The Bible

I love the bible!

The bible contains so many wonderful spiritual insights. It begins with the idea that it is a holy task to bring order out of chaos; that somehow we humans have been invited to be collaborators with the Sacred in doing this. It ends with the demand that we be brothers and sisters with all other humans and treat all with justice and love.

Of course along the way, there is a lot of nonsense, legalism and even some--though not as much as the bible's detractors like to emphasize--horrible, cruel acts and commands attributed to God.

In light of the latter, how do I continue to revere this collection of documents called "Holy Scripture", the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament? Of course there are many conservatives who call themselves "Evangelical Christians" who have no trouble with this question. They claim that God, Himself (And God is always male) wrote all these words or at least dictated them to the authors. They believe that all these writings are absolutely with any error; they are literally true. They manage to argue around all the contradictions, then accept that, "God said it and therefore I believe it to be true." If God wanted to "smite" the children and animals in Jericho then so be it. There must have been a reason, but that is God's decision.

They have all kinds of excuses for the existence of two separate and contradictory stories of creation. They dismiss any claims of similarities with other middle eastern creation stories from the surrounding nations. Moving to the Christian Testament, they have no trouble with the irreconcilable contradictions in the stories of the birth of Jesus. They don't see the myriad of other internal evidence proving that much of the New Testament is mythological, that there is much in the stories that is not objectively factual.

But to answer the question as to why I love the bible: Read as historical metaphor, the bible points to a reality beyond reality. It is fashionable right now to attack all religion and with it to attack spirituality. Sam Harris is the most rational of the critics of religion. Beyond him there are several others--Fundamentalist Atheists. Yet most people discern something sacred in their world. Most of us experience the kindness of others, love and caring and intimations of justice as somehow divine, somehow beyond the rational.

I am not prepared to say that human ethics requires the existence of a deity out there beyond our world. In fact, I have no idea what "beyond our world" even means. But a large number of us feel that we have encountered something, either in ourselves or in the confluence of community, where our own selves and our world come together, something that deserves reverence and that pushes us to a spiritual reality. We don't all use the same language. We often have our perception of the Sacred embedded within our own unique cultural mapping. In fact even when we use the same language, our experiences are not the same, but individual. Yet it there is some common reality that we point to.

So the bible is a mostly metaphorical, somewhat historical, collection of stories in which the writers attempted to explain their personal numinous reality. In those stories, we can discover how others experienced the Sacred and use those discoveries to begin learning--discerning how that works in our own lives. The writers and story-tellers learned from each other. There is, in the bible, a progression from primitive magic to spirit, from archaic rule and law to the justice spoken of by Amos, Micah, Isaiah and the other prophets.

The creation story, of God bringing order out of chaos, lastly creating humankind and enlisting us in the continued work of creation helps me discern my "calling" to work to end war and poverty and injustice; to support those organizations and individuals who are active in this creation work. The story in Matthew 25 about who are the sheep and who are the goats helps me discern my calling to provide for those in need. (And to remember that from my limited perspective, I am not always fully able to discern the goats from the sheep.) The story of Elijah reminds me of the need to go aside from my busy daily life to hear the spirit stirring in a "still, small voice." But also to go back, after a time, to be with those who need what I can offer. The story of Jesus picking corn on the sabbath because people were hungry reminds me that human need supersedes all orthodoxy. Jesus' life explicates the meaning of "Love."

The bible is a wonderful book of wisdom, if it is read as a spiritual finger pointing to the moon of spiritual awareness, enlightenment, the Sacred. If we worship the finger, the bible, we will surely miss the Sacred. But if there is no finger, we can look in all the wrong directions and not see the moon. The conservative Christians worship the finger, the militant atheists dismiss the finger and not seeing the moon, they can't believe that it even exists. Of course the bible is not the only finger pointing to the moon.

(Finger and moon from traditional Zen analogy.)