Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

by Rachel Held Evans

Our relational God has given us a relational sacred text, one that, should we surrender to it, reminds us that being people of faith isn’t as much about being right as it is about being part of a community in restored and restorative relationship with God.

Anytime the Bible is used to justify the oppression and exploitation of others, we have strayed far from the God who brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, “out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:2).

“I do theology as a matter of survival,” explained Rev. Broderick Greer, who is black and gay, “because if people can do theology that produces brutality against black, transgender, queer, and other minority bodies, then we can do theology that leads to our common liberation.”

When you can’t trust your own God-given conscience to tell you what’s right, or your own God-given mind to tell you what’s true, you lose the capacity to engage the world in any meaningful, authentic way, and you become an easy target for authoritarian movements eager to exploit that vacuity for their gain.

If the slaughter of Canaanite children elicits only a shrug, then why not the slaughter of Pequots? Of Syrians? Of Jews? If we train ourselves not to ask hard questions about the Bible, and to emotionally distance ourselves from any potential conflicts or doubts, then where will we find the courage to challenge interpretations that justify injustice?

If the Bible teaches that God is love, and love can look like genocide and violence and rape, then love can look like . . . anything. It’s as much an invitation to moral relativism as you’ll find anywhere.

The point, he said, is that wisdom isn’t about sticking to a set of rules or hitting some imaginary bull’s-eye representing “God’s will.” Wisdom is a way of life, a journey of humility and faithfulness we take together, one step at a time.

To engage the Bible with wisdom, then, is to embrace its diversity, not fight it. “For everything there is a season,” wrote the sage of Ecclesiastes, “. . . a time to mourn, and a time to dance . . . a time to tear, and a time to sew, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak, a time to love, and a time to hate” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4, 7–8 ESV). Arguably, these verses imply a pro tip too: When your friend is sitting in a heap of ashes, grieving the loss of his family and scratching his diseased skin with a shard of broken pottery, it’s time to be silent. It’s a time to listen and grieve.

While American evangelicalism instilled in me a healthy love and respect for Scripture (without which this book would never have been written, I’m sure), many of its institutions taught me to expect something from the Bible that the Bible was never intended to deliver—namely, an internally consistent and self-evident worldview that provides clear, universal answers to all of life’s questions,

A book of poetry, stories, letters, and prophecies cannot be easily rendered down into bullet points, so treating Scripture as an owner’s manual, based on a few verses here and a few verses there, will leave you more lost than found.

In his marvelous book Prophetic Lament, Soong-Chan Rah explained that lament challenges the status quo by crying out for justice. It runs counter to our American hubris, which focuses on trumpeting our successes. He explained, “The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in a loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.”

The word apocalypse means “unveiling” or “disclosing.” An apocalyptic event or vision, therefore, reveals things as they really are. It peels back the layers of pomp and pretense, fear and uncertainty, to expose the true forces at work in the world. Using highly symbolic, theologically charged language, the authors of Scripture employ apocalyptic literature to dramatize the work of the Resistance, to offer hope to those suffering under the weight of an empire that seems, on the surface, all-powerful and unassailable.

“The point of apocalyptic texts is not to predict the future,” explained biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine in The Meaning of the Bible; “it is to provide comfort in the present. The Bible is not a book of teasers in which God has buried secrets only to be revealed three millennia later.” Rather, she argued, apocalyptic texts “proclaim that a guiding hand controls history, and assure that justice will be done.”7

And I think that’s because Americans, particularly white Americans, have a hard time catching apocalyptic visions when they benefit too much from the status quo to want a peek behind the curtain. When you belong to the privileged class of the most powerful global military superpower in the world, it can be hard to relate to the oppressed minorities who wrote so much of the Bible. (And no, their oppression did not consist of getting wished “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” at Target. That’s not actual persecution, folks.)

I think that’s because Americans, particularly white Americans, have a hard time catching apocalyptic visions when they benefit too much from the status quo to want a peek behind the curtain. When you belong to the privileged class of the most powerful global military superpower in the world, it can be hard to relate to the oppressed minorities who wrote so much of the Bible. (And no, their oppression did not consist of getting wished “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” at Target. That’s not actual persecution, folks.) The fact is, the shadow under which most of the world trembles today belongs to America, and its beasts could be named any number of things—White Supremacy, Colonialism, the Prison Industrial Complex, the War Machine, Civil Religion, Materialism, Greed.

The fact is, the shadow under which most of the world trembles today belongs to America, and its beasts could be named any number of things—White Supremacy, Colonialism, the Prison Industrial Complex...

The fact is, despite wistful nostalgia for the days when America was a supposedly “Christian nation,” the history of this country is littered with the bodies of innocent men, women, and children who were neglected, enslaved, dispossessed, and slaughtered so the privileged class could have more and more and more and more. More land. More money. More power. More status. More furs, more guns, more profits, more amenities, more square footage, more security, more fame.

There’s just no denying that the very things for which Israel was condemned by the prophets—gross income inequality, mistreatment of immigrants and refugees, carelessness toward life, the oppression of the poor and vulnerable, and the worship of money, sex, and violence—remain potent, prevalent sins in our culture. These sins are embedded in nearly every system of our society from education to law enforcement to entertainment to religion. We are all culpable, all responsible for working for change.

My friend Jonathan Martin, who is a third-generation Pentecostal preacher, described the election of Donald Trump as an apocalyptic event—not in the sense that it brought on the end of the world, but in the sense that it uncovered, or revealed, divides and contours in the American social landscape many of us did not want to face, deep rifts regarding race, religion, nationalism, gender, and fear. It was certainly apocalyptic for me in the way that it exposed, to my shame, my reluctance to resist certain injustices in this country until the resistance movement fit more conveniently with my political persuasions.

For too long, the white American church has chosen the promise of power over prophetic voice. We have allied ourselves with the empire and, rather than singing songs of hopeful defiance with the exiles, created more of them. We have, consciously and unconsciously, done the bidding of the Beast—not in every case, of course, but in far too many.

I include the story of Esther as a resistance story because this dramatic tale from exile, and its reenactment each year in the Purim play, sanctify satire as a ready weapon in the arsenal of holy resistance. Sometimes the best way to fell the Beast is to look it in the face and laugh. Beneath the bared teeth and bloodied claws lies a frightened little kitten, insecure about its hair.

In Paul’s world, if a man took the active role in a sexual encounter, his behavior was deemed “natural,” but if he took the passive role, his behavior was considered “unnatural,” for he had taken the presumed position of a woman, deemed in that culture to be his inferior. The opposite was true for women: sexual passivity was deemed “natural,” while dominance was “unnatural.” These ideas were rooted in the honor-shame cultures of the Mediterranean and heavily influenced by patriarchal assumptions.

So once again we are left with some questions: Must we adopt first-century, Mediterranean cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality in order to embrace the gospel Paul was preaching there? Must we condemn all short-haired women, long-haired men, and gay and lesbian couples as “unnatural”? Do we apply the same rightful condemnation of pederasty and rape in ancient Rome to loving, committed same-sex relationships today?

We may wish for answers, but God rarely give us answers. Instead, God gathers us up into soft, familiar arms and says, “Let me tell you a story.”