The Bible: My Battle with the Book

Not in all human history has one book had so much impact as the Bible. The world’s all time best-selling book, it has been the subject of discussion, the pretext for conflict, the justification for acts both noble and abhorrent and the bedrock of societies and communities throughout civilisation.
But this is not an attempt to map the history and evolution of this great library of ancient texts, nor do I wish to engage too deeply in literary criticism. Such scholarly discussions concerning archaeology, collation, translation, canons, synods and the like I shall leave to those with greater knowledge than I.
This is my story; my journey with this most peculiar book, through fascination, resentment, bewilderment, intrigue, dogmatism, resignation, zeal, doubt and love. This is not intended to be some exhaustive, innovatory definitive conclusion or revelation; it is simply my story, told in the hope that it may prove helpful to some of you.

I was raised, during my formative Christian years, in what I guess one might label a ‘conservative evangelical’ environment. Not that I was especially conscious of this at the time, mind you; I naively assumed that all ‘proper Christians’ subscribed broadly to the school of thought and conviction that I was part of, especially when it came to the issue of the Bible.
My teenage years were spent amidst a cacophony of throw away phrases pertaining to the Bible: “The Word of God,” “The Maker’s Handbook,” “The Father’s love letter,” “The Truth” and so on and so on. “Test everything” cried impassioned preachers, “against what is written in The Book.” And thus I did!
I became the zealous sermon critic, frenziedly cross-referencing at every juncture and crying “foul” at the merest hint of anything I deemed “un-Biblical.” I was well schooled in the art of counter-argument; using the Scriptures like hand grenades – throwing them one after the other into the camps of the would-be “heretics,” the “misinformed” and, most vehemently of all, the damned “wishy-washy liberals.” The Bible was my ultimate authority, holding, I relished in quoting: “everything we need for life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3) (The fact that this verse can only very tenuously be applied to the context I referenced it in, was apparently of little concern!)
And so, armed with a handful of thematically selected verses (usually on the most controversial of topics) I went about fashioning my theology. To my mind, it was simply Christian orthodoxy; nothing fundamental, just what was true and from God. Consequently, there was a “correct” position to be held on almost every given issue from contentious and live subjects such as gender roles, sexuality and healing to more philosophical discourses surrounding the after-life and the spiritual realms, and even into the political sphere of touchy subjects like the state of Israel. Discussion and division were rendered quite unnecessary, I reasoned, by virtue of the fact that all the answers were clearly available in the Holy Scriptures. Life really was black and white – literally!
Put like this, I sound like something of a monster! Its true to say that I was certainly very intolerant and somewhat bloody minded when I thought I was right (which, of course, was all of the time!) but it seemed that God, in His infinite grace, was still able to us me. One great positive to arise from my fiery demeanour was an insatiable hunger for a greater degree of God’s power and presence in my life. I craved the miraculous and, in many respects, had a level of boldness and daring in my faith that I long to re-capture now.
Things first came to a head when I was 19 and on my gap year before beginning University.
I was living and working in Durban, South Africa – part of a team of 11 young Christians volunteering with the Christian charity Soul Action. We were from a range of denominational backgrounds and, it soon transpired, held a vastly differing array of spiritual, theological and doctrinal views.
Over the course of our four months living together, heated debates became the norm and, for possibly the first time, I found that my tried and tested methodology of “Bible-verse warfare” simply didn’t wash. They too had read the Scriptures and could well justify their opposing conclusions. Moreover, I truly had the wind taken out of my sails when my boundless Biblical fervour came up against something I had very little of: life experience.
It is one thing to hold a firm conviction on the issue of Divine healing, based purely upon a smattering of carefully selected Bible verses; it becomes quite impossible to argue this point quite so dogmatically when faced with a Christian friend whose infant brother was tragically taken from him and his family, in spite of all their faith-filled prayers. All my carefully crafted arguments and Biblical “principles” seemed pretty hollow in the face of such inexplicable realities. Reducing the Christian faith to Biblically evidenced formulae and propositional statements, might well lend itself to a neat and tidy no-nonsense theology, but it just didn’t fit with the complexities, unfairness and messiness of people’s lives.

The following September I started University and became involved in a large and vibrant Anglican church. The people I met there were amazing, and they became my spiritual family, but if I had found my short time living in Durban challenging, it was only a foretaste of what was to come!
Being a large student church, I was soon leading a “cell group” of about ten Christians, each around my own age. Every Wednesday evening we would gather together in someone’s living room and delve deeply into the Bible. Leading these small discussions, I did not ever expect to find myself being opposed. We were, after all, all fellow evangelical Christians who surely held to the same understanding of Scripture – that is, the “right” one! Not so. It soon became quite apparent that my supposedly “orthodox” stance was not one that was universally accepted (not by a long way in fact) and no amount of bashing my adversaries with endless tirades of evidential verses was going to bring them round. Indeed, the issue was not that they didn’t know the Scriptures, simply that they knew them differently to me, in much the same way, I suppose, as their own relationship with God was different – uniquely different.
Around this time, I began to take a keen interest in Christian theology and apologetics. Within our student community we ran a programme called “Opening Scripture,” concerned with a more rigorous study and dissemination of the Bible. I shall never forget the lesson we were taught at our very first meeting. We had been given a number of Old Testament textual extracts to study and were then asked to comment on what we felt was the unifying significance of them. Contrasted against one another, it soon become obvious that each story or account had a much more profound subtext running consistently throughout: Jesus.
“And that is a really great way of engaging with the Bible,” enthused our would-be teacher, Dan. “Always look for the person of Jesus. He’s all over it!”
That really revolutionised my relationship with the Bible. Its sounds foolish now, but it had never occurred to me that there might be some underlying grand narrative binding these ancient texts together. Until this point, my understanding of the Bible was of a morality meter or a doctrinal indicator – an instruction manual against which everything could be checked and scrutinised: the Christian’s compass. Now, I was being encouraged to, as it were, “zoom out” and see the bigger picture. No longer would reading the Bible be about the collation of charged Scriptural fragments to form reductionist propositions, now it became a quest for the Person of Jesus; the revelation of the Saviour.
The excitement of this new enlightened thinking kept me going for quite some time, and released me from a heavy burden of legalism, guilt and dogmatic pigheadedness that, I only realised in hindsight, had held me captive for a good many years.
By this point I was morphing into a serious armchair theologian, with a head for books and an appetite for controversy. I also found myself increasingly in the company of the like-minded: the would-be scholars, clergymen, critics and philosophers who fuelled my fascinations. In turn, all this happened to coincide with the beginnings of my preaching ministry within the church, something which, itself, necessitated a greater engagement with Biblical commentary and theological discourse.
I began to observe with horror and alarm as my newly revived assuredness in “the Word” began to collapse like the preverbal house of cards. For starters, the more one searched, the more undeniable it became that there were whole swathes of this “holy book” which were seriously dubious. Beneath the black and white evangelical absolutism that had been the bedrock of much of my faith, lay a tangled mess of questionable authorships, historical inconsistencies and translation errors, not to mention the now strikingly obvious issue of why one ought to trust this ramshackle collection of ancient manuscripts at all? Even if the textual authenticity itself could be verified, what was so great about Moses or Isaiah or John or Paul that I should take their words, quite literally, as gospel truth?
Although I dared not share it too widely at the time, I suffered a small, but significant, crisis of faith. I simply did not know what to believe any more. Nothing seemed certain. My concrete foundation had been exposed as rotting timber, and with that realisation it seemed that my very Christian existence was rapidly subsiding as I scrambled wildly to find some point of absolute to which I could cling.
When I emerged from this temporal existential abyss, I prayed. “Lord,” I cried, “I don’t know what to think, I don’t know who to trust, I don’t know where to turn, but somehow, I know you have the answer.”
What possessed me to do that in the light of all my uncertainty and doubt? To this day, it seems a nonsensical response, and yet even amidst the faith drought I found myself in, I could do no other but call out to my Jesus – I can put it no other way.
In the months that followed I wrestled with my new shakiness. What had once seemed so firm and concrete now felt disconcertingly fragile and precarious. I ploughed on. I continued reading the Bible daily – what else could I do? I read books and listened to Christian speakers whom I wouldn’t have ventured anywhere near only a few short years ago. So, it seemed I wasn’t the only believer in such a predicament!
It is important for me to stress, that in all this I never seriously contemplated abandoning my faith in God – in Jesus Christ. How could I? I knew too much; my exposure to His grace had been too great, there could be no going back now, where could I possibly run to?

I went to talk to my Vicar who, to my initial slight surprise, was not in the least bit astonished and, indeed, in broad agreement and sympathy. We discussed such terminology as “inerrancy” and “infallibility” and the inevitably reductionist kind of theology that such dogma leads to. Of course, the Scriptures were riddled with human error and a whole catalogue of contentions which one needed to wrestle with. Such questions as “to who is this being written?” “by whom?” and “for what purpose?” were not only perfectly valid but, arguably, essential if we were to discover what God was saying to us today in our context and our culture. Without a doubt, aspects of what has been written are not applicable to today’s Church in quite the ways they were to the Ancients or even the Apostolics. “But,” concluded my Vicar, “where does this leave you?”
It was a question that stuck in my head. Where did this leave me? How could I continue with my preaching of sermons and my ministering to other Christians, let alone my own personal pursuit of God? Where was my point of absolute? Was there a point of absolute, or was I doomed to live and preach a Christianity founded solely on subjective and experiential relative-truths; a faith with no quantitative linchpin or bedrock in which we could be corporately grounded?

Where once I had sat as the “Biblical Gestapo,” quizzically monitoring every Christian speaker for unorthodox slurs, now I became the frustrated sceptic tutting and sighing every time the preacher prefaced his statements with such tripe clichés as “The Bible says” or “God’s Word states.” I sought some comfort in the four Gospel accounts, for whilst I knew they too were not immune from all the textual problems that plagued my thinking, they were at least the closest thing one had to the actual recorded words of Jesus Christ and thus evoking of some level of trust and acceptance.
I read the Gospels: the differing perspectives of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as they walked with the Lord. I found them newly inspiring – all other Scripture aside, this Jesus was a truly amazing Man, and the more I became enraptured in His life, His relationships, His teachings, the more I too found myself uttering the words of the Roman centurion as Jesus breathed His last: “Surely, He was the Son of God.”
I grew increasingly obsessed with the Person of Jesus. Who was this Man? Indeed, who is He and how might I know Him more deeply; how might I live a life that models His? Where might I look to find Him?
As I searched and longed, I was reminded once more of those influential words that had impacted me so much as a student: “always look for the Person of Jesus.”
Thus I returned to my Bible with a renewed sense of urgency. Damned be the historical inaccuracies, the dubious authorship and the contentious doctrine, where was this Jesus? I cared for nothing else.

All of a sudden, or so it seemed, a number of things happened almost simultaneously which were to propel me into a wholly new chapter on this journey with the book!
The first came in the form of a book I had been given, written by well renowned evangelical author Alison Morgan and entitled The Word on the Wind. I must admit, the book’s title didn’t fill me with confidence, but it had been a gift so I thought I ought to at least give it a crack. Within a few pages, I was captivated.
Alison’s book is a thrilling, if somewhat intellectually challenging, read and I devoured it in almost no time at all. Amongst other things, she embarks on a wonderful exposition of the etymology of the word “word” as used across the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible and asks what these mean, what they have come to mean and how we need to readjust our thinking and engagement both with the Person of God and with Scripture. It is a rich and complex book and I will not attempt to outline its content here, but I direct you towards it if this debate is one you wish to engage with more deeply. Her analysis of our often reductionist interpretation of the Bible, however, can probably be summed up in the following extract, in which she embarks on a constructive critique of evangelicalism (alongside the other major “tribes” existing within the Church):

"It is all too easy to reject the materialist values of modernity but to accept its basic premise, which is that knowledge is based on fact and certainty is available.
We simply find ourselves investing this certainty in a different place – in scripture. Scripture becomes literally true, and a guide for everything from whether women should speak in church to how many days the world was made in; and believing the right things becomes more important than loving people... This is a classic way to shrink the gospel, a way of turning what should be a living, outward looking relationship with God into a spirituality of print."

It was so refreshing to read these words from a self-professed evangelical believer! To hold the book of the Bible as the very definition of truth or an authoritative manual against which everything must be rigorously checked, was to miss the point. As I was soon to discover, these ancient manuscripts, these printed words were concerned with something far more wonderful and revelatory and alive than the one dimensional approach of my youth had allowed permitted.

Exactly what that was, was revealed to me from the most unlikely of sources: Catholicism!

Both Roman and Anglo Catholic traditions are rooted in an orthodoxy of Tradition and Scripture - a notion I had once poo-pooed in my staunch evangelical days! Working in a Roman Catholic school and taking it upon myself to visit a handful of local Anglo-Catholic church congregations I found myself speaking with priests and laity about what this alien peculiarity entailed. Scripture revealed the person and the nature of God whilst Tradition ensured that the Church and the Gospel remained constant, consistent and true to its heritage – not swept up by every passing bandwagon or corrupted by culture’s fickle sensibilities. It was an antiquated concept I would have once scoffed at, and yet now it seemed the very wisdom I needed to hear.
It has been said, that we in the West today exist in an extremely individualistic culture - “I” am at the centre of my own universe – and try as we might to deny it, this reality is as prevalent within the Christian Church as anywhere else. Faith, for us, is a personal experience and salvation an individualistic event. We talk in terms of “my faith” and “my relationship with God” and we draw special attention to profound “salvation moments” in people’s lives, the implication being that every seeker is entitled to their very own “road to Damascus” encounter with the Lord! Before long, the very idea of Christian faith is reduced to “me and God” quite apart from the rest of the World, or even the Church.
It smacks of immense arrogance, pointed out one Anglo-Catholic Priest to me, to think of faith in such terms. Who are we to presume to enter into union with God Almighty, in ignorance of the multitudes of men and women of faith who trod this path before us? How dare we enter so lightly into the courts of the King, believing we have nothing to learn and no adherence to pay to the patriarchs, the apostles and the forefathers of our faith? Do we honestly believe that we come to Christ in isolation, or do we not recognise that we join in a mighty throng, an historic family of the elect spanning the ages and crossing borders and cultures? I had never thought of it in such terms.

People change. God does not; He is the same, yesterday today and forever. Consequently, whilst cultural baggage, human error and fluctuating politics posses a hindrance to our engagement with the Bible, one thing must surely remain constant: God. Surely, if the God I profess to follow is the same God of Paul, of John, of Malachi and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Moses and Adam, then one should be able to recognise Him in their words?
I thought of my own family: my grandfather who, middle aged, depressed, spent and alcohol-dependant had encountered Christ for the first time, and my parents whom the Lord had revealed Himself to during their teenage years. We span three generations – three wildly different cultures one might even argue – and we certainly hold quite distinct and individual views on the world, and yet the God we follow and have staked out lives upon is the same. Jesus Christ is the lifeblood that sustains us; He is our primary identity and the one absolute that, when all peripherals fade, remains.
I find this too within the wider Church. Bring together a company of Christians and have them debate doctrine or quibble over style, tradition or politics and you’d be forgiven for thinking these people had no business being together; that they were little more than an incoherent rabble of randomly selected anomalies with no consistent story to tell. But have them speak of this Person of Jesus; this Saviour, this Lord, this Great Messiah, and everything changes.

I have marvelled so often at Christians at prayer. It is a wonder to behold and all the more so at ecumenical gatherings as one observes the most ardent doctrinal adversaries, not engaged in heated debate or theological jousting but in communing with their Lord as they know how. It is quite beautiful, and that some choose liturgy whilst others silently meditate and still others feel liberated to cry or laugh or even shout, is all immaterial. There is unity there. Not a unity of intellect, or style, or even perhaps of doctrine, but a unity of communion – communion with the King.

And so, we come full circle: what is this Bible? For me, the answer came as a refreshing and freeing new lease of spiritual life. This Bible; this messy, corrupted, rag-tag collection of human texts riddled with historical inaccuracy, cultural bias, theological ignorance, intellectual inconsistency, literary peculiarity and of dubious authenticity; this amazing book was a story. Not a story as we might understand the term, not a work of fiction, not a fable, not a myth, but a Grand Narrative. It is the story - the wonderful story - of God and His people, and the best of it is that its told in the words of men and women just like us: fallible, ignorant, ill-motivated, culturally indoctrinated sinners, who knew something of the greatness, and of the grace, of God.
Indeed, I wonder if God would have had it any other way. Surely it is both the Lord’s prerogative and His pleasure to use the worst of sinners, the most chaotic of contexts and the most questionable of methodologies to bring glorify to Himself, if for no other reason than to guarantee no possibility of Man extracting any credit! Isn’t that just the sort of thing our God would do?
If the Bible really were a book of universal truth and authority - an encyclopaedia of principles and absolutes - then our faith would be simply a matter of unfaltering and un-altering formulae received through the generations and which one could learn by rote. But it isn’t. Our faith, primarily, is relational and as our great and glorious God reveals more of His Person, more of His grace and more of His wonder to us, we marvel at the sight; we grapple to find words to express it, we struggle to make sense of it, we try and fail to define and contain it and we hunger after more of it – more of Him. The journey is messy, it’s frustrating, it’s fraught with danger, its open to abuse; sometimes it feels like guess-work, sometimes we’re blinded by our own broken humanity and oftentimes we screw up.
To hold that the Bible is “Divinely-dictated” revelation – the pure, unmitigated, absolute communiqué from God to His people - is to take this book to be God’s final word. Put another way: God has said His piece, there is nothing more to add, nothing further to say, nothing greater to reveal. We need no longer seek Him or expect His direction or input in our lives; it is pointless to be expectant for further wonders or revelations of His majesty and grace. God has spoken, God has revealed and God has left us a book of printed words to keep us on the straight and narrow whilst, perhaps, He concerns Himself with his next “Universal” project.
Mercifully, this is not the case. Rather, this Grand Narrative, this Epic Story of God told as best they could (or best they thought they could!) by His people continues on. From Adam to Abraham to Moses to Isaiah; from Luke to Paul to John, this Gospel of God winds its way through history and, from the confines of our fallen humanity and complex cultures, we try to give it words.

Still this wondrous story continues to unfold: God and His people; Him and us. Thus, we continue the great journey of our forefathers, picking up the story and trying, with our lives, to put words to the wonders that we see.
What will they say of us in the next millennia, and of our part in the story? Will it be true to say that our theology was ignorant, that our cultural presuppositions were wildly unbalanced and that our churchmanship was ill-motivated? Almost certainly it will. But we can be sure that through it all, God will glorify Himself, Christ will be revealed and, in the most unlikely vessel of us His people, this miraculous story will thunder on, every gaining momentum, until He returns.
I wrestle with it, I puzzle at it and I marvel at it and for perhaps the first time in my life I can surely say I love it. With all its glaring faults and shameful flaws, I love this book the Bible. It is the greatest story to ever be told, and it isn’t finished yet...