Lately I’ve been talking a bit about rethinking rituals of the church so they can be used to bolster resistance. Today let’s talk about the Bible.
I grew up in a church that took the Bible both seriously and literally. We were taught that everything we needed to know about God and about life could be found in the Bible. Reading the Bible in that way causes a lot of problems. It’s why, when I first came out, I was desperate to explain away those clobber passages. Not to mention all of the other contradictions that I had to do mental gymnastics to explain away. So, for a while, as I moved out of my fundamentalist upbringing I started reading the Bible like a textbook. It became something that was best put in historical context, a book that needed to be read with a lot of caution. After a while, though, that way of reading the Bible became kind of dry and I needed a new way to read. 
I am appreciative of my upbringing for instilling in me a love of the Bible and a deep knowledge of it, because in my effort to reframe how I read the Bible, that love and knowledge has gone a long way. And I am also thankful for the time of reading it like a textbook because the historical context has brought the Scripture alive in new ways and has deepened my formation as a radical.
If we are going to be communities of resistance, we must learn to read the Bible well and with deep love. We can learn from the Psalms how to pray with honesty. We can learn from the example of the lives of our foremothers and forefathers how to serve God well (and often, how to serve God poorly). Our imaginations can be enriched by parables and prophets. We can learn to dream new futures and get a sense of what it means to live together in community.
We learn from the stories about Jesus what it means to live as a constant resistor to empire. We see what inclusion looks like. We understand more about nonviolence as a way of life. We get a glimpse of a new community struggling to define itself and make sense of their experience.
And as we see all of these various types of literature, all of the stories of flawed and holy people, all of the grasping at language to explain God, we learn how to speak and to think. Our lives are shaped and we are strengthened for the work that is in front of us.
The Bible isn’t a field manual, but it doesn’t need to be. It is instead the story of people on a journey toward God and toward justice. We would do well to let it encourage us and strengthen us, to shape us and change us, to deepen our imagination and to challenge our limited thinking. It is a text that continues to encourage my commitment to resisting imperialism both in the world and in my own heart. It is a text I wrestle with and one that I love. And living in that tension with the Bible helps me also to live in tension in the world.
First, just to get it off my chest: your old tradition did not actually read the Bible literally, that is impossible. It read it in a way very strongly shaped by an interpretive community and as (conscious or not) rhetorical strategy to make the reading look unquestionable, referred to it as “literally.”
Now to actually engage your post. I don’t think that there’s a true conflict between reading the Bible in a careful historically-oriented way and one that embraces the beauty and themes of the Bible. I think to really understand what’s going on with a text even 100 years old requires attention to history, and the Bible’s texts include portions well over 2000 years old.
Understanding the context of things makes what would be clear to the early readers, available to us, or at least partly so.
This doesn’t mean that we need to carefully cross reference every thing we look at in the Bible, but it does mean we need to read with an eye to context, and an awareness that it isn’t rooted in our own time.
Yes. I realize they didn’t read it literally. I was just trying to engage with how I thought I was reading the Bible.
And I agree, reading historically doesn’t take away from the beauty. I personally think that reading in that way deepens beauty and meaning. However, I also think that if one is only reading it as an historical document you miss a lot of what is life giving about it.
Well put, Shay! It was a huge struggle for me to reclaim and devotional and worship-oriented way of reading the bible after only a year of academic study, and took many years after that. Actually, to be honest I need to say that it’s an ongoing process. But I really appreciate your inclusion of the OT – there is so much humanity and grace there, and recently in liberal Christian circles I’ve been finding it hard to even begin to articulate that. There’s a lot of liberal supersessionism and Marcionism out there.