Why the Bible?

Introduction

One morning on my way to the coffee pot, I passed my three-year-old (at the time) daughter who was sitting on the couch with her mom’s Bible open on her lap. 

She stared intently at the words on the page and said, slowly and clearly, “What. The. Heck.” 

Maybe you can relate to the sentiment.

A lot people started the new year resolved to read the Bible more in 2021. Some plan to read it more often. Some plan to read more of it—maybe cover-to-cover for the first time. Excellent goals, both of them.

The thing is, follow through on resolutions is famously bad. Most of us will give up on them by February. Giving up on diets or exercise or reading more books or watching less TV may leave us feeling defeated. But giving up on Bible reading can leave us feeling guilty, ashamed even, because we can’t summon enough will power to read the one book we consider most important of all. 

(I’m trying to encourage you. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but stay with me.) 

Encouragement begins, I think, with naming the problem—the reason many of us will give up on our goal to read the Bible more is because reading the Bible is hard. Maybe it’s harder than eating better or jogging or turning off Netflix.  

And we don’t like to admit that. Instead, we (and by “we” I mean evangelicals, mainly) actually talk a lot about how simple the Bible is to understand. There’s an old quote attributed to St. Jerome that I’ve heard in various forms throughout the years: “The Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for a theologian to swim in without ever touching the bottom.” 

One of the glories of the Bible, in other words, is that anyone can understand it, even if no one can master it. Evangelicals tend to put the emphasis on the first part of that observation. Pastors and theologians talk about the “plain meaning” or the “clear meaning” or the “literal interpretation” to encourage us to read. We are encouraged to read the Bible, revere the Bible, and even to defend the Bible. Many of us are proud to be “Bible-believing” people who attend “Bible-preaching” churches. 

And for these reasons, I suspect, we are hesitant to admit this most basic truth: we don’t always understand the Bible. There’s a lot at stake here, personally and spiritually. If the Bible is easy enough for a child to understand and the meaning is plain or clear to everyone else except for me—if I don’t understand it and the meaning doesn’t strike me as plain—then there must be something wrong with me. How else do you explain that feeling you get when you make it to Leviticus in your through-the-Bible plan and you know it’s the inspired Word of God, just like every other book of Scripture, but you find yourself thinking over and over, What. The. Heck?

Look: there’s nothing wrong with you. Understanding the Bible can be hard. Let’s just be honest about that. And let’s be clear about why it’s hard. It’s hard because reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience. 

The Bible was written in three languages by more than thirty human authors over a period of something like 1,500 years, under the rule of several global empires. The remarkable thing about all this is that a mammoth collection of stories, songs, parables, histories, liturgies, etc. all cohere and contribute to a single story of God’s work in the world. God’s mix tape sings in harmony. That’s a miracle. But that miracle doesn’t automatically make the meaning of any one passage clear or plain or easy. And it doesn’t make you deficient if you don’t understand it.

Think of it this way: when you sit down in the morning with a cup of coffee, half awake, and open up your Bible and start to read, your bottom is in a chair in, say, Joliet, Illinois, and the words on the page were written possibly 3,000 years ago by a political refugee from a country you know very little about in a language you can’t read (then translated into English) and who is concerned about events and customs that are wholly unfamiliar to you. And you’ve got ten minutes to extract a word from the Lord out of that passage before the kids wake up and all hell breaks loose. 

And that’s hard. 

We have biblical precedent (if we need it) for acknowledging the difficulty of the task. For some time now I’ve been interested in the story about Philip, one of Jesus’s early disciples, and an Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. The eunuch is reading the Bible on the side of the road when Philip strolls up and asks him, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” 

The eunuch’s response is remarkable. He doesn’t say, “Of course I can. The meaning is plain and the reading is easy. A child could swim in this text without drowning.” 

No. The eunuch says to Philip, “How can I understand it unless someone explains it to me?” 

Here’s a guy who lives much closer to the time of Isaiah the prophet, whom he’s reading, and who understands enough about the God of Israel to bother riding all the way from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to worship him, and who values the Bible enough to bother reading it. And he says to a complete stranger, “How can I understand it unless someone explains it to me?”

I’m not saying it’s impossible to understand the Bible. I don’t mean that you need an expert to explain it to you. I have great confidence in our potential to read and understand it, to hear a word from Lord. But I think all that potential is dormant until we admit the complexities in the process and anticipate where we are prone to go wrong in the process. The beginning of understanding is What. The. Heck.

Real quick, the way I see it, there are three dynamics (or dimensions) going on when we read the Bible—all the time, whether we realize it or not. The more aware of them we become, the better we can navigate the cross-cultural experience of our Quiet Time.

There’s what’s happening in the text. The first dynamic in reading the Bible is paying attention to the words on the page and the situation of the paragraph in the book and the book within the broader sweep of the whole Bible. It includes the literary stuff like genre (are we reading a history or a song or a letter?) and rhetorical stuff (like allusions and intertextual connections to other parts of the Bible, and more). There’s a lot going on right there on the page.

There’s what’s happening behind the text. Then there’s what’s happening behind the words on the page—the original cultural context of the book of the Bible we’re reading. If we’re reading a letter (like the ones Paul wrote), the world “behind the text” includes the customs, rituals, experiences, habits of mind, and such, of the people the letter is addressed to. 

There’s what’s happening in front of the text.  There’s one more dynamic that is too frequently overlooked: us. Just like the original audience of Paul’s letter (for example) had customs and experiences and ways of thinking that they shared with Paul, you and I have customs and experiences and ways of thinking that are very different from Paul’s. We bring all that with us when we read—personal experience, theological background, cultural values. 

Any one of these dynamics can create challenges. All of them together can result in “What. The. Heck” moments. Take heart: it’s always been that way. Now we know and, since we know, we can address it.