2 This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
1 Samuel 15
In a review of Brian McLaren’s book ‘A New Kind of Christian’ I found this quote:
“When we let go of [the Bible] as a modern answer book, we get to rediscover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value for us, a kind of universal and cosmic history, a book that tells us who we are and what story we find ourselves in so that we know what to do and how to live.”
The phrase ‘a modern answer book’ really leaped out at me. I have posted before on how troubling I find certain concepts of what the Bible actually is. On that occasion it was the Bible as ‘map book’ analogy. Even worse to my way of thinking is the old chestnut that the Bible is an ‘owners manual’ (like a cosmic Haines guide) or instructions that accompany some infernally complex piece of flat pack furniture. I understand these are analogies and often well-intentioned, but they may be so simplistic as to actually distort the picture.
I said in my last post that the Bible is a very old book. That is only partly true. It is a very old collection of even older writings. It seems likely that the majority of the Old Testament was committed to written form during the Babylonian exile. That is not to say that these writings did not rely on older oral traditions. But we must acknowledge that the scribes were relating to events that were as distant to them as the exploits of King Arthur or Robin Hood are to us.
Dozens if not hundreds of different hands were involved in its authorship of scripture over thousands of years. Contrary to an attitude that sometimes seems to emanate from the church, there is no Christian tradition that the book arrived complete at the end of a lightning bolt, or was dictated by angels to obedient human scribes. The Bible is a result of process.
This is no neat set of holy histories or pithy wisdom texts; it is the mysterious history of the revelation of the Divine to and through broken, messed up human vessels. Scripture has been contested, fought over, edited, cast and re-cast. It is that process that for me makes it alive. Let me be clear: I have a very high view of scripture. I believe it is inspired by the Holy Spirit (which is a no-brainer if you consider what ‘inspired’ means). It’s just that I see no contradiction between something being inspired, but also being messy and difficult and obscure sometimes.
In my last post I wrote about how often anti-theists will attack the content of scripture, pointing to passages like that at the beginning of this post. Sitting in a 21st Century context, reading a modern English translation, they will draw conclusions about a culture that is ancient, alien and entirely opaque to them. And why shouldn’t they? Christians have been doing it for years!
I could easily slip now into my usual rant about lumpen, flat-footed, prosaic ways of reading the Bible, the complete misunderstanding of ‘literalism’ as an academic term… but it will take me away from what I really want to say.
A certain way – I believe the wrong way – of reading scripture could very easily lead you to imagine a god who is angry, misogynistic, vengeful, genocidal; a god who’s sole purpose seems to be to smite those who displease him on legal grounds that seem to offend even our own fallen notions of justice. Many an atheist or agnostic will justifiably ask how one can or would choose to believe in a god like that. My response is that I don’t believe in that god.
As a Christian I believe that the ultimate revelation of God is found in Jesus. We understand the God of the Old Testament by looking at the figure of Christ in the New; if we are to take the doctrine of the Incarnation at all seriously, we can do no other. Now to be sure, this is sometimes a difficult process; the early heretic Marcion advocated a complete split in Christianity from the Jewish Yahweh. Some non-theists are sceptical, seeing this as a kind of retreat from the harsh realities of the Old Testament to a more palatable ‘gentle Jesus’. But this view is built on caricature and a backwards notion of the trajectory of Christian theology. We should not assume that we understand the concept of ‘god’ – even from the writings of the OT – and then see if Jesus fits our preconceptions. We must look at Jesus first and try to understand the OT through that lens.
With that approach, the first caricature that gets discarded is the ‘gentle Jesus’. Instead, we find a radical, revolutionary, deeply challenging figure. Significantly, one of the central thrusts of Jesus’ career was his attack on the forces of organised religion: on those that claimed they spoke for God or held some kind of divine monopoly.
Sometimes it can seem like we view the Bible as a jigsaw puzzle, with each verse as a piece that we must somehow fit in correctly to make the picture. However, if we do this perhaps we fall into the same mistake as the Pharisees: Zealous in their attention to the detail of scripture, but crucially missing the heart.
The New Testament authors played pretty fast and loose with their handling of Old Testament prophecy. Often when we read that something ‘fulfilled’ a prophecy we might do better to note that the Greek word behind this can also carry the sense of ‘filled full’. Jesus Himself interpreted (or reinterpreted) and edited the scriptures. For example, look at Luke 4. He read some things out and pointedly omitted others. He didn’t seem to need to play our game of scriptural Diplomacy. He clearly favoured some texts over others presumably because they were more relevant or more true to his message and agenda. This could seem marginally offensive to us, because as in Brian McLaren’s quote, we want to see the Bible as a modern ‘answers book’: as a grab bag of proof texts and pithy life verses. While that potential exists, we must not lose sight of the fact that there is a narrative, an over-arching story that runs from Genesis to Revelation. And it is to that greater narrative rather than to individual verses that it seems Jesus was most committed. Perhaps we should be too.
