A Serious Bible For Serious Times

Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

Rachel Held Evans’ fourth book commences with a vital question: how can modern Christians read the Bible receptively? Given its bouts of misogyny, genocide, and intolerance; its apparent scientific illiteracy; and its often contradictory moral compass, how can we take the Bible seriously? Despite Evangelicals’ common claim, nobody reads the Bible literally; all believers select what they consider authoritative. Why, then, don’t we chuck the whole thing out?

Raised conservative Evangelical, Evans describes her childhood relationship with the Bible as a “magic book.” She loved church, attended a Christian college, believed the dogma. But adulthood left her disillusioned, like many of us. Reading the Bible with grown-up eyes, she discovered it little resembled the picture books and Sunday School flannelgraphs of childhood. She struggled with doubt, left her church, and began questioning everything.

Years of mentorship under theologians, academics, pastors, and street-level Christians taught her to understand the Bible, not as textbook or instruction manual, but as story. Human beings think in narrative. We need important concepts in ethics, science, politics, and other topics translated into stories before we understand them. And that’s what these biblical writers did, providing stories for peoples struggling to find their places in an often oppressive world.

To help understand what she means by “story,” Evans rewrites biblical moments into modern forms. Job’s argument with God as a screenplay set in a modern Christian university. The autobiography of the Samaritan Woman at the Well. Peter walking on water as a Choose Your Own Adventure. Biblical writers told these stories in the language of their time; Evans makes a stab at retelling them in our language.

Many Christians’ nagging desire to find universal aphorisms in Scripture blinds them to the remarkable characters and epic struggles which permeate the Bible. We read national histories, but also family histories; pitched battles and lingering wars, but also deep internal struggles with doubt. These stories resemble our own stories, the generational memory of favored grandparents and national myths. We indulge the same impulses that drove the biblical authors millenia ago.

Rachel Held Evans

This isn’t a mere storybook, however. A seasoned journalist, Evans combines deeply personal, even autobiographical, ruminations on the Bible with the latest scholarship on how stories bind humans together and raise a thinking mind. Her personal struggles with faith share equal footing with public debates about stories’ meanings, especially amid changing values about sexuality, gender, and politics. Our world is changing; how does that affect our stories?

One story features a First-Century pastor reading one of Paul’s epistles to the congregation. We forget that Scripture was written to be read aloud, an engagement of multiple senses in public. In both her stories and her chapters, Evans attempts to recapture the wonder first-generation Christians must have felt discovering Jesus for the first time. We lose the plot when we become hypnotized by strict exegesis or seek moral absolutes.

Scripture admittedly does have occasional blunt declarations of truth. The Commandments, for instance, or the Levitical laws. But nobody (except the most Orthodox of Jews) applies all laws equally; we have stories, experiences, moments that help us decide which truths apply. The Bible, Evans writes, isn’t one book; it’s several books, written across several centuries, a panoply of stories feuding to provide the best explanation of the reality we share.

I especially like when Evans notes that Christians use Scripture to foreclose debate. “The Bible says X, so do it!” Jews, by contrast, use Scripture to commence debate: “The Bible says X, what does that mean? Did it come from a context? Does this commandment ring through the ages, or must we strive to understand God’s will now?” Christians could profit from reclaiming this spirit of debate.

Evans wrote this book in the year surrounding her first child’s birth. Unsurprisingly, questions of how we pass stories from generation loom large in her investigation. The Bible represents a sophisticated oral and written tradition specifically intended to preserve a people’s heritage and beliefs across the span of time. Evans doesn’t have simple solutions. She simply says we must not fear to bring the eternal story into our changing world.

Maybe the Bible isn’t a “magic book” anymore. Maybe adults, facing a world very different from that which birthed the Bible, must have a different relationship with the story than we once did. But Evans invites us faithful doubters to reclaim the story heritage our ancestors took for granted. Maybe then we can rediscover what it means to love and have a relationship with our beloved Bible.