What I Like and Dislike about the Bible

​What you can conclude from my title is that I am not a “true believer,” that is, someone who accepts every word of the Bible as the “inerrant word of God.” Rather, I’m someone who considers the Bible as the fallible work of individuals from specific times and cultures whose understandings reflect those of their ethnic groups and contemporaries. Moreover, as a Yale-trained literary analyst with a doctorate in English language and literature, I am an experienced critic of all sorts of literature, sacred and profane. Finally, when it comes to the Bible, I have read it a number of times, both on my own, and in three separate programs: The Lutheran Church’s three-year Bethel Bible Program, the first two years of the four-year Episcopalian Education for Ministry, and, most recently, the Episcopal Church’s Bible Challenge: Read the Bible in a Year, which I just finished two hours ago.

So let me begin on the positive side of the ledger. There’s a lot that I like, even love, in the Bible, which I’ve mainly read in the New Revised Standard Edition but also, in parts, in German and French translations, including Luther’s original 16th-century Deutsch. As an author myself, I love the stories, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels—think Ruth or the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Next, I’m an unrepentant fan of the Shakespearean language of the King James version of 1609. I also have some favorite characters: Abraham, Joseph, Ruth, Esther, Sampson, David, Mother Mary, Mary Magdelene, and, above all, Jesus. I have a love-hate relationship with the Apostle Paul but usually enjoy his rhetoric even when I find the self-referential side of his character somewhat off-putting. Speaking of rhetoric, I love how Hebrew poetry, while not rhyming phonetically as ours often does, has rhyming thoughts; that is, a single verse will repeat the same thought in different words or metaphors. That’s how the psalms, for example, “rhyme.” Finally, I’m a fan of certain lines and pieces, in part because of their familiarity, like the 23rd Psalm, or from my perspective, their perspicacity. An example here would be Jeremiah 31:31-34, where the prophet says that the Almighty, despite his various “Omni’s,” rethinks how humankind can best live a religious life and in due course Jeremiah says will give us a new operating system, God’s regulations written on our hearts.
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As for things I don’t like, I’ll begin with the works-righteousness of the Torah, where a fully religious person is required to do 613 do’s and mostly don’t’s, some of which seem trivial or even silly in today’s world. For example, women may not bathe during menstruation. I also don’t care for many of the Psalms, a number of which are IMHO too long and repetitive, and all too many seem to be buttering up God to protect the writer from “his” enemies and zap or kill them in the process. By the same token, I get bored with the Prophets, both major and minor, where the main focus seems to be the wayward “Children of Israel,” whom the writers upbraid at length in hopes of their changing their ways. The writers clearly never heard the late Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner say, as I did, that, over time, positive reinforcement works far better than negative reinforcement to change another’s behavior. My main gripe, especially with the Jewish Scriptures, however, is how transactional and dictatorial the Almighty is shown to be. It’s my way or the highway, seems to be “His” point of view. There’s also a lot of all-or-nothing in what God says—i.e., that everyone is bad, no one is good. Oy! Shape up or else bad things will happen, seems to be the lesson. Fortunately, Jesus shows us another version of God, not as the Great Dictator but as Abba, Daddy, i.e., a nice guy. And for that I say, “Thank you, Jesus—and God!”

The Bible I used for Read the Bible in a Year.