Tag: bible

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Tweaks to how I’ve been teaching the Bible

As readers of this blog are aware, one of my great frustrations over the past several years has been my inability to find a satisfying way to teach biblical studies in a high school setting. Comparative religion? Check! Theory of religion? Check! American religion? Check! Even philosophy? Check! All these topics have been doable; not perfect, always, but doable! But most of my classes on the Bible have been frustrating. They’ve been the hardest to maintain attention, manage my classroom, create discussion, etc.

The harsh feedback of one student last year was something like this: “This class goes too deep; it covers too much”. We used to offer up to two semesters’ worth. The last versions of these classes were known as “The Hebrew Scriptures” and “The Christian Scriptures”. Loosely, they covered the Tanakh/Old Testament and then the New Testament, dabbling a little in non-canonical literature.

The decision was made to streamline the religious studies catalog going into this year. This included creating a standard class that all students must take as part of their religious studies credit (“Philosophy for Human Flourishing”). And it meant that we’d have a single semester offering of the Bible (“Introduction to the Bible”).

While I’m only a quarter of a year into it, so maybe I’m speaking too soon, I think this was the correct decision. Here are some of the changes that occurred in how I teach the Bible now that I’ve got half the time to do it in:

  1. I spend a unit talking about how we got the Bible: ancient writing, scribal culture, the role of the printing press in standardizing and democratizing access to the Bible, and how we get modern English translations. This was received surprisingly well.
  2. I focus on the basic basics. I mean, I essentially outline the Bible around Abraham, to Moses, to David, to Jesus. I don’t assume any biblical literacy going in. This is wise. I’ve noticed a steep decline in biblical literacy. I assume no pre-knowledge and explain everything like it’s the first time my students are hearing it. For those with some pre-knowledge, they’re able to contribute by asking questions and making observations that thicken the class discussion.
  3. I focus on the canon. While I do explain non-canonical literature, most students in high school taking a class on the Bible (in a private school in Texas) want to study the Bible, not early Jewish and Christian literature in the abstract. I’ll miss reading the Infancy Gospel of Thomas with my students, but I do think most people who enjoy non-canonical literature do so because of their familiarity with canonical literature.
  4. I’ve moved away from deep hermeneutical theory. Now, I will say that for many of my students, the hard work of hermeneutics was the most transformative part of my class. Students may have hated going through the lessons on how we read the Bible in an academic context, but they often expressed that this is where they learned the most. On the other hand, some students struggled and shut down during those lessons, which, for better or worse, I fronted my semesters with. Also, those for whom the Bible is such a sacred object that they’re almost afraid to read it (such actions should be left to a priest or pastor, right?), those lessons could cause them to become defensive. This isn’t to say that I’ve moved away from reading the Bible academically. But instead of explaining how this is done, I just try to model it for them.
  5. I’m more open to my students exploring the Bible as an object of their faith. I think I often taught the teenager I was, and not to the ones I had in the room with me. I needed someone to deconstruct certain fundamentalisms for me. The toxic presentation of the Bible that I experienced in my youth and college years needed fixin’. And I think I tried to introduce my students to academic biblical studies in order to preemptively help them avoid some of the pitfalls of fundamentalist hermeneutics. I still try to be the teacher who gets my students to think about historical, cultural, and other contextual matters; I still try to help them see the challenges of interpretation. But I’m not teaching teenage me. My audience is different, and I think they come to class with a healthier relationship to the Bible, maybe because they haven’t been force-fed it. They want to understand the text, and for many, maybe most, this is not because they want to study the Bible academically, but because they want a basic understanding of the sacred text of their faith. So, I’m trying to be more accommodating to that interest.
  6. I’ve gone back to physical Bibles. I used to print out excerpts. But I think there’s something about holding a book that leads us to take the act of reading more seriously, especially a book like the Bible.
  7. The final thing is outside of my control: class size. Usually, my classes are 20+. I know my public and Catholic school colleagues are probably thinking, “cry me a river,” but 20+ is a lot. This semester, my “Introduction to the Bible” classes are 11 and 14, and next semester, 14 and 20. The smaller numbers have made it more conducive to reading a text closely with a group.

We’ll see if these changes continue to have a positive impact, but I will say that even as I’ve watered down the academic side of things, a lot, I’m having more fun teaching the Bible than I’ve had in years!

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Religious, theological, and biblical studies when you can’t go the traditional route

I know that there are many people out there who would like to major in something as fun as religious or biblical studies, or go to graduate school to study religion, or seminary to study theology, but because of the inflation related to earning a degree, and because of the demands of life, are unable. If that’s you, and you run across this (unpaid/unsponsored, by the way) blog post, let me make a few recommendations for how you might still get an education a less traditional way.

Religious Studies
Andrew Mark Henry, the creator behind the fantastic YouTube page “Religion for Breakfast”, has just launched a new website called “The Religion Department”. Since it’s brand new, there’s a “trailer” that just dropped where he tells you all about what will be offered with a subscription. Let’s just say, it looks fantastic and he’s lined up some excellent professors to contribute. Basic membership (only $99 a year, which is way cheaper than graduate school) gets you a past catalog of classes and access to upcoming ones. Special seminars where you can learn Greek or Coptic, for example, cost a little more, but still look amazing. See the announcement below though. It tells you what you need to know!

Theological Studies
I’ve been a long time listener of Tripp Fuller’s podcast “Homebrewed Christianity”. He brings on some of the best guests one can find. And he’s connected to a whole host of amazing theologians, scholars of religion, and biblical scholars (which makes his service a little bit “religious studies,” “theological studies,” and “biblical studies,” but since he leans mostly into theology, that’s how I’m labeling it). Not too long ago, Fuller launched “Theology Class”. There are already 55+ courses in the catalog ranging with topics ranging from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to Process Theology, to Black Theology, to J.R.R. Tolkien, to the “Nones” and deconstruction, and so forth. The offerings align more with progressive/liberal theology, if that’s your taste.

Biblical Studies
Finally, both of the aforementioned programs offer Bible-related content, but it’s the team that’s put together the Bible for Normal People podcast that I want to mention with their “Classes for Normal People”. The current catalog has classes ranging from the Infancy Narratives of the Gospels, to the Apocrypha, questions about hell, the origin of the Old Testament, divine violence, and a lot more. Sometimes these courses venture into theological/religious studies as well, so there’s overlap between these three offerings.

I hope someone looking to increase their understanding of these subjects who can’t go the traditional route stumbles across this post and that it helps connect you to these amazing, affordable resources.

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No longer teaching the New Testament, kind of

A week or so ago the spring semester ended. For the past nine years, I’ve taught some sort of introductory course on the New Testament during the spring, and there were a few years where my school offered it in the fall at first. Last year, I proposed an overhaul to our religious studies catalog that was accepted. It included a mandatory course on philosophy (of meaning, purpose, values, and ethics) that all students must take before they graduate and then two other courses, one of which must be chosen: “Religion in Global Context” (basically theory and sociology of religion) and “Introduction to the Bible”. This means that we won’t offer two separate semesters of biblical studies—we’ve offered a class on the Old Testament/Tankah in the fall each year. Instead, we’ve condensed our biblical studies down to one.

This is the result, in part, of my own observations about how students have handled year-long classes on the Bible—since most students who chose to take one semester of on the Old Testament/Tankah usually chose to go straight into the New Testament in the spring—and what I’ve heard from my students over the years. What I’ve observed is that for whatever reason—I’ll share some hypotheses below—students struggle to remain engaged and take serious the biblical studies courses whereas the religious studies courses that I’ve offered, “Religion in Global Context” and the now (maybe temporarily?) retired “Religion in the United States,” usually retain student interest and engagement. This semester, I asked two of my students who really struggled to stay engaged, yet who professed to be Christians, what it was about the class that seemed to so disinterest them. They said, in gist, that it goes too in-depth. This may be correct. Why though? I think for some, the Bible is of symbolic value. I’ve talked about this before: see “The Bible is a talisman (for many). Reading it leads to deconstruction. Deconstruction is necessary.” The Bible is best left on a coffee table as a good luck charm, and left to a priest to read and interpret. Like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, you’re safest if you never open it.

For other students, they presumed that they knew the Bible already. They had checked that box in Sunday School or during confirmation classes. Even as new material was being introduced, or as I was unpacking further what they had learned only in the most shallow sense, their ears shut off because they had convinced themselves that this class was redundant.

Still others see all of their education as merely a means to a different end and that end is getting into a good college, getting a good job, and making a lot of wealth. They can’t see how studying the Bible helps them with these goals (or, in their words, “this doesn’t get me anywhere‘). Interestingly, when students take my comparative religion courses, they can see how, for example, not making a faux pas that offends your potential business partner of a different faith is a practical outcome to studying religion. Other similar justifications for my comparative religion classes, such as the need for a tolerant, pluralistic society, or to be aware of his religion intersects with say politics, or law, are also easier for them to embrace. While I’ve tried to make similar arguments for biblical literacy, those arguments are far less effective.

So, for my own sanity as the primary biblical and religious studies teacher, and I guess in a sense for the well-being of our students who have sometimes shown and other times stated outright that the biblical studies classes aren’t what they want/need, we’ve condensed our offering. I think it’s the good and right thing to do but it’s bittersweet for sure. It brings to an end a major stage of my life that has lasted about two decades. As I ended college and prepared to go and complete a MA, ThM, and PhD, I had in my mind that I was preparing to teach the New Testament, possibly as the graduate level at a seminary or maybe at a Christian liberal arts college. Then reality hit. The job market changed. Biblical studies jobs disappeared and my pedigree wasn’t competitive in the arenas I sought to play. Fewer people are going to seminary to train for ministry anyway. And the church is shrinking rapidly in the United States. Where it continues to thrive, e.g., the Assemblies of God, theological education is valued only as denominational apologetics. So, about a decade ago, I off-ramped to teach biblical studies (primary) and some comparative religion to high school students. This wasn’t the demographic that I wanted to teach or planned on teaching but it was were I could teach while also getting paid and having benefits. It worked out and now I have a hard time imagining myself as something other than a high school teacher.

During my MA, I loved studying Hebrew and Greek, and taking electives on topics like a deep exegetical dive into the Epistle to the Hebrews. During my ThM, I thought that I was going to become a “Paul guy” focusing on Pauline Studies. I wrote a thesis on Romans 8 and the renewal of creation. As I entered by doctoral program, I decided that I was going to be a “Gospels guy” instead. I wrote a thesis on John the Baptist in his historical context. And then the years passed, and I taught a small handful of students, out of the hundreds that crossed my path, that would’ve been remotely interested in doing a deep-dive into anything related to John the Baptist. The lack of reciprocity with regard to passion for the topic that I was teaching slowly drained me. Simultaneously, the demise of American Christianity over the past decade has made me second guess that value of what I spent years studying in hopes that I could one day serve “the Church”. The realities on the ground drove me to put more effort into understanding comparative religion, since that was resonating a lot more with my students, and it drove me to read a lot of philosophy, since my theological adventures have mostly left me feeling like I’ve come up empty handed, unsure that I have the emotional interest to continue pouring myself into topics that matter less and less to the world in which I live, including to the very Christians that I imagined my education would serve.

The new “Introduction to the Bible” class will cover the New Testament, in brief. It will take up maybe a third of a semester rather than a whole one. So, I’m not completely abandoning all the work that I did for the past two decades. But I’m clearly saying goodbye to the vocational identity that I thought I was building over those many years. Not only will I not be a “Professor of New Testament” somewhere as twenty-something me imagined but I won’t even teach a class solely dedicated to the New Testament, maybe ever again.

That said, I’m excited about my new philosophy class. The first run begins this Monday with my summer school students. As they say, “every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end”.

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A box of books, roomier shelves, and past selves

Yesterday, I filled a box halfway with books that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books this morning. Now, I’m a fan of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “antilibrary” where the unread books on our shelves remind us of all the knowledge that we don’t have and won’t acquire in this lifetime. If I could, I’d fill my house with books, read and unread. It would look like a library. It would elate and humble me. But I’m not the only person in my household who makes decisions about home decor, so there are limits to where books can be stored. This means that I needed to clear some space for the many new books that I’ve bought that have been stacking up on my desk—mostly philosophy books in preparation for a new class that I’m teaching next school year. Hence, the half-filled box that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books.

I chose mostly biblical studies and theology books. I didn’t touch my philosophy section. I didn’t touch my religious studies or American religion sections. I decided that only so many books on the Bible were needed, so that’s what I’m selling today. This decision reflects a change in my interest and even personhood over the past few years. I’ve struggled to teach students about the Bible in a way that confounds me. When I’ve taught courses on comparative religion, American religion, or even local religion (ala my summer offering “Religion in San Antonio”), it’s been easy to retain student interest and investment. And honestly, when I teach the Hebrew Bible, other than a lot of whining about “all the reading” (you signed up for a course on the Bible, kids!), it goes well. But every spring, the combination of the year drawing nearer and nearer to the end, along with self-understood “familiarity” (which is hardly any familiarity at all) that breeds contempt, and the fear of using critical thinking skills to evaluate something so sacrosanct as the Christian New Testament, I find myself struggling constantly with resistance to learning. Most of my educational training has been around the Bible, especially the New Testament. I’ve written ThM and doctoral theses on its content. I’ve presented papers at conferences about it. But nearly a decade of teaching it to adolescents has sucked the joy out of it. I enjoy teaching high school…just not the New Testament. And this has led me to lose interest in the very content matter that was at the heart of an undergraduate, two graduate, and one doctoral degree.

Is there another context where I could find myself enjoying the teaching and discussion of the Gospels or the Epistles of Paul again? Sure. I imagine an adult education class at a church, if I had the time or will power. But my experience in my context has so zapped me of interest in that material that I lobbied to reduce our two semesters of biblical studies to a single semester offering titled “Introduction to the Bible” which seems far more manageable for my students and me. I mean, to be fair, if students are going to learn about religion in high school—a privilege that many high school students don’t have or have only in contexts of indoctrination—I find it strange that they would spend all their time on the holy book(s) of Judaism and Christianity without even learning about Judaism and Christianity let alone all of the other religious traditions that are out there. Most of them aren’t going to seminary someday. If they stay Christian, as many of them are, they’ll hear the Bible through the comforting filter of sermons, which seems to be their preferred method of engagement anyway. (Sorry if this sounds bitter!)

This has led me to rethink other aspects of my personality and how I’m using my time. For example, do I want to remain a member of the Society of Biblical Literature? My son’s birthday will be every November, just a few days before Thanksgiving Break when the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion meet. Do I want to spend my time at those conferences anymore? I’m not sure. I don’t want to hear papers on some micro-exegetical evaluation of a portion of the Gospel of Mark, that’s for sure. So, is membership and conference attendance a waste of precious time and money? It’s beginning to seem like it.

I’ve been through these transitions before. So far, they’ve always turned out well but they’ve left me with a pedigree that doesn’t match who I’ve become. Let me explain. In high school, no one considered me college material. At best, I would go to the local community college for some skills but I think that most presumed that I would enter the workforce when I graduated. The summer before my junior year, I became curious about the Pentecostal tradition that my mother was raising me in, and by default, I became curious about how to read the Bible “the right way”. The positive side to this is that I turned around as a student and graduated from high school, which was in doubt at times, and then went to a denominationally affiliated college because I thought I was going to become a minister in those Pentecostal circles. By my junior year, I knew this wasn’t going to be the case. I didn’t believe any of their core teachings anymore, so I bid my time until I graduated, looking for a new place to belong.

The negative side of this is that my undergraduate degree is from a truly terrible school. I will never step foot on that campus again. But my options weren’t Stanford or Cal Berkeley as I neared graduation. My options were workforce/community college or this denominational school and the denomination school did give me the skills needed to get into graduate school. So, I went to Western Seminary, which is loosely affiliated with Baptist churches but mostly brands itself as conservative, “big tent” Evangelical (compared with say the more “liberal” “big tent” of a Fuller Theological Seminary). I earned a MA and then a ThM (Master of Theology) from there. As I began my studies for my PhD, through the University of Bristol but facilitated by the Anglican school Trinity College Bristol, I began to experience a from of deja vu. Just as I had known that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in the Pentecostal circles that had raised and educated me, because I could no longer identify with them, so my time in Evangelicalism was drawing to an end.

The end of my doctoral studies were traumatic. As I neared the completion of my thesis (what they call a dissertation in the UK), a series of things went wrong and I began the job that I’m still working today, which was great because I had a teaching job, but made it extremely difficult to finish off my thesis. For this reason, my viva was a bloodbath. I had to spend the next several months making corrections to my thesis in order to graduate and in order to not fail my doctoral program. I pulled it off but something had changed forever. As much as I’ve tried over the years to regain some sense of myself as a biblical scholar, the confidence was gone. I hated my thesis, so I never could find the will to edit it further to try for publication. It sits as a PDF on my computer and as a lost book somewhere in the library of the University of Bristol. (By the way, the external evaluator who bludgeoned me to death during my viva: his books, which I’ve kept on my shelves all these years, are in the box that I’m taking to sell this morning!)

All of this has me thinking about one of my favorite concepts from Buddhism: anatman/anatta. It’s a complicated theory, but as Daniel Weltman summarizes it: “there is no persisting self—nothing about us that remains the same at all times.” (I recommend his explainer, “The Buddhist Theory of No-Self”, for those who want to know more.) While I don’t know that I’m on board fully with the idea of no-self or no consistent self, it makes a lot of sense experientially. Is the Brian LePort that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister the same as the Brian LePort who thought he was going to be an Evangelical biblical scholar who became a high school religious studies teacher in an Episcopal school? Yes but also in many ways, absolutely not. Those versions of me were necessary for the current version of me to exist, for sure. If I wasn’t under the delusion at age 18 that I was going to be a Pentecostal preacher, I wouldn’t have the job that I enjoy now at age 42. But also, the decision of the 18 year old to go to a school that trains ministers in a highly sectarian denomination forever limited to future options of the person that I’ve become and am becoming. It’s still on my CV and I’m sure that along with schooling from conservative Evangelicals, it’s caused people to write me off as a candidate for many jobs. I got extremely lucky that when I applied for my current job a decade ago, that chaplain who was heading the search has himself spent time in Pentecostal and Evangelical circles, so he was curious about me. I fear that a born-and-bred Episcopalian who’ve never given me a chance!

On the other hand, there seems to be hardly anything left of that kid that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister. If I could warp time and meet him, we’d likely agree that there’s no connection between the two of us. We’d have a hard time imagining that we’re the same person in any meaningful sense.

I’ve written mostly about the changes that came from transitions in and out of religious traditions and academic settings but there’s no doubt that other major events forever altered me into someone new, ranging from my marriage at age 27, to moving away from California and eventually living in Texas, to the birth of my son last November, to a major health scare that I experienced just this January. These types of events feel like when the butterfly comes out of the cocoon. There’s continuation but the discontinuation is what’s radical.

Am I a philosopher now? No. I’m self-trained. I’ll always have a more developed skill set for biblical studies than for philosophy but the biblical studies books are going to the store to make room for more philosophy because who I want to be now is someone who thinks philosophically. I’m not as invested in the project of creating human knowledge around/about the Bible as I used to be. It’s a noble endeavor, as all humanities work is, but it’s not my endeavor anymore. And while I’ll continue to teach a class on the Bible for the foreseeable future, it’s not my area of interest anymore, so I hope my philosophy class is a success! Who knows who I’ll be or how I’ll feel in a year from now. I’m sure there will be far more continuation than discontinuation. I’m a relatively stable and static person. But sometimes you need to make room for a new version of yourself by getting rid of that which is old. So, if anyone is looking for a good deal on some biblical studies books, go to Half Priced Books over off Bandera Road here in San Antonio. You’ll find some of my stuff there.

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Conference paper: Bible +

Earlier this year, I had two papers accepted for the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. That same week I received the biggest news of my life: I was going to be a dad and my child would arrive around the time of the conference. So, I ended up withdrawing one paper and having another read for me in absentia. Here’s that paper:

Bible +: Why I Am Happy to Have Ended Up a High School Teacher!

Introduction

I have dreamed of being many things. When I was in high school, I imagined the day when I would be one the anchors on the evening SportsCenter on ESPN. In my college days, I thought I would become a Christian apologist. When I entered graduate school, I had matured: I would be a Pauline scholar! As a doctoral student, I shifted my focus again. Now I wanted to be a Gospels scholar who specialized in traditions related to John the Baptist. 

I became none of those things. Instead, I teach religious studies and philosophy at an Episcopal high school in San Antonio, Texas. If sixteen-year-old me could hear this, he would be mortified. But forty-two-year-old me is happy, actually. I enjoy what I do, almost every day. While I may trade my current position as “Social and Religious Studies Instructor” for that fantasy SportsCenter gig, I am quite convinced that I would not trade it for being a Pauline or Gospels scholar. In this paper, I will try to explain why this is and I will try to make my sales pitch to those of you who have a doctoral degree in biblical studies or are pursuing one. 

As you are aware, pretty much every media brand out there signifies that there is more being offered when they add a “+” sign to their name: Disney +; Hulu +; ESPN +. I am titling this paper “Bible +” because I think that for many people who attending the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (and/or the American Academy of Religion), they know how demanding modern higher education has become. They recognize that the “publish or perish” culture requires them to become increasingly myopic, diving deeper into one small segment of human knowledge until the well is as dry as they can make it. For some, this is a delight. For others, this is a nightmare: imagine all those other articles or books about other interesting topics that you will never read, or all those other articles and books about other interesting topics about which you will never write, or all those classes that you would like to design and teach but that you cannot design and teach because you must become the expert in the use of the kai conjunction in the Gospel of Luke! (Again, for some of you, that is the dream, and I have no desire to throw shade on that dream; I am appealing somewhat hyperbolically to those who feel that this is what they must become but who wish it was not!)

A Fox or a Hedgehog?

As I neared the end of my doctoral work, I was hired at TMI Episcopal in San Antonio, Texas. (Do not ask me to explain the acronym “TMI”. It takes a history lesson.) I was asked to teach biblical studies but also a “world religion” class. A couple of years into the job, I morphed the “world religion” class away from the “World Religion” model where you summarize the “big 5” or “big 7” religions, instead turning it into something of a theory of religion class called “Religion in Global Context”. In addition, I noticed that my students needed more religious literacy paired with their civics, so I created a class I called “Religion in the United States” that examines a wide array of topics from religious language in the founding documents and in the ideologies of the different Founding Fathers, to interpretations of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, to new religious movements that originated in the United States, and much more. 

When I created these two classes, I was qualified to teach biblical studies, but I had to do a ton of work to prepare myself to teach about Hindu cosmology or Buddhist ritual or recent Supreme Court cases focusing on religious freedom claims. Admittedly, I do not think I would be prepared to teach on these topics in a college classroom, but I made myself ready to do so in a high school setting where the demand for specialization is a bit weaker. I do not know if the demands of my teaching context turned me into a fox rather than into the hedgehog that I imagined I would be, or if I was always a fox trying to live in the world of hedgehogs, but I am relieved to discover that I am happy being a fox.

What do I mean by being a fox rather than a hedgehog? I am sure that many of you are familiar with the saying of the Greek poet Archilochus who wrote: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”. Isaiah Berlin took this short saying, and he turned it into a book about Leo Tolstoy titled, The Hedgehog and the Fox. This book popularized the idea that some of us like to learn a lot about a lot—the fox—and others of us like to learn a lot about a little—a hedgehog. When I dreamt of being a Pauline or Gospels scholar, I dreamt of being a hedgehog. Modern academia is designed for hedgehogs. But my job demanded that I become a fox, or recognize that I was a fox, depending on what you think about “personality types” and the fluidity or concreteness of our personalities.

I am convinced that there are more foxes at this annual meeting than are aware of it. There are more of us who want to connect the dots across wider plains of human knowledge. We may not be experts on a specific, local region but we can help people find their way down paths leading from one place to another.

Biblical Studies within Religious Studies

For example, in 2023, SBL’s membership stood at 6,844. The American Academy of Religion sits at about 10,000. I know that SBL covers more than the Bible and more than Judaism and Christianity but it seems that these numbers reflect the powerful hold of text based religious scholarship which in turn leads us to think of religion through the lens of sacred texts, their interpretations, their meanings, etc. But religions are so much more than their sacred texts. I will speak for myself when I say that my education was wildly disproportionate. I learned about the Christian Bible for years while having only a minimal understanding of the history of Christianity or global Christianity. This has to do with the Protestant identities of the institutions where I studied but my point stands: the Christian Bible is but one part of the ideological network that gives the Christian Bible meaning. The Christian Bible is but one part of Christianity. Christianity is but one part—though a very large part—of what it means to understand human religiosity. 

My appeal here is not to those who hear what I am saying and see no problem; my appeal is to those who have been asking themselves whether or not their own interest in teaching (primarily) but also reading, researching, and writing may be far broader than what biblical studies has to offer.

Religious Studies within the Humanities 

I have colleagues who completed degrees in biblical studies and religious studies who teach global history or Advanced Placed (AP) high school classes like “United States History”; who offer electives on topics like the Holocaust or race in America; who lead clubs like “Mock Trial Club” or run the school’s Model U.N. program. Personally, I have been shifting gears myself as I have recognized the need for a philosophy class where I teach, so I am doing the work to improve my own knowledge of philosophy in order to teach my students. I am thrilled to be doing this. I do not know what alternate universes look like for me. I may be thrilled to be teaching the Pauline Epistles in a seminary or the Gospels to an undergraduate audience, but I think I would be frustrated with the limitations that being a specialist like this puts on us. Again, for many, this is the dream, and I respect that. I am talking to those who think to themselves, “I wonder how my dissertation topic relates to that wildly disparate topic over there, and I wonder if there is a context where I would be allowed to build a very long bridge between the two?” If that is you, then teaching high school might be the answer!

At the Frontline of a Crisis for the Humanities

We know that the humanities are facing a crisis of legitimacy, of relevancy. We know this begins early when STEM subjects are promoted while the humanities are topics that many schools treat as necessary but not central. Can a poet earn a living wage?! We need more people who are willing to meet students earlier in their formative years, who can model for them the beauty of the humanities, including the study of the Bible and religion more broadly. If you were passionate enough to go for a Ph.D. in these topics, there is a chance that you are passionate enough to convince sometimes very hard to convince adolescents that what we study should matter to them. 

Also, on a more practical side: as higher education continues to shove more and more of us into adjunct-or-bust roles where you get minimal pay, often have to work at multiple institutions without many protections, and almost always are not offered health and dental benefits, or retirement, etc., let me ask you to consider teaching high school. You get to do much of what you dreamt of doing. I still teach about the Bible. I wrote my own curriculum. I get to teach and think and write about religion. But I also have benefits, and retirement, and depending on the state in which you live, you may even be able to afford a mortgage. The injustices of the adjuncting system are real and as difficult as teaching teenagers can be, I would not trade my experience. This will not be the case for everyone but once again, this paper is not for everyone, but it could be for you!

Conclusion

My career has become Bible +. Bible + comparative religion, theory of religion, sociology of religion, American religion, American history, religion and law, and now philosophy along with all the other pluses that I am not taking the time to name. My career is Bible + investing in emerging generations during the crisis point that is adolescence. My career is Bible + not being held captive by higher education’s refusal to take care of all of their teachers (which is not to say that there are not injustices against workers in the K-12 system but that, again, the bare minimum of a constant pay check, some job stability, benefits, and retirement is a lot better than what most adjuncting roles offer). I hope that someone out there will consider the possibility that a Bible + career may be the right fit for you as well! 

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Meaning, significance, purpose, and “sonder”

More than a decade ago, I admitted something out loud in a conversation that I knew to be true to how I felt but that I was embarrassed to articulate. I was in my early-30s and I was disillusioned with much of my life. Things weren’t going as I had imagined they’d go. And I said, “I thought I would live the type of life that someone would write a biography about.” As I said the words, I knew they sounded foolish. They sounded narcissistic. It’s likely that they were narcissistic and foolish. But these delusions of grandeur had come from a sincere place. While I can’t unpack all that went into this misguided vision, I can summarize things this way: I had embraced a bad theology that led me to think that if I dedicated my life to certain higher spiritual ideals (“seek first the kingdom of God”) and forsook debased, “worldly”, selfish pursuits (“and his righteousness”), I would be rewarded with a life that was full of significance and meaning (“and all of these things shall be added unto you”). When I say “significance and meaning” I mean divinely given significance and meaning (see the Gospel of Matthew 6:3). The kind of significance and meaning that you “know” comes “from above” because other people recognize it.

There’s a little prosperity Gospel in there. There’s a lot of problematic theology around “calling” as well. (In religious circles, this is sometimes referred to as “discernment” where other people who have been called “confirm” that you have been called as well.) But at the time, I couldn’t get my head around why I was just another face in the crowd. I thought I had made a covenant (as in Matthew 19:27: “Look, we have left everything and followed you.”). Why had I committed myself to the path that I was walking if it led me obscurity? But not just obscurity, since this wasn’t about fame. Purposelessness. Meaninglessness. I felt unneeded. I wasn’t contributing to anything. Why didn’t I focus on a career path that would’ve let me pursue my own “selfish” goals, like wealth?! The exchange (as I imagined it) was for a life that would make an impact on the world. I wasn’t making an impact.

Thankfully, I got therapy. My therapist suggested, gently, that there may be a lot of meaning and significance in the world but that it wasn’t to be “found” or (divinely) “gifted”. She had me read Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. I remember coming away with a new sense that significance and meaning could be created. The universe wasn’t meaningless. It was full of meaning. But that meaning isn’t necessarily inherit or objective. You don’t have to go on a quest to find it. You don’t have to pray, fast, and wait for it to be announced to you by an angel from heaven. You have to create it.

This places a lot of responsibility on the individual. As John Paul Sarte said in “Existentialism Is a Humanism”: “…man is condemned to be free.” But theologies that tell you that there’s a (single) divine will for your life that you must find is a greater condemnation. You’re responsible but powerless. It’s almost like you have to get lucky. You have to follow the divine calling the “right way” without knowing what that way is! The existential thinking of Frankl and Sarte is freeing in that while you’re responsible, there’s no “wrong” life for you to create. The condemnation is that there are many possibilities. But I’ve come to embrace “possibilities” as superior to the idea of a single, divine plan for one’s life. (If this needs theological rescuing for some readers, then consider this: we may be “creators” with a small “c” created by our “Creator” with a big “C” for a purpose of co-creating. I don’t know if that’s good theology but if theology is needed, then it’s better theology than the alternative!)

In my formative years, I heard preachers talk about “the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God” (Romans 12:2, KJV). These were framed as “three types” of divine will. Your life would fulfill it’s purpose only if you happened to discover the “perfect will of God” which is superior to the “good…will of God” or the “acceptable…will of God”. In retrospect, I don’t know how this exegesis worked but it stuck in my brain, tormenting me for years, even when I was shown that this isn’t the meaning of the quoted passage from the Bible’s Epistle to the Romans.

Eventually, I got a job teaching high school. I found it meaningful. It took me a little while longer to come to terms with the reality that my life could have meaning, significance, and purpose without approval by institutions ecclesial or academic. (Honestly, I think I may be arriving at that realization in its fullness only this year.) It took time to accept that I might be “only a high school teacher” and not a scholar, or a frequently published author, or a “thought leader”, or whatever else the previous generations’ equivalent to an “influencer” is! It’s unlikely that I’ll make a great contribution to theology, philosophy, or history. Instead, I’ll do my best to contribute to the formation of young people, some who will bluntly tell you things like “your class doesn’t matter” or “no one takes this [subject] seriously”. You smile and remind yourself that you said a lot of mean things as a teenager too!

I think the fear of my 20s and most of my 30s was that I would live an insignificant life. In a vast universe, there seemed to be nothing more horrifying than being just another person, a statistic, a name that future generations would forget. To be forgotten seemed like a form of eternal damnation. In my religious circles, I was told that I needed to create a “legacy”. In broader American Evangelical circles, people speak of a “purpose-driven life”. It was preached that God put us on this earth “for a reason” and to “make a difference”. It was as if living a normal, peaceful life would be a disappointment to God. That terrified me.

In my mid-30s, as I was deconstructing and recovering from this theology, a colleague shared a concept created by the author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He called the concept “sonder”. Here’s his definition:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

This word captured my fear but simultaneously empowered me with a realization. Even the most well-known people in the world whose lives seem more significant than the rest of ours have moments when they are background characters to other people’s stories. They may be a wealthy CEO but merely an insignificant person in their own child’s life. They could be a powerful politician who eventually becomes a rambling, tired old face on television. The fact of the matter is that no matter how “objectively” “significant” you try to be, the most important person in everyone’s life is themselves. We’re the “main character” in our own minds and even wealthy and powerful people are merely background characters in the lives of others.

For a few years now, off and on, I’ve pondered this word “sonder” and what it represents. And I’ve thought about how meaningful it is that we get to be mere “extras” that create the elaborate tapestry of someone else’s life. Think of this. In our individual insignificance (“an extra sipping coffee in the background”) we contribute to the greater, collective significance of what it means to be alive and to share in this life in this world. Even as the person who does nothing but turn on our kitchen light creating texture for someone walking through the neighborhood, we add to the lives of others. We’re significant in our insignificance. I think the Buddhists would call this “interdependence”. “Sonder” has the potential to infuse our own lives with meaning, significance, and purpose but in a way that is counterintuitive. It is an antidote to narcissism. It can prevent us from obsessing over how much we do and accomplish. It allows us to live lives that we enjoy knowing that in some small sense, even if we’re not “great”, even if we don’t “change the world”, no one can remove us from being part of the world as long as we’re alive.

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Anthropomorphic speech about “God”, animals, and inanimate objects

I don’t know much about “God”. In fact, it would be better if I wrote “God” as God using the tradition of sous rature, or “under erasure”, developed by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, where the strikethrough functions to retain a “necessary” word while acknowledging that it doesn’t represent the traditional metaphysics often associated with the word. I’m a theist, maybe more in the Spinozist sense than would make most of my coreligionist comfortable but not so much that I claim to have any lasting insights into what it is that the word God references. Christianity has made room for apophatic theology from the beginning, so it’s to the negative that I appeal if pressed to explain my own theology. Whatever ideas are floating in my head today may not be the same ones tomorrow, so you won’t find me being all that dogmatic in my “God-talk”. There is “God-talk” with which I’m increasingly uncomfortable though. More often than not, it’s anthropomorphic in nature.

Anthropomorphic speech about God
I was raised around Pentecostalism. Pentecostals find the divine presence everywhere and everywhere active, not in the aforementioned Spinozist sense that the divine animates everything, or according to some is one with everything (a type of monism, if you will). Pentecostals retain a stark natural/supernatural divide that fits within the very Enlightenment modes of thought that they reject. For Pentecostals, the supernatural breaks through the restraints of the natural. It does this frequently. You should expect it. But it’s still supernatural.

I was raised, in part, to expect to see divine activity in the world. I won’t say whether I have or not. I will say that I haven’t seen anything that I would say is clearly divine in distinction from nature—nothing clearly supernatural. I’ve had this or that pointed out to me. I may be unable to see it due to skepticism but I would presume that if it were evidently supernatural, my skepticism wouldn’t matter. If God were to part the Red Sea in front of me, I should be able to recognize this as something clearly unnatural.

My discomfort has to do primarily with what it means to claim that we’ve seen something supernatural happen and that we know it was so. For example, if I say that God gave me a job, this implies that God prevented someone else from getting it. We’re seeing terrible hurricanes hitting Florida this fall. If I claim that God spared one home from destruction, then this implies that God chose not to do the same for all the other homes. When we deconstruct language about an interventionist deity, it leaves us with something more troubling than encouraging.

One might reply that “God’s ways are mysterious!” This may be true. I don’t know. I do know that if we are going use this type of agnostic language about the people God doesn’t heal, or protect, or rescue, or feed, or house, or bless, etc., then we should retain the same agnosticism about whether God is actively healing, protecting, rescuing, feeding, housing, blessing, etc.

I think that some fear that such agnosticism will leave us with a lack of gratitude. Maybe. On the other hand, as I’ve discussed, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates says  (Lee’s translation, p. 71), “…while god must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some factors other than god as a cause of evil.” Similarly, in the Epistle of James in the Christian New Testament, we read the claim, “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” Both “Socrates” and “James” claim that goodness is from a divine source. This leaves us silent on the source of badness. We can affirm this if we want without saying that God actively gave me a parking spot near the front of the store while ignoring people starving due to a famine somewhere else in the world. In this sense, God is like the sun that shines down on us without intention or aim. It’s just the nature of the sun to do this. There are things that block the sun’s rays from us but this isn’t the sun judging us or withholding light from us. It’s just the nature of our reality.

In this vein, Jesus himself said (Matthew 5:44-46), “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” I’m not saying that Jesus would agree with my God-talk, per se. I’m saying that when Jesus encouraged his followers to do good and show love to even those who do not love them, his example was the generousness of the Father which is available to the just and the unjust alike.

This is where things get tricky for me. I see what Jesus was doing when he called God “Father”. While the anthropomorphic language can lead to all sorts of theological absurdities—e.g. if God exists, “he’s” “male” or he’s a “father” in the same sense of whatever that words means in your culture—we risk an opposite danger when our God-talk begins to sound like we’re talking about the Force in Star Wars or even the Tao of Chinese philosophy like Taoism. There’s part of me that’s more comfortable with these impersonal presentations of ultimate reality. I don’t mind speaking of the “Universe” but the minute I say the “Universe” did this or that, I’ve personified it and I’ve drifted into anthropomorphic language. This is a flaw but maybe a necessary one because I think we humans know our world only through what it means to be human. Therefore, as non-human as God would be, if there are aspects of the divine nature that are anything like our own (e.g. God is/has “mind”), we risk misunderstanding God further by choosing to speak of God as “Force” or something completely impersonal.

For this reason, as uncomfortable as I may be with anthropomorphic God-talk, I don’t know if there’s a better solution. Do we speak of God as a mathematical formula? It seems like this would make God irrelevant to most of us. Anthropomorphic ways of thinking have their strengths and weaknesses, no matter the context, including God-talk.

Anthropomorphic speech about animals
For example, I’m the type of person who doesn’t even speak of myself as a dog “owner”. Yes, I’m one of those who says that I’m “my dog’s human”. There’s a strength to this. When I anthropomorphize my dog, I see her as a being with emotions/feelings, motivations, and wants. Whether or not we can say she has a “will” or “thoughts” may depend on how we’re using those words. But when I think of her this way, it’s unlikely that I’ll mistreat her. In fact, she’s quite spoiled. My wife and I love her as a member of the family.

But this can be dangerous. If I interpret behaviors that I dislike as being done with “intention” like a human might do, then I’ll be holding her to a standard that’s unfair to her as a dog. As a dog, I need to value her “dogness”. This may mean seeing her dogness through an anthropomorphic lens at times. But she’s not like me in the same way other humans are. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in Philosophy of Psychology, 327 (or Philosophical Investigations II, 190), “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Lions live in a different embodiment than we humans. They see the world differently. If we could find a way to “translate” lion “speech” into human language, we may be lost still and unable to understand them. At least, Wittgenstein thought this was so. (Also, we could reference Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”)

Anthropomorphic speech about inanimate objects
A similar pro-/con- scenario can be applied even to inanimate objects. We’re a wasteful bunch, we humans. We throw away so many things. We create trash. Now, I’m not saying we should be unsanitary or hoard purposelessly. But maybe we can learn from say Japanese culture with the art of kintsugi. There are inanimate objects that we anthropomorphize which infuses those things with added value. We may think of stuffed animals or robots. Admittedly, it’s easier to do this when the inanimate object has been given humanish characteristics by its creator. But we do this with far from human things too. How many people name their cars?

On the flip side, if you treat your car better than your spouse or children, then you may have taken things a bit too far. Materialism (in the economic sense of the word) can lead us to dehumanize humans in favor of attributing excessive value to objects. With each category—God, animals, and objects—anthropomorphic thoughts can be positive or negative. They can lead us to undervalue or overvalue the reality about which we speak. This can lead to good theology (God loves me and God cares about me personally) and bad theology (“I’m favored by God which is why ‘he’ gave me this big house and nice car”). It can lead us to the better treatment of animals or it could drive us to expect things from them that are unfair. It can lead us to value objects, to be thrifty and grateful, and it can lead us to hoard.

We can’t escape anthropomorphic language, usually. We don’t have to. But we should be reflective when using it. We should have a mental asterisks next to each thought that attributes human characteristics to non-human realities. I try to do this with my dog but also with God. Whenever I hear a passage from the Bible read that makes God sound like a giant human, I try to abstract it. When I show gratitude toward God, it may be quite similar to how I’m grateful to the sun for its light. Yes, this may lead me to miss this or that divine reality, if God exists, but I’d rather miss in the negative than miss in the positive of wrongly attributing intention to God where such attribution would have to bring to question the goodness/justness of God.

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Euthyphro and Goodness

This past week, I reread Plato’s Euthyphro. This is the source of the famous “Euthyphro Dilemma” or “Euthyphro Problem”:

In Euthyphro, the question is whether the gods command what is good/holy because those commands are right/just or whether what the gods command are right/just, and therefore good/holy, because the gods command it. If the former, then it would seem that the gods are responsible to submit to a higher standard meaning that there is something greater than the gods, namely goodness, or justice, etc. If the latter, then what we call good/holy/right is merely a matter of power: we have to do what the gods tell us and this can be arbitrary; this can change over time. The gods could say “don’t murder” today but then “murder!” tomorrow and the rightness of it all would be determined by their divine positionality.

According to the polytheist Euthyphro, “…what’s holy is whatever all the gods approve of” (Tredennick and Tarrant translation, p. 20). For the monotheist, agreement isn’t needed about the number of gods. For monotheist, this uniformity is accomplished with the one god. As the video above presented it though, monotheism doesn’t escape the question: Is something right because God commands it or does God command it because it’s right. If the former, it seems arbitrary; if the latter, it seems that God is held to a standard greater than God. Most monotheists that I know respond with an argument that goes something like this: “What God commands is good because God’s commands are based on God’s nature which is inherently good.”

I’m not opposed to this argument but I think it closes the door on more fundamentalist readings of sacred texts. Let me turn to something Socrates says to Euthyphro to explain. Euthyphro is prosecuting his father for murder. Euthyrphro claims that what his is doing follows divine commands. He gives the example of how Zeus himself castrated his father Cronus because Cronus “had unjustly swallowed his sons”. In other words, Cronus had done an evil, so Zeus was justified in harming his own father.

The point I want to make has nothing to do with whether in the context of the myth, Zeus was justified. Instead, it’s Socrates’ response that interests me, as I noted above. Socrates says, “whenever someone talks like this about the gods, I find it very difficult to accept” (he says it in the form of a question but it implies his view, p. 14). Socrates finds this depiction of Zeus and Cronus problematic. Recall that recently I wrote a post titled “Would Plato approve of children reading the story of ‘Noah’s Ark’?” where I shared how in The Republic, Socrates says that God must be presented as “good”. Returning to Euthyphro, in response to the story of Zeus and Cronus, Socrates asks, “…do you really believe that these things happened like this?”

I find that if anyone is going to respond to the Euthyphro Dilemma with the claim that God’s commands are good because they come from God’s good nature, then they have to reject many of the Bible’s stories’ theologies (as well as the similar stories of other sacred texts). The response of the apologetically inclined will be to say that God’s goodness is different than ours. Maybe but to what degree? Humanicide? Or if we are to speak of doctrines like eternal damnation? If God’s goodness includes these horrid acts—acts that none of us would call good if God wasn’t attached to them—then the word “goodness” becomes meaningless. We should abandon any theologizing.

Socrates pushes Euthyphro to consider whether he understands holiness and divine justice. Euthyphro’s appeal to stories like Zeus castrating Cronus are unconvincing to Socrates because they present an inferior depiction of the divine. Socrates’ main goal is to help Euthyphro realize that he doesn’t know what the gods want because he doesn’t understand holiness and its relationship to justice. He needs epistemic humility. Likewise, modern religious people that speak of a good God doing things that we’d clearly define as bad in any other context seem to not understand divine goodness, if such a thing exists. They need epistemic humility. And they should be hesitant to appeal to sacred myths that depict the divine as having a lower standard of good than our own. Our own standard of good may not meet divine standards (because God is so extremely good) but surely they shouldn’t be clearly superior to them either. I would never exterminate almost all of humanity nor would I burn anyone for an extended period of time, let alone for an eternity. Such theologies make God wicked by any standard. And the only recourse is to retreat into arguing that what God says is good is good because God’s more powerful than us and God declared it. If this is so, then the dilemma hasn’t be addressed at all.

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Asking good questions while reading…and while living

I’ve mentioned this in a blog post years ago (see “How I teach hermeneutics to my students”) but it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, so I’m writing about it again. In graduate school, I had a professor named Gary Tuck. In one of my first classes, he had us get in groups during the week where we’d read the beginning of the Book of Genesis—the first couple of chapters if my memory serves me correctly—and we had to come up with a long list of questions. (My memory tells me one hundred of them but that may be a mistake. It may have been fifty? I can’t recall precisely.) It seemed peculiar at the time but once we were done, I realized why he had us do it. We were forced to just ask questions. This meant that we were forced to read the text closely. We were forced to cultivate an awareness of our ignorance rather than just seeking answers. We were forced to revisit a text that many of us thought we knew. Our questions showed us that great texts can be visited time and time again with each visit delivering something new, something fresh for us to see.

I’ve duplicated this exercise for several years now. I ask my questions to put on different “lenses” asking historical, sociological, literary, and theological/philosophical questions as they read smaller excerpts. It’s a tough ask. Simultaneously, I can see it wear out some students while enlivening others. The students who enjoy it must sense what’s happening, much like I did after I followed Dr. Tuck’s instructions. The students who don’t understand the value of the exercise often do later. I’ll read their reflections when they tell me about something important, something paradigm shifting they learned in my class (see “An assessment that I’m glad I gave [and how it relates to what I’ve been saying about biblical studies]”), and it’s almost always hermeneutics or even metacriticism. It’s almost always about how they used to approach the Bible and how they do it differently now. It’s rarely a random observation from the Bible but instead a discussion of their presuppositions and paradigms. When it is about something specific in the Bible, lurking in the background is a hermeneutical shift that allowed them to ask good questions about messianism or Markan Christology or something of the sort.

The other day, as I walked students through the Second Creation Narrative of the Book of Genesis, I had a student ask a brilliant question. In this story, “the Lord God” doesn’t want humans to have the knowledge of good and evil though he places a tree the fruit of which can provide them with this knowledge in their utopian, paradise garden and he gives them a commandment to not eat from it. They eat from it. There are consequences (some say curses) upon all the characters involved: the man, the woman, the snake. One student asked, “If the humans don’t know what’s good and evil, how could they understand that it was wrong to disobey a commandment.”

There may be a good exegetical answer for a question like this (though Hebrew Narrative is notorious for leaving massive plot holes, maybe intentionally) but I’m less excited about the possibility of providing answers to their questions than I am that they ask questions like this in the first place. Whether or not they read the Bible as adults is a secondary concern. In a sense, whether they’re all avid readers (which I would hope for them but I’m a realist) is secondary. It’s the openness. It’s the curiosity. It’s the posture toward a text and in a sense, all the world can be a text. If we ask good questions, we’re on our way to living a good life. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a letter once (see Maria Popover’s “Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force” for a deeper exploration):

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I love this mentality toward reading, thinking, and living. I think it’s freeing. I hope my students don’t learn to ask questions thinking that I’m restricting an exercise like this one to reading the Bible. I hope that it’s a paradigm shift that shapes how they live their lives!

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Some inspiring reasons to read the Bible

In my last post (see “Some uninspiring reasons to read the Bible”), I outlined four reasons for reading the Bible that used to inspire me but that no longer do: (1) reading the Bible as an inerrant/infallible text; (2) reading the Bible as a source of doctrinal proof texts; (3) reading the Bible from an “originalist” perspective because it shows the “original intent and goals of Christianity” that should be pursued to this day; and (4) for professional development purposes. So, if these approaches that used to matter to me are inspiring no longer, what does inspire me?

The Bible as a tool for thinking about history
Much of the Bible is mythology. I don’t say that pejoratively. Myth teaches us truths. It teaches us about ourselves. But it doesn’t stand up to the rigorous demands of critical historical research, or our modern scientific method, etc. That being said, it can teach us a few things about history: (A) it does preserve some historical data; (B) it tells us about the historical roots of Judaism and Christianity; (C) it shows us that the world isn’t static; (D) it reminds us that if history doesn’t trouble you, then what you’re experiencing is propaganda.

Regarding (A), archaeologists and historians have used the Bible to help them discover and understand the past. I’m thinking about say some of the developments in the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Hezekiah. Or how the New Testament when paired with the writings of the historian Josephus give us most of our access to first-century Galilee and Judea. So, the Bible does have historical value, even if other major sections of the Bible, like the Exodus, or Jesus’ resurrection, are inaccessible through the tools used by historians.

Regarding (B), both Judaism and Christianity take and have taken inspiration/guidance from the collection called the Tanakh or Old Testament and Christianity has been inspired/guided by the New Testament. These aren’t the only sources of inspiration/guidance for these religions but they are prominent ones. If we want to understand the roots of these religions, the Bible’s presentation of history is valuable and if we consider how to Bible has been used in these religions, a.k.a. its “reception history,” then the Bible’s continued value helps us understand these religions, whether from the inside or the outside.

Regarding (C), an exercise that I’ll have my student do in a couple of week is a comparison between 2 Samuel 24:1-25 and I Chronicles 21:1-30. Both of these texts are about how King David took a census that upset Israel’s God leading to a plague on the people. 2 Samuel is believed by most scholars to have been written in the 6th century BCE whereas 1 Chronicles can be placed in 4th century BCE. In 2 Samuel, it’s Israel’s God that provokes King David to take the census and then judges David and the people for David’s sin. This is an uncomfortable depiction of divinity: God as both tempter and judge. In 1 Chronicles, a character known as satan (an “accuser” or an “attacker”) is the one who provokes David to disobedience. 1 Chronicles’s theology removes God from being directly responsible for human evil/disobedience which is a vision of God that better aligns with the theologies we find in most forms of Judaism and Christianity today. This exercise shows students that history preserves the evolution of theology because humans visions about “God” are continually changing and in some sense, this provides readers of the Bible with an impetus to continue in this tradition of rethinking what we mean when we say “God”. History and the history of our religions isn’t static.

Regarding (D), the Bible can be troubling. My students find themselves wrestling with God’s command to flood the earth; or the Akeda where Abraham seems willing to sacrifice Isaac to his god; or King David’s violence and sexual abuse. As if politicians in Oklahoma and Texas have their way, the Bible will be taught as uncomplicated history! But again (and I don’t know the original source of this very accurate quote), if what you learn about history isn’t complicated and doesn’t make you a bit uncomfortable, then what you’re learning is not history but propaganda. And to be fair, the Bible is full of propaganda: just look at how the Davidic line is presented in Chronicles compared to Samuel.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about literature
The Bible is excellent literature. This is what brings me back to it time and time again at this stage in my life. Have you ever read the Book of Job? The wisdom of the Book of Ecclesiastes? This stuff is brilliant. The characters are simple (e.g. we don’t see their thought lives or motivations) and yet somehow extremely complicated (maybe because we are responsible, as readers, for providing them with thought lives and motivation).

I doubt many English high school teachers expect their students to return time and time again 1984, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Catcher in the Rye. Instead, these books are used to try to install a love of literature, reading, fictional worlds, narrative, etc. The Bible can be taught the same way. And with this in mind, it relieves me of some of the disappointments I mentioned in the last post, namely knowing that many of my students won’t read the Bible as adults. Most of them will engage the Bible through the filter of a pastor or a priest, maybe through the bubble-wrapped presentation of a devotional, but rarely from the challenging, in-depth perspectives that I try to acquaint them with.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about philosophy and theology
While I’m quite uncomfortable with using the Bible to create normative, constructive, prescriptive theology, especially because the God of the Bible is far to anthropomorphized for my taste, I think the Bible can remain provocative for our thoughts about God. Retiring to the Book of Job: I don’t think the author intended for his readers to come to the conclusion that human suffering can be the result of the Creator God having a petty wager with an angelic being. Instead, there are two message that I find probably: (1) the Creator’s world is full of suffering, pain, death, chaos, and you, dear human, are no freer from this reality than a whale, or an elephant, or a dog, all of which derive from the same creative power as we humans do; (2) most attempts to come up with a satisfying theodicy will be comical, at best, and harmful, at worst, just as the “God-Satan bet” at the beginning, or Job’s friends theologies throughout, show us.

Furthermore, the Bible can help us think philosophically. I’m reading Plato’s The Republic again right now. And while I get there are differences, I do think that just as this book can provoke us to think philosophically, especially regarding ethics and politics, so can biblical books like the Books of Daniel and Esther, for example. In fact, juxtaposing Daniel and Esther can be very helpful as both books appear to be Jewish texts written under Greek rule that look back on previous Persian (and to a lesser extent, Babylonian) rule. Daniel’s message is much like deontological ethics: stay true to your convictions no matter if it leads you to a fiery furnace or a lion’s den. (And maybe you’ll be divinely delivered but you do your duty even if no deliverance comes.) Whereas Esther’s message (at least in the original Hebrew version) leaves Esther making pragmatic decisions for her survival and the survival of her people with no expectation of divine deliverance no absolute fidelity to her ancestral laws and customs if those laws and customs leave her and her people vulnerable to extinction. A reader doesn’t need to share the theology of Daniel or Esther to wonder whether deontological ethics or consequentialist ethics are more valuable in the long run. These are philosophical questions that these biblical books can help us consider.

The Bible as a tool liturgical reflection
Finally, I admit this: the Bible is a book better preached than taught, sometimes. (This can be abused though.) It’s a book that’s better read prayerfully, whether individually or communally, than it is scholastically. It’s a book that’s better suited to get us thinking about the divine than it is telling us what to think about the divine. It’s better read like we read poetry than touches us than it is science, history, law, etc.

Maybe I say this because I’ve been around the Episcopal Church for nearly a decade and this view of the Bible sits well in the tradition that is unified not so much around a shared creed as around the type of practiced Christianity advocated by the Book of Common Prayer. Reading the Bible as a wisdom text, or as resource for meditation, makes sense to me. This means reading it openly, non-dogmatically, and in the vernacular of many younger people, spiritually but not religiously (a dichotomy that I don’t think holds when critically evaluated but a “feeling” that I understand).