An Atheist’s Brief Argument for Reading the Bible

An Atheist’s Brief Argument for Reading the Bible

AFBR

First, a bit of my story. The really short version.

I grew up reading the bible, studying it nearly every day, from my first days in my mother’s lap with the Children’s Bible, through my 12 years at a conservative Christian high school and then in college – an interdenominational liberal arts institution, and into seminary, where I got a masters in systematic theology. As I changed, my impressions and the way I saw and interpreted the holy scriptures changed.

Influenced by more conservative (and a few moderate) teachers in elementary through high school, I was taught that the bible was the holy word of God, inerrant and perfect, and the Lord’s guide to us for how to live and be saved. In college, where I encountered more moderate and open thinkers – many who came from similar conservative backgrounds as myself – I learned that while the pledge, the faith agreement, the professors were required to sign read something like, “I believe the bible to be inerrant in its original manuscripts,” we did not have any “original manuscripts” and wouldn’t know it if we did; that any version of the bible is a best guess (usually, but not always, very educated guesses) at what any original text might say to us. Yet there were always solid scholarly reasons for believing the Christian bible to be the word of God to us sinners, even as there were issues and “problems,” or “inconsistencies,” in translations and interpretations.

In seminary, where I had a mixture of conservate, moderate, and progressive instructors, the realization deepened that the bible was not perfect, but could still (and should) be accepted as a way to understand a transcendent God’s attempts to communicate truths to us humans. My own focus on literary criticism and the overlap with philosophy, theology, and history led me to write a master’s thesis titled “A/vangelical: Spreading the Good News of a Postmodern Theological Critique.” This work, in short, was a philosophical and theological argument against fundamentalism and absolute Truth Claims in Christianity.

Moving ahead a bit, as I rejected Christianity for agnosticism, I began seeing the bible as both a horrifying and fascinating work. Reading the books, realizing that so many people across the world (myself included, at one time) believe it to be the literal word of God for living and instruction and that it is “perfect” and inerrant, I am terrified. It competes with the Koran and some other manifests in claiming a premium on Truth with the capital T – an absolute command to both love and hate; accept and exclude, depending on one’s goals. Its content and subsequent theological and sectarian spin-offs have contributed to the miseries of the human race for several thousand plus years.

And yet, when considered and studied as a work of collective history, myth, legend, religion, literature, and sometimes high metaphoric poetry, it is an amazing and intriguing collection of books that can enrich even a secularist’s understanding of Judeo-Christianity and middle eastern culture.

While I’d read the bible since I learned to make out words, and even through seminary, where I read and reread and reread passages, sometimes in Greek and Hebrew, I’d never read the books from beginning to end. Now, for the past year and a half, or thereabouts, I have made time to read, currently landing in Ezekiel. And I am realizing a few things. Some I will write of here.

The lenses we take to the text can both help and hinder our understanding and appreciation of the bible. If one grew up forced to read and believe the text and now has come to reject it – that is, if one feels “burned” or abused by the force of their childhood community or family and wants nothing to do with it anymore, that is understandable as a hinderance to wanting to spend any time in its pages. Or, if one stresses an enlightened or progressive feminist approach, one can be put off by the legacy of brutal patriarchy that saturates the pages of this work and wish to read no further.

But sometimes we can choose which lenses to put on our inquisitive eyes. My argument here is not to force anyone to forget an important part of their identity, but to consider, if they can, entertaining a posture of inquiry in their approach to the text. In the bible there are fantastic stories, sharp metaphors, attempts to understand the Numinous, and a desire to come to grips with the fact that a personified version of God may just be a reflection of how humans understand power and politics as much as claims to know the holy. In its pages is both a preservation of history as well as a hope to transcend that history when conditions go horribly wrong; a clinging to traditions at the expense of precious lives even as those lives are lamented and God’s and human’s brutality are second-guessed, as in the book of Job, as I read it.

In closing, I know a lot of people can’t take the time to read the whole bible straight through. If you can, great. But if not, laying out time to read and critically study what one can might provide new insights into a work that has – for sometimes good, but so many times for evil – had an indelible impact on history, religion, and culture, and will continue to have for perhaps hundreds of years to come.