My childhood Bible was a formidable factor. I carried it round in a quilted tote bag geared up with further pockets for highlighters, pencils, bookmarks, and notepads. I had an elaborate color-coding system for the highlighters— yellow for God’s guarantees, pink for the divine injunctions I wanted to observe, and blue for the verses I discovered comforting after I felt unhappy or scared. The margins had been stuffed with my tween wonderings: The place did Cain’s spouse come from? How did all of these animals coexist on the ark with out consuming one another? Did Jesus know who he actually was when he was little?
I learn my Bible voraciously, and I learn it actually. Raised in a bibliocentric custom, I used to be taught that God’s phrase is ideal, devoid of inconsistency or error. Each phrase in it’s deliberately chosen by God, and each occasion recorded in it’s traditionally correct. So Jonah actually did spend three days inside an enormous fish, and there actually was a catastrophic flood that engulfed all of planet Earth, and there actually is a “lake of fireside” the place non-Christians will sometime gnash their enamel.
I used to be additionally taught to learn the Bible as a simple and definitive rule guide that covers all bases on the subject of each day dwelling. The acronym my religion group unwittingly affirmed was B-I-B-L-E: Primary Directions Earlier than Leaving Earth.
Once I look again now on the years I spent lovingly carrying that pink purveyor of certainty round like a talisman, I really feel many issues. Tenderness for my girlhood fervor. Envy for the innocence I delivered to my devotional studying. Anger for all of the questions I wasn’t allowed to ask. Grief for the unconditional affection I as soon as held for the guide—an affection I discover a lot tougher to entry now.
As with most everybody who goes by way of a religion deconstruction, my inherited methods of participating the Bible fell aside after I was a younger grownup. It turned clear that literalism couldn’t maintain water, that not all the pieces within the Bible is prescriptive, that God is not going to be contained or constrained by something we people craft in God’s identify, and that there are many life circumstances for which the Bible gives no directions in any respect. I felt duped, and I ended studying. I not knew what the Bible was or what it was for. I not knew who I used to be in its presence. I made a decision I’d by no means permit myself to be tricked once more.
It was a painful loss. The Bible had been my closest companion for years: my refuge, my confidence, my positive pathway to God. Letting it go felt like loss of life.
Philosophers and theologians typically converse of “a second naïveté” in issues of religion. Paul Ricoeur describes this as “a return to the enjoyment of our first naïveté, however now completely new, inclusive, and mature.” Richard Rohr means that it’s a type of childlike simplicity we return to after a lot wandering—the best approach to proceed the journey of religion “with out turning into indignant, break up, alienated, or ignorant.” A second naïveté, Rohr insists, “is the very objective of mature maturity and mature faith.”
My work now’s to domesticate this second naïveté in relation to the Bible. To return to scripture with all of the instruments of historic and literary criticism I’ve realized, with out permitting these instruments to develop into obstacles. To reintegrate coronary heart and thoughts, soul and physique. To belief that the God who first met me within the pages of scripture can nonetheless meet and nourish me now.
It grieves me that so many progressive Christians shrink back from this work, selecting biblical illiteracy as an alternative. As if the guide can solely be credibly opened by those that dissect it in divinity faculties or wield it with collars round their necks. The reality is, we are able to’t afford to be blind to the Bible at this cultural second when it’s being weaponized in opposition to weak individuals. Loving our neighbors properly and effectively means cultivating a deep familiarity and confidence across the phrase of God. Whether or not we prefer it or not, the Bible is within the cultural market, and the conversations it generates there have life-and-death penalties. It’s incumbent upon us to take part intelligently in these conversations.
So how do I method the Bible now, on this, my second naïveté? I wrestle with it. I take care of it, chew on it, argue with it, query it. I inform God truthfully when it delights or appalls me. I consider that God’s Spirit is in my bewilderment and rage as a lot as she is in my awe and gratitude. If a narrative in scripture breaks my coronary heart, I ask if it breaks God’s coronary heart, too. If I see biblical characters invoking God’s identify to justify horrific acts, I don’t assume that God is OK with these acts. As a substitute, I howl with God in sacred indignation.
In brief, I not method the Bible as a rule guide, science guide, or historical past textual content. I see it as a wealthy, multivocal, multigenerational library of conversations about God and with God, undertaken by flawed individuals who cared about in search of and serving the Divine and who acquired the entire enterprise flawed as typically as they acquired it proper. I see the Bible as each devotional and instructive in that it gives us a tremendous document of an evolving, in search of, lurching religion. Three steps ahead, two steps again. A damaged humanity stumbling towards an ever-gracious God who beckons us ever ahead.
And eventually, I see the Bible because the opening strikes in a dialog that’s dynamic and ongoing. The guide is open, not closed, and that’s the reason we have to hold studying it—nevertheless fraught and complex our studying is likely to be. Its subsequent pages await our participation. They are going to be written throughout our very lives.
