So Safe It's Boring
My take on the modern church take on the Bible
“…Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” (Susan Pevensie)
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver….”Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you”
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Bible isn’t a safe book, but I fear our modern church missed the memo. Our cookie-cutter approach to exploring, teaching, to tackling difficulties (passages, provenance, interpretation), and our poor attempts to ‘wrestle with the text’ have encouraged a view of the Bible that’s So Safe It’s Boring.
In an interview with The Bible for Normal People podcast, Richard Rohr called the Bible “God’s invasion into human consciousness.” N.T. Wright wrote a book titled The Day the Revolution Began. These enviably worded descriptions are too seldom mimicked in our churches, neither in form nor in substance. What we are left with is a book that’s So Safe it isn’t worth reading.
I worry that since the book is on nightstands or bookshelves across America, the Bible is just another book we judge by how it makes us feel about ourselves. This makes it a safe book; so safe, in fact, we find ourselves bored with it. We’ve watered down its revolutionary undertones, failed to treat Jesus as the manifestation of the Holy invasion he claimed to be, we’re afraid to ask questions we’re not sure we already know the answers to, and we’ve missed how very dangerous this book actually is.
How dangerous of a book is it? Well, in the late 14th Century, John Wycliffe tried to translate the Latin version into English, and only his death of natural causes spared his life. His body was later dug up, his bones burned, and the ashes thrown into the river. It was so dangerous that William Tyndale, another translator, was first strangled to death and THEN burned at the stake in 1536 for another attempted translation. So dangerous that Xi Jinping’s modern China is working to “retranslate and annotate” it to ensure it fits with socialist thought and to ensure a “correct understanding” of its text. This is not a safe book.
And yet, I fear, we have lost the message of what a dangerous book we have on our hands.
My advice is to stop reading the Bible if you’re looking to prove:
God exists
Jesus saves
it’s 100% historically accurate
how to vote in the next election
insert your preferred issue here
Read it only if it MATTERS and it only matters if it’s, somehow, representative of God himself. This ancient book was written by a particular people group, over 1500 years of human history, who sincerely believed that they had been touched by the divine. Large sections of it were captured, often first in song and then later in written form, and copied by others convinced that they had a duty to represent that divine touch so others could know the divine themselves. Some of them were tortured because they were so convinced it needed to be read by you.
Read it because, if they were right, the divine wants to tell us something about Himself.
Stop pretending it’s safe; and in accepting it’s dangerous, start to ask questions. Questions like:
Where did these books come from? How (and who) decided which of these books merited the label “Holy”? Why were some books included and others not? Why do different faith traditions hold to different numbers of books?
What types of literature were used by the people who wrote the books and why? Do those types of literature mean something about how we are to read the text?
What did it mean in the context in which it was passed from one generation to the next, either in its oral form or written?
Stop pretending you know all the answers, and stop being afraid to ask questions you aren’t already confident you can answer. If it’s truly God talking to us, there will be no way to shut him up. Read and ask to see if you, like those ancient writers (and transcribers and translators), are convinced the divine has something to say. Not to ‘the world’, not to your neighbor, not to a political party or someone you disagree with. But to YOU. See if you find you are convinced of what I believe it’s trying to tell you: you (and I) are loved more than we could ever possibly hope to be loved. Today, right this moment, just as you read these words. Right now, with all the terrible (or good) stuff you’ve ever done bloodying your palms. Read it if you’re (fill in the blank with your pet issue or ‘sin’ or doubt or whatever here) ______________ and LISTEN to hear if you are convinced the divine has something to say to you.
