On My New Book

My New Book

Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians

I have a new book that’s just coming out. I self-published it under my full name, Thomas Calnan Sorenson, through Archway Publishing, the self-publishing arm of Simon and Schuster. The title is Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians. I want to say a bit here about the origin and intent of this book and why I think it is a worthwhile effort. Yet it occurs to me that I said most of what I want to say here in the Introduction to the book, so I’ll begin this post simply by pasting in that Introduction. Here it is.

“The Bible is to be taken with great seriousness, and studied, and made the basis of our preaching, and the guide to the church’s ongoing reformation of itself; but in the knowledge that it is a human book, however transcendent the message that it wants to convey to us.”

Douglas John Hall, Waiting for Gospel

“The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.”

Ira Gershwin

INTRODUCTION TO OUR GUIDED TOUR OF THE BIBLE

©Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2014, 2015

Many people know, or believe that they know, many things about the Bible. Here’s one truth about the Bible that few people know. The Bible needs liberating. That may seem an odd statement to you, but it’s true. The Bible needs liberating because it has become a captive. The Bible has become captive to a narrow, restrictive, even strangulating literalism that is choking all of the life out of it. The Bible has become captive to old theological understandings that no longer have validity in the postmodern world. It has become captive to a narrow, restrictive, even strangulating sense that because it is, as people suppose, the Word of God there can be no error and no contradictions in it. Those convictions, that the Bible has no error in it and that it has no contradictions in it, won’t stand up to even the most minimal critical scrutiny, but they are what countless millions of people over countless generations have been taught about it. The Bible is the prisoner of what in my book Liberating Christianity I call Biblicism, the belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible combined with the belief that it must be read literally, that is, factually. In Part Two of Liberating Christianity, which has the title “Overcoming the Obstacle of Biblicism,” I critique Biblicism and offer a vision of the Bible as myth and human spiritual experience that I believe liberates the Bible, but my earlier book doesn’t examine much of the Bible itself. Its focus is more broadly theological, not specifically on the Bible and what’s in it. My work as pastor of a local congregation has led me to the belief that we need a general introduction to the Bible, all of it, that is not Biblicist, that is, that looks at the Bible with clear eyes not clouded by old teachings and beliefs that actually obscure the real Bible from us. We need a guided tour of a liberated Bible.

So welcome to a guided tour of the liberated Bible! I, your humble tour guide, hope that this tour will help you in understanding the Bible, help you use the Bible for your personal devotions, and help to bring the Bible alive for you in all of its many different aspects. The Bible is perhaps the most important book in the world, but it is an immensely difficult book at best. Understanding it in any meaningful way takes a lot of work. It may take a lot of work to overcome what you have been taught about the Bible in the past that now doesn’t work for you. My hope is that on this tour I will be able to help you do at least some of that work.

It is a commonplace today that the Bible is the most read and least understood book in the world. That clever remark about Christianity’s foundational book is almost true. It is almost true and not totally true because while the Bible may be widely purchased it is probably less widely read. It certainly is widely misunderstood. We mustn’t however let the rather flippant nature of that comment about the Bible conceal a profound truth from us. The way that the Bible is understood today is a serious matter. The way that a great many Christians today misunderstand the Bible is, in particular, a cause of much harm in the world. Misunderstanding the Bible leads Christians to deny and reject the brilliant insights of modern science and to attempt to force a totally unscientific—and un-biblical—creationism on the public schools. Misunderstanding the Bible once led many Christians to deny the God-given dignity and equality of Black people and to support slavery. In like manner misunderstanding the Bible today leads many Christians to deny the God-given dignity and equality of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and to support legislation that codifies discrimination against them. Misunderstanding the Bible leads some Christians still to deny the God-given dignity and equality of women, to deny them positions of leadership in the church, and to oppose legal measures designed to protect their equality in the workplace. Misunderstanding the Bible leads a few Christians to deny the value of protecting the earth’s environment because, they believe, the world is going to end soon in any event and they will be whisked up into a blissful eternity in heaven. All of these positions claim to have biblical warrant; and, while it’s easy enough to cite biblical texts that appear on the surface to support them, they are all grounded in a misunderstanding of the Bible. My aim on this tour is to give seeking Christians a different, and I am convinced better, way to understand the Bible. My aim is to guide you through the Bible without either of us wearing a Biblicist lens.

This tour began as a yearlong adult education forum at the church I used to serve as pastor. That series was occasioned by a particular book that claims to be an introduction to the Bible. One of the members of my church who regularly attended our Sunday morning adult education forum read a book with the title Bible Babel.[1] He was very enthusiastic about that book, so I read it to see if it would be a good book for our whole group to read. I very quickly decided that it wasn’t. Because my reservations about that book prompted this one, or at least prompted the adult education series that spawned it, I’ll restate here some of my objections to that book:

1. It says that the only way one can reject the notion that the Old Testament book of Isaiah predicts Jesus is to deny the divinity of Jesus. It says that Christians are on solid theological ground when they say that Isaiah predicts Jesus. Wrong. Isaiah doesn’t predict Jesus. Rather, early Christians applied some of the language from Isaiah to Jesus as a way to express their experience of him. Isaiah was written in and for particular ancient Hebrew communities. It addresses their concerns, not the concerns of Christians hundreds of years later.
2. It applies the term “homosexuality” to things in the Bible while admitting that the Bible “says very little about homosexuality.” Wrong. The Bible actually says nothing about homosexuality. The concept “homosexuality” didn’t exist in the world of the Bible. It is a modern concept not an ancient one, and the Bible says nothing about it. The Bible does on a very few occasions mention and condemn homosexual acts, but it says nothing about homosexuality as a natural variety of human sexuality. That is, it says nothing about homosexuality.
3. It mentions Jesus’ “turn the other cheek” statement in Matthew without betraying any awareness of Walter Wink’s brilliant and revolutionary exegesis of that passage. We’ll look at that reading of Jesus’ words in Matthew when we get there. “Turn the other cheek” doesn’t mean what you’ve probably understood it to mean.
4. It insists that all New Testament authors saw Jesus as divine and believed in his virgin conception. In fact, most New Testament authors actually don’t see Jesus as divine, and only Matthew and Luke show any interest at all in his conception and birth. No one else in the New Testament even mentions those things about him.
5. It says that there are four “biographies” of Jesus in the Bible. Wrong. There are no “biographies” of Jesus in the Bible. There are four Gospels, but they aren’t biographies in anything like the modern meaning of the term biography. They are proclamations and confessions of faith in Jesus and are not primarily intended as factual accounts of his life.
6. Swenson’s book says that “Christians believe that Jesus is the incarnation of God and that because he was a uniquely sinless human being who sought with divine love to redeem people to God, he could choose to die as an ultimate sacrifice for human sin so that those who believe in him would be forgiven and enjoy eternal life with God.” Wrong. I’m a Christian, and I (along with a lot of other Christians today) don’t understand Jesus as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin. That understanding is a classical and wide-spread Christian understanding, but you can’t say that all Christians believe it. Most New Testament authors didn’t believe it either. The New Testament has several different understandings of the significance of Jesus. His being a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin is one of those understandings but it isn’t the only or even the dominant one.
7. The book says that Christians believe that Jesus returning will still happen someday in the future. Wrong. I’m a Christian, and I don’t believe that. I believe, with John Dominic Crossan, that the Christian belief in the Second Coming, which did indeed appear very early in the Christian tradition, is actually a great denial of the first coming. Our task is to continue the work of the first coming of Jesus, not to sit around waiting for a second coming.
   
   
   These aren’t the only problems I found with Bible Babel, but they make the point. I hope that my quick review of some of the problems with that book gives you just a tiny foretaste of the discoveries that we’ll make on our tour of the liberated Bible. Bible Babel is nowhere near an adequate introduction to the Bible for critical, thinking Christians. It does not introduce us to a liberated Bible.
   Because I couldn’t recommend that book to my church group I looked for an introduction to the Bible that I could recommend. I couldn’t find one. So I undertook to give my adult education group a more adequate introduction than I could find in any published book. That effort led me to write introductions to some of the preliminary concerns that any informed reading of the Bible must address before reading the book itself. Those notes quickly began to look like the beginnings of a book. This book is the result. It is quite obviously not an exhaustive study of the Bible. The books and scholarly articles that have been written on the Bible would fill many libraries. This book is only a brief introduction to the Bible; but it has a serious intent, and it is based on what scholars say about the Bible .
   A great many people believe, or at least have been told, that there is some virtue in reading the Bible straight through, cover to cover. Many have done it. Some have done it many times. More have tried and not made it all the way through. I can admire the faith and the tenacity of people who have made it all the way through the Bible on their own, but I have reservations about how valuable that exercise really is for most people. As we shall see on our tour, the Bible is an immensely complicated book. Really to understand it requires a knowledge of languages, history, and ancient cultures that most people, including many people with a seminary education, don’t have. I don’t have all of those things either, on my own. The virtue of seminary training in the Bible isn’t that the student learns all of the answers. The attentive and interested seminary student will, however, at least get an introduction to the issues that the Bible raises with regard to its construction, intent, and meaning. She will also learn some about reliable resources for addressing those issues as they come up in her ministry. I intend this tour as a guide to the Bible for seeking, critically thinking Christians who want to read the Bible cover to cover or who at least want to know what’s in it and to understand it better than they have before. I intend it as an introductory guided tour of the liberated Bible for people who want to love and use the Bible but who cannot accept the traditional understandings of it that they have been taught, people who must either find another way of understanding the Bible or reject it altogether. I also intend this book for those o who are beginning to question their earlier understandings or at least are open to hearing about a different way to understand the Bible.
   This series is grounded in a critical perspective of the Bible. In western Europe critical scholars began to apply newly developed methods of critical analysis to the Bible in the eighteenth century CE. Those methods were grounded in the rationalism of the Enlightenment, that transformative intellectual movement of the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries that transformed the way western people understand truth. Before the Enlightenment truth was understood largely factually, but it was understood also as something that God revealed to people. It wasn’t, for the most part, something people discovered on their own. In the Enlightenment truth became precisely something that people discover on their own. For the great thinkers of the Enlightenment people discover truth through the application of human reason to whatever the question was to which they were trying to find an answer. When scholars began to apply reasoned human analysis to the Bible they quickly discovered that much of what people had taken to be true about that foundational book of the Christian faith wasn’t actually true at all. All of a sudden it made no sense to say that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, for example. All of a sudden (relatively speaking) the complex editorial history of many of the Bible’s books became apparent. All of a sudden there wasn’t one book of the prophet Isaiah, there were three different Isaiahs whose work had somehow gotten all clumped together into one book. All of a sudden Mark was understood as the oldest Gospel, and the letters attributed to St. Paul were divided into authentic letters and pseudo-epigraphical letters, letters that say they are by Paul but that are not by Paul. The insights that have flowed from a critical analysis of the Bible are endless, and new ones come to light every day.
   Yet a great many Christians have no real knowledge of any of those critical insights. Rather, they have been taught Biblicism. They have been taught, in effect if not in so many words, that God wrote the Bible and that therefore there are no contradictions and nothing demonstrably false in it. They have been taught that they must understand the Bible literally, that is, factually. Those contentions about the Bible, however, are simply untenable. On our tour of the Bible I will introduce you to at least some of the major critical insights into the Bible, who wrote it, when it was written, and how it came to be in the form in which we have it. Those insights may challenge some of your long-held beliefs about the Bible. So be it. On this tour we will look at what is really there in the Bible, not what any of us have been told is there nor what any of us expect is there. We will spare no sacred cows. We will not ignore unpleasant (or worse) realities in the texts of the Bible. We will lift up and celebrate the things in the Bible that are worth lifting up and celebrating, and there are many such things in it. Still, the Bible says what it says; and if we are to use it as the foundational book of our faith we must understand what it actually says, not what we’ve been told it says or what we wish it said.
   This tour is obviously an introduction only. It is not an exhaustive study of the Bible. No tour can include every sight along its route, and we won’t include every verse of the Bible in this tour. We will focus on the most important things. We will look at major themes. We will look briefly at each book of the Bible, more briefly at some books than at others. My hope is that on one or another of our stops your interest may be piqued and that you will then do more research into a particular book or a particular issue. Obviously the selection of subjects is subjective. I have selected things that I find interesting or important. Such a subjective selection of topics to cover is unavoidable. Every author does it. Every tour guide does it. I hope only that you will find the topics I have selected for discussion to be interesting and perhaps important for your own spiritual journey. On a couple of the Bible’s books I will offer only side trips. I do that because some of the books are less important for today’s readers than others, and I do it in the interest of space. This tour is long enough as it is.
   Our tour has three major parts. The first involves preliminary matters, things to consider before we dive into the Bible itself. This part gives a very brief overview of the Bible. It’s a good idea to learn something about what you’ll see on any tour before you take the tour, and that’s what Part One of this tour seeks to give you, some preliminary, background knowledge that, I hope, will make the tour itself more meaningful for you. Part One includes brief discussions of questions such as the theory and practice of biblical interpretation, issues of language, manuscripts, and translation, and the development of the canon. Part One also gives you a quick overview of such issues as biblical geography, the history behind the Bible, the history in the Bible, and questions of biblical authorship. Part Two covers the Old Testament. Part Three covers the New Testament. By the end of the tour you should have received at least an introduction to the whole Bible and the myriad issues that it raises. You should have gotten an introduction to a Bible liberated from the things that keep it bound, that keep it from being alive, that keep it from being meaningful in our lives.
   Whatever else the Bible may be, it is at least the foundational document of our Christian faith. We encounter the Bible regularly in worship, in classes at church, in our private reading and devotions, and even out in society. Knowing some of the basic facts about the Bible—about its nature, origins, content, and legitimate uses—is important to any informed Christian faith. Yet especially in our more liberal or progressive Christian tradition biblical literacy is not very deep or widespread. The purpose of this work is not to use the Bible devotionally but to study it more or less objectively (not that true objectivity is ever possible for us humans) as an essential element of the Christian faith. My hope is that you may become more familiar with the Bible and with some of the major issues involved in reading and using it. My purpose is not to detract from the Bible as holy scripture but to deepen our understanding of it so that it may open to us the spiritual treasures that it contains.
   
   
   There’s a little bit more in the Introduction than that, but this is the part that tells you about the book. I hope this book finds a readership. I think it deserves one. It gives open-minded Christians a rather thorough, although of course by no means exhaustive, introduction to Christianity’s foundational texts. It addresses and corrects many misconceptions about the Bible and how to read it. It gives lay readers an introduction to some of the most significant biblical scholarship of recent times. It introduces the reader to concepts like postmodern hermeneutics that are vitally important and nowhere near widely enough known. The book has not been professionally proof edited because of the cost of having that done. I gladly accept responsibility for and errors that remain in it. If you’re interested you can order the book from Archway Publishing, or any bookstore should be able to order it for you. It’s also supposed to be available in a much less expensive e reader version, but I don’t know if that one is available yet. I hope you’ll read it. I hope it is meaningful to you.

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[1] Swenson, Kristin, Bible Babel, Making Sense of The Most Talked About Book of All Time, HarperCollins, 2010.