I recently finished reading a book in French called Zapping de la Bible. Published by Larousse, better known for dictionaries, this book was neither promoting nor degrading the Bible. It had about three thousand little boxes of facts about the Bible. “Zapping” means that no single piece of information was explained at length. It is a sort of summary of the things that people should know about the Bible. Everything from Cain and Abel to Noah to Abraham to David to the prophets to Jesus to Paul. I knew most of them, from decades of Bible study. But there were some overall surprises.
The first was that most people know few, if any, of these things. There seems to be two groups of people. First, the ones who claim to believe the Bible, but know almost nothing about it. I did surveys of my students back when I was teaching in Oklahoma, and found that most students claimed to believe the Bible but knew almost nothing about it (e.g. who King David was). These people just believe what their leaders tell them to believe about the Bible. Most recently this means to believe that Donald Trump is bringing about the Will of God on this planet (a belief strengthened by the release of the Trump Bible). Any difficult questions simply do not occur to them.
The second group is people who reject the Bible as nothing more than white males trying to control, even enslave, the rest of the world. These people, also, seldom know anything about what the Bible actually says.
The fundamentalist mindset that controlled me for many decades of my life blinded me to the true purposes of much of the Bible. Take, for example, the apocalypse (Revelation). My fellow fundamentalists all believed that the details of the Apocalypse would all occur in the future—not the author’s future, but ours. Point by point. One radio preacher even organized a tour group to go see the valley of Megiddo in Israel, which, she said, would be filled with blood as deep as horses’ legs (which would require billions of people to be killed). But in reality Revelation was a message to the churches which were just beginning to experience Roman persecution: keep the faith. It was coded in a mysterious way so that, if the manuscript got uncovered by Roman authorities, they could not understand it. It was all a retelling of concepts from the Old Testament. The four beasts came from Daniel; the four horses from Zechariah; the lion from Amos; the sky rolled up like a scroll from Isaiah; the locusts from Joel. The whole symbolism was lifted from the marginally-crazy visions of Ezekiel. No one in Jewish-Christian society of about 100 C.E. could have missed this. But us fundamentalists did.
The Bible, in reality, raises many interesting questions about the purpose (if any) of humankind and the world, and about how we should live. Often, the Bible itself offers no clear answers or, if it does, these answers are contradictory. But I believe that, in our culture, to deal with these questions, it is important to know how the authors of the Bible dealt with them, in order to selectively agree or disagree with them, neither swallowing nor rejecting the whole.
The first and most obvious fact about the Bible is that it is not a book. It is 66 books, written by at least 40 different people (we assume, men, but we cannot be sure about some of them) over the course of at least 1500 years. Not surprisingly, the authors all believed different things. The final list of which books to include in the Bible was not made until the Council of Carthage in the year 397 of the current era. The Bible presents these different viewpoints then leaves it up to us to figure out what it all means.
Whatever you believe, you can probably find it in the Bible. If you believe that God has chosen a people (originally, the Israelites, and today America) to rule the world, you can find a lot of this in the Bible. If you are agnostic, or even think that God is inexplicably unjust, you can find that too, especially in Ecclesiastes and Job.
I strongly believe that my grandchildren should have access to this information so that they, as I eventually did, can make up their own minds about what to believe. This is how we raised our daughter who, like me, had a journey from faith into skepticism. And our daughter and son-in-law believe the same thing: they do not hate the Bible. They are willing to let our grandchildren explore it.
Meanwhile, we are all fiercely dedicated to the general religious principles of how to live: to love your family and your neighbors, for example. No destructive behavior, toward self or others, is tolerated. This is no different from those humanists who accept altruism as one of the main components of evolution. Love is a product of evolution, not a miracle from God.
The only problem is, explore it when and how? I struggled with the idea of how to bring the subject up with my grandchildren, who are still too young to understand much about life. Not to indoctrinate them, but just to get them interested. If there is a Spirit, the Spirit can take it from there.
It turns out that nature can take its course. When I finished the Zapping book, I left it on the return-to-library shelf. My granddaughter saw it and asked about it. Before long my wife and I were explaining the Exodus and how the modern Christian Passover is Easter, a holiday we had just celebrated by seeing the resurrection of the green foliage of the trees.
And there is no turning back now. The subject of the Bible is open for the next generation. I did not need to artificially open it. France is a secular society, but it has many holidays based on the Christian calendar. Everything closes down not only for Easter Sunday but for Good Friday and Easter Monday as well. You won’t find that in Christian America.
