WHAT IS THE BIBLE?
Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash
When I was a kid, I was taught (in a joking/not joking way) that the word Bible was an acronym that stood for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Many Christians treat the Bible as though it is primarily a rulebook, or maybe a self-help guide. 7 Habits to Help You Get Into The Good Place. But the Bible isn’t a rule book, or a self-help guide, and reading it won’t “punch your ticket” to ensure your place in heaven. The Bible is a story.
More than that, it’s The Story. The story not of how to help ourselves but how God helped us when we were trapped. Over and over again, human beings got lost, or trapped, or imprisoned, or wound up otherwise without power within ourselves to help ourselves, and God came to the rescue. And the Bible is a collection of people’s perspectives on how that rescue felt to them.
While the Bible tells one coherent story, that of God’s love for us and faithfulness to us and constant riding to the rescue on behalf of us, it tells this story from many perspectives and with many voices. Christians do not teach that the Bible was literally dictated to its human authors by God from on high. Rather, God gave these authors the freedom to tell their story about how they experienced God in their midst. Yes, we do say that Scripture is “God-breathed,” but you might be more familiar with the word inspired, which means the same thing. God spoke to these people, yes, and inspired them to tell their story, but God did not compel or constrain the Bible authors from describing their experience, even when their stories didn’t entirely match up. The Bible is a multivocal text, that teaches us it is more important to include everybody’s experience with God than to prune out the stories that don’t match to create one, singular narrative. Let us turn now to that story.
What Story Does the Bible Tell?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, all the living creatures within them, and human beings, male and female, in God’s image. Right out of the gate, we get a story whose proper genre is myth — not because it is untrue, but because the truth it tells is not in the facts of the case. No, the whole universe wasn’t created in seven 24-hour days. But God did create it, and God does love what God has made. God did give human beings the responsibility to care for it, and to rest ourselves, any co-creatures in our care, and the land on the seventh day. God did make human beings in God’s own image, which tells us some important things about what God is like, how deeply God is connected to us, and how we ought to treat one another.
Fast forward to Abraham, whom God chose out of nowhere, for no particular reason, as the man with whom God wanted to make a covenant. God promised that if this man left his home, and his family, and his kindred, God would make of him a great nation, with children who would outnumber the stars in the sky and the sands in the desert, and God would give them a land in which they could live. All this, even though Abraham was old, and his wife Sarah was too old to bear children! She laughed when she heard the promise! They doubted it so much, they exploited Hagar, a slave woman in their household, and made her bear a child “just in case.” God said no: I will keep my promise — and I will take care of Hagar and her child too, just for good measure.
God was faithful to Abraham’s descendants, Isaac & Jacob, to Jacob’s son Joseph and his brothers, but through a series of unfortunate events, the Israelites wound up becoming “mislabeled as slaves” (1) in Egypt. God remembered Israel, God heard their cries, and God sent Moses to demand that Pharaoh let God’s people go. After some plagues, Pharaoh did, and God led the people through the Red Sea on dry land, through forty years in the wilderness, to Sinai, where they received the gift of the Law, and into the Promised Land.
You’ll already have noticed some problems here. Not only do we have confusion of genre, mixing and mingling myth with history — so far, many Bible characters aren’t exactly all-round paragons. This will get worse, not better, as we move forward in history. For example, Joshua comes next with his conquest of the Promised Land and extermination of the existing inhabitants. What is a modern day Bible reader to do? To read the Bible faithfully, are we required to support this genocide? Of course not! This is why it’s critical not to exclusively rely on the Bible as a rulebook or guide. Many stories within the Bible describe what happened, or what the authors think happened — but that doesn’t mean that’s what God intended to happen, or what God wants us to imitate. A Christian radio station in my hometown growing up described itself as “safe for the whole family.” The Bible is not safe for the whole family. It is not intended to be. Why do you think the prophets are constantly calling on people to repent? Many, if not most of the characters in the Bible are not role models, they are cautionary tales.
These messy beginnings continue throughout the kings of Israel and Judah — Saul and David and their wars, Solomon and his truly disgusting levels of wealth — and eventually divide the kingdom into two. These kingdoms were easy for their neighbours to pick up, and first Israel, then Judah go into exile, their way of life destroyed, their relationship with the land cut off. Again, God rescued them. Again, God called them to return. But once home, all their problems were not over. First Greece and then Rome came to occupy and oppress the Judeans. In the midst of this, Jesus was born.
In Jesus, our story reaches its heart. Jesus is the key to the rest of the story. Moral exemplar above moral exemplars, but more than that: Jesus the Messiah is more than our lifelong pattern, he is our Saviour. And the four gospels tell the story of how he saved us.
Jesus was born in a stable, the son of Mary, the wife of Joseph of Nazareth. From his earliest days, Jesus, through whom all things were created, lived among and as one of his creatures. He was baptized in the Jordan River by his cousin, John the Baptist, and proclaimed to everyone who would listen that the kingdom of heaven had drawn near. This kingdom represents an alternative to the oppressive empire under which the people were living, which was crushing them so hard under its boot heel as to produce a truly astonishing number of sick people. Jesus healed them from all their diseases, and called them to follow him as his disciples under the sovereignty of this other kingdom, God’s kingdom. Jesus called the religious elite, the wealthy, and other collaborators with the opposing kingdom of Rome to repentance, for which he was crucified, as many others had been before and after him, to proclaim the might of Rome. But in God’s kingdom, the cruel might that is the power to crucify is not strength, but weakness. Jesus’s death on the cross, far from serving as a defeat, became victory over Sin & Death, exemplified by his resurrection on the third day. The whole rest of the Bible — the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the news about Jesus that spread through the whole Mediterranean region within twenty years of his crucifixion, the promise of his return in Revelation — serves as a response to this new world, new creation, new way of being that Jesus inaugurated by rising from the dead.
What is the Bible for?
The Bible isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means that allows us to see God. The story it tells is meant to show us who God is, who we are, and how we relate to one another. For members of the Anglican tradition, we often speak of balancing Scripture with Tradition and Reason, as three legs on a stool. But a better metaphor is that of a telescope. Telescopes are made up of multiple lenses, or mirrors, that allow our eyes to see further away than we otherwise could. Reason is the lens closest to us, made up of our own mind, our own experience of and perspective on the world. We bring our Reason to bear on the Tradition, the wisdom of our ancestors and the way they interpreted Scripture and lived out its teachings. And that Tradition is brought to bear on the farthest out lens of Scripture, which was inspired by God and given to us as a gift to show us God’s own true self. The trouble arises when we put the lens cap on the end of the telescope. When we look only at the Bible and what the Bible says, rather than using it for its intended purpose: to look at God.
When we look at God in the Scriptures, we see that God does new things throughout the Bible, things that surprise people who are familiar with the Bible they had at the time. Jesus told his listeners in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard it said … but I say to you … ” God is active, not static. God responds to the needs of God’s world rather than staying away and aloof. God loves individual people, families, nations, the world itself, and demonstrates that love faithfully, over many millennia. A preacher has said, “I would like for you to be familiar enough with God’s modus operandi as presented in the Bible that you’ll know it when you see it out in the world.” (2) That is what the Bible is for: to tell us stories about God’s action in the past, so that we can recognize God’s handiwork in the present.
How Should We Interpret the Bible?
It’s clear, then, in light of everything that’s been said already, that we can’t interpret the Bible literally. Not that we shouldn’t, we can’t. The original texts, written in Hebrew and Greek, are multivocal and express different perspectives on the same story, whether that’s the four different gospels or the two versions of the Noah story. Furthermore, if you are reading this article, you probably primarily encounter the Bible in English. Whenever we translate the words of the Bible from their original language (a worthy goal, to make the Bible accessible to more than ancient language specialists), we interpret the Bible. You have never read a literal translation; there is no such thing as a literal translation. It would be incoherent nonsense. Translators make an interpretive choice — an informed choice, backed up by years of study — but a choice, nonetheless. Finally, millennia of Christian tradition has grown like moss over the top of the stories. Songs we learned as kids, pictures we’ve seen, movie versions — they all come to our minds when we read. No one with any familiarity with Western literature approaches the Bible clean.
The solution is not to throw it all out, say we can’t read it literally, so we might as well not read it at all. Rather it is to be honest about what clouds the lenses through which we view Scripture. And it is to make intentional choices about the lenses we choose to put on, instead of claiming that we are helpless against the “plain meaning” (ha!) of the text. Here are some lenses I have found helpful:
Interpret the Scriptures in community. In our baptism, we promise to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship. Fellowship and teaching go together, because we need one another in order to understand and respond to that teaching. Reading alone, we might come to some truly wild and wacky ideas about how we ought to respond to the Scriptures. Reading together, we can test those interpretations and learn from our siblings in Christ. These siblings don’t have to be your physical or geographical neighbours either! In fact, I would encourage you to build a community of Christians unlike yourself — perhaps in time, by reading old books as C.S. Lewis advises. Perhaps in geography, by reading commentaries by Christians in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Perhaps by seeking out Christians in your own community who have a perspective different from your own or the majority view — Esau McCaulley has written “Reading While Black,” but we can easily imagine reading with those who encounter the Scriptures “while trans,” “while in a war zone,” “with disabilities.” How can the interpretations of others who are unlike you open your experience of God in the Scriptures? What can you learn from them? How might the Holy Spirit be speaking through them to today’s Church?
Interpret the Scriptures through the lens of the Gospel. In many churches, during Sunday Eucharist, the Gospel is read not from the lectern, as the other readings of the day are. Rather, the Gospel is processed into the centre aisle, to be read in the midst of the people. We stand to hear it. We sing a hymn to announce it. We turn our bodies to face it, to signal that our whole physical selves are oriented towards it. These bodily acts, as part of our worship, make manifest what we believe: the whole of the Scriptures ought to be interpreted in the light of what Jesus said and did in the Gospels. It’s the same thing signified by the Bibles that put Jesus’s words in red letters. Jesus’s Gospel is the heart of the Scriptures, and everything else within them needs to be interpreted (for Christians) through his life, death, and resurrection.
Interpret the Scriptures through the lens of the Great Commandment. We can get even more specific, by interpreting the Scriptures through the lens of what Jesus taught was the Greatest Commandment, upon which hang all the rest of the Law and the prophets: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.” St. Augustine, eminent theologian who formed many of the ways we think about God today from his vantage point of fourth century Africa, claimed that “Anyone who thinks that he [sic] understands the Scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that does not build up this twofold love of God and neighbour, has not yet understood them as he ought.”
What is the Bible? Fundamentally, it is as the classic hymn would have it: “the old, old story of Jesus and his love.” It is a multivocal story, where perspectives aren’t assimilated into the Borg but allowed to build up a messy picture of who God is and how God acts in history so that we can recognize God when God shows up in our world.
I am indebted to the Rev. Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, for this perfect phrase.
I have sadly lost this citation, but it was not me who came up with this.
