What's Up with the Bible?

I’ve read the Bible. That’s why I’m an atheist! (Online meme)

As a Pastor, and as one who loves the Bible, I get it.

After all, the Bible is filled with violence, either at the hand of God or commanded by God. There’s a lot of smiting going on in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament.

Women seem to be demeaned over and over again. Patriarchy seems to reign.

The Bible hard to understand. It’s archaic to say the least.

Sure, it has some beautiful poetry. Psalm 23 comes to mind (The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want...). Or the Genesis 1 creation story (In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...). Or one of the most moving passages in all of literature, Luke 2 (In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…)

Sure, it has some interesting insights into life (see Proverbs).

Sure, Jesus, in the Bible, offers a radical view of God and life.

But on the surface, the Bible seems to have far more to overcome than is worth the effort.

Then again, the Bible is the best-selling book in the world. Not bad for a book that’s thousands of years old.

Some great and not so great movies have been made based on the Bible from Samson and Delilah (starring the late, great Victor Mature) to The Greatest Story Ever Told to David and Bathsheba to The Ten Commandments.

Many of the “catch phrases” we use in culture come from the Bible:

But that doesn’t negate the fact that the Bible is filled with so much violence. That the God portrayed there seems to be so cruel and hell-bent on destroying us.

Or… is there another way to read the Bible?

Let’s start here: The Bible is a difficult book to read. Because it wasn’t written to us. It was written to people who lived thousands of years ago, in a very different part of the world from many of us, with a very different world-view.

They didn’t have 21st Century science available to them. They didn’t have social media. They didn’t have access to the international information we have today.

When we try to read the Bible as if it were written to us, we quickly get confused or frustrated.

Another way of saying it—the Bible needs to be read as the Bible wants to be read, not as we think it should be read from our 21st Century world-view.

For example, the earliest Bible characters, like the cultures around them, lacking modern science, assumed that anything and everything that happened, good or ill, happened at the hands of the gods (or God). If it rained, the gods made it rain. If there was a drought, the gods caused the drought. They didn’t have a Farmer’s Almanac to guide them in their planting seasons… only a primitive view of the gods.

They had a pre-modern world-view. And as the Bible writers wrestled with issues of God, life, and faith, they did so through that world-view.

It was easy for the people of Israel to assume that their God was like the other gods—petulant, angry, condemning, one to be afraid of. And we see that view of God again and again in the Bible.

But alongside of that view we also see something shockingly radical about God—that the God of Israel is nothing like the other gods. That the God is Israel is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.

The God of Israel, unlike the other gods, despises child-sacrifice. The God of Israel is not a tribal God, but the God of all creation—a God who creates out of love and grace, not out of violence like the other gods. The God of Israel created male and female equally, in God’s image.

The Bible is an amazing journey of discovery as the people of Israel, living with a pre-modern mindset, surrounded by the gods of other cultures, encounter a radically different kind of divine being: one who loves, saves, and rescues.

That journey reaches its highpoint in the story of Jesus—the One who shows us the true face of God through a cross.

The Bible needs to be read as the Bible wants to be read. That starts with context: The Bible was not written to us.

But the Bible was written for us.

Once we understand the context and how the text was understood originally, we can then ask the question, what, if anything is that text saying to us today?

More next time.

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org

How Can Jesus Still Possibly Love the Church?

Philip Yancey, in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew tells a tragic, heart-wrenching story related to him by a friend. This friend worked with the homeless and street people of Chicago.

One day a woman approached him asking for help. The woman lived on the streets and made her living on the streets. She needed money to feed her two-year daughter.

She suddenly broke down and began to pour out her heart. She admitted to the shameful things she’d done in her life and to her daughter to make money—not to buy food, but to support her drug habit.

Yancey’s friend had heard many horrific stories doing mission on the streets. This story shocked him. Once he finally regained his balance, he asked the woman if she had ever considered going to a church for help.

This time it was the woman’s turn to be shocked. She said:

Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.

Hypocritical.

Judgmental.

Mean.

Condemning.

Holier-than-thou.

These are just a few of the criticisms leveled at the Church.

And you don’t have to look far to find the evidence:

  • Sexual scandals and abuse perpetrated by and covered up by the Church

  • Christians shunning people and trying to deny them their rights if their beliefs or lifestyles don’t align with those of church-goers

  • Acting one way on Sunday morning and the opposite way the rest of the week

  • Creating hoops to jump through and rules for people to adhere to in order to attend church

  • The blurred lines between the Church and a particular political party or ideology

  • Pastors buying private jets with cash donated by their parishioners

The history of the Church doesn’t help.

The (very oversimplified) story of the Christian movement is one of Christian leaders seeking power, obtaining power, being corrupted by power, and then abusing that power.

We see it in the abuse of the Inquisition, where the Church tried to force people to become Christians or die.

We see it in the abuse of Indulgences, where essentially Christian leaders lied by promising that if people gave more money to the Church they would spend less time in Purgatory (hell, not the ski resort!).

We see it in the demeaning of women, not allowing them into leadership roles in the Church.

And the list goes on and on.

The Church has provided—and continues to provide—an easy excuse for writing off all of Christianity.

And that’s exactly what many people are doing. In fact, it’s become somewhat of a spiritual badge of honor to say, I believe in Jesus but not the Church.

Which leads to the question, How can Jesus, after 2000 years of disfunction and abuse, still love the Church?

One could image that by now Jesus has had enough.

Certainly, many of his followers have.

Yet, surprisingly, if not shockingly Jesus holds a high view of the Church!

The Bible calls the Church, The Body of Christ, suggesting that Jesus has tied himself and his reputation to the Church.

The Bible calls the Church, The Bride of Christ, reminding us that Jesus gave his life for her.

It’s a head scratcher.

But if you know anything about Jesus, it won’t come as a surprise at all. In fact, his commitment to the Church goes to the very heart of the Gospel.

More next time.

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org

Does Christianity Matter?

Philip Yancey, in his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace? asks some tough questions about the current state of Christianity. In reflecting on how people interacted with Jesus he noticed that people who once ran to Jesus now seem to run away from him (or at least his Church). The worse people felt about themselves the more likely they were to seek out Jesus. Today, not so much (again, at least not through the Church).

So what happened? Does the Christian story matter anymore?

Throughout history, as human beings have tried to come to terms with God (if there is a God), we’ve almost always seen God as angry; as a Being not only deeply disappointed in us but downright disgusted with us—or most of us, anyway.

Yet, this God seemingly and begrudgingly offers us a way out. If we

  • Follow certain laws

  • Get our act together

  • Make the right sacrifices

  • Believe the right things

then maybe, just maybe, God will accept us.

We see that storyline in almost every religion and spirituality known to humankind—a storyline that says that we have to earn God’s love somehow in some way. And once we’ve earned it, we’re in. And once we’re in we now have the right to judge and condemn those who are out.

All too often, Christianity, as a religion, seems to say the same thing. One doesn’t have to look far to see it:

  • Christians threaten non-Christians with an eternity in a fireball of torture and despair

  • Christians determine who can come to church and who can’t

  • Christians become the arbitrators of who God will love and who God can’t possibly love—all the while pretty certain, of course, that God loves us!

But when anyone, Christian or not, takes a look at Jesus, they see a shockingly and scandalously different view of God. A radical view of God. A God so foreign to our impressions of God that we simply can’t believe it.

Jesus shows us a God of messy grace:

  • A God who doesn’t condemn—but loves

  • Who doesn’t judge—but forgives

  • Who doesn’t demand right behavior—but transforms us with kindness

This view of a God of grace was so radical that Jesus was ultimately killed because of it. This view of a God of grace is so radical today that most churches built on the name of Jesus can’t fully buy into it.

And yet it’s precisely that radical, messy, scandalous, unearned, splashed-indiscriminately-on-everyone grace that makes the Christian story unique. It is the only religion or spiritual expression on planet earth that stakes its claim on God’s unconditional love.

Christianity is the story of radical grace. It’s the story of a God who always runs to us with love. It’s the story of

  • A rancher who paid those who had only worked an hour a full days’ wage.

  • A shepherd who leaves behind 99 sheep, risking his life to find the one lost lamb.

  • A woman who rips her whole house apart to find one lost coin.

  • A father who throws a feast for rebellious son.

  • The God who enters into human history as one of us.

  • Jesus who died for his enemies.

  • The God who finds us worth dying for.

Christianity may or may not be true. I can’t answer that question for you. But what sets it apart, what makes it unique is Jesus and his unrelenting grace. And the radical go-to-the-cross promise that

  • You are the one God loves

  • You are the one God forgives

  • God is for you

Period!

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org