Scriptorium Daily
It would help if more people with opinions about the Bible, good or bad, had read it.
Secularists reading the Bible are too often like ethnocentric tourists visiting a foreign country. The American tourist who misses great feasts by sticking to McDonalds, because the food of the nation he is visiting is different is foolish. In the same way, the person who avoids or misunderstands the Bible is also missing out.
The Bible isn’t what they are used to reading and they read it badly. They don’t begin with sympathy to see what caused the Bible to become such a great book in the first place, but instead assume that if they don’t get it nobody of intelligence would either.
First, let us state the obvious: the Bible isn’t a simple book; it is at least sixty-six different books collected into a whole. Each discrete book is different, some very different. The skills needed to read Proverbs are very different from those needed to read Revelation. Reading the whole of the Bible well begins with reading each of the books well.
Of course, as in any intentional collection of books there many good questions to ask about what these book have in common. What are the themes in the collection itself?
Good hard work, the best kind of intellectual pleasure, is to be found in understanding Sacred Scriptures, but the kind of education most modern people get, with the tendency to specialize in a field, is not likely a good preparation for reading any old books. Most educators have had the experience of anti-intellectualism from otherwise bright people who cannot learn from Hamlet, because Shakespeare did not know about the space shuttle.
The first key to reading an old book is figuring out what is trying to give us and not impose on it some other agenda or expectation.
If we demand of a book something it is not giving, then we will miss what is in it as well as creating a stupid misunderstanding in our own minds.
The Bible has to be read for what it is (or rather what each discrete book in it is), not what it is not. The Bible is not a modern novel, it is not modern history, and it is not a science book. That doesn’t mean it does not contain stories, history, and scientific truths just that is not any of those kinds of books.
Second, the Bible can be the most important book in human history without being to my taste. Liking a particular work and recognizing greatness in it are two different things. Titus Andronicus is not my favorite Shakespeare play. I came close to walking out of a particularly bloody rendition at the New Globe in
Unfortunately for me, my line of work requires knowing a bit about Titus so my likes and dislikes are not relevant to whether I will watch the play. I have learned to appreciate what is good about it and even have caught hints of its greatness as a result.
My guess is that most students who turn to most great literature, but especially the Bible don’t like it. It is not what they know best, which is film and the story telling that goes with it. The characters, with a few exceptions like King David, are not well developed and they have a hard time “getting into it.” Like the ship lists in Homer’s Iliad, the Bible contains long passages whose interest is nearly incomprehensible to most moderns. Literary genealogy is not good television and those parts of Scripture, which often lead off a book like Luke can kill any desire to move forward.
It is easy to despise what we don’t like, since it gives an excuse not to bother with hard work. Safe to say then any rant about the Bible, such as a Richard Dawkins extended sneer, however much it may fail do justice to the glories and importance of the Bible will find an audience.
Sadly for such a person the Bible isn’t going away. A billion people base some portion of their life on it and their numbers are growing, not shrinking. Islam is connected to it and that adds hundreds of millions more, but it isn’t just the religious who need to understand Sacred Scripture. Even if the Bible stopped selling today, and it is the best seller year after year, any well educated person should read it carefully.
The Bible has motivated much of the great art, philosophy, and science of the past. If you don’t know the story of the Prodigal Son, then you are going to miss the point of a great many paintings. If you don’t read the words of Jesus in the New Testament, then you will miss a great deal of what Abraham Lincoln had to say.
If you don’t like Star Trek or Joss Whedon, then if you are like most educated people, you safely can ignore it and him. That is just not true of the Bible.
You may never learn to like the Bible as a reader, and perhaps few turn to it for pure amusement, but most readers I know learn to respect it.
Once I had a student frustrated with his failure to learn Spanish who complained that everyone should just learn to speak “real.” When pressed about the nature of this mysterious, though evidently ubiquitous tongue, the student admitted, that “real” was English. He imagined Spanish as a kind of perverse alternative English that some people insisted on speaking despite the obvious fact that everybody he knew spoke English. Sadly, this kind of attitude is not rare. If our social group does something, then it must be “normal” or “reasonable.”
In the same way, it is possible to insulate oneself in a secular media or academic culture and become incapable of understanding who any reasonable person could cherish the Bible. Isn’t that positively medieval? Isn’t the Bible full of errors, wickedness, and stupidity?
Not surprisingly the Bible is not as foolish as some popular critics pretend. It has endured generations of such critics for very good reasons. Even if it is not the very Word of God, as I believe it to be, the Bible is a stunning work of art and literature properly understood. Academics, religious and non-religious, find it worth their entire careers to study a single short book in it. Most of the charges against it are old and there are reasonable responses to them.
If you are a Christian, of course, the same rules apply. The Bible is a book and there are rules about how to read books well. Cheering for the Bible, when one has not carefully read it is as parochial as the American “patriot” all for the Constitution “whatever is in it.”
Christians think the Bible is sacred and holy. That does not mean that we read it in a weird way. It simply means that having read it carefully, men and women became persuaded by its message. Many people on reading the Bible have decided God had a hand in writing it. Thinks God does are different, set apart from the commonplace. That is why believers call the Bible holy.
If God exists, and religious believers know He does based on best reason and experience, then He is radically different and greater than humankind. Anything God does would partake of that quality. Any place God especially touched would be sacred, a God-thing. Christians believe that the Bible is a sacred book.
If God wrote the Bible, then He did so in cooperation with many different human authors. The Bible is not just holy and sacred, but is also human. If it is what it claims to be, then the collection of books called the Bible discloses God to humans as best can be done. It is a Babel-fish from God in the ear of mankind.
How do I know this is true? The Christians believes God will touch the mind of any who reads His book. The Spirit of God will try to communicate with our human spirit. The believer thinks there is a unique experience possible for the reader of the Bible.
One does not have to accept this idea, however, to grasp the essential message and importance of the Bible. The believer reads the Bible like any other book. Since each book in it had a human author, the text can be understood in a fully human way. The message can be examined and subjected to critical scrutiny using human reason.
This human experience of the Bible is open to anybody from atheists to Christians. If there is more to it than that, as I believe, then it begins simply and humanly with something open to all. The Bible’s message can, of course, be rejected by a thoughtful reader, I have known a few such souls, but at least it will have been rejected knowledgably.
As someone who has benefited from ancient literature of all kinds, pagan, Christian, and secular, this much is plain to me:
Charity to text and different times broadens thinking and enriches the reader.
