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

by Rachel Held Evans

So what is this good news? Well, it depends on who you ask. For the apostle John, the gospel is the good news that in Jesus, God “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14 ESV), or more literally, God “became flesh and tabernacled—pitched a tent—among us.”

For the woman at the well, the good news is she doesn’t have to find the right temple after all, for God has started a new family of faith, beginning with despised Samaritans and the kind of women who do not belong at wells.

For Matthew and Mark, the good news is that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah sent to establish God’s reign on earth, not through conquest, power, and revenge, but through faithfulness, sacrifice, and unconditional love. The kingdom of heaven is not some far-off, future dream; it is here, among us, made real by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is what it looks like when God is king, when God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven.”

To the Galilean children who annoyed the disciples by asking Jesus for a blessing, the good news is that Jesus is the kind of king who laughs...

To the physician Luke, the gospel is especially good news for the poor and oppressed, the disinherited and the sick. Defying nearly every culture’s understanding of blessing, Jesus declared, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (Luke 6:20–21). Luke, more than any other gospel writer, shows that these promises of liberation are meant to be taken literally, that this is a God who rescues and heals and sets things right.

“If there’s one thing historic Christianity is clear on,” he said, “it’s that bodies matter to God. A revolution without bodies isn’t a revolution.”

As Jeffrey John explained in The Meaning in the Miracles, these and other healing stories “seem to have been deliberately selected by the evangelists to show Jesus healing at least every category of persons who, according to the purity laws of Jesus’ society, were specifically excluded and labeled unclean.”2

“Hope,” wrote N. T. Wright, “is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to change the world.”4

I like how Dallas Willard put it: “We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it,” he said, “or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.”5

So perhaps a better question than “Do I believe in miracles?” is “Am I acting like I do?” Am I including the people who are typically excluded? Am I feeding the hungry and caring for the sick? Am I holding the hands of the homeless and offering help to addicts? Am I working to break down religious and political barriers that marginalize ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and people with disabilities? Am I behaving as though life is more than a meaningless, chaotic mess, that there is some order in the storm?

Activist Shane Claiborne likes to challenge Christians to not only believe in miracles but to “live in a way that might necessitate one.”6

Act like you believe and maybe, at long last, you will. Move your feet and your heart will catch up.

It’s been said that if you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat. Sometimes getting out of the boat looks like showing up for another recovery meeting. Sometimes it looks like filling out hospital paperwork for an elderly neighbor. Sometimes it looks like making a casserole for the family down with the flu or offering free babysitting for the friend with a job interview. Sometimes it looks like jumping when it matters.

we dishonor the intent and purpose of the Epistles when we assume they were written in a vacuum for the purpose of filling our desk calendars with inspirational quotes or our theology papers with proof texts. (For the record, Paul told Titus to find among the Cretans leaders who were “blameless,” “hospitable,” “self-controlled,” and “disciplined,” so obviously he didn’t apply the stereotype to all from the island.) The Epistles were never intended to be applied as law. Even conservative biblical scholar F. F. Bruce once remarked that the apostle Paul would “roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah.”

In a sense, the Epistles are a lot like wisdom literature, for they remind us that wisdom isn’t just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true. Untangling culturally conditioned assumptions from universal truths in order to figure out how the wisdom of the Epistles might apply to us today is the task of modern-day hermeneutics, and it’s not an easy one.

Consider, for example, the confusion around how ancient people understood the terms natural and unnatural. You’d never know it from current debate, but the Bible says very little about same-sex behavior and arguably nothing at all about committed same-sex relationships, whose prevalence in the ancient world is a subject of historical debate. One of the few, indirect references to same-sex activity in Scripture appears in Romans 1, where the apostle Paul, arguing that both Jews and Gentiles need salvation, alludes to Gentiles who were so “inflamed with lust” that the “women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” and men “committed shameful acts with other men” (Romans 1:26–27).

And yet many of the same Christians who condemn all same-sex behavior as “unnatural” according to the Bible, don’t apply the same standards to head coverings or hair lengths among the men and women in their own congregations. Most understand Paul’s language to the Corinthians to describe cultural customs, based on ancient views of gender roles, not universal truths.

So once again we are left with some questions: Must we adopt first-century, Mediterranean cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality in order to embrace the gospel Paul was preaching there? Must we condemn all short-haired women, long-haired men, and gay and lesbian couples as “unnatural”? Do we apply the same rightful condemnation of pederasty and rape in ancient Rome to loving, committed same-sex relationships today?

“The Bible looks the way it does,” wrote Peter Enns, “because, like Jesus, when God shows up, it’s in the thick of things.”

Both groups, I suspect, suffer from the habit of dislocating Paul from his original context and mission. N. T. Wright insisted that the New Testament “must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas.’”8 When we unmoor the Epistles from their larger story, we tend to think of Paul as a disembodied voice affirming or unsettling our own points of view, rather than a religious, first-century Jew whose life was upended by an encounter with Jesus Christ.

As it turns out, the letters of Paul weren’t written by a crotchety misogynist intent on regulating the behaviors of women and minorities for millennia to come, nor were they composed by a godlike philosopher disseminating soteriological truths into the universe from an ivory tower. The apostle Paul was a smart, worldly, and broad-minded Jew who had been utterly transformed by what he saw as his singular mission in life: to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and welcome them in to Israel’s story. In pursuit of that mission, Paul was determined to break down every religious, ethnic, and cultural barrier that stood in the way.