I don’t want to add up how many hours I spent playing Mario Kart as a kid. Good gravy, I might have a PhD by now had I spent my weekends and after-school hours more prudently. Still, I have no regrets. Even now, as I type, if someone showed up with a Super Nintendo and challenged me to a 150cc Mushroom Cup Grand Prix, sorry, dear reader, I’d leave you in a heartbeat.
If I didn’t know a course yet, my strategy involved choosing a small and nimble kart (Toadstool FTW!) for tight turning and quick acceleration out of crashes. But once I had the course memorized and could anticipate each turn or obstacle, I’d pick Donkey Kong every time. No kart could match him for pure speed.
The newest version of Mario Kart offers twenty-three different items hiding in those spinning question-mark boxes, but in the original version—the one that robbed me of a PhD—there were six. In my opinion, the banana peel gets the prize as the most undervalued weapon. I didn’t fully appreciate its potential until I realized that if you held Up on the directional pad while pressing the A button, you could launch the peel over racers ahead of you, ostensibly creating an obstacle for your opponents out of thin air. When timed properly, whether dropping it behind or launching it forward, the banana peel is a dangerous weapon to foil the progress of your friends and family.
Kind of like the Bible.
Friction with Scripture is another significant obstacle when becoming a progressive Christian. Nothing stops you quicker in your tracks than when those closest to you respond to your newfound expression of faith with, “Well, the Bible says . . .” Weaponized like the banana peel, many of us have endured friends and family members who harnessed the power of the Bible in their attempts to prevent us from further advancing down the path toward progressive Christianity.
Who among us hasn’t cringed through a multiple-swipes-long stream of copy/paste Bible verses posted on our Facebook page in a feeble effort to show us the error of our ways? Or rolled our eyes at emails passive-aggressively closed with nothing but a verse reference casually dropped at the end, forcing us to look it up on our own, stung by its implication (i.e., Matt 26:41, 2 Chr 7:14, or 1 Tim 4:1). Or who hasn’t been in the middle of telling your dad about a recent Rob Bell podcast or Jen Hatmaker book when he suddenly cuts the conversation short and walks off mumbling, “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear,” as though he memorized 2 Timothy 4:3 for such a time as this.
As you embark on your Shift, no one can prepare you for how many Bible verses well-intentioned people will hurl your way. Your exit will trigger all sorts of insecurity among your old church, family, and friends. In their fear, they will attempt to pull you back by appealing to Paul in Romans or Jesus in Matthew, as though one last verse might do the trick. I’m not sure there exists a more unique and perverse pain than when the people you love forge the words (you used to love) into a weapon aimed to shame you, accuse you, or otherwise justify their troubling behavior toward you. For all the times and ways this might have happened to you, I am sorry. It is wrong and you did not (and do not) deserve it. If leaving conservative Christianity wasn’t already motivated in part by a sense of disillusionment regarding the Bible, then I’m sure having it weaponized against you soured your feelings toward it even more.
In high school, I remember returning to the intersection where, just days earlier, a brutal car accident nearly took my life. My heart raced and my stomach lurched as we pulled up to the exact location where the flatbed tow truck (which was also towing a car!)T-boned my shiny, red 1988 Nissan Pulsar. When you open a Bible these days, or—like many people in my church have told me—sit in church when your pastor reads a passage aloud, you might experience a similar sort of PTSD. The struggle is real, especially if your exit from conservative Christianity involved getting kicked out, with Bible verses utilized as justification for your shunning.
If you never pick up the Bible again, I don’t blame you.
On the other hand, maybe you haven’t completely sworn off the Bible . . . yet. But things are clearly different now. In your previous life, you might have read it daily, highlighted your favorite verses, and looked forward to hearing your pastor unpack the original meaning of the text. Now, you can’t recall off the top of your head where in the house your Bible sits—assuming you still have one. Questions such as “What even is the Bible?” and “Who cares what old dudes wrote thousands of years ago?” and “Can it really offer any value for me?” swirl in your mind like the last piece of cereal refusing to be scooped up by the spoon.
Even if you escaped having the Bible weaponized against you, you still probably don’t feel the same way about it as you once did. No longer do you reach for it when hard times come, as the words that once brought comfort now stir only questions. Nor do ancient customs function any longer as your moral compass, for you realize that twenty-first-century issues such as climate change and tax reform weren’t on the minds of Stone Age philosophers as they mused on tribal warfare etiquette or which animal sacrifice covers which transgression.
Some days you might feel resentful that many of the beliefs you no longer hold can still nonetheless be reasonably supported and defended by this verse or that passage (as I’m sure your old Bible study group won’t let you forget). It’s just that you’ve come to believe either (1) those verses have been grossly misunderstood or misinterpreted, and/or (2) regardless of what the verse says, you know deep in your bones that it can’t be right. Every part of your conscience feels violated when, for instance, women are denied leadership roles in the church—verses about submission and silence be damned.
You’re not foolish for feeling frustrated with the Bible. Nor are you alone. Most people I’ve encountered who have experienced the Shift feel far removed from the days when they took for granted that the word of God provided everything needed for life. Figuring out how (or if) the Bible still plays a role in our lives as we become a progressive Christian ranks as one of the more confusing parts of the Shift.
I don’t have any easy answers. Yet, even though my posture toward the Bible has changed dramatically, I still believe it offers time-tested witness to some of life’s deepest and most powerful truths. And if we’re open to it, the wisdom of the past can provide light, companionship, and insight for the journey ahead.
The first thing concerned Christians question when you start shedding the clothes of conservative Christianity is your commitment to the Bible. This usually comes by way of a form (metaphorically speaking) containing two boxes: one labeled “Inerrant” and the other “Infallible,” followed by a request that you still check both. In their minds, failure to do so signals that you truly have abandoned the faith. Yet, it’s fully possible (even preferable) to drop these two commitments and still be a Christian who learns from, is energized by, and holds the Bible as a sacred work of art. So, here’s what Cheryl, your old choir director, means when she looks at you aghast and says, “Well, don’t you believe the Bible is the perfect word of God?”
First, the term inerrant means “without error.” To say the Bible is inerrant means its facts are accurate, it does not contradict itself, and everything inside it—if interpreted correctly—is absolutely true. Most progressive Christians reject the inerrancy of Scripture, either explicitly or implicitly. This often happens when we discover how areas of science such as evolutionary biology and archeology directly contradict either the historical facts in the Bible or a literal reading of the text (i.e., the creation accounts in Genesis 1–2). With regards to contradictions in the Bible, I recall the incredible feats of mental gymnastics required to try to square obviously different accounts in the gospels of things like Jesus’s genealogy, birth story, and what took place that first Easter morning. Maintaining that the Bible is without error simply became an untenable position for many of us who left conservative Christianity.
Second, the term infallibility in its strictest sense means “incapable of making a mistake.” Most Christians use the term to mean that the Bible is reliable and trustworthy and will not lead you astray. Like inerrancy, progressive Christians can’t accept the infallibility of the Bible seeing as how the church used Scripture to justify slavery, the subjugation of women, and the oppression of LGBTQ people. Those three efforts all had “strong biblical support,” yet they are also some of the grossest stains on the history of the church. Obviously, one can follow the literal words of the Bible and still be led to disastrous and inhumane outcomes, rendering infallibility an idea one cannot in good conscience use in conjunction with the Bible.
I have held on to, however, a third I word used to describe the Bible, though I asterisk the hell out of it. I’m referring to inspired, and even though I don’t mean it in the same way I once did, I nonetheless still consider the Bible to be a divinely inspired collection of ancient letters, stories, and poems. Allow me to explain.
Along with most of your conservative friends and family, I used to understand divine inspiration like this: God, as a super being up/out there, exerted “his” actual thoughts and words into and through the men who composed the works that came together as the Bible. To say the Bible was divinely inspired, in other words, was to say that the very ink on the papyrus flowed directly from the mind of God via the Holy Spirit. Sure, theologians give space for the unique personalities of each biblical writer to shine, but the bottom line remains: God beamed words to Earth via meat-puppet vessels known as Moses, Jeremiah, Peter, Paul, and so on.
I no longer find that a compelling or plausible account of how the Bible came to be. Now when I think about the Bible as inspired by God, I think about God as described earlier in chapter 4. Not so much a being out there who exercises an option to control beings down here, but more like an Event, an Ultimate Reality, a Source from which creative goodness flows and gives witness.
If you imagine God as the highest truth, the deepest beauty, and the greatest good, then whatever work of art in our space and time illuminates what is true, beautiful, or good must therefore point to God. And not only point to God, as though art is the tip of an iceberg merely testifying to an even greater amount of ice beyond itself, but you can also imagine art (truth/beauty/goodness) flowing out of God as a product of the divine at work. God can therefore be conceived of as both the ultimate reality of the iceberg below and the water itself by which the iceberg comes to be at all. God: both source and object of artistic expression.
So, am I saying that the Bible sits rather unexceptionally alongside other inspired works of art such as Michelangelo’s David, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and every time LeBron James takes the floor? Well, no and yes. Great inspired works of art must also come from and point to God. There’s no other option, as I see it. (Not unlike at the end of The Last Battle, when Aslan welcomes the pagan Emeth into heaven by saying, “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.”) But clearly not all inspired works are created equal. Some capture more of the ultimate reality. Some reflect more of the highest truth, deepest beauty, and greatest good than others.
Further, not all works inspired by God offer the same value in terms of their capacity to transform a person’s life or aid them in coming more alive. When I say that God inspired the Bible, I am naming its deep potential to reveal beneficial truths about the human experience in such a way that empowers us to change for the better. I wholeheartedly agree with 2 Timothy 3:16–17, which says scripture “is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good.” Yes, yes, and yes! The Bible need be neither infallible nor inerrant for it to be useful for teaching, training character, and equipping us to do good.
Yes, the Bible has errors and contradictions, and it has been used to justify grotesque actions. Humanity has often been guilty of using good things to justify bad deeds. At the same time, my progressive sensibilities are not threatened by maintaining a conviction that the Bible still possesses immense value. I believe that this collection of ancient poems (written in an attempt to articulate humanity’s experience with God), letters (composed to the earliest churches in an effort to organize and spread a new type of beloved community), and stories (passed on through oral tradition for hundreds of years before being collected, edited, and written down for future generations), all point to ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness as they flow from the depths of divine wisdom.
In other words, inspired.
If you’re interested in (or open to) integrating the Bible with your spiritual life, but are unsure how to do so (because you’re still a bit unsure about the Bible in general), let me offer you four suggestions. I’ve found these principles immensely helpful in not only renewing my appreciation for the good book but unlocking a whole new way to interact with it.
1. Read the Bible literately instead of literally. In other words, if we miss that something is an allegory and read it as a historical record or ignore that a particular passage is poetry and read it as propositional truth statements, we’ll be like my son using a butter knife to make a robot costume from a cardboard Amazon box. Wrong tool, wrong approach, and nothing but crude, disastrous results await. Reading the Bible literally is tempting as a simple and clear way to interact with the words on the page, and no doubt was the primary approach many of us grew up with, but it flattens all flavor and ignores any nuance. Taking the time to let the genres and the styles of the literature inform how we read and understand it can transform what these ancient letters, poems, and stories do in and for us. Which leads me to . . .
2. Play with the text. Oh, that Christians might learn from our Jewish heritage, which takes for granted that any given passage of Scripture might have room for dozens of different ways to see, understand, and live it. The goal is less about figuring out the right answer and more about the conversation dancing around the various ways the words make people light up. I used to read a story in the gospels and ask, “What exactly happened? What did it mean back then? What does it mean now?” Nowadays, I approach it in the same manner my friend Scott, an artist, challenges people to approach any work of art. Instead of asking “What does it mean?,” we stand before it, hearts open, and ask, “What is this stirring up inside me?” Seen in this way, I’ve discovered Bible stories as mirrors that reflect me back to myself, or poems that articulate my own feelings of lament or jubilation. I’ve found layered in the letters to the early church Peter and Paul’s exhaustion in trying to build spiritual communities, helping me feel like less of a failure when I think about how hard church planting is. Playing with the text gives us the freedom to receive such insights.
3. Take the best and leave the rest. Anyone who has ever tried to take the Bible seriously ends up picking and choosing which passages to emphasize and which to ignore. Admitting this is true is the first (and hardest) step. My previous conservative self, steeped in evangelical thought and action, followed the party line “We don’t pick and choose! We believe every word of the Word.” But I was simply ignorant to all the ways I was indeed picking and choosing. I recall the intense fear surrounding any suggestion that a particular verse or passage not be true, because in my conservative Christian world the Bible was an all-or-nothing book. But now I encourage people to let whatever parts of the Bible speak to or resonate with them do their thing. And if other parts or entire books do nothing for them, no worries! No need to force it. For example, when Paul writes in Colossians 3:18–4:1 about “wives submitting to their husbands” and “slaves obeying their masters,” there are reasons abound to let such words fall to the wayside. And maybe, once we give ourselves permission not to take those words literally, and not to think they are God’s design for how homes should function for all of history, other insights might emerge. Such as how Paul, in this passage, began with the culture’s standard codes of conduct for households and then imagined what a transformed household might look like as a result of the teachings of Jesus. Yes, this passage as we read it now is backwards and archaic, yet for its time it was movement toward greater justice, equality, and love. Then we can ask questions like, “How might we, today, imagine elevating our own society’s expectations of what a family should or should not look like?” Seen in this way, the Bible becomes “living” and “active” (Heb 4:12), with the potential to be a potent tool in manifesting the kingdom of God on Earth as it is in heaven.
4. Use love as your hermeneutic.Hermeneutic is a fancy word that means “how you interpret the Bible,” sort of like the lens through which you see the text. Cartoonist David Hayward, whose website declares he creates “graffiti on the walls of religion,” once drew a cartoon where Jesus says to a group of people, “The difference between me and you is you use Scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.”[1] That’s a hermeneutic of love. When I decided to let love be my hermeneutic—inspired by Jesus’s continued insistence that the most important thing in life is love (for God, for self, for neighbor)—suddenly, I had the tool I needed to navigate these ancient stories, letters, and so on. Whatever this or that passage says or means or points to, if it’s not greater wholeness and connection, and if the end result is not love, then it is just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
I’m about as progressive as they come, and at the same time, the Bible still emerges as a source of great wisdom for me—even after dropping beliefs about the inerrancy of Scripture. Making these slight (but significant) tweaks in how I approach the Bible has freed me up to find God once again in Genesis, Mark, and Corinthians. Using this new approach, I want to share with you just a few ways that the Bible has deeply impacted me these past couple of years.
In the Bible I learned how practicing gratitude for the grace of the present moment rescues us from the misplaced nostalgia of yesterday and the needless anxiety around tomorrow. How did I learn this? Through the ancient Jewish legend of manna, the stories from Exodus that tell how God miraculously provided a breadlike substance for the Hebrew people and sustained them as they wandered the wilderness for forty years. The recently liberated slaves, upon running out of provisions, cried out in hunger and longed to go back to Egypt . . . to be slaves again! . . . but, hey, at least their bellies got filled. How often does our current pain blind us into longing for days gone by? At some point in your journey away from conservative Christianity, you may experience moments when you feel so lonely and sad that, even though it goes against everything you’ve come to believe, you find yourself wishing you could go back. You want to go back to your old church and old friends, because at least then you felt a part of something. God responds to this ache with manna, a temporary substance that cannot be stored, so it cannot be relied upon for future security. What manna does is ground you in the here and now, forcing you to pay attention to this moment. It is such mindfulness of the present that rescues us from nostalgia for the past and keeps us from getting anxious for the future. “Give us this day our daily bread,” Jesus prayed. Today, here, now.
In the Bible is where I realized sometimes the wind, rain, and crashing waves don’t scare me nearly as much as the calm after the storm. The gospels tell the story of when Jesus and the disciples were on a boat one evening and a storm hit, threatening to overwhelm them all. The disciples woke up a sleeping Jesus, who rolled over and ordered, “‘Silence! Be still!’ The wind settled down and there was a great calm” (Mark 4:39). I never noticed how Jesus then asked his friends “Why are you frightened?” (v. 40) only after the storm had passed. Sometimes I think we over-identify with our storm, our pain, our rotten situations in life. Sometimes, though it beats us down, we become comfortable as the victim of the raging storm. So much so that we’re terrified—not of remaining in our pain—but at the prospect of healing. We might sabotage our own efforts to get better, frightened by a future freed from our pain. I cling to my victimhood because at least then, when people abandon me or let me down, I can nurse my wounds by saying, “See, I told you this would happen. People always let you down.” Sad and lonely, sure, but also strangely comfortable and definitely predictable. I know the storm. It’s the unknown calm that concerns me. Jesus then asked his friends, “Don’t you have pistis yet?,” and it echoes through the ancient pages as a challenge to me to remain open, trusting in the transforming power of God. It challenges me to trust that not only will the storm not kill me, but that on the other side of it I can survive the calm as well. Perhaps it’s time for me to claim that the storm is over and get on with the business of healing and living.
In the Bible I discovered language to articulate how our true strength can never fully manifest without us first becoming undone. I discovered this in one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthian church in which he bragged about his weaknesses and told the story of how God refused to relieve him of a thorn in his side. Paul heard from God the words, “My grace is enough for you, because power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Of course, I’d heard this verse countless times, but a couple years ago during a challenging season of coming to grips with my own humanity, where I peeled back many of the masks I referred to in the last chapter, I heard these words as though for the first time. “Power,” which can mean strength, “is made perfect,” which is to say whole or complete, “in weakness,” which described perfectly my experience of coming to the end of my many false selves. There is a type of formation in character, a strengthening, that only comes on the other side of fully falling apart. I hate the falling apart, yet I can look back on those moments and see how they led me toward a life more whole, complete, connected, and beautiful. In hindsight, I can echo Paul’s words, “Therefore, I’m all right with weaknesses, insults, disasters, harassments, and stressful situations for the sake of Christ, because when I’m weak, then I’m strong” (2 Cor 12:10).
Ten years ago, I would’ve read those last three paragraphs and rolled my eyes, annoyed at the interpretations and offended by the loosey-goosey, esoteric, overly sentimental applications. I used to believe the Bible had one possible truth, one interpretation, one meaning for every verse, and the Christian’s job was to study, memorize, understand, and live it. As a pastor and author, I’m clearly not opposed to studying the Bible or trying to understand it, but my posture toward what the Bible is (and is not) has completely shifted.
No, it’s not a perfect account of history or a perfect recording of the voice of God declaring divine revelation for all time. No, it’s not immune from leading us astray, nor does it hold all the answers for all of life’s problems. Yes, it has been used to justify great harm toward many people. Yes, it can be triggering to hear old, familiar verses and phrases. As mentioned earlier, I completely understand if you need to leave the Bible behind altogether.
But when (or if) you’re ready, you can hold the Bible in such a way that it frees you up to rediscover fresh insights, profound truths, and ancient wisdom within its pages. If you’d like, you might try pushing through your resistance to all the ways the Bible has been misused or leveraged to control and manipulate, and perhaps discover on the other end an openness to hear these words in a new light. Who knows what you might find?
I like to think of the Bible as this hard-fought gift that took thousands of years of psychological, emotional, and spiritual struggle in order to unearth some of the deepest truths of what it means to be human. And this gift, against all odds, now sits at my fingertips thanks to hundreds of years of men and women compiling, curating, and preserving such wisdom.
All complications and questions aside, millions of people have found this gift to be a lamp unto their feet and a light for their path. Seeing as how I often find myself stumbling around in the dark, perhaps I too might receive the gift of the light waiting to be discovered in these old, dusty books.