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. The Bible’s ancient refrains have given voice to the laments of millions of oppressed people and, too often, provided justification to their oppressors.

The Bible, I learned, was the reason Christians voted for Republicans, rejected evolution, and opposed same-sex marriage. It was the reason I could never, as a woman, be a pastor, the reason I should always, as a woman, mind my neckline.

“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?”

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. If you’re curious, you will never leave the text without learning something new. If you’re persistent, you just might leave inspired.

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.

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.

Womanist Midrash

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

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.

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.

Allen Dwight Callahan explained in his masterful work The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible,

Articles online led me to books, which led me to conferences, which led me to dinner table conversations and worship services and protests. Not all of these experiences have been comfortable, of course. Often a speaker or writer will say something that jars me. I’m still learning, still getting things wrong. But sometimes God knows the kind of deliverance you need the most is deliverance from your own comfort.

wrote pastor Jonathan Martin in his book Prototype. “Our society tells us that if and when we get ‘there’—the job or position or degree we’ve always wanted—that’s when all the important stuff will start happening. Not so. All the good stuff happens in obscurity.”

The people of God would do well to listen to those who have sojourned in the outskirts.

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.

For every battle a thousand tales could be told, yet we seldom hear more than one of them. What took the walls of Jericho down? Only God, who holds every story, knows.

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. I tried reading Scripture with my conscience and curiosity suspended, and I felt, quite literally, disintegrated. I felt fractured and fake.

Brené Brown warned us we can’t selectively numb our emotions, and no doubt this applies to the emotions we have about our faith.4 If the slaughter of Canaanite children elicits only a shrug, then why not the slaughter of Pequots? Of Syrians? Of Jews? If we train ourselves not to ask hard questions about the Bible, and to emotionally distance ourselves from any potential conflicts or doubts, then where will we fin...

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.

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.

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

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.”

The point is, 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.

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.

“the Crucifixion of the Warrior God,”

On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.

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.

Finally, after thirty-seven chapters of speeches, God talks back,

One of my favorite insights in all the Bible’s wisdom literature comes from Proverbs 27:14: “If anyone loudly blesses their neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse.”

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.

It’s a bit like programming your GPS to take you to a destination, then ignoring every instinct in your body as its cheery voice tells you to take an exit you know you’re not supposed to take or make a U-turn in the middle of a suspension bridge. There’s a great episode of The Office in which this strategy lands Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute in a lake during a sales trip, Michael shouting, “The machine knows!” as he follows the GPS instructions and drives his SUV off the road into the water.

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

In his marvelous book Prophetic Lament, Soong-Chan Rah explained that lament challenges the status quo by crying out for justice. It runs counter to our American hubris, which focuses on trumpeting our successes. He explained, “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.”14

On a muggy June morning in South Carolina, a young black woman named Bree Newsome scaled the thirty-foot flagpole outside the state’s capitol building, looked straight into the eyes of the Beast, and said, “Not today.”

The prophet Ezekiel compared Israel’s sins to those of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, noting, “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49).

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.

The fact is, despite wistful nostalgia for the days when America was a supposedly “Christian nation,” the history of this country is littered with the bodies of innocent men, women, and children who were neglected, enslaved, dispossessed, and slaughtered so the privileged class could have more and more and more and more. More land. More money. More power. More status. More furs, more guns, more profits, more amenities, more square footage, more security, more fame.

While the ultrarich get richer, middle- and lower-income wages have stagnated so that the number of “working poor” in America continues to grow. In many states, you can still get fired from your job for simply being gay, but you can be a serial womanizer who brags about grabbing married women “by the pussy” and still get elected president.

Saying we are a nation of peace doesn’t make it so—not for Trayvon Martin, not for Tamir Rice, not for the twenty kindergartners shot at Sandy Hook Elementary School, not for that Cherokee mama, not for the Iraqi villagers in the crosshairs of our drones. Tensions around issues of injustice must not be avoided in the name of an easy peace and cheap grace, but rather passionately engaged, until justice rolls down like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.

For too long, the white American church has chosen the promise of power over prophetic voice. We have allied ourselves with the empire and, rather than singing songs of hopeful defiance with the exiles, created more of them. We have, consciously and unconsciously, done the bidding of the Beast—not in every case, of course, but in far too many. This is why it’s so important to follow the lead of modern-day prophets like Bree Newsome who, in scaling that flagpole, removing the Confederate flag, and declaring God’s reign over and above the centuries-long reign of white supremacy, honored a long and storied tradition of prophetic protest. Her actions helped my generation visualize a better future. She simultaneously revealed things as they are and how they might be.

Sometimes just showing up to the communion table is a way of looking straight into the eyes of the Beast and saying, “Not today.”

What I love about the Bible is that the story isn’t over. There are still prophets in our midst. There are still dragons and beasts. It might not look like it, but the Resistance is winning. The light is breaking through.

Sometimes the best way to fell the Beast is to look it in the face and laugh. Beneath the bared teeth and bloodied claws lies a frightened little kitten, insecure about its hair.

could fill a house with hungry and thirsty people, people ready to laugh again, and eat, and start something new. We could put flowers on the table. We could sing old songs.

Jesus is what it looks like when God is king, when God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven.”

This story about the nature of God and God’s relationship to humanity smells like mud and manger hay and tastes like salt and wine. It is concerned, not simply with questions of eternity, but with paying taxes and filling bellies and addressing a woman’s chronic menstrual complications. It is the biggest story and the smallest story all at once—the great quest for the One Ring and the quiet friendship of Frodo and Sam.

At some point, you will get to Jesus, and Jesus will change everything.