The Bible. No matter who you are, if you live in the west you’ve probably read some it, and if you don’t own one you probably did once.
Not many people have read all of it, though. I know I haven’t, and I doubt I ever will, for despite years of going to church religiously, I am an atheist. Perhaps the roots of my atheism lie in being bored during sermons and reading the bible instead. At first I was looking for amusing bits in Proverbs (“A nagging wife is like water going drip-drip-drip on a rainy day.” Proverbs 27:15) but the more I read of the bible, the less comfortable I became with it.
When I was a Christian I read the bits of the bible I was asked to read: the bit we were studying in the youth group, the bit the vicar based his sermon on, the bit my daily reading notes were about – but not the whole bible. Good heavens no! The idea of just sitting down and reading the bible in order was treated as a pointless and slightly crazy thing to do, at my church at least.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the bits of the bible where God has people killed are rarely selected for bible study groups. I’d love to hear a sermon on 2 Kings 2 23-24 (where God sends bears to kill children for the crime of laughing at Elisha for being bald) but I am not holding my breath. The more I read, the more bits I found that I didn’t like, and the more I struggled with those bits, the more I noticed that ‘real’ Christians had an ability to seemingly only process the ‘good’ bits of the bible. So when I read the story of the flood, I was troubled by the ethics of God drowning almost everyone, whereas Christians seemed able to ignore that bit and focus on the rainbow and God promising not to do it again.
It was the same with much of the Old Testament – I wanted to know why God would even think about asking Abraham to kill his son, why God was on such friendly, chatty terms with the devil that he ended up having a bet with him that caused Job such suffering and led to the death of his family, how he could regret the flood if he was omniscient, why he ‘hardened the heart’ of Pharaoh so he ‘had’ to kill all the first-born in Egypt and so on. ‘Real’ Christians only seemed to notice that God didn’t actually get Abraham to kill his son, and ‘gave’ Job a new family (with prettier daughters, so that’s ok) and set the Israelites free. It was like the ‘bad’ bits weren’t there.
In the end I stopped reading the bible, and so it sits on my shelf; slightly yellowed and slightly dusty. A testament to a time when I wanted to believe but found that the very book that was supposed to help me do so was, in fact, one of the main reasons I couldn’t. So you will understand, perhaps, why I can’t help but smile when I talk with Christians and they ask me if I’ve read the bible. In my head my reply is “Yes, have you? Mad, isn’t it?” but most of the time politeness wins out, and instead I reply with a non-committal “Not for a while” and try to talk about something else instead.
As an atheist I view the bible much like the Daily Mail. A lot of irrelevance (I mean – Numbers – that’s a dull book right there), a certain amount of hyperbole, a fair amount of self-reference, a degree of unpleasantness, a good dose of misogyny and a dressing of nonsense, all seasoned with a small amount of fact, resulting in a text that is unaccountably popular and often cited as ‘proof’ of something instinct tells me is merely supposition.
As endings go that one isn’t great. But I once read this book that was about an absent father who went on and on about how much he loved his kids how he and missed them terribly, but ultimately he planned to allow his sworn enemy to kill a load of them. Weird thing was my friend only noticed that he was planning to be really nice to the remaining few. Now that was a terrible ending. What was that book called again … ?
Hi Tom. Well written article. The bible is challenging especially the bits where God kills women and children.
I can’t explain why God would do this but there are people who are more knowledgeable of the bible than me who can provide credible reasons.
Do I think that God sent all of those children whom were killed after Moses came down from Mount Sinai after the Israelites had made the Golden Carf into hell? No I don’t. The same way that he didn’t do this to the children of the canaanites who were killed. Obviously I can’t prove this but I believe that God is ultimately a God of love.
I cant explain everything I read in the bible but I do believe that there is a God and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. This is the most important question to ask yourself. Who is Jesus? Once that question is answered then the bible can take on a whole new meaning.
Finally, I believe that God doesn’t condemn us to hell we condemn ourselves. Why would Jesus have gone through the horror of being flogged and nailed to a cross? God wants us to accept the salvation he offers.
It would be great for other CVM members to respond to Tom’s article in a constructive and respectful manner.
Tom, I pray that you will find the answers you are looking for and will ultimately come to know God.
I can really sympathise that you are unconvinced with a Christianity that cherry picks the “nice” bits of the Bible – I would be too.
Christians are sometimes guilty of glossing over some of the hard and unpleasant bits of the Bible, and that’s wrong. Overfamiliarity can dull us to the horror of, say, God wiping out almost the entire human race in a Flood.
But I also know many Christians and churches that engage with the hard questions and tackle the seemingly unpleasant parts of the Bible. I’ve heard sermons on passages like Exodus 4:24-26, where God is going to kill Moses until Moses’ wife touches him with his son’s foreskin(!), done seminars on youth camps on stuff like the ‘genocides’ in the Old Testament, and so on. I’d encourage you to engage with Christians who themselves engage the Bible as a whole.
It would take a while to discuss all of the issues you raise properly, so I’ll just make three broad points:
1) If God is God, then he sets the standard of goodness; it would be greatly arrogant to assume that out of all of human history and culture, 21st century Western values match up exactly to his. We shouldn’t be surprised that God sometimes surprises and shocks us. We can’t judge the truth of the Bible on whether or not it matches our values – if it is true, then we need to conform our values to God’s.
2) That said, part of the culture shock we get from reading the Bible is a result of the influence of the Bible on our culture. Many of our Western values are the product of two millennia of Christian influence. The ideas that we should love our enemies, treat everyone equally, protect the weak were foreign to many ancient cultures. In the Old Testament, we see the very earliest stages of God redeeming the world – he was starting from where we were at as sinful human beings. What the Bible records it doesn’t necessarily approve, and God was working within the culture as it was at the time. It’s a mark of God’s work that we have come closer to his values of love, mercy and righteousness than we were back in the Bronze Age.
3) We underestimate our wickedness and sin, and don’t think that we deserve death for rebelling against our good and loving God. We do. God was perfectly just to judge people in the OT, and will be perfectly just to judge us if we haven’t trusted in Jesus Christ.
That still raises difficult questions about instances where God used the Israelites as agents of judgement on the people of Canaan, for example. But the Bible makes clear that this judicial role which God sometimes enacted through Israel has now passed to Jesus Christ, not to the church. So Christians today would be completely wrong to attempt to enact God’s judgement on his behalf (e.g. in “holy war:). “It is mine to avenge, I will repay”, says the Lord.
There are lots more specifics we could get into, but I hope that gives a bit of meat to get started!
Dear Tom,
thanks for your comment. I wrestle with these things too – Jacob style, I guess. I am reminded of a conversation Jesus had with Thomas, one of his disciples:
You know the way to the place where I am going.’
Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’
Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’.
John 14.4-6.
Jesus asks us, simply: Will you trust in me?
“Like the Daily Mail” … I like that. I wrote a blog post about the Bible a little while ago. Might be of interest (and controversial?) http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/things-that-a-minimalist-christian-does-not-have-to-believe-the-bible-is-the-complete-and-perfect-truth/
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Some Christians I know do search deeply about such issues and don’t try and gloss over them, although I agree this glossing over happens a lot. The bible becomes gradually clearer part by part as you progress, and this takes a lifetime.
There is a book called the Freedom Diaries by Mark Holloway, which discloses conversations with God, in which God explained He wanted to guide the listener to parts of the bible He wants them to read and will help them to understand.
Bits such as Numbers seem boring and irrelevant – but actually all those names and genealogies are historical evidence that those books are a record of things that happened, and this points to the reliability of the Old Testament, which in turn points to the reliability of the New.
Perhaps not so mad after all.
There are a growing number of Christians who more than agree with you Tom. And as a result their faith is positively transformed. There is no contradiction in a full on postmodern deconstruction of The Books and encountering Jesus more clearly than ever. In fact it’s a complementary exercise.
I used to revel in the ‘pragmatism’ of God the Killer – no more. I only see Him most clearly in Christ. Not in the myths of evolving Bronze Age civilizations, even with their flashes of gold. And not in the rationalizations of his pre-modern Jewish followers with their extremely limited concepts of patriarchy, sin, death and atonement which Jesus Himself struggled with.
Hi Tom – good questions. A true atheist would’ve dropped the Bible like a hot potato. Since you keep yours, I suspect somehow there’s a closet agnostic in you 🙂
I believe in reading the Bible thru, page by page, looking up the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek (every year). Question everything. Never to be taken out of context. Test everything. I went to a Lutheran college and was taught how to take notes (in church!) and see that it stands with the Word. If not, that pastor is not teaching the Bible. Christianity is the only religion on the face of the earth that does not require works. Which is why Christians have become so lazy in giving or helping, so judgmental of others and their own, and too lazy to read. Truthfully, we deserve what we get from others for our complacency.
We, as Christians, cannot listen to pastors once a week and expect to learn anything. We must read, must study, must ask for wisdom. I recommend anyone who questions to simply ask ‘If You are real, show me, please’ You’ve nothing to lose.
It is impossible for anyone to ‘argue’ a person into the kingdom of God, to believe in Jesus, his death and resurrection– so this isn’t an argument not even a plea. I leave that job to God. Only He can give you the faith.
one answer for you on the question why God would tell Abraham to sacrifice his son. 1. Abraham adored his son. Loved him beyond belief. 2. God told him to sacrifice him. WHAT??? one says. How insane! 3. But God wasn’t ‘asking’ He was telling. Abraham had a choice YES or NO. 4. Abraham probably– with a severe sadness, walked his son (a child in Jewish history I believe was up to age 19) up a hill, prepared the altar, and obeyed. 5. God wanted Abraham to recognize faith in God, and his obedience. 6. Isaac was old enough to say sooooo no, I am about to take off or beat ya up old man. But Isaac too, obeyed, and in faith believed a sacrifice would be given by God. 7. Both realized that God provided the sacrifice. Was no surprise to God that they would obey, but without the willingness to love God beyond everything else in the worst of trials, they would never understand God, faith, grace.
for many years I just listened to the pastors who skipped this and that. That is sanitized Christianity. Without reading the Old Testament no one can fully understand the New Testament. Paul’s address of women teaching or wearing certain clothing had everything to do with the city he taught in. In Ephesus, for example, the idolatry of Artemus the goddess of fertility (if I got my history right there) the priestesses of Artemus were prostitutes who would teach childless men that if they came to the temple, paid a price then their wives would have kids. The prostitutes wore specific makeup, jewelry, and shoes like flip flops that announced each step who they were. The Bible teaches God created man in His image, man and woman He created them. They were equal. Read up on the koran and find that it’s legal to rape women who are not covered in the way the men say, if they gang raped (because she has to prove it, otherwise if she can’t then the cops can rape her too), they can be taken into slavery, they can beat their wives (there’s a video on how to do it), they are considered chattle, their husbands can buy them jewelry with GPS locators on them *Amazon* sells them, they can marry as young as 6, fondling babies is okay, and all Jews and Christians should be utterly exterminated. They have to work or die their way to heaven to get ’72 virgins’ (they’ve raped em all, so no one left). It’s a tough choice. 🙂