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March 9 - March 22, 2020
deep insecurity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Israel shared a conceptual world with its neighbors and used similar literary genres and stories to address issues of identity and purpose.
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.
At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.
Why do bad things happen to good people? Will evil and death continue to prevail? What does it mean to be chosen by God? Is God faithful? Is God present? Is God good? Rather than answering these questions in propositions, the Spirit spoke the language of stories,
What both hardened fundamentalists and strident atheists seem to have in common is the conviction that any trace of myth, embellishment, or cultural influence in an origin story renders it untrue.
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
“The Bible said it; I believe it; that settles it,” which is not exactly the sort of conversation starter that brings people together.
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.
I’ve learned anything from thirty-five years of doubt and belief, it’s that faith is not passive intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It’s a rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred, all-night-long struggle, and sometimes you have to demand your blessing rather than wait around for it.
It reminded me that whether it’s a forty-year journey through the wilderness or a forty-week gestation, the most important tasks of life are accomplished a day at a time. Deliverance
I’m convinced Christians arrive at these malnourished understandings of biblical Law whenever we remove the Law from its narrative context.
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery”
these divine instructions helped forge a unique national identity,
While it is shortsighted to discount Scripture’s laws as totally backward and amoral, it is just as misguided to pretend they reflect a more just society than they do.
at the top of another mountain,
Jesus is what the living, breathing will of God looks
compassion for the poor, esteem for women, healing for the sick, and solidarity with the suffering.
It means breaking bread with outcasts and embracing little children. It means choosing forgiveness over retribution, the cross over revenge, and cooking br...
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“The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than t...
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The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say.
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 all go to the text looking for something, and we all have...
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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.
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.
Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. . . . We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”
that every human being is of infinite worth and value, and that the Bible is the infallible Word of God.
for reasons beyond my comprehension. “God’s ways are higher than our ways,”
“a good example of why women should be kept from church leadership,” one acquaintance said.
the good Christian listens to God, not her gut.
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.
“Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man,” Thomas Paine said.5 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 language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”
God would rather die by violence than commit it. The cross makes this plain.
“on the cross, the diabolic violent warrior god we have all-too-frequently pledged allegiance to has been forever repudiated.”
On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.
I’m still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn’t let go of me yet.
karmic reciprocity
we learn that the person in pain is a theologian of unique authority,”
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.
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 Scripture to support their points of view.
While we may wish for a clear, perspicuous text, that’s not what God gave us. Instead, God gave us a cacophony of voices and perspectives, all in conversation with one another, representing the breadth and depth of the human experience in all its complexities and contradictions.
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.
“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.”
