The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  The preacher, in Ecclesiastes 3:11, informs us, “He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

  Jesus, himself a preacher and teacher of righteousness, declares in Matthew 11:25, “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to babes.”

  Saint Paul, who seems to know everything, tells us in I Corinthians 4:1, that he wishes us to be regarded as “servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God”; and in case there is any doubt, we are told in I Timothy 3:16, “Great, indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.”

  The deep things of God of which the Bible speaks in nearly its every breath are not problems waiting to be solved but a mystery into which we are invited to enter, discover, explore, and indeed to enjoy, forever.

  This is an invitation I believe we are able to hear for the first time in a very long time, and this is an invitation that I believe more and more sincere seekers are prepared to accept, and not just for the duration but forever. The evidence of the spiritual hunger and thirst of this generation is around us and on every hand, and so much of this renewal of interest in the deep things of God, this desire to take the mystery of God seriously just as we wish to be taken seriously by that mystery, comes on the part of people who have either been estranged from or never really engaged with the Christian Church.

  Many of the people I see fall into one of two categories. Obviously, and first, I see undergraduates in college who, rather than falling away from the faith of their fathers and mothers, in college discover faith on their own and for the first time, and often to the mild bewilderment of their secular parents. A cynic might say that if adolescent rebellion thirty years ago was to drop out of church, adolescent rebellion today is to drop in. There is more to it than that, however. This is not simply the smug cyclical theory of American religion that says that what goes down must turn up again. This is not a renewal of 1950s white-bread American Protestantism, picking up where our parents left off. Too much has happened for that to occur.

  No. What we are now experiencing is the end of one world and the birth of another. Now I know how dangerous that sounds with fewer than four years remaining until the millennium and all of the fanciful eschatological predictions that this arbitrary and man-made appointment calendar will induce. The world that is fast coming to a close is a world whose secular assumptions have long proven to be unhelpful and uncredible substitutes for making meaning in a life worth living. The disenchantments of the 1960s were really but the first skirmish in a larger battle against the stifling smugness of a world that had come to believe itself to be the best of all possible worlds. All the social upheavals, the movements for social and political change, the so-called cultural revolutions, and the various struggles for liberation—nearly all of which we can name and envisage whether or not we approve of them—all of these, together with the counterrevolutions of recent years and the attempts to put the cultural genies back into their bottles, have revealed not only a failure of systems generally regarded as unfair, but a profound poverty of spirit, a soulless and spiritual barrenness which godless communism helped conceal; but now that communism has collapsed of its own weight, we are left not to savor our victory but to confront, now thoroughly undistracted, the bleakness of our own interior life and the futility of our terribly threadbare hopes. It is this terrible fear that “there is no there there,” as Gertrude Stein once said, that has driven so many into the mean-spirited politics of nostalgia, and so many others to drugs, drink, and self-indulgence on a scale unprecedented since the collapse of ancient Rome.

  It is this realization, a sober self-assessment of the limits of human achievement and an acute dissatisfaction with the shoddy, the substitute, and the synthetic, with which we believe we are now condemned to live, that is driving so many people, and not just the young, to an examination of what the Bible calls, in Hebrews 12, “the things that cannot be shaken.” Not a few of those who seek such spiritual security now that their social security is threatened are men and women who by the standards of this material world have everything. The churches of America are filling up, but this time not simply with the very young and the very old, but with those whom we might call, for lack of a better term, the deconverted, meaning either those who once had their religious faith and lost it, and seek it again, or those whose faith was in the exchangeable commodities of this world, and who have lost their faith in mammon and are seeking out God. Either way, these are the people with enormous spiritual cravings and an abundance of the experiences of this world, who are now seeking the things that endure. They are not frightened of mystery; they embrace it. Their argument is simple and direct. If there is good news in there, let me have it.

  Who of us dares deny that this is the work of God? Are we so content with the glancing shadows on the walls of our Platonic cave that we prefer them to the possibility of something else, anything else, anyone else? The age has lost its nerve, and whenever a culture loses its nerve and its sense of self-esteem, its sense of self-confidence, legitimate or illegitimate, its natural tendency is to indulge itself in diversion. Cultural clutter, a more polite term than decadence, is a sure sign of the culture’s attack of acute anxiety. Now we are not afraid of nuclear holocaust or environmental chaos; we are afraid that when we get up in the morning and look in the mirror there will be nothing there. It is in this bottoming out of a once self-confident and self-sustaining culture that people have always turned, first after turning on each other, to the deep things of life.

  Theologians are not always very good at reading the signs of the times, largely because they tend to look for guidance into the rearview mirror, and thus always know where they have been, but are neither quite sure where they are or where they are going. Paul Tillich, however, was not one of these. As early as in 1958, in a sermon titled “Behold, I Am Doing a New Thing,” based on Isaiah 43:16, 18–19, he said:

  Our period has decided for a secular world. That was a great and much-needed decision. It threw a church from her throne, a church which had become a power of suppression and superstition. It gave consecration and holiness to our daily life and work. Yet it excluded those deep things for which religion stands: the feeling for the inexhaustible mystery of life, the grip of an ultimate meaning of existence, and the invincible power of an unconditional devotion. These things cannot be excluded. If we try to expel them in their divine images, they reemerge in daemonic images. Now, in the old age of our secular world, we have seen the most horrible manifestation of these daemonic images; we have looked more deeply into the mystery of evil than most generations before us; we have seen the unconditional devotion of millions to a satanic image; we feel our period’s sickness unto death.

  Tillich went on to say, “Nothing is more surprising than the rise of the new within ourselves.”

  That surprising consciousness to which Tillich refers is what I mean by an empowering modesty. For most of us modesty is not something to aim for, and we are one with Winston Churchill when he said that “modesty is for those who need it,” but those moments have past and we stand in enormous need. To know our need is not a concession to weakness; it is the first step in spiritual empowerment, and it is this for which people all over the world, but most especially in this country at this time, are hungering and thirsting. It is as true for those who think that they know it all as it is for those who know that they don’t, and who doubt that they know anything at all. This spiritual hunger, this deep poverty of soul, exists in all segments and at every level of the population.

  The hope of the Good Book, the conviction of those who have sought to understand it with mind and heart, is that it will help us in the good life, the life that brings us nearer to God and
to one another. Such a hope animates us and, indeed, encourages us to use our minds and trust our hearts. In the English Coronation Service, the Sovereign is presented with a Bible in these words:

  We present you with this book, the most valuable thing this world affords. Here is wisdom. This is the Royal law. These are the lively oracles of God.

  These lively oracles of God are a living word, from a living God for a needy people. It is indeed the Good Book.

  Afterword

  THIS book began with the concerned conviction that to many people the Bible is a confusing and difficult book with which they have only a passing acquaintance. I could not really address those for whom the Bible is of no interest; I could not really think of how to persuade those who had written off the Bible to reconsider it. My ambition was a bit more limited or, as I should prefer to say, more focused, for I am convinced that there are many people, the children of modernity, as it were, who are anxious about what they do not know of the Bible, eager to find a way of introducing or reintroducing themselves to it, and trying to reconcile what they know of the Bible with what they know of themselves and of the world. So, in the first case I wanted to address what B. Davie Napier once called the “unbelieving believers,” those whose nominal hold on the Christian faith and its chief book, the Bible, leaves them keenly aware that they do not know enough and want to know more.

  In the second case I wanted to address those who want to take the Bible seriously but who feel, or have been made to feel, that the Bible belongs to somebody else, to people more expert, more holy, more central to God’s plan than they themselves could possibly be. I wanted those who saw themselves as strangers and outcasts to the Bible—the marginalized and the excluded—to see that the Bible itself included them and was for them, and that the record of its reading and interpretation was an ongoing invitation to come in. For such as these were the biblical words written: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Thus, I wanted black people, women, and homosexuals, among others, to see and to hear that the Bible was both for them and with them. I wanted them to know that the Bible was theirs by right and intention, and not merely mediated to them by others or wrested from others by social guilt or clever scholarship. I wanted them all to know and to share in the full wealth of conviction.

  My third ambition was to encourage those to think again, who think that they know all they need to know about the Bible and what it says and means. This is an invitation not to guilt, although there is much about which to feel guilty, but rather to modesty, one of the more neglected of Christian virtues. One must not use the scriptures as the drunk uses the lamppost—for support rather than for illumination; rather, one reads those inspired words with the very fallible apparatus of fallen human beings. The discussions of anti-Semitism, slavery, women, and homosexuality are not meant to condemn scripture as culturally wrong, or to impugn the faithful ambitions of sincere Christians who may hold differing opinions on these critical matters. These discussions are intended to remind the faithful of the wickedness done in the name of good, of God, and of the Bible, and to make us more cautious and self-conscious of the besetting sin, alas, endemic to the faithful, of confusing our cultural prejudices with the immutable will of God, and of using the Bible as a footnote to our convictions. Orthodoxy must never be permitted to become the protective coloration for the self-interests of the status quo; the entire record of scripture cries out against this utterly sinful abuse.

  By this discussion of the hard texts, and the painful circumstances that invariably attend them, I wish also to demonstrate the dynamics of interpretation and culture. The texts, as we know, have not changed. We do know more about them, and by virtue of the discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the library of Nag Hammadi, we have more of them; but the canon is the same as that formed and confirmed by the primitive church in the second century. It is tempting to say that the world has changed but the text has not; the slogan so often offered to close debate is that “God’s word is changeless,” and that change is simply a matter of interpretation. That is a silly argument, substituting a misplaced piety for the hard work of destabilizing thought. “Thy true and lively word,” of which the Eucharistic Prayer speaks, suggests that scripture itself, and not merely culture and interpretation, is dynamic and living. In Hebrews 4:12, written in the formative period of the faith, the word of God is described as “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” That “word,” of course, does not refer simply to the text of scripture, for “scripture” then would not have meant the New Testament as we know it. That word is the whole disclosure of God, apprehended by the aid of the Holy Sprit, witnessed to by prophets, apostles, and martyrs, made manifest in Jesus Christ, and mediated to the faithful in all ages by the sacraments, and by tradition, reason, and experience. Such a process is hardly static, fixed, unchanging, and it is into that living, lively, dynamic word of God that I invite all of those who hunger and thirst after it.

  All of this takes work and effort. I wish therefore to expose lazy Christians, and their even lazier reading and study of the Bible, to their spiritual obligation to use their minds. The Proverbs tell us that “he also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster (18:9), and in Philippians, the apostle tells his followers to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12). Lest I be accused of proof-texting, however, by those better at that vice than I, let me remind us all of Jesus’ own great summary of the law in Mark 12:30, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This means that for the Christian the study of the Bible can be neither a hobby nor a mere act of devotion, and that what passes for Bible study among so many of us is nothing less than a scandal. If we are to do more than “overhear the gospel,” in Fred Craddock’s memorable phrase, we must read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest both what the Bible has to say and how we may understand what the Bible means. This means that we cannot afford to leave textual, historical, and theological study to the experts but must take the time, trouble, and imagination to learn not only what the Bible says, but what the best minds of the church say and have said about it. Anything less than this on the part of a Christian who professes to take the Bible seriously, is a dereliction of duty.

  Some will say that the great ignorance of the Bible began when the Supreme Court forbade the reading of it in the public schools, and they think to improve upon this ignorance by insisting that such readings be reinstated. That is an evasion of the point. It is not for the state, however sympathetic we may want it to be to the interests of religion, to authorize readings of the Bible; it is the clear and unambiguous responsibility of Christians to make the Bible known to themselves and to their own. If we are ignorant of the Bible it is because we Christians have neglected its study for ourselves and for those committed to our care, and that is a responsibility that we must now embrace, or fail to do so at our peril.

  This task may be more easily stated, and even more easily accepted, than accomplished. The field of biblical scholarship is enormous, complex, and intimidating, and we have long lived in a culture that celebrates simplemindedness, fears complexity, and has a very short attention span. What has long impressed me about fundamentalism is its high-impact diligence in the study of the scriptures. Contrary to the image of raving anti-intellectualism that still pervades much of evangelical Protestantism, it is largely the churches of this tradition of fundamentalism that have kept the study of Greek and Hebrew alive. Their churches are not just one-stop-one-hour Sunday filling stations, but are busy and filled all week long with intensive lay study of the Bible because they know that their lives depend upon it; and theirs is a model from which the whole church could benefit. Today the average Christian has available, at
the nearest bookstore or public library, resources in biblical scholarship which would dwarf those available to Augustine, Calvin, or Luther.

  Finally, and above all, I wish my readers to know that the Bible is more than syntax, doctrine, and interpretation, and that it is one of the most available and extraordinary means by which humans are brought into proximity with the divine. Saint John tells us that the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” In the Bible we come to experience the fact that the flesh also becomes word, and that it too dwells among us, full of grace and truth. (John 1:4) The Bible is not only the account of those who have come to know something of the transcendent love and power of the living God through the experience of human suffering and joy, and for whom this ultimate reality is also the ultimate mystery; the Bible also assures us that their experience of these things may in some measure be ours as well. As God not only “spake” but “speaks,” so we too may hear that message that makes sense and meaning of our lives. Who of us does not want this? Who needs it? We do. This is why Charles Wesley says in his hymn “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing”…