–the first in a series of posts exploring the nature of the Bible–
In the beginning was the Argument, and the Argument was with God, and the Argument was: God. God was the subject of the Argument, and the Argument was a good one.
Who is God?
What is God like?
What does God require of us?
What is God doing about injustice?
What is God doing, if anything, to relieve the human condition?
Is God benevolent, malevolent, or simply indifferent?
Is there any divinely-infused meaning to human existence, or is it all just senseless?
I have recently posted a blog series – The Wars of the Lord – based on his chapter on violence and genocide in the Old Testament. These posts were uncomfortable for some, and really made the question: ‘what is the Bible?’ come to the fore.
So what is the Bible? A very good question, a central one. Many of us grew up with a certain idea about what the Bible is, and what it is not. It is the Word of God. It is whole. It is unified. It clearly and unequivocably is the voice of God. It is without error. It is entirely different than any other books that have ever existed.
Upon deeper study of the Bible, many – myself included – have needed our understanding of this ancient text to be altered a bit. The simplified understanding of equating the Bible with a unified book with no errors or contradictions, showing up at our doorstep directly from God – probably in the King James Version – needs to be revisited.
Many of us have unconsciously assumed the Bible speaks with unanimity on every topic it covers. The Bible speaks with one voice. So I can pick a verse from one place, say the Psalms, and expect that to be in line with a verse from the gospels, or one of Paul’s letters, or Revelation. Simple, right?
Consider an alternative to this ‘single-voice’ approach:
Throughout history, worshipers of Yahweh have been engaged in this argument, and for every question posed, they have proposed a plurality of divergent answers. In the beginning, long before there was the Word of God, there were the words of God’s people. That is to say, before there was a Bible – a “Word of God” as a singular entity – there was an argument about God, reflected in diverse texts and traditions; and it is in fact that argument that is today enshrined in the Judeo-Christian canons of scripture. As John Collins has it, the Bible is a “collection of writings that is marked by lively internal debate, and by a remarkable spirit of self-criticism.” To put it bluntly: the Bible is an argument – with itself. (Stark, ch.1)
What do you think of this approach?
an ancient tradition
It is worth considering. I like it because it preserves the rabbinical idea that God is present in the community as it debates the text together. In other words, as we wrestle with the text together, God is there. The wrestling is a necessary part of hearing the voice of God in scripture. It is not a simple, one-off pronouncement of X or Y, but a divinely-inspired communal wrestling with the ways God has interacted with his people in the past. As we do that, we may find God is at work among us today. The text is not static – it is living and active.
This approach also acknowledges the discrepancies and alternative voices found within the Bible that we often ignore or attempt to impossibly reconcile in our attempt to squeeze the Bible into the box we’ve created for it.
The Bible is where I encounter God. And as I approach it, I must remember that the Bible itself is a library of sorts – an ancient library, and like any library, contains various books written by different people that don’t all say the same thing (and some of the books themselves are products of the community). That doesn’t mean that God isn’t speaking, but is, perhaps, the evidence that God has spoken.
—
I will follow up this post with several examples, but for now, just wanted to whet your appetite with a different approach that I feel does justice to what the Bible actually is, rather than what we want it to be.
So… a good night at the pub last Thursday. So intense it took me a week to attempt to relive it. A nice group – some friends from in town, some friends from out of town, some other friends…
The topics, shorthand, were setup as follows: man vs. wild, soul vs. body, and interpretation vs. facts.
First topic: Like animals – we eat, sleep, defecate, and have sex. How are we different?
Interesting question. Everyone at the table finally admitted to participating in all the above activities. Wait, was I not supposed to share that?
“We are animals. Does anyone here think we’re not animals?” Steve had to know.
Silence. Crickets.
The non-animals among us refused to speak up. Guilty as charged. Apparently our initial dichotomy – ‘man vs. wild’ should be rephrased to: ‘man is wild’?
Brian noted the law recently passed in Florida which forbade sex with animals.
“Apparently it’s now illegal to have sex in Florida,” he quipped.
Clever.
Yet.
There are differences, aren’t there? You wouldn’t imagine a group of hyenas gathered around a table having existential ponderings. You don’t see chimpanzees inventing smartphones. You don’t see parakeets writing novels. So there are some differences. What are they?
Rational thought? The ability to step outside ourselves? The awareness of our own mortality? The ability to have empathy? The presence of a soul? The need to dispose of our defecation?
Well, we couldn’t let that one alone. Somehow we stumbled on the topic of privacy when it comes to going to the bathroom.
Courtesy flush?
“I can’t stand it when stalls don’t have doors.”
“Don’t you hate it when that guy just has to keep talking to you at the urinal? You know that guy.”
“One time, I was in a stall in a large bathroom near the beach, and I just started making loud painful groaning sounds. It was hilarious.”
Wait, what?
Speaking of, what do you make of the following:
“[T]he immediate appearance of the Inner is formless $h*t. The small child who gives his sh-t as a present is in a way giving the immediate equivalent of his Inner Self. Freud’s well-known identification of excrement as the primordial form of gift, of an innermost object that the small child gives to its parents, is thus not as naive as it may appear: the often-overlooked point is that this piece of myself offered to the Other radically oscillates between the Sublime and – not the Ridiculous, but, precisely – the excremental. This is the reason why, for Lacan, one of the features which distinguishes man from animals is that, with humans, the disposal of sh-t becomes a problem: not because it has a bad smell, but because it came out from our innermost selves. We are ashamed of sh-t because, in it, we expose/externalize our innermost intimacy. Animals do not have a problem with it because they do not have an “interior” like humans.”
Leave to Zizek to get all psychoanalytic about poop.
Yet perhaps he’s on to something.
In any case, isn’t there a Game 7 tonight? Spoiler: the Wings came up just short. Oh that’s right, that was a week ago.
We did spend some time on the idea of the soul. Is that a differentiating factor? Do all dogs go to heaven?
We started talking about the idea of the Christian hope in a new heavens and a new earth. I wondered, “So, what about dogs? I mean, I assume on the new earth there will be animals. Will they be the ‘same’ animals? I mean, will my dog Oscar that we had when I was a kid be there? Or will there just be some ‘stock’ golden labs who are like Oscar but aren’t actually Oscar?”
Compelling question. Unfortunately no one had a definitive answer.
“Much of the afterlife is simply speculation,” noted Kristen (not to be confused with Kirsten).
Agreed.
Somehow we stumbled on to the idea of biblical inspiration, and how to deal with some of the difficult texts in the Old Testament.
“When the Bible has God say, ‘Kill every man, woman, and child,’ is that really God saying that, or just the people saying God said that? Maybe they just slaughtered a group of people, and now they are attributing their actions to God’s commands to them, which sort of takes the responsibility off of them for what they’ve just done. History is written by the winners, so perhaps they’re just putting their spin on it. Or God did actually say it, and if so, what does that mean about God?”
“Well, maybe it’s neither of those – maybe it’s something else. History is often written by the winners – but the Bible seems an exception. Israel was not a great nation or empire, even at its peak, compared to Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and so on. Perhaps God is telling them these things, but he has a reason for it, and it’s reflective of the time, the culture, and how things worked then. If God was easy to explain, would he still be God?”
“Wait, is this the topic?”
“Who cares – this stuff is interesting!”
Indeed.
So we decided that we are all animals, but animals who care, and that makes us special. We also decided that some things, like difficult texts in the Bible, are a bit of a mystery, and we can have some flexibility in our understanding of them, and should allow our ideas of inspiration to have room for different readings and approaches to the text. Actually there were no group decisions.
A must read?
But on the note about challenging texts in the Bible, I came across a book recently that I’m intrigued by: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). It’s written by Thom Stark and published by Wipf and Stock. (Hey – sounds like they publish quality books…)
Here are a few endorsements:
I learned so much from this book that I can strongly encourage anyone who is seeking to move from simplistic proof-texting to a comprehensive understanding of the Bible to read this book carefully.
–Tony Campolo
author of Red Letter Christians
Christians can ignore the facts that Stark brings into the light of day only if they want to be wrong.
–Dale C. Allison, Jr.
author of Constructing Jesus
This is must reading for Christians who have agonized over their own private doubts about Scripture and for others who have given up hope that evangelical Christians can practice intelligent, moral interpretation of the Bible.
–Neil Elliott
author of Liberating Paul
[W]ith the help of this book, we may discover that the Bible when we read it in all its diversity and vulnerability does bring healing words to those who keep listening.
–Ted Grimsrud
author of Embodying the Way of Jesus
Stark’s book effectively demonstrates how the Bible, in practice, is the most dangerous enemy of fundamentalists.
–James F. McGrath
author of The Only True God
The Human Faces of God is one of the most challenging and well-argued cases against the doctrine of biblical inerrancy I have ever read.
–Greg A. Boyd
author of The Myth of a Christian Nation
Stark provides a model for theology that is committed to hearing the voice of the victims of history, especially the victims of our own religious traditions.
–Michael J. Iafrate
PhD Candidate, Toronto School of Theology
This book is the most powerful antidote to fundamentalism that I’ve ever read.
–Frank Schaeffer
author of Crazy for God
Wow. Maybe I’ll read it. I downloaded the first chapter free on my Kindle. I’ll check it out and let you know if it’s as good as everyone says.
Here’s a summary:
Does accepting the doctrine of biblical inspiration necessitate belief in biblical inerrancy? The Bible has always functioned authoritatively in the life of the church, but what exactly should that mean? Must it mean the Bible is without error in all historical details and ethical teachings? What should thoughtful Christians do with texts that propose God is pleased by human sacrifice or that God commanded Israel to commit acts of genocide? What about texts that contain historical errors or predictions that have gone unfulfilled long beyond their expiration dates?
In The Human Faces of God, Thom Stark moves beyond notions of inerrancy in order to confront such problematic texts and open up a conversation about new ways they can be used in service of the church and its moral witness today. Readers looking for an academically informed yet accessible discussion of the Bible’s thorniest texts will find a thought-provoking and indispensable resource in The Human Faces of God.
From a reader on Amazon.com:
This is the book I have been waiting for my whole adult life. Like Stark, I was raised to understand the Bible as the inerrant word of God, “dropped from heaven”. I have been a Christian my whole life, yet I have increasing become uncomfortable with some of the difficult texts in the Bible and their implications on my faith and personal understanding of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. This has been compounded by the fact that I now have young children and am reading the Bible with them, struggling with how to present stories such as the Passover, wishing I could somehow skip over them. Stark addresses the difficult issues with precision, intellect, and devotion, never turning his back on Christianity. For me, the chains are off. Ironically, I can now read the Bible with more commitment. I don’t wish to skip over the difficult texts, I can address them again. My faith has been rekindled. Thank you, Thom Stark.
Good stuff! I think I’m getting a copy for Half the Sky, the Watershed Community Library. But I’m not here to sell books… (at least not yet.) 🙂
