by Timothy Beal
But the flagship consumer product, the heart of the industry, remains this cultural icon of the Bible, shaped by nineteenth-century Puritanic Biblicism, refined by early-twentieth-century fundamentalism, and repackaged, again and again, by neo-evangelicalism. That’s what the Bible biz is selling in pop culture form. And that, I have come to believe, is a dead end.
The icon of the Bible as God’s textbook for the world is as bankrupt as the idea that it stands for, of religious faith as absolute black-and-white certainty. Just as the cultural icon of the flag often becomes a substitute for patriotism, and just as the cultural icon of the four-wheel-drive truck often becomes a substitute for manly independence and self-confidence, so the cultural icon of the Bible often becomes a substitute for a vital life of faith, which calls not for obedient adherence to clear answers but thoughtful engagement with ultimate questions. The Bible itself invites that kind of engagement. The iconic image of it as a book of answers discourages it.
The Course of This Book
This book begins in the present, exploring the culture of biblical consumerism, in which marketing teams are the new evangelists and spreading the Word goes hand in hand with moving product. As publishers race to reinvent the Bible in an ever-widening variety of forms, all competing in the marketplace of faith to be the ultimate realization of the cultural icon of the Bible, I argue that they are stretching that idea to its breaking point. The icon of the Bible, The Book of books, is in the process of deconstruction.
And that, I believe, is a good thing. It’s the end of the Word as we know it, and I feel fine. The Word as we know it is not very old, as we have already begun to see, and it’s a distraction from the Scriptures themselves. Its end is an occasion to find a fresh approach to the Bible that is truer not only to its content but also to its fascinating history.
Many will be surprised to realize that there never has been a time when we could really talk about the Bible in the singular. There is no such thing as the Bible in that sense, and there never has been. The Bible has always been legion, a multiplicity of forms and contents, with no original to be found. In early Judaism and Christianity, there were many different scrolls and codices, variously collected and shared in many different versions, with no standard edition. Even in the early centuries of the print era, after Gutenberg, we find a burgeoning Bible-publishing industry with literally thousands of different editions and versions. The difference between Bible publishing then and now is a matter of degree more than kind.
As we explore the cultural history of the Bible, beginning with earliest Christianity, before the Bible, and continuing through the print revolution into the present day, we come to realize how differently Christian Scriptures have been produced, understood, and used in different times and places. In the process, we begin to question the received wisdom that the Bible as we know it today is the way it’s always been known. The closer we look at its history of development, the more richly complex the picture becomes. Here, then, is an opportunity to rediscover the Bible after the Bible. The end of the Word as we know it calls for another way of knowing.
As a professor of religious studies in a secular university, I never presume that the students in my classes share a common religious or nonreligious background. A typical class includes a wide diversity of religious perspectives and perspectives on religion. A lot of them are Christian or Jewish. Most are not. I am very comfortable teaching in this kind of context, and I hope that this book will reach similarly mixed company.
At the same time, students of every background often remind me of what I knew very well back when, as a student, I fell in love with what I now teach: that the most powerful educational experiences always come very close to the bone. Our hearts race. Our faces flush. Our skin tingles. We find ourselves making connections between what matters inside the classroom and what matters outside. We find the histories we’re exploring in class speaking to our own personal stories.
Often, toward the end of a course, after final papers have been handed in and things are winding down, a student will raise her or his hand and ask me how I personally make sense of what we’ve been studying. It usually goes something like this: “You’re a Christian, right? So what does the Bible mean to you in your spiritual life?” Or more bluntly, “How can you still be a Christian?” It’s usually a conservative Christian student who asks the question. But most students in the class perk up to hear how I’ll respond. For some, like the questioner, the course has challenged their understanding of the Bible and its history in profound ways. They can’t look at the Bible the same way as they used to. They’re wondering if it’s still relevant to their faith. I’ve obviously been through a similar process. How did I do it? For others, especially those who are not religious or who are even antireligious, it seems like I’ve laid out plenty of good reasons to throw out or at least play down the importance of the Bible. Yet I don’t want them to. Why not? Where’s the value, let alone the necessity, in continuing to read it religiously? Moving through the first two parts of this book, many readers, I expect, will have similar questions. And they matter very much to me, too. In the last chapter, I hope to clear some space to reflect on them.
That, in a nutshell, is the course of this book: from the present, to the past, to the future. It’s the end of the Word as we know it. There’s no going back. But there is a way forward.
My Utmost, Revisited
Shortly after I began my first job as a professor of biblical studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, I received a package from my parents in my office mailbox. Inside was a brand-new copy of the devotional classic My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers, a beloved Scottish preacher and founder of the Bible Training College in London. Published ten years after his untimely death in 1917 of acute appendicitis, My Utmost is a collection of Chambers’s teachings that were transcribed and edited by his widow, Gertrude Hobbs, into 365 daily devotionals. Each begins with a biblical passage in the familiar King James Version, followed by an exhortation inspired by that passage. For as long as I could remember, a very well-worn copy of this book had lain open on Mom’s nightstand, next to her Bible, and I had often seen her reading from it during her daily prayer times.
A short handwritten note from Mom bookmarked the entry for December 15, my birthday. The biblical passage at the top of the page was from Paul’s second letter to his disciple Timothy, my namesake, in the New Testament. It reads, “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” In the brief exhortation beneath the passage, Chambers takes on the voice of Paul, encouraging his reader, as though a young disciple, to struggle to find a way to express God’s truth for himself so that his words can strengthen others in their faith.
In the note, Mom wrote that she and Dad had made this biblical passage and Chambers’s reflection on it their lifelong prayer for me. They had read it together and prayed for me every December 15 since my first birthday.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but at the time I didn’t fully appreciate this gift. Moved as I was, and always have been, by my parents’ steadfast, prayerful care for me, I was put off by the book and the biblical quotation in it. I’d never read My Utmost, but I had dismissed it as sentimental and moralistic. When it came in the mail, I immediately associated it with the kind of fundamentalist Biblicism that I had rejected.
Reading Chambers’s exhortation now, however, I can see what my parents must always have seen: not a command to submit to authority for approval, but a call to wrestle with what presents itself as authoritative in order to find my own voice in relation to it. “If you cannot express yourself on any subject,” Chambers begins, “struggle until you can.” He describes this struggle, this suffering for words, as going through the “winepress of God,” where inherited expressions of truth get crushed like ripe grapes. “You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strength
ening to someone else.” He concludes,
Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.
Struggling to divide the “word of truth” that I’ve inherited, wrestling with the theological traditions in which I’m steeped, with the Word itself, experimenting to remake those inheritances into words that I can write or say with integrity, words that might mean something to someone else, which is what my parents had prayed and wished for me. This is the struggle and experiment of my life. It is, I daresay, my calling, my vocation as a writer and teacher. It is both an intellectual, scholarly struggle and a personal, religious one.
What I had once seen in myself as an unacceptable struggle with the meaning of the Bible, and a drawn-out rebellion against the biblical faith of my parents, I now recognize as an answer to prayer. Whether or not prayer can move mountains, there’s no doubt that it can be powerfully transformative for the one praying, and for those prayed for. As the very wise minister to whom I’m married reminds me, prayer is most essentially the expression of deep desire. Pray ceaselessly, Paul exhorts. Over time, you may live into the desires of your most heartfelt prayers. I believe that my folks, especially Mom, lived into their December 15 prayer for me. They created a safe and loving home space in which the striving to understand and articulate articles of faith for myself, dividing words of truth, was not only allowed but encouraged and celebrated, even when the outcome, often born of much angst and struggle, was an articulation of faith that neither of them could themselves entirely affirm. Even today, I notice a quickening flush of pride and joy on Mom’s face when we argue, which we often do, about the Bible and theology. Likewise when she reads, with an occasional furrow or flinch, something I’ve written.
Although I’ve drifted quite a distance from the familiar biblical waters of the conservative evangelical tradition in which I was raised and which my parents so admirably represent, I hold much respect for that tradition and gladly acknowledge my own enduring debt to it. Its emphasis on introspection in search of personal growth has challenged me always to dig deep within myself in order to examine critically my own presuppositions and vested interests. Its emphasis on working out one’s own salvation with fear and trembling has inspired in me a lifelong restlessness of mind and spirit. Above all, its biblical literalism and its supreme valuing of every iota of the Bible have instilled in me an abiding passion for biblical interpretation and a love for the smallest details of the text. All these gifts have served me well not only as a teacher and scholar of religious studies but also as a person of faith.
At the heart of the evangelical tradition, aptly captured in Chambers’s exhortation, is struggle. There is no way to grow and mature in one’s faith without wrestling with the ideas and traditions that one has inherited. No one else can do it for you—not parents, not ministers, not youth group leaders, not professors, not Bible publishers. The iconic idea of the Bible as a book of black-and-white answers encourages us to remain in a state of spiritual immaturity. It discourages curiosity in the terra incognita of biblical literature, handing us a Magic 8 Ball Bible to play with instead. In turning readers away from the struggle, from wrestling with the rich complexity of biblical literature and its history, in which there are no easy answers, it perpetuates an adolescent faith. It keeps us out of the deep end, where we have to “ride these monsters down,” as Annie Dillard put it, trusting that it’s not about the end product but the process.
I have tried to write a book about the Bible and its place in society that will mean something to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds, liberal and conservative, religious and nonreligious. For some, what I’m saying here will be liberating, an opportunity to overcome a dominant idea of the Bible that has felt oppressive to them for many years, perhaps a lifetime. For others, however, my argument may be unnerving. After all, I’m challenging the very foundation of the idea of religious faith as a search for clarity, suggesting that faith dwells as much in questions and mystery as it does in answers and certainty. I want to acknowledge that sense of unease, and confess that I, as a person of faith, sometimes feel it, too. But I also want to ask, as a fellow Christian, does this not follow the pattern of God’s revelation that is at the core of the Gospel? Isn’t this quintessentially the Christian experience? Should it surprise us that the God who took on human nature would leave us with a text with as much complexity as the human experience? Indeed, like so many encounters with Jesus in the Gospel stories, we might go to the Bible looking for answers, but we usually come away with more questions.
That said, it’s not necessary to believe that the Bible is a divine creation or product of “intelligent design” in order to appreciate what I’m trying to do in this book. Like so many stories, including some in the Bible, you can find God in this one if you’re looking, but you don’t have to. I myself usually think of the Bible’s growth and development as something akin to the science of chaos. I see it emerging in all its wonderful complexity—“coming to life,” if you will—in the course of a long and often chaotic process involving multiple, often conflicting interests and influences. Perhaps that way of seeing it works better for you. Or perhaps you think both make sense. In any case, it’s a wonder to behold.
For now, I’m happy to make Chambers’s final exhortation my own prayer for this book: to provoke myself and others to think through what we may accept too easily when it comes to the Bible, and in the process to rediscover Scriptures in fresh new ways.
2
The Greatest Story Ever Sold
TONIGHT, WE ARE MAKING sure America understands that sometimes one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor.” So declared Republican presidential hopeful and Southern Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee after his unexpected, if not miraculous, wins against Mitt Romney and John McCain in the Super Tuesday primaries of February 5, 2008. His rock-beats-armor metaphor was a biblical one, taken from the story of the future king, David, who toppled a purportedly invincible Philistine, Goliath, with one of “five smooth stones” that he plucked from a nearby river valley and shot from his sling. Huckabee’s implication, for those in his conservative Christian base with ears to hear, was that he was more than just some comeback kid; boldly conquering the Philistine giants of the party faithful, he was claiming divine ordination.
“And we’ve also seen,” he continued, “that the widow’s mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world.” Another biblical reference, this one to the Gospel story, found in both Mark and Luke, in which Jesus praises a poor widow who contributes all she has, two small coins, or “mites” in the King James Version, to the temple treasury. Jesus declares that her offering is more valuable than those of the others in the congregation, who gave from their great wealth. The implication: Huckabee’s supporters may not be as rich as those supporting the party giants, but God will use their humble offerings to bring blessings to his campaign well beyond their monetary value. What his backers lack in funds is more than made up for in righteousness.
Having set his face toward Washington, the Baptist minister and champion of biblical inerrancy was infusing his campaign speeches with biblical phrases and story references meant to inspire his well-versed base.
Sodom and Gomorrah Equals Love
Just how broad was Huckabee’s base? How many actually had ears to hear? Probably not as many as he hoped. National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty did a little Jay Leno—style research on the National Mall to see how many passersby recognized the candidate’s smooth stone and widow’s mite as biblical. One conjectured that the smooth stone might have something to do with war. Or maybe peace? None seemed to recognize it as biblical. What about the widow’s mite? A mite’s a bug, right? Maybe a spider?
Yet few people have it. Recent polls and surveys offer these biblical revelations:
Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis, in Hebrew Bereshit) or the four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is a Bible verse. I suspect that many would also say that “The Serenity Prayer” and the “Footprints in the Sand” parable are in there somewhere.
More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and one in ten adults believes that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. (Those two must’ve been multiple-choice questions.)
