“ONCE UPON A TIME . . .”
Once upon a time, there lived a girl with a magic book.
Like many other books, this one told tales of kings and queens, farmers and warriors, giants and sea monsters, and dangerous voyages. But unlike any other, it cast a spell over all who read it so they were pulled into the story, cast as characters in a great epic full of danger and surprise. From the book the girl learned how to be brave like the shepherd boy David, clever like the poor peasant Ruth, and charming like the beautiful queen Esther. She memorized the book’s proverbs, which were said to hold the secret to a rich and happy life, and she sang the book’s ancient songs, just as they’d been sung for thousands of years. She learned that with enough faith, you could topple a giant with a slingshot, turn water into wine, and survive three days in the belly of a great fish. You could even wrestle an angel. She learned, too, how to defend the book against its enemies, those who said its story wasn’t true. She could fashion the book into a weapon if she wanted, and wield its truth like a sword. Rumor had it the book was divinely inspired, and she believed it, for every word she read echoed with the voice of God.
When the girl met a teacher named Jesus in the story, she heard that voice even louder than before, so she promised to love and follow him forever. Jesus taught her to care for the poor, be kind to the lonely, forgive the bullies, and listen to her mother. He healed the sick and raised the dead and said those who followed him would do the same. The girl never healed the sick or raised the dead, but still she believed.
Then, one day, the story began to unravel. The girl was older now, with a mature and curious mind, and she noticed some things she hadn’t before. Like how God rewarded the chosen patriarch Abraham for obeying God’s request that he sacrifice his own son. Or how God permitted the chosen people of Israel to kidnap women and girls as spoils of war. After the famous walls of Jericho came a-tumblin’ down, a God-appointed army slaughtered every man, woman, and child in the city, and after Pharaoh refused to release his slaves, a God-appointed angel killed every firstborn boy in Egypt. Even the story of all the earth’s animals taking refuge in a giant ark, once one of the girl’s favorites, began with a God so sorry for creating life, he simply washed it all away. If God was supposed to be the hero of the story, then why did God behave like a villain? If the book was supposed to explain all the mysteries of life, why did it leave her with so many questions?
Deep down she knew there was no such thing as crafty serpents and talking donkeys, and that you could never fit every kind of animal on earth on a boat. Science proves the earth wasn’t made in seven days, nor is it held up by “great pillars” as the book claimed. There were contradictions in the various accounts of King David’s reign, and even the stories of Jesus’ famous resurrection didn’t read like reliable newspaper reports.
Perhaps, the girl reasoned, the story wasn’t true after all. Perhaps, she feared, her book wasn’t magic.
With each question, the voice of God grew quieter and the voices of others grew louder. These were dangerous questions, they said—forbidden questions, especially for a girl. They told her to fight against her doubts, but her sword grew heavy. They told her to stand strong in her faith, but her legs grew weak. Words that once teemed with life nettled her mind, and stories that once captured her imagination triggered her doubts and darkest fears. It was as if the roots of beloved and familiar trees had risen up to trip her on the path. There was no map for a world suddenly rearranged, no incantation to light the road ahead.
She was lost.
And yet the spell remained unbroken. The characters, many more sinister now, wandered in and out of her life just as before, interrupting her work, her relationships, her plans. Old stories continued to be told. Old battles continued to be waged. She couldn’t get the ancient songs out of her head.
She was still caught in the story. Like millions before her and millions after, she couldn’t run away. In her unguarded moments, she found herself wondering, Is the magic of the book really divine blessing, or is it, in truth, a curse?
And that’s when the adventure really began.
Controversial. Sacred. Irrelevant. Timeless. Oppressive. Embattled. Divine.
The Bible conjures all sorts of adjectives among modern-day readers, and yet its “magic” is indisputable, for every time we tease about “forbidden fruit” or praise a good Samaritan, we betray our fascination with this ancient collection of stories and poems, prophecies and proverbs, letters and laws, written and compiled by countless authors spanning multiple centuries and cited by everyone from William Blake to Beyoncé. The Bible has been translated into more than two thousand languages, its tales inspiring the art of Shakespeare and Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston and Blind Willie Johnson. Its words are etched into our gravestones, scribbled onto the white posters we carry into picket lines, and strategically incorporated into our dating profiles.
Civil rights activists quoted heavily from biblical texts, as did the Christian segregationists who opposed them. The Bible’s ancient refrains have given voice to the laments of millions of oppressed people and, too often, provided justification to their oppressors. Wars still rage over its disputed geographies.
Like it or not, the Bible has cast its spell, and we are caught up in the story.
My own life got grafted in the moment I first drew breath at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, and was named Rachel. In Scripture she is the beautiful shepherdess who stole Jacob’s heart, defied her father, nursed a bitter rivalry with her sister, and begged God to give her children right up until the birth of her second took her life. In Birmingham, Alabama, in the hairspray haze of the Reagan era, this Rachel was an intense and imaginative kid with severe eczema, knock-off Keds, and political opinions. When I first learned in Sunday school, at age seven, that my biblical name means ewe, I came home crying, certain my parents had taken one look at my naked baby body and declared it gross. Learning a ewe is simply a female sheep did little to cheer me, especially when my friend Sarah’s name meant princess.
As a child, I imbibed the stories of Scripture as a fish imbibes the sea. The evangelical subculture of the eighties and nineties produced no shortage of Bible-themed books and videos, so along with the cast of Sesame Street and a relentless cavalcade of Disney princesses, the figures of Moses, Miriam, Abraham, and Isaac marched through my imagination. My first Bible was one of those Precious Moments volumes that boasted blond, doe-eyed David on the cover, two baby lambs resting in his arms, and a sparrow perched on his staff, the shepherd boy blissfully unaware that in a few short years he’d be delivering two hundred Philistine foreskins to his father-in-law as a bride price. Inside were all my favorite biblical heroes and heroines depicted as children. (Well, almost all of them. The artists failed to include Jael, whose precious moment involved assassinating a general by driving a tent peg through his skull.) These characters occupied a similar space in my brain as Abraham Lincoln, Bear Bryant, and dead relatives whose antics were conjured up at family gatherings from time to time. They were mythic yet real; true yet more than true. The Bible’s stories were the ones in which every other story belonged, the moral universe through which all of life’s dramas moved. So convinced was I that I inhabited the same reality as Lot’s wife, I refused for years to look out the rear window of our Chevy Caprice for fear of turning into a pillar of salt.
By the time my family relocated to one of the most famous notches of the Bible Belt—Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925—my evangelical roots ensured I drank deep from the waters of Scripture. I’d memorized large portions of Psalms, Proverbs, and Romans before entering high school, where I served as president of the Bible Club and a leader in my church youth group. (You know you’ve found your place in the world when you make it to the homecoming court . . . representing the Bible Club.) The pages of my Ryrie Study Bible bled yellow, orange, and green from highlighting, and I never missed my morning “quiet time” in the Word. If the Bible of my childhood functioned primarily as a storybook, then the Bible of my adolescence functioned as a handbook, useful because it told me what to do. I turned to it whenever I had a question about friendships, dating, school, body image, friendship, or any number of adolescent concerns, and it never failed to provide me with a sense of security and direction.
Every evangelical teenager was expected to choose a life verse, and mine was Philippians 3:8: “I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ” (NASB). (It’s funny now to think that the words in a two-thousand-year-old letter from an imprisoned ex-Pharisee to the members of an obscure religious sect convinced a sixteen-year-old girl in 1997 to choose going to a Bible study over seeing Titanic in the theater, but such is the strange power of our biblical text.)
No one was surprised when, after graduating from high school, I enrolled in the English literature program at a conservative Christian college that promised to teach every discipline—from psychology, to history, to economics—from a “biblical worldview perspective.” If the Bible of my childhood functioned as a storybook and the Bible of my adolescence a handbook, then the Bible of my young adulthood functioned as an answer book, or position paper, useful because it was right. The Bible, I learned, was the reason Christians voted for Republicans, rejected evolution, and opposed same-sex marriage. It was the reason I could never, as a woman, be a pastor, the reason I should always, as a woman, mind my neckline. A biblical worldview, my professors assured me, would prepare me to debate atheists and agnostics, and would equip me to engage the moral confusion of postmodern culture still reeling from September 11, 2001. The more I learned about Scripture, they said, the more confident I would grow in my faith and the better I would be at answering the world’s questions.
But their assurances, however sincerely intended, proved empty when, as a young adult, I started asking those questions for myself. Positions I’d been told were clearly “biblical”—young earth creationism, restrictions on women’s roles in the home and church, the certainty of hell for all nonbelievers—grew muddier in the midst of lived experience, and the more time I spent seeking clarity from Scripture, the more problems I uncovered. For example, why did my church appeal to Paul’s letter to Timothy to oppose women preaching from the pulpit, but ignore his instructions to the Corinthians regarding women covering their heads (1 Timothy 2:12; 1 Corinthians 11:6)? How could we insist the Bible is morally superior to every other religious text when the book of Deuteronomy calls for stoning rebellious children, committing genocide against enemies, and enslaving women captured in war (Deuteronomy 20:14–17; 21:18–21)? What business do I have describing as “inerrant” and “infallible” a text that presumes a flat and stationary earth, takes slavery for granted, and presupposes patriarchal norms like polygamy?
It was as if the Bible had turned into an unsettling version of one of those children’s peekaboo books. Beneath the colorful illustration of Noah’s ark was—surprise!—the violent destruction of humanity. Turn the page to Joshua and the battle of Jericho and—peekaboo!—it’s genocide. Open to Queen Esther’s castle and—look!—there’s a harem full of concubines. Gone was the comforting storybook of my childhood, the useful handbook of my adolescence, and the definitive answer book of my college years. The Bible of my twenties served only as a stumbling block, a massive obstacle between me and the God I thought I knew.
My parents responded to my questions with compassion, but the evangelical community around me treated them like a wildfire in need of containment. Friends, professors, and Sunday school teachers rushed to offer explanations, often referring me to Gleason Archer’s massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a five-hundred-page tome that promised answers to all the Bible’s most challenging puzzles, but which proved less than helpful to a reluctant skeptic previously unaware half of those puzzles existed in the first place. The harder my fellow Christians worked to minimize my objections, the more pronounced those objections became. Beneath all the elaborate justifications for Israel’s ethnic cleansing, all the strange theories for where Cain got his wife and how Judas managed to die in two different ways (he hanged himself and then fell headlong onto the ground), I sensed a deep insecurity. There was a move-along-nothing-to-see-here quality to their arguments that only reinforced my suspicion that maybe the Bible wasn’t magic after all, and maybe, deep down, they knew it. Instead of bolstering my confidence in the Bible, its most strident defenders inadvertently weakened it. Then when a pastor friend asked me what personal sins might have triggered my questions—“sexual immorality, perhaps?”—I saw that my journey through these doubts would be a lonely one.
I would leave my faith a dozen times in the years following, only to return to it a dozen more. I got married, became Episcopalian, voted for Barack Obama, and discovered the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. Armed with a library card and a blog, I delighted in informing people whose life verse was Jeremiah 29:11 (“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’”) that those words were directed at the nation of Israel during the Babylonian exile, not high school seniors, and I made sure to interrupt references to the Bible’s epistles with the knowing caveat, “if Paul authored the letter to the Colossians,” to the wry chuckles of other readers in the know.
In short, I became something of a Bible bully.
While the scholarship I’d encountered was sound, I used it to render the Bible into little more than a curiosity, an interesting religious artifact to study for sport. Beneath the incessant hum of objections, corrections, and clarifications lay a terrible silence wherein the Bible still fascinated me but no longer spoke to me, at least not with the voice of God. The Bible remained a stumbling block, but a fixture now cold and mute.
My journey back to loving the Bible, like most journeys of faith, is a meandering and ongoing one, a story still in draft. And like all pilgrims, I am indebted to those who have gone before me, those saints of holy curiosity whose lives of faithful questioning taught me not to fear my doubts, but to embrace and learn from them.
Memoirist Addie Zierman writes an online advice column, “Dear Addie,” for people who have left legalistic religious backgrounds. Recently a reader named Megan asked for advice on how to engage the Bible when it comes with so much baggage, when it tends to trigger more doubts than it resolves. Zierman advised Megan to think of the Bible not as one of those Magic Eye books, which, with enough squinting and studying, reveal a single hidden image, but rather as a song that can be covered and remixed by a variety of artists. “Find your cover artists,” she wrote. “Find the voices that help you hear the same songs differently.”1
Over the course of the last decade, I have discovered my cover artists—those scholars and poets, traditions and practices, that help make the Bible sing. From the rich history of Jewish interpretation, I learned the mysteries and contradictions of Scripture weren’t meant to be fought against, but courageously engaged, and that the Bible by its very nature invites us to wrestle, doubt, imagine, and debate. Liberation theology (which views the Bible through the lens of becoming free from unjust conditions) and feminist biblical interpretations showed me how the stories of Scripture could be wisely appropriated for social good by pointing us to justice. The spiritual practices of Lectio Divina and Ignatian meditation, which invite contemplative engagement with the text, helped me recover a devotional element to Scripture reading that had long ago gone missing.
Through their faithful example, my parents continue to remind me the whole purpose of biblical devotion is to be “thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:17); and Old Testament scholar Peter Enns, whom I count as both a mentor and friend, has encouraged me to approach Scripture with a new set of questions, questions like, “What if the Bible is just fine the way it is? . . . Not the well-behaved-everything-is-in-order version we create, but the messy, troubling, weird, and ancient Bible that we actually have?”2
These questions loosened my grip on the text and gave me permission to love the Bible for what it is, not what I want it to be. And here’s the surprising thing about that. When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not—static, perspicacious, certain, absolute—then you’re free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic. The ancient rabbis likened Scripture to a palace, alive and bustling, full of grand halls, banquet rooms, secret passages, and locked doors.
“The adventure,” wrote Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky in Reading the Book, lies in “learning the secrets of the palace, unlocking all the doors and perhaps catching a glimpse of the King in all His splendor.”3
Renowned New Testament scholar N. T. Wright compared Scripture to a five-act play, full of drama and surprise, wherein the people of God are invited into the story to improvise the unfinished, final act.4 Our ability to faithfully execute our roles in the drama depends on our willingness to enter the narrative, he said, to see how our own stories intersect with the grander epic of God’s redemption of the world. Every page of Scripture serves as an invitation—to wonder, to wrestle, to surrender to the adventure.
And so, at thirty-five, after years of tangling with the Bible, and with every expectation that I shall tangle with it forever, I find myself singing Psalm 121 to my baby boy each night. “He who watches over you will not slumber,” I sing into his sweet-smelling wisp of hair, as many thousands of mothers and fathers have done before. “He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
I am teaching my son the ancient songs and hearing them again for the first time. I am caught up in the story, surrendered to its pull.
Citing G. K. Chesterton, author Neil Gaiman often noted, “Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”5 In those first, formative years of my life, before I knew or cared about culture wars or genre categories or biblical interpretation, this is what Scripture taught me: that a boat full of animals can survive a catastrophic flood, that seas can be parted and lions tamed, that girls can be prophets and warriors and queens, that a kid’s lunch of fish and bread can be multiplied to feed five thousand people.
At times I wonder if I understood my sacred text better then than I do now or ever will again.
My aim with this book is to recapture some of that Bible magic, but in a way that honors the text for what it is—ancient, complicated, debated, and untidy, both universally relevant and born from a specific context and culture. I write with two audiences in mind: first, those who share my evangelical background and find themselves navigating the great chasm between Scripture as they learned it and Scripture as what it actually is, and second, those who share my present affiliation with progressive mainline traditions and are itching to explore more deeply the background, significance, and relevance of the texts sampled in the liturgy each week. I hope to show how the Bible can be captivating and true when taken on its own terms, avoiding both strict literalism on the one hand and safe, disinterested liberalism on the other.
I’ve arranged the book around various biblical genres, alternating between short, creative retellings of familiar Bible stories (“The Temple,” “The Well,” “The Walls,” and so on), and more in-depth explorations of those genres (“Origin Stories,” “Deliverance Stories,” “War Stories,” and so forth). Woven throughout are reflections from my own life and invitations for readers to consider how their stories intersect with those of the Bible.
I tackle this subject not as a scholar, but as a storyteller and literature lover who believes understanding the genre of a given text is the first step to engaging it in a meaningful way. My focus is on the Bible as a collection of stories, stories best able to teach us when we appreciate their purpose. For the scholarship, I rely heavily on the work of Peter Enns, as well as the writings of Walter Brueggemann, Ellen Davis, Delores Williams, Nyasha Junior, Amy-Jill Levine, Soong-Chan Rah, J. R. Daniel Kirk, Scot McKnight, Glenn R. Paauw, and N. T. Wright. I’m more grateful than ever for the faithful contributions of these fellow pilgrims.
A book about the Bible by a memoirist may seem like an odd undertaking, but anyone who has loved the Bible as much as I have, and who has lost it and found it again, knows how a relationship with the Bible can be as real and as complicated as a relationship with a family member or close friend. For better or worse, my story is inextricably tethered to the stories of Scripture, right down to my first name. Rather than attempting to rend the threads of my life from those of the sacred text, I hope to better understand their interconnectedness and, perhaps, to step back far enough to see a tapestry emerge.
The Bible never refers to sacred Scripture as “magic,” which is understandable since the term carried even more cultic baggage in the ancient world than it does today. Instead, the author of 2 Timothy 3:16 declares, “All Scripture is inspired by God” (NASB). Here the writer has created a new word—theopneustos—a combination of the Greek theo, meaning “god,” and pneo, meaning “to breathe out” or “to blow.” Inspiration, both in the English language and in its ancestral languages, is rooted in the imagery of divine breath, the eternal rhythm of inhale and exhale, gather and release. The book of John describes the breath of God as blowing wherever it pleases. “You hear its sound,” the text says, “but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going” (3:8). It’s the invisible power of wind in sails, the strange alchemy of air on embers. You couldn’t track it down even if you tried.
Inspiration is better than magic, for as any artist will tell you, true inspiration comes not to the lucky or the charmed but to the faithful—to the writer who shows up at her keyboard each morning, even when she’s far too tired, to the guitarist whose fingers bleed after hours of practice, to the dancer who must first learn the traditional steps before she can freestyle with integrity. Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator.
While Christians believe the Bible to be uniquely revelatory and authoritative to the faith, we have no reason to think its many authors were exempt from the mistakes, edits, rewrites, and dry spells of everyday creative work. Nor should we, as readers, expect every encounter with the text to leave us happily awestruck and enlightened. Inspiration, on both the giving and receiving end, takes practice and patience. It means showing up even when you don’t feel like it, even when it seems as if no one else is there. It means waiting for wind to stir.
God is still breathing. The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready the sails and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the biblical character Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a blessing.
If you’re curious, you will never leave the text without learning something new. If you’re persistent, you just might leave inspired.