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

by Rachel Held Evans

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?

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 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.”

Renowned New Testament scholar N. T. Wright compared Scripture to a five-act play, full of drama and surprise, wherein the people of God are invited into the story to improvise the unfinished, final act.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”2

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.

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.

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.

And so we have on our hands a Bible that includes psalms of praise but also psalms of complaint and anger, a Bible that poses big questions about the nature of evil and the cause of suffering without always answering them.

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.

Of course, we miss all this when we insist the Bible’s origin stories are simply straightforward recitations of historical fact, one scientific discovery or archaeological dig away from ruin. 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. But this represents a massive misunderstanding of the genre itself.

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.

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

“The Bible creates community,” wrote Timothy Beal in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, “by providing space for community to happen. It offers storied worlds and theological vocabularies around which people can come together in conversation about abiding questions. It calls for creative, collaborative participation.”11 This attitude stands in stark contrast to the winner-take-all posture in many fundamentalist Christian communities, which positions the solitary reader as objective arbiter of truth, his “straightforward” reading of the text final and exclusive. 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 is how Paul engaged Scripture, after all, and Jesus—both of whom were Jews.

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.

“Perhaps we need the angel to start grappling with us,” wrote Madeleine L’Engle in A Stone for a Pillow, “to turn us aside from the questions which have easy answers to those which cause us to grow, no matter how painful that growth can be.”14

This crimson thread of justice has been traced by marginalized people through the ages, their struggle for freedom sustained by Scripture’s call to honor the poor, welcome the stranger, and liberate the oppressed.

After all, Scripture is described as the living Word of God (Hebrews 4:12), which means it remains animated and active, pulsing with possibility.

Of course, the fact that a single biblical text can mean many things doesn’t mean it can mean anything.

This is why it’s especially important for those of us who come to the Bible from positions of relative social, economic, and racial privilege to read its stories alongside people from marginalized communities, past and present, who are often more practiced at tracing that crimson thread of justice through its pages.

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

As 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

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.

Of the Bible’s texts of terror, theology professor and poet Nicola Slee wrote, “We will listen, however painful the hearing . . . until there is not one last woman remaining who is a victim of violence.”13 It’s not always clear what we are meant to learn from the Bible’s most troubling stories, but if we simply look away, we learn nothing.

If the Bible’s texts of terror compel us to face with fresh horror and resolve the ongoing oppression and exploitation of women, then perhaps these stories do not trouble us in vain. Perhaps we can use them for some good.

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.

Finally, the last thing I know is this: If the God of the Bible is true, and if God became flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ is—as theologian Greg Boyd put it—“the revelation that culminates and supersedes all others,”16 then God would rather die by violence than commit it. The cross makes this plain. On the cross, Christ not only bore the brunt of human cruelty and bloodlust and fear, he remained faithful to the nonviolence he taught and modeled throughout his ministry. 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.

I’m in no rush to patch up these questions. God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don’t want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don’t think he wants me to be either. 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.

In the Protestant Bible, the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon are generally grouped together and categorized as wisdom literature. Jews identify these books as part of the Ketuvim, or “Writings”—miscellaneous works that are neither Torah nor prophecy.

The aim of wisdom literature is to uncover something true about the nature of reality in a way that makes the reader or listener wiser. In the Bible, wisdom is rarely presented as a single decision, belief, or rule, but rather as a “way” or “path” that the sojourner must continually discern amid the twists and turns of life.

Wisdom is a way of life, a journey of humility and faithfulness we take together, one step at a time.

“From this book above all others in scripture, we learn that the person in pain is a theologian of unique authority,” wrote Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis in her marvelous book titled Getting Involved with God. “The one who complains to God, pleads with God, rails at God, does not let God off the hook for a minute—she is at last admitted to a mystery. She passes through a door that only pain will open, and is thus qualified to speak of God in a way that others, whom we generally call more fortunate, cannot speak.”2

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. You reap what you sow—except when you don’t.

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.

I’d always thought the more time I spent with the Bible, the more clarity I would receive, but as my nightstand grew cluttered with precarious stacks of books presenting Four Views on Atonement, Three Views on Hell, Five Views on Evolution, and Four Views on Homosexuality, it became apparent that, even among people who believed the Bible to speak with authority, the Bible’s message is not always plain. The presence of hundreds, if not thousands, of Christian denominations makes this point obvious.

I had encountered what Catholic sociologist Christian Smith termed “pervasive interpretive pluralism,” which simply refers to the reality that even among people devoted to its truth, the Bible yields different interpretations and applications of its many teachings. This reality challenges the idea that the Bible is a straightforward blueprint for living or a compendium of inerrant teachings on which the faithful will always agree.

“Even among presumably well-intentioned readers,” Smith wrote in The Bible Made Impossible, “. . . the Bible, after their very best efforts to understand it, says and teaches very ...

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.

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

Because of all this, the Bible makes a lousy owner’s manual. It fails massively at getting to the point. The Bible isn’t some Magic 8 Ball you can consult when deciding whether to take a job or break up with a guy, nor is it a position paper elucidating God’s opinion on various social, theological, and political issues. 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. 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.

Jesus takes the Resistance beyond prophecy, beyond songs of hope and lamentation, beyond satire and mockery, and beyond apocalyptic visions to declare the inauguration of a new kingdom. With his birth, teachings, death, and resurrection, Jesus has started a revolution.