“Excuse me, I hate to bother you,” my new friend said to me as she walked past my table at the cafe where I was seating wearing my keffiyeh (which I wear everywhere I go as often as I can).

“Yes?” I said.

“Is that the Bible you’re reading?” she asked.

“Well, yes it is.”

“Is it important to read the Bible?”

I thought carefully about how to respond. My seminary training suddenly seemed inadequate when face to face with a person asking me about the Bible.

“I like to read the Bible to become a better person,” I said, “but it’s not about rules. I always say if I’m reading the Bible and become judgmental then I know I’m reading it wrong. But I read it to judge myself, but not to follow rules.”

“But is it important to read the Bible?” my new friend persisted. “How do I begin?”

“I would start in the book of John. And only pay attention to what Jesus says. There are four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Start with John because it teaches Christ is Lord, and the others are more historical.”

“Oh, I need the message Christ is Lord,” she said.

“Anytime I’m here, just come up and we can talk about the Bible,” I answered.

“Well, not the Bible, just the Book of John.”

“Right!”

Common pitfalls: Homophobia, Judgementalism, Christian Exclusivism, and Christian Zionism

Upon sitting down to read about God for my seminary schoolwork, I kept replaying her question in my head. Why do I read the Bible? Why am I in seminary? Why did I choose an evangelical seminary when I am frequently the most interspiritual person there? What would I want someone new to Scripture to avoid? These thoughts open into something larger for me…

I am developing a framework of certain ideas that hang together. What follows are my first attempts to share this framework with others.

Homophobia/Judgmentalism

How could I say all that I wanted to say? Don’t read it and hate queer people…don’t think that Jews are evil or that they’re not children of Abraham unless they believe in Jesus as Lord…so much. Honestly, reading the Bible is challenging nowadays because of how frequently it is misused and misapplied. I’m making a small book on how to get into the Bible for people, that warns against pitfalls that can make you hateful, judgmental or, worst of all, exclusivist, thinking that only Christians are saved.

The need for deeper analysis to avoid injustice

What about injustice? In encouraging a new person to follow Christ, was I helping form someone into a person who perpetrated injustice if they went to a church that treated immigrants as less than? I believe that we need to analyze not just the time period of the Bible but also our own time period, studying society, and specifically, social justice teachings crafted by the oppressed. We need to study how the history of interpretation of the Bible has led to injustice in a Christian dominant society. This work is never done.

Are Christians the only ones who are saved?

I’m developing a lens that helps people see God more clearly today. Christ is Lord, and believe in the bodily resurrection with the soul; however, when the Bible teaches that only Christians are saved, is it really teaching that? Even the most conservative will frequently say “All truth is God’s truth.”

Would recommending the Gospel of John lead my new friend to conclude that Christianity was the only way? Biblical scholars debate this.

Christ didn’t die so we can go to heaven.

When Adam was created in Genesis, there was no Judaism. Christ is described as the second Adam, and when he died, there was no Christianity.

All are made in the image of God, of all religions, Genesis itself teaches this. As Adam is the universal human, so Christ is the universal savior. Furthermore, given my personal knowledge of the nature of Christ, I am confident that it is untrue that only Christians are saved. The first person in heaven was a thief, remember?

Evangelicalism can threaten hell to people as a reason to believe, but to believe and act Christian because you don’t want to go to hell is missing the point:

During my psychotic break my soul left my body and I met God face to face and I experience no doubt in my relationship with God. God is so much bigger than the Bible. It is important to read the Bible, and it is important to read the Bible knowing that God is bigger than all of it. God created the entire universe. God created the earth billions of years ago, and the Bible is only a few thousand years old. The world existed before the Bible existed as a book. Even those who believe in creationism must admit that the Bible was written only after the Hebrew Scriptures were spoken thousands of years prior to their having been written down. God is not a book. God is in the spiritual impulses of all people, manifest most clearly in the incarnation of Christ. That is my belief. But this is also what allows me to hold the Bible so lightly. I use it to become an ethical person, to challenge myself, and to find common ground with fellow Christians in our Christian-dominated society.

Zionism is a threat and a heresy

I thought about my friend’s question again and determined that I am re-grounding theology in my work that is Christian-expansive (reread the above paragraphs if you wonder if this is in the nature of Christ). Why am I doing this? I decided to do this after talking with a Christian Zionist conservative woman. I thought: wow, the end-times story, where Christ will come and slay the Jews or force their conversion, shapes how you look at the entire Bible.

If we are going to transform holistically, which is what conversion is, we have to give people something sustainable to spiritually eat so that they aren’t racist against Muslims or using Jews as pawns in salvation dramas. Christian Zionists believe that we need to get a critical mass of Jewish people in Palestine so Christ can come again. The Jews, according to this heresy, who convert are saved, and those who don’t are eternally damned. Tell me that that isn’t antisemitic.

I am creating materials that point to transfiguration in the image of God and not merely transformation.

We can still read Scripture Christianly: My Favorite Verses (Isaiah 40: 1-5)

What follows is a sample of how I propose we read Scripture. I am not setting myself against tradition but rather am reawakening tradition from the captivity to the Bible that has been present since only a few hundred years ago. We need to be structurally beholden to the Bible and not literally.

The verses that follow mean little without considering them within the context of the whole book of Isaiah, and from there, all of Scripture (both testaments). First of all, though what follows mentions Jerusalem, I never take the Bible’s mention of Israel, Jews, or Judaism to mean that it applies to those ideas or people today.

In other words, I don’t read it like a fundamentalist, where “Jerusalem” means geographical Jerusalem; instead, I read it structurally, to the extent that it has nothing to do with Jews or Israel or Jerusalem at all but is about riding the waves of distress and calm as conveyed as the narrative unfolds, and fully feeling the relief that occurs when a prophet enters the madness to utters such words as these:

“Comfort, comfort My people,” says your God.
²     “With gentle words, tender and kind,
Assure Jerusalem, this chosen city from long ago,
    that her battles are over.
    The terror, the bloodshed, the horror of
My punishing work is done.
This place has paid for its guilt; iniquity is pardoned;
    its term of incarceration is complete.
It has endured double the punishment it was due.”

³ A voice is wailing, “In the wilderness, get it ready! Prepare the way;
    make it a straight shot. The Eternal would have it so.
Straighten the way in the wandering desert
    to make the crooked road wide and straight for our God.
⁴ Where there are steep valleys, treacherous descents,
    raise the highway; lift it up;
    bring down the dizzying heights.
Fill in the potholes and gullies, the rough places.
    Iron out the shoulders flat and wide.
⁵ The Lord will be, really be, among us.
    The radiant glory of the Lord will be revealed.
All flesh together will take it in. Believe it.
    None other than God, the Eternal, has spoken.”

These are the sacred scriptures of the Jewish as well as the Christian people. We should not be afraid to read these Christianly, either. The above verses are like a balm to to me when I am distressed. While Christians believe that John the Baptist was acting in the tradition of the prophet Isaiah as seen in the above passage, rather than seeing this as only prefiguring Jesus’s time, building up to the New Testament, I look at this structurally.

A Return to Creativity: Other Ways of Looking at Scripture

Throughout history, interpretation of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures has been varied, and frequently highly creative. Midrash was a Jewish improvisational reading that was an interpretation and gloss of Scripture. These were diverse and multivalent, diverging widely and adapted to suit the needs of a community at any given time. One can see the creative interpretation of these Scriptures carried out in the New Testament as the Jewish writers of the New Testament interpret their scriptures and prophecies in light of the miracle of the resurrection of Christ. Over time, these narratives were crystallized and written down (most scholars think this happened within the first 100 years of Christ’s death and resurrection). The texts were canonized, meaning that there became official versions. The process of making the scriptural canon took centuries, and the Protestant version of the Bible emerged during the Protestant Reformation (1517). There are different versions of the Bible in different traditions such as in Orthodoxy versus Roman Catholicism.

Hyper-literalism in biblical interpretation is a new phenomenon

In the last 300 years, with the surge in literacy paired with the abundance of Bibles in Protestant homes has resulted in an increasing literalism. In previous eras people were open to metaphor and analogy, especially in the first few hundred years of the church. I am calling for a return to creativity, and I am by no means the only one. We need to recognize the recurrent pattern of fall, redemption, war, peace, birth, and death, such as that seen in Ecclesiastes 3 are everywhere. It begins,

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot     
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,    
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

The Reformation led us down a path of false, idolatrous certainty

The Reformation was a time of creative recovery of the sacred texts. Now is the time for creativity, too. With each new year the American Evangelical church gets more and more rigid in her interpretation of Scripture. In fact, I just read a book that talked about how every year more discoveries take place revealing how perfectly the Old and New Testaments fit together. While I agree they perfectly inhere, as I read his argument, I realized he was very specific about what he meant. He was saying that certain utterances of the prophets had to mean a specific event that actually happened.

In reality, the resonances between Old and New Testaments reveal a certain overlap because these are the ebbs and flows of life itself as experienced by humans, who are the authors, “experiencers,” and “embodiers” of Scripture. We are analogical beings, connecting events loosely as we compare them to what Scripture teaches. When we get too certain, and start to see geographical names in the Bible not as ideas but as a map for what needs to happen today, this takes us off course. Herodotus wrote that we never step into the same river twice. This applies to biblical interpretation as well. Biblical interpretation is not a science but rather an art, the continued existence of Holy Land is not an invitation for colonization and archeological discovery.

Does it cause harm? If it does, it is not of Christ

Truth is singular and yet incarnational and therefore manifold: we are all individuals, and yet in unique bodies. Only a cult would demand total uniformity. Just as in Acts 2 individuals received the gift of the Holy Spirit in their own languages while being united in thought and heart, so the creator is breathing life into us so that we are unique as we are made fully alive in Christ. Scripture is text and therefore should be contextually applied. The integrity of an interpretation rests on this alone: does it cause harm?

In his book Theology of Hope, Moltmann wrote, in 1967, when the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began, that we cannot look at the promises of God abstractly, apart from the God who promises. Fulfillment of God’s promises “is entrusted directly to God in his freedom and faithfulness” and so fulfillment of Scripture or prophecy cannot be forced to fit in a “hard and fast juridical system of historic necessities according to a schema of promise and fulfillment.” In other words, this cannot be done by demonstrating the functioning of a promise-fulfillment pattern, nor in making plans for the future. He writes:

“If they are God’s promises, then God must also be regarded as the subject of their fulfillment.” (104)

Special thanks to Lani Lanchester for helping me edit this article. The ideas and their potential shortcomings are my own.