Why study the Bible?
Why study the Bible? Is it because the Bible claims to be the Word of God? But, surely, if you are an atheist or an agnostic, such a claim is laughably ludicrous at best and patently false at worst. So why study an antiquated book? And why study the Old Testament in particular? Why study a ‘bloody’ book, whose central character, according to Richard Dawkins, is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as: “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-‐ freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Dawkins probably raided the thesaurus while writing his book!
I am not going to ask you to study the Bible because I believe it to be the Word of God. No. In the first of our series of lectures entitled Breakfast with the Bible, I am going to plead with you to study the Bible because I believe that the Bible is the founding document of Western civilisation. The Harvard scholar Samuel Huntingdon defines a ‘civilisation’ as the ‘broadest cultural entity’. Western civilisation, it may be argued, had its tap-‐root in the Judeo-‐Christian tradition, its secondary roots in the Greco-‐Roman civilisation and its tertiary roots in the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment.
A publishing house called The Teaching Company (TTC) has produced a whole series of audio books on how the Bible influenced Western literature. I could go on to deliver a whole series of lectures on how the Bible has indelibly influenced Western art, architecture and music. Take a piece of music that is a foundational cultural artefact to Middle England—Handel’s Messiah. More than half of Messiah is from the Old Testament. But Handel also wrote nine other oratorios all based on OT figures: Esther, Deborah, Athalia, Saul, Samson, Joseph and his brothers, Belshazzar, Joshua, Solomon, Jephthah and Judas Maccabeus. Even contemporary composers like Andrew Lloyd Webber cannot resist tapping into the Bible and producing musicals like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
Let’s take art. Take just one famous painter—Rembrandt. Here’s a list of just a few of his paintings: Bathing Bathsheba, Belshazzar’s Feast, Balaam and the Ass, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Daniel’s Vision, David’s Farewell to Jonathan, three paintings from the book of Esther, Jacob blessing the children of Joseph, Jacob wrestling with the angel, Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem, Jonah praying before the Walls of Ninevah, Joseph accused by Potiphar’s wife, Joseph telling his dreams to Jacob, Laban greeting Jacob, Moses at the burning bush, Moses found, Moses smashing the tablets of the Law, Samson accusing his father in law, Samson telling a riddle at his feast, Saul and David, the angel appearing to Hagar, the blinding of Samson, the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau…
If you are biblically illiterate, you miss out on the best of Western art, music, literature and culture. And that’s why you need to study the Bible and teach it to your children. But what about the Illiad and the Odyssey—you might ask? Don’t I need to have a fair grasp of the great works of Greek and Roman mythology if I
am to walk around the Walker Art Gallery and come away on an artistic high? Sure, you do. So what’s so different about the Bible? Why do I need to study the Bible? Here’s why you need to study the Bible. Here’s what’s radically different about the Bible.
1. Ideas have consequences.
2. The Bible in general and the OT in particular provides a series of seminal ideas, often counter-‐cultural and liberative, that has had irreversible consequences for human history.
3. It is these seminal ideas that have become foundational to our Western worldview. It is these seminal ideas that are intrinsic to freedom—free thinking and free living.
But how can someone who believes in God claim to be a free thinker? How can someone whose mind is governed by Scripture claim to be a free thinker? Is this not a contradiction in terms? There is a Chinese saying: ‘If you want to know what the water tastes like don’t ask the fish’. The fish has always lived in water. The fish has never tasted anything else. The fish is domesticated by the water it lives in. The fish has no external reference point to draw a comparison with the water. If you ask the fish what the water tastes like you will get a fishy reply! You need an external point of reference. If you need to think outside the box, you need to have ideas that emerge from outside the box. The Bible is a good external reference point not only because it claims to be God’s Word, but also because it offers us liberating ideas from another culture, another time in history, and from another worldview.
Ideas have consequences. The Old Testament is a gift to humanity because it is a script that contains ideas that have had the greatest consequences for the human race in general and for Western civilization in particular. We are scripted by the dominant orthodoxies of the day. The Bible descripts us by exposing the current scripts as oppressive and offers an alternative script; a script that it insists is liberative. Of course, the biblical script is not without its own problems, and that is a matter for subsequent lectures.
Most of you will have heard of Alexander Solzenitsyn. Solzenitsyn died three years ago in 2008. Solzenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Four years later he was stripped of his citizenship after the first part of his book The Gulag Archipelago appeared in the West. It was his prophetic writings that were to some extent responsible for the collapse of communism. It is one of history’s great ironies that one of Russia’s greatest thinkers was once regarded as Russia’s greatest troublemakers. When nearly one-‐third of the world had come under the spell of atheistic communism, when nearly one-‐third of the world was scripted and domesticated by the dominant orthodoxy of its day, when entire swathes of the worldwide church were singing the high praises of dialectical materialism and preaching the fifth gospel according to St Marx, what is it that made Solzenitsyn a free and fearless thinker? What is it that motivated this deeply committed Russian Orthodox Christian to think differently? Among the mourners at his funeral was Ekaterina Markova, a writer and friend of Solzhenitsyn. This is what she said: “Solzhenitsyn served only God. Not the
government, not democracy, not even America. Only God, that’s why he was a free person.”1
Solzhenitsyn lived under some of the most enslaving conditions known to man. He spent eight years in the Gulag and three years in internal exile. Yet, paradoxically, he was free. He became one of the world’s most respected free thinkers. We, on the other hand, live in the free world, vote in free elections, operate in a free market, travel across free borders, and have unlimited access to free media. We enjoy freedom of religion, freedom of information, and freedom of speech (or at least we think we do). But are we really free thinkers? Or are we slaves to the ideologies and philosophies that have ruled the Western world for over three centuries? By rejecting the God of the prophets have we fallen prey to the God of the philosophers? Have we become free thinkers by replacing the truth of the Bible with the false teachings of modernism and postmodernism—of rationalism and empiricism, romanticism and relativism? “Solzhenitsyn served only God. Not the government, not democracy, not even America. Only God, that’s why he was a free person.”
I am going to argue that the Bible is a compendium of free thinkers who broke away from enslaving ideas of their predecessors. We need to study the Bible so that we can be truly free! So let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start!
When people were enslaved by animism and pantheism and lived in fear of nature—when people worshipped the sun and moon and stars—a freethinker revealed to the world a completely novel concept. The freethinking author of Genesis broke free from the stranglehold of animism and pantheism and wrote one of the world’s most profoundly liberating lines: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” A pantheistic god is a useless god—because if god is everything in general he/she/it is nothing in particular. A pantheistic god is an amoral god, because he/she/it does not and cannot make moral demands on people. A pantheistic god is a purposeless god because people who believed in pantheism were people who believed that they were nobodies on a journey from nothing to nowhere. The first freethinking statement in the Bible suddenly results in a cataclysmic cultural fissure. Man is no longer a slave to nature—he is now caretaker and custodian of nature. He is now free to study and experiment and probe the mysteries of nature; in the words of the free thinker of Genesis—
“to fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Centuries later, this would provide the foundational motivation for the study of the natural sciences. Francis Bacon followed by Isaac Newton would declare that God had given the human race two books: the book of Nature and the book of Scripture and both books revealed God’s truth. As the Latin inscription over the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge confidently declares: ‘Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them’. The words are from Psalm 111:2. It was the first director of the Cavendish laboratory James Clerk Maxwell, discoverer of electromagnetism and widely regarded as the scientific link between Newton
1 The Times, Thursday August 7, 2008, p. 29.
and Einstein. Maxwell was an outstanding Christian who selected this verse as an inspiration for scientists who would follow him.
When people were enslaved by polytheism and lived in fear of hundreds of gods—a free thinker uncovered another completely novel concept. God is one. Monotheism was liberating. There was no longer any need to placate a pantheon of capricious and carnal gods and goddesses. The free thinker who wrote Genesis, began with the words: ‘In the beginning God’ and NOT ‘in the beginning gods’—as was the case with every other religion then known to human beings.
When people thought of human beings as no different from animals; when a number of religions taught that human beings were created to do the dirty work of the gods—a free thinker revealed to people another completely novel concept. Human beings were endowed with a dignity that was inherent and non-‐ negotiable. The freethinking author of Genesis defiantly wrote of a God who created “man in his own image.” With these words the seed of human rights was sown. In an oppressive caste-‐based society like India, untouchables find new life and human dignity when told that they are not created as sub-‐human but they are the very reflection of God.
When people were enslaved by the idea that god was either an impersonal principle; or the gods were a pantheon of squabbling pleasure seekers the freethinking author of Genesis wrote of a personal God who revealed himself to one man Abraham and contracted with him to care for him and to bless him and his descendants and through him all the peoples of the earth forever (Gen 12).
For the first time in history God was about to get involved in history. God was about to initiate a new kind of drama and a new concept of time. Thus far, time was an arena in which nothing fundamentally changed. According to many of the world’s greatest historians, Arnaldo Momigliano, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, J. H. Plumb, Eric Voegelin and the anthropologist Mircea Eliade, this was the moment history was born.
When people lived as slaves—when the Israelites slaves silently acquiesced to slavery for 400 years—slavery was, after all, an accepted fact of life, a freethinker called Moses was inspired to lead the first slave revolt in history. Slavery was no longer acceptable. The book of Exodus would become a novel paradigm for liberation.
When people were enslaved by the belief that God was on the side of the powerful and noble—a freethinker called Moses encountered a God who was on the side of the least, the lost, the last and the lowliest. This was a God of slaves who pulled down the mighty Pharaoh from his throne and exalted the humble slaves; a God who filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.
When people were enslaved by the idea of monarchy—when people hadn’t the foggiest idea of ‘democracy’, the authors of the books of Deuteronomy and Kings pointed out the severe limitations of kingship and revealed to Israel the novel
concept of a ‘tribal confederation’. The people would now rule themselves through elders they themselves had chosen.
When people were enslaved by the idea that the status quo was permanent and that rebellion against the status quo was not even conceivable, let alone possible; a whole new movement of free thinkers burst on the scene. This group of oddballs came to be called ‘prophets’. But what was novel about the prophetic ministry? After all, there was scores of ‘prophets’ in Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and other nations of the ancient Near East! But the difference is that these prophets were oracles or foretellers or fortune-‐tellers. The biblical prophets were forth-‐ tellers rather than foretellers.
By means of foretelling, forth-‐telling and retelling; through rhetorical strategies of poetry and metaphor; the prophets assaulted popular imagination, demolished the strongholds of the dominant versions in people's minds and then disclosed to them an alternative version of reality’. The status quo could be dismantled. The dominant orthodoxies of the day could be challenged. An alternative version or vision of reality was not merely conceivable, but also possible.
When people were enslaved by greedy businessmen freethinking prophets like Isaiah, Amos, Micah and Hosea spoke of ‘social justice’—a concept that was utterly novel and intensely liberating. Isaiah warned the exploiters: “Woe to you who add house to house and field to field until there is no more room and you have to live alone in the midst of the land.” Micah called for justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-‐flowing stream. He warned those who tried to bribe God with offerings and sacrifices: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
When people were trapped in a maddening cycle of production and consumption, when people worked without ceasing, when rest and leisure were only for the rich, a free thinker revealed to the world the idea of a Sabbath. No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest. Leisure is appropriate only to a free people. Leisure is the necessary ground of creativity, and a free people are free to imitate the creativity of God. “Those who live without such septimanal punctuation are emptier and less resourceful,” writes Thomas Cahill.
When people were enslaved by a simplistic idea of reward and punishment— when people believed that good people are blessed and bad people are cursed, a freethinker called Job shattered this belief and through his own suffering explored the idea of why even innocent people often suffer terribly in this world.
When people were enslaved by the idea of fate and the inevitability of the impending future, when the greatest literary contribution of the Greeks was
‘tragedy’, when ‘tragedy’ was considered to be the unsurpassed achievement of Sophocles, Aeschylus and the rest, the freethinkers of Bible came up with a new category of eschatology—hope.
‘Now tragedy belongs to cyclical time. It takes a very specific view of the world, which is that the world is fated more or less to remain the same. That is called fate. And every belief that we have that we can somehow resist fate is what the Greeks called hubris and is punished by nemesis. All our dreams of changing the world are destined to be shipwrecked on the hard rocks of reality’, says Jonathan Sacks. What is the Hebrew word for tragedy? There isn't one, actually. ‘There is no Jewish word for tragedy because Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope. And I find this extraordinary, that despite the many tragedies of Jewish history, there is no word’. Religion was about to become, not a conservative force but an evolutionary and even revolutionary one! ‘To change the world. That is the key phrase. The idea that together with G-‐d we can change the world, make history, not just be made by it.’
“Without the Bible we would never have known the abolitionist movement, the prison-‐reform movement, the anti-‐war movement, the labour movement, the civil rights movement, the movements of indigenous and dispossessed peoples for their human rights, the anti-‐apartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland, the free-‐speech and pro-‐democracy movements in such Far Eastern countries as South Korea, the Philippines and even China. These movements of modern times have all employed the language of the Bible; and it is even impossible to understand their great heroes and heroines— without recourse to the Bible,” writes Thomas Cahill in his book The Gifts of the Jews.
How can someone who believes in God claim to be a free thinker? How can someone whose mind is governed by Scripture claim to be a free thinker? I hope I have answered your question. “Solzhenitsyn served only God. Not the government, not democracy, not even America. Only God, that’s why he was a free person.” That is why Solzhenitsyn was one of the greatest free thinkers this century has produced.
In 1983, Solzhenitsyn was presented with the prestigious Templeton Prize for progress in religion. In accepting the award, he gave this clear assessment of what lay behind the tragedy that had wrecked his country: “I have spent well-‐ nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution. In the process, I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own towards the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that has swallowed some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened’.”
He went on to warn the so-‐called ‘free world’: “The West is on the verge of collapse created by its own hands. There is an irreconcilable contradiction between good and evil. One cannot build one’s national life without regard for this distinction. We the oppressed people of Russia watch with anguish the tragic enfeeblement of Europe. We offer you the experience of our suffering. We would
like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery that we have paid.” Are you a free thinker or a slavish thinker?
If you are truly passionate about the freedom we enjoy in the West; if you are concerned about the future of Western civilisation, may I invite you to join me in a journey through the foundational document of Western civilisation. From next Sunday we will begin with the book of Genesis. I’d like you to read Gen 1-‐2 in preparation for our study. If you’d like to, please feel free to read the entire book of Genesis. I am going to suggest that you read the King James Version and I will explain why later. If you find it too cumbersome, read any modern translation like the NRSV but please do not read a paraphrase.
We have created a website that will support these lectures and I will try and make additional material available on the website. I will use the most recent tools in biblical scholarship to take us through the biblical texts. I will looks at the texts from historical, literary and theological perspectives. I will also digress from time to time and look at issues that are relevant—other religions, science, gender justice, ethical issues and so on as well as cultural artifacts from music, literature and art that have been influenced by the biblical stories and texts. I will use powerpoint only when I need to, but I will supply you with handouts when necessary. The last ten minutes of each lecture will be reserved for questions and if you are a volunteer and wish to leave at 10.05 please feel free to do so.
The Reverend Canon Dr Jules Gomes
Dwelly Raven Canon & Lecturer in Theology Liverpool Cathedral