How the Bible Actually Works
Page 21
In other words, Paul’s opening about “unnatural” acts isn’t about laying down some unconnected point about the worst sin ever: “Before I begin, let me just say that God absolutely hates queers.” Rather, Paul’s comment is a setup. It creates the rhetorical energy Paul needs to unsettle his fellow Jews: even though they do not condone that behavior, they are in fact no better.
My point is that even though Paul’s words can’t be made to mean anything we like, once we dig in to the cultural context a bit, we see that Paul might mean something other than what we expected.
Whatever else we do, and especially with issues that generate so much conflict, wisdom must be pursued by all and invited to take a prominent place in these discussions—if only so that they may remain discussions and not an exercise in lobbing back and forth “clear” Bible verses as grenades. Using Bible verses to end discussions on difficult and complex issues serves no one and fundamentally misses the dimension of wisdom that is at work anytime we open the Bible anywhere and read it.
And certainly power plays and intimidation have no place. Rather here, precisely because human sexuality is such a divisive issue among Christians, we must be tuned in to the need to seek wisdom together at all costs and with all patience and humility. There is room for pointed debate—but not for verse wars and hatred. Abandoning wisdom is never an option.
Never has been. Never will be.
Chapter 14
Grace and Peace to You
The God of the Here and Now
So what’s my point? You’ve probably been wondering since page 3.
What we’ve seen in chapters 1–13 is a normal part of Christianity, past and present. Christians, just like their Jewish ancestors, have always been reimagining God, adapting the sacred past to discern God’s presence here and now. And we can never simply appeal to the Bible as an unchanging standard, for the Bible itself—Old and New Testaments alike—never sits still. Its authors have already accepted their sacred responsibility to employ wisdom.
As should we—always respectful of the past, but never assuming that we are meant to recreate it and live in it; always tied to this ancient tradition, but without expecting it to do the heavy lifting for us.
The life of faith has always been about respecting this tension and living by wisdom.
Earlier in the book I confessed that I no longer think of God as “up there,” because my experience won’t let me. For me, there is no “up” above a flat earth in a small cosmos topped with a dome. This is where ancient Israelites might have imagined God to be, and they communed with God by those images authentically. But let’s not forget that those very images were part of their ancient Mesopotamian world. Other than to put myself in their place as an intellectual exercise, I cannot believe as they did. I live in a different world.
My view of God has to take into account the reality I live in in order to be authentic here and now. I think of God not as taking up space somewhere far away, but as ever-present Spirit—not one to be discovered “out there” who makes occasional appearances in burning bushes, dreams, or a select few prophets, but as one always present and to whom I need to be awakened daily. Of course, that’s just me, though I am hardly alone in conceiving of God this way. In fact, this understanding of God is already part of the biblical trajectory,* though it also leaves some of it aside.
No part of my faith can steer clear from wisdom questions: “What is God like here and now?” “What do I mean when I say ‘God?’” “What does it mean to believe and trust in this God?” And all those questions have their own flavor depending on who is asking them, when, and where.
I ponder these questions by taking seriously this ancient, ambiguous, and diverse Bible we have as well as honoring my humanity—my experiences, my reasoning, when and where I was born—and I try to get all these factors to talk to each other. That may ring a bell with some of you. I am echoing the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral. We are always processing God and faith not from a high place, but from the vantage point of our inescapable humanity—our reason, experience, tradition, and scripture. (The Episcopal Three-Legged Stool is similar, but it combines reason and experience.)
And in the midst of all that sometimes exhilarating, sometimes anxiety-provoking, but never dull work of wisdom, I have come to believe that this God we speak of, if this God is worthy of the name love, is not surprised or put off by our human limitations, even if some around us are. This God is not shocked when we “don’t get it,” but understands who we are and what we are and is fine with it.
If the incarnation is true—God with us in Jesus of Nazareth—what else could we say? If this core mystery of the Christian faith (which I believe can never be truly articulated) is true, and that the Creator not only took part in the human drama, but suffered in that drama, perhaps we have an understanding and compassionate God, not one out to get us?
Maybe it’s all good.
That’s really my point. As I said near the beginning, this book may be called How the Bible Actually Works, but the deeper topic is how we think about God here and now. Processing that question happens in the arena of wisdom, which, as the Bible shows us, has always been the case—whether we are talking about fools, wealth, or slave laws; whether children are punished or rewarded for their parents’ deeds; whether Manasseh or the Assyrians repented; whether the exile will ever end. All these questions are really about what God is like.
That was the struggle of the ancient Israelites, like the psalmists who pleaded with God to deliver them from their enemies.
That was the struggle of the Judahites in exile as they pondered what kind of God would do this and whether it will ever be over.
That was the struggle of Jews living under the thumb of the Greek and Roman Empires, seeking how to be faithful to the past while living in a world that the past never accounted for.
And that is the struggle of the New Testament writers, as they sought to understand how the new wine of the gospel and the old wineskin of Israel’s ancient tradition can coexist.
The Christian tradition has always been about the business of reimagining God, of following this trajectory laid out for us in scripture.
Drop a pin anywhere on the timeline of Christian history, even the earliest stages, and we will see without fail people of faith adapting the tradition to speak to their here and now.
Christians began writing creeds perhaps as early as the second century, though that practice owed little to the Jewish heritage that bore the Jesus movement and more to Greek and Latin philosophy. And that’s fine. That’s the form the Christian faith took in that time and place. That was the world of ancient credal Christians, and they put the gospel into words in ways that reflected that world.
As if there were another option.
But these creeds are not high moments of the Christian tradition simply to be recited as if that’s the end of it, though they tend to be seen as that. Rather, they are monuments to wisdom that we revisit with profit, but dare not hold up as the nonnegotiable high moment of the tradition. That place is taken by Jesus, the true subject that all creeds are trying to put into words.
The same goes for any other stage of this Christian tradition—including the one any of us might happen to hold dear. The medieval church had a long history of struggling with how to read the Bible for spiritual value and gave us four “methods” for doing so: the Bible can be understood literally, allegorically, morally, or prophetically. So the exodus, for example, isn’t just literally about release from Egyptian bondage. Allegorically it points us to redemption in Christ. Morally it symbolizes personal conversion from sin to grace. Prophetically it points to our leaving the bondage of this world and moving on to the next.
This “Fourfold Method,” as it’s called, didn’t just pop up out of nowhere, but grew over centuries as pilgrims asked how this Bible can help along this journey. I don’t feel I can or should ignore their wisdom, but neither can I long for a time gone by as if it held the secret key. I have
my own context to deal with, as they did theirs. I have my own sacred responsibility.
The broad movement known as the Protestant Reformation wasn’t dropped out of heaven to correct fifteen hundred years of bad Catholic theology (which is what some Protestants think). It was a movement for its time that grew out of all sorts of political, geographical, and ecclesiastical complexities. Good certainly came from it, but to think that sixteenth-century Europe is where God has spoken most clearly and that the church’s task today is to form coalitions to recover the “spirit of the Reformation” is, ironically, not in keeping with the wisdom that the Bible models for us.
Wisdom leads us to dialogues with the past. It doesn’t lead us back to the past.
The Challenge of Wisdom
Christians today, living when and where we are, have no choice but to be intentional in following the Bible and the entire history of Christianity in accepting the sacred responsibility to ask how we can talk about God in a way that is both connected to the tradition and meaningful for today. It is most fair to ask whether at some point we will cross the line from adapting the tradition to obscuring it. But the fact that this concern is valid does not mean we can avoid the wisdom task altogether. The life of faith isn’t that easy.
But I am reminded again of the Bible itself and how its portraits of God are deeply rooted in the cultures of the time. When Yahweh is described as a mighty warrior who slays the enemy, or a sovereign king who makes treaties with his people, or male, or seated in the midst of a divine council of gods, I am reminded that there is no God-talk that can keep its distance from our humanity. All our language of God, including that of the biblical writers, is inescapably enmeshed with how people of any time think and talk about anything—even as they speak of One who is not bound by time and place.
Even the climax of the story for Christians—Jesus—is expressed in the language of the time as it tells a story that transcends time. Jesus is called Lord, Savior, and bringer of the Good News of peace and grace—all of which mimics the language of the Roman Empire to speak of glorious Caesar as a means of pointing beyond Caesar. The Greek word for god, theos, was used to speak of Zeus and the other gods; the New Testament writers use it to speak of their God alone as the true God. Jesus was Messiah, a Jewish royal term charged with political meaning, but redefined around suffering, death, resurrection, and hope for all humanity.
Whatever any of us think about the Bible as God’s inspired word, it should make us take a step back and reflect for a moment that scripture itself portrays the boundless God in culturally bound ways of thinking.
And all that brings me to ask the question that I have been asking over and over again, it seems, throughout this book in one way or another: If that is how the Bible itself actually behaves, who are we to think that the Bible’s purpose is to have us step around our own sacred responsibility to reimagine God rather than warmly embrace it?
If that notion is still a bit unnerving for some, as I can well understand, look on the bright side. We are all already doing that very thing whenever we talk about God—and the biblical writers were already doing that very same thing long before any of us came on the scene.
Whatever fear there might be, grace and peace are also to be found by taking the Bible seriously enough to accept the challenge of wisdom and truly own our faith here and now. That, as I’ve been saying, is our sacred responsibility, and by accepting that responsibility we will learn to let go of the youthful fear of the unfamiliar and move toward wisdom and maturity.
That, I believe, is what God wants for us. After all, God is not a helicopter parent.
Acknowledgments
I’m not an island, though I do hope to own one someday.
I write in community, primarily as a member of a family. No, my wife, Sue, and our three grown offspring, Erich, Lizz, and Sophie, don’t actually do any of my writing. They’re busy people—though I should say that Sue read the page proofs and caught dozens of errors and said, “I think this is your best book.” So there you go. Anyway, my family is always there, and every word I write is as a member of this now growing family and feeds off of this immeasurable blessing, which has been the center of my life, now pushing thirty-five years, and means more to me than writing books.
My sincere debt of thanks goes to my agent, Kathryn Helmers, at Creative Trust, who—as she may recall—I had to pester for a year before she agreed to take me on. And I’m glad she did. Kathy gets what I’m trying to say before I know it myself. And speaking of which, the team at HarperOne is amazing (and fun) to work with. Mickey Maudlin, my editor, has such a knack for seeing what I’m getting at that I’ve begun to wonder whether this was in fact the reason why he was put on this earth. He also has unparalleled skill for finding kind ways of saying, “I have no idea what you’re trying to say here” (me neither) or “Do you even have a book concept?” (you tell me). Assistant editor Anna Paustenbach lent many insightful observations, and always kept things running smoothly in this unwieldy process of writing and editing. Production editor Lisa Zuniga gracefully made sure we stayed on schedule toward the end. Courtney Nobile in publicity and Jenn Jensen and Kalie Caetano in marketing are to be commended for putting their careers and reputations on the line by working with me.
Oh, and the team is even bigger. Thanks to the guys who waterproofed my basement and replaced my sewer line so I wouldn’t have to. Thanks to my student Will Abbott for helping me shingle a roof, and my colleague Eric Flett for helping me replumb my entire house and paint my basement floor. You all helped me salvage some time to finish the book almost on time. Highlights magazine—yes, the children’s magazine—has this great conference center where I spent a week in a cabin (how writer-ish of me) in the hope of getting some clarity on where in heaven’s name this book was going. And it worked. And the great food and (free) wine and beer didn’t hurt either. My former students Michelle Miles and Alyssa Welty graciously agreed to read the final proofs in a timely manner and (though noting “you’re really being sarcastic here”) didn’t utter a single negative word even though this could have been major payback time. And finally, Shay Bocks somehow managed to create a beautiful timeline and maps based on my unreasonable, even incomprehensible, instructions (“No, no, I want it to look like, really good, with like curvy arrows and banners or something, but not too curvy or bannery. And we need it by tomorrow.”), even while surrounded by her three young boys.
Whenever I think, write, and teach on the topic of scripture, I am mindful of those through the years who have enlightened and motivated me to think better thoughts. I am often asked who my favorite scholars or books are, and I am never able to give a straight answer. There have been too many, and what constitutes “favorite” tends to change over time. But I would like to mention two of my doctoral professors, James Kugel and Jon Levenson. Without realizing it, they modeled for this sheltered Protestant what it means to read the Bible closely and on its own terms, rather than seeking from it the comfort of arriving at familiar conclusions. Their influence has shaped much of my thinking and I remain in their debt nearly thirty years later. I hope some portion of what they taught me has been passed on to my unsuspecting students over the years.
All of which is to say, this book has been a team effort. I hope those reading it will find some encouragement in its pages.
Finally, to my wonderful granddaughter, Lilah, to whom this book is dedicated. Not only is she a cutie buns, but she tirelessly looked over several versions of this book and spit up on several of them. I couldn’t have done this without you—though I might have gotten done a bit sooner.
Scripture Index
The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.
Old Testament
* * *
Genesis
1:1–2
7
1
45, 56
2:2
175
3:9
178
6:6
176
6:17
123
6
122, 145
12, 15
98
15:6
224
17
99, 156, 222
18:19
224
22:11
184
Exodus
3:1–6
178
4:19
211
12:3–4, 7, 19, 22
67
12:8–9
67
12:12
140
12:24
67
13:2; 22:29
247
13:13–15
247
20:4–6
91
20:22–23:33
59
21:1–11
66
21:12–14
60
21:23–25
65–66
24:7
59
24:10
176
25–40
226
32
145
40:34
228
Leviticus
11
156, 182, 222
24:14
123
25:39–47
66–67
Numbers
3:12–13
40–46, 247