What Is The Bible and What Does It Do?

by Dave Mantel

If you read the title of this post in the voice of Arnold in Kindergarten Cop...then we're starting on the right page.

An ongoing, and seemingly endless, conversation in evangelical circles is: how do we interpret the Bible in light of more and more historical and scientific discovery in this modern age? As a Christian, whether you claim belief in the Bible as 100% without error, or a book of stories outlining a moral code for humanity to live by, or something in the large gap between, there is an ongoing question of why we believe what we believe about the Bible.

Recently, Rob Bell has been writing a series on his blog entitled "What Is The Bible?" It's a great read, whatever your own preconceived answer to that question is, and I really recommend it. It compelled me to examine just what I believe about the Bible, its authorship, divine inspiration, and purpose.

Something I have been curious about for a long time is how devout Jews look at the Old Testament—the Torah, specifically—compared to the evangelical world. The morning I started writing this post, Rachel Held Evans had a Q&A in her "Ask A..." series with Rabbi Rachel Rose. In this post, she answered, in part, some of the questions I was having. When asked ,"How do you interpret the passages where God seems to command things that are immoral?" Rabbi Rose answered,

The classical Jewish answer is that these rules were never intended to be taken literally, and were in fact never followed at all. For instance, in the case of the commandment to stone an unruly child, our sages placed so many conditions and qualifications on that commandment that it could never have been carried out...

In Jewish tradition, we frequently speak in terms of "Written Torah" (the text of the Hebrew Scriptures as they have come down to us) and "Oral Torah" (the ensuing centuries of conversations and interpretations of our sages and rabbis, which are also considered to be holy.) We always read Torah in the context of generations of commentators and interpreters, Rashi, Talmud, Midrash, all the way to new interpretations in the modern age...

She references an excerpt from the Jewish Virtual Library, Rebellious Son, in which the author asserts, in reference to Deuteronomy 21:18–21,

"There is no record of a rebellious son ever having been executed, except for a dictum of R. Jonathan stating that he had once seen such a one and sat on his grave (Sanh. 71a). However, it is an old and probably valid tradition that there never had been, nor ever will be, a rebellious son, and that the law had been pronounced for educational and deterrent purposes only, so that parents be rewarded for bringing their children up properly (ibid.; Tosef. Sanh. 11:6)."

One of the more easy examples, no doubt—stoning the rebellious son. But what about some of the more problematic texts that were enacted? Slavery? Polygamy? What about texts like Jonah or the Exodus that seem to live far from the current reality we know today?

Jonah: known for, among other things, getting vomited out of a fish.

In the series mentioned above, "What Is The Bible?" Bell says with regard to the story of Jonah,

"If you don’t believe it literally happened, that’s fine. Lots of people of faith over the years have read this story as a parable about national forgiveness. They point to many aspects of the surreal nature of the story as simply great storytelling because the author has a larger point, one about the Israelites and the Assyrians and God’s call to be a light to everyone, especially your enemies.

Right on. Well said.

Just one problem. Some deny the swallowed-by-a-fish part not from a literary perspective, but on the basis of those things just don’t happen. Which raises a number of questions: What’s the criteria for the denial? Do we only affirm things that can be proven in a lab? Do we only believe things we have empirical evidence for? Do we believe or not believe something happened based on…whether we believe that things like that happen or not? (That was an awkward sentence. Intentionally.) Can we only affirm things that make sense to us? Are we closed to everything that we can’t explain?

If we reject all miraculous elements of all stories because we have made up our mind ahead of time that such things simply aren’t possible, we run the risk of shrinking the world down to what we can comprehend. And what fun is that?

That said, there are others who say Of course he was swallowed a fish, that’s what the story says happened!

Fine.

Just one problem. It’s possible to affirm the literal fact of a man being swallowed by a fish, making that the crux of the story in such a way that you defend that, believe that, argue about that, and in spending your energies on the defend-the-fish-part miss the point of the story, the point about allowing God’s redeeming love to flow through us with such power and grace that we are able to love and bless even our worst enemies."

The reality is, the Bible was written by human beings. They had agendas, they had stories to tell. They were from ancient times, writing to ancient peoples. Their world was completely different than our own. So what does that mean? It means that the most important questions we can ask when studying the Bible are, "Why is this here?" and "What was the author's intention in writing this this way?" Without beginning with those kinds of questions, it would be easy for us to start stoning our disobedient sons to death in the middle of town. And I, as an occasionally disobedient son, am not a fan of that outcome.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ramsey.Psalter.1310.jpg
Photo 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Lastman_-_Jonah_and_the_Whale_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg