I got my first Bible pretty much at birth, it was a big story book with lots of pictures of people wearing leaves, animals hanging out on arks and white men with beards. Years later I got my first “proper” Bible, one where nothing was missed out and there were a lot less pictures. However I didn’t really start reading the Bible properly until I was in my teens. Up until then it was a story book, it didn’t have a huge impact on my life and I don’t know whether I believed it held much significance to me. It was just a book.
As a teen I had a “Youth Bible”, this was packed with comments and articles written by youth workers helping to contextualise what the text was saying to teenage life. There were articles about sex, drugs, self worth, identity, relationships and what it meant to have a faith. This was when I started actively reading the Bible (even if it was just to read the articles). I started to realise this book maybe had some significance to my life, maybe it was more than just a book.
As I got older, and learned more about the Bible, I heard it described with phrases like ‘word of God’, ‘infallible’, ‘divine inspiration’ and my favourite “a love letter from God”. I realised that if I was to believe the Bible was true, then I had to believe it was the word of God, that it was dictated by God and that there were no errors. I started to get quite zealous, believing that science was a lie, that the earth was 5,000 years old and that heaven was somewhere in the clouds. I would argue these claims, stating that “if you don’t take it all literally then you may as well not take any of it literally”. The Bible wasn’t just a book, it was the word of God, and you couldn’t argue with it.
I entered my twenties, my world got a lot bigger and I started to question things. As I learnt more about where the Bible came from, I started to conclude that maybe it wasn’t all to be taken literally. As I examined the claims of science and evolution I realised that they were probably a lot stronger than some of the ‘creation science’ I had been reading. When I studied theology, I learnt that the Bible is a library of books written by over 40 authors over a period of one and a half millennia. I learnt about the debates over the authorship of the books, about the things that are lost in translation and context, and about the disagreements over which books should be included in there in the first place. As I tried to process all of this information, I began to wonder whether God had any influence at all over the composition of these texts, maybe it was just a book?
Throughout this process I would still make time, when I could, to read the ‘book’. Despite my questions and doubts over whether or not it literally happened, I still found there was something drawing me to it. While I didn’t believe it was divinely authored, I still felt like I could identify with what was being written. It was strange.
I wouldn’t say I’m very good at reading the Bible, I don’t read it every day and every time I’ve tried to do ‘Bible in One Year’ I give up pretty quickly. I wouldn’t say I believe it was dictated by God, or that everything in it is literal. For me it’s clear that the Bible is a collection of human texts written by human people into human situations. In that way I guess I’d conclude that it is just a book, or maybe rather just a collection of books.
However there is something that sets the Bible apart from other books, the authors weren’t just writing for the sake of it, there were certainly no publishing deals and I doubt they get any royalties. The texts that make up the Bible tell us about people’s encounters with the divine. They tell stories of people who make mistakes, people who experience emotion and loss, and of the work of God in their worlds. Whether you take it literally, or as some kind of story or metaphor, I don’t think it matters. People wrote these things down for a reason and these stories endured for a reason, they tell us something about the divine and about humanity’s story. And when I read it, I can think about my own life. What does it mean for me? How can I relate to God in the light of this? Can I make this more than just a book?
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