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

by Rachel Held Evans

Well, for one thing, it favors the wisdom of those who have actually suffered over those who merely speculate about it.

“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

Even more significantly, the book of Job challenges the prevailing wisdom—wisdom found elsewhere in Scripture—that good things happen to good peo...

“The book of Job is like a fault line running through the Bible. In it, the moral universe affirmed in texts like Deuteronomy, according to which righteousness equals blessed well-being and disobedi...

In short, when it comes to the nature of suffering and blessing, the Bible does not speak with a single voice. There is not a biblical view of theodicy. There are biblical views of theodicy. And the people who wrote and assembled Scripture seemed perfectly fine with that unresolved tension.

“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.

This is important for me to remember as a chaplain.

German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno

once said, “To let suffering speak is the condition of all truth.”

The Bible reflects the complexity and diversity of the human experience, with all its joys and sorrows.

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

realized, for example, that I’d been taught to formulate an entire economic philosophy around Paul’s instructions to the Thessalonian church that “the one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) while setting aside hundreds of other biblical passages that call for economic justice for the poor, including those too disadvantaged to work. Volunteering at a local free health clinic, where I cried with patients enduring terrible, chronic pain because they couldn’t afford their medication, upended for me the notion that the only biblical position on America’s health care crisis was to leave it to the free market to solve.

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.

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.

(Luther wanted to leave out the book of James, for example, which he called “an epistle of straw.”)6

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.

As Timothy Beal put it, “The Bible canonizes contradiction.”7 While these disparities may cause modern-day literalists to squirm, the authors and compilers of Scripture saw no need to iron them out. In fact, Jewish readers make a point of highlighting the Bible’s contradictions to spark discussion and debate.

“The iconic idea of the Bible as a book of black-and-white answers,” wrote Beal, “encourages us to remain in a state of spiritual immaturity. . . . In turning readers away from the struggle, from wrestling with the rich complexity of biblical literature and its history, in which there are no easy answers, it perpetuates an adolescent faith. It keeps us out of the deep end, where we have to ‘ride these monsters down,’ as Annie Dillard put it, trusting that it’s not about the end product but the process.”8

The world has questions, we assume, so it’s up to us to provide the answers. But this posture can easily result in heavy-handed, didactic work, designed to prop up ideologies rather than to capture the beauty and nuance of the actual human experience,

Philomena

We are doing the thing to which all artists are called, which is not to dazzle or instruct or lecture, but to tell the truth—in all its beauty, frustration, and surprise.

If the Bible is smudged with human fingerprints, then the Psalms may give us the blotchiest pages of all.

In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the Psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.”11

The Psalms, Norris explained, “demand that we recognize that praise does not spring from a delusion that things are better than they are, but rather from the human capacity for joy.”12

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

That American tendency toward triumphalism, of optimism rooted in success, money, and privilege, will infect and sap of substance any faith community that has lost its capacity for “holding space” for those in grief. As therapists and caregivers explain, to “hold space” for someone is to simply sit with them in their pain, without judgment or solutions, and remain present and attentive no matter the outcome.

The Psalms are, in a sense, God’s way of holding space for us. They invite us to rejoice, wrestle, cry, complain, offer thanks, and shout obscenities before our Maker without self-consciousness and without fear.

“Eli, Eli lema sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). It’s a cry straight from Psalm 22, the God to whom these words were first spoken, speaking them back in human form. Three days later, Jesus would rise from the dead, but in that moment, when all hope was lost and the darkness overwhelmed, only poetry would do.

Bree Newsome

but in the case of the mutant creatures of Daniel and Revelation, they represent the evils of oppressive empires.

It is in this sense that much of Scripture qualifies as resistance literature. It defies the empire by subverting the notion that history will be written by the wealthy, powerful, and cruel, insisting instead that the God of the oppressed will have the final word.

throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, sometimes overtly and sometimes with a subtlety that might be missed by the untrained eye. (Remember how the creation narrative of Genesis 1 is meant to stand in contrast to those Babylonian tales of warring gods and goddesses?)

Perhaps the most significant character in any story of resistance is the prophet. Biblically speaking, a prophet isn’t a fortune-teller or soothsayer who predicts the future, but rather a truth-teller who sees things as they really are—past, present, and future—and who challenges their community to both accept that reality and imagine a better one.

Jeremiah, for example, wore an ox yoke around his neck to symbolize Israel’s impending oppression under the Babylonian Empire. Ezekiel memorialized the fall of Jerusalem by building a model of the city and lying down next to it for over a year—390 days on his left side and 40 days on his right side—eating only bread cooked over cow dung at meals. When a group of teenage boys taunted the prophet Elisha’s baldness, God sent two female bears to maul them to death. (My youth pastor liked to tease his students with that story when we commented on his receding hairline.) When Jonah tried to avoid God’s call to preach in the dangerous Assyrian city of Nineveh, God sent a giant fish to swallow the prophet up for three days before spitting him out on the closest shoreline. Hosea married a prostitute to make a point. John the Baptist famously took to the wilderness, subsisting on locusts and honey and urging the people to

“repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 3:2).

In other words, the prophets are weirdos. More than anyone else in Scripture, they remind us that those odd ducks shouting from the margins of society may see things more clearly than the political and religious leade...

King Ahab called Elijah “you troubler of Israel” for speaking out against injustice and banished the prophet to the wilderness, where Elijah relied on ravens to bring him bread (1 Kings 18:17). Queen

The prophets directed their most stinging critiques at the leaders of their own community.

“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).

Jeremiah’s particular skill at lament often lends him the moniker “prophet of doom,”

The poet-prophet contrasted this with Yahweh, depicted in Isaiah 46 as a mother carrying the descendants of Jacob in her womb, speaking tenderly to them, as if in a lullaby, “I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you” (v. 4).

The word apocalypse means “unveiling” or “disclosing.”

It might not look like it now, but the Resistance is winning. 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 point of apocalyptic texts is not to

predict the future,” explained biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine in The Meaning of the Bible; “it is to provide comfort in the present. The Bible is not a book of teasers in which God has buried secrets only to be revealed three millennia later.” Rather, she argued, apocalyptic texts “proclaim that a guiding hand controls history, and assure that justice will be done.”

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.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world; and even though roughly the same number of white people use drugs as African Americans, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at six times the rate of whites.

My friend Jonathan Martin, who is a third-generation Pentecostal preacher, described the election of Donald Trump as an apocalyptic event—not in the sense that it brought on the end of the world, but in the sense that it uncovered, or revealed, divides and contours in the American social landscape many of us did not want to face, deep rifts regarding race, religion, nationalism, gender, and fear.

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.

Indeed, the biblical story, which tells how Mordecai and Esther helped saved their

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