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.

why did my church appeal to Paul’s letter to Timothy to oppose women preaching from the pulpit, but ignore his instructions to the Corinthians regarding women covering their heads (1 Timothy 2:12; 1 Corinthians 11:6)?

What business do I have describing as “inerrant” and “infallible” a text that presumes a flat and stationary earth, takes slavery for granted, and presupposes patriarchal norms like polygamy?

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

The spiritual practices of Lectio Divina and Ignatian meditation, which invite contemplative engagement with the text, helped me recover a devotional element to Scripture reading that had long ago gone missing.

Old Testament scholar Peter Enns, whom I count as both a mentor and friend, has encouraged me to approach Scripture with a new set of questions, questions like, “What if the Bible is just fine the way it is? . . . Not the well-behaved-everything-is-in-order version we create, but the messy, troubling, weird, and ancient Bible that we actually have?”

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.”

I write with two audiences in mind: first, those who share my evangelical background and find themselves navigating the great chasm between Scripture as they learned it and Scripture as what it actually is, and second, those who share my present affiliation with progressive mainline traditions and are itching to explore more deeply the background, significance, and relevance of the texts sampled in the liturgy each week.

I hope to show how the Bible can be captivating and true when taken on its own terms, avoiding both strict literalism on the one hand and safe, disinterested liberalism on the other.

I tackle this subject not as a scholar, but as a storyteller and literature lover who believes understanding the genre of a given text is the first step to engaging it in a meaningful way.

My focus is on the Bible as a collection of stories, stories best able to teach us when we appreciate their purpose.

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.

Our Bible was forged from a crisis of faith.

the Old Testament, began during the reign of King David and gained momentum during the Babylonian invasion of Judah and in the wake of the Babylonian exile, when Israel was occupied by that mighty pagan empire. One cannot overstate the trauma of this exile.

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.

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.”

we automatically adjust our expectations when a story begins with “Once upon a time” versus “The Associated Press is reporting . . . ,”

Christians can learn a lot about Scripture from the people who have had it the longest.

midrash—those imaginative explorations and expansions of Scripture that serve as the most common form of biblical interpretation in Jewish traditions. These writings, some ancient and some modern, alerted me to details in the text I’d never noticed before, and offered both playful and instructive interpretations of those details that animated the biblical characters in fresh new ways.

Midrash, which initially struck me as something of a cross between biblical commentary and fan fiction, introduced me to a whole new posture toward Scripture, a sort of delighted reverence for the text unencumbered by the expectation that it must behave itself to be true.

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.

Yet just one person in all your sacred Scripture dared to name God, and it wasn’t a priest, prophet, warrior, or king. It was I, Hagar—foreigner, woman, slave. Don’t you dare forget.

this “law of retaliation” represented a deliberate move away from the excessive punishment allowed in other tribes by limiting retaliatory action to judicious, in-kind responses.

When Jesus was challenged by the experts on the Law to give an answer for what Scripture is all about, he offered a very straightforward, very Jewish response. Quoting Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, he replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37–40).

We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it.

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?

the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, What does this say? but, What am I looking for? I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).

Recounting his role in the massacre, Puritan John Underhill wrote, “Down fell men, women, and children. . . . Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? . . . Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. . . . We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”

The text reports that Joshua’s army “destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21). Only Rahab, a prostitute, and her family were spared because they had sheltered Israelite spies ahead of the siege. (A children’s book in my home provides a G-rated version of the story, explaining that Rahab was able to help because she “often had visitors coming and going at odd hours.”)

Of Israel’s conquest of Canaan, the text notes, “Except for the Hivites living in Gibeon, not one city made a treaty of peace with the Israelites, who took them all in battle. For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses” (11:19–20).

When it comes to processing these troubling stories, there are generally three types of people: (1) those who accept without question that God ordered the military campaigns in Canaan and has likely supported others throughout history, (2) those who are so troubled by the notion of God condoning ethnic cleansing that it strains their faith or compels them to abandon it, (3) those who can name all of the Kardashian sisters and are probably happier for it.

Feminist scholar Phyllis Trible aptly named these narratives “texts of terror.” “If art imitates life,” she wrote, “scripture likewise reflects it in both holiness and horror.”2

Rereading the texts of terror as a young woman, I kept anticipating some sort of postscript or epilogue chastising the major players for their sins, a sort of Arrested Development–style “lesson” to wrap it all up—“And that’s why you should always challenge the patriarchy!” But no such epilogue exists. While women are raped, killed, and divided as plunder, God stands by, mute as clay.

When I turned to pastors and professors for help, they urged me to set aside my objections, to simply trust that God is good and that the Bible’s war stories happened as told, for reasons beyond my comprehension. “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” they insisted. “Stop trying to know the mind of God.”

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.

But this is the deleterious snare of fundamentalism: It claims that the heart is so corrupted by sin, it simply cannot be trusted to sort right from wrong, good from evil, divine from depraved. Instinct, intuition, conscience, critical thinking—these impulses must be set aside whenever they appear to contradict the biblical text, because the good Christian never questions the “clear teachings of Scripture”; the good Christian listens to God, not her gut.

I’ve watched people get so entangled in this snare they contort into shapes unrecognizable. 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.

if God was real, then God didn’t want the empty devotion of some shadow version of Rachel, but rather my whole, integrated self. So I decided to face the Bible’s war stories head-on, mind and heart fully engaged, willing to risk the loss of faith if that’s where the search led.

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.

accepting the Bible’s war stories without objection threatened to erase my humanity. “We don’t become more spiritual by becoming less human,” Eugene Peterson said.6 How could I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength while disengaging those very faculties every time I read the Bible?

People take extraordinary risks to be part of a story that will outlive them.

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.

Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”

Peter Enns explained, for the biblical writers, “Writing about the past was never simply about understanding the past for its own sake, but about shaping, molding and creating the past to speak to the present.”

“The Bible looks the way it does,” he concluded, “because God lets his children tell the story.”12

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.

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.