I have friends that often say they turn to Scripture for encouragement. And I believe them because there are many passages of the Bible, and even entire books of the Bible that are offered as encouragement to people – people who have had bad days, or even bad years, people who are suffering, people who hate their lot in society. But as I’ve spent more and more time with the text of the Bible, I am more careful to say that the Bible is entirely a book of encouragement. Or that it is what we turn to every time we need encouragement.
Because some parts of the Bible are downright haunting. And I’m not entirely sure what to do with them.
In the Bible, I read the stories of incest, polygamy, and betrayal. I read of a man and a wife who go out on no clearer instructions from God than, “Go to the land that I will show you.” And I read further of how that same man passed his wife around to some of the foreigners he encounters in order to make money off the trip. I read of a man who gets nothing but a mysterious name so that he can disrupt the entire enterprise of political power in Egypt. He leads a bunch of rag tag, whiny slaves to freedom, and follows God’s instructions completely, save for one. And because he struck the rock wrong once, he doesn’t get to enjoy the land of freedom with the rest. I read of how that land of freedom that God promised was not only filled with milk and honey, but many other indigenous tribes that God not only helps to conquer, but orders complete genocide upon. I read stories like the one where a man’s wife is gang raped nearly to death, and without even checking to see if she can be saved, the man cuts her body into pieces to serve as a call to war.
In short, I read a Bible that tells stories about bad things that happen to good people, people who do everything God tells them to and still are left out of the best parts of life’s journey, and people who are constantly doing some pretty violent things in the name of God.
To be honest, the Bible doesn’t always give me encouragement. Sometimes it keeps me up very late at night – wondering. Maybe it’s a bad hermeneutic for Scripture. But maybe it’s something else.
Maybe it’s a reminder that the Bible isn’t always supposed to fit into the box we’re trying to put it in. It tells us that we can’t fit it into any of the traditional values Christianity has been wrapped up in for awhile. It calls us to be braver than pulling out a three-point sermon about being a good person, not lying, and coming to church more often. It says outright that we can’t tame the Bible, so maybe we should stop trying. Maybe the best thing for us to do is just set it free.
People have been trying for awhile, but we constantly get hung up on the historical facts, or truth, or ideas that it’s about God and so it must be perfect. We start a juggling act, where we place some things in the context of ancient history, but we pull some things out as eternal truth. And the problem is when we don’t always agree on what stays and what goes. When we encounter the parts about slaves obeying their masters we say that doesn’t count anymore, but when we encounter the stuff about women in church, or homosexuality we think that must still be true. When we encounter the really ugly, wrathful parts of God, we remind ourselves of the Jesus who helped us end the story happily ever after
But the truth is that there are deeply committed, devout people who wrote the story of God long before Jesus came to be. The things that are said about God in the Bible meant something to someone at sometime. It doesn’t necessarily tell us exactly who God is, but it tells us what God meant to someone in history.
For example one of my favorite images in the Hebrew Bible is from Leviticus 25. It’s about Jubilee and God tells Israel when they go into the Promised Land, every 50 years they are going to celebrate. But it’s not just a party. They’re not supposed to farm, they’ll just live off the land. And if they have taken any property from one another they are going to give it back. And if they have servants, they are to set them free, and everyone is to return to their family. And if anyone has debts, they are to be forgiven. It’s an image so powerful that Isaiah used it in prophecy. And Jesus also repeated it as his mission statements according to Luke’s Gospel.
As radical as it sounds, I don’t think it’s telling me that God is a Communist, but that maybe someone saw the lavish gifts of God as a gift of equality. We’re not supposed to enjoy them at the expense of others, but every now and then we’re supposed to celebrate the gifts – equally.
Because it’s so messy, and imperfect, because it’s filled with haunting stories as well as hopeful and encouraging ones, and because God looks different almost chapter to chapter – I’ve given up on the Bible as a story about God from God’s perspective. Or even a story about God written by human hands that God kept nudging in the right direction.
Instead, I’m looking at it for what it is – a human story. Because when it’s a human story, that makes the messy parts okay. It means that it is the constant retelling of the human experience that has been happening throughout history. When we look at Scripture, we shouldn’t be looking at how the people in the Bible responded to situations according to their contexts and take their answers as our own. Rather we should be looking at a mirror – a mirror that we don’t repeat but that we can learn from.
How many times have we cursed God because things weren’t going the way we thought they would, or because we weren’t getting the answers we wanted? How many times have we held up the tortured bodies of folks and co-opted them for political symbols? How many times have we claimed the name of God for our wars?
With this in mind, the Bible becomes the human story about God. We give the Bible the same amount of credibility as it had when the Scriptures were being composed – an attempt to understand the Divine in light of human experience. Scripture is honest with us and doesn’t hold anything back. It is time we start being honest with Scripture and not hide anything about it. It is time that we live into that story of human experience, learn from the skewed images of God, and the messy human events so that we can tell a better story of God. It is time for us to stop trying to tame Scripture and let it run wild.
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