Starting Saturday (10/20), we’ll examine the question “Aren’t women treated poorly in the Bible?” On Saturday, we’ll look at the patriarchal culture that dominated Biblical times and how Jesus treated women in the Gospels. Later in the week, we’ll take a look at Paul – did he support women in leadership in the church or did he really mean that women should remain silent?
In the meantime, I want to share a recent blog post from Rachel Held Evans. I started following her blog after coming across her book Evolving in Monkey Town, which looks at faith, doubt, and the challenge of asking tough questions about Christianity. Her newest book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which is due out soon, chronicles her attempt to follow the biblical instructions for women as closely as possible.
This particular post is called I love the Bible. She talks about wrestling with the Bible and with differences in interpretation. Here’s a brief excerpt (actually, the entire post is not that long):
"Differences in interpretation should not lead us to question one another's passion or commitment to Scripture, but rather invite us into conversation with the shared assumption that we are all struggling toward truth, all trying to figure it out.
"Those of us who have wrestled know that no one's interpretation is inerrant. Those of us who have wrestled know we can be wrong.
"I love the Bible more now than ever before because I have finally surrendered to God’s stories."
In the meantime, we've had some interesting discussion on the post Is Church Still Relevant Today? so I hope you'll check that out if you haven't done so already.
I’m having a hard time buying Evans’ Bible-as-a fairy-tale pabulum. Once you get past the view that the Bible is the inerrant word of God argument though, then that gets you into interpretation. I’ll agree with her assertion that “no one's interpretation is inerrant” of the Bible as a whole, but individual verses or passages are different. Someone is right and someone is wrong in those cases, and it’s worth discussing. I do agree with her that “differences in interpretation should not lead us to question one another's passion or commitment to Scripture, but rather invite us into conversation”. It may well be that the vagueness is intentional and made to draw us into a living relationship with God and/or to give the Bible some flexibility across millennia.
ReplyDeleteShe has also overlooked the fact that the Bible is somewhat historical, which gives it some credibility. Archeology verifies it in places, and other historians such as Josephus back it up. Finally, where it has two or more witnesses agreeing with each other, it lends credence to whatever they’re saying. To look at the Bible as nothing more than a collection of God-inspired stories I think is incomplete at best.
That's an interesting perspective that I didn't get when I read her blog post (maybe that's because I've read other posts on her blog and could be reading more into this one than is actually there).
DeleteI have the impression that she takes the Bible seriously, but not in a strictly literal and inerrant sense. What I drew from her post is that we don't do the Bible justice if we view it only in terms of a blueprint for living, a how-to manual, or short inspirational verses divorced from the context of the Bible as a whole.
There's a viewpoint that runs through the responses in Christian Piatt's book that the Bible is a collection of books written by different people over thousands of years and they don't always agree with each other. Instead of wrapping things up all neat and tidy, the books and voices of the Bible call out to us to join in the discussion, to wrestle with the interpretations and implications. As you say, to draw us into a living relationship with God.
What I think she advocates (and I could be wrong) is to approach the Bible not with our own preconceptions but to be open to God's story as it moves from the pages of the Bible and into our lives. Or maybe that's what I want it to mean.
In any event, after we wrestle with what the Bible says about women this week, I want to shift focus to some questions about how we interpret the Bible. So there will be much more to discuss on this topic!
Here's something I would have added to the original post if my mind had actually been working at the time:
ReplyDeleteOne thing I appreciate about Rachel Held Evans is she takes the Bible seriously enough not only to read it but to advocate that we should read it as well rather than rely on someone else to interpret it for us. I grew up in a mainline Protestant church in an area that was (and still is) dominated by Southern Baptists, Pentacostals, and other conservative fundamental denominations. As a kid, I heard a lot of conflicting pronouncements about what was supposed to be in the Bible - including ideas that didn't always jibe with what I was learning about God and Jesus. Except for one gospel, parts of the book of Revelation, and a feeble attempt to start from the beginning that faltered somewhere in Genesis, I really didn't read the Bible to see if what I heard made sense.
Sadly, I drifted away from the church after high school, puzzled by the sometimes nasty debates between Christian factions and with only a gut feeling that some of the declarations just didn't seem right. Somewhere down the line I recall hearing someone say that "God helps those who help themselves" came from Ben Franklin and not the Bible. It made me start thinking about how many other things people have said that wasn't actually in the Bible. Or what interpretations, based on scripture, only stand up if you ignore the rest of scripture.
It took me a long time to come around to reading the Bible seriously. That came in baby steps. First, reading bits from the old "Good News Bible" I was given as a kid. Then, after returning to church, getting involved in group studies and making that leap to buying a study Bible. Finally taking that big leap of reading the entire Bible all the way through (more than once) with the help of many friends at Grace.
That doesn't make me a Bible expert (in fact, it reminds me how much I still have to learn). But I've learned to appreciate the Bible not as a dusty old book of instructions for everything but as a living account of God and our relationship with God. And I've learned that not only is God tolerant of my questions, but God responds when I ask them.