Why do Christians love the Bible?  Since many millions of us read it fairly frequently, and hundreds of millions of us revere it as a communication from, or at least about, a benevolent God, what in it makes reasonably intelligent people take it seriously?  These questions seem particularly acute when we recognize that many of the props that supported the Bible for some of its readers (belief in its scientific accuracy, for example) have been kicked out from under it.  They also become pressing because many of the efforts to “save” the Bible only work by suppressing any sort of careful reading or questioning of it.  Too often, Christians take refuge in sentimental, “what does it mean to you?” approaches that substitute a certain kind of approved experience or even emotional profile for any sort of activity that deserves the name of thinking.  So, we should ask the question, again, is the Bible reliable?  Why do we love it so?

            Perhaps we might begin with what the Bible is and is not.  It is not a book of science.  It says nothing about how species develop, the hydrology or geology of the earth, the size of the observable universe, or any number of other questions that we modern people are legitimately interested in.  People who love the Bible are thus free to pursue scientific inquiry full on without worrying that they will somehow transgress a spiritual boundary.  Since science is not the only way of understanding reality – and in many ways is a far less interesting and informative way than philosophy, history, or poetry – to say that the Bible is not a scientific work in no way denigrates it, anymore than saying that my child is not a supernova somehow makes her less interesting or important.  Only the crudest sort of eighteenth-century reductionism (which often is still being played out in the popular media, oddly enough) could think of “non-scientific” as a flaw.

            Also, the Bible is not a blueprint for all human societies in every time and place.  Although many of its readers attempt to read off its pages some sort of map for their lives either individually or collectively, it simply does not work this way, at least not in a simple, straightforward fashion.  There is not always a straight line between a given biblical statement and a behavior or practice in the real world of believers.  There never has been, and sensitive readers have always known that.  Moving from Bible to behavior requires careful thought in the context of a community of faith.

            What is the Bible, then?   A simple read-through would reveal a great many forms of literature, a multitude of ideas and commitment, and, in short, an extraordinary collection of human experiences and emotions.  Page after page of soaring poetry in every mode of human life from ecstasy to horror and despair.  Stories about kings and prophets, and of course Jesus of Nazareth and his marvelously self-deprecating disciples (who after all, gave us the stories of their own failures).  Visions of redeemed worlds and cosmic struggles.  All these things and more populate the pages of the Bible.  Much of it is poetry to be relished for its imagery and its profound insight into human existence.  Much else is narrative to be entered into with imagination and sympathy for the predicaments in which we find ourselves.  The very earthiness of the Bible, its refusal to embrace churchy, sentimental (that word again!), washed-out views of reality makes it both challenging and endearing.  It is still the inevitable book.

            At this point, however, many modern readers may offer objections that seems to them serious (though I personally find them much less so than I used to).  “If the Bible is just poetry or just story, then in what sense is it true?  Isn’t it just propaganda for somebody’s beliefs somewhere, maybe even just a power play?”  One hears this sort of thing all the time, and it makes sense to try to respond to it in some way.

            The first objection strikes me as the less serious.  We might well ask a question or two in response.  “What do you mean by true?”  Surely you don’t mean simply “verifiable” or “repeatable” in the way scientific experiments allegedly are.  If you do, then you are simply begging the question: only things that are verifiable and accessible to all are true because only things that are verifiable and accessible are true.  How do you know that the statement itself is true, since it can’t be testable in any timeframe or circumstance that would be manageable?

            Take, for example, the lovely little line from the Song of Songs: “Love is as strong as death.”  It comes near the end of the book after some of the most gorgeous passages in literature describing frustrated longing for one’s lover.  Is it true?  If empirical verification is our only avenue to truth, then of course we are at sea, since we can’t measure, much less compare, the strength of love or death.  Their  inevitability is our experience so far, but who can speak of the future, and who can say if “strength” and “inevitability” are the same thing?  Yet is it true?  Certainly our experience seems to indicate reasons to believe that it might be, and we often act as though it is.  I think we could multiply such examples a thousandfold, not only from the Bible, of course, but from all of human literature.  There is simply no reason to reject the Bible on grounds of scientism, since the belief that only science provides truth is simply a prejudice, an unwarranted assumption that is self-contradictory on its face.

            The second objection is thus more serious, in my view, and it is where most modern critics of the Bible land.  The claim we often hear is that the Bible is simply immoral, that it advocates practices and beliefs that hurt real people and that it attributes to God attitudes and beliefs that in a human being would be considered reprehensible.  This claim is so serious that many religious thinkers have felt a need to address it, going back more than two thousand years.  That will be the subject of my next post….