Common to Christianity worldwide is the belief that the Bible represents the values, perspectives, desires, expectations, history, and moral precepts of God himself.
To the vast, vast majority of non-Christians worldwide, that’s hogwash, but if that’s you, please keep it to yourself; us believers get really grumpy when folk trash the Bible. It’s OUR book, for crying out loud, and we can’t understand why non-Christians refuse to embrace it. Never mind that it’s been used throughout history as a call to war, or that it tells an occasional story of God commanding his people to perpetrate atrocities, or that it just can’t seem to jive with contemporary life.
Up until my early thirties, I saw the bible as a weird collection of writings that had something to do with God and church. I then stepped onto planet Evangelical and got more bible than I could ever want, ultimately enrolling in a 4-year master’s-level study that focused heavily on even more bible-related things.
Today, I have a view of the bible influenced by academia, friendships with people on both ends of the faith spectrum, and now, a two-year COVID-induced break from church. To the idea that the bible is the “word of God,” I have some thoughts.
You’ve likely heard that “Constantine collated the New Testament,” i.e., the books of the bible were written hundreds of years after the time of Jesus, then curated by people of immense power and a nefarious political agenda. I also hear a lot about our modern bibles being copies of copies of copies; it can’t possibly represent what was originally written.
There’s certainly some evidence to support these perspectives, otherwise you wouldn’t have PhD-level folk writing so much about them. But the associated historical/archaeological data (there’s a lot, go figure) paints a much more complicated picture, one that’s embraced by an equally impressive number of PhD-level folk who tell a much different story.
I know this will make you sad, but I’m not going to nerd out on all of that. If you want to study the origins of the bible more deeply, I’d ask that you consider both sides of the story – all the data, like we should with any hotly debated issue – not simply the one that reinforces what you already believe.
I do however want to make a couple of important points about the idea that God wrote a book.
First, why a book? Can’t God simply come down and tell us what he wants us to do/believe? Christians say that’s exactly what he did, but instead of thundering his commands from heaven with lightning and chaos, he took the form of a human loser and gathered a large following of other human losers, some of whom recorded his odyssey for future generations.
A book is important because it is dismissible. I have the freedom to say yes or no to it, and the God of the bible seems to respect human freedom, even to our peril. An easy-to-dismiss collection of almighty precepts seems right up his alley. If he instead showed up as a towering monster who squashes anyone who gets in his way, we would be forced to believe, and I don’t think love works that way.
I’m OK with the idea that God decided to communicate via the writings of humans, hard as that is to believe.
What’s much more difficult are the parts of the bible that don’t square with my idea of justice. Again, there are stories in the Old Testament especially that should turn your stomach.
Consider the story of Jericho for example: the Israelites, now free of their Egyptian captivity, are commanded to attack, and promised a great victory. As such this story is frequently used as an example of how God loves his people, how we can trust him, etc.
I think it’s an awful story, for both sides involved. The horror of that day is not something that we should turn into a sweet Sunday morning church tune.
When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.
Only a sick individual could walk away from that day, covered in blood, screams of children still ringing in their ears, thinking, “Yay! We won!!” At the least, their thoughts about God would be different than before the walls of Jericho fell.
If we were given some kind of rationale this might make more sense. If we could, for example, go far into the future and see that Jericho blossoms into something akin to Nazi Germany, that might help a little; I could understand this story the way I understand the many times that us mortals have gone to war. But we’re given nothing. The multiple human rights violations of Jericho seem pointless, and in their pointlessness, unjust.
But it doesn’t stop there. The bible has a few moral precepts that seem over the top to me. If the bible is the word of God, and God is love, why is he so hard on things like human sexuality, for example? Christians throughout history have waged war on this front (while completely ignoring so many others), beating people over the head, refusing to bake cakes, completely alienating themselves from the non-churchy world, etc., etc.
But if God is against something, shouldn’t we be? If the bible is the word of God, and it calls something an “abomination,” shouldn’t we go to war against it? So many Christians over so many hundreds of years would say yes. While I understand this sentiment, and have a waning compassion for it, I don’t agree that the bible is a declaration of war.
But, as a bible-believing Christian, I have to square with these things that don’t line up with my understanding of reality. Following are the basics of how I’ve managed that over the years.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that God, via humans, penned the Old and New Testaments and made sure that it was preserved throughout the centuries. There would be one thing about these books that nobody should argue.
ken [ ken ] noun
knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: “an idea beyond one’s ken.”
If God exists, and he’s capable of creating a universe, his ken would be more extensive than ours, i.e., his ability to understand things, grasp concepts, and operate in the best interests of humanity would forever outstrip ours.
That’s insulting to a planet of people who’ve gotten a bit too impressed with discovery and accomplishment. The idea that there are things too far removed from our ability to understand is anathema to us, as is the idea that our ignorance far outstrips our knowledge.
But us, trying to understand the entirety of the cosmos, is not unlike a four-year-old trying to learn how to drive a car. He doesn’t have the reach, there are things he simply can’t understand. Mom and Dad could sit with him all day long and try to explain but it’s not going to happen.
And if Mom and Dad wrote an over-simplified version of how our world works, there would be some things he’d agree with and others he wouldn’t. Parts of this document would seem patently unjust. If you’ve tried to raise kids, you know the difference between your ken and theirs, and how they react when you tell them to do something that isn’t “fair.”
If God wrote a book, it would, at times, seem unjust to me. It would contain moral precepts that seem little more than prudish overreach. There would be some things that make sense to be sure, and others that simply wouldn’t add up. To that, St. Paul commented:
…the foolishness of God is wiser than humanity’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than humanity’s strength.
If God wrote a book, it would also have to be unique for me to buy in. Why not embrace the book of Mormon, or Quran, or dig up some old clay tablets from ancient Ugarit? What’s the difference? These religions reference holy books that rival the bible’s nonsense, so why pick the bible?
I’m not going to exalt its content over that of other holy books. I will however point out that the bible’s version of anthropology, soteriology, and atonement (equally emphasized in other holy books) has no rival in religious thought. Nerdy words, I know, but if you believe the bible on these three issues alone, you can’t judge others, you can’t exalt someone for their religious heroics, or exalt yourself over someone else. You’re forced to accept your own glory along with everyone else’s. And if you can’t forgive, unconditionally, you are no Christian.
The highest values in the bible are peace, mercy, justice; things that would turn this world on its head if the bible-believing people – just the bible-believing people – truly believed.
Either way, a God who has very strict rules but finds a way to unconditionally accept a humanity that is too week to follow them won’t be found in any other book.
It is, at its core, alien.
When I read a Jericho-ish story, or consider the bible’s prudish precepts, I’m forced to live in the tension between feeling like these are wrong and embracing a God who doesn’t think like I do. When I encounter these, I’m not going to develop a theology that places them at the center. There are too many other passages that are clear, easy to understand, and directly applicable to the human predicament.
And because of the bible’s alien call to unconditionally love my fellow humans, you won’t find me using it to justify some kind of war against people who don’t believe like I do.
But if I follow Jesus’ example, I might find myself at war with the people who do think like I do.
For bible-believers who uses our holy book to justify the sins within the church while condemning those without, I’ll continue my constant annoying reminder that the bible calls us to something much more difficult, and far less convenient.
