Oh Good. Another Book on the Bible.
To clear the air, let me just put this out there. I am a left-brained academic of German heritage with control issues and marginal social skills. Iâm leaving out a few steps, including hours of therapy and self-help seminars, but since I fear you might be losing interest already, let me get to my point.
Iâve been studying, teaching, and writing about the Bible since the Reagan administration, andâfunny thingâIâve noticed the same questions keep coming up, not only for me but for plenty others, like:
What is the Bible, exactly?
Who cares?
What do I do with it?
and especially:
How does this ancient, distant, and odd book work for people who look to it today for spiritual guidance?
These questions keep coming up because they are not easy to answer. They mean a lot to me, though. They drive what I do.
My last two books lay out common beliefs many Christians have about the Bible that are actually wrong, are not at all biblical, and cause all sorts of spiritual problems. In The Bible Tells Me So, I look specifically at the mistaken belief that the Bible is something like a divine instructional manual, a rulebook, so to speakâjust follow the instructions as printed and youâre good to go. In the follow-up book, The Sin of Certainty, I look at a related mistaken notion, namely, the idea that having strong faith is the same thing as feeling certain that the beliefs we hold are correct, and thus periods of doubt or spiritual struggle reveal a weak faith.
When we come to the Bible expecting it to be an instructional manual intended by God to give us unwavering, cement-hard certainty about our faith, we are actually creating problems for ourselves, becauseâas Iâve come to seeâthe Bible wasnât designed to meet that expectation. In other words, the âproblemsâ we encounter when reading the Bible are really problems we create for ourselves when we harbor the misguided expectation that the Bible is designed primarily to provide clear answers.
Starting with these mistaken notions causes the whole Christian enterprise to go off course. It causes anxiety and stress about following the Bibleâs fine print as if it were the âTerms and Conditionsâ for your latest Apple download, whereas Jesus promises rest to weary pilgrims. And all that stress about needing the Bible to provide certainty about God, life, and the universe is rich soil for cultivating a defensive attitude about our beliefs and therefore an angry and combative posture toward those who see things differentlyâjust another thing to argue about on Facebook, like politics, sports, or who should have won the Oscar.
And maybe thatâs why a faith that celebrates someone known for his radical agenda of loving oneâs enemies and turning the other cheek has a public image, according to a number of opinion polls, for being judgmental, condescending, and nasty.
So thatâs what the other two books are about, and I canât recommend them highly enough. In this book, however, I want to focus not on mistaken beliefs about the Bible and the problems those beliefs cause. Instead, I want to look more closely at the how the Bible actually works. I want to explore how I think God intended the Bible to be used and so to find deeper spiritual benefit in its pages.
Of course, I donât for one minute claim to know what God actually âintendsâ about anything. Iâm not a televangelist or cult leader, claiming special access to the Creator that the rest need to pay for. All Iâm going on is what I see the Bible doing, how it behaves when I pay attention to the words in front of me. And when I do that, I see some pretty conspicuous characteristicsâthree, to be exactâthat are not tucked away in a few corners of the Bible, but that are baked into its pages, though they donât always get the airtime they deserve, since they wreak havoc with the aforementioned view that the Bible is a source book for certainty in matters of faith.
Three Surprising Things That Make the Bible Worth Reading
This might be a good time to tell you what these three conspicuous yet often suppressed characteristics of the Bible are: the Bible is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.
That might sound a bit obscure. I donât blame anyone for expecting me to have used words like holy, perfect, and clearâterms more worthy of the Bible. And those words are fine, I suppose, but not if they paper over how the Bible actually works.
The spiritual disconnection many feel today stems precisely from expecting (or being told to expect) the Bible to be holy, perfect, and clear, when in fact after reading it they find it to be morally suspect, out of touch, confusing, and just plain weird. And they are further told that anything they come across while reading the Bible that threatens this lofty view is either actually no big deal or unfortunate evidence of their own poor reading skills, and neither should get in the way of said lofty view. (Denying the obvious is a great way to create a stressful life for yourself.)
But these three characteristicsâancient, ambiguous, and diverseâare not rough patches along the way that we need to âdeal with,â so we can get on with the important matter of reading the Bible properly. They are, rather, what make the Bible worth reading at all.
They are not hiding but on full display. They are not obstacles to faith, but characteristics that, if we allow them to chart our course, will let us come to know the Bible in new and spiritually refreshing ways. By embracing these characteristics, we will find a Bible that:
Challenges and cheers us on as we walk our own difficult path of faith;
Doesnât close windows and lock doors to keep us in, but invites us to risk, to venture forth beyond what is familiar to us, and to seek God directly;
Gently urges us to see through and past the words on the page to what God is up to right here and now;
Encourages and helps us to step out and find God for ourselves.
So what of these three conspicuous yet often suppressed characteristics of the Bible? To say the Bible is ancient might seem mundane and unnecessary to point out, but I find the opposite is true. The Bible, because it is a constant companion of faith, is often thought of as âGodâs personal love letter to meâ or the like. But that familiarity risks obscuring how old the Bible really is.
We are as distant from the time of King David (three thousand years ago, about 1000 BCE) as we are from the far distant future time of 5000 CE. Go back another thousand years earlier if you want to start at the time of Israelâs most ancient ancestors, Abraham and Sarah. On one level, when we read the Bible, we need to bridge that distance, which is fine, but we still need to respect that distance. Otherwise the Bible can become too familiar, too much like usâtoo comfortable.
We can open the Bible almost at random and begin reading, and it wonât take long before we see how deeply embedded the Bible is in this distant and utterly foreign world. In fact, any decent study Bible (a Bible that comes with explanatory footnotes) will point that out by the time we get through the first two sentences of the Bible (Gen. 1:1â2). The ancient writer describes the âbeginningâ not as a ânothingâ or a âsingularity,â as cosmologists call the preâbig bang state, but as a dark primordial chaos, called the deep, which is something like a threatening vast cosmic ocean that God has to tame.
And that sounds weirdâwhich is my point.
If weâre paying attention, turning a blind eye to the Bibleâs ancientness cannot be sustained for long; the distance between now and then needs to be respected as a key character trait of the Bible we have. The writers of the Bible lived long ago and far away, intent on asking their questions and seeking their answers, oblivious to our own questions and concerns. Now this may seem as if the Bible is locked forever in its ancient moment, but that is most definitely not true.
As we will see, the Bibleâs antiquity shows us the need to ponder God anew in our here and now. Indeed, it gives us permission to do so.
And thatâs nothing new. As we will see later in the book, Jews and Christians throughout history have always known that this ancient Bible cannot simply be âfollowedâ like a recipe. It takes creative imagination to bridge the ancient and modern horizons. And, as we will see in due course, that process is already happeningâI canât stress this enoughâwithin the pages of the Bible itself. So instead of trying to pretend this time gap between our day and biblical times doesnât exist, we should embrace this characteristic and let it chart our path.
By ambiguous I mean that the Bible, perhaps surprisingly, doesnât actually lay out for anyone what to do or thinkâor it does so far less often than we have been led to believe. When it comes to the details of what it means to live a life of faith, the Bible doesnât hand out answers just because we are pounding at the door.
Rather, when reading the Bible for spiritual guidance, we find we are usually left to work things out for ourselves at the end of the day. This isnât a drawback or a problem. This is by design. And the thing is, the need to work things out has always been the case, ever since there has been a Bible. So instead of being fed up and frustrated with a Bible that refuses to tell us clearly what to do, maybe we should step back and ask why this is so and what benefit we might derive from it.
And the Bible is diverseâmeaning it does not speak with one voice on most subjects, but conflicting and contradictory voices. It may feel shocking or disloyal to speak of the Bible this way, but the diversity is actually hard to miss, especially if we read large sections of the Bible in one sitting.
This diversity exists for one simple reason: the Bible was written by various writers who lived at different times, in different places, and under different circumstances and who wrote for different purposes. Their writings demonstrate to us with blinding clarity that they were human beings like us whose perceptions of God and their world were shaped by who they were and when they lived. People of faith have walked this same spiritual path ever since.
So instead of going though painful intellectual contortions pretending this diversity does not exist in the Bible, we should ask why there is so much of it and how this might actually be good news for us.
I donât mean to start off by giving the wrong impression. It might appear that by speaking of an ancient, ambiguous, and diverse Bible I am aiming to focus on whatâs wrong with the Bible, to point out problems that ought to be overcome, avoided, or at least minimized. But I hope itâs clear that my intention is the exact opposite.
I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bibleâs true purpose isâand the need to align our expectations with it.
Godâs Plan A: Wisdom
What, then, is the Bibleâs true purpose when we take seriously its antiquity, ambiguity, and diversity? And with that question we are getting to the main point of this book.
Rather than providing us with information to be downloaded, the Bible holds out for us an invitation to join an ancient, well-traveled, and sacred quest to know God, the world we live in, and our place in it. Not abstractly, but intimately and experientially.
A questâmeaning this is going to take some time and effort. No âHave a Great Spiritual Life in Five Easy Steps!â pamphlet. The Bible isnât just going to hand us the goods.
Iâm not suggesting that the Bible doesnât provide us with any information to enlighten and inspire us or any answers to help mark our path. It does, and I trust that will become clear enough as we move along. I only mean that it also provides us with another kind of information that (appreciate the irony) shows us that âproviding informationâ and âgiving answersâ is not the Bibleâs true purpose.
After all, if the Bibleâs true purpose were to provide us with rulebook information about what God is like and what God wants from us, then why can the Bible be so easily used to:
Justify both slavery and its abolition?
Justify both keeping women subordinate to men and fully emancipating them?
Justify violence against oneâs enemies and condemn it?
Justify political power and denounce it?
Both sides of these (and many other) issues have been embraced with uncompromising passion throughout the course of history by real people, convinced they were simply following the Bibleâs âclear teaching.â But if polar opposite positions can keep claiming the Bibleâs support, then perhaps providing âclear teachingâ might not be what scripture is prepared to do. Just throwing that out there.
The Bible, it seems to...
