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| Book cover for "Inspired" by Rachel Held Evans. Image source. |
As an ex-evangelical who is still a bible nerd, I LOVED the book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again [affiliate link], by Rachel Held Evans. It's about reading the bible in a whole new way- well, actually, not new at all, but in a way that I never heard about in evangelicalism.
The intro chapter is SO GOOD and so relatable. Evans talks about how, as an evangelical, she always viewed the bible as a "magic book", but in slightly different ways as she grew up. As a child, she viewed the bible as a wonderful storybook. As a teenager, it was a handbook to tell you how to live. As a young adult, it was an answer book that gives all the reasons why we need to vote Republican/ reject evolution/ oppose same-sex marriage/ etc. But then, she began to question her faith, and question the interpretations of the bible that she had always heard.
Some quotes from the intro:
It was as if the Bible had turned into an unsettling version of one of those children's peekaboo books. Beneath the colorful illustration of Noah's ark was-- surprise!-- the violent destruction of humanity. Turn the page to Joshua and the battle of Jericho and-- peekaboo!-- it's genocide. Open to Queen Esther's castle and-- look!-- there's a harem full of concubines. [page xvii]
and
Beneath all the elaborate justifications for Israel's ethnic cleansing, all the strange theories for where Cain got his wife and how Judas managed to die in two different ways (he hanged himself and then fell headlong onto the ground), I sensed a deep insecurity. There was a move-along-nothing-to-see-here quality to their arguments that only reinforced my suspicion that maybe the Bible wasn't magic after all, and maybe, deep down, they knew it. Instead of bolstering my confidence in the Bible, its most strident defenders inadvertently weakened it. Then when a pastor friend asked me what personal sins might have triggered my questions-- "sexual immorality, perhaps?"-- I saw that my journey through these doubts would be a lonely one. [page xviii]
Damn that is so real. The "move-along-nothing-to-see-here," and the idea that people who question their church's teachings are motivated by a desire to have sinful sex (which makes me especially angry as an asexual). (See also: Evans's 2013 post, Is doubt an STD?)
I feel the exact same way. I know the bible so well- I've read the entire thing multiple times, in college I would have a "quiet time" every day where I read the bible and prayed, I started bible study groups, etc etc etc. But at some point, as I began to question a lot of evangelical teaching, it became so difficult for me to read the bible at all. These familiar stories that I knew so well, that had always comforted me- and suddenly I would try to read them and immediately have so many questions. There were so many things that seemed weird or wrong, that I had never seen before.
These were the stories we knew so well, we lived them, we memorized them. But we only saw one side of them. Children's bible story books and Sunday school classes are always about "here's the nice tidy moral lesson we are supposed to get out of this bible story. Ruth teaches us about loyalty. Joseph teaches us about forgiveness. Abraham teaches us about obedience. Daniel teaches us about standing up for what's right." And when you grow up and become an adult, it's still like that... Sermons about "this is what this bible passage means." That's how the bible is taught, in my experience. Here's the bible, here's what it means. If you have more questions, let's find you an apologetics book that answers them. And that's that.
There's something so amazing about hearing the stories discussed in a new way. It's like, all these bible verses I know so well, suddenly tilted at a slightly different angle, like wow, how did I not see that before?
Let me give an example- and this was back when I was evangelical, so it has nothing to do with challenging evangelicalism or the "inerrant" view of the bible. I sometimes went to the international student bible study back when I was in college- this was a college in the US, and I am American, but I went there because I was studying Chinese and wanted to meet Chinese people. One night, the group was reading a passage about how we are not citizens of this world, we are citizens of heaven. (Perhaps Philippians 3:20 or 1 Peter 2:11?) And the bible study leader was saying "we understand how this is, because we are living in this country but we are not citizens, and we miss our home countries." And I was just so amazed, because I had never thought of that- reading a verse about how we are not citizens, and connecting it to actual people who are not citizens of the country where they live, and how they understood that verse in a way that was different than I did, because of their experiences. (And now I live in China...)
So... the idea of seeing bible stories in a "new" way is something that evangelicals love, in my experience. But there are limits to it... Some of the interpretations of bible passages in this book would probably get a "wow that's cool!" reaction from evangelicals, and some are crossing a line into "false teaching" and saying the bible isn't inerrant (gasp!).
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Structure of the book
Here's how the book is organized: Each chapter is about a different type of bible stories- for example, origin stories, deliverance stories, war stories, etc (8 types in all). Each chapter has a fanfic (or poem or something along those lines) at the beginning.
For each of the different types of stories, Evans discusses it in a completely new light. Well, not actually "completely new", because Christians have been reading these stories for 2000 years (and Jewish people have been reading them even longer than that)- none of this is actually new. But I say "new" because I never heard anything like this when I was evangelical.
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Bible fanfic, and honoring the bible's victims
OKAY. YOU GUYS. I love bible fanfic SO MUCH. I am so ridiculously proud of the ones I have written. You have no idea. This is SO important to me.
And, let me just take a moment here and share MY FAVORITE bible fanfic: lament for the slave girl in pharaoh’s house (2018) by Micah J. Murray [content note: child death].
In the book "Inspired," my favorite bible fanfic is the one about Hagar. When I was growing up, I just viewed Hagar and Ishmael as Abraham's mistake- a symbol of Abraham's sin of not trusting God. But no, Hagar and Ishmael deserve better than that.
Background info, if you don't know the story [starting in Genesis 16]: God promised Abraham that he and his wife Sarah would have a son. But Abraham and Sarah were both very old and unable to have children. They were supposed to have faith in God's promise, but instead they decided that Abraham would impregnate Hagar, the slave. So Hagar had Abraham's baby, and the baby's name was Ishmael, and there was *drama* between Hagar and Sarah. Later, God did keep the promise, and Sarah had a baby named Isaac. Isaac was the child that came from having faith in God's promises, and Ishmael was the child that came from sinfully taking things into your own hands instead of trusting God. (Also, rape... but in church I never heard anyone say "Abraham raped Hagar" even though it's clearly true.) In Galatians 4 (in the New Testament, hundreds of years after Abraham), Paul makes this whole big analogy about how Hagar represents slavery and the law, and Sarah represents God's promise, and obviously we want to be Sarah's children rather than Hagar's.
So anyway, I always thought Hagar and Ishmael were the "bad guys" and Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac were the "good guys." In the simplest children's bibles, Hagar and Ishmael are not even mentioned- it's all about Isaac. Hagar and Ishmael are... kind of a "stain" on the story of Abraham the Good Godly Role Model.
(Also, I've heard that Muslims have a completely different take on Ishmael. It would be interesting to hear more about that.)
But, that's terrible, to treat Hagar that way. None of this was her fault. It was what Abraham did to her.
And actually, the writer of Genesis doesn't even treat Hagar so one-dimensionally. In Genesis 16, when Hagar, pregnant, runs away into the desert because Sarah is so cruel to her, an angel meets her. The angel gives her a promise- her son Ishmael will be "a wild donkey of a man" and she will have uncountable descendants. Hagar responds by saying "You are the God who sees me" and "I have now seen the One who sees me" which is significant because NOWHERE ELSE IN THE BIBLE does a person give a name to God. (Evans's fanfic is about this story.) And a similar thing happens in Genesis 21- drama between Hagar/Ishmael and Sarah/Isaac, Sarah drives them away, and again an angel meets Hagar and encourages her, and gives her a promise that Ishmael will become a great nation.
(Some of my posts related to Abraham and Hagar: Honest Lent: Abraham's Slaves and "Waiting On God" - But Like, Why Though?)
Yeah, I love bible fanfic, and actually, evangelicals love bible fanfic too. All the kids books about bible stories, all the Hollywood movies based on bible stories- they all add some embellishments. You pretty much have to add things, because the bible passages are short and just tell the basic story, without enough details to be a whole movie. Modern writers add their own ideas about what the characters were thinking or feeling, add characters who weren't mentioned in the bible at all, add extra scenes to make the story fit together better, etc.
Evangelicals love bible fanfic (though they don't call it "fanfic") but there's a limit to it. It has to be consistent with evangelical beliefs about what the bible means.
For example, I remember one fanfic I read in a Christian magazine for kids- it was from the perspective of the wife of one of the shepherds who had seen the angels in the sky when Jesus was born, and the whole fic was about how surprised she was that her husband and the other shepherds had left their sheep behind to go see baby Jesus. This "shepherd's wife" is a totally made-up character, not mentioned in the bible, and the idea that the shepherds left their sheep behind when they went to see baby Jesus is also not mentioned in the bible- but this fic made a big huge deal about how "they left the sheep" and how it was so hard for her to understand what was so important about baby Jesus, that would cause the shepherds to respond like that.
The point of the story was, Jesus is so amazing and important, that it is worth it to take shocking risks or make sacrifices in order to have a chance to experience him. So, from an evangelical perspective, that's a great message to send. (But, to be honest, there are probably some evangelicals who would quibble with it, for making up things that weren't mentioned in the bible. And yeah every time there's a movie based on the bible, you can find evangelicals arguing with each other about this or that thing in the movie that wasn't in the bible, and whether it means the entire movie is blasphemous.)
I also write my bible fanfics to make a point, but they're always points that challenge evangelical beliefs. For example, Noah's Evangelism was one giant metaphor about evangelical beliefs about hell. Strange Fire is about the bible story where God kills the priests Nadab and Abihu for their sin of ... something about burning incense wrong? idk? ... and my fic says the bible is wrong about that, and here's what really happened. Mary's Choice was a pro-choice metaphor (hopefully this was obvious) which grapples with the idea of making big choices that change the trajectory of your life, when you're too young and inexperienced to even know what you're getting into, and how that intersects with being called by God and choosing to take risks for God.
So, I mean, yeah, there's a whole range of bible fanfic, pushing different ideas. Thinking about Evans's fanfic about Hagar, my first instinct is that this would not be an evangelical-approved fanfic, because it invites the reader to empathize with Hagar, who is, you know, a "bad guy", a sin, a mistake in Abraham's life, that we just want to forget about.
The thing is, though... the bible does say that Hagar was a slave, and Sarah "gave" Hagar to Abraham. And that when Hagar was pregnant, Sarah was so cruel to her, that she ran away into the desert. The bible says these things. Hagar was a victim, and what Abraham and Sarah did was wrong. There's no way to read those verses and then argue with that. It's right there, chapter and verse.
Nobody's embellishing anything. Evans's fanfic is, quite simply, the thoughts and feelings that a pregnant woman would likely have in that situation. The reason it strikes me as not-church-approved is that it invites readers to consider how Hagar felt, to care about her, rather than viewing her as nothing more than a regrettable detour in the story of the birth of Isaac.
Fanfics that draw attention to the minor characters in the bible who are innocent victims who suffer because of what God does, or because of what the "bible heroes" like Abraham do... We need more fanfics like that.
Evans discusses the idea of honoring the bible's victims and, wow, this blew my mind, and I love it:
In one of the most moving spiritual exercises of my adult faith, an artist friend and I created a liturgy of lament honoring the victims of the texts of terror. On a chilly December evening, we sat around the coffee table in my living room and lit candles in memory of Hagar, Jephthah's daughter, the concubine from Judges 19, and Tamar, the daughter of King David who was raped by her half brother. [Note from Perfect Number: this list is 4 people total. In case the commas make it confusing.] We read their stories, along with poetry and reflections composed by modern-day women who have survived gender-based violence. My friend built a diorama out of a pinewood box that featured five faceless wooden figures, huddled together beneath a ring of barbed wire, their silhouettes reflected on the backboard by pages cut from a book. Across the top of the box were printed the words of Christ-- "As you have done unto the least of these, so you have done unto me." [p 75]
This is, wow, really powerful. To say, what happened to them was wrong, and they deserve to have someone care about that. Typically, all that Christians have to say about these stories is "these parts of the bible are descriptive, not prescriptive- it tells the truth about how sinful people were, and it does NOT mean we should act like that too." As if the only issue is the bible's position on whether or not it's okay to gang rape a woman and then cut her body into pieces (Judges 19, trigger warning, my god)- don't worry everyone, the bible is NOT saying that's okay! All right now move along nothing to see here.
To actually spend time caring about the victims of the bible... wow, that's something new and powerful.
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Job
There's a section in "Inspired" where Evans talks about the story of Job. If you don't know this story from the bible, here it is: Job was a righteous man. One day, Satan and God were discussing Job, and Satan said the only reason Job worships God is because God has blessed him with huge herds of livestock and lots of children, but if all this was taken away, Satan is sure Job would not worship God any more. God says, okay, sure, try it and see. So then a series of disasters causes Job to lose all his wealth, and all his children die. This happens in the first 2 chapters. The book of Job is 42 chapters long; the entire rest of the book is Job and his "friends" debating the question of why God allowed such terrible things to happen to Job. The "friends" say Job must have sinned, and these things happened as a punishment, but Job insists that's not true.
So... if this is a true story, then, well, God's behavior is horrifying. Letting all of Job's children die, just to win a bet with Satan? NOT COOL.
But Evans says the story of Job is in the bible to present a different perspective than other bible passages which say that living a righteous life leads to prosperity- mainly the book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs in the bible is about wisdom- basically a bunch of simple, common-sense principles to live by, to make good decisions and have a happy and successful life.
Job's friends are basically following the logic of Proverbs. Proverbs says that if you follow God's rules and make wise decisions, then you will have a good life. Job had all these bad things happen to him, therefore he must not have been following God's rules correctly. He must have sinned, and that's what caused these bad things to happen.
Please note that that's a terrible thing to say to someone who's grieving. Telling them that it's their fault. That's awful. But if you believe that the principles given in Proverbs are always true, then it follows logically.
That's why the bible includes the book of Job, to offer a different perspective than the one presented in Proverbs. The book of Job tells a story about a man who truly was innocent, and had the worst tragedies happen to him, for reasons that really had nothing to do with him, reasons that no human could have possibly figured out. This shows us that yes, in general you should live according to the wise advice in Proverbs, in general that leads to success, but not always. Sometimes innocent people suffer, that's a fact, and it doesn't do any good to question them about what they did wrong to "cause" it to happen.
Also: The story of Job didn't really happen. Perhaps some progressive Christians would phrase it as "The story of Job is not literally true" but I don't really see a difference between "not true" and "not literally true." (Maybe because I'm autistic.) It's not a true story. It didn't happen. It was written to engage with the question of why bad things happen to good people. To bear witness to the reality that sometimes bad things happen to you, and it's not your fault.
And those things are literally true. Yes, it is literally true that sometimes bad things happen to people, and it's not their fault, and we don't have answers about why God allowed it, and we just need to respond with compassion, rather than blaming them. That is literally true.
The story of Job is basically what you would get if a writer wanted to write a fictional story with the most extreme elements of "bad things happen to good people and we don't know why." Job is a righteous man, so righteous that he even makes extra sacrifices to God, just in case one of his children sinned. He is extremely rich. Then he loses everything- all of his wealth and all of his children. And the reason is that God and Satan happened to be arguing about the motivation for Job's obedience to God- it had nothing to do with any "sin", and none of Job's friends could have possibly guessed that that was the reason.
I'm imagining the ancient people who heard the story of Job... perhaps then they heard about someone in their community who suffered some terrible tragedy, and their first thought was to wonder what sin this person committed, to cause the tragedy- but then they remembered the story of Job, and how Job and his family suffered even though they were innocent.
Job wasn't a real person, but "bad things happen to good people" is real. It's fascinating to me that writing a fictional story about this real-life fact can make it feel more real.
And, if the story of Job isn't a true story, well, that's great news, because then we don't have to get stuck on the way it portrays God. God, in this story, is arrogant, heartless, allowing Satan to kill Job's children just to prove a point. But, since it isn't a true story, if someone is horrified by God's behavior in the story, we can just say "you're reading too much into it." You can just ignore that part, because it's not true, because the whole story is not true.
Interesting that the story teaches "God doesn't care if Satan kills your children" and also teaches "sometimes bad things happen to good people", and one is true while the other is "oh stop it, you're reading too much into it." (So... then the bible is not authoritative- it depends on its readers to have an understanding of which parts they are supposed to learn from and which parts they are supposed to ignore.)
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Pronouns
In this book, Evans does not use any pronouns for God. She just uses "God." You get sentences like, God did this because God wanted God's people to blah blah blah, a lot of "God" in the sentence instead of She/He/They/Whatever.
(I don't remember if the characters in her fanfics use pronouns for God. In my bible fanfics, my characters use he/him pronouns for God, because that fits with the way they would have viewed God, even though personally my God is a They/Them.)
I was glad to read a book that doesn't use he/him pronouns for God, because honestly it's a bit jarring to me when people refer to God as a "he." (Wow look how queer I am, I guess.)
At the same time, though, if you don't use any pronouns for God, well, your readers might not even notice. If your God is a he/him, and you read a section of Evans's book, which says "God did this and God did that, etc" with no pronouns, just a lot of "God", and after you read it, someone asks you if Evans referred to God as "he" in that section, what would you say? Maybe you would say yes, because when you read about God, you imagine it's a he/him God, and you didn't notice whether the text explicitly said that or not.
It's something that I think people won't notice unless they're specifically looking for it. Or, if there's a sentence like "God loves God's people" like very blatantly crying out for a pronoun because the density of "God" in the sentence is just over-the-top. Or if you have a sentence with the word "Godself" where a normal person would put himself/herself/themself. If you can avoid those specific issues, then you can write and write and write about God and most readers won't even notice that you never gave God a pronoun.
So, I gotta say I'm not really a big fan of not using any pronouns for God. It feels like not taking a stand. Yeah, it's better than using "he" pronouns, but ... If you have a reader whose God is a he/him, who has never even heard of the idea that God could be anything other than a he/him, and this reader reads your entire book and still has no awareness that God could be anything other than a he/him, well, I'm not impressed by that.
If you're going to not use pronouns for God, I would like to see some kind of explicit statement about "I don't use pronouns for God, because God is all genders. God is not more masculine than feminine." Yeah, I would be happy with that.
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Conclusion
For this blog post I just picked out a few interesting things about the book "Inspired," but there's so much more. I loved this book. Evans looks at so many different bible stories and puts a fascinating new spin on them- although, actually, there's nothing "new" about any of this, really, it's just that you could live your entire life in evangelical culture, read the bible every day, and never hear these interpretations.
It feels so incredible to me, reading these new takes on the bible stories that I know so well, that I've read so many times and memorized. To look at them from a different angle, and wow, it's like I knew all of this but I never put it together that way, and suddenly there it is.
(And that's why I write bible fanfic.)
The bible we see in "Inspired" is not an authority over us, telling us what the right answers are, and we must force ourselves to stay within those rigid interpretations. No, this bible is living and active. We are made in the image of God, and we create just as God creates. We take the bible stories and we use them to create meaning, informed by our own identities and our own experiences. Living with the story and in the story.
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Follow-up posts:
For Rizpah (or, a post about human sacrifice in the bible)
If God Metaphorically Made the World in 6 Days, What Does That Even Mean?
Related:
She was the first (Thank you, Rachel)
Not Sure I Want My Kid Reading the Bible
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