 NIV). This verse is, after all, a significant part of why so many Christians take this inerrancy approach to the Bible. Scripture being “God-breathed” is also taken to mean that it is “God-inspired.” The reference to “all scripture” is taken to mean everything contained in the Christian Bible. The reasons are mounting for why some people get defensive when someone suggests that there are errors or contradictions within the Bible.

So, in light of these things, I invite you to take a few moments to mull over the following two points:

1. WHAT SCRIPTURE DOES 2 TIMOTHY 3:16 REFER TO?

The letter of 2 Timothy was written before the Gospels and letters that make up the Newer Testament were considered to be “scripture.” The author of 2 Timothy would have been writing from the tradition of Judaism. So “scripture” referred only to the passages in the Torah, Prophets, and Writings that he would have been familiar with.

Additionally, the author of 2 Timothy could not have anticipated the formation of the Newer Testament (which was formalized in the late fourth century), much less that his letter would be included in it. Some people (including myself, at one time) might claim that God knew what writings would eventually be considered scripture, wanted this line to refer to all scripture, and therefore inspired 2 Timothy’s author to say those things. Viewing the Bible as inerrant makes such reasoning possible, but it doesn’t take seriously the writer’s actual context or intention.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this question that I hope you will think about is this: if you have a passage in scripture that says that all scripture is God-breathed, then you have a self-validating system or an example of “circular reasoning.” Think about this for a moment. While convenient, I do not think that God would endorse such sneakiness.

2. WHAT DID “GOD-BREATHED” MEAN?

Now that we know that scripture meant the Hebrew Bible, we are still left with a conundrum: how are we to understand the “God-breathed” part? Would the original recipients have thought it meant that every word in the Hebrew Bible was as God intended, as many people take it to mean today? Or would they have thought of it in the generally inspired kind of way? Would the original audience have thought that it meant that there would be no errors, in terms of names and places and dates, and that every story happened just as it is narrated, as many people do today? Of course, we will never know. But here are a few insights for you to consider, for now. We will get into more depth on these topics throughout the book.

Let’s take the idea that all the stories in the Bible happened exactly as they are told to us. This is, for instance, what people believe to be the case when they hold to a strict Creationist perspective on the origins of the planet. They read the first couple of chapters of Genesis as a narration of what transpired “in the beginning.” Aside from this being a bit difficult, since no one was there to transcribe what God said and did, there are logical problems to the poetic order described in Genesis 1, such as the occurrence of day and night before there was a sun to rise and set.

As for the matter of there being no inaccuracies, in terms of names or dates or places, you could compare Judges 1 with Joshua 10. Joshua’s narrative makes it clear that the Israelites kill everyone they come across, slaughtering town after town full of people. Judges tells us that the Israelites did not drive out the inhabitants of the land but that the Canaanites remained and the Israelites settled among them. Surely these cannot both have transpired. But there is a way to read both accounts that respects them and does not require that you ditch your faith as a result. It does require that you read with an understanding of the stories’ contexts and why they were written and at least a dose of how histories were told and passed down at the time.

On the matter of every word being exactly as God intended it to be, consider juxtaposing the following passages. Exodus 34:6: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” Compare this with Genesis 6:6, where God is said to regret having made humankind, or Exodus 32:9-10, where God calls the Israelites “stiff-necked” people and wants to let the divine wrath consume them. Can those all be accurate representations of God? Maybe we can read some of these passages in a way that honors them, without having to attribute them all to God’s intention. But if they are all read literally, then there seems to be a contradiction in there, somewhere.

What about what we see in scripture regarding murder? The sixth commandment, of the “Top 10,” says not to murder, clear and simple. Yet, the LORD also tells the Israelites to slaughter towns full of people and to put people to death as a consequence for many offenses described in the other commandments. So, which is it?

While the idea that the Bible is God-inspired can be quite a comforting thought, taking this idea literally can set people up to expect the Bible to be a kind of book that it is not, leading to some very uncomfortable mental gymnastics in the attempt to reconcile conflicting statements and one’s own experience.

The Bible is actually a collection of writings. The books of the Bible were all written by humans. They did not descend from the heavens as one perfect whole, bound together, Genesis to Revelation. Many of the books of the Hebrew Bible were written down hundreds of years after the events they narrate. Think about how the stories would have been adapted over time, for different audiences and situations. We see something similar with some of the Newer Testament writings, primarily with the Gospels and Acts. The earliest Gospel was written down at least thirty years after Jesus’ execution and resurrection, and the latest was another thirty years later. The book of Acts depicts what Jesus’ disciples did in the early 30s but was not committed to writing until the mid-80s.

Perhaps it is okay, then, to begin to rethink how you see the writings in the Bible. The idea of scripture being perfect, as many people would have us believe, needs to be set aside. Did those authors believe that they were capturing events exactly as they had happened? Is that even possible or a reasonable thing to suggest?

Some people would counter that God told them exactly what to write and that is how the authors were able to write without errors. I see the appeal of this belief, since I used to hold it myself. But somewhere in the process of the writing of these texts, this belief becomes difficult to uphold. Was it the original version (none of which we still have) that was inspired? For many of the scriptures, what we have today are copies of copies that include small, and sometimes significant, add-ons. Furthermore, though we turn to the same basic collection of hundreds of manuscripts (in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) to produce a copy of the Bible today, we know that a saying in any language will lose something in translation to our modern languages. So which version is exactly what God wanted?

The books of the Bible were written for various reasons, employing several genres. Most, if not all, of the Bible was written by men and from their perspectives. So, let’s take a look at why motivations, genres, and perspective matter.

MOTIVATION BEHIND THE WRITINGS

I have heard many people say that the Bible is best understood as: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth—B.I.B.L.E. This approach to the Bible says that we can read the words on the pages as they present themselves, trusting that God’s truths are eternal and that God’s Spirit will reveal to you the truths you need to hear. But if you have not stopped to ask what it was that people thought they were communicating to others when they told the first story of creation in Genesis 1 (see chap. 2), or why someone was writing down David’s story at all (chap. 6), or even what we should expect from a biography of Jesus (chap. 9), then there is a good chance we will look for and expect to find the wrong things in the words of the Bible.

Whatever the original motivations at work were, we do know that they were written to inspire faith in God and to give the original faith community a sense of collective identity. No question. But that does not mean that we should expect all the stories to have taken place just as they are told. In fact, in some cases, it does not even matter if the stories took place at all. What matters is that the stories are there and have defined reality and identities for millions of people over the centuries. They have even inspired countless masterpieces, without which our world would be much the poorer.

But there are also stories and passages in the Bible that seem to have been written to justify some pretty horrific things. Thus, as reasonable, rational, and loving people, we might want to be able to say that some parts of the Bible are not inspired by God but by humans (chaps. 5 and 7).

It is also worth noting that the purpose and the genre—why someone writes and the form he wrote in—are often intimately connected. This leads us to the discussion of genres found in the Bible.

GENRES IN THE BIBLE

Being aware of the different genres used in the Bible allows you to read a passage appropriately. There are many people who believe that the truth contained in the Bible is entirely self-evident, such that one can find a line anywhere within the Bible and immediately apply it to one’s life. Similarly, one can connect two lines or passages, if they have a word or idea in common, and they can serve to support each other, regardless of the context of each passage. This practice is often called “cherry-picking,” because people pick and choose which verses to read and leave others out. In pairing passages based on shared ideas, however, we often overlook the all-important context and form of the writing.

The list of genres used in the Bible might surprise you. Histories are the most common type of story. A good deal of the Hebrew Bible is comprised of this genre, but it is also found in Acts in the Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Advance Praise for Permission Granted
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 What the Bible Is and Is Not
• 2 Two Creation Stories and Other Myths
• 3 What Really Happened in the Garden?
• 4 Sex: Who, What, and Why?
• 5 Violence: The Language Everyone Understands
• 6 Cover-Ups and Edited Stories
• 7 Biblical Women: Silent, Submissive Baby Makers?
• 8 Born of a Virgin?
• 9 Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
• 10 Was Paul the First Christian?
• 11 Judgment Day Is . . . Not Coming
• 12 Now What?