What happens when the words of God no longer point back to the Word of God, himself?
When the holy scriptures become so riddled with misinterpretations, biased exegesis, and painful memories that the words no longer sound anything like the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us?
When the one and only means many Christian circles ever gave us to interact with, hear from, and engage with the heavens becomes the thing that reminds us most of our worst moments of hell?
If you grew up Christian, especially evangelical, I want to honor your even clicking upon this title and enduring what I am sure has felt like an incredibly uncomfortable intro by affirming right up front: I don’t believe that means we disregard it.
I want to affirm that I personally believe the Bible is divine, inspired, and a wonderfully precious gift from the Holy Spirit intended to help us understand, recognize and experience the Divine in our time. I believe it is a truly sacred treasure of words, stories, poetry, worship, and documentation straight from our brothers and sisters throughout history given to us to help in our never-ending process that is the understanding of the God of all creation. I believe it is a blessed example of God partnering with humanity to bring about His will of goodness for all and the restoration of all things.
But I also believe it has been used to perpetuate the most evil and cruelest forms of destruction.
And I believe that we can no longer pretend that it hasn’t.
Misreading Scripture with Traumatized Eyes
In Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes authors E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien share a literal back-translation to English of Psalm 23 ("The Lord is My Shepherd") as understood by the Khmus tribe of Laos:
The Great Boss is the one who takes care of my sheep I don't want to own anything The Great Boss wants me to lie down in the field. He wants me to go to the lake. He makes my good spirit come back. Even though I walk through something the missionary calls the valley of the shadow of death, I do not care. You are with me. You use a stick and a club to make me comfortable. You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes while my enemies watch. You pour car grease on my head. My cup has too much water in it and therefore overflows. Goodness and kindness will walk single file behind me all my life. And I will live in the hut of the Great Boss until I die and am forgotten by the tribe.
Similarly, I want to share a literal back-translation of another common verse, but this time as understood by those abused, harmed, and manipulated by religious entities:
For God so loved the world that he murdered and tortured his one and only Son, that whoever says a prayer and confesses him as Lord shall not burn in an eternal lake of fire but get to exist in an ethereal cloud paradise forever. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world (unless you are gay, a woman preacher, a democrat, or have sex before marriage), but to save the world through him. Whoever behaves and acts like a good Christian is not condemned, but whoever does not behave and act like a good Christian stands condemned already because they have not believed in the interpretations and truths the men in charge declared came straight from the mouth of God’s one and only Son. This is not an exaggeration. This is how John 3:16-18 is understood by a vast majority of people who were raised in religious spaces. I know, because I recently walked through this exact passage with 11 of them and this is what was heard.
Because I believe what I do about the Bible, we endured through the mess and chaos that was our preconceived understanding of this passage and sought to find a better way forward. We fought together to get past the baggage and very real and embodied trauma that these verses brought up within us and did our best to read the words with fresh eyes and a reminder of original context that did not include Christian nationalism or the Billy Graham Crusades. It was hard. It was exhausting. It was honestly, not really at all encouraging. And that was with every voice being heard in a safe and trusted environment where no one person was trying to declare their own interpretation as “the right one.”
Because I already know, there are many that read that back-translation and immediately thought to themselves, “of course that’s wrong! my preacher would never present it that way. He uses the right commentaries and went to the right seminary. So they should just come to my church where they can be told the right way of understanding those verses instead. All better!”
Not all better, friends. Not all better.
Information Overload
I existed in the realm of Bible studies and Bible teachers long enough to know exactly what our knee-jerk response to the issue I am presenting is. Just deliver the right information instead. Just keep preaching it, teaching it, and lecturing it at them until all their painful woes go away. Just give them the right authors and commentators and preachers to learn from and all is well, they can get back to their daily devos as sponsored by LifeWay.
But what any trauma-informed, heck any trauma-experienced individual can affirm is that we can not be lectured out of our pain. Often, our traumatic experiences exist as a wall, one built to protect and help our souls survive, but a wall nonetheless that becomes impenitiable. And information alone is not strong enough nor stable enough to burst through such walls, let alone begin to help gently take them down.
Dismantling such walls is a process. One that takes time and patience and resilience and presence. A process that requires safety and trust, and the time and consistency required for both to be built. So, while sermons and lectures and information output may have their place in such a process— such intellectually fixated solutions cannot be our main mode for such healing.
And if most church folk, especially evangelicals, were being honest with ourselves— that absolutely terrifies us.
In the world of 40 minute sermons and endless Bible study series and celebrity preachers and famed podcasters and authors, intellectual solutions are all we really know. So, if those hurt and damaged by religious spaces can’t get it together long enough to sit through a sermon, to come to our 6 week women’s study, to watch a Matt Chandler video or to start listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast, well they are just shit out of luck aren’t they? After all, that’s all we really know or have to offer.
And so we finally arrive at my point in all this:
Dear Church, that is no longer enough.
It is biblical to believe that God is bigger than the Bible
If the only way we know how to encourage folks toward the heart of God is through a book that we ourselves have been complicit in manipulating, misinterpreting, and utilizing for selfish and controlling purposes, we are the ones who are shit out of luck.
What does it say of our beliefs and of our faith that the primary means through which we can have others experience, know, and learn about God is via a piece of literature, that in itself reveals just how many ways there are beyond it’s written words to engage with and relate to God?
Within the Bible itself we see food and feasts and celebrations and stories and parables and walking together and traveling together and learning hard lived lessons together all contribute to humanity’s knowing and engaging with the Divine. We see caring for the poor, the ill, the outcast, the forgotten, the widow, the orphan, and the marginalized all be means through which everyday men and women grow closer to the likeness and ways of Jesus. We see the gosh dang Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ himself reveal themselves to be the word of God incarnate, God with us, and God within us, intending to do much greater things than those we read of in this ancient text.
The word of God reveals just how active and present the Word of God is beyond the written words of scripture. Therefore, no one’s relationship with God should be wholly dependent on such written words alone.
There are a myriad of ways God has provided for humanity to engage with the Divine. And I truly believe that if church folk could humble themselves enough to actually want to learn from and exist with the deconstructed, the shunned, the isolated, and the lost, we are the ones who would end up blessed, discovering just how active and present our God is even outside of the written words of Scripture.
If we truly want to live according to those words and care for the hurting, seek after the strays, draw near to the brokenhearted, and sit near and with the sick, we have to reckon with the reality that the words of Scripture may actually be causing them more pain than healing right now. And while I, myself, will hold onto the reckless hope that this will not always be the case, I do believe that the words of Scripture confirm, our God is bigger and able and willing and wanting to continue to engage with humanity fully throughout whatever long and slow and patient process will be required for healing our understanding of such a sacred text again.
The only question left to ponder is, are we?
“Okay, but like how?”
I am always one for practicality and as a pastor and planter very much present in the space of learning how to address this reality, I’d like to end this post by sharing some ways our church is seeking to follow, know, and engage with God and the ways of Jesus even in the midst of our complex feelings toward scripture.
Experimenting with ways to explore scripture communally and conversationally, rather than having one voice declare a meaning of scripture declaratively.
Making room in our liturgy for discussions, for the sharing of our everyday lives, for the voicing of questions and frustrations, and for the uncomfortability that comes with not needing to resolve those right away.
Exploring, discovering, teaching, and practicing methods of meditation and holistic reflections that help us get in tune with our emotions, our bodies, our thoughts, and the voice of God we hear internally.
Utilizing the gifts and practices of the historic church like complines, icons, the liturgical calendar, and the Creeds.
Various forms of prayer like Examen, Lectio Divina, and Ignatius Contemplation. Visio Divina is a favorite for our crew. I have previously shared some examples of how we practice such forms of prayer here:
Taking the time to truly get to know one another and share about each other’s faith experiences, helping us both recognize and leave space for one another’s perspectives.
And most recently, seeking and discussing together what bringing healing and redemption to our greater community might look like through communally discerning a shared mission. (CLICK HERE for more information on how integral mission is to the foundation and forming of our church)
I have learned about all of the above practices through various other faith traditions, unheard of books from the 60s, spiritual formation experts, a psychology book or two, and of course, the Bible itself. The reality of trying to engage with God communally in ways that go beyond a simple exegetical presentation of scripture is that there isn’t really one clear roadmap for that. It takes a sort of creativity, a sensitivity to the Spirit, and a deep knowing of your people that I think far too many pastors have gotten away from requiring for far too long.
Would we have the courage to put down the Bible study guides for a second. Would we have the boldness to step away from the repetitive discussion questions for a time. Would we be so brave as to seep ourselves into the spiritual, the mystical, the trauma-informed, and the psychologically proven in order to truly offer our people a safe and healing experience of the Divine.
Holy Spirit FIRE right here!! 🔥 Love this piece.
Hmm. In all your philosophizing you seem to miss the point that what we call 'the Bible' is written exclusively by Hebraic/Jewish authors. And compiled by them. And even translated by them (think Septuagint). It is the Hebraic/Jewish take on God. It is very similar to other Ancient Near Eastern cultures in some regards (think Hammurabi's code). It is not in chronological order, and for a Western mind on the heels of Greek logic and scientific rationalism/empiricism, that often leads to struggles to understand. It has metaphor, but it is that culture's metaphor and that makes it hard to understand. (Think the book of Revelation...lots of metaphor, which though it might make us scratch our heads, the author believed that what he wrote was going to come to pass.) It was also not originally written in any language save paleo-Hebrew, Aramaic, and koine Greek. That's why your paraphrases are total bunk...because you skip over the necessity to try and read it not through an emotional lens, but through the lens of the languages in which it is recorded. It has its own civil codes, moral codes, societal codes, political codes, cultural expectations, etc. You have to let those things be there when you read it. That's something atheists and skeptics just don't get. They totally don't do that with any other ancient religious texts. And though it may have things you think "God is bigger than that now", you cannot unfairly use that expectation to make it say or not say something it doesn't (outside its cultural context). Otherwise you are eisegeting and not exegeting.
(Let me say in this next bit I'm not passing moral judgment on you, only pointing out what I think might be an error in your thinking about this topic).
It's pretty clear from your post that you don't read the Bible as what it is: a claim by a people group that THEY and only THEY have the CORRECT view of YHWH ELOHIM (God). That THEY and only THEY were SELECTED by this YHWH to reveal him to the world (which is the TORAH). All other religions (of that day and even to now because the Jewish/Hebrew people still exist) therefore are INCORRECT views of YHWH and INCORRECT views on how to approach Him. They believe God created the world by fiat declaration. They believe that God has certain expectations of how to approach Him and how to approach each other in community. They have prophecies (some of which do seem to have come to pass; others are still waiting to be proved). They have kings (these have been confirmed by other sources). They have battles. They have political infighting (think when the two kingdoms split into Israel and Judah). They have romance (Song of Songs). They have poetry that captures the essence of human desires and hopes and sorrows (many psalms fall into each category). They have wisdom in day to day life problems (Proverbs). They are unafraid to ask the BIG questions about life, God, purpose, death, etc. (Think Ecclesiastes). They have claims that God incarnated as a human being to save us in a way the first Adam was supposed to do (the Gospels, the Epistles which explain the Gospels). In a short summary...you have a human book that carries the full brunt of the human experience though the eyes of an ethnic people group. And there are places where apparently they believed the actual words from God Himself were being spoken, either to a prophet, a king, an apostle (through the mouth of Yeshua), and so on. You have a historical mythology unlike anything the world has ever seen or produced in any other culture or religion or philosophy. That in itself is a miracle that boggles the mind. And in the literature, no one hides the heroes' moral vices and flaws. David was a polygamist and rapist. Paul was a murderer. Peter was a foot in the mouth Dunning-Kruger type. Solomon was a lothario. You have people praying for all kinds of things: sex, romance, marriage, children, parents, national safety, God to show up, miracles, wealth, purpose, and so on. Let it be that. Let it be that.
But I'm always intrigued when a 'Christian' starts wanting God out of the context in which He is presented. Like, "God is bigger than the clear writings against homosexuality" or "God wouldn't mind female leaders in a congregation" and so on and so forth. When it's clear the text says completely otherwise. (Just choosing those two more controversial topics as an illustration.) Because in one breath a Christian will say I accept and believe the Bible, but then turn around and try to reason away the parts he or she thinks are obsolete or no longer applicable because, "God is bigger..." That just smacks of intellectual contradiction and two-facedness. I for one, don't want to go there simply because it's not fair to the people who wrote it. So using point one. Why is God against homosexuality from the Hebraic/Jewish point of view? Culturally because it is a direct act of disobedience to his first command ever given to humanity: Be fruitful and multiply. Heterosexuality was created for that purpose. Homosexuality was not. The creation of man and woman in the marriage relationship is also symbolic of the love of the bridegroom (Yeshua) and His bride (the Ekklesia). Anything that distorts that is anathema to YHWH ELOHIM. I'm not trying to 'bash gays' by saying this. I'm simply informing that is how that culture saw this. It's how the early apostolic communities would have interpreted homosexuality as a bad thing - because it doesn't fulfill God's purposes for humanity to increase and be blessed, whether it's male or female homosexuals. Homosexuality is basically flipping God's heterosexual design off to His face. To the second point. There is a deeper reason the apostle Paul (and we can assume the other apostles as well as they all met from time to time to compare and make sure they were ALL preaching the same thing) did not appoint or allow female heads/leaders in the congregations (church is the incorrect translation by the way, but I'm sure you know that). It actually has to do with what transpired in Genesis chapter six when fallen angels mated with female women. I'll let you do the research. That's why. If women are granted equal authority to men in a biblical congregation it would act as a draw for fallen angels to try that again. You might think I'm crazy, but I'll let you do the research.