Eating The Bible
Eating the Bible
What This is About
The Bible.
You are not interested in the Bible?
You don’t have time for the Bible?
You are tired of how the Bible is used as a weapon to go after those unliked or different?
I’ll talk here about all of that.
But let me start with two encouragements (and the same two with which I will leave you when it’s all said and done).
Two Things to Do
I encourage you to do two things with a Bible. One, read it every day. Take about 15 to 30 minutes every day to read it. Two, talk with someone or a couple of someones once a week about what you are reading in it.
Read it every day. Talk with someone about your reading once a week.
Getting at The Objections of Time and Interest
Some may object to this reading and discussing because they don’t have any interest or don’t have any time. Let me engage those objections by talking a bit about eating and nutrition.*
Even people who could care less about culinary arts or cuisine, don’t really care about what goes into food dishes or what is in the foodstuffs (animals, plants, synthetics) themselves, still make eating a habit. And even people who don’t have time to go grocery shopping or prepare meals or even have the time to go to a restaurant (or even a “fast food” place!) still manage somehow to find time to eat.
And why is that? Why do they eat even though they are not interested and have no time?
Because they cannot live without eating.
I am saying, I suppose, that a person is not really living without being engaged by Scripture, by this particular kind of encounter with God.
Excursus here. Step aside with me for a moment before I continue on “not really living without being engaged by Scripture.” I can hear some (many?) who may be objecting here to the thought about “not really living” without engaging any encounter with God (that encounter here being writings that one particular religious tradition, Christianity, considers revelatory, the Bible). It’s a huge assumption to make, I know. Why should I project my need or desire to encounter God on you? No reason. But my thinking is that it’s not projection, but rather that this “encounter” with God is already happening with and to all of us, of religious and non-religious stripe, but that we use different language and different prior experience and different prior knowledge with which to identity this happening that is happening to all of us. What I’m thinking is that all of us can relate to and indeed have at least four fundamental questions we consistently and everlastingly ask as we go through our days:
Who am I?
Where do I belong?
Why am I here?
What will become of me?
These four questions concerning identity, community, purpose and destiny, we might say, are simply part and parcel of what it means to be human. What I am saying here is that these questions, as they describe humanity, are too, simultaneously, an encounter with divinity (by the way, related to this is my not unique to me assertion that Jesus is not the Answer to our Questions but that rather Jesus is the Question to our Answers!). Theologians and Philosophers call this notion that all of us, regardless of prior knowledge, have this sense that there is more to life than meets the eye or other senses, apriori knowledge. And these same Theologians and Philosophers will debate whether or not apriori is actually a thing when it comes to knowing God. I side with the side that says it is a thing and that it’s best identified by those four questions of Who, Where, Why and What.
A 16th Century Debate that is Older Than That and Still is Debated Today
And then let me say one more thing about these questions and how the Christian Bible relates to them. Theologian (and Philosopher) Martin Luther and Philosopher (and Theologian) Desiderius Erasmus had a famous written debate about Free Will and Bound Will back in the 16th century that still resounds today. Luther, in his significant contribution to that conversation, a treatise entitled The Bondage of the Will (1525), had quite a bit to say about how the Bible is all about asserting the certainty of God’s promises up and against and in life-giving destruction of all of our speculations concerning God and our relationship and encounter with God. Relating this to our conversation here: we all have endless speculations about God and our encounter with God (again, the Four Questions), and so innately want to find some resolution and peace about it all. If the Bible is designed to do just that, to give “shalom,” or peace that is not just the absence of violence but also the presence of justice, why would a person not be all over it? Why would we not be reading the Bible daily and talking about it weekly so as to continuously receive this Peace?
The Bible Can Be Difficult, But There is A Way In and Around
Now, granted, the Bible does this delivery of the goods rather cryptically and in mixed fashion, but the Promise is there and the Speculation can end (what comes to mind here is John Dominic Crossan’s insightful book How To Read The Bible and Still Be a Christian. Crossan argues that, to use my language, not Crossan’s specifically, there is a Push and a Pushback that goes on throughout the Bible’s parts that can make it sound like it’s talking out of two sides of one mouth. For example, is Jesus the Avenging Warrior as depicted in the Book of Revelation or the Non-Violent Leader as depicted in the 4 Gospel Books?). Here’s where I have to add another thing for you to do. It’s a good idea to get together periodically, at intervals, with somebody who is a trained biblical professional. And so, practically speaking, how might that happen if you don’t have one of those trained persons at your daily disposal? A regular discipline that is the taking in of a “Bible study” can work here. Get with that trained person and do “Bible study” at regular intervals. I know, I know, I said there were only two things to do: read the Bible yourself daily and discuss it with others weekly. But consider it this way: the “Bible study” done at intervals (not daily, not every week) is simply a guided discussion of that weekly sort, but now also with somebody that has some biblical theology acuity who can help clarify things. And, as mentioned, you don’t need it weekly, just regularly, at intervals. It’s not essential, by oh my, it can be very helpful!
Okay, back to the business at hand: about that “not really living without engaging the Scripture.”
If a person doesn’t eat, a person dies physically. If a person doesn’t read Scripture, do they die spiritually? Yes. We can talk separately about how people of other faith traditions than Christianity, including atheism, can read and engage their holy writings with regularity. I would say that yes, they need to do so in order for vitality. I would want a separate conversation about how the Bible is qualitatively different than other of the Traditions’ sacred documents, but, yes, that is a separate conversation.
If that’s the kind of life you want, dying physically and dying spiritually, ok. Don’t eat and don’t read and discuss your Bible. But if you want to live, to be vital, even flourish, trying eating and Bible daily.
Some Thoughts on What Happens to the Stuff You Read
And then, a thought regarding what a person is then consuming and what happens to it.
When you eat stuff, some of it is good for you and is nutritious and your body uses it, but some of it is not helpful, even bad, and your body discards it as waste. The same thing happens when you read the Bible – your read it because it’s part of the fare, but you discard some of it because its wrongheaded in some of its ways. For example, in places it turns God into Somebody we can manipulate (e.g. the Deuteronomy pieces that insist God will bless us if we sit up and fly right). Another example: It turns Jesus into the Great Avenger who is out after blood (the Book of Revelation pieces I already mentioned that have Jesus slaughtering the abject). There’s more: the entire Book of James, which I happen to really like because it’s so darn straightforward about how to be a just and conscientious person who is disciplined in being kind to others and how loving God is about loving neighbor, but which never says a thing about God doing the saving in and through anything let alone Jesus of Nazareth, and so the writing is often misconstrued as a statement clearly saying that you and I, through our compassionate actions, actually have something to say about our eternal destiny.
More Considerations
And, then, there is more that can be said, of course, about this daily Bible reading and weekly Bible conversation. Just like with eating, where there are helpful and more healthful ways to eat (e.g. make sure you eat some breakfast; don’t eat right before bedtime), there are better ways to read the Bible: what parts first, what sequences, what translations to use and all the rest. And just as in eating, where it can be helpful to have someone who knows something about preparing and cooking and presenting the food so that the eating is an experience that allows you to get into, if not appreciate more, what you are actually chewing and swallowing, it can be helpful to be in touch with someone schooled in the Bible’s history, literature, language, hermeneutic and more. That trained person. We have already touched on that point.
Getting At the Objection of the Weaponization of the Bible
Then, there’s this thing about how people use the Bible as a weapon on others. The Bible gets used by many to beat up other people. Not physically with the bound pages, of course, but legally, emotionally, psychologically, socially, economically and then physically by use of the written words that drive physical destruction. Think of how Scripture is used to defend slavery, patriarchy, heterosexual hegemony, state militarization, economic prosperity wherein not all get what they need but some get particular favor, and more. The Bible gets used by people to further their own political, social and economic agendas. Its gets used by people to try to make those users look Christian, which gets equated with being moral, so that will further their popularity. With today’s Christian Nationalism the Bible gets used to equate America with God and denigrate and degrade other nationalities and other religions.
This abuse, not use, of the Bible in all of these fashions gives good reason to be sick and tired of anything to have to do with the Bible and stay away, disgusted about it all.
A couple of things about this.
One, it usually takes more than reading the Bible to get at ways to counter this abuse. It usually takes some of that “Bible Study” I have mentioned. For example, a person can read quite clearly in the New Testament Books of I and 2 Timothy and Titus how women are expressly not given equal rights and place. And tradition has it that the Apostle Paul wrote that stuff. But some study will tell us Paul did not write it but rather others soon after or concurrent with Paul who thought Paul’s radical equality given women (in the spirit of Jesus, the one he was following) in the letters Paul in fact did write (Galatians, Romans, and 5 other New Testament books) was a bit too much and needed to be pulled back and softened so that male domination reigned.
Two, it’s important to read the Bible not so you can do something with it but so that it can do something with you and to you. I know that this can still be understood as a way of seeing a cause lifted up in the Bible (e.g. go, baptize people!) that you then are to do something about, but that’s not what I am saying here. When I say we need to try to let the Bible do something with us and to us I mean to try to use it to change us, not others. If and when we do that, the Bible is not a weapon to be wielded on others, but rather an opportunity for change in ourselves that will open us to live for others with justice and reconciliation.
Ok, Read it Daily, Talk About your Reading Weekly with Others, Study it Periodically and as Needed, And then One Last Thing!
You can do one more thing too, but you don’t have to do it to start out, because it will happen pretty much defacto, if you do the first two things and likely will still happen if you don’t do the third thing (Study) This last thing is talk with God about what you are reading. If you will allow it, you can look forward to vigorous and invigorating conversation. By the way, there’s a bunch of that in the Bible itself. Take the book of Job, for example, and check out there what an innocent sufferer has to say to God and what God has to say as well.
Ok, Ok, Three or Four Things to Do with the Bible Are Too Much? Let’s Just Start with the Two Things.
So, yes, there is a lot to consider, but really the most important thing to do is to get started with those two things: read daily and talk to someone weekly about what you’ve been reading.
Eat your Bible.
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* Eugene Peterson, the Pastor/Theologian/Author, wrote a book a while back (2006) entitled Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (By the way, Peterson also wrote the excellent paraphrased Bible that he called “The Message,” something I would recommend you have alongside a good, reliable English (if that’s your primary language) translation (say, the New Revised Standard Version) so you might refer to it for some enlightening angles on the biblical narrative). In Eat This Book, Peterson describes how spiritual reading is not like reading something for information only. John of Patmos writes in his revelation from God, that is recorded in what we now call The Book of Revelation in the Bible, that he, John is instructed to eat the scroll that the Angel gives to him (Revelation 10:9-10). From the accounting of this ingestion, Peterson gives us his creative work and this compelling metaphor to which I commend you.
