My Approach to Scripture

Gendered language, violence, and translation choices

If you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll give my introductory post from last week a read. In there, I lay out my reasons for starting Liturgical Threads, and what to expect from it. Today, I want to take some time to talk about how I approach reading the Bible, and in particular, what my policy is going to be on issues surrounding gender referents to God, violence, and choosing an interpretation to stick to.

Let me start by talking about my reverence for Scripture. Progressive or liberal Christians often get a bad rap when it comes to the Bible, subject to the critique that we don’t value it highly enough, because of our stance that it is not infallible. But I think that’s a very narrow way to show reverence, by making it do something it is not trying to do. The Bible is a collection of books, written by people thousands of years ago, subject to the follies and the whims that come with human beings. Further, it has been subjected to two thousand years of translation and interpretation and cultural baggage, before it ever gets to our eyes and ears. The Bible is not trying to be perfect, and we should not burden it so.

Nevertheless, the Bible is the sacred text of our tradition, my tradition. And, while I don’t hold it to be infallible, that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that it is divinely inspired. Those two things are not incompatible. I certainly do think that those authors, composing and writing and editing and stitching together across generations, did something amazing, something that did have the hand of God in it, in a way. And those who preceded us in this faith, they recognized the power in these texts, and preserved them, and passed them down to us, and in the process, built a worldview and a way of being human around these words of wisdom, around these stories of human beings searching for – and finding – God.

So, I carry a lot of reverence for Scripture. It’s a book that has become very familiar to me, that I find time daily for reading, that I spend a lot of time thinking about and grappling with, that I feel affection and even a sense of protectiveness for. That’s part of what drives me in this Liturgical Threads project – I love engaging Scripture; I love using my passion and my talent for theology and writing to read with and think about this text, in conversation with all the voices across two thousand years who have done the same.

And, even with this reverence, I can also hold some misgivings about certain parts of these texts, just as I can recognize the faults and the failings in my loved ones, and yet love them anyways. To do so is not to denigrate the Bible; it is to be in a honest and authentic relationship with it. It is to some of these misgivings I want to turn now.

Gendered and Inclusive Language

One thing readers here will learn quickly is that I don’t use pronouns about God. I don’t just avoid the use of he and him; I make a point of always just saying God, even if it convolutes sentences at times. This is a theological choice for me, but one that often gets misinterpreted as simply political, or even more uncharitably, “woke.” Let me lay out the theology here, without getting too deep into the weeds.

God is outside of our ability to describe or capture, in any way. Even use of the name, God, is to grasp imperfectly at a reality we cannot fully comprehend, as limited beings. My feelings about this delve into the field of apophatic theology, which is theology that reasons towards God via what we cannot say about God. To put God in any box is not only to cheapen our notion of God, but it borders on heresy. For this reason, I choose to simply refer to God as God, the only step I’ll take down the road of saying who God is. This doesn’t mean I don’t attempt to describe God in some way; I have no problem echoing Scripture when it says that God is love, or that God is merciful, or even that God at times feels anger. These are descriptors of our understanding of the nature of God, and how God interacts and presents God’s self to Creation. But, when referring directly to God, as a God, I’ll prefer to stay away from reducing God to a “he” or “him.”

At times, I’ll use the phrase “the Divine”, which takes a stab towards the idea of Divinity more than God’s own self. But, for me, God is simply God. And, crucially, part of that is knowing that God escapes all of our notions of gender, and humanity. Humanity may be imbued with the very Image of God, as Genesis tells us, but it does not work the other way around; God does not also have a piece of us. To reduce God to a “he” is to, in some critical way, to deny that women, and those outside of the gender binary, are found to carry that Image themselves. But, we all have it. And, thus, we cannot reduce God to a word representing less than half of us. Not everyone may agree with this choice; but it’s the way I choose to use language concerning the Divine.

Now, everything said above pertains to my own use of language. Obviously, when quoting someone else, I’m not going to alter their language. And, when quoting Scripture directly, I will stay true to the translation I’m using (on which more is written below.) So, when the Bible calls God a “he”, or refers to God as “Father”, I will cede to the translator.

Violence in Scripture

One of the key ways I practice my Christianity is through a strong commitment to nonviolence, which I derive from the words of Jesus, and the traditions of the faith stretching back to the first days of the movement. There can be some cognitive dissonance, however, when that commitment to nonviolence runs up against some of the violence that is inevitably found in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament. So, how should we hold this dissonance? And, what use should we make of passages that feature, or even extol, violence?

On the first question, while I certainly feel that dissonance, I don’t actually struggle too much with it. As I noted above, I don’t hold the Bible to be inerrant. Consequently, I don’t think the instances of violence in these stories, even violence done with righteous intention, by the “good guys”, sometimes at the alleged instruction of God, to be direct commands by or reflections of the nature of God. The first and most important thing to remember is that, for Christians, all of Scripture must be read through Jesus Christ, and his life and example in the world. Jesus’ teachings were radically non-violent, to the point of his own death. Thus, we must understand the violence found elsewhere in Scripture with Jesus in mind. We must remember that God is seen most clearly in Jesus, and as such, a violent God does not square with a nonviolent Christ.

With that understood, in accordance with leaving aside infallibility, we can come to understand the violence in Scripture not as being endorsed by God, but as a record of the people of God, and their place in an ancient world where violence was a part of every day life. The context of ancient Palestine, or the Roman empire, or Pharaonic Egypt, was very different from ours. Further, we should read these stories of ancient Israel as part of an unfolding story, pointing the way towards Christ, which includes an unfolding and growing understanding of God and what God desires of humanity. The story of Scripture is the story of an ever-expanding circle of inclusion, and growing revelation of what God’s kingdom looks like, both of which culminate with the wildly open, love-filled and merciful Way of Jesus.

So, how should we make use of the violence we find in the Bible? Or, maybe more relevantly, should we even be using these passages as texts where we can plausibly learn how to live like Jesus? I think the answer is yes, we can and should read and interpret and make use of these texts, both in worship and in our personal devotions. And I don’t just mean in a dismissive, high-handed way, where we are turning our noses up at those people long ago, who were clearly less civilized than us. We should not denigrate our spiritual forbears that way, or the text revered by our faith tradition. We can read and understand these texts for what they, images of God and people’s relationship to God through the ages. We are no better than they; we too are figuring out who God is and what we are called to do. Inevitably, people in the future will look back at us and shake their heads at our depredations and choices. But, I would hope they wouldn’t dismiss our stabs at truth, however meager they may be. Let us not do the same.

Translations

I won’t delve too deeply here, because we may really be getting into the weeds if I do. The translation I’ll be relying on most often in this work will be the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition (NRSVUE). The NRSVUE is the translation I am most comfortable with; my main Bible since college has been the Harper Collins Study Bible, which is an NRSV, with the Apocrypha included, and I still have that edition ready at hand. The Updated Edition was put out just a few years ago, and is what you will find on the Bible Gateway website, which is a go-to resource for me. The NRSVUE is the clearest translation out there, as far as I’m concerned, with a strong commitment to a literal translation of the text while also working to stay true to the spirit of the text.

In my own work, I also make reference fairly often to the Common English Bible, as well as The Message translation, which I use fairly often with my youth, as it helps them understand the text a little better. I also really like Robert Alter’s translation and commentary on the Torah. Additionally, I will from time to time use the English Standard Version, which is not highly thought of by scholars, but which is a pleasant translation purely from a reader’s perspective. And finally, I have at home the Bibliotheca collection, a beautiful printing from Germany of Scripture, presented in the American Literary Version translation. This is another immensely readable version of Scripture that I like to use at home for my own devotions, but it does have the drawback that, in an effort to maximize readability of the page, it does not include chapter and verse marking.

Most often, you will find the NRSVUE here at Liturgical Threads, especially in the weekly Scripture Notes. The NRSVUE is the best text there is for exegetical explorations of text, due to its unique literal translation, and the profuse notes included in the Harper Collins edition I have. However, I may from time to time turn to other translations, especially in liturgical materials, or sermons, if the literary features of certain text provide an emphasis or flair I think is useful. If and when I do this, I’ll always be sure to indicate which translation I am using.

I’m really excited to launch this project here at Liturgical Threads, and I hope these thoughts today give you some insight into my methods as we explore Scripture together. One final point I want to make on all of this is that I am not perfect. There will surely be times I break some of the ground rules I’ve laid for myself here, or fail to meet the standard I hope to set. Never will I do so intentionally, at least not without explaining myself. Thank you again, for your trust, and for supporting this project.

Grace and peace,

Justin