Dear Bible, It’s Not You, It’s Me: Reframing Our Relationship with the Bible

Note: This was originally published in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, Liminal Spaces. To get future issues delivered to your inbox (and get our ebook for free!), sign up here.

“People are leaving faith these days not because of what they don’t know about the Bible...It’s because of what they do know.” —Marcus Borg

Several years ago, I (Gary Alan) broke up with the Bible. Things started out well enough, but somewhere along my spiritual journey, things went sideways. As a child, it was easy to have an almost magical romance with the Bible. It contained stories of talking snakes, epic floods, and man-eating whales. What’s not to love? The fact that it was perfect, divinely dictated, and downloaded directly from heaven only barely registered on my radar. 

But once I got older and stopped looking at it through rose-colored lenses, the love affair quickly turned troublesome. I became aware that the God of the Old Testament is often depicted as tyrannical, petty, vindictive, jealous, genocidal, and malevolently capricious. I began noticing the horrific passages about rape, abuse, and violence perpetrated against women. In many narratives, women are property and playthings, bought and sold for their sexuality, like in Genesis 19 when Lot protects two male strangers by instead pimping his daughters to the men of Sodom. (Scholar Phyliss Tickle refers to such stories as Texts of Terror in her aptly titled book.) 

And I couldn’t get past the glaring inconsistencies. Why hadn’t I noticed that there are two creation stories that contradict each other and don’t even agree on the chronology of events?! Why was I just now seeing that the Gospel writers seem confused about what happened at the resurrection of Jesus? Did the women really flee the tomb in fear and not tell anyone, as the original version in Mark states, or did they run with joy and share the good news with the eleven, as Luke records? How had I missed all this?!

P.S. To hear more about this way of approaching the Bible, check out our podcast episode featuring Dr. Pete Enns!

But recently, thanks to the wisdom of many thinkers and scholars, I’ve begun to see that the unhealthy, codependent relationship I had with the Bible was the result of asking it to do things and be something it was never designed for. It turns out the problem wasn’t the text, just the lens through which I had been taught to view it. The pressure we modern Christians have placed on the Bible to be perfect, offer total representation of God, and be universally applicable on all matters for all time is just unfair. The Bible isn’t an encyclopedia or a rulebook (nor did it claim to be), it’s a story—two stories, actually: the story of ancient Israel’s understanding of God and the early Church’s understanding of Jesus. “The Bible is what you get when God lets [God’s] children write God’s story,” as biblical scholar Dr. Pete Enns puts it.

So the problem in the relationship wasn’t the Bible, it was me and my expectations.

In light of all this, I’m now considering reconciliation, but first I need to redefine the relationship. For starters, I have to be okay with the Bible being what it is—an ancient, ambiguous, and diverse book of wisdom that helps us comprehend God—and with it not being what it’s not—a one-stop shop for all the answers in the world. I also need to allow it to change its mind from time to time, or at least recognize when growth and change are developing within the text. And instead of relying on it to do all the thinking for me, I need to muster the courage to enter into dialogue and even disagree with it when my gut tells me something is off. I really do want a healthy relationship with the Bible, but to do so will require me to change, not it. I must accept that the Bible is a diverse, often confusing, and sometimes exasperating collection of literature that points us to the infallible Word of God, and His name is Jesus. 

FIRST BIRTHDAY GIVEAWAY!

A year ago, we hit send on the first issue of this humble little e-newsletter, not knowing if a single soul would read it, let alone resonate with it and find it helpful. But here we are, 26 issues and a bunch of new friends later (shout out to anyone who’s been with us since the beginning!), so we’re celebrating by giving away some of the books we love to THREE lucky winners! Check out this Instagram post for all the deets on the prizes and how to enter. Entries close Monday, May 31 at 11:59 pm MDT.

What We’re Reading, Listening To, Watching

Melanie

• Listening to: “Wicked Pastor of the Midwest Part 1: Flying Monkeys” (Uncertain podcast)

• Watching: The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)

Gary Alan

• Reading: How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind by Pema Chodron

• Watching: The NBA Playoffs