First published on JULY 13, 2009 7:06AM
Note: This post contains teaching applicable to Christians. However, much of it is equally applicable to Jews. I also think that it can be helpful to those of other faiths and of no faith at all who approach it with good will. This is how I view the Bible, nothing more, nothing less.
This is, of course, not the only way to look at the Bible. Unfortunately, too often those other ways have lead to abuse of the Bible and of those who trust the abusers. Many people have used it as a club with which to beat others over the head, to laud their superiority over others, to keep them in submission and under control, to foist their own agendas upon it and then claim that the Bible justifies their actions, and in hundreds of other both stupefyingly ignorant abuses of it as well as in highly intelligent yet devious and equally abusive uses of it.
It is time that we realize that the Bible is not our book to abuse as we please. It is God's book and we should do our best to use it as what it is meant to be: a source of God's revelation of God's self to us. If we believe, as I do, that the Bible is a Holy Book then it is incumbent upon us to treat it with respect. At the same time it is equally incumbent upon us not to worship it.
What follows flows from an discussion first of a small portion of a letter from St. Paul to his disciple, Timothy.
2 Timothy: 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, 15 and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
As we read above, in this letter Paul is admonishing his beloved pupil that Timothy should persevere in what he believes. He is to remember that he has known from childhood the "sacred writings" that are able to "instruct" him for salvation through his faith in Jesus Christ. Paul goes on to say that these scriptures are inspired by God and all are useful for teaching and for training in righteousness.
Paul was talking about the book we now call the "Old Testament" or the "Hebrew Bible." In Christian teaching Paul's admonitions have long since been applied to the New Testament writings, including, of course, Paul's own writings.
Today, Christians believe that Paul's teachings to Timothy are equally applicable to us. And so, some 2000 years later we are still to look to the Bible for teaching and training in righteousness. In fact, Christians look to the Bible as the primary source of God's revelation to humanity. It is to both inform us and to form us as to how we are to live.
Unfortunately, well meaning pastors, seeking to never offend a single soul in their flocks, see their jobs as taking what has long been considered an old, culturally conditioned, sexist, and often racist and narrow minded book in parts, and, rather than dealing with those issues head on, choose to poke around here and there in it and find the parts that might be "compatible" with our way of living. It then becomes kind of a soft, easy to swallow and digest, bland and tasteless gruel, but at least that is not offensive to anyone.
So too many then poke around in it and take some from part A and some from part B, conflate them, and wonder why they provide no nourishment. Worse, some then think this gruel needs to be spiced up a bit so they decide to tell the Bible what is possible and what is not, what they think is rational and what isn't, what they think make sense and what doesn't. All this is in some vague hope that we will pay attention to it, or at least be able to ignore it without having a guilt trip from hearing it.
For decades Robert Schuller filled the Crystal Cathedral and wrote dozens of "Be Happy" books by taking note of the American craving for self esteem and crafting a message which rendered Jesus into a personal therapist. Today, varying the theme just a bit, Joel Osteen fills his Lakewood Church with tens of thousands by preaching another form of feel good religion, calling himself a "life coach."
At the other end of the spectrum we have preachers like Jimmy Swaggart who preached hell fire and damnation for those who did not subscribe to the strictest of guidelines which he carefully picked selectively from the Bible. Ironically, of course, when he was caught in the act of sin, he then appealed to his public and, in tearful confession, managed to stay in the ministry and, within two years, was preaching the same old time religion that failed to keep him from straying.
When I was in seminary some self proclaimed feminists were somehow "shocked" to learn that the Bible was sexist, although there had been dozens of books written on the subject and a class was taught on the fact for two decades, and refused to take essentially any of the Bible seriously, rewriting it before giving practice sermons to say what it should have said, and would have said had a woman written it.
Since then, with a predominance of women now graduating from the nation's mainstream seminaries those soon to be pastors have taken to dealing with the sexism issues in the Bible head on, not shocked at all, but discussing the problem, shining a light on it and moving on to find the truth that lies behind the culturally conditioned words. Those are two very different ways of dealing with the same problem. And it proves that progress in Biblical interpretation is not impossible.
In conservative evangelical circles entire denominations and their seminaries have chosen to concentrate exclusively on one or two types of "sin" that they define and rail out against those. They conveniently exclude worrying about the other million or so sins that they themselves indulge in and have declared somehow "lesser" sins, although the Bible does not distinguish sin on the basis of severity. Some of the "sins" that they claim are not even sins when the Bible is carefully studied and interpreted.
There are literally hundreds of other examples I could cite, and no doubt you have come head to head with some of this arrogance that is allegedly "in the Bible." Now, some of this highly indigestible stuff actually is. But most is not. And when it is it needs to be dealt with directly and a light shown upon it. For some reason, however, many pastors and preachers don't have a stomach for dealing with these issues honestly.
All of this is simply to prepare you for my belief that I do not think it is my job, or the job of any pastor or theologian, to make the Bible palatable to modern men and women, nor do I think it is the job of any legitimate pastor, teacher, preacher or theologian to use the Bible to make it tell us what they want the Bible to say.
Rather, my job is to make modern men and women, including me, able to hear what the Bible is saying to us. And that job extends to making us able to hear what the Bible is saying even if we don't like it, and even if we disagree with it. I do not assume that task is easy. It is much harder, in fact, than doing any of the easier things above. It is infinitely easier to read into the Bible what we want to hear (eisogesis) that to read out of the Bible what it is saying to us (exegesis).
It is hard to do exegesis because we often approach the Bible not as the sophisticated, educated and erudite people that we think we are, but rather as parochial, myopic folk whose vision doesn't extend much further than what has or is happened to us.
When I was preaching I know that many of the people in the congregation came to church wondering whether or not I was going to preach about something that would make them feel better, solve a particular problem that was bothering them, or give them a lift. I tried to do some of that, but that was never the real reason they should have come. They needed to come to worship God and hear what God was saying to them. If they did that chances are that they would feel better without worrying about whether they would or not.
I think that the Bible sometimes has rough going among us not because we are modern, sophisticated, astute, logical and rational, but rather because we can become quite content to be naive, narrow minded, narcissistic, inexperienced critics of the very book that Christians say we depend upon to guide our understanding of the world and our life in it. And when we allow ourselves to be like that, well, the Bible just seems odd. And there is the rub. Because when it comes right down to it our true feelings about it and abilities to understand it do not match our stated allegiance to the Bible. Too many Christians prefer to "talk the talk" and not "walk the walk."
Nevertheless, millions of Christians gather in churches on Sunday and act as if the Bible knows more about life than they do. We even pledge ourselves, over and over again, to living as though that is true. But far fewer actually live as if it is true. If we were honest we would admit we spend very little time with the Bible, and that we think that it is odd, difficult, demanding, and dogmatic.
But, what, in the name of heaven, do we expect? It is the BIBLE! Do we really want and expect that the Bible should read like a third grade primer about Dick and Jane? Do we really want a book that deals with complicated issues like life and death to read like a Doonesbury cartoon?
The Bible is, after all, about life. Where did we ever get the notion that it should be simplistic? Where did we come up with the idea that the solutions to life's problems are simpleminded, do-it-yourself formulas? Life is messy. And so is the Bible.
So, if it is a big, complicated book about life and living, and death and dying, and everything in between, what, specifically, is it about? And to that question I have bad news for our egos. It is mainly not about us. It is first about God! And therefore it is really big! I don't mean big as in long, although it is long. I mean big in the sense that God is big. The Bible is about big things, big events, big cosmic, earth shattering, mind bending, turn the world on its head happenings.
And it matters not whether the story is as big as the parting of the Red Sea, or as small as the parable of the mustard seed, or as commonplace as getting a drink from a well in a strange neighborhood, the stories are all big because they are about God. This God, this YHWH, is not some tame, timid, little idol that we can manipulate to fit our needs, or teach to do tricks. Nor is God the kind of god who is content to be used only as a consultant in those hours of our desperation when we finally turn to God.
So, I think that our main problem with the Bible isn't that it is so primitive and outdated. Rather it is that the Bible isn't designed to fit the way we are most comfortable thinking about ourselves. Our main problem with the Bible is that we come to it, if we come to it at all, with ourselves mostly in mind, to get a better glimpse of who we are, to receive help for ourselves. And sometimes that happens.
But the Bible simply isn't mostly about us. What we really find in the Bible is a big, prickly, outrageous God who demands justice, and paradoxically, and simultaneously, demands obedience to a love covenant that he sets before us, wants to be in with us, by his grace.
As Christians, we find his Son, Jesus, the Christ, who, by doing the outrageous thing of dying for us on a cross, turns on its head every idea about power and privilege that we ever had. This Son's actions are outrageous, yet he tells us that he loves us in spite of every evil that we do. This is a love that is so grand that St. Paul can only stutter and call the very telling of it a "stumbling block."
And, then, if that is not enough, we find this Holy Spirit in the Bible that dogs us and prods us and insists that we "listen to" this strangely loving and forgiving Son of God. And the Bible tops it all off by telling us this incredible story of God raising him from the grave, telling us that he is alive. He is "Emmanuel," God with us. Here and now. Wow! What a story! Who can top that?
No. The Bible is not first about us. That is the first hard truth to swallow about the Bible. And here is the second truth, a truth we will never understand until we believe the first truth: that, in the end, the Bible is about us, but only in a very peculiar way.
The Bible is about us understanding that we are creatures, mere mortals, finite, ultimately helpless over everything that really counts in life; and certainly helpless over death. We are creatures that are dependent on God for our very existence. Yet this God calls us his "children." So the Bible is about us, but only in relation to our God.
And because the Bible is about us in relation to God, it is messy! We are messy creatures, after all. And the Bible stories that recount the lives of the saints of God who came before us are messy stories. Few Bible stories follow neatly, one after the other. Things get repeated; get out of place; even Jesus tells parables that make no sense to us without careful study, and many of his parables don't even end! In fact, the Bible itself really doesn't end, because the story it tells, the love story between God and us, does not end.
The Bible is a bit like those old Saturday matinee "serials" of my childhood. They always "ended" with the words "to be continued." The Bible is "to be continued" because God isn't done with us yet. And perhaps that is why, even when we don't quite understand it, we keep coming back to it and trying to understand. We have this hunch, this faith, that maybe, just maybe, it will turn out to be our story after all. That is, after all, what the Bible wants us to do: to see that its stories are, in fact, our stories, that the God it describes is, in fact, our God.
If we can just manage to see ourselves as small enough, there is a lot to learn from this big, wonderful, unwieldly, unpredictable book that we call the Bible.
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