“[The Bible] is repetitive, contradictory, sententious, foolish and even at times ill intentioned”….Read it Anyway.

Why GQ is right. And wrong. About the Bible

Nothing gets one as much undeserved attention as criticizing the Bible or Christianity. For a tradition that has endured plagues, persecutions, various attempts at annihilation (both from within and without), modern American Christianity is remarkably sensitive — or in the parlance of our times ‘a Snowflake’.

As a Christian pastor, I tend to ignore most of the ‘war on Christmas’, ‘Christian persecution’ stories in the west for two reasons: 1) I don’t have that much free time, and 2) there are real Christians, facing real persecution, in places like the West Bank, the State of Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China and others that should SHAME any American Christians who claims to be ‘persecuted’ because their million dollar temple can’t send more than a certain amount of money to their favorite political candidate.

But GQ’s claim that the Bible is ‘a book you don’t need to read’ intrigued me. For the most part, culture magazines don’t write about Christianity these days, unless it is to comment on ‘Cool Pope’s’ wardrobe (verdict: envious) or to cast dispersions on some fringe Christian pastor doing something embarrassing with a Koran.

So what was this about? Well first of all — we should consider the other books on the list ‘Catcher in the Rye’, “Huck Finn’, ‘Farewell to Arms’ — all books you should definitely read are on this list. So maybe don’t take it too seriously. Second, the recommended ‘instead of’ read is ‘The Notebook’ which — well I just don’t know what to do with that. But others have written better and longer about the dangers of vague moral therapeutic Deism so I’ll just leave it at that.

But GQ Editors do raise some valid critiques of ‘The Bible’ (and miss some important ones too). Principle among their concerns are that scripture is repetitive, foolish, and self contradictory. (They also call it sententious and ill intentioned — which well, kind of contradict each other. And there is a whole argument about whether God as the arbiter of morality can ‘over moralize’ but whatever).

SO. Is the Bible Repetitive? (John 11:40), Foolish? (1 Cor. 1:23) and Self Contradictory? (Matt 5:38?)

ABSOLUTELY It is. And that is why you should read it. Over and over and over again.

You see — what the editors of GQ perhaps have missed, and what we in the Church frequently miss, is that Scripture was written BY MAN. FOR GOD.

Key to our understanding of how scripture works is that God inspired man and man wrote it down. And here I use ‘man’ intentionally because, it is highly likely all of the original autographs (recordings of scripture) were written down by men. Which means it is quite likely that a thing or two got lost in translation.

AND THEN. Someone copied that copy. And copied that copy. And translated that copy. And re-translated. And reverse translated. And now you can walk into a bookstore and see a whole shelf of bibles with different translations and commentaries and editions, and well it is all just quite a lot.

Remarkably — Christians throughout the ages have kept a pretty open mind about the whole thing and been willing to say ‘well maybe we don’t have all the answers here’. Which is why we keep reading, studying, marking, and inwardly digesting these sacred but at times profane words.

Does Jesus ‘do away’ with the old laws? Or just improve on them? Do David’s failings make him unreedemable or the model of redemption? Was Sodom’s sin homosexuality or a lack of hospitality? Why does Paul call Jesus’ story ‘foolishness’ and ‘a stumbling block’? Why is it Jesus’ own friends who betray and abandon him? Why do the women in scripture STILL not get enough credit?!? (See comment above regarding writers and editors).

BUT….READ IT ANYWAY

Of course, where I (and I hope) all of Christendom part ways with GQ is to say that we SHOULD in fact read scripture, not in spite of the imperfectness of it but because of it.

Because in the imperfections in scripture we can begin to map out the contours of imperfections in our own lives and in our world today. A story about ‘the worst King, even worse than his father’ and how the community reacted can tell us as much about leadership as it can tell us about our own complacency with bad political, clerical and community leadership in our towns and cities. The back and forth between Jesus’ identity as teacher, prophet, savior, King should help us understand our own struggles to figure out who we are, and what exactly we should DO with our lives. And the lack of clarity in scripture around our most intimate moments — around sexuality, human interaction and love — should be a warning to us about not to jump to too many conclusions as we wrestle with how to understand and process changes in the landscape of sexual morality in 2018.

Maybe this all sounds terrible to you. Maybe you want to argue about it. I welcome it. But first you are going to have to pick up the Bible and re-read it’s for yourself!