Some Fundamentals: Bible, Part 2

The Bible is an essential piece for approaching and appropriating the world.  It helps form the ways we see God and the world.  It gives us language to speak of God; its stories form an endless well from which to draw identity.  Obviously there are nuances upon nuances that I hadn’t considered at eighteen.  Now it seems obvious, in answer to Mark Simone’s assertion about the Bible as the greatest source for information about Jesus, that people learn as much or perhaps more about Jesus from the tradition of their church as from the Bible.  And that makes sense.  The Bible is part of the tradition of the Church, which has existed longer than the Bible, and whose faithfulness to that collection of archaic writings is all that has preserved it for us today.  It is the tradition of the Church, along with its reverence for the Bible, which shapes Christian faith.  It’s the constant turning to the tales woven in Scripture and Laws and the poetry which then shapes the Church.

            I used to teach an adult Sunday School class called “Stories You Wish Weren’t In The Bible.”  We talked about the Bible as though it were written for adults, not a children’s’ bedtime story book.  We read stories like the near-death of Isaac at the hands of Abraham, the rape (or was it a seduction?) of Dinah, the wholesale slaughter of  Israel’s enemies, and Ananias and Saphira and their money, lies, and deaths.  Those are troubling stories for twenty-first century people to wrestle with.  But there they are.  We dealt with them, and in doing so we came closer to understanding our own assumptions about God, the Bible, and life in general.  It was fruitful and challenging, at least for me.  I think that’s true for some class members, as well. 

One story we read dealt with Tamar, whose husbands kept dying on her.  By tradition, her father-in-law, Judah, from whose name comes the land of Judea and the contemporary Jews in all their diversity, was obligated to give her another son.  Then another and another so she could have children.  After a couple of boys dies, Judah decided that Tamar was cursed or worse.  He refused his obligation.

            Then his own wife died.  After a suitable amount of time, he went off to visit a nearby shrine prostitute.  It happens.  Guys get lonely, they get desperate, they get stupid.  Tamar heard all about it and disguised herself as the prostitute and had sex with Judah.  I guess she kept the veil on and didn’t talk much.  When it was over, the old man found himself financially embarrassed.  “No worries,” said the still veiled naked woman, “just leave me your staff (not that one) and your seal.  We’ll settle up later.”

            A few months later, who turns up pregnant?  The errant man-killer Tamar.  Well, we’ll just have to stone her.  After all, why break tradition now?  Two birds and one stone, so to speak.

            “Well . . .,” says the adulterous witch, “we might want to get the man who planted this seed, right?  I’ve got his stuff right inside.”

            The old man, on seeing his own cane and seal, says, “She is more righteous than I am.” 

To which I reply, “No shit.”

            But a woman in the class says, “But, Judah was a good Christian man, wasn’t he?”  And I can’t tell if she’s being funny or what.  No, Judah was nothing like a Christian, living so long B.C.  And his goodness is surely in question in this tale, at least.  That’s the beauty of the Bible.  There are seldom black and white stories, laws, or descriptions.  It’s as complex as the world it describes and the minds whence it sprang.

            We didn’t even start to explore the clear contradictions in places like the Samuel books or Chronicles and Kings, and especially not in the gospel accounts of Jesus life.  We aren’t talking about paradox here, the only real way to understand complex realities, but simple contradictions in detail.

I actually don’t have any trouble saying that the Bible is the word of God.  How that’s true in probably different for every person.  There are people who use the words inerrant and infallible to talk about the Bible.  In fact, those words have come to mean more to some people than the words of scripture themselves.  They say that in the original manuscripts, the writings were inerrant, without fault, perfectly communicating God’s intentions to us.  They would have no room for redaction, editing.  Those manuscripts, alas, are lost to history and history’s thieves – mildew and decay.  So, for all practical intents, the theory of inerrancy says we no longer have the Word of God available to us.  This from people whose only intention was to maintain some reverence for the Bible. 

Inerrancy and infallibility are descriptions too brittle for the real world, let alone a real God.

Another way of thinking about the Bible as the word of God is to say that as it is spoken, read, or pondered, it becomes the Word all over again.  In a sense God snatches the dusty words from a page or from the air and appropriates them to speak to new hearers.  It is in that way that the Bible never gets old.  It’s like a sponge that has soaked up water and is never dry.  Not because of some inherent property in the words themselves, but because God chooses that arcane collection to communicate to new generations in new ways.

In other words, if I took a copy of the Bible, buried it in the back yard, and forgot about it, it would not be the Word of God, nor would it carry the thoughts of God.  It would be fertilizer in no metaphorical sense at all.  If someone dug it up, and if she could read English, then God could speak to her through the wormy pages.  But only then would it ever come close to being God’s word.

In the struggle for the Bible, by and large the fundamentalists have won and even liberals are pretty sure of it.  Consequently they spend a lot of their time trying to look like they don’t take the Bible all that seriously or explaining it away.

The fundamentalists have even won over the nonbelievers.  Whole forests have been felled to convince the public that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible.  Anyone who can read (including the people who edited and collected the Bible) can see that the entire collection is rife with contradictions.  But believers and unbelievers, fundamentalists and liberals, accept the proposition that if parts of it are less than true, none of it can be true.  Again, too brittle.  We need something flexible, alive, organic.  The truth is, it really doesn’t do much to damage the credibility of the Christian faith to point out the problems with the texts if we remember that the texts are part of the tradition of the Church’s tradition.  They’re part of what helps us understand Jesus.