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| Artwork showing Joshua leading the Israelites to march around the walls of Jericho, blowing trumpets and carrying the ark of the covenant. Image source. |
I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles." The last chapter is called "What Does a Child Want? Reflections on Children's Bible Stories," by J. Cheryl Exum.
I want to talk about this quote from this chapter, page 337, because it's mind-blowing:
Retelling Bible stories for young readers is a real challenge, involving difficult decisions, especially where the god character is concerned (for a brief history of the character of god, see Bottigheimer 1996, 59-69). Problems can arise when authors identify the god of the Bible with their idea of a real god or with what they take to be their readers' assumptions about the relation of the biblical god to modern ideas about god-- or when they encourage or simply leave room for this identification. The problem is intensified when the Bible is implied or assumed to be his word (he is so well identified as male-- ask any child) or when it is presented as qualitatively different from other literature; for example, by referring to it as an "inspired" or "sacred text" or as "Scripture." Of course readers will have their own expectations about a god and the status of the Bible as well.
!!!!! "Problems can arise when authors identify the god of the Bible with their idea of a real god or with what they take to be their readers' assumptions about the relation of the biblical god to modern ideas about god" oh my goodness, this is such a good insight!
OF COURSE when I read the bible as a kid, I assumed that the God described therein is the God that really exists and that I believe in and worship. OF COURSE. If you're evangelical, it's impossible to imagine reading the bible in any other way. (And the things that Exum says in the paragraph I quoted there- evangelicals would strongly object to all of it, and I don't even know how to go about explaining it to an evangelical reader, because it is so opposite to how they view the bible.)
But seriously, look at some of the things that "God" is described as doing in the bible. God sends a flood to kill everyone on earth except Noah and his family. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son (fortunately at the last minute, God sends an angel to tell him not to). God commands Joshua to lead the Israelites in the conquest of Canaan, to kill every person living in that land, and take their land. And many many other violent things in the bible that God commands or approves of.
And if you believe in biblical inerrancy, you have to make yourself believe that all those things were good. That what God did was right. That the God you pray to is the same God who judged all the people in Noah's time as deserving of death, and killed them all in a flood- and God feels the same about you, really, but Jesus is holding him back from giving everyone the punishment they deserve.
Kinda ****ed-up, isn't it?
But what if we read these bible stories like they are stories, with a "god character" (as Exum says)? And we can judge the god in the story, and say what he did was wrong. And we can say we don't believe in that god- the god we believe in is different.
This is huge. This completely changes what it means to read the bible, and to tell bible stories to kids.
Yeah, when you believe the bible is true and inerrant, and everything that "God" did was right, it really interferes with your ability to faithfully relate the stories to children. Because... we recognize we can't just straight-up tell children that there was all this violence and it was a good thing- like, subconsciously, we know we can't just tell children the story directly from the bible and also tell them it is true and good... so we tell a cleaned-up version of the stories, which teach nice little moral lessons, and we aren't honest with ourselves about what we're doing.
Also, I realize at this point of "Text, Image, & Otherness," evangelical readers will feel that the book sort of tips its hand- saying that it's a problem when writers of children's bible stories view the God of the bible as the real God, and it's a problem when they view the bible as Scripture (them's fightin' words)- evangelical readers will think "oh, so these are godless secular academics who reject God's word because of their own sinful biases- we should ignore this entire book."
(This excerpt from "Text, Image, & Otherness" goes even farther than me, actually- I *do* view the bible as Scripture, as something different from other literature. But I want to read it the way we read other literature.)
I don't really know what to do about that. How to convince an evangelical audience that it *is* valid to talk about the bible in this way. But I guess the point is, it shows that when scholars talk about the bible in an academic context, it's in an entirely different universe than when Christians talk about it in church.
I love the bible, really I do- I hope that comes through in all these blog posts. And it's so freeing to be able to read it and not have to believe it's true. Then I can look at it for what it really is, rather than constantly subconsciously stop myself from noticing possible problems or mistakes or contradictions or bad behavior from "the god character."
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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":
"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is)
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith"
Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories
Children's Bibles and "presenting mass slaughter to children"
Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations"
Children's Bibles and the Victims of the Flood
The Problem of Equating the Bible's God with a Real God
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