In my journey from Christian fundamentalism to Christian evangelicalism to Christian agnosticism, I had to relinquish many doctrinal beliefs. These doctrinal beliefs had strangled me. But I now realize that doctrinal beliefs had also strangled the Bible. With these doctrines laid aside, the Bible has also been liberated from the preachers’ strangle-hold.
It was quite simple, actually. I just had to give up the assumption, which is as basic to orthodox Christianity as it is absent from the Bible, that the Bible is an internally-consistent book written by God. I can now see how absurd this assumption is. The Bible is not a book; it is 66 books, written over the course of centuries and by people with very, very different viewpoints. In most cases, the writers claimed that God was speaking through them; but no writer claimed this about all of the other writers by name, and at the time that they were writing the canon of scripture had not been defined. It is the theologians and preachers who claim that the entire Bible is a thread of argument that God is making. All I had to do was to listen to what each writer, individually, had to say.
Once the assumption that the Bible is God’s Coherent Book is dropped, many things become clear. It becomes obvious why the J and P documents contradict each other (e.g. Genesis 1 vs. 2); they represent two different traditions. It becomes obvious why the Chronicles differ from Samuel and Kings; the former was a reinterpretation from the viewpoint of the Southern Kingdom (Judah). It becomes clear why the prophets denounce the religious establishment who were the keepers of the law and the official histories. This is why the Gospels differ from one another; each writer had a different point to make that did not blend entirely with what the others said. What can one make of John, who wrote, “Love one another, for love is of God; he who loves is born of God and knows God; he who does not love does not know God”? This passage makes it clear that the “saved” are those who love, regardless of whether they believe in a particular doctrine or any doctrine at all. Of course, other parts of the Bible say something quite different. The religious leaders who put the Bible together had respect for all these viewpoints and included them in a “bible,” which is a library, not a book. They made no attempt (except for the redactors of the Old Testament J and P documents) to homogenize these books.
And, by dropping the God-Book assumption, I was also able to toss aside those Biblical writings that are obviously deviant from the God-is-love message. I am referring, of course, to the book of Revelation, which shows Jesus making the Earth flow thick with blood and gore. The Apocalyptic image of Jesus does not in the least resemble Jesus of Nazareth. Well guess what. You should not expect it to. I wonder if the writer of Revelation had even read any of the gospels. Revelation is a terrible book and it is time for it to be buried in the Great Recycling Bin in the Sky. Every time I look at the book of Revelation, I have the irrepressible feeling that its author had gotten some really bad hash from Damascus. It has not escaped my notice that Revelation is the favorite book of the political right, since it gives them permission to bring holocaust upon any social or political entity that they consider to be ungodly. The fact that those people, in whose lives hatred plays such a prominent role, like the book of Revelation so much is one reason that I hate it so much.
The book of Ecclesiastes is an expression of religious agnosticism and does not fit in with the rest of the Bible. But why should it? I can love Ecclesiastes, hate Revelation, and admire the other books, with the same freedom that I have when browsing at a library.
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