Coming Back to the Bible

I checked out a book at the library yesterday. I just couldn't resist! When I'll have the time to read it, I have no idea. It's by an author named Susan Campbell, and it's called Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl.

The inside flap said stuff that intrigued me. Susan grew up in the Church of Christ, a fundamentalist denomination that emphasized (well) trying to be right all of the time. It was against dancing, instrumental music in church, sex outside of marriage, and the ordination of women. When Susan was baptized at age 12, a piece of fabric on her clothes floated to the top of the pool, so she wondered if she had truly been buried with Christ. There are fundamentalists who are like that, believe it or not!

Susan was drawn to Jesus, and she played by the rules of the Church of Christ. She guarded her chastity before marriage, memorized passages of Scripture, and went door-to-door to witness even though she couldn't preach from the pulpit. But questions still arose because of the facts of real life. She wasn't allowed to dance, but she was elected to be part of the homecoming court. What should she do? She knows that her church frowns on instruments in worship, but can she have a piano at her wedding?

Eventually, she loses her faith over the issue of gender. As the inside flap of the book says, "her questions begin to surface, and when dogmatic answers from her Bible teachers, family, and congregation fellows confirm that women will never have a seat at the throne, her faith begins to erode."

But the final paragraph is what moved me and made me want to check out the book: "After Campbell flees her church, she remains thirsty for an unwavering and compassionate faith she knows is out there, somewhere. To find it, she returns to the historical works of religious movements, studies the works of early feminist thinkers and contemporary theologians, and rereads the Bible with the same fervor of her youth." As I looked through the book, I saw insights about Jesus' relationships with women and the Gospel characters of Mary and Martha.

Susan Campbell left behind her fundamentalism and legalism, but she still came back to the Bible. She may not view it as rigidly authoritative or inerrant at this time in her life, but she still finds herself returning to its stories and ideas.

To kill two birds with one stone, let me tie this to my daily post about my comps reading. Over the past week, I've been reading Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's (ES) The Savage in Judaism, which concerns anthropology and the Torah. Eilberg-Schwartz tries to free himself to interpret ancient Israelite rituals in light of other cultures. But certain scholarly trends have discouraged this approach. For a while, a desire to present Judaism and Christianity as superior to the "savage" primitive cultures hindered an anthropological look at ancient Israelite religion. After all, why read ancient Israelite rituals in light of primitive cultures, if the whole idea is to show that God's religion is superior to all of them?

But ES appears to have been encouraged by the Romantic "noble savage" idea, which had a more favorable opinion of "primitive" societies. Unlike many in the Enlightenment, his aim's not to point out similarities between the Bible and primitive cultures in order to discredit the Bible, but rather as a means to understand it better. Freed from the religious goal to defend the Bible and the anti-traditionalist desire to dismiss it, ES takes a serious look at other cultures and then comes back to the Bible, with fresh interpretations of its rituals and laws.

A similar sort of thing occurred with a friend of mine. He grew up in a cult and tried to make Christianity work for him, until he concluded that he didn't believe in God. His early blog posts were bitter against religion, then he got to the point where he was trying to understand it better. Now, he has a concept of God, whom he calls the Source.

Recently, he offered an interpretation of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil story in Genesis 3. He said that its point may be that we needed to grow up and become wise, but now God desires for us to return to him while we hold on to wisdom. Many scholars have interpreted the story in this fashion: Before eating the fruit, Adam and Eve were in a state of innocence and immaturity, but the forbidden fruit made them wise and is thus responsible for human society as it exists today, both the good and also the bad. With the Fall came human culture and progress, but people also became violent and selfish, which resulted in God sending the Flood. In the Garden, Adam and Eve were supposed to trust God as little children, but their state after the Fall compelled them to weigh things and to make moral decisions. Nowadays, as biblical wisdom literature shows, God wants us to be in relationship with him even as we exercise wisdom to choose between good and evil, to believe in God, but in a state of maturity. My friend may not be approaching the Bible as a hard-core fundamentalist, but he's still coming back to it.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make in all this. Am I saying that certain religious or anti-religious approaches to the Bible dampen our reading of it, and that it's good to read the Bible with fresh eyes? Am I looking for a way to get something out the Bible without having to be a rigid fundamentalist? Am I honoring the Bible's power and how it can have a hold even on non-Christians, or people without a specific confession? Perhaps all of these are my point. Maybe another point will emerge as time goes on.