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

by Rachel Held Evans

Civil rights activists quoted heavily from biblical texts, as did the Christian segregationists who opposed them. The Bible’s ancient refrains have given voice to the laments of millions of oppressed people and, too often, provided justification to their oppressors. Wars still rage over its disputed geographies. Like it or not, the Bible has cast its spell, and we are caught up in the story.

In those first, formative years of my life, before I knew or cared about culture wars or genre categories or biblical interpretation, this is what Scripture taught me: that a boat full of animals can survive a catastrophic flood, that seas can be parted and lions tamed, that girls can be prophets and warriors and queens, that a kid’s lunch of fish and bread can be multiplied to feed five thousand people.

God is still breathing. The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready the sails and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the biblical character Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a blessing.

Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.

As much as we may wish them to be, our present squabbles over science, politics, and public school textbooks were not on the minds of those Jewish scribes seeking to assure an oppressed and scattered people they were still beloved by God.

“It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis,” wrote Peter Enns, “to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of

In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross.

In short, we have on our hands a Bible as complicated and dynamic as our relationship with God, one that reads less like divine monologue and more like an intimate conversation. Our most sacred stories emerged from a rift in that relationship, an intense crisis of faith. Those of us who spend as much time doubting as we do believing can take enormous comfort in that. The Bible is for us too.

So ubiquitous they can blend into the scenery, origin stories permeate our language, our assumptions, our routines.

Should all other identities or securities be thrown into tumult, should nations be fractured and temples torn down, this truth remains—God is with us and God is for us. It’s a story as true now as it was then.

We know who we are, not from the birth certificates and Social Security numbers assigned to us by the government, but from the stories told and retold to us by our community. Should the time of birth on your certificate be off by a minute, or should it be lost altogether, it wouldn’t change what’s truest about you—that you matter and are loved.

The origin stories of Scripture remind us we belong to a very large and very old family that has been walking with God from the beginning. Even when we falter and fall, this God is in it for the long haul. We will not be abandoned.

For Jewish readers, the tensions and questions produced by Scripture aren’t obstacles to be avoided, but rather opportunities for engagement, invitations to join in the Great Conversation between God and God’s people that has been going on for centuries and to which everyone is invited.

While Christians tend to turn to Scripture to end a conversation, Jews turn to Scripture to start a conversation.

The refrain goes something like, “The Bible said it; I believe it; that settles it,” which is not exactly the sort of conversation starter that brings people together.

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.

This understanding of themselves as a people who wrestle with God and emerge from that wrestling with both a limp and a blessing informs how Jews engage with Scripture, and it ought to inform how Christians engage Scripture too, for we share a common family of origin, the same spiritual DNA. The biblical scholars I love to read don’t go to the holy text looking for ammunition with which to win an argument or trite truisms with which to escape the day’s sorrows; they go looking for a blessing, a better way of engaging life and the world, and they don’t expect to escape that search unscathed.

In other words, Bible stories don’t have to mean just one thing. Despite what you may have heard from a pastor or Sunday school teacher along the way, faithful engagement with Scripture isn’t about uncovering a singular, moralistic point to every text and then sticking to it. Rather, the very nature of the biblical text invites us to consider the possibilities.

Of course, the fact that a single biblical text can mean many things doesn’t mean it can mean anything. Slave traders justified the exploitation of black people by claiming the curse on Noah’s son Ham rendered all Africans subhuman. Many Puritans and pioneers appealed to the stories of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan to support attacks on indigenous populations. More recently, I’ve heard Christians shrug off sins committed by American politicians because King David assaulted women too. 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).

Every time we retell stories of God’s faithfulness in the past, whether around a candlelit seder table or under a bright, red-and-white-striped revival tent, we are reminded that if God can make a way for Moses and the Hebrew slaves, for Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, for the grandma living on Social Security, for the alcoholic marking twenty years sober, and for the strung-out pregnant lady mumbling incoherently about rutabagas, then maybe God can make a way for me too. Storytelling always has been, and always will be, one of humanity’s greatest tools for survival.

The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say. You can bend it until it breaks. For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We’re all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?

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? How will we know when we’ve got it wrong?

In other words, the authors of Scripture, like the authors of any other work (including this one!), wrote with agendas. They wrote for a specific audience from a specific religious, social, and political context, and thus made creative decisions based on that audience and context.

The point is, if you pay attention to the women, a more complex history of Israel’s conquests emerges. Their stories invite the reader to consider the human cost of violence and patriarchy, and in that sense prove instructive to all who wish to work for a better world.

On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.

There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I’m still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn’t let go of me yet.

Wisdom, it seems, is situational. It isn’t just about knowing what to say; it’s about knowing when to say it. And it’s not just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true.

If the Bible’s war stories reveal the perils of letting God’s children tell the story, then the Bible’s wisdom stories uncover the beauty of it, the necessity.

When God gave us the Bible, God did not give us an internally consistent book of answers. God gave us an inspired library of diverse writings, rooted in a variety of contexts, that have stood the test of time, precisely because, together, they avoid simplistic solutions to complex problems. It’s almost as though God trusts us to approach them with wisdom, to use discernment as we read and interpret, and to remain open to other points of view.

In the Psalms, you will find the right words for nearly every occasion—anger over an election that turned out all wrong, grief for the loss of a friend, awe at the sight of a sky thick with stars, joy upon entering a sanctuary swelling with worship music.

On a muggy June morning in South Carolina, a young black woman named Bree Newsome scaled the thirty-foot flagpole outside the state’s capitol building, looked straight into the eyes of the Beast, and said, “Not today.”

So when the prophets Daniel and John envision the empires as vicious beasts, what they’re saying is, Beneath all the wealth, power, and excess of these dazzling empires lie grotesque monsters, trampling everyone and everything in their path. And when they depict God as tolerating, then restraining, and finally destroying these monsters, what they’re saying is, The story isn’t over; even the greatest empires are no match for goodness, righteousness, and justice.

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.

America’s no ancient Babylon or Rome, I know that. But America’s no kingdom of God either.

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.

That’s what’s so striking about the gospel, or “good news,” of Jesus. It’s a story at once grand and particular, sweeping and intimate.

As N. T. Wright and other New Testament scholars have shown, it’s important to understand that kingdom terminology refers not to some faraway paradise filled with disembodied souls, but rather to the will and reign of God, unleashed into the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The gospel means that every small story is part of a sweeping story, every ordinary life part of an extraordinary movement. God is busy making all things new, and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus has opened that work to everyone who wants in on it. The church is not a group of people who believe all the same things; the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center.

In all three stories, the point isn’t just that Jesus healed these people; the point is that Jesus touched these people. He embraced them just as he embraced other disparaged members of society, often regarded as “sinners” by the religious and political elite—prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritans, Gentiles, the sick, the blind, and the deaf.