Things I Can't Un-see - part 1

When I started reading the Bible like it wasn't the Bible, I loved the Bible even more...go figure

I didn’t want to write several long essays, but I did want to talk about some of the things I’ve deconstructed about the Bible. It’s been an exercise trying to come up with the words. Part of me wants to write this like a scholar (which I’m not). Show you my work. Cite my sources. Include really long footnotes with big words I’d probably misspell. But there are plenty of resources out there that do a much better job than I can of explaining the things I’m talking about, and they're probably more worthy of your time. But then there’s another part of me that wants to be more sermonic about it all. I just don’t want to sound preachy. The last thing I want to do is sound like I’ve got it all figured out or tell you that you should. With theological certainty being one of the things that I’ve moved away from in my deconstruction, the last thing I want to do is give you a false hope or some alternative sense of certainty that doesn’t exist.

That being said, I do want to talk about some of the things about the Bible that, as I've described in the title of this post, I can’t unsee.

What I’ll do in this series of posts is share my perspective, which will probably sound like my opinion. But I hope you can trust me when I say that it’s an informed opinion; from someone who’s not trying to take down the faith or introduce confusion, but from someone who loves the Bible and has spent much of my life discussing it, reading it, and studying it. Deconstructing it has been no different. Don’t worry, I’m not about to say anything new either. No new revelations or silver bullets. The conclusions I’m arriving at about the Bible- because I still haven’t arrived - are things that many in the academy, the church, and beyond have embraced for a very long time.

In the past, whenever I’ve taught the Bible, I’ve tried to communicate about it in a clear and simple way. This wasn’t easy, and it got pretty frustrating at times, mostly because - and this is one of the things I’ve finally admitted when it comes to interpreting the Bible - this anthology of literature is by no means clear, as some believe. It’s also not as flexible to our modern standards as others try to make it. Examining any book, topic, or era of history in the Bible is extremely complex and when all the information is taken into consideration, you might not come away with as much as you think if you’re looking for a modern moralistic application. But the Bible is still fascinating and worth exploring.

With all this in mind, here’s the first thing I can’t unsee: reading the Bible from a non-faith perspective.

To put it another way, when it comes to interpreting the Bible, I believe that approaching the Bible primarily through a non-faith perspective is the most informative and meaningful way to understand the Bible.

A Limited Perspective

My elder millennial sensibilities never allowed me to get into Pokémon. So when Pokémon GO was popular a few years ago, it missed me like a t-shirt cannon in the nosebleed section. You’d see people outside, in the streets and in nature, eyes down with their faces glued to their phones trying to discover the hidden Pokémon characters in the wild. The game succeeded as a way of getting people outside, but I’d notice how some, for the sake of the game, seemed to miss everything else happening outside - the sunsets, the sky, nature, people enjoying themselves. You could say Pokémon GO became a kind of lens through which people had started experiencing the world. I started to feel this way about reading the Bible.

For as long as I’ve read the Bible, which wasn’t too long after I learned how to read, I believed it came from God. He was its author, he spoke through imperfect humans, and they wrote down a variety of literature that told the truth about him and his involvement in human history, particularly when it came to saving people. That’s the foundation I built on, accepted without question, and from there I learned concepts like inspiration and inerrancy, biblical metanarratives, biblical and systematic theology, harmonization, and a lot other things. I viewed the literature in the Bible primarily as “Biblical literature”, as if that were its own special category that produced its own special meaning. But after a while, it felt like something was missing. I felt like I was missing the forest for the trees; the beauty of the park or the cityscape for the discovery of the hidden Pokémon. For me, the Bible had become about discovering the theological meaning of the text but what got neglected was seeing the bigger picture of the literature in the Bible, and the hundreds of other things going on with it. And that’s not to say the theological meaning isn’t “part of” the bigger picture, but there’s certainly more to it.

And this is where engaging the Bible from a non-faith approach begins: not viewing it primarily as divinely inspired (although I’m not saying you can’t arrive that conclusion on your own), but as ancient literature written by human authors; literature that falls within the category of the several surviving texts of Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman literature that we currently have available to us. Imagine Genesis being in the “You Might Like” list after Atrahasis or The Gospel of Mark on a Barnes & Noble shelf next to Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. Viewing the texts in the Bible this way is a bold move, but putting aside the lens of divinity and just reading the texts as literature might be one of the most grounding and clarifying experiences you can have with the texts of the Bible.

This was something I really tried to do—not just as a Christian, but also as a pastor—but it wasn’t easy. I had a hard time taking off my “theology hat,” so to speak. It was a tight fit and didn’t come off easily. A lot of the time, I ran into theological assumptions and walls that didn’t give me satisfying answers—not about faith necessarily, but about what the text was actually saying. Those walls made it hard to even consider other, more plausible ideas that came from outside a faith-based perspective. And eventually, it was some of those ideas that were like a wrecking ball to my former ways of thinking. Even now, there’s still this inner Christian apologist that still tries to make his case for old interpretations. His arguments are thin, but persistent, holding on to the smallest speck of plausibility, begging me to give him a better apologetic or philosophical argument. But honestly, looking at the Bible in this way isn’t about apologetics or philosophy or theology. Each of those categories comes from a faith-centered interpretation of the text and what I’m referring to is different altogether. I’m talking about engaging the texts as literature.

Approaching the Bible from a non-faith perspective doesn’t mean interpretation is easier, but it’s certainly less restrictive and less restricted. It’s less restrictive because many of the unbiased and more scientific resources about the text are far more curious and expansive than those centered in a faith perspective. It’s less restricted because the conclusions about a text aren’t boxed in by predetermined theological concepts or strict doctrines aimed at supporting long held theological beliefs. Interpreting the Bible primarily from the perspective of faith significantly limits both the questions we ask the text and the conclusions we draw from it. If you choose to approach the Bible through the lens of faith, then that should come after you’ve tried to understand this ancient literature in the most unbiased and thoughtful way possible. Theological beliefs should be based on what the text actually says, not what we assume it means or hope it will affirm. This doesn’t mean that everyone who interprets the Bible from a non-faith perspective is irreligious or anti-religious or that everyone who believes in the God of the Bible misinterprets the texts. I’m not even saying you won’t come to the same conclusions about the text or many of the same things you would if you interpreted the Bible primarily from a place of faith. You might. My point is that, if you come to the Bible with the openness to see the texts as capable of doing things like affirming slavery and child sacrifice, commanding genocide, acknowledging other deities, or mimicing preexisting cultural stories and fables (all things texts in the Bible do, and all things that many faith-centered interpreters reject), then you’re going to save yourself a lot of frustration. You won’t have to force theological frameworks or systematic conclusions onto ancient writings that don’t have any of those neatly crafted conclusions or systems in mind. Even if you reach the same conclusions you would from a faith-centered perspective, you’ll get there with greater depth, more openness, and less of a rushed or rigid sense of certainty. You’ll probably have some more humility as well.

No Statements Here

A little over a decade ago, I got my Master’s degree from a popular conservative seminary. Not too long after graduating from there, I applied to another, more liberal, seminary hoping to get another Masters. One afternoon, close to the end of the enrollment process, I found myself sitting in the dean’s office, a well known and prominent Black preacher who invited me to study under him while I was completing my classes. Before he got to any of that though, some of the first words he said to me - words that have stayed with me to this day - were, “Son, we have no statement of faith here.” I assumed it was probably because I was coming out of one of the most conservative evangelical schools in the world, and maybe he was feeling me out or even trying to warn me about the very different theological environment I was about to enter. He never said why, but I appreciated those words because they defined what it meant to approach the Bible through the lenses of non-faith.

See, statements of faith had always been an entry level feature of the fundamentalist and evangelical spaces I had been in, right next to the code of conduct. An entryway. Signing them felt more like a formality, an afterthought. But where I once viewed them as the ground floor, I now realize they were more like the ceiling. These statements were the fence in which you were able to think, reason, disagree, or explore, and anything beyond this boundary was viewed as a threat, not mainly to God or spiritual belief, but to a Westernized system of theological order. The statement of faith functions more as an instrument of control than a mark of faithfulness, a way to protect a particular order rather than understand the original meaning of these ancient texts.

Most Christians probably won’t face any major consequences for signing or not signing a statement of faith. Maybe rejection from church membership or a Christian school or organization, but the same isn’t true for the professors, the senior leaders, and the teachers who are tasked with explaining these ancient texts. By signing these statements and limiting themselves to a faith-centered approach to interpreting the Bible, they confine themselves to the dominant religious tradition and commit themselves to perpetuating long-held theological interpretations with no room for growth, nuance, disagreement, or differing perspectives on complex issues. If they reject a statement of faith, their careers are on the line. How objective can leaders educators really be in Christian spaces? If medical schools were only allowed to teach the interpretations of ancient shamans, how effective would their surgeons be in the operating room? Believe it or not, my point in saying this isn’t about whether or not people should be signing formal statements of faith. Take from that what you will. My point is that when we interpret the Bible, I think the best approach is similar to the dean’s that day in his office, reading the texts of the Bible while saying to yourself, “ I have no statement of faith”, trying to best understand the original meaning in the settings they were written in, before attributing any divine significance to them.

To wrap this up, what I’m not saying is that we all need to be experts or scholars. I’m not even saying we all need to “do our own research” as if we could come to clear conclusions about these ancient texts on our own with Google, a concordance, and an open heart. We’re gonna need a lot of help because, again, the Bible is not clear. We’re talking about ancient languages, with linguistic factors, cultural knowledge, historical background, and comparative studies that we couldn’t begin to know without scholarship, archaeology, and a bunch of other factors and resources. We need experts, not to read the Bible, but in order to read the Bible more accurately, with a better understanding about how ancient peoples viewed themselves and deity and what that meant for their lives. It’s only from that foundation that any subsequent theological beliefs, if any, can be established.