Struggling with the Bible

Blessing and Damage from the Evangelical Church

Recently a number of us from Rector’s Cupboard / Reflector Project were at an art exhibit and lecture series. One of the speakers, our friend David Goa, had been given as a topic, “The Bible: Fact or Fiction”. As soon as he started his talk, David pointed out that the title was problematic. He said, “Once people started presenting the Bible as fact, it could then be read as fiction.” He argued that what was important, in spiritual texts, was truth and that truth and facts were not always the same thing.

I bring this up, because as we think about aiming for a more hopeful theology, we will come back repeatedly to how the Bible was read, used, and interpreted in our religious traditions. In evangelicalism, the phrase “The Bible says…” was often spoken. It could be used in a positive manner, in order to articulate hopeful truth. It could also be used in a negative manner. It could be used against people as a kind of attack, closure to an argument, or a claim of superiority and authority on the part of the person saying it.

If you grew up in the evangelical church then there may well be things for which you are thankful. There may also be things from which you need to recover. The Bible probably fits into these two categories. Many of us who are familiar with evangelicalism have seen beauty and depth and life and hope within the Bible. However, we have also seen how the Bible can be difficult and troubling, and even more, how it can be used to divide and hurt and hate.

Christian faith remains the hope of my life. I have gratitude for the church and a love for Christian scripture, which I still read pretty much every day. Even as this is true, I find myself saying sometimes that there are people I knew as part of the church, who almost certainly would have been much healthier if they stopped going to church. Church for them became a bubble, a means by which to measure themselves and their family in unhealthy ways. It is also the case, I think, that for some people, it might be better to stop reading the Bible. (Most people in most churches rarely if ever read the Bible, but some still pick up damaging ideas from its abuse.) If the church has become destructive and fear inducing then there might be more hope of finding faith by separating from church for a while. If the Bible has become something that has become associated with division, fear, accusation and condemnation, then the hope of discovering the real life and beauty in scripture might come through taking enough space from it that those negative associations lose their power.

I suppose that this is simply a way of saying, if the church has been used against people, then it is not really the church. If scripture has been used against people, then it is not really the Word.

I am actually making this argument as a believer in both the church and the Bible. I am simply aware that a hostility to life-giving expression often comes from within the church itself. In the evangelical church scripture tended to be interpreted in narrow ways. We have seen the result of this in discussions around LGBTQ rights and identity. We can also see the results of this in establishment of some doctrine and teaching as unquestionable and inspired that is clearly one particular interpretation. Many texts can be interpreted in multiple ways. It is not a bad thing to look for the plain meaning of scripture. It is just a bad thing to assume that your particular interpretation is the one true meaning.

This came to light in a special event that we were pleased to host this week. We run a programme called “Tasting Room Theology” that works to present hopeful theology. Rabbi Dr. Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Professor of Inter-Religious Studies at Vancouver School of Theology (previously Department Head of Philosophy at University of North Carolina, Charlotte) spoke to us about animals in the Bible and specifically about the story of the snake in the garden.

Rabbi Laura’s talk was amazing and through simply telling the story of the woman and the snake and the tree, she skilfully showed how much of our preconceived notions are imposed upon the text, rather than spoken from the text. Concepts such as original sin are taken as a given from the story, but those concepts come from interpretation and from consideration of other texts more than they come from the text itself. Rabbi Laura also showed us how the story itself tells us not to take a literal interpretation. One of the ways in which this happens is the description of light and hours and days existing before the sun was created. This is a literary device that points to how the text should be read, and how it should not be read. Rabbi Laura knows the Hebrew text well of course, but I pictured how many evangelicals I have known would have hastily jumped up to tell her how she was wrong (if they had only been there), or to later tell those present how wrong she was. She mentioned that for some people discovering the precise, sole meaning of God’s revelation in scripture is thought of as the interpretive calling. For others, including many in the Jewish tradition":

“We have interpreted this in the exact opposite way. We say the Bible is God’s speech and God’s speech contains so much more meaning than human speech. Every single thing that God has said to us, this is how we explain it, contains so much meaning that it will take an entire community of people multiple lifetimes to figure out what it is.”

Here is my hope and prayer as I write this. I pray that you will be freed from any hurtful and negative associations you have with the Bible because of how it was used and talked about in your upbringing.

When I told Rabbi Laura about the title, “The Bible: Fact or Fiction?”, she laughed out loud immediately. Maybe there are ways in which the Bible has been made smaller, not more expansive, by how it has been handled in evangelicalism. I am thankful that the evangelical church encouraged me to read scripture. I developed a love of the Bible in the church that has stayed with me to this day. I am also aware that as I became a student of the Bible, one of the things that I learned was that the evangelical church used the Bible in some very particular ways that were not always- to say the least, biblical.