Quick review of part I:
- Stay calm
- Read a short book from the Bible like you would a long article, all at once if possible
- If it’s too long, break it up in a way that makes sense to the book (ask google for help)
- Remember this doesn’t fix everything
- And remember you’re not too stupid or unholy to understand the thing, you just need a little help from your friends
I hope the strategies from Part I are at the very least taking some pressure off of your reading conscience. Part II is probably going to do much more to get you understanding the content of the actual books though. Hold on to your hat.
The kind of Bible that is on most bookshelves looks like a book. It’s one set of pages, with a cover around it and everything. But the Bible is not a single book. Maybe you already know this because Christians like to refer to it’s ‘parts’ as ‘books’. Many books within one “book”. It’s really more like an anthology.
In some college classes, English, History, the like, you may have a textbook that is an anthology. It will include several different works, each one written as a complete text, that an editor has selected from a wide range of possible texts. In a literary anthology, an editor may select the most representative short stories of the greatest writers of the first half of the 19th century. Each of those short stories is meant by its author to be read for its own sake. The editor has come along at a later time and gathered together many short stories by different authors, and published them together for a separate purpose.
In most conceivable cases, the author who wrote the original work and the editor who collected it will have different purposes for that text. Depending on the anthology, the editor may even put one author’s short story in a book with other works that seem to be quite different from it. For example, this hypothetical editor could work on a collection of the most popular writings from England in the 16th century. They might compile texts that are fictional and non-fiction, written for the theater or written to be read in a church service, written at the beginning of the century or written at the end a hundred years later.
You get the idea. It’s a collection. It’s a book. It’s Superman.
You may have recognized this simple fact long ago. Good for you. But even if you did, you may not have thought through the ramifications of a statement like that. The Bible is not one book. It is an anthology. Simple statements about it are usually inaccurate because they miss this point. What you say about one book in the Bible may not be true for another.
Take a simple adjective like ‘fast’. What does this word mean? I usually mean by it that some event took less tik-toks on the clock than another event that took more tik-toks. That’s not the only meaning of the word that I could reasonably use when I write. People may understand me if I used the term ‘fast’ to refer to something that was secure. That’s only two acceptable 21st century uses of the word. I’m not a word-ologist though, and I have to take into account that if I read a book in English from three hundred years ago, I have no knowledge of how many different uses they had for that word. There are ways I can find out, but I shouldn’t assume that everybody thinks the way I do.
Do a google search (or just keep reading, it honestly doesn’t matter). “What does the Bible say about ‘salvation’?”. You’ll easily find a hundred verses that all include the word salvation. But beware! Remember – the Bible is not one single book. Many different people had a hand in writing its component parts.
What about a term like ‘spirit’? ‘divine’? ‘sin’? ‘heaven’? I know what I learned in Sunday School about these terms in the English speaking state of Florida during the late 1900’s at a protestant church, but the biblical authors never went to my Sunday School class. They never got to consult with each other on setting down what things mean. They lived hundreds of years apart, in different cultures, speaking different languages, living totally different lives from each other in many cases.
It’s all about follow-through…
How many gods exist according to the Bible? Depending on which Bible author you ask, there’s at least one, but many of them believe that more exist.
In Genesis 1, God says “Let us make man in our image”. Who did the author think God was collaborating with? The Trinity? Jesus and the Holy Spirit who were chilling with God the Father? No. When would this writer have heard about Jesus? You may say, “Well that ‘us’ is really a three-in-one God!” How would the author know that? This guy just knew about one main guy doing all the work – “God”.
Another thought people have is that maybe the author was clueless about the true meaning of what he had written. God made him write about the Trinity without him actually knowing what in the world that was. Sure, maybe God did that. But the issue there is that it still means that the author must have thought that there was more than one god in existence.
Now, of course he may have thought they were lesser gods, or less important, but they still existed. When he wrote ‘us’, he understood that there was more than one god, even if he only cared about the main one.
The book bearing the prophet Isaiah’s name contains verses that doubt that other gods really exist. People think they exist, but when they worship objects devoted to those gods, that writer would say they’re just worshipping trinkets in their house, no more. Different person, different time, different beliefs, same Bible. The writer of Genesis chapter 1 would have disagreed with that idea.
Some Christians and non-believers feel like if they don’t understand something in the Bible, they are doing something wrong, they’re not “in” enough to get it, or they’re not mature enough in their faith to understand. I agree that maturity can be an issue, but getting saved, or being more fervent or faithful does not clear everything up. There are many different types of maturity. Handling ambiguity well is just one type, and it does not get free 2-day shipping to your brain just because you love God. That should be a perk though. Somebody make a petition.
Take-aways
The Bible is an anthology of texts that were written for different reasons, by different people, in different places and times in history and collected together much later. This book is many books. Those individual books sometimes “agree” in what they mean, or what the author seemed to believe. But that is not true of every concept, word, or belief from cover to cover.
The Bible’s authors sometimes disagree on how many gods really exist.
The Bible’s authors have different ideas of what “salvation” means, or even who God might want to save.
They have different ideas of what God is like and what he does.
They are not the same people. They are not the same books. And there are accessible ways for you (yes, you!) to study in a way that you can make sense of individual books, or even the anthology of the Bible as a whole.
More in pt. 3.
The Artless Ramble 