Essential* Christianity, Part 2: What's to be done with the Bible?
Essential* Christianity, Part 2: What's to be done with the Bible?
The Bible is weird, frustrating, powerful -- and a love story.
(Note: A table of contents for this project, including a link to the intro, can be found here.)
The other day I read this summary of Genesis 1-6 in The JPS Jewish Heritage Torah Commentary, which I found pretty funny. According to the commentary, God creates everything, including “humanity in the form of Adam and his wife, Eve, who take up residence in a verdant garden.”
Then, according to the commentary:
“. . . God gives the new humans one simple command: do not eat from the tree of knowledge. Goaded by a talking snake, humans violate this order and are expelled from the garden.
“Not long thereafter, human morality faces another test in the form of the world’s first homicide: Cain murders his brother Abel in a fit of jealous rage.
“Humanity’s moral record thereafter does not improve. By the end of parashah, God expresses regret for having created humans in the first place, and resolves to blot them out. One man, however, stands out as a righteous, albeit lonely, exception . . .” [This is Noah.]
Even for people raised outside of rigorous faith traditions, these and other Biblical stories are part of the background of the culture, and sometimes part of the background of personal consciousness — oftentimes sitting there undisturbed not really bothering anybody.
But to look straight at it, I think it’s safe to say that for a modern mind, the Bible is thoroughly weird. Trumpet blasts in the sky. Pillars of flame. On several occasions in the Torah, the Creator of everything walks around as a person, talking to various people, physically wrestling with Jacob, etc.. From time to time, that Creator appears to be interested in asserting his superiority over other gods. That’s weird. Jonah gets swallowed by a fish. Weird. In the book of Ezekiel angels appear in what sounds a little like some form of aircraft. Also very weird.
Surprisingly little in the Bible can be corroborated by other historical scholarship or archaeology, and surprising portions do not make a whole lot of sense even by any internal logic. Adam and Eve are the first humans, and when their son Cain is cursed he’s afraid of what other people will do to him. Where did those people come from? Jacob is sold by his brothers into slavery, and then he becomes the ruler of all of Egypt — in what some scholars simply term an ancient spiritual novella.
And that’s not to mention the ways the Bible can be irretrievably patriarchal, which I think have tragically dragged much of modernity, and continue to.
The past year or so, I have begun formal academic study of the Bible, and I find it both fascinating and frustrating. It’s not easy to find a way to connect the Bible to modern life. It is not easy to treat it any of it as history, because so little of it can be verified by other means. The supernatural elements are impossible to connect with any modern conception of reality, and even some of the more grounded narrative elements (like the arc of Jacob’s story) seem unlikely.
In terms of the larger human story, modern scientific materialism offers a narrative that just doesn’t seem to jibe very well with the Bible at all. It neither corroborates the Bible especially, nor does it seem to need it. In some ways parts of the Bible start to seem like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or the ancient Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, and parts are like Homer’s Iliad, or the stories posted on memorial stele throughout the ancient Near East — none of which form the basis for any sort of serious modern cosmology. It can start to look like the Bible is just the text — as one friend put it — of a small tribe of Bronze and Iron Age Near Eastern people talking to themselves about their “sky dad.”
What does that have to do with any of us?
The Israelites
Here and there, in my own journey with the text I find some things that are seem to me to be objectively compelling, even from a more secular, academic perspective. One of them is the formation of the nation of Israel itself.
In the scriptures the Israelites are taken out of bondage by Moses, who is led by God, into “the wilderness.” And then, led by Moses, who’s led by God, they create a nation in the wilderness — as Walter Bruggemann puts it, more or less ex nihilo — with an elaborate system of culturally definitive customs and laws.
We can’t corroborate the journey out of Egypt, or the formation of the nation in the wilderness with any confidence, and we apart from scripture can’t attest to when and where a system of laws was put into practice, but we can attest to the fact that the system of laws exists. And most notably, we can see that the nation described by these laws is highly communal — with specific injunctions for the care of foreigners and the vulnerable — and it is also essentially anarchic, because it posits no structure of human government, and instead proclaims that God is essentially the government.
From even the most secular rationalist view of human life, I think this is completely fascinating. Everything about this culture, including its own cultural traditions, becomes interesting. Particularly for anyone with spiritual inclinations.
The Power of Myth
And the Bible doesn’t have to be grounded in historical reality at all to be valuable. There is also the general “power of myth” to consider, it seems to me.
Myth itself is mysterious. We just don’t know where myths come from, and in our incarnate existences we may never know for sure. But they can still have a meaningful impact on our lives. Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung are two voices that I find to be especially accessible and insightful about this, but there are many others. Mythical stories can help us access important parts of personal, collective, and cosmic reality in ways that are otherwise hard to describe or access.
Even when we watch the way modern culture fiercely embraces Marvel superheroes, or Star Wars, or Star Trek — and there are definitely parts of the culture where devotion to these, perhaps Star Trek in particular, approaches something genuinely religious — we can see that good stories have the power to shape our lives in ways that go way, way beyond mere entertainment.
Reality is Absurd
The Bible is peculiar because it doesn’t stay within its lane of myth. It is definitely trying to be sociopolitical history as well. The Torah even contains what I think you could call a version of a Constitution. And tendrils of this effort reach into our contemporary reality in peculiar ways, because the Biblical myths appear to be linked to us by an unbroken successions of believers. These unbroken lineages compel us to try to look back from our modern world, somehow, into a world of abstraction and mystery, in a way that boggles us.
We can certainly reject the Bible for the particular ways that it seems absurd to us. But there is no reason to reject the Bible’s cosmology simply because it is absurd. In some ways, the questions raised by the Bible, and the absurdities that it attempts to wrestle with, are fundamentally unavoidable. In fact, every single cosmological explanation for existence is absurd.
Note, for instance:
The idea that everything came from nothing is absurd.
The idea that an omnipotent Creator with humanoid aspects has always existed is also absurd.
The idea that everything came from a singularity, expands for a period of time, and then re-contracts into that singularity — and that this “Big Boing Theory” is the essential mechanism of a universe, which has simply always existed — is also absurd.
Any explanation for existence itself is incomprehensible to us. There is no attempt to fully explain existence that isn’t absurd, and it seems to me that once that fact is really ingested, then that at least leaves the Bible still somewhere on the table for its cosmological offerings.
So. What are we to do with the Bible?
To this point, for me, I feel I can say one thing with real confidence:
If one has an open, honest, consistent encounter with the Bible, it is possible to have a transformative encounter with a living divinity, in ways that can beneficially and even profoundly shape the course of life. All manner of doubt, reaction, and critical thinking should be welcomed and even encouraged. It’s important to notice what is more human even as one access that which is more compellingly divine. To some extent, it’s okay to be wrong one way or the other. (And, certainly, to some extent being too vehement about something that is too wrong can also end up being harmful.)
In some ways, I think the Bible is like the monolith in 2001. It is just here, as we circle it, and prod it, and hoot and beat the ground. Humans wrote it, but it’s so old and time-sculpted that at some point the human part really does seem to give way to something otherworldy. The scholarly facts we accumulate, insofar as they are solid, can help. But to some extent the Bible just is. And, generally, I am clear that through the sincere, prolonged encounter, the Bible has the power to prove itself.
What is it? I don’t know.
Honestly, I suspect nobody does.
How much of it is true? I don’t know.
Honestly, I suspect nobody does.
But I am clear that there is valuable truth in the Bible (some of which I’d like to try to describe in later posts). And it’s clear to me that the sincere, prolonged encounter with it is definitely an experience that is worth having.
As a compelling beginning, I’d offer what one of my mentors says: “The Bible is a love story. And the more I read it, the more the love exudes from every page.”
This is definitely my experience, too.