Black Girls Are Holy especially when they ask big questions about the Bible

All of my life I’ve heard people say things like “If it’s in the Bible…”, “the Bible doesn’t lie”, and to consult the Bible if I have questions about any and everything for my personal and spiritual growth.

I’ve observed people throw around phrases like biblical inerrancy (the bible is without error) and biblical infallibility (the bible can’t be wrong) when engaging in conversations about scripture.

I’ve even come across churches that have labeled themselves as ‘Bible-based’ because they want you to know for certain that they take their Bibles seriously as if most Christian churches don’t already consider the Bible to be a holy and sacred text.

When someone says that something is in the Bible (especially as it relates to personhood, identity, rules, and rituals), often they’re not wrong. The Bible covers a lot of ground, some topics more controversial than others. But, these topics are often connected to stories with deeper metaphors and meanings, and if we’re not careful, we miss the context of why something is written, why it is presented in a particular way, and so many other factors that make scripture what it is.

Years ago, I found myself asking these two questions:

1. If it’s in the Bible and the Bible is the literal book of an entire faith tradition, it must be right?
2. Who am I to say it’s wrong?

Because I was afraid of being labeled a heretic (believing something that is contrary to traditional Christian beliefs), I knew I couldn’t consult the pastors of the church I was attending. So, instead, I sought out a spiritual director. I found Margaret’s information on the internet and called her up to schedule our first session. I didn’t really know what a spiritual director was or what they did. But, I had questions about what I was reading in the Bible and needed some guidance and clarity.

At the time, I was a faithful churchgoer and I attended and served at a new, very popular, and fast-growing church — actually one of the fastest-growing churches in the country at the time.

In this space, I began to develop my skills and interest in being a religious and spiritual leader. I attended at least 3 out of the 6–8 services offered each weekend. I served on multiple teams, and during the week, I hosted a Bible study at my home.

At the same time, I was a high school English teacher tasked with teaching teenagers how to read, write, reflect, and respond to the texts we were reading and the world around them.

While we weren’t reading anything remotely close to the Christian Bible, my students were very aware of the religious undertones that were present in almost everything we read that year. Many of them went to church or had grandmothers that took them for special occasions. Confirmations and special moments at their quinceaneras were also reminders of the faith they proclaimed.

But they were also growing up in an era where they constantly saw how religion could be insidiously dangerous and divisive while also learning more about embracing their own identities and advocating for themselves and those around them.

They picked up on the subtleties of Christian nationalism as they watched Donald Trump begin to pick up momentum for the 2016 Presidential Election. In many of our class discussions, they were quick to call out injustices and inequality for the sake of all humanity.

Because the Bible says so wasn’t a good enough answer for them. And slowly it became the same for me.

The same push that I’d given to my students to listen, read, and reflect critically was the same one that I eventually gave myself when it came to what I was hearing in Sunday sermons and what I was reading on my own.

Fast forward to my first meeting with Margaret: A gentle older woman, she greeted me with a smile and walked me into the meeting space at her church. We sat down in two chairs that faced one another, and once settled, she said a brief prayer. When she finished, she unfolded her hands and allowed me to share more about why I was there.

“Paul,” I said. I had been reading Ephesians 5:22–24:

22 Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Saviour. 24 Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.

I was trying to understand what Paul meant by submission. Submission was (and always seems to be a hot topic) when it comes to talking about marriage in church, and there was something stirring inside of me trying to understand why. When I went to Google for clarification, I was troubled by what I found. I stumbled upon the blog of a man who had confided in his own pastor about his wife who didn’t want to have sex with him. He wrote that his pastor, in turn, told him that it was her wifely duty to do so and used the same Ephesians text…which is why it came up in the Google search. As I was recounting my mini-research project about Paul, submission, and the blog that I found, Margaret just looked on calmly.

“So, what do you think about what you’re reading in relation to what you’ve found?” she asked me.

“It’s written in the Bible, but I’m not quite sure I agree with this man’s pastor,” I replied. “What he’s suggesting isn’t right”. I didn’t have the language to express just how wrong he was yet, but I knew that it was.

Margaret then pointed me to Ephesians 5:25:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Interestingly enough, I had never moved beyond the ‘wifely duties’ part of Ephesians, often because the magnifying glass always seems to be on what women should be doing. I was also appalled that this never came up in the blog post from this man and his pastor’s advice.

I continued to wrestle with this until Margaret reminded me that this was simply this man’s interpretation. And then she reminded me that how one interprets scripture is just as important as the scripture one is reading.

She also pointed out how choosing to read one part of scripture literally (Ephesians 5: 22–24) but skipping over other parts (Ephesians 5:25) can be a dangerous practice if it goes unchecked.

Margaret affirmed my ability to think critically and ask questions, especially because I was navigating a new world where asking questions about the Bible was scary.

I grew up thinking that if I questioned the Bible, that meant I was questioning God which would then mean I was questioning my faith.

However, having the space to finally unpack my lingering curiosities was liberating in a way that I didn’t know it could be. I would continue to meet with Margaret until I applied, was accepted, and moved four states away to be enrolled in Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.

I remember the first day of the Old Testament like it was yesterday. My professor looked around the room at all of us and said “Congratulations, you are all theologians.” His spiel included the importance of biblical literacy and interpretation for our churches and communities. Because we had made the choice to commit to seminary, we were also making the choice to see, read, and interact with scripture in a way that empowered the communities of faith we served.

We’d start each class session with a quiz on the biblical text we were assigned to read, but then the class discussion would move towards understanding biblical history, different methods of biblical interpretation, and how the biblical text compares to the sacred texts of other religions and traditions.

I’ll never forget the day we unpacked Moses, the Red Sea, and the mystery of this biblical account.

Without going into too many details and down a rabbit hole, Bible scholars have been debating the question of ‘is it the red sea or the sea of reeds and did the Israelites actually cross over a body of water?’ for centuries based on archaeological research compared to biblical accounts.

Classmates sat in both awe and agitation over the multiple interpretations of this Bible classic because moving beyond the text changed or shifted their perspective.

This happened all the time, and I absolutely loved it.

After a year in Old Testament, we’d continue doing the same thing in New Testament, especially in light of the Gospels (hello Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John!). We also spent a lot of time in Introduction to Preaching also thinking through biblical interpretation, especially with texts of terror and how to preach through really hard texts in the Bible.

All of these experiences helped me come to an important conclusion for myself: The question isn’t really about whether the Bible can or cannot be inerrant or infallible…because that’s not what it’s meant to be.

Before you clutch your pearls, hear me out. The Bible isn’t meant to be right or wrong because it simply exists just as it is with an open invitation to its reader to make meaning from its words and stories.

This means that literal readings will miss the mark every single time and our arguments about the rightness or correctness of scripture will quickly gloss over the depth and the variation that comes with reading the sacred text. Also, keep in mind that meaning and understanding don’t always translate well across languages, so what we’re reading and comprehending in English may not be what the writers actually meant in Hebrew and Greek.

Expanding how you read takes practice, courage, and a little bit of creativity. Here are a few suggestions and considerations to move beyond literal readings of scripture:

1. Consider reading in “community”: We read the text through our own eyes and with our own background and experiences in mind. Thus, the reader (you and I) must be willing to engage the text with others, particularly those who are not just like us. The Bible offers a variety of perspectives and voices, so we should also acknowledge the diversity of thought in our readings. If your spiritual community is in need of additional voices, commentaries are a great place to start when it comes to wanting to see and hear how others are reading and interpreting.
2. Be willing to be curious and ask questions: There are some really crazy Bible stories, some that will make you laugh and others that will make you uncomfortable…but, that’s the point. Anything that feels unsettling about a particular text is an invitation to go deeper into it, explore, and ask questions. Questions signal that you’re thinking about God and thinking about God is doing the work of theology.
3. Consider the fullness+ of God and the story of God’s people in your interpretation: One of my favorite postures for Christian life and faith comes from the United Church of Christ and their belief of “God is still speaking”. The Bible presents us a complex story of humankind and its relationship to God through a very unique origin story to and through the birth of Jesus to the aftermath of Jesus’ ascension into the beginning foundations of ‘the church’. We’re a long way removed in 2023, and yet, there’s something about the Bible that keeps us coming back to it for inspiration. Our world looks very different from the world experienced in antiquity, but we can draw parallels between the two. However, consider the mystery of God. As much as we try to understand God, it is quite perplexing to comprehend that we’ll never really know all there is to know about God. Same for our Bibles. And that’s the beauty of the word, but in text and in its living form. This is the same Bible that the world’s greatest preachers and teachers have been engaging within their churches forever, and no two messages are ever the same.

If you see the Bible simply as a rule book, then you’ll see your faith in the same way. If you read it word-for-for and believe that it’s literal, then you’ll miss the nuance, the metaphor, and the invitation to interpretation. If you use it to justify your hate or dislike/disdain for a person or a group of people, then you’ve most definitely missed the point.

The Bible is not one singular story. It is a collection of stories, poems, historical documentation, lineages, family trees, and oral histories in written form that tell the stories of multiple generations of people living and seeking out something, sometimes the divine, sometimes meaning, sometimes power, and sometimes an answer to their deepest questions. Sometimes fact, sometimes fiction, sometimes myth, and sometimes history, the Bible is an anthology that gives us another way to see and experience God alongside one another.