Christians call themselves “people of the book,” and like Jews and Muslims, we have a formative text at the heart of our faith tradition, in our case the Bible. The Bible is foregrounded in the Christian tradition as a devotional text, a tool for worship, even, in some cases, as an idol that rivals the God it points toward. But as important as the Bible is in Christianity, some Christians read the Bible badly and some not at all, and some who call themselves Christians have made a conscious decision not to read the Bible because when it is read, it seems to turn into a weapon against those the reader dislikes or to validate a worldview or cosmos-view that seems patently out of touch with the here and now.
I myself have been one of those people of faith who is generally afraid to read the Bible in my daily life, and I want to begin to wrestle with that problem here with you. It’s not that I fear the Bible without knowing it: I have read the whole Bible, cover to cover, have studied big chunks of it formally in seminary, littler chunks of it for sermons, have pieces of it by memory, and carry much of the rest in my fuzzy remembrance. I was raised in an intensely Biblical tradition, and bear the King James translation in my bone marrow, and now the Book of Common Prayer psalms in my veins. I am not coming to this phobia from ignorance.
And, the truth is I can’t actually avoid reading the Bible. In two of my lives, I work as a preacher and as a theologian. Moreover, in the Anglican tradition, scripture is the most important of the three legs to our stool (the others being tradition and reason), so scripture is a significant part of my life as a worshipping Episcopalian. I have to engage scripture in this work and worship.
But here’s what I mean by avoiding the Bible: I’ve resisted making the reading of scripture a daily practice outside of those things, I’ve resisted making it a part of my devotional time outside of the scripture in morning and evening prayer, and I’ve resisted letting the scripture speak to me as insight into God on a regular basis.
And I’ll confess that it’s mostly because I haven’t liked the way scripture has been used on and around me in my life, the way others have read it in bits and pieces that corresponded to their worldview, the way they have read those particular bits literally and centered on the things with which they agreed and ignored the things they didn’t.
How can people of faith make the Bible an important part of their lives, despite all the ways it’s been read and misread, used and misused?
I think it has to start with an understanding that what the Bible has to say is not just what its primary advocates think it has to say. And with a way of reading it that pulls those things to the forefront.
This week I’m teaching a class on peace and justice in the movies, and anticipating some blowback from segments of my parish population that tend to read the Bible in this way.
(Justice, by the way, refers here not to the work of repaying people for what they have done, as in our criminal justice system, but to the Hebrew understanding of justice, righteousness, doing what is right for all concerned, trying to see that no one suffers or starves because of an unjust system.)
Now, I don’t expect blowback where you might think, on doing theology and the movies—I think I’ve made converts there, for the most part.
But on the peace and justice thing: Some Christians think that holiness, piety, and morality constitute their most important responses to God’s call to them, and for them, peace and justice work are radical and on the periphery. These are the kinds of people who called on Martin Luther King to quit stirring things up and to preach about God instead of men, to Desmond Tutu to sit down and let God work, however long that takes.
Others associate peace and justice with politics, or with a purely secular ethics and morality. Marcus Borg has noted how, before he returned to the faith, he strongly identified with the Civil Rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War, while simultaneously recoiling from an identification with formal Christianity. I was the same way; for many years, Martin Luther King was the only Christian with whom I could stand to be in the same room. I believed completely in the work his faith compelled him to do, although I came to sympathy, I thought at the time, purely through my own human sympathy.
There are faithful and secular folks alike who think that peace and justice work is peripheral to the work of the Church, or can be carried on just as well by the secular world, or is so tainted by politics or Politics (in America, peace and justice are typically associated with the Democratic Party, although neither major party, frankly, does what it ought on these issues), that no self-respecting Christian ought to bother about it too much. I mean, sure, rescue the perishing, care for the dying, and all that. Compassion is all well and good. But redistribution of wealth, radical sacrifice, rejection of power and prestige?
That’s un-American.
And what all of this misses is the essential thrust throughout the books of the Bible (yes, we came back). Borg points out in Reading the Bible Again for the First Time that whether we look at the formational books of the Hebrews (the Law and the Prophets), the Gospels, the Letters of Paul, or the Revelation of John, when we ease ourselves away from an attempt to read literally verse by verse and instead read for meaning and in ways that are historically and culturally sensitive, two things stand out.1) There is a God, one God, a God of love and mercy who deserves our praise and worship.2) Because there is a God, we should be changed, and that change should be reflected in how we treat each other. We should care for those less fortunate, the widows and orphans, the homeless and dispossessed. We should tear down the structures of power that elevate some and crush others beneath their feet.
We should be people of justice. And we should be people of peace, for Jesus, our greatest window into the mind of God (Origen called him the “Autobasileia,” or “Kingdom in Person”), preached peace, renounced violence as a solution when others called for him to take power, and even renounced it when he was faced with the ultimate challenge for people of faith: Should I use violence to save my own life?
Jesus answered no to this, of course, even telling people that God could send enough heavenly beings to sweep Palestine free of Roman occupiers if he asked it—but he didn’t, and wouldn’t.
However people might have understood the scriptures before Jesus went willingly to his own death, the Crucifixion showed that God was not and would not be a conquering God, ruling over others as the kingdoms of the world rule, through compulsion and authority. The life and death of Jesus were the period to the sentence that the rest of the Bible writes: If God is real and we have experienced God, then we are called to be people of peace and justice.
Now all this seems fairly black and white to me. But, not, as I mentioned, to everyone else. The same folks who read the Bible literally when it condemns men having sex with men in a verse in Leviticus and generally decry metaphorical and cultural readings of the Bible seem to become all metaphorical and cultural whenever they run across passages about peace, justice, and radical self-sacrifice. “We live in a different society,” they say. “God didn’t really intend for us to restructure wealth, in the way the Year of Jubilee calls for, or to prohibit charging interest. Interest makes capitalism possible. God just wants us to be charitable, watch out for each other.”
It is one thing to be charitable, to be compassionate, and I certainly believe we should be. I congratulated myself last week for giving a homeless man something to eat. Go me.
But I had given out of my (comparative) plenty, out of my (admittedly precarious) position toward the top of the economic food chain. A system that elevates some and oppresses others, a system in which some feast and some starve, is exactly the kind of system the scriptures indict over and over again. We find this in the laws and wisdom literature, in the gospels and in Revelation. It’s everywhere, and it’s uncomfortable as hell.
Read the prophecies of Amos some time, and ask yourself if what he’s condemning in that book doesn’t look something very much like our situation today, if we have the courage to be brutally honest with ourselves.
The Bible is speaking about all of this, about politics and poverty, not just to sexuality or individual piety as so many believers believe. Even the letters of Paul do this, yes, even Paul, with whom I have long had difficulties because of his sexist words and cultural chauvinism. I’ve also been mad at Paul since many believers ignore (or are ignorant of) the fact that in his letters, he was writing about distinct problems in individual faith communities and not necessarily intending to pronounce judgment for all time. Paul, as some writers have noted, did not know he was writing scripture, and for several centuries after, until those letters were collected in definitive collections that turned into the Bible, he hadn’t.
But, as Borg notes, the ultimate message in the Pauline epistles is the same as we find in the other books of the Bible: “Religion and politics are combined for Paul, as for Moses, the prophets, and Jesus: the domination system is not Lord.” [1] For Paul, whose primary goal is to proclaim the Lord Jesus crucified (and raised from the dead, his life and teachings vindicated by God), then this must be true: If Jesus is Lord, then the Empire (Rome in Paul’s case) is not.
And this is what the Bible has to tell us, too, if we’re only willing to listen. I love the country I was lucky enough to be born in (one of my students at Baylor once wrote in an essay that being born in America was like winning the lottery), but I do not worship America. My faith and devotion should go to the One God, and I am trying hard not to manufacture other gods out of nation, consumption, or anything else.
Some days I am successful.
And I find, with some chagrin, that those days generally come when I am brave enough to read the Bible.
[1] Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001, 245.
You highlight one of the great tragedies of the last couple decades, that many believe the Bible is toxic, full of hate and ignorance; when in fact the toxicity is in some Bible readers. If there is hate, fear, etc. in scripture, it’s there because it’s also in the human heart, which the scriptures have to deal with. I’ve loved the Bible all my days (as I think you have in a love-hate sort of way, perhaps), but the last thing I admit among many people I love is that I am a person of the Book. These days perhaps it’s better to say sola Christ rather than sola scripture.
John Hamilton
August 2nd, 2008
Hi, Im from Melbourne.
Here is a provocative statement.
Any religion that claims to possess the one true faith/way/revelation has effectively declared war against all other faiths and their cultural expressions, and will, given half the chance, use whatever means they can to impose their “way” on everyone else.
Both Islam & Christianity specialize in this attitude and tactic. As does Judaism to a lesser degree.
Sue
August 8th, 2008
Sue–
Thanks for your comment. Kimball’s book When Religion Becomes Evil says exactly the same thing. I know Christians who claim to possess the one true way–and others who claim that Christ is their true way. And those seem like very different statements to me.
admin
August 13th, 2008
I was interested to read about the difficulties people have in reading the Bible. I think that the key lies in your opening statement that ‘Christians call themselves people of the Book’. In the Prologue to his Gospel, John tells us with absolute certainty that the Word of God is Jesus – not the Bible! The central fact of Christianity is not a Book but a Person. The Word of God was a Greek expression for that which made sense of a random, chaotic world; John proclaimed that the Word of God is uttered in creation, in his boundless grace and in his ultimate purpose in Truth. When I first realised this, it was like a wind of fresh air blowing through my life. The discrepancies and contradictions in the Bible paled into insignificance. I wanted to take someone by the lapels and demand to know why they hadn’t told me this before, because it is so obvious – but I couldn’t find anyone small enough! The Bible is the primary source of our knowledge of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but we must build on that through our relationship with the Living God. The collection of sacred books that we know as the Bible was not the basis of the belief in a divine revelation, but its consequence.
Bryan Jones
August 26th, 2008
Thanks, all for your comments. Bryan, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. In my faith tradition growing up, we treated the Bible as though it was truly holy–as though God lived inside it. Too often, the Bible becomes our object of reverence instead of the God it tells us about.
GG
admin
August 26th, 2008