When I was three years old, I was dropped on my head.
The official story from my preschool was that I fell off a piece of playground equipment and hit my head. But I have a vivid memory of one of my preschool teachers holding me upside down on the playground and dropping me. Accounts vary, but I know which one I believe.
Either way, my mother had to leave work to pick me up and take me to the emergency room. She said my ruffly dress and hair bow were covered in blood, all the way down to my ruffly socks. (It was the 80s; ruffles were in.) I looked like a tiny, lacy crime scene.
At the ER, I had a handful of stitches sowed into my scalp. I was a tender-headed child, so my mother was worried about how it would go. Fortunately, the topical anesthesia the doctor used worked great, and I didn’t feel a thing.
As I received my stitches, I dangled my little legs off the exam table and sang with gusto: “Oh, the B-I-B-L-E! That’s the book for me! I stand alone, on the word of God! The B-I-B-L-E!”
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I didn’t know what to make of the Bible for a long time. As I’ve said, I was raised only casually in church, so I knew the Bible was supposed to be an authority of some sort, but I had a hard time claiming to know what was in it. I understood that it said God loved me, and that it included some rules for us to follow, but I didn’t know much about it beyond that.
As a teenager, the more I learned about the Bible–or perhaps, how the Bible was used–the more uncomfortable I became with it. Part of the reason I stayed out of church for so long was because of the ways the Bible was used to justify behavior I fundamentally couldn’t agree with, like excluding LGBTQ folks from communities and women from leadership positions. While I had no theological justification of how I felt, when I heard such exclusionary statements framed as Biblical, my gut insisted, “That doesn’t sound right.” My moderate Methodist upbringing left me with the impression that God was pretty much cool with everybody, and anyone who gleaned otherwise from the Bible was missing the point.
And yet, these messages are persistent. As I’ve stepped back into church, I’ve realized how many people experienced legalistic and limiting teaching of the Bible. I’ve talked to women who were told they would go to hell if they kissed a man before marriage. For a religion that claims forgiveness of sin as its central tenet, many factions seem stuck on the idea that one little slip can mean an irredeemable Game Over.
And with my therapist hat on, it’s impossible to ignore how damaging these messages are to the hearts and minds of the people who receive them. Women and LGBTQ people especially walk around consumed with guilt and anxiety about the status of their souls and whether they’ll be judged, punished, shunned, or worse.
When I first went back to church, I all but kept it a secret from most of my friends. It seemed like many of the people in my life outside of church had an understanding of the Bible that basically amounted to “omg, that book suuuuuuuuucks.” And I understood why they felt that way. It took me a while to sort through my own cognitive dissonance and admit to people that I was engaging with a community centered around a book that had hurt so many people.
Thankfully, I was introduced to scholars and authors who have helped me understand the Bible in ways that were a game-changer in my ability to relate to it. Rob Bell put the Bible in historical and language contexts that helped me understand what the authors were actually saying to their audiences at the time. Nadia Bolz-Weber showed me places in the Bible that spoke of radical grace and inclusion. And women like Jen Hatmaker and Austin Channing Brown showed me what Biblically-informed social justice looks like. And that combination of understanding, grace, and justice excites my soul.
I’m learning to read the Bible in a different way now. It isn’t black-and-white rules to be followed. It’s a series of complicated, subversive texts that are meant to be questioned and wrestled with. Jesus questioned and wrestled with him, as did the Jewish people of his day. The early Christians who established what we know of as the church questioned and wrestled with them. And yet, here we are, two millennia later with overarching cultural ideas about a book that supposedly says a bunch of things it doesn’t actually say.
The most interesting thing to me about the Bible is not its rules, but rather the rules it was encouraging readers to break. For example, in Deuteronomy 21, Moses writes about reconsidering the rules of war in a way that–through our modern lens–seems barbaric, but at the time would have been incredibly progressive. In that era, if a man killed another man in battle, he had the right to take that man’s lands, property, and wife as his own; when he was “done” with the wife, he had the right to kill her. Moses calls upon Jewish men in this scenario to instead give the woman time to mourn her dead husband, and when he is “done” with her, to set her free to live her own life elsewhere. Today, we might look at that passage and think how horrific that a man might force a woman to marry him after killing her husband (and it is a horrific thought), but Moses is asking Jewish men to consider women’s feelings and right to live beyond her usefulness to any one man. Considering the context women lived in at the time, these notions are downright earth-shattering, perhaps even proto-feminist. This was the closest version of “treat women like people” the audience of the day would have understood. Again, what’s interesting about this passage is not the verbatim rules as written, but the encouragement to question the rules of the day.
The point of the Bible is not that it gives us hard-and-fast laws to be obeyed, but that it gives us complex and stimulating ideas to consider. Knowing this requires us as humans to go big in our thinking, to be willing to get more questions than answers, and to sit with the uncertainty of unknowing instead of the comforting-yet-limited assurance of always having the “right” answer.
And, most importantly, the Bible is full of contradictions. Those who’ve tried to quantify all the places the Bible contradicts itself often get to well over 1000 before they give up counting. In fact, the Bible contradicts itself in its first two chapters: Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis offer two different accounts of how the world was made in a week. And the deeper we dig into the cultural context of the Bible, the more it seems like its authors were totally okay with those contradictions. “Consider this,” they seem to say. “Okay, now turn it around and look at it another way. How does that feel?” And on and on they turn the stories over for us to look at, like shifting colors of a theological kaleidoscope.
Here’s what I’ve come to know and love about the Bible: Its writers were theological progressives whose letters invited subversive ways of viewing the world. They spoke out against oppression, greed, and problems of the ego. They called on readers to question the status quo and show up in new ways. And those messages still resonate today.
I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out my entry point with the Bible and, much to my surprise, I’ve developed a habit of nightly Bible study. I’ve read a few of the Gospels, poked around in Paul’s letters, and really gotten into the letter written by Jesus’ brother James. And overwhelmingly, the message I get is, “Love each other.” Jesus and his disciples drive this message home over and over. Love each other, take care of those in need, do all things with gratitude to God.
As I read the Bible now, I start to remember how it felt to be a three-year old little girl who was content in the knowledge that God loves us all no matter what.
I’m still trying to figure out what my relationship is to the Bible and how I can make it fit with my modern life. But the more I see this message of love, repeated many times in many ways, I start to think, maybe it is the book for me.
