Book + Excerpt: The Bible
From "Everything Good about God is True: Choosing Faith" (Broadleaf Books, 2024)
Because I am woefully behind on a book manuscript deadline — Prophets, Priests, Pastors, and Poets: Being and Becoming the Resurrected Christ — in lieu of new content and for the next month or two, I will share book excerpts from past book projects. I would not hate it if you bought a copy or ten :-)
The Spirit and The Bible
An excerpt from Everything Good about God is True: Choosing Faith (Broadleaf Books, 2024), 81-83
How does the Spirit move through the Bible?
The Spirit moves through the Bible:
Not an indifferent collection but an anthology of human experience.
Not a contract to be enforced but a covenant to be honored.
Not a map to be followed but an adventure to be embraced.
Not a literal set of rules but evolving truths to be revealed.
Not a weapon of faith but a wellspring of liberation.
The Bible tells the breadth and depth of the human experience with God. The Bible both liberates and binds; it is a living conversation and delicate dance between humanity and the Spirit. It’s a record of God’s story as told by authors who sought to discern God’s movement in the story of their people. Yes, it contains beautiful passages that evoke love, hope, joy, and peace. But the Bible also contains the rawness and reality of a world filled with ugliness, despair, sorrow, and destruction. While some prefer a faith devoid of difficulty, strife, and conflict, I find deep comfort in the fact that, in the midst of the good and the bad, God still speaks.
I do not deny that the Bible has been weaponized to oppress communities, justify systems of violence, and otherwise serve as a handbook for human havoc-raising. But I am not going to start there. I want to start with why I believe the Bible is important. Put simply, the Bible operates as a living guidebook for our lives. The Bible guides us into understanding God’s faithfulness to us. While some see Scripture as clear and concise rules for life, I don’t. In fact, the Bible is anything but clear or concise. But I do believe that reading Scripture challenges us to dive into discerning God’s longings for us, in any particular time and circumstance.
Most importantly, the Bible communicates God’s greatest hopes and intentions for humanity. The Bible is long and complicated enough to embody a multitude of God’s hopes for us. When we read the story of Jeremiah, in which God calls a child to speak truth to the world, we might find God calling us, too, to be prophetic in the face of injustice. As we read about Jesus’s constant prayer and study (which often left the disciples confused), we might commit ourselves to practices of self-reflection and discipleship, which means following Jesus. In Mark 2, when we read of people going to great lengths to carry their friend to Jesus for healing, we learn what it means to experience belonging. Through the wisdom literature—Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs — we are given language for God’s beauty, creativity, and expansiveness. Through the Bible, God tell us through human authors, “Here is what I hope you to be and become, and I am with you always.”
As much as the Bible brings clarity, it is also filled with contradictions. Using a lens of biblical literalism—the belief that the Bible is the exact word of God—to understand a document written by humans is fundamentally flawed and leads to proof-texting and dangerous misapplication.
If you are willing to take the text out of context, you can probably support almost any position, about anything, by using the Bible. The weaponizing of the Bible is one of the most destructive and dangerous parts of Christianity, past and present. For instance, when people claim “biblical marriage” as the standard in the debates about same-gender marriage, they do so as if there is a singular standard of marriage endorsed by the Bible, and thus by God. News flash: if we listed the ways in which people engaged in marriage in the Bible (polygamy, incest, sexual violence, and an absence of state-sanctioned marriage at all), most people would not choose to have a “biblical marriage.” This is where the Spirit comes in, challenging us to interpret Scripture in community and to hold onto nuance. The Spirit reminds us that, even though this text was written by human hands, over generations, and through countless cultures and contexts, the words are as alive today as they were when chisel, quill, or pen was first put to stone, parchment, or paper.
Seeing the Bible as a living, breathing container of God’s voice to us is not a sign of weakness or an old-fashioned, out-of-date faith. Rather, it is a sign of depth and confidence of faith in God’s meaningful presence yesterday, today, and always.
Thanks for reading this book excerpt. All of my books can be found on bookshop.com or wherever you buy books to be added to your nightstand pile.