Living Word

 

Pastor’s Epistle—June 2021

One of the books on my summer reading wish list is The Atheist Handbook to the Old Testament. That might seem like a strange choice for a cleric; or not, depending how well you know me. But the author in question seems as intriguing as his subject. A former fundamentalist, he attended Bible college, seminary, and even served as a U.S. Air Force chaplain. After earning a few more degrees, he became an Assyriologist and an atheist.

I’m fascinated by the former—having minored in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies once upon a time—and sad about the latter. The way he’d been taught to read the Bible simply could not stand up to rigorous scholarship. And so now he writes atheist handbooks. This is but one of the reasons why our approach to the Bible is so important.

The Bible is not a science book, nor a theology book, nor even a history book; not in the way that we think of history today. In a very real sense, the Bible is not a book at all, but an entire library, with at least 50 authors writing over the course of 1000 years. These authors do not all agree; they contradict each other, even argue with each other. But how could it be any other way? How could we even begin to tell the story of an entire people’s relationship to God without many, many witnesses, without argument, disagreement, and discernment? The very name “Israel,” after all, means “he who wrestles with God.”

The Bible was not dictated by a single prophet, as was allegedly the Quran. It was not handed to mortals by angels on tablets of gold, as claims for itself the Book of Mormon. The Bible is messy and beautiful and offensive and profound. There are things in it we find reprehensible and heinous, as well we should. And there are things in it that we find unspeakably beautiful, terrifyingly sublime; things that still shake us to the core with but a glimpse of the ineffable, inexorable, depthless love of God.

Some time back, a Christian named Tatian wrote (or rather, edited) a book called the Diatessaron. In it, he combined the four Gospels into a single, unified account, one story taken from four witnesses, attempting to add to them nothing but conjunctions. In it, contradictory stories were sometimes combined and sometimes duplicated. If we were to lose all copies of the four Gospels, and had only the Diatessaron, we might be able to tease out the originals: to back-breed four Gospels from the one combined account.

The Torah, or Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible, from Genesis through Deuteronomy—is a lot like the Diatessaron. It’s clear that during the Exile, when the people of Israel were scattered throughout Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, one unified account was compiled and edited into the form we have today. Different witnesses, different versions of the same or similar stories, were stitched together and the edges smoothed out to produce the Old Testament stories that we used to know so well.

That’s why many tales in the Hebrew Bible appear to be repeated, or to contradict each other. Did God create humans before animals or after? Did the Flood last for 40 days or 150? Was the Tabernacle in the midst of the Israelite encampment or outside of it? Should the Passover sacrifice be roasted (and only roasted) or boiled? It all depends which parts you read. It depends what source was used.

And this understanding of an edited, multisource Old Testament, is no greater hurdle to Christian understanding than are the four canonical Gospels all witnessing to the one Christ. Less so, in fact, because Christians have traditionally rejected literalistic interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures! The Church Fathers knew all too well the contradictions; they knew all too well the problematic violence of the texts.

My point is simply this: don’t make the Bible into something that it’s not. It isn’t a textbook. It isn’t perfect in the sense of never making a mistake, never having any flaws. It has plenty. The Bible is the record of one people’s tempestuous love affair with God, wrestling the divine, culminating in the perfect union of God and Man in the risen Christ.

We worship Jesus, and not a book. Indeed, the book is only of value to us insofar as it gives us, through the inspiration of the living Holy Spirit, the true Word of God who is Jesus Christ our Lord. And once we realize that, we see Him everywhere, in life as in the text. Even the contradictions begin to make a mystical sort of sense. Is God transcendent and cosmic as in Genesis 1, or immanent and personal as in Genesis 2? Was the presence of God found in the midst of Israel, or beyond it? Of course in Christ these all are true!

Fundamentalism and atheism really aren’t all that different. Neither one of them reflects the real mystery of the divine, embracing instead certainty at the expense of spirituality. But look to Jesus risen, and there you’ll see humanity. Look to Jesus crucified, and there you’ll see our God. Only in this way is the Bible infallible: in that it gives us Christ, and Christ will never fail.