‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’
(1 Corinthians 13:11)a
If you are a regular listener to BBC Radio 4, you cannot have avoided Desert Island Discs. A famous personality is shipwrecked on an imaginary island and asked to choose their eight favourite records. At the end they are offered one luxury and one book – in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare.
Desert Island Discs is not a religious programme, nor are its guests chosen for their religious beliefs. Yet the formula has not changed in over 50 years. Two books are felt to need no justification. One is by an author universally acknowledged to be among the greatest dramatists and poets who ever lived. But the other is … well, what is it exactly? Is it a work of faith? Then what use is it to atheists, or to believers in a different faith? Is it a work of philosophy, a guide to life? If so, what is the philosophy it puts forward? What are we to make of its frequent condemnation of non-believers? Is it Christian – or Jewish? Is it a set of beliefs? A framework of moral rules? Or just a collection of stories and poems?
Every Christmas, small children write their letters to Santa Claus to tell him what they specially want. As they grow up, children progressively lose their belief in Santa: we might be sorry to meet a four-year-old who did not believe in him, but we would be more troubled by a fourteen-year-old (or a 40-year-old) who did. There is a childish way of thinking about Santa – and there is Santa for grown-ups.
Every Christmas, the same small children in Western schools are carefully coached to act out the story of a child announced by an angel, fathered by a spirit, pointed out by a star, and born to a virgin. None of this – and very little of what surrounds it in the Bible – corresponds to our everyday reality any more than the story of Santa Claus: most of it, indeed, considerably less. Yet no one tells us how to make the transition from the innocent belief of the child, to a mature ability to get these stories into perspective.
There is a childish way of thinking about the Bible – but what is an adult way? What, in short, would be ‘the Bible for grown-ups’?
The intention of this book is not to break new ground, nor to be contentious. There is a huge amount of careful, thoughtful, and fascinating biblical research and scholarship from the past two centuries; but all too often it does not get over the academic frontier. This book seeks to make that research more widely known, in terms that the general reader can understand.
The book is theologically neutral. It neither requires, nor rejects, belief. What it tries to do is to help intelligent adults to make sense of the Bible – a book that is too large to swallow whole, yet too important in our history and culture to spit out. How do we approach the Bible, not with the naivete of the child, but with the maturity of the adult? How can we read the Bible with our brains in gear? The purpose of this book is to do just that.
Footnote
a. All quotations are from the Authorised Version, the King James Bible. Where newer Bible translations are more accurate, I have shown the amendments in square brackets.