The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Story of God: That’s A Dumb Purpose If You Ask Me.

Part One – An Introduction
Part Two – The Mystique

I never really understood how we came to believe that the purpose of the bible was to teach us something.

I guess if I’m going to be sacrilegious I might as well do it with my first sentence.

I mean I had always been told and taught that the bible was a textbook. That one day God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit (and the missing part of the Trinity, the animate, pre-incarnate bible) got together and decided that if there was ever going to be a way to reconnect humanity with it’s created intent, that the best way to do it would be for the Holy Spirit to possess some human bodies like something out of Poltergeist and dictate a hell of a lot of pages that taught humans about truth.

I mean if I was God, which I’m not, and I wanted to get my creation to restore it’s relationship with me . . . I don’t think I would send a textbook to them. If I did, I wouldn’t really bother with them at all. I’d just get my boyz together and have a weekend writing session with the angels at Starbucks and then just drop down the completed project from the clouds in the sky where I live.

Sometimes I get this icky feeling that the bible is typically seen as nothing more than the latest edition in the Idiot’s Guide series. Like the Idiot’s Guide to Life or something. What does God think about sex? Turn to page 642. What does God think about war? Turn to page 327. What does God think about my mean boss? Turn to page 853.

I’m just really uncomfortable with the purpose of the bible being some sort of answer book that God created to teach us about truth. And “absolute truth” at that. Maybe I’m just immature and want the bible to be something more than that. Maybe I want it to just fit my agenda. But I just can’t approach the bible that way.

To me, it’s about a story. It’s about a story of a group of people who have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed at living within God’s dreams for the world. And it’s a story about a God who sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed at getting through to a stubborn group of people.

It’s the story of a community’s vertical relationship with God and their horizontal relationship with their neighbors. As cheesy as that sounds, that’s how these stories developed. They didn’t begin with God and his boyz deciding to create a book that would have all of the answers in it and be absolutely right 100% of the time.

They began as experiences shared. Told over a meal. Told to a neighbor. Told around a camp fire. Passed along by travelers and merchants. Told by fathers and retold by sons.

Some of these stories held deep resonance with the people that were telling them so they decided they should write them down. Perhaps as a way of remembering. Perhaps as a way of looking forward. The intent was never to teach academically “right” or “wrong” answers or “black” and “white” teachings.

I mean sure . . . perhaps that’s what Moses was doing with the 10 Commandments and other portions of the Pentateuch. But as a whole, the bible was more a story of how a community was relating to God and God to them than it was a collection of teachings to be obeyed.

I guess some people think to believe this means that you take a lesser view of scripture (I think it’s the opposite). But where was it ever said that the bible had to be a curriculum? Where was it ever said that God manually/personally wrote these things so that we would know “black” and “white” answers?

I’m afraid this approach is a rather new one in the history and tradition of the community of God. And really gained it’s prominence over the last 100 years or so with the rise of rationalism at the height of modernity. Where rational apologetics were the only way you could defend your faith. You approached the bible like a scientist, scientific method in hand looking to find “truths” to dispel the secularism and liberalism of the 20th century. This understanding of the bible developed as Christians faced the growing challenges of an atheistic, agnostic, secular, “liberal” culture.

People who were born and grew up in this heated climate of apologetics have known no other way to approach the bible than to approach it like a textbook. That’s the only way they know. And I guess that’s fine. It’s just not the way the ancient Hebrews approached it. It’s not the way the early church approached it. It’s not the way the Orthodox tradition approached it for 1600 years (although the Catholics took the textbook approach in order to maintain power and control). And it’s not the way the early Protestant reformers approached it – although they did much to set the stage for the later transition.

The bottom line is that God never created the bible. I’ll discuss inspiration later. But until I develop that, let’s just assume that God didn’t write the bible in his home in the clouds and drop it down to us in a golden chest.

If that’s the case, that means that humans wrote it. We then have to ask ourselves why they wrote it? Did they do it so they could teach their children textbook answers about God? Or did they do it to tell their ancient and future story with this strange new God of the desert?

I have a hunch that it’s the latter.

This is why most of the Old Testament, Moses’ Pentateuch notwithstanding, are . . .

- stories of relationship like Ruth, Judges, Job, Jonah
- songs of remembrance and cries of intervention like Psalms and Lamentations
- visions and wishes for the future like the major and minor prophets

So all the time these people were telling and retelling these stories and yet it was a really, really long time before these stories got collected.

So to believe that they were all being written and “inspired” by God thousands of years before requires what I perceive to be some problematic thinking about the Holy Spirit and the nature of inspiration itself.

And to that I will turn my attention tomorrow.

Listening: Nightcrawler – Pete Yorn

[tags]Scripture, Bible, Scripture + Evolution[/tags]