When I was a little girl, I knew I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up, except a pastor. According to my Sunday school teacher, the Bible says that only boys can grow up to lead churches. I didn’t find this particularly disappointing at the time, as I planned to be either an author or a cowgirl when I grew up, and the Bible doesn’t have anything to say about that. But the whole thing bothered me a little bit because it made me feel like God had reserved all of the important, spiritual jobs for the boys, like he thought that girls are second best.
Once when I saw a lady preacher on TV, I asked my dad if he thought she would go to hell. He said he didn’t think so, so I asked him if he agreed with my Sunday school teacher that only boys could grow up to be pastors. “Well, I think that’s what the Bible teaches,” he said. “But some people disagree with me on that.” The lady on TV wore a fuchsia suit, white stockings, and black heels. She had a short haircut and a throaty Southern accent. For some reason, she upset me. I felt as though she had disturbed my paradigm somehow.
I quickly learned that to grow up as a strong-willed woman in the conservative evangelical community is to never quite understand your place in the world. It means sorting through a barrage of mixed messages from both male and female authority figures regarding your proper role in society, the church, the home, even the bedroom, each message punctuated by the claim that it is God’s will that you do this or that. I’m not sure when I first encountered the concept of “biblical woman-hood,” but I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out what that means, wanting desperately to be the kind of woman God wants me to be.
The hermeneutical mazes can be dizzying. Women cannot be pastors, I learned, because in a letter to Timothy, the apostle Paul said he did not allow women to teach or exercise authority over men (1 Tim. 2:12). These instructions apply to all women at all times and in all cultures. However, the apostle’s admonition just two sentences before, that women should not braid their hair or wear expensive clothes (1 Tim. 2:9), no longer applies literally but is culturally constrained. In fact, it was good if I looked especially nice at church, just not so nice that I made my brothers in Christ stumble. I learned that while Paul encouraged mutual submission in his letters to early churches, women are the only ones specifically defined by this role and should therefore defer to their husbands when it comes to decision making in the home. Churches that encouraged women to pursue traditional gender roles in compliance with 1 Timothy 2 were “Bible-believing” churches, but those that required women to cover their heads in compliance with 1 Corinthians 11 were “legalistic.” I learned that I should try to model myself after the virtuous woman described in Proverbs 31, who rose before dawn and worked until dark managing the home. (She also had servants, a fact that usually went unmentioned.) God prefers women in supporting roles as helpers, I learned. Biblical women such as Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, and Phoebe — who served as prophets, teachers, judges, and leaders — were counted as anomalies and largely ignored. No one talked much about Mary for fear of coming across as too Catholic.
I was always disconcerted by the inconsistencies in biblical interpretation and confused about what all of this meant for me. When boys didn’t volunteer for leadership positions in my youth group, I took them on myself, to the warm praise of members of my congregation. Once when I spoke in church about the AIDS crisis (violating 1 Cor. 14:34, which states that women should remain silent in the churches), I received only the kindest of compliments and encouragement. A friend of mine once told me, “You’d be a great preacher if you were a guy.” So I always found myself pushing the boundaries a little bit — leading Bible studies among both male and female peers, running for student government positions in college, writing and speaking on biblical topics, and pursuing a career before starting a family. People rarely complained. In fact, my leadership qualities were often affirmed and celebrated, and for that I was incredibly thankful, though a little perplexed.
The whole concept of “biblical womanhood” really began to unravel for me at apologetics camp. The goal of the conference was to teach teenagers and young adults to adopt a Christian position on every conceivable issue — science, economics, politics, the role of men and women in society — based solely on the Bible. My job was to guide a group of seventeen-year-old girls through the material at the end of each day, answering any questions they might have.
On the day we discussed gender roles, the speaker explained that the Bible serves as the single authority regarding matters of church, state, and home. Women should therefore take their cues from Scripture, as God’s Word contains everything we need to know about gender identity. Feminism was decried as an abomination and blamed for societal ills such as divorce, consumer debt, and unruly children. At the mention of Hillary Clinton, the room erupted with groans and snickers from the audience. The speaker said that when it comes to dating, the Bible includes some clear guidelines. Among them are waiting until we are financially ready for marriage before pursuing romantic relationships, abstaining from sex until marriage, dating only in the presence of friends and family to avoid tempting situations, deferring to parents on dating decisions, and honoring God-ordained gender roles in preparation for married life. For men, this means assuming the role of leader in the relationship. For women, it means stepping back to allow men to take the lead.
Some of the teenage girls in my group were understandably mystified by such a scheme. Later that night, one of the girls nervously confessed that she had invited a boy to prom, thereby inadvertently usurping his God-ordained leadership role in their relationship. Another, a soft-spoken, pretty red-haired girl with an easy demeanor, buried her head in hands, ashamed of having kissed a boy. Their responses embodied all that I felt as a young woman trying to find my way in the conservative religious culture — the shame, the confusion, the sense that my sexuality and ambition were liabilities in my relationship with men and with God.
I didn’t know what to say to them then, but if I could somehow go back, I know what I would say to them now. I would tell them not to be ashamed, that God loves them just as they are and isn’t angry at them for wanting to take on the world as powerful women. I would tell them that to claim there is a biblical view of dating is a bit of a stretch, since people in the Bible didn’t date. I would tell them that using the Bible as a model for marital relationships requires some selectivity, seeing as how in Bible times women were generally sold by their fathers to the highest bidders, men were free to take as many wives as they pleased, and women who had been raped could be required to marry their rapists. I would tell them that the idea of a single, comprehensive biblical worldview to which all Christians can agree is a myth and that it’s okay to ask questions about people’s interpretations. I would tell them that this doesn’t diminish the beauty and power of the Bible but rather enhances it and gives Christians something to talk about. And I would tell them that womanhood, like the Bible, is far too lovely and mysterious and transcendent to systematize or explain.
One of my most vivid memories of my childhood is of sitting on my hands in a folded metal chair, the buckles of my white Mary Janes clinking frantically against its legs. I wait with my classmates for Miss Linda to deliver the command. My Bible sits closed on my lap, but it feels alive with tension, as if it might jump out at any moment. The room is silent and still, despite being filled with nearly a dozen twelve-year-olds who have just been served a generous amount of apple juice.
Miss Linda clears her throat.
“Romans 3:23!” she finally shouts.
First comes the sound of little hands against leather-bound books, then the rustling of paper, then the panicked whispers of “3:23, 3:23, 3:23,” then impatient groans as some of us get lost rushing backward through the Epistles. After about twenty seconds, someone jumps out of his chair and triumphantly shouts, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God!” as if he’s just discovered a cure for cancer or something.
Following an unenthusiastic spattering of applause and sighs, some congratulations from Miss Linda, and a few complaints about how so-and-so knocked so-and-so’s Bible out of so-and-so’s hands, the room falls silent again so the process can start over.
“Keep your hands off your Bible until I give you the verse,” Miss Linda reminds us before shouting, “First Timothy 3:16!”
Sword drills were my introduction to the world of competitive Bible-verse finding. Named from the passage in Ephesians 6 in which the apostle Paul instructs his readers to put on the full armor of God, sword drills were designed to help familiarize young soldiers with the basic layout of the Bible, which is described by the apostle as the “sword of truth.” I got pretty good at sword drills over the years. A cornerstone activity at vacation Bible school and AWANA, these drills prepared me for years of personal study and corporate readings. Sometimes when I’m sitting in church and the pastor instructs the congregation to turn to a certain passage, I eye the people around me and then rush to beat them to it. I like winning pointless little games like that.
For as long as I can remember, the Bible has been compared to a weapon, and for as long as I can remember, it has been used as one. Many of us who participated in sword drills as kids never really grew out of them. We just learned to adapt the overall technique to more adult circumstances, like theological debates, political positions, or confrontations with other Christians. Rather than using the whole Bible as a sword, however, we tend to pick out certain verses and use them as daggers so we can fight at closer range. We take short, frantic stabs at each other — a John 10 from the soldier for limited atonement, a 1 John 2 from the soldier for unlimited atonement, an Isaiah 66 in the name of God’s wrath, an Isaiah 55 in the name of his mercy. These battles usually leave us bloody and scathed and angry but rarely mortally wounded or dramatically changed. Occasionally, opposing forces will unite to fight against easier targets, shooting arrows from Matthew 5 at the divorced and dropping bombs from Leviticus 18 on gays and lesbians.
Only in the battles over biblical inerrancy do the weapons of mass destruction surface. The best way to silence an opponent in biblical warfare is to question his or her commitment to an error-free Bible. This usually happens to me after I’ve gone and said something like, “Maybe Genesis 1 is not meant to be a scientific explanation of how the world began,” or, “I think Paul’s instructions for the Corinthian church are culturally constrained,” or, “I don’t like that verse and am not sure what to make of it.”
“Are you saying that you don’t believe the text is inerrant?” someone inevitably will ask.
“No, I’m saying that I don’t think your interpretation is inerrant,” I’ll respond defensively.
“Oh, so you think that your interpretation is without error?”
“Well, no . . . I suppose I could be wrong.”
“So then whose interpretation is inerrant?”
The dense silence that falls between us is enough to make us realize that we have just come upon something important, something that could potentially change everything, something that could result in the demise or rebirth of Christianity, something infinitely more frightening and intriguing and life-changing than anything we have encountered before, and yet something entirely beside the point.
There is an exchange of troubled glances, an eerie quiet on the battlefield, and then the fighting resumes.
The Bible is by far the most fascinating, beautiful, challenging, and frustrating work of literature I’ve ever encountered. Whenever I struggle with questions about my faith, it serves as both a comfort and an agitator, both the anchor and the storm. One day it inspires confidence, the next day doubt. For every question it answers, a new one surfaces. For every solution I think I’ve found, a new problem will emerge. The Bible has been, and probably always will be, a relentless, magnetic force that both drives me away from my faith and continuously calls me home. Nothing makes me crazier or gives me more hope than the eclectic collection of sixty-six books that begins with Genesis and finishes with Revelation. It’s difficult to read a word of it without being changed.
The apostle Paul wrote that Scripture is “inspired by God,” and yet it is clear that the Bible has human handprints all over it. The Bible is perfection crammed into imperfect language, the otherworldly expressed in worldly ways, holiness written down by unholy hands, read by unholy eyes, and processed by unholy brains. Filled with poetry and history, laws and letters, stories and genealogies, the Bible is commonly referred to as “God’s Word,” a description that sounds so definitive and singular that it is almost misleading. In truth, the Bible represents a cacophony of voices. It is a text teeming with conflict and contrast, brimming with paradox, held together by creative tension.
For a skeptic like me, the Bible is at times helpful and at times troublesome. On the one hand, I love what Jesus said about forgiveness and enemy love. On the other, I am horrified by the acts of genocide committed by Joshua in the Old Testament, acts seemingly condoned, even ordered, by God. While I marvel at Christ’s embrace of the poor and suffering and his unorthodox appreciation for women in a patriarchal culture, I struggle to accept what can be described only as misogynistic elements in biblical stories and law: how women were assumed to be responsible for infertility, how Paul said that women are more easily deceived than men, how no one objected to polygamy or the kidnapping of virgins as spoils of war. It baffles me that the same God who cast the lepers out of Israel sent his Son to minister among them. The same God who ordered the death of every man, woman, and child in Canaan welcomed little children into his arms. I wonder why Jesus, in a radical move, chose women to be the first witnesses to his resurrection, only for Paul to omit them from his account for fear of sounding unreliable. In the Bible, there are passages that speak of God’s unsurpassed wrath and passages that speak of his unfathomable mercy, verses that describe his love as universal and verses that describe his love as territorial, stories in which he is hailed as uncompromising and stories in which he changes his mind. All my life I’ve been taught that the Bible is the glue that holds Christianity together, so whenever I encounter parts of it that don’t make sense, I start to worry that my faith might fall apart.
When I am among fellow Christians, my questions are usually met with dismissive confidence — “That was part of the old covenant, of course,” or, “This is clearly meant to be interpreted poetically,” or, “That’s just from the Old Testament,” or, “Jesus obviously was speaking hyperbolically.” Occasionally, someone will come right out and say, “What’s the big deal anyway? Why can’t you just get over it?” or, “Shhhh . . . the movie’s starting.” If I’ve learned anything about what it’s like to be on the outside of Christianity looking in, it’s how awful it feels when your questions aren’t taken seriously. Sometimes I just want to hear someone say, “You know, I’m not sure what to make of that either.”
Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer’s massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible — from whether God approved of Rahab’s lie, to where Cain got his wife. (Note to well-meaning apologists: it’s not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn’t even know that half of them existed before you recommended it.)
Despite all of the elaborate explanations and rationalizations, all the theological justifications and hermeneutical treatises, most Christians are offended by the accusation that they “pick and choose” from Scripture. Now, this is an issue I can relate to from both perspectives, that of a believer and that of a skeptic. To the skeptic, it’s complete nonsense: “Of course you pick and choose; you’re okay with people eating shellfish, but you’re not okay with women teaching in church.” But to a lot of believers, it’s perfectly reasonable: “Yes, but I have good reasons for interpreting the Bible differently in different circumstances; there’s a method to my madness, and it’s called hermeneutics.”
The skeptic may rightly point out that it’s mighty convenient for a passage condemning other people’s actions to be taken literally, while a passage condemning one’s own actions should be ignored.
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I know for a fact that a lot of my Christian friends have thoughtful reasons for interpreting the Bible the way they do and that the phrase “pick and choose” sounds far too arbitrary to describe the attentiveness and concern with which they approach the text. I don’t like it when people tell me that I “pick and choose,” especially when I feel that I’ve spent a lot of time studying and contemplating an issue. On the other hand, I’m also convinced that our interpretations of the Bible are far from inerrant. The Bible doesn’t exist in a vacuum but must always be interpreted by a predisposed reader. Our interpretations are colored by our culture, our community, our presuppositions, our experience, our language, our education, our emotions, our intellect, our desires, and our biases. My worldview affects how I read the Bible as much as the Bible affects my worldview. In fact, I’d say that how I interpret the Bible (or how I “pick and choose”) says as much about me as it says about God.
Here’s what I mean: There’s this mysterious passage in the Gospels in which Jesus says, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces” (Matt. 7:6). When I was Reformed, I assumed this referred to the nonelect. When I was Arminian, I assumed it referred to the unrepentant. When I voted Republican, I thought it might refer to welfare moms, people leeching off the system. When I voted Democrat, I thought it might refer to the powerful and elite. When I was a fundamentalist, I was convinced it referred to liberal Christians. When I was a social justice advocate, I was convinced it referred to conservative ones. At the moment, I’m inclined to think the passage refers to literary critics. You can tell a lot about someone based on who they fear might tear them to pieces.
This is why I’ve grown increasingly skeptical that there is such a thing as a biblical worldview. When we refer to “the biblical approach to economics” or “the biblical response to politics” or “biblical womanhood,” we’re using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective. We inadvertently imply that embracing the Bible as truth requires embracing one interpretation of it. This results in false fundamentals, which result in an inability to change, which results in a failure to adapt and evolve. Imagine if geocentricism were still “the biblical view of cosmology”!
In his book Velvet Elvis, pastor Rob Bell writes, “In Jesus’ world, it was assumed you had as much to learn from the discussion of the text as you did from the text itself. One person could never get too far in a twisted interpretation because the others were right there giving her insight and perspective she didn’t have on her own. Jesus said when he was talking about binding and loosing that ‘where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.’ ”13 Sometimes I wonder who really had the most biblical support back in the 1800s, Christians who used Ephesians 6 to support the institution of slavery, or Christians who used Galatians 3 to support abolition. Both sides had perfectly legitimate verses to back up their positions, but in hindsight, only one side seems even remotely justifiable on a moral level. On the surface, the Bible would seem to condone slavery. But somehow, as a church, we managed to work our way around those passages because of a shared sense of right and wrong, some kind of community agreement. Maybe God left us with all this discontinuity and conflict within Scripture so that we would have to pick and choose for the right reasons. Maybe he let David talk about murdering his enemies and Jesus talk about loving his enemies because he didn’t want to spell it out for us. He wanted us to make the right decisions as we went along, together. Maybe God wants us to have these discussions because faith isn’t just about being right; it’s about being a part of a community.
For as long as I can remember, the Christian response to conflicts within Scripture has been to try to explain them away, to smooth over the rough spots and iron out the kinks. The goal is to get everyone on the same page, to come up with one consistent, coherent, and comprehensive biblical worldview so that we can confidently proclaim that God indeed has an opinion about everything, including politics, economics, theology, science, and sex. We think that if we can just have a perfect, seamless book that can be read objectively and without bias, we will have the ultimate weapon. There will be no need for a God who stays hidden up on Mount Sinai, and there will be no need for each other. Instead, we will have a physical representation of God on which to dwell, personal idols made of paper and ink.
As much as I struggle with the things I don’t like about the Bible — the apparent contradictions, the competing interpretations, the troubling passages — I’m beginning to think that God allows these tensions to exist for a reason. Perhaps our love for the Bible should be measured not by how valiantly we fight to convince others of our interpretations but by how diligently we work to preserve a diversity of opinion.
I’ve had the same Bible since junior high. My maiden name is engraved on the front in loopy gold letters that look tiny and shy against the black leather cover. The corners are folded, the spine frayed, and many of its pages so severely corrugated that words look distorted and crammed together, as if passing under a dimpled glass. I can’t bring myself to get a new one. I’ve grown so familiar with all of its irregularities and markings that I have trouble finding my way around other Bibles. It serves as a diary of sorts, a spiritual travelogue told in sloppy underlines and barely legible notes, notes that I hastily scribbled in the margins with markers in high school, ink in college, and pencil more recently.
At first, I felt embarrassed about having my name on the cover. It seemed presumptuous, as if I were taking credit for something. But now I’m glad it’s there. It means I can never open my Bible without being aware of my own presence beside it. It reminds me that I’m always there, that I cannot read a word of this glorious, God-breathed book without bringing myself along, baggage and all. All that I think of when I think of my name — my memories, my secrets, my culture, my education, my opinions, my relationships, my sexuality, my prejudices, my preferences, my sincerest hopes, and my deepest fears — colors and infuses and brings to life everything that I read. My interpretation can be only as inerrant as I am, and that’s good to keep in mind.