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

by Rachel Held Evans

Memoirist Addie Zierman writes an online advice column, “Dear Addie,” for people who have left legalistic religious backgrounds. Recently a reader named Megan asked for advice on how to engage the Bible when it comes with so much baggage, when it tends to trigger more doubts than it resolves. Zierman advised Megan to think of the Bible not as one of those Magic Eye books, which, with enough squinting and studying, reveal a single hidden image, but rather as a song that can be covered and remixed by a variety of artists. “Find your cover artists,” she wrote. “Find the voices that help you hear the same songs differently.”1

When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not—static, perspicacious, certain, absolute—then you’re free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic. The ancient rabbis likened Scripture to a palace, alive and bustling, full of grand halls, banquet rooms, secret passages, and locked doors. “The adventure,” wrote Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky in Reading the Book, lies in “learning the secrets of the palace, unlocking all the doors and perhaps catching a glimpse of the King in all His splendor.”3

Citing G. K. Chesterton, author Neil Gaiman often noted, “Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”5 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. At times I wonder if I understood my sacred text better then than I do now or ever will again.

Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator. While Christians believe the Bible to be uniquely revelatory and authoritative to the faith, we have no reason to think its many authors were exempt from the mistakes, edits, rewrites, and dry spells of everyday creative work. Nor should we, as readers, expect every encounter with the text to leave us happily awestruck and enlightened. Inspiration, on both the giving and receiving end, takes practice and patience. It means showing up even when you don’t feel like it, even when it seems as if no one else is there. It means waiting for wind to stir. 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.

Even the story of Adam and Eve, found in Genesis 2 and 3, is thought by many scholars to be less a story about human origins and more a story about Israel’s origins, a symbolic representation of Israel’s pattern of habitation, disobedience, and exile, set in primeval time.1

To demand that the Bible meet our demands is to put ourselves and our own interests at the center of the story, which is one of the first traps we must learn to avoid if we are to engage the Bible with integrity or care.

“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 worship.”

In the same way we automatically adjust our expectations when a story begins with “Once upon a time” versus “The Associated Press is reporting . . . ,” we instinctively sense upon reading the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah’s ark that these tales of origin aren’t meant to be straightforward recitations of historical fact. The problem isn’t that liberal scholars are imposing novel interpretations on our sacred texts; the problem is that over time we’ve been conditioned to deny our instincts about what kinds of stories we’re reading when those stories are found in the Bible. We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way. 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 an...

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

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. “Turn it and turn it,” the ancient rabbis said of Scripture, comparing it to a precious gem, “for everything is in it.”3 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).

It seemed every conceivable story of pregnancy complication or loss found its way to my social media feed, and as my skin stretched over my belly, it was as if it became more porous, more absorbent of the suffering of others, particularly the mothers and children whose flight from violence in Syria and Iraq occupied the news hour each night. I’ve always had an active imagination, but pregnancy sent it into overdrive, the scenarios it conjured enough to impress the most ambitious horror novelist.

As Walter Brueggemann, renowned theologian and Old Testament scholar, said, “Like manna, [God’s] wilderness presence is always enough on which to survive, but not too much. Like manna, he can be graciously received but not stored or presumed upon. Like manna, it is given out of fidelity but never fully seen and controlled.”7

It’s worth noting that at the culmination of nearly every wilderness journey is a naming. After receiving a new name of his own, Jacob, now called Israel, names the place where he wrestled with God Peniel, which means “face of God.” Hagar names the well of her salvation Beer Lahai Roi, “I have seen the God who sees me.”

In other words, you can demand restitution for your loss, but no more; this is about justice, not revenge. The law also limited kings’ accumulation of wealth, issued special protections for orphans and widows, and required that laborers were paid fairly and promptly. It even proposed a year of Jubilee every fifty years, in which prisoners and slaves would be freed, debts would be forgiven, and wealth would be redistributed. (Whether this proposal was ever honored is a matter of debate.)

As Elton Trueblood put it, “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.”

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 you are looking for Bible verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to honor and celebrate women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, there are plenty. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, there are plenty more. If you are looking for an outdated and irrelevant ancient text, that’s exactly what you will see. If you are looking for truth, that’s exactly what you will find. This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, What does this say? but, What am I looking for?

When asked in 2010 about Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, Reformed pastor and theologian John Piper declared, without hesitation, “It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.”3 Piper’s dispassionate acceptance represented pure, committed faith, I was told, while mine had been infected by humanism and emotion—“a good example of why women should be kept from church leadership,” one acquaintance said.

Brené Brown warned us we can’t selectively numb our emotions,

A lot of people think the hardest part about religious doubt is feeling isolated from God. It’s not. At least in my experience, the hardest part about doubt is feeling isolated from your community. There’s nothing quite like going through the motions of Christian life—attending church, leading Bible study, singing hymns, bringing your famous lemon bars to potlucks—while internally questioning the very beliefs that hold the entire culture together. It’s like you’ve got this ticker scrolling across every scene of your life, feeding you questions and commentary and doubts, and yet you carry on as though you can’t see it, as if everything’s fine. Say something and you risk losing friendships and becoming the subject of gossip. Keep your doubts to yourself and you risk faking it for the rest of your life. I know a lot of people, including some pastors, who are faking it.

Those of us troubled by language about the “extermination” of Canaanite populations may find some comfort in the fact that scholars and archaeologists doubt the early skirmishes of Israel’s history actually resulted in genocide. It was common for warring tribes in ancient Mesopotamia to refer to decisive victories as “complete annihilation” or “total destruction,” even when their enemies lived to fight another day. (The Moabites, for example, claimed in an extrabiblical text that after their victory in a battle against an Israelite army, the nation of Israel “utterly perished for always,” which obviously isn’t the case. And even in Scripture itself, stories of conflicts with Canaanite tribes persist through the book of Judges and into Israel’s monarchy, which would suggest Joshua’s armies did not in fact wipe them from the face of the earth, at least not in a literal sense.)9 Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”10 Pastor and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler, dubbed it “ancient trash talk.”11 Even Jericho, which twenty-first-century readers like to imagine as a colorful, bustling city with walls that reached the sky, was in actuality a small, six-acre military outpost, unlikely to support many civilians but, as was common, included a prostitute and her family. Most of the “cities” described in the book of Joshua were likely the same...

For example, as the Bible moves from conquest to settlement, we encounter two markedly different accounts of the lives of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and the friends and enemies who shaped their reigns. The first appears in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. These books include all the unflattering details of kingdom politics, including the account of how King David had a man killed so he could take the man’s wife, Bathsheba, for himself. On the other hand, 1 and 2 Chronicles omit the story of David and Bathsheba altogether, along with much of the unseemly violence and drama around the transition of power between David and Solomon. This is because Samuel and Kings were likely written during the Babylonian exile, when the people of Israel were struggling to understand what they had done wrong for God to allow their enemies to overtake them, and 1 and 2 Chronicles were composed much later, after the Jews had returned to the land, eager to pick up the pieces. While the authors of Samuel and Kings viewed the monarchy as a morality tale to help them understand their present circumstances, the authors of the Chronicles recalled the monarchy with nostalgia, a reminder of their connection to God’s anointed as they sought healing and unity. As a result, you get two noticeably different takes on the very same historic events.

But, as Joshua Ryan Butler astutely observed, when it comes to civilian casualties, “we tend to hold the ancients to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves.”14 In the time it took me to write this chapter, nearly one thousand civilians were killed in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, many of them women and children. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II, and far more civilians died in the Korean War and Vietnam War than American soldiers. Even though America is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it takes in less than half of 1 percent of the world’s refugees, and drone warfare has left many thousands of families across the Middle East terrorized.15 This is not to excuse Israel’s violence, because modern-day violence is also bad, nor is it to trivialize debates over just war theory and US involvement in various historical conflicts, which are complex issues far beyond the scope of this book. Rather, it ought to challenge us to engage the Bible’s war stories with a bit more humility and introspection, willing to channel some of our horror over atrocities past into questioning elements of the war machines that still roll on today.

God would rather die by violence than commit it. The cross makes this plain.

Boyd called it “the Crucifixion of the Warrior God,” and in a two-volume work by that name asserted that “on the cross, the diabolic violent warrior god we have all-too-frequently pledged allegiance to has been forever repudiated.”17 On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.

So to whatever extent God owes us an explanation for the Bible’s war stories, Jesus is that explanation. And Christ the King won his kingdom without war.

Boyd argued that God serves as a sort of “heavenly missionary” who temporarily accommodates the brutal practices and beliefs of various cultures without condoning them in order to gradually influence God’s people toward justice. Insofar as any divine portrait reflects a character at odds with the cross, he said, it must be considered accommodation.

I had a college professor who assigned the book of Proverbs to his Psychology 101 class, instructing us to circle in our Bibles every appearance of the word way or path. 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 an anxious student who spent a lot of time worrying that her major or her homecoming date or her student senate bid were outside of God’s will, this lesson proved an enormous comfort.

In short, when it comes to the nature of suffering and blessing, the Bible does not speak with a single voice. There is not a biblical view of theodicy. There are biblical views of theodicy. And the people who wrote and assembled Scripture seemed perfectly fine with that unresolved tension. Job’s friends make the mistake of assuming that what is true in one context must be true in every context—a common error among modern Bible readers who like to trawl the text for universal answers. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar said some “biblical” things in their remarks to Job, and yet in that context, those things weren’t true. We should be wary, then, of grand pronouncements that begin, “The Bible says.” Where? To whom? In what context? Why? “You reap what you sow” may apply in one circumstance, like when the apostle Paul said it in his letter to the Galatian church to encourage them to continue in good works (Galatians 6:7), but it fell woefully short in the context of Job’s plight. So Job rightly condemns his friends-turned-accusers, saying, “If only you would be altogether silent! For you that would be wisdom” (13:5, emphasis added). 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.

German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno once said, “To let suffering speak is the condition of all truth.”

In many ways, the Bible of my youth was set up to fail. 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, from whether climate change is real, to why God allows suffering in the world, to how to keep a marriage together and raise obedient kids. The Bible, I learned, served as a kind of owner’s manual for life, Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. It came without flaws or contradictions and could be trusted to speak clearly and decisively on any political or social issue up for debate. As a result, I emerged from my conservative Christian college with what I thought was the biblical view of American history, the biblical view of economics, the biblical view of gender and sexuality, the biblical view of science, the biblical view of politics, the biblical view of pop culture. The problem was, in most cases, the texts I memorized to support those views were selectively chosen to support a particular set of ideologies—usually politically conservative ones—a fact that became apparent when, after graduation, I encountered devoted Christians who believed and voted and worshipped quite differently than me, and could just as handily cite ...

The truth is, the Bible isn’t an answer book. It’s not even a book, really. Rather, it’s a diverse library of ancient texts, spanning multiple centuries, genres, and cultures, authored by a host of different authors coming from a variety of different perspectives. These texts, like others from antiquity, have undergone edits, revisions, copies, and translations through the years. No one has the originals. Before they were canonized, they circulated as disparate collections of scrolls and codices, and before that, many were passed down as oral traditions. The Scripture Jesus knew and taught looked nothing like the specialty Bibles we sell in our Christian bookstores or even the giant, leather-bound heirlooms we treasure in our churches. Jews were still debating which texts should be canonized in their Scripture a century after Jesus’ death, and Christians were arguing over the shape of their canon well into the Protestant Reformation. (Luther wanted to leave out the book of James, for example, which he called “an epistle of straw.”)6 Ask a Catholic monk, an Orthodox priest, an evangelical pastor, and a Reform rabbi how many books are in the Bible, and you’ll get four different answers. These various traditions sort their books in different ways too, because Scripture consists of stories, poems, proverbs, letters, laws, genealogies, parables, and a host of other genres that can be difficult to categorize since they emerge from a culture so different from our own. Because of ...

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.

If the Bible is smudged with human fingerprints, then the Psalms may give us the blotchiest pages of all. They are, in the words of British Benedictine Sebastian Moore, “rough-hewn from earthy experience.”10 “The Psalms don’t theologize or explain anger away,” wrote author and poet Kathleen Norris, who studied the Psalter as a Benedictine oblate. “One reason for this is that the Psalms are poetry, and poetry’s function is not to explain but to offer images and stories that resonate with our lives. . . . In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the Psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.”11

But the church does not always embrace the messy, unresolved psalms. One study examined the prayer books and hymnals of several prominent Christian denominations to find that the majority of psalms omitted from liturgical use are the laments. Another estimated that while lament constitutes 40 percent of all psalms, it makes up only 13 percent of the hymnal for the Churches of Christ, 19 percent of the Presbyterian hymnal, and 13 percent of the Baptist hymnal.13 Christian Copyright Licensing International lists the top one hundred worship songs used in contemporary worship each year, and usually only four or five qualify as songs of mourning or frustration.

That American tendency toward triumphalism, of optimism rooted in success, money, and privilege, will infect and sap of substance any faith community that has lost its capacity for “holding space” for those in grief.

One of the most important questions facing the people who gave us the Bible was: How do we resist Babylon, both as an exterior force that opposes the ways of God and an interior pull that tempts us with imitation and assimilation?

It is in this sense that much of Scripture qualifies as resistance literature. It defies the empire by subverting the notion that history will be written by the wealthy, powerful, and cruel, insisting instead that the God of the oppressed will have the final word.

“It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination,” wrote Brueggemann in his landmark book, The Prophetic Imagination, “to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”5

the prophets are weirdos. More than anyone else in Scripture, they remind us that those odd ducks shouting from the margins of society may see things more clearly than the political and religious leaders with the inside track. We ignore them at our own peril.

What power people always discover is that you cannot finally silence poets.”

“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.”

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.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story.”1

“God’s kingdom in the preaching of Jesus,” explained Wright, “refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ . . . Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of ordinary life—God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.”

There is nothing Jesus talked about more than the kingdom. It is by far his favorite topic. “Jesus went through all the towns and villages,” Matthew reported, “teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness” (9:35). And yet you’d never know it from the way many modern Christians talk about the gospel. “Jesus came to die,” they often say, referring to a view of Christianity that reduces the gospel to a transaction, whereby God needed a spotless sacrifice to atone for the world’s sins and thus sacrificed Jesus on the cross so believers could go to heaven. In this view, Jesus basically shows up to post our bail. His life and teachings make for an interesting backstory but prove largely irrelevant to the work of salvation. Dallas Willard called it “the gospel of sin management.”5 What happened on the cross has been the subject of wonder and debate for centuries, with Christians of good faith employing different metaphors and language to articulate its significance, but any view that reduces Jesus to a sort of deus ex machina, necessary only for a single moment of rescue, strips the incarnation of all its power and tells a far simpler story than the one the Bible actually gives us. Jesus didn’t just “come to die.” Jesus came to live—to teach, to heal, to tell stories, to protest, to turn over tables, to touch people who weren’t supposed to be touched and eat with people who weren’t supposed to be eaten with, to brea...

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.

it is notable that according to the Gospels, when God was wrapped in flesh and walking among us, the single most occupying activity of the Creator of the universe, the Ultimate Reality, the Alpha and Omega and the great I AM of ages past and ages to come, was to tell stories. Lots and lots and lots of stories. Matthew reported that Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables and “did not say anything to them without using a parable” (13:34). The movies always make it seem as though people were drawn to Jesus by some mysterious force beyond their control, a gravitational pull accompanied by swelling strings and warm light. But to me the appeal of Jesus seems a lot more concrete: this was a man who loved a good feast and could spin a good tale. Of course people craved his presence.

Episcopal priest and gourmet chef Robert Farrar Capon says the parables show us that the Bible “is not about someplace else called heaven, nor about somebody at a distance called God. Rather it is about this place here, in all its thisness, and placiness, and about the intimate and immediately Holy One who, at no distance from us at all, moves mysteriously to make creation true both to itself and to him.”

“I am a Christian,” I concluded, “because the story of Jesus is still the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”