Part 1: There’s Something More Going On Here
There’s actually a progression of violence in the early chapters of Genesis, a progression that starts with a man named Cain killing his brother Abel, and then it continues to escalate as all of humanity spirals downward into greater and greater conflict and destruction. By the end of chapter 11—the chapter before we meet Abraham—people are setting up empires to oppress the masses, entire systems perpetuating injustice. How much worse can it get? That’s the question hanging in the air when the storyteller introduces us to this man Abraham who decides to leave and start something new. He’s leaving his home, but he’s also leaving an entire way of life.
The storyteller wants you the reader to know that Abraham has a destiny to fulfill in which he becomes the father of a new kind of people to usher in a new era for humanity—one based in love, not violence. As Abraham is told in chapter 12, all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. This was a new idea. They won’t conquer other people but bless them?
So when Moses led his people out of Egypt, this wasn’t just the liberation of a specific tribe—it was the answer to a question people have been asking for thousands of years: Are our lives set in stone and unable to change, or can we be set free from whatever it is that enslaves us? But it wasn’t just an answer to a question. This story about Moses and the Exodus was also a warning to anyone who has ever bullied another person, anyone who has ever held their boot on the neck of someone they were dominating, anyone who has ever used their power and strength to dehumanize and exploit the weakness of another: Your days in power are numbered because the deepest forces of the universe are on the side of the oppressed, the underdog, and the powerless.
Why bother with such a strange, old book? Because it’s a book about them, then, that somehow speaks to you and me, here and now, and it can change the way you think and feel about everything.
The Bible is a library of books, written by forty or so authors over roughly fifteen hundred years on three continents. This library is vast and diverse and covers a massive amount of ground. At various moments over the past several thousand years, people made decisions about what books became part of their Bible and what books were left out. People wrote the books that became the Bible and then other people decided that those books would or would not be included in the Bible. These people had meetings and discussions and developed criteria and had more meetings and discussions, and eventually they made decisions. Decisions about what the Bible even is. It’s important to point out that these writers—and the people who decided whether or not to include their writings in the Bible—were real people living in real places at real times. Their purposes in writing, then, were shaped by their times and places and contexts and psyches and personal histories and economies and politics and religion and technology and countless other factors.
The Importance of Altitude
When you read the Bible: You can read a verse and study the individual words. You can reflect on a sentence. You can look for insight in the flow of several verses together. You can study a paragraph or a chapter. Or you can fly higher, looking at the entire book.
This is what I mean by altitude: You can read the Bible at different heights, from the up-close scrutiny of a single word to the ten-thousand-foot-high view of an entire book or the entire library itself. And when you fly up high, you often see things that you missed when you were flying closer to the ground.
And then there’s the book of Exodus. How does it begin? With the Hebrews in slavery in a foreign land, owned by Pharaoh, with their God nowhere to be seen. With God absent. And how does it end? With these slaves freed and living in the wilderness, with a tabernacle in their midst with God dwelling in the tabernacle in the sight of all the Israelites during all their travels. The story begins in darkness but ends in light, begins in slavery but ends in freedom, begins with the absence of God and ends with the presence of God, begins with God out of sight, ends with God in sight.
And while we’re at it, how about the book of Ephesians? The apostle Paul writes a letter to his friends in the city of Ephesus, and for the first three chapters, he doesn’t tell them one thing to do. He simply tells them who they are. He says they’re blessed and adopted and redeemed and forgiven and included and marked and sealed and alive and raised up and on and on he goes, announcing who they are and what God has done for them and how Spirit dwells in their midst. He just keeps telling them who they are and what’s been done for them. And then, in chapter 4, he begins to tell them what it practically looks like for them to live out this new reality in everyday life.
First, he tells them who they are. Then he tells them what to do. Why? Because the Jesus message is first and foremost an announcement of who you are. It’s about your identity, about the new word that has been spoken about you, the love that has always been yours. If you start with instructions and commands, people might be mistaken into thinking that God loves us because of what we do or how religious or moral or good we are. That’s not gospel. Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You’re a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you’re one of them. And if you keep telling people who they are, who their best selves are, if you keep reminding them of their true identity, there’s a good chance they’ll figure out what to do. Once again, you fly higher and you spot that little shift from the end of chapter 3 to the start of chapter 4, and it opens up the whole letter, revealing all sorts of insight.
If the Bible was a movie, the opening scene, involving a tree, and the closing scene, involving a tree, are very, very similar. We live between the trees. That’s why the Bible is not a book about going to heaven. The action is here. The life is here. The point is here. It’s a library of books about the healing and restoring and reconciling and renewing of this world. Our home. The only home we’ve ever had. So when you’re reading the Bible, ask yourself: Is there something I’m missing because I need to fly higher?
When you’re reading it, you’re interacting with things earlier in the story, referencing things that happened in other places in the Bible, customs, cultures, gestures, words, geography—you’re reading it in light of all these other things that are going on around it. And over time, a bit like reading Shakespeare, you start to see some of the same patterns and ideas emerge, and you find yourself getting to whatever is going on here much faster. And then other times, you realize quickly that you’re missing something, and then you know what you’re looking for. Sometimes huge details are left out because the original audience wouldn’t have needed those details.
So when you’re reading the Bible, you’re always asking questions. You’re asking questions about the details of a particular passage, and then you’re asking larger questions about that passage as it relates to everything around it. What comes before it? What comes after it? Is there any action or phrase or idea that I’ve seen before? Sometimes the meaning is in the story itself, other times the meaning is found in how the story sits among a number of other stories, and sometimes it’s the larger pattern that is the point.
When you’re reading the Bible and come to a huh? part, assume that part flows out of the previous part. Assume the writer is making a case for something. Trust that this is going somewhere and that the twists and turns are intentional. (Like when the apostle Paul in Romans connects suffering with hope. He’s doing something very insightful there when he shows how hope is something that is created within you—it’s not a fleeting thought or idea, it’s a state of being—that is only shaped when you allow the suffering you’ve been through to work on you and transform you in particular ways.)
If it sounds odd or shocking, it’s probably because the writer is trying to jolt you out of your normal way of thinking. Take the thing you’ve just read, and then place it beside the thing after it. How do they relate? Why did the writer place this idea after that idea? Why are those two odd, unexpected images placed side by side? (Like in 1 Corinthians when Paul keeps contrasting strength and weakness, or in the book of Proverbs when being simple is the opposite of being prudent, or in the Gospels when stories about outcasts and losers are placed beside stories about leaders and rulers.)
Where does the one thing take you, and then why is the next thing after it? Why would the writer place them in that order? And always, always keep in mind: the weirder, the stranger, the more unexpected— it’s probably intentional. That’s what’s so powerful about so much of the Bible. It’s about the disruption that occurs when you’re jarred out of your present mode of thinking and seeing. It’s the moment of upheaval when you realize that the way you’re living or thinking or treating people isn’t working. You’re the one throwing pearls to pigs, and it’s absurd. And you need to stop.
In the rabbinic tradition, they talk about scripture having seventy faces. So when you read it, you keep turning it like a gem, letting the light refract through the various faces in new and unexpected ways.
I’ve heard people say that they read it literally. As if that’s the best way to understand the Bible. It’s not. We read it literately. We read it according to the kind of literature that it is. That’s how you honor it. That’s how you respect it. That’s how you learn from it. That’s how you enjoy it. If it’s a poem, then you read it as a poem. If it’s a letter, then you read it as a letter. If it’s a story but some of the details seem exaggerated or extreme— like when Samson kills exactly one thousand Philistines or Balaam’s donkey starts talking to him or Elijah is taken up into heaven before their very eyes— there’s a good chance the writer is making a larger point and you shouldn’t get too hung up on those details. You read it, and you ask questions of it, and you study and analyze and reflect and smile and argue and speculate and discuss.
Part 2: The Nature of That Something
When you read the Bible, embrace the weird parts. Animals wearing sackcloth is odd. Take note of the strange parts because they’re usually there for a reason.
If we reject all inexplicable elements of all stories because we have made up our mind ahead of time that such things simply aren’t possible, we run the risk of shrinking the world down to what we can comprehend. And what fun is that?
It’s possible in defending the literal “facts” of the story to be missing the point of the story that can actually change your heart and in the process can be turning people off from engaging the Bible. You can argue endlessly about fish, thinking you’re defending the truth or pointing out the ridiculous outmoded nature of the man-in-fish miracle, only to discover that everybody in the discussion has conveniently found a way to avoid the very real, personal, convicting questions that story raises about what really lurks deep in our hearts.
Floods, fish, and a son. Those are three of the most famous stories in the Bible. And they’re often the stories that people point to when they’re insisting that the Bible is a primitive book deeply out of touch with the modern world. A flood in which God orders the destruction of everybody on earth but one family? A man being swallowed by a fish and living to tell about it? A God who commands someone to kill his kid? Crazy. Barbaric. Destructive. Fairy tales. Outdated. The list goes on.
But then we read them, keeping in mind what the world was like at that time. And what we saw was that in each of those stories, there was something new happening. Something better. Something pulling people forward. An understanding of God not based on destruction but relationship. Forgiving your enemies so that you wouldn’t keep the violence in circulation. A divine being who wants to bless. And show favor. A divine being who provides. These ideas were all leaps forward for that day. Progress. Enlightenment. Hope. The raising of consciousness.
When you read the Bible, then, you read it as an unfolding story. You don’t edit out the earlier bits or pretend like they’re not there; they reflect how people understood things in that time in that place. You read the stories in light of where they’re headed. The earlier bits reflect how people understood things at that point in history, but the stories keep going. The Bible comes out of actual human history, reflecting the funky, flawed, frustrating world these stories came out of. And right there in the midst of those stories, you often see growth and maturing and expanding perspectives.
What you find in the Bible are stories accurately reflecting the dominant consciousness of the day, and yet right in among and sometimes even within those very same violent stories, you find radically new ideas about freedom, equality, justice, compassion, and love. New ideas sit side by side with old ideas. Vicious violence is right there next to new understandings of peace and justice. (Kind of like now.)
You’ll often see this in criticisms of the Bible. People quote a verse from one place and refer to a story from another and then mention a passage from earlier or an idea from later as evidence of how primitive or contradictory it is. You have to read it differently. You have to ask where you are in the story. You have to read it not as a flat line, in which you can pick and choose, but as a reflection of how people saw things at different places in the story.
For many in our world, the Bible ends the discussion. Someone stands up and reads from the Bible and then tells the gathered masses what it means and what is right and how it should be interpreted and then the service is over and everybody leaves. But in the first-century world of Jesus, the Torah and the prophets and the wisdom writings were the start of the discussion. You read it, together. And then you interpreted it. You engaged with it. You turned the gem. This wasn’t just an intellectual exercise. This was about life. How do you live? What do you do? How do you act? How do you treat people? How do you conduct yourself? Think whatever you want, let your mind wander, but how you act— that’s what matters.
Abolishing and fulfilling were common ways of speaking about the Torah in Jesus’s day. When people were discussing the Bible and trying to figure out what it looks like to live it out, if someone suggested a terrible or misguided interpretation, they would be told, You have abolished the Torah! Or as we might say, That’s missing the point. Or, You’ve lost the plot. Or, That’s not it. But if you got it, if there was some agreement that yes, that is what it means, that’s what it looks like to live it out, then you’d say, You have fulfilled the Torah! Because that was the goal— to take the words and bring them to life. In your life. That’s the movement in the Bible: from word to flesh.
That’s what we mean by the word incarnation. It’s not ultimately about the words— it’s about the powerful, mysterious thing that happens when the words are acted out in the real world by real people. So when Jesus comes along and says that he’s come to fulfill the Torah, he’s announcing that he’s come to make it speak. To show what it looks like in actual space and time. To put a body on it. To give it legs. This was both familiar— people would have understood abolishing and fulfilling language— and also a bold, radical thing to say.
Try this: Repeat the line All things are yours like a mantra throughout the day. Write it on the wall or on your hand. When you come across something beautiful, something inspiring, something that moves you, something that grabs hold of your heart, say it to yourself. Let it form grooves in your neural pathways. Let it be the song you’re listening to. Let it etch itself on your heart. Let it open up your mind. Let it give you eyes to see what you’d missed until now.
Paul writes because his experience of the resurrected Christ opened him up. It made him bigger and wider and more embracing and full of joy and courageous and filled with wonder and awe. You can see the world this way. You have this choice. You have this option. You have this opportunity. You are invited to this. As you go about your day and you face the usual sorts of annoyances and grievances, pay attention to what it’s doing to you. Remind yourself that all things are yours. Imagine yourself rooted and established in love. When you find yourself engaging with people who come from vastly different backgrounds and perspectives, be the first to celebrate whatever is good and true and beautiful in your midst, regardless of where it comes from or who says it or how it arrived there. All things are yours.
I kept repeating this truth that the Bible was written by humans because when you start there, and you go all the way into the humanity of this library of books, you just may find the divine. And when you do, you will have gotten there honestly.
When people charge in with great insistence that this is God’s word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.
Part 3: Where That Something Takes Us
Jesus talked about a coming time when God would restore and renew and reconcile and redeem and make things right, and he invites us to anticipate that day by doing our part to bring heaven to earth, here, now, today.
The word apocalypse literally means uncovering or unveiling or disclosing. A true apocalypse is about things being revealed for what they actually are. Like in 2 Peter in the New Testament, where Peter writes that the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. The phrase laid bare in the Greek is the word heurisko—it means to find or learn or discover.
When the writers of the Bible wrote about this laying bare, it was with the anticipation of everything being made right, put back in place, restored. It was a hopeful, buoyant, joyous expectation that there is still a better future for the world. And so every time you act in anticipation of that, you’re taking part in the future now. So when Peter writes, You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming, that’s actually an apocalyptic verse. What? Speed its coming? We can affect the future. We can participate in bringing about a new world. Us. Right now. A true apocalypse isn’t something to be feared but something to be celebrated. And entered into. Now.
The writers of the Bible were from a tribe that had been on the receiving end of an untold amount of suffering and hardship at the hands of powerful, dominant nations. And so they write with particular vehemence toward those who abuse their power and take advantage of people weaker than they are. We see this theme emerging again and again in the Bible. What will you do with your power and wealth and might and armies? What kind of world will you create with it? Will you use it to manipulate and overpower others to build your empire even bigger, or will you use it to help the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you?
History is usually told by the strong, who, with great flourish, tell you about all of those they conquered and all the brave acts they did. But the Bible is different. The Bible writers relentlessly critique those kinds of stories. Empires always need propaganda to keep expanding. They need a myth, a story, a narrative that justifies their endless hunger for more soldiers, more victory, more wealth and power. And these writers of the Bible know that underneath all that propaganda will be an animating myth that justifies the bombs and drones and violence. And they condemn it, again and again and again. Can you see why Americans often miss some of the central themes of this book? Can you see how citizens of the most powerful global military superpower the world has ever seen might miss some of the themes of a library of books written by people under the rule and domination of the military superpowers of their day?
Part 4: The Questions That Always Come Up
Why Are There All Those Genealogies?
What is the point of all these lists of names? Once again, a great question, one that is answered when you ask, What is the story they’re telling? It’s a story about a tribe, a new kind of tribe, a tribe that would bless all the other tribes. Remember, all of the tribes had their gods and goddesses. That was how things were. And when you traveled to a new place, you would ask about the god of that region because each tribe had their gods and each region had its gods. But this tribe was different. This tribe believed that there was one God who was the source of all life, one God who was good and loved everybody and wanted to bless everybody through their tribe. Living this out was obviously something they had a difficult time doing, but the idea was deep in their bones. So being a part of this tribe was important, and passing on the legacy of the tribe (having kids) was one of the most important ways you honored the tribe.
The story, after all, began with a man named Abraham who had faith, we’re told. Faith that a better world was possible, faith that God was up to something in this battered and broken world, faith that he had a role to play in the new thing God was doing. Who was Abraham again? Oh that’s right—nobody. In the ancient Near East, you recorded genealogies to show how you were the preeminent people, you were the best, you were the first, you were the most important. (Sumerian, Egyptian, etc., genealogies were giant exercises in reminding people of your greatness.) But Abraham—Abraham was a nobody. And those long lists of dudes who begat dudes who begat dudes? Nobodies. Average Joes.
The people who wrote these lists believed that the God of the universe, the singular source of life, was at work within human history through really normal, average people to redeem the whole thing. And so those lists were a way of saying, and he was faithful and his son was the real thing and his son stayed the course and his son did the right thing and his son was faithful...
To the original audience of these stories and the genealogies in them, those lists weren’t boring; they were inspiring. God uses nobodies. And how do you acknowledge the role a nobody played in the redemption of all things? You write down their name. And you remember them. And you thank God for them. And you vow to do your part to carry on the tradition. So you may skip them, and wonder why they’re there, and pick them apart for their accuracy or lack of it, but for the original audience, those long lists—and the longer the better—were signs of hope. Hope that nobody is forgotten, hope that average people living normal lives, not known for being heroes or coming from wealthy families or having royal blood, were all a part of something bigger than themselves.
Why Is Leviticus in the Bible?
Leviticus begins with extensive instructions on how to offer five different sacrifices—the burned offering, the grain offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the guilt offering.
Two notes about the text: First, the book begins with the LORD (this name for God is intimately connected with the God who rescues people from whatever they’re enslaved to) telling Moses to tell the people, When anyone among you brings an offering to the LORD... The word for offering here in the Hebrew language is the word corban, and it means to draw near. Draw near? Let’s get some context. The gods at that time were understood to be distant, detached, demanding, and constantly needing to be appeased. You never knew where you stood with the gods. But this God—you can draw near to this God? You can? That was a new idea.
Which leads to a second observation about the text: One of the offerings is called the peace offering. It’s an offering that you give because you have peace with God. One of the instructions in chapter 7 regarding this peace offering is that the meat that you offered must be eaten on the day it is offered. What’s it called when you eat something? (Not a trick question.) It’s called a meal. You come near to this God, and then you have a meal celebrating the peace that you have with this God. In other words, you can know where you stand with this God.
But what if you suddenly realize that you did something wrong several days ago—how do you make things right? There was an offering for that. What if you did something unintentional that ended up harming someone but you only just now found out about it? There was an offering for that. What if you had a deep sense of anxiety in your conscience from something you felt guilty about? There was an offering for that as well.
But why all the endless details? People believed that the gods could smite you at any moment for an improper gesture or a sacrifice offered carelessly. That’s how people saw the gods. One screwup and you’re done. The details would have had a significant calming effect, reassuring you that you’re doing it correctly and not bringing unnecessary judgment on yourself. And a much deeper level at the heart of Leviticus is the insistence that human action matters. That it is holy. That there is weight and significance to what people do in the world. In a time and place where human life was fragile and fleeting, and people were often victims of great violence, to insist on the dignity and holiness of human action was a revolutionary idea.
Culture was primarily oral at this point. The repetition made it easier to memorize and then hand down to the next generation.
Did Jesus Have to Die?
Death is the engine of life. All around us, all the time. This death-and-life rhythm is built in to the fabric of creation. So when you read the Bible and it tells the story of a death that is somehow the engine of new life in the world, this is not a new story. This is not a new truth. This is how the world has worked for a long, long time. This idea—this truth—did not come out of nowhere. (Obviously, then, it’s not a surprise that stories about death and resurrection have been told in lots of cultures across the ages.)
Which leads us to an observation about the Bible: The writers of the Bible bear witness to how things are. That’s why these stories and images and metaphors and ideas have resonated so deeply with so many people across the ages. Life is mysterious. Suffering does make you feel like your heart has caved in. Humans are capable of astonishingly good and bad acts. People do reflect the divine image. In some traditions that emphasize the importance of the Bible, people can easily pick up the idea that if something is in the Bible, it’s true. But it works the other way around: it’s in the Bible because the Bible writers were witness to truths larger than any book or tribe or religion.
These first Christians interpreted Jesus’s life and death through the lens of the sacrificial system because that was one of their primary lenses for understanding God, life, faith, and the events they had experienced. They believed their God dwelled uniquely in the temple in Jerusalem, the city you went to for offering sacrifices. This was not unusual—throughout the ancient world, temples were understood to be the places where the gods resided, and you went to them to offer tithes and offerings to honor them and keep their favor. God didn’t set up the sacrificial system. People did. The sacrificial system evolved as humans developed rituals and rites to help them deal with their guilt and fear.
God didn’t need the blood of sacrifices. People did. This is why the writer of the book of Hebrews keeps talking about how God doesn’t need the blood of animals. God never did. We did. Offering sacrifices came out of a deep human need to do something about guilt and shame and the haunting sense that you haven’t done enough to keep the gods on your side. It all takes place in an unfolding story. God didn’t need to kill someone to be “happy” with humanity. What kind of God would that be? Awful. Horrific. What the first Christians did was interpret Jesus’s death through the lens of the sacrificial system, trusting that the peace humans had been longing for with God for thousands of years was in fact a reality—and always had been—that could be trusted.
Can you see how they would have understood Jesus as the ultimate, last, complete sacrifice? This is where things get interesting. The story of Jesus dying on the cross as an act of sacrifice is often told and then understood in such a way that it appears primitive and barbaric. And an innocent man being executed is, obviously, extraordinarily primitive and barbaric. But the truth is, the story as we read it is actually a giant leap forward. It’s a story about humanity growing in maturity, leaving behind the idea that the divine needs blood. That’s the giant leap that’s happening in the New Testament. The Bible is a reflection of a growing and expanding human consciousness. If you try to freeze it or isolate a particular section or passage as if it exists independent of the time and place in which it was written, you will end up asking the wrong questions. Which will always lead to frustrating and unfulfilling answers.
What About Sin?
Sin is anything we do to disrupt the peace and harmony God desires for the world. Here’s the problem with how many understand the word: When sin is understood primarily in terms of breaking or violating or disobeying, there’s no larger context to place it in. There’s whatever you did or didn’t do, and then there’s God’s anger or wrath or displeasure with you. But when you place it in the larger context of the good, the peace, the shalom that we all want for the world, then it starts to make way more sense. Of course I’m guilty of disturbing shalom. Is there any sane person who wouldn’t own up to that?
In the Bible, we are not primarily identified as sinners, but as saints. This is important: your primary identity, your true self, is found in who you are in Christ, not in the ways you have disrupted shalom. In the Bible, people are taught first who they are, because the more you know about who you are, the more you’ll know what to do.
In the Bible, there’s only one kind of sin—the kind that God has forgiven in Christ. There’s no other kind. And so we do what we can to make amends with whoever we’ve sinned against, trusting that the only kind of sin there is, is forgiven sin.
In the Bible, sin is the middle word about you. The first word is that you’re created in the image of God, crowned with glory and honor, a child of the divine. That’s who you are. The second word is the honest, unvarnished truth about how we all fall short. We all sin; we all disrupt the shalom that God intends for all things. The third word is the continual insistence that the last word hasn’t been spoken about you and your sin, that all sins have been forgiven in Christ, that we are loved and restored, redeemed, reconciled, and renewed. That’s what the writers return to again and again and again.
Is It the Word of God?
Words have power. There are those moments when someone says exactly what you need to hear—you know there’s more, you know that what you’ve been taught wasn’t the last word on the matter, and you have a sense that you were missing something, and then you hear someone say it. They name it, call it out, describe it, insist it is possible, give it language—whatever it is that they say, it makes your heart leap. Or maybe you were in a bad place. Filled with despair and doubt, wondering if there was any way forward, and someone said something that changed everything. It inspired you, moved you, spurred you to action, gave you hope that there was a way forward. Words can do that. Words... can create new worlds. (Heschel said that.) Words can change everything. So when you open the Bible and start reading the poem on the first page, does it surprise you that the poet describes a God who creates using... words? Words create new realities. And when this God speaks, the poet insists, things happen.
According to the Hebrews, there is a creative life force that surges through all creation, giving it life and sustaining it, from the movement of the planets to the breath of a child. God speaks, and then God continues to speak. As the Psalm writer puts it, God continually works to renew the face of the ground. In the Bible, the whole universe is God’s megaphone. God speaks, God acts, God creates, God sustains—God is the source of the endless energy that pours forth into creation, bringing new life and sustaining everything from trees and rocks to hearts and minds. So the Bible is the word of God? Yes. Lots of things are.
So how would you define the word of God? The creative action of God speaking in and through the world, bringing new creation and new life into being. So what do people mean when they say that this library of books written by people is the word of God? What they’re saying is that they find this library of books to be a reliable record of what the ongoing, unfolding creative work of God looks like in the world. But can’t you experience that through lots of books, lots of other words, lots of other experiences? Of course. That’s something the writers of the Bible say often. It’s as if the writers keep saying, Open your eyes, look around, listen, and pay attention. God is always speaking—the whole thing is a word.
To answer the question, Is the Bible inerrant, or without error? Let’s start with a few questions about Mozart: Did Mozart’s symphonies win? In your estimation, has Mozart prevailed? Do Mozart’s songs take the cake? Are his concertos true? Odd questions, right? They’re odd because that’s not how you think of Mozart’s music. They’re the wrong categories. What you do with Mozart’s music is you listen to it and you experience it and maybe you study it or play it but mostly you enjoy it. That’s the problem with the word inerrant when it comes to the Bible: it’s the wrong category.
The power of the Bible comes not from avoiding what it is but by embracing what it is. To argue for inerrancy is arguing for a different kind of library of books, a library that we don’t have. We weren’t given a science textbook. Or an owner’s manual. Or a hermeneutically sealed document. What we have is a fascinating, messy, unpredictable, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful, other times viscerally repulsive collection of stories and poems and letters and accounts and Gospels that reflect the growing conviction that we matter, that everything is connected, and that human history is headed somewhere.
Which leads me to one last question: If something extraordinary and real and compelling was happening in human history, how else would it have been written down? Or to put it another way: When it comes to the Bible, what were you expecting? Or to put it another way: Where did people get the idea that without error is the highest form of truth? Is the sunset without error? Is the love between you and the person you’re in love with without error? Is the best meal you’ve ever eaten without error? You don’t think about those experiences in those terms because that would rob those experiences of their depth and joy. So when you are trying to talk about those experiences, you need poems and images and pictures and stories—which of course is what we find in the Bible. So is the Bible inerrant? I have a higher view of the Bible than that.
What’s the Best Question to Ask When You’re Reading the Bible?
Why did people find this important to write down? Start there. There are lots of other questions you can ask, and many of them can be very illuminating, but start with this one. Why did people feel the need to write about this?
People wrote these stories down because they found in them something that helped restore their dignity; the stories gave them a sense of identity; they helped give voice to their pain.
What’s the Worst Question to Ask When You’re Reading the Bible?
It’s a question that begins with these three words: Why did God... ? I’m assuming you’ve heard some version of this question—or asked it yourself—something like Why did God tell those people to kill those other people? or Why would God create people if God knew they would screw things up? or Why couldn’t God have just skipped the sacrificial system? or Why did Jesus have to die—couldn’t God have saved the world some other way?
The problem with questions like these is that they have a world of assumptions built into them, assumptions about God and the Bible that will never get you to a satisfying answer. Here’s what I mean: if you were to ask the person asking the question where they got their ideas about this being named God that they have questions about, they would most likely reply, From the Bible. Are you with me here? Do you see why this can be a problem? The person asking questions like these already has a number of assumptions and beliefs and thoughts about God and the Bible that they bring to their reading of the Bible. So while they’re reading it, they’re constantly comparing what they’re reading to what they have already decided about who God is and what God is like.
So when you read that God told them to kill everyone in the village, someone wrote that. That’s how someone understood that event. Don’t drag God into it. The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine. People at that time believed the gods were with them when they went to war and killed everyone in the village. What you’re reading is someone’s perspective that reflects the time and the place they lived in. It’s not God’s perspective— it’s theirs. And when they say it’s God’s perspective, what they’re telling you is their perspective on God’s perspective. Don’t confuse the two.
Beware of sermons in which the point is to prove something about the Bible. The Bible is not an argument. It is a record of human experience. The point is not to prove that it’s the word of God or it’s inspired or it’s whatever the current word is that people are using. The point is to enter into its stories with such intention and vitality that you find what it is that inspired people to write these books.
What’s the Other Best Question to Ask When You’re Reading the Bible?
So the best question, the one you start with when you’re reading the Bible, is, Why did people write this down in the first place? And then the other best question to ask is, Why did this passage endure? Or Why is it still around, thousands of years later? Why did people protect and preserve it? Why have people literally risked their lives to reproduce and distribute this library of books?
And those questions will always lead you to even better questions. Why has this story/passage/verse/account resonated with people for this long? What does this teach us about what it means to be alive, here, in this world, now? And that question will lead you to this one: What is it that was true about this book or story or poem or letter for them at that time that’s also true for us, here and now?
The question is: Why have these poems and prayers endured? Why, thousands of years later, do we still have them? And the answer you’ll return to again and again is: They speak to our human experience. We relate. We know what the writer is talking about. Especially the vicious stuff. The lines where the writer wants God to destroy their enemy. Who hasn’t felt that before? The Psalms show us what healthy spiritual life looks like. You name everything that’s happening inside of you. You give it language and expression. You articulate exactly what the desolation feels like. If you don’t drag it up and give it words, then it’s buried down in your being somewhere. And it will come out in other ways. Unhealthy, destructive ways. You’ll keep it all bottled up. And you’ll be miserable. These prayers and poems in the Psalms have endured because they speak something true about our hearts and minds and hopes and feelings and desires and wounds. That’s the power of the Psalms. That’s the power of the Bible.
And so you keep reading these stories, asking why people wrote them down in the first place and then asking why they’ve endured. What do they say about what it means to be human? What do they teach us about hope and love and pain and loss and forgiveness and betrayal and compassion? How do these stories help us better understand our stories? Often, especially when people come to a particularly strange or gruesome or inexplicable passage, they’ll ask, Why did God say this? The better question is: Why did people find it important to tell this story? Followed by: What was it that moved them to record these words? Followed by: What was happening in the world at that time? And then: What does this passage/story/poem/verse/book tell us about how people understood who they were and who God was at that time? And then: What’s the story that’s unfolding here, and why did these people think it was a story worth telling?
Part 5: Endnotes
Books About the Bible That Will Blow Your Mind
First, I’d recommend starting with two books by Thomas Cahill: The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels and then Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.
One of my favorite writers is Robert Farrar Capon. Start with The Mystery of Christ ... and Why We Don’t Get It. Then go to The Parables of Grace. Chapter 3 of Dallas Willard’s book The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God changed everything for me. Jürgen Moltmann wrote a book called The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. I’m still recovering.