The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  We should congratulate those who see that what they have is less than meets the eye, we should encourage them in their search for meaning and transformation, and those of us in the religion business should pray to God that we are able to help them in their search for the living waters. Perhaps one of the most remarkable phenomena of our age, at the end of what we like to call “modernity,” is this palpable search for the good, for goodness, and for God. Some will call it a revival. I do not, for it suggests that people are looking for that which they once had and lost. I prefer to call it a pilgrimage, whose characteristic is the search for that which has not yet been achieved. This is not a backward, nostalgic, sentimental retreat into the religious certainties of an earlier age. This is not your father’s Chevrolet, as a very effective advertisement for the newest model once put it. Because this movement arises out of the despair and disappointments of our experience of a true secularity, this is truly countercultural, new, and full of adventure; and that others in other times have discovered what these now seek is a sign of encouragement in the pilgrimage.

  An Elusive Book

  The people of whom I have been speaking have a sense that the Bible has something to do with the true good life that they have been searching for. They know it is a holy book, but they don’t quite know why, or how it is so, and that is in part because they have no real sense of what the holy is. That is not because they are an ignorant or insensitive lot, but rather because they have been the products of a spiritless, godless, and remorselessly mundane world in which the notion of a transcendent and ultimate other has been erased from our collective memory. The culture that has shaped and formed the culture in which they live and against which they must now contend has been so arrogantly and aggressively hostile to what cannot be quantified, measured, bought, or sold that it is no wonder that wonder itself has been held hostage to sensation and feeling, but not to meaning or to awe. The reigning ideology of our age, the notion that we are the solitary centers of the universe and that in our splendor we are quite alone, means that we are left with just the consoling conceit that we are the only ones who have ever asked the great questions of life, that we alone have suffered, feared, loved, lost, and sought for something beyond our grasp and control. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dreadful hymn to “Self-Reliance” has persuaded us not only that we are on our own but that we ought to be, and that we are failures if we cannot make it as solitary, self-sufficient voyagers.

  Somehow, despite all this, people sense that there may be something in the Bible for them although they are not certain what it is and how to find it, and are fearful of confessing their ignorance in the matter. The answer is not to give these seekers the full benefit of a thousand, or even of the last twenty-five years, of biblical scholarship. That would be like a thirsty person trying to get a drink of water from an open fire hydrant. Biblical scholarship is important. I have made its importance central both to my preaching and to my teaching, and to this book as well. People do need to know, and deserve to know, what the Bible is and is not, and how it came to be, and what can and cannot be expected of it. No one should be in the position of a devout Catholic layman of whom I recently heard, who, now in late life, said that he was brought up in the pre-Vatican II church which told the laity not to read the Bible, and that all they would need to know about it the priest would tell them. “Now,” he said, “in my old age I would like to read it for myself, but I don’t know how.”

  The Bible has a talismanic quality, with magical, even oracular powers attributed to it. This is why brides are given a Bible bound in white to take down the aisle on their wedding day; this is why oaths in court are sworn on it, and why presidents take their oaths on it as well. Many are the stories of soldiers in war whose lives were saved when a bullet meant for them was stopped by the leather-bound Bible in the breast pocket of their battle dress. “Swear on a stack of Bibles” is the ultimate request for truthfulness, and “It’s in the Bible” is the ultimate clincher to a religious argument among Christians. In our churches the place of honor given to the physical artifact of the Bible would confirm that impression. In Catholic churches one knows that the place of highest honor is the Tabernacle, in which the consecrated elements of the Eucharist are to be found, the very body and blood of Christ. It is to this that the priest and all others make their acts of veneration. In Episcopal churches the faithful make an act of reverence before the cross, both on the altar and when it passes them in procession, but in most Protestant churches it is the Bible that is the object of the devotions of the faithful. In certain churches the open Bible is to be found propped up between two candles on the Communion Table or altar. On Protestant pulpits the Bible is displayed, and in biblically minded churches the preacher makes much of the well-leafed floppy Bible in his left hand, to which he points with his right. Bibles are placed in cornerstones of buildings. The Gideons place them in bedside-table drawers in hotels and motels across the world, and the queen of England is presented with a Bible at her coronation.

  We are supposed to be a people beyond symbols, living in an age when symbols have lost their potency, but as a symbol of what we aspire to and do not know, the Bible remains. The question also remains: What do we do with it? How do we get at it? Surely it is not to be read as we would read a catalog, a textbook, or a novel, is it?

  One of the reasons that fundamentalist and evangelical churches have experienced such profound growth in recent years has to do with the emphasis they place upon the Bible. It is not necessarily the theology of fundamentalism that draws people in, and within the broader evangelical tradition there is a wide diversity of opinion on many matters of faith and practice. What these traditions have in common, and what fundamentalism offers in particular, is the assurance that they know what the Bible says, and are capable of telling the inquirer in such a way as to satisfy every need. For many this is an answer to prayer; they want to know what the Bible is about, and here is a place that will tell you all that you need to know, and then some.

  There are many who have a desire to make use of the Bible, to come to know it, and to discover within it the things that make for the good life they now seek. They do not wish to become either biblical scholars or Christian fundamentalists. They feel awkward with the concept of “using the Bible,” wondering, perhaps, if profane hands can “use” holy things. Yet they worry as well that if they don’t make some effort to explore the deep things of God, which they believe the Bible speaks to, they will be hostage to anybody and everybody who knows more about it than they do. One very intelligent young woman told me that she was driven to consider a more intentional study of the Bible because when she was visited by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, she, a lifelong churchgoer, knew that what her visitors were saying about the Bible was nonsense, but she had no basis on which to argue with them. “They knew more than I did,” she said, “and that made me mad and embarrassed.” I have heard variations of this concern when young Christians try to argue with fundamentalist lay evangelists or street preachers.

  Arguments about scripture generally are unprofitable, and no one has ever been persuaded from his or her position in a biblical argument by the weight of superior scholarship; and so it is not my purpose here to provide tips on how to read the Bible, or strategies on how to best your antagonist in an argument about the Documentary Hypothesis or the Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch. The scholarship is available to be consulted, and it ought to be. Bible “study” should be that, and not just the steadfastly uninformed piety of the reader reflecting on “what this verse means to me.” God has given us a mind, the church has given us the benefit of its teachings, and the best of biblical scholarship has given us unparalleled resources with which to assist our understanding. It is not piety but arrogance that refuses to take advantage of these opportunities for edification.

  Five Questions in Search of an Answer

  My concern now, however, has to do with the relationship between the search for the good life and the Bible’s ability
to help in that search. The needs of the age can be summarized in five question which those in search of the good life are likely to ask, and to which I believe the Bible provides an answer. The questions are these:

  Am I the only one who is confused?

  What can I trust?

  Am I on my own?

  Can I feel good about myself?

  How can I face the future?

  Am I the Only One Who Is Confused?

  Critics of the Bible have often said that its moral authority is compromised by the fact that it is filled with so many less than exemplary characters. No less an exemplary character than Helen Keller said of the Bible, in her autobiography, “There is much to the Bible against which every instinct of my being rebels, so much that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end.” Thomas Paine, writing in his anti-religious tract The Age of Reason, complained of the “obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, and unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled.” What engages the reader of the Bible is the fact that it is filled with people very much like the reader, people who are confused and confusing, who are less than exemplary but who nevertheless participate in a developing encounter with God. If the Bible were just about the successful and the pious it would be little more than a collection of Horatio Alger tales or Barbara Cartland romances. It could aspire at best to the status of Aesop’s Fables or a Norse epic. What makes the Bible interesting and compelling is the company of human beings who through its pages play their parts in the drama of the human and the divine. In the sense that Bible stories tell our story, the human story in relationship to the divine, they are true. They are not true because they are in the Bible; they are in the Bible because they are true to the experience of men and of women.

  Take, for example, the common theme of reluctance to accept responsibility that God wants to confer. None of the prophets took on their assignments willingly or gladly. Moses complained that he was not eloquent enough and that people wouldn’t believe him. Isaiah claimed himself unworthy, “a man of unclean lips.” Samuel was just a little boy. Ezekiel was sent out to preach to dead bones. Jonah refused to go to Nineveh, and yet God took these people and turned them into something for his purpose.

  Esther we know of because hers is the only book in the Bible in which the name of God does not appear, and yet we know she was used of God, and had been “called to the kingdom for such a time as this.” Rahab the Harlot, who saved Joshua’s spies, and Ruth, who gleaned in Boaz’s field and became an ancestress in the genealogy of Jesus, and Sarah, who laughed when she learned that in old age she was to bear a son to Abraham—none of these were heroic in the Greek sense of heroic. They were not even celebrities in the American sense of people being famous for being famous. They were ordinary people for whom God had a use, and the adventure of their stories is their discovery of their use of God’s use of them.

  No one who has ever suffered and wondered about the goodness of God can read the book of Job without a sense of profound recognition. No one can read the Psalms without a sense of the Psalmist’s psychological insight into the depth and breadth of human experience. I once advised a woman about to undergo surgery for cancer to read the Psalms straight through, preferably in the King James Version. I wanted her to read the whole thing in one or two sittings in order to have an immersion experience in the soul of the writer, and I wanted her to read it in an unfamiliar yet evocative translation where there would be rhythmic power and imagery just slightly anachronistic so that she would have to enter into it and not simply be carried along by the familiarity of it all. She did as I suggested, and when I asked her how it went, she replied that she had had no idea that the Psalmist knew who she was, her precise condition, and what she needed and when. “When he rejoiced, so did I,” she said, “and when he howled and cried out, I did too.” She was not alone.

  I hated Lent as a child because the Passion story that gained in momentum as we got nearer and nearer to Easter was all about my impetuous namesake, Peter. Poor Peter, he never got it right. He was always promising more that he could deliver. He walked on water, and then fell in. He promised never to deny Jesus, and then he did, not once but three times. His flaws were mine, his anxieties mine, and then, when I thought about it, his redemption and rehabilitation were also mine, and that was not so bad.

  The apostles of Jesus never seem to understand what is going on, and yet he loves them. They forsake him but he does not forsake them, and each one of their ordinary, shabby lives is transformed after an encounter with the living Jesus. They finally do “get it,” and we rejoice that they do.

  The Bible is filled with the companionship of the confused and seeking, men and women made of the most ordinary stuff who often fail to understand, who make mistakes, whose humanity is transparent, but who encounter the living God and whose lives thereby are changed. When Paul says that he regards no one any longer from a merely human point of view, he means that in Christ the limitations of the human perspective are overcome. People are not taken out of this life, but are given strength and power and purpose to live in it. In Romans 12, Paul invites the members of the Roman church to present their bodies as a living sacrifice to God, and in so doing they are not to be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of their minds. In other words, they are to grow and change and become something and somebody other than what they now are.

  Think of Nicodemus, that wise doctor of Israel, in John’s gospel, who comes to Jesus by night to learn of life. He is very much confused and uncertain, this Nicodemus, when he hears Jesus say, “You must be born again.” So, too, are so many modern-day people confused when they hear that phrase, “born again.” To so many it sounds like a statement of spiritual achievement, a destination at which one has already arrived, and when it is uttered with the spiritual pride with which so many American Christians utter it, as a badge of spiritual and moral superiority, we can understand why people are confused and mightily put off. What “born again” in the gospel means, however, is literally to begin all over again, to be given a second birth, a second chance. The one who is born again doesn’t all of a sudden get turned into a super-Christian. To be born again is to enter afresh into the process of spiritual growth. It is to wipe the slate clean. It is to cancel your old mortgage and start again. In other words, you don’t have to be always what you have now become. Such an offer is too good to be true for many, confusing for most, but for those who seek to be other than what they are now, who want to be more than the mere accumulation and sum total of their experiences, the invitation, “You must be born again,” is an offer you cannot afford to refuse. The Bible is an account of that great company of people who have both sought and found a way. We should take them seriously, for they have much to tell us.

  What Can I Trust?

  The world is longing for something worthy of its trust. So too are most men and women—longing for something to trust in, longing for someone and something worthwhile to give one’s heart and life and love to. We are not too stingy, as the conventional wisdom goes; we are too generous, too trusting, and thus over and over again we give away our hearts and our trust to that which is not worthy of them. This is called idolatry, and because we must worship something we are tempted to worship anything, giving completely to that which can respond only partially, if at all. The sin of idolatry which is denounced in the Ten Commandments is denounced not so much for what the worshiper does not give God, but for what the false gods cannot give the true worshiper: “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt.” The emphasis is where it should be, on the one who performs the action. Because of the action performed, liberation from slavery, the God who accomplishes this deserves and demands priority. A false god, or an idol, is by definition one who neither has nor can deliver the goods.

  Political dictators do not gain the loyalty of their adherents, at least at first, by coercion. Those of us opposed to them
like to think that that is the case, but I suggest that it is not necessarily so. Dictators win the loyalty of their people because people are anxious to have someone and something in which to believe and to whom they can give that loyalty. Dictators rely upon trust first, then upon gratitude, and only after these two, on fear and on terror and the repression that goes with them. Anyone who has watched any of those old newsreels and documentaries on the rise of the Third Reich notices with some chagrin that the German people listened to Hitler and heard him gladly, not because they were coerced into doing so but because they wanted to trust him and they were grateful for what he was able to do first for their spirits and their imagination, and then, by implication, for the state.

  Paul Tillich1 wrote famously of “ultimate concern,” and attracted the attention of a generation deeply eager to find something worthy of its ultimate loyalty and trust. Writing in America’s most popular magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, in the middle of a postwar revival of religious interest that saw so great a boom in the building of new churches that the phenomenon was called “the edifice complex,” Tillich titled his article “The Lost Dimension in Religion,” and argued that despite the apparent institutional success of Christianity, the real dimension had been lost: “If we define religion as the state of being grasped by an infinite concern we must say: Man in our time has lost such an infinite concern. And the resurgence of religion is nothing but a desperate and mostly futile attempt to regain what has been lost.”