Bible Study

I can still remember sitting in my small Sunday School class and learning Bible stories. I remember David killing Goliath with a sling and a rock. Then there was Solomon showing how wise he was by threatening to slice a baby in two in order to determine which of two women was the real mother. Adam and Eve got us all in trouble by eating fruit that a wily serpent convinced Eve to try. I remember Jonah getting swallowed by a whale. And there was Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt by parting the Red Sea.

We learned lots of stories about Jesus. The miracle stories always got my attention. I knew about Jesus turning water into wine before I had ever seen a glass of wine – though I knew they used wine when my mother walked up to the communion rail once a month. I remember Jesus walking on the water and healing a leper. I remember being impressed by the story of a twelve year old Jesus discussing religion with the learned elders of the temple.

We would sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

On my thirteenth birthday my parents gave me my own leather covered Bible with my name printed on the front in gold letters. That way I could take my own Bible to confirmation class on Saturday morning. I still have it. It is, of course, the King James version. And it has all the words attributed to Jesus printed in red ink.

The Bible holds an amazing place in western and American culture. Millions of people revere the Bible and believe it is God’s word. Among Christians, one’s attitude toward the Bible is critical in defining one’s place on the spectrum from fundamentalist on one extreme to “liberal” on the other.

Our own traditions, the Unitarians and the Universalists, came from the more radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. While many thought them heretics, both the early Unitarians and the early Universalists based their theological dissent on the Bible. The Unitarians believed the Bible did not support a Trinitarian theology. The Universalists believed the Bible supported a view that God would save all of humanity. The founders of our movement in America, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, saw the Bible as the highest religious authority. They supported their theological arguments with biblical proof texts just the way modern fundamentalists do.

So even our tradition, which now stands at the edge (or maybe just beyond the edge) of mainline Protestantism, has its foundation in an interpretation of the Bible. Our forebears revered the Bible and studied it in depth. You and I are the inheritors of a religious tradition in which the Bible has played a central part. You and I live in a nation where the Bible is and always has been not only a central religious work, but a central part of our culture.

Yet you and I live in a very different world today from that of our religious ancestors. The physical sciences have taught us that the universe is huge and ancient. Historical studies, anthropology and archaeology have changed our view of human origins and human history. Increased exposure to other cultures and other religious traditions lets us see our own tradition as one way among many.

What are we to make of the Bible in light of all we know today? What role, if any, should the Bible play in our religious lives? How are we to interpret its meaning today? Does it have one meaning? Do we use the Bible as a source of instruction? How do we pick and choose what parts of it to use? Is it all right to pick and choose? How are we to live in a culture where so many see the Bible as the literal word of God? How are we to discuss the Bible and religion with friends and family for whom the Bible is the center of their lives?

Before we explore what use we make of the Bible, however, we should take a quick look at the Bible itself. What is it? Who wrote it? How did it come to be?

While it sounds a little odd, we first need to remind ourselves that the Bible is not a book. That is, it is not a book in the way we usually think of a book. It does not have a single author. And while the Bible can be seen as an anthology, it is not a typical anthology, either. We don’t know who wrote the vast majority of it. We don’t even know who originally selected most of the works in it.

We should also note that the book we call the Bible is really two Bibles: the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. When we call these by their usual names – the Old Testament and the New Testament – we already adopt a Christian perspective. I should also note briefly that not all Christian Bibles are the same. The Catholic Bible and the standard Protestant Bible are slightly different, as are Bibles of Greek and Slavonic Christians.

I think of the Bible as less an anthology than a collection. It is more like a small library than an anthology. An anthology has a kind of intentionality about selection, criteria for inclusion and an identifiable editor or editors. The Bible lacks that. The very name “Bible” is derived from a plural Greek term, “ta biblia,” which means “the little scrolls.” When they were first collected the writings were indeed on scrolls of leather or papyrus. Different communities had different collections of sacred writings. In fact, the standard collection we have come to know as the Bible was not compiled and ratified by the early church until more than 300 years after the death of Jesus. Some books by Christians were included and others left out because of differences in doctrine. The early church put together the Bible in large part to exclude writings with which it did not agree. Writings by Gnostic Christians were omitted. Some books, like the Book of Revelation, were quite controversial and barely were included.

The works included in our Bible today were written over a period of more than a thousand years. As I mentioned, we don’t know who wrote the vast majority of the books. It is quite clear, however, that the authors of the books in the Bible never imagined that they were writing something to be included in the Bible. That is, they were writing an individual work for a contemporary audience. They never imagined that their words would part of a larger collection and be read two or three millennia in the future and taken to be the inspired word of God.

Even the whole idea of authorship is a problem. Today we see authorship as a form of individual expression. That was manifestly not the case for the men (and they were almost certainly all men) who wrote down the books of the Bible. Often they were writing down and editing elements of an oral tradition, not an original personal statement. They had very different ideas about authorship. For example, we are pretty certain that about half the letters attributed to the apostle Paul were not written by him. However, whoever wrote letters in the name of Paul was following a long tradition of writing in the spirit or tradition of someone famous and putting the famous name on it. They saw nothing wrong with that. Our modern views about plagiarism did not exist.

Let’s look a little closer at a famous Biblical passage as an example of how complicated the whole idea of authorship is. Genesis, the first book in the Bible, opens, in the King James translation, with the famous passage:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” This familiar story in the first chapter of Genesis continues through the six days of creation and culminates with God creating man in his own image.

What scholars point out is that in this section of the creation story the name used for God is “‘Elohim,” a plural Semitic term for divine being. Suddenly, beginning in the second chapter, the name changes. Now the name used is a series of Hebrew initials “YHWH,” which is usually rendered as “Yahweh” or, less accurately, “Jehovah.” In the familiar English translations this is usually rendered as “the Lord God.” The name change begins with the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis:

“These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

A few verses later humankind is created a second time. It is in this second creation that we get the image of the Lord God (or Yahweh) forming man from the dust and breathing life into his nostrils. It is this second creation story that gives us Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.

The point is that it appears as though the author of Genesis is artfully combining two separate creation stories – stories that were probably handed down orally for many generations. Biblical scholars believe that there are at least four separate sources for the first five books of the Bible, the group called the Pentateuch and that Jews call the Torah.

Examples like this abound. What emerges from modern biblical scholarship is a picture of a collection of writings by unknown authors, writings which are often themselves compilations and adaptations of other lost writings and/or an oral tradition. And the writings we do have are copies of copies of copies of copies.

What are we to make of this Bible?

I suggest that we simply take the Bible for what it is. I also suggest that we not take the Bible for what it is not. I would even go so far as to claim that to make the Bible into what it is not is a kind of idolatry.

The Bible is not a work of science. Genesis was never intended to be a historically or scientifically accurate account of the origin of our universe. When Genesis was written there was nothing like a concept of scientific accuracy.

The Bible is not a work of history, although there is a great deal of history in it. But there is a lot of myth, too. I suspect that the writers of the stories of Moses parting the Red Sea and Jonah in the whale would be amazed that we treated these accounts in the way we would treat an Associated Press news story or a modern academic history of the American Civil War.

We should not ask the Bible to be something it is not and something its authors never intended it to be.

Most religious liberals, and certainly most Unitarian Universalists, are not likely to fall into the trap of a rigid, literal, fundamentalist reading of the Bible. The danger for us is just the opposite. The danger for you and me is that in our sophistication we dismiss the Bible altogether.

If you and I take the Bible for what it is, we will take it seriously. In its pages are the seeds of virtually everything we hold sacred in our religious and ethical vision. In the Bible we find an account the emerging religious vision that is the foundation of our religious vision today. In the Bible we find the affirmation that we are to walk humbly, love justice and do mercy. In the Bible, both in the Hebrew and in the Christian scriptures, we find the radical religious (and political) idea that everyone matters. We find an image of human community founded on compassion.

Of course, to read the Bible in this way we have to pick and choose. We have to read it with modern eyes. We have to read it with intelligence and discernment. And, yes, there are certain things we must dismiss as historically and culturally limited.

For example, the rigid patriarchy must be left behind. But the truth is that everyone, even the most rigid and literal fundamentalist, finds the need to read the Bible selectively. Our fundamentalist friends are fond, for example, of condemning homosexuality based on their reading of the purity codes in Leviticus. However, I do not hear them arguing that we should follow the prescriptions in Exodus regarding the sale of children into slavery (though I admit that in my most exasperated moments as a parent I would have been tempted to consider it). I don’t see our fundamentalist friends arguing that we should put to death who people who have committed adultery or who work on the Sabbath, even though biblical passages are crystal clear on this. I don’t see them arguing that it is all right to own slaves, even though the Bible clearly condones it in several places. The fact is that none of us gets off the hook for picking and choosing. We all have to use our intelligence and good sense.

We have to read the Bible with our minds and our hearts open. When we read with open minds and open hearts, I believe we find in the Bible, for all its limitations, an amazing story. It is the story of a people coming to grips with who they are and what it means to live in a way that is acceptable to their God. We read a story of their image of God expanding, gradually through the centuries, from a tribal God who protects his chosen people and who smites their many enemies to an image of a God who loves everyone and who desires that all people love each other and live in peace. That is an amazing story.
The collection of writings we call the Bible contains the emerging human awareness that we are all brothers and sisters. It contains a deepening sense that love, compassion and community are central and essential if we are to make the kingdom of God a reality. This is our story. We are heirs to this story as much as anyone is. This is our Bible, too. It is the common inheritance of everyone. The Bible does not belong to those who have a narrow and literalistic interpretation of it.

And the story the Bible tells is not over. The story did not end two thousand years ago. The story did not end because church fathers canonized certain writings 1600 years ago. The story of the Bible is a story of the human search for what binds us together and what it means to live faithfully. That story, our story, is still unfolding.

We need to study the Bible so that we know the beginnings of our own story. Then we must, like the writers of the story, take inspiration from the past and then write the next chapter in religious and human history.

May the chapter we write be a chapter of one more step in the building of a world where all loved, all are equal, all are accepted. When we learn to live together in love, peace, and community we will have truly studied the Bible and learned its deepest lessons. May we make it so. Amen.