Now that the whole truth has come out about her husband’s double life—including the fact that she and Jack were never legally married—Jessie is standing on her own for the first time in her life. As she struggles to put Adornments, her rental store for designer labels, on the map in Tinsel Town, her relationship with private investigator Danny Callahan gains momentum. When she dresses a reluctant Danny in Valentino for undercover work at a formal affair, it’s him rather than her store that captures Hollywood’s notice. Danny, snapped by photogs, lands as the unlikely cover model on the front of L.A. Magazine. So much for inconspicuous. Will his popularity thwart her efforts to grow her business? Or worse, can Jessie afford to put her faith—and heart—into another relationship when she’s so obviously handicapped in the good judgment department?
A Doubter's Guide to the Bible
By Terry GilesAbingdon Press
Copyright © 2009 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-687-65833-6Chapter One
DOES THE BIBLE REALLY MATTER ANYMORE?
Why should anybody bother with the Bible? It's a fair question and where we must begin. After all, the world has changed pretty drastically since the Bible's pages were written. Not many of us keep wandering flocks of sheep, live in a small dynastic kingdom, or sacrifice cows in the backyard (unless the summer backyard cookout gets out of control!). But there's more. Not only is there a great gulf between the way we live and the way people in the Bible lived, but also how we think about the world around us has changed tremendously from how people in the Bible thought about their world. So if the Bible does matter, if it is going to have a continued place, the first condition that we need to consider is the very fact of change.
A FLY IN THE AMBER
I recently watched a fascinating television show that illustrated the matter well. The show was a science special featuring researchers intent on the examination of insect life from long, long ago. Apparently, at a time in the far distant past, some poor little bugs had become stuck in gobs of pine pitch that have, over the millennia, solidified into amber stone, with the little critters still entombed and well preserved inside. These little insects are frozen in time, preserved in pieces of transparent amber stone and visible to curious onlookers from the outside.
For many, this is what the Bible has become. It is an ancient collection of strange and old writings available to the curious onlooker. Stuck and lifeless, just like those little insects, the Bible is frozen in time. In many instances, those entrusted with its teaching and preaching have led us here. They arrive at this point from two quite opposite directions.
Some, especially among those of us in colleges, universities, and other academic settings, follow a path that is focused largely on the past. Content to explore all that can be known about the circumstances of the Bible's composition and compilation, we find it easy to avoid asking why and how this particular collection of documents has had such tremendous power and influence. It's much safer to content ourselves with the dispassionate examination of an inanimate relic from the past, peering into its pages much like the biologist gazing into the amber stone. I don't mean to say this kind of inquiry is unimportant—for indeed it is important! The age of the biblical books, where they came from, and the condition of their preservation are all valuable pieces of knowledge. These are important things to know if we are going to make sense of the Bible. But these sorts of things don't tell the whole story. Stopping here leaves the Bible a curiosity from the past, frozen in amber stone.
Others have chosen a different path. Reacting against the tendency to treat the Bible as frozen and lifeless, a thing of the past, some, particularly in the religious trades, argue for the Bible's vibrancy and eternal relevancy but also end up with a fly in the amber. They are persuaded that the Bible is changeless, unmoved by its changing circumstances and environment, just like those poor little bugs. Convinced that the Bible is anything but dead and lifeless, they attempt to simply read its words within the context of our own place and time, forgetting that the writers of the Bible were citizens of a world quite different from our own. In a sense, those on this path assume the way we see it now is the way it's always been. They appeal to the timeless relevancy of the Bible without providing evidence to back the claim. It's almost as if the Bible simply dropped out of the sky, never touched by the realities of time, culture, and history. The Bible becomes a parenthesis in time, thought to be equally applicable anytime, anyplace. Part of the wonder of the biblical books is that they do speak to fundamental human issues shared by us all, and so in a sense the message of the Bible is timeless. But the ways those issues are addressed in the pages of the Bible always bear the marks of the time and place in which they were written.
Unfortunately, when applied without consideration to culture and environment, the Bible becomes a perversion of its former self. A religious Jurassic Park is created in which the span of time between the Bible's writing and our day is collapsed, with the assumption that the Bible will communicate now just as it did when first written. But when removed from the time and culture of its origin and simply dropped into a foreign environment, the Bible can become just as misplaced and potentially dangerous as the dinosaurs of the movies.
Regardless of either path taken—viewing the Bible as only an artifact from the past, or effectively denying that the Bible has a past—the result is the same. The Bible, itself, as it was written and as it influenced the world in which it was written, becomes like those little insects, nothing more than a fly caught in amber.
CHANGELESSNESS AS A SURE WAY TO AVOID DOUBT
A sure way to avoid doubt about the Bible is to keep it securely closeted in the past or proclaimed timeless and independent from the processes of history. Safely removed and unchanging, the Bible becomes free from doubt but totally irrelevant. It is reduced to nothing more than a curiosity from another time and another place or it is forced to assume a voice imposed on it by those who seek to bring it into the world of today.
But let's face it—times have changed. The world we live in is far different from the world of the Bible. The fundamental differences between these two worlds naturally lead to some doubts about the Bible today. Let's explore some of the changes that have occurred.
CHANGE IN THE DEFINITION OF TRUTH
The first change that we need to consider is a fundamental change in the definition of truth. By this I don't mean that there is no real universe out there and that we simply create whatever kind of reality suits us at the moment. I don't mean that truth is changing in this fashion at all. Instead, the way in which we know the reality out there is changing at an incredible pace. Consider, for a moment, how different the microscopic universe appears when viewed through the old-fashioned microscopes used in high school science classes thirty years ago compared to the view afforded by the most recent high-tech, computer-assisted, electron microscopes. That microscopic universe looks quite different now. The same sort of changing view is now occurring time and again in all sorts of areas, even in our understanding of the Bible. (I'll talk more about this below.) But it isn't simply technology that is giving us a different view of the universe around us; the very paths we use to explore that universe are changing. The advent of cell phones and video texting is drastically changing closed and secretive societies like Myanmar and China. The flow of information and news can no longer be controlled effectively by the central governments of either country, resulting in irreversible social change. Particularly in the case of China, that change will be global in scope. The following observation made by Adam Bly, editor-in-chief of the very thoughtful and future-looking science magazine Seed, brings the effects of this change to our focus:
We are living in a moment where our traditional sources of truth—legacy news outlets, heads of state, community leaders, etc.—have diminished in standing.... And we're left having shifted the power equation but desperately lacking new ideas to fill the void that we have revealed. So now what?
The "now what" is doubt. Nothing can be taken for granted anymore. Not just the formulation of religious truth, but all sorts of commonly held ideas about politics, education, the global economy, the use of natural resources, energy availability, and just about anything else you might think of are under renewed scrutiny. Bly has put his finger on something very important. The way we make knowledge—the way we know and think about the world around us—is changing. Consequently, doubt.
But this isn't such a bad thing. We doubters take things very seriously—especially the things that are important to us. This serious scrutiny uncovers pretenders with no real substance. The true from the false, the real from the shadow, are revealed, more often than not, as a result of doubters testing the claim or authority to see if it really is so. Doubt can be very uncomfortable, but it can also be very beneficial.
CHANGE IN THE NATURE OF AUTHORITY
A second reason the Bible has been cloaked in doubt has to do with the changing nature of social authority. Conventional authority figures, upon whom we have relied for direction and insight—whether it be scientific, political, or religious—have all suffered a credibility crisis with the resultant rise of popular skepticism and doubt. As religious authorities are diminished in credibility (whether fairly or not), so too the Bible has lost credibility both as a religious authority in its own right and in its use by other religious authorities.
For the past twenty years it has been my job to introduce first-year university students to the Bible. If you find yourself in the group that came of age at the turn of the millennium, let me say directly that the rest of us are watching you with great interest. You are creating a cultural shift with deep significance. The trends that you introduced during your college years are gradually becoming cultural norms as we progress through the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In a manner that has grown in intensity over the past twenty years, you have demonstrated a growing doubt about the Bible, its place within your own lives, and its place within the culture you are creating. But it goes much further than just the Bible. Progressively, you have concluded religion is itself pretty doubtful, and because the Bible is perceived as a religious book, the Bible too has lost its sure footing as an object of respect and trust. In fact, and with good reason, you are sifting out authority figures of all sorts in a challenge to see what will last.
When applied to the Bible, this loss of credible authority works out in several ways. The Bible has been cast into doubt because the claims it makes and the claims made about it are so high and lofty. But doubt about these lofty claims doesn't have to be threatening. If indeed the Bible is a word from God, or even if it is simply a collection of very important writings with a lot of good advice, it ought to be able to withstand the scrutiny that all important things demand. Should the Bible have a significant role to play into the twenty-first century, it will only be as a result of the tangible, pragmatic, and very real help it offers to its readers. Just as any parent discovers all too soon, the rationale "because I said so" isn't very effective. The Bible can no longer claim a special place simply "because I said so" or because a religious leader says so or because some isolated sentence within the Bible says so. If the Bible has a future, it will be because doubters grant it one. It will be because you, the generation of the twenty-first century, have asked your sincere and very hard questions, and it will be because the Bible has emerged from this testing fire with confirmation.
For some of you, the Bible is clouded in a fog of doubt simply because the Bible is a closed book. Many of you have heard about the Bible but have never really spent time reading it, or at best know it only secondhand from movies and novels. Still others have doubts because you have spent time with the Bible, slammed it shut, and have come away shaking your heads at the sometimes outrageous things you've read.
Complicating things all the more is an abundance of religious preachers, teachers, and hawkers of religious "must haves" all claiming to have the final word on the message of the Bible. Even though many claim to proclaim a message "based on the Bible," a great many of these religious authorities are in flat contradiction to the others. Overlay all this with the almost daily barrage of news stories featuring bombings, attempted bombings, shootings, wars, and violence of all sorts motivated, to no small degree, by religious identities that draw the Bible right into the middle of the turmoil. It should be no surprise that Bible doubters are growing in number.
CHANGE IN THE NATURE OF CHRISTIANITY
A third major change that is expressing itself in doubt about the Bible is the change that is occurring in the nature of Christianity. It used to be that Christianity was pretty much defined by people who went to church. The church (all denominations included) was the visible expression of Christianity. This is no longer the case. A rift has occurred separating the church from Christianity, resulting in an ever-growing number of people who define themselves as de-churched. The de-churched maintain a vibrant spiritual life and consider themselves Christians, but for whatever reason have not found the church necessary or even helpful. Chances are you consider yourself part of this de-churched group. The de-churched recognize a separation between spirituality and religion that leads us to think about the Bible in whole new ways. Most obviously, this separation between spirituality and religion means that the Bible, as a book about spirituality, doesn't need to be constrained by the interpretations favored by any one religious group, church, or denomination. Church leaders or spokespersons are no longer the recognized authorities on Bible interpretation. Competing voices, sometimes flavored with more than a little sensationalism, attempting to tell the rest of us what the Bible means, have led many to conclude the Bible is a book with no clear voice of its own.
It's not just the de-churched who are forcing a change within Christianity. Christianity is also changing from within in ways that are influencing the churched, the de-churched, and the nonreligious alike. These changes from within are not limited to Christianity and have to do with the way organized religions fit into the larger context of Western culture. The way in which religion in general and Christianity in particular functions to legitimize political positions is changing, with as yet no clear end point in sight. The presidential campaigns that led up to the November 2008 election provide ample illustrations.
In the early spring of 2007, and just prior to his death, Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and a leading political activist for fundamentalist Christianity, related an imaginary conversation between a United States Marine and Chelsea Clinton. During the imaginary conversation, the Marine told Chelsea, "There are three things I fear most: Osama, Obama, and your Momma." The force of the statement comes from more than the clever rhyme. Implicit in Falwell's statement is a connection between religion (in this case radical Islam) and political positions at odds with those favored by fundamentalist Christianity. It's unfortunate but not surprising that during the campaigns of the spring and summer of 2008 Barack Obama felt compelled to repeatedly defend himself against two politically motivated accusations: (1) that he is Muslim, and (2) that he is unpatriotic. Religion, nationalism, and a certain brand of family values have long been associated in American culture (God, Mom, and apple pie), but progressively that association is becoming quite explicit and the God of this triad is wearing the garb of fundamentalist Christianity. All of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, would do well to think seriously about the powerful potential religion represents when placed into the political arena.
But there is more. Christianity is a moving target, changing as its environment changes. All the signs point in one direction: Christianity and the way many people view the Bible are about to receive an extreme makeover! That makeover will have a ripple effect leading many to reevaluate their affiliation with organized Christianity. In a nutshell, Christianity has moved south. For most of its history Christianity's day-to-day world was first European and later North American. This is no longer the case. Christianity has moved south and is beginning to be characterized by ways of thinking about things more at home in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern. This move south has resulted in a new Christianity, what Philip Jenkins calls a "distinctive new tradition of Christianity comparable to Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy." Christianity has found a new home among the world's poorest. The shift south means more than just a shifting demographic among adherents. Christianity's new home means that there will be changes in theology, ritual, and metaphor—changes in the way of looking at the world though "Christian" eyes—that will have profound implications for the way in which believers view the Bible. Reflect for a moment on the following observation made by Philip Jenkins:
European Christians reinterpreted the faith through their own concepts of social and gender relations, and then imagined that their culturally specific synthesis was the only correct version of Christian truth.... As Christianity moves southward, the religion will be comparably changed by immersion in the prevailing cultures of those host societies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Doubter's Guide to the Bibleby Terry Giles Copyright © 2009 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
