It would help if more people with opinions about the Bible had read it.
Secularists reading the Bible are too often like ethnocentric tourists visiting a foreign country. The American tourist who misses great feasts by sticking to McDonalds, because the food of the nation he is visiting is different, is foolish. In the same way, the person who avoids or misunderstands the Bible is also missing out.
The Bible isn’t what they are used to reading and they read it badly. They don’t begin with sympathy to see what caused the Bible to become such a great book in the first place, but instead assume that if they don’t get it nobody of intelligence would either.
First, let us state the obvious: the Bible isn’t a simple book; it is at least sixty-six different books collected into a whole. Each discrete book is different, some very different. The skills needed to read Proverbs are very different from those needed to read Revelation. Of course, as an intentional collection of books there many good questions to ask about what these books have in common. What are the themes in the collection itself?
Good hard work, the best kind of intellectual pleasure, is to be found in understanding Sacred Scriptures, but the kind of education most modern people get, with the tendency to specialize in a field, is not likely a good preparation.
If we demand of a book something it is not giving, then we will miss what is in it as well as creating a stupid misunderstanding in our own minds.
The Bible has to be read for what it is (or rather what each discrete book in it is), not what it is not. The Bible is not a modern novel, it is not modern history, and it is not a science book. That doesn’t mean it does not contain stories, history, and scientific truths - just that is not any of those kinds of books.
Second, the Bible can be the most important book in human history without being to my taste. Liking a particular work and recognizing greatness in it are two different things. Titus Andronicus is not my favorite Shakespeare play. I came close to walking out of a particularly bloody rendition at the New Globe in London, but it is easy enough to see that for a “revenge play” it is first rate. If you have a taste for revenge plays, then Titus must be a revelation, but this is a taste I lack.
Unfortunately for me, my line of work requires knowing a bit about Titus so my likes and dislikes are not relevant to whether I will watch the play. I have learned to appreciate what is good about it and even have caught hints of its greatness as a result.
My guess is that most students who turn to most great literature, but especially the Bible, don’t like it. It is not what they know best, which is film and the storytelling that goes with it. The characters, with a few exceptions like King David, are not well developed and they have a hard time “getting into it.” Like the ship lists in Homer’s Iliad, the Bible contains long passages whose interest is nearly incomprehensible to most moderns. Literary genealogy is not good television and those parts of Scripture, which often lead off a book like Luke, can kill any desire to move forward.
It is easy to despise what we don’t like, since it gives an excuse not to bother with hard work. Safe to say then any rant about the Bible, such as a Richard Dawkins’ extended sneer, however much it may fail do justice to the glories and importance of the Bible, will find an audience.
Sadly for such a person the Bible isn’t going away. A billion people base some portion of their lives on it and their numbers are growing, not shrinking. Islam is connected to it and that adds hundreds of millions more, but it isn’t just the religious who need to understand the Sacred Scriptures of the world’s great monotheistic religions. Even if the Bible stopped selling today, and it is the best seller year after year, any well-educated person should read it carefully.
The Bible has motivated much of the great art, philosophy and science of the past. If you don’t know the story of the Prodigal Son, then you are going to miss the point of a great many paintings. If you don’t read the words of Jesus in the New Testament, then you will miss a great deal of what Abraham Lincoln had to say.
If you don’t like Star Trek or Joss Whedon, then if you are like most educated people, you safely can ignore it and him. That is just not true of the Bible.
You may never learn to like the Bible as a reader, and perhaps few turn to it for pure amusement, but most readers I know learn to respect it.
Once I had a student frustrated with his failure to learn Spanish who complained that everyone should just learn to speak “real.” When pressed about the nature of this mysterious, though evidently ubiquitous tongue, the student admitted, that “real” was English. He imagined Spanish as a kind of perverse alternative English that some people insisted on speaking despite the obvious fact that everybody he knew spoke English. Sadly, this kind of attitude is not rare. If our social group does something, then it must be “normal” or “reasonable.”
In the same way, it is possible to insulate oneself in a secular media or academic culture and become incapable of understanding why any reasonable person could cherish the Bible. Isn’t that positively medieval? Isn’t the Bible full of errors, wickedness and stupidity?
Not surprisingly the Bible is not as foolish as critics pretend. It has endured generations of such critics for very good reasons. Even if it is not the very Word of God, as I believe it to be, the Bible is a stunning work of art and literature properly understood. Academics, religious and non-religious, find it worth their entire careers to study a single short book in it. Most of the charges against it are old and there are reasonable responses to them.
If you are a Christian, of course, the same rules apply. The Bible is a book and there are rules about how to read books well. Cheering for the Bible, when one has not carefully read it, is as parochial as the American “patriot” all for the Constitution, “whatever is in it.”
Christians think the Bible is sacred and holy. That does not mean that we read it in a weird way. It simply means that having read it carefully, men and women became persuaded by its message. Many people on reading the Bible have decided God had a hand in writing it. Things God does are different, set apart from the commonplace. That is why believers call the Bible holy.
If God exists, and religious believers know he does based on best reason and experience, then he is radically different and greater than humankind. Anything God does would partake of that quality. Any place God especially touched would be sacred, a God-thing. Christians believe that the Bible is a sacred book.
If God wrote the Bible, then he did so in cooperation with many different human authors. The Bible is not just holy and sacred, but is also human. If it is what it claims to be, then the collection of books called the Bible discloses God to humans as best can be done. It is a Babel-fish from God in the ear of mankind.
How do I know this is true? The Christians believe God will touch the mind of any who reads his book. The Spirit of God will try to communicate with our human spirit. The believer thinks there is a unique experience possible for the reader of the Bible.
One does not have to accept this idea, however, to grasp the essential message and importance of the Bible. The believer reads the Bible like any other book. Since each book in it had a human author, the text can be understood in a fully human way. The message can be examined and subjected to critical scrutiny using human reason.
This human experience of the Bible is open to anybody from atheists to Christians. If there is more to it than that, as I believe, then it begins simply and humanly with something open to all. The Bible’s message can, of course, be rejected by a thoughtful reader, I have known a few such souls, but at least it will have been rejected knowledgably.
As someone who has benefited from ancient literature of all kinds, pagan, Christian and secular, this much is plain to me:
Charity to text and different times broadens thinking and enriches the reader.
I. Reading Ancient Literature Charitably
Sometimes Christians have the bad habit of reading old books only to find what is wrong with them. This style of Christian writing hunts for heresy in Plato and then discards the great writer. Not surprisingly, this makes it hard to learn anything from non-Christian literature.
This narrow approach to texts means that any good in them will almost always be missed. The great Christian writer John Bunyan has a wonderful image of a man raking through muck to find some small treasure when over his head was a crown of great worth and glory. A good reader should start by looking for the jewel in a great work and only then shake off the muck that she might have acquired in the process.
In the same manner, secularists will often just go dumpster diving for problems in the Bible without pausing to check out context and content. These problems in the biblical text are then pressed into service in the culture wars.
Both secularists and Christians will find perspectives and “errors” in any ancient text. Fixating on these makes it easy to forget that these errors and perspectives may look no better to us than our own perspectives and errors will look to later writers.
Instead, I have always found it refreshing to attempt, as best I can, to adopt the view of the writer I am reading. When I read Homer, I try to read as an ancient pagan Greek in a polytheistic world. When I read Isaac Asimov science fiction, I try on the perspective of a secular humanist living in a world of space travel and robots.
Any good reader tries to “get” the book. The best critic first learns what is lovable in any great book and then steps back to see the errors. In ancient books, the errors, or perceived errors, are easily caught, but the different perspective is not.
Christopher Hitchens is a writer most guilty of cheating himself of the Bible in order to attack it. He will not concede being able to learn anything from its pages and one begins to suspect he almost certainly has not. One is left to account for how Scripture could continue to inspire first-rate thinkers like Alvin Plantinga, writers such as Madeline L’Engle, or film makers such as Andrei Tarkovsky.
If Hitchens could understand how the biblical narrative could inspire the artistry of Tarkovsky or Solzhenitsyn, working to create beauty in Russia while crushed down by an atheistic regime, then his attacks on the Bible would be more effective. Christopher Hitchens will never defeat a biblical view of reality until he sees what is good about that view. It is not just that the Bible inspired a few people in a few places at a few times, but it has animated people as diverse as Rosa Parks and Good Duke Wenceslas.
Fortunately, both secularists and Christians can rejoice. There is a field dedicated to helping people read books: old and new. This field is called “hermeneutics.” Like all disciplines, it is highly technical and like any field dealing with human things almost everything in it is contentious. Despite the complexity and the contention, there are still a few rules that critics of the Bible or any other ancient book should keep in mind when they start reading. Some of them can be boiled down into a series of questions that I encourage my own students of ancient literature to keep in mind when they read a book. Such questions help keep both praise and criticism from utterly missing the point of the book.
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris or other pop-secularists would write better biblical criticism if they kept them in mind.