The Bible | Book Review | The Komorebi Effect

Prologue

The story

My first thought was that the Bible needs no introduction. But then, recalling recent conversations on the topic of scripture, it occurred to me that Biblical fluency may be worse now than it was even before literacy became widespread. There was a time when Christian virtues were embedded in the language and culture of Western society. That isn’t the case any longer. We have unprecedented access to books and information, yet those who eschew Christianity too often don’t even understand what it is they are rejecting.¹ The same is true for a lot Christians. Much like the way many of us approach marriage, we don’t really know what it is we are saying ‘yes’ to.

I used to see the Bible as a tool for coercion. I dismissed religion as a crutch for the weak-minded. So I put aside my childish fantasies of God. Later, I realized that the subversive message of Jesus is feared by despots around the world, even by those within the church, making this text an unlikely instrument for crowd control. I also realized that, far from being anti-intellectual, the scriptures are among the most critically examined texts of all time. These are not primitive writings. The Bible is ridiculously sophisticated. Not only that, but the scriptures contain countless objectively verifiable predictions about a distant future that ultimately came to fruition.² Might God really be calling His shots?
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Fulfillment of prophecy is one aspect that sets the Bible apart from other religious texts. The scriptures foretold historical events. I am not aware of other writings that reliably and repeatedly predict specific events.³ The Bible’s predictions are oddly specific. For example, we know the person of Jesus was crucified by Pontious Pilate, most likely around 33 A.D. Based on a prophecy in the the book of Daniel, Jews were anticipating their messiah at that very moment.⁴ They knew approximately when the Messiah would be born⁵ and that he would be born in Bethlehem.⁶ Daniel also spoke about the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple which is known to have occurred in 70 A.D. And yet the book of Daniel was written hundreds of years before Christ and was already recognized as canon in fist and second centuries B.C. This incredible prophetic streak continues with the regathering of Israel.⁷ This occurred in the 20th century. Any single prophecy can be explained away. But with hundreds of verifiable prophecies contained in the Bible, there is arguably a compelling weight of evidence.

Judeo-Christian and Muslim scriptures are unique in that they claim to speak for God. Eastern religions hold up sacred writings, but they generally submit these as speculations from wise sages. Authors of the Bible take the incredible and unnecessary risk of naming specific times and places. Most other religious texts avoid specific statements rooted in physical space and time that could be objectively verified. This doesn’t make the Bible true, but it puts it in it’s own unique category. David Bentley Hart rightly points out that the Bible is not a collection of “oracles and historical reports, each true in the same way as every other, each subject to only one level of interpretation, and all perfectly in agreement with one another.”⁸ Representing it as such, as some fundamentalists do, is disingenuous. The Bible deals with phenomenology, not natural science. In other words, it’s concerned with what matters, and not just matter. It’s largely instructive rather than descriptive. This is a notable distinction. Still, phenomenology is very much concerned with the pursuit of truth. And clearly there are historical kernels throughout that we can verify. There is textural evidence outside the Bible for king David.⁹ Solomon’s Gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer mentioned in the book of First Kings¹⁰ have been located. Archeology will never prove the Bible, but again these anchors in time and space set it apart from most other religious writings.

Upon further examination of scripture I found not proof, but plausibility. I wondered, “What if we are prefigured, known, and even loved by creator God?” This began to haunt me. Doubts remained, but I found myself revisiting scripture and seriously considering the claims of Christ. No book affected me as this one has. And no book has impacted the world more.

The Bible elicits strong reactions. It’s hard to remain indifferent toward it. To some it’s offensive, sexist, and bigoted; easily dismissed as backward superstition. Other’s remain convinced that it is God’s revelation, sweeter than honey and more precious than gold. It’s effect is like that of a knife edge, separating joint from marrow. No one rests comfortably on the edge of this sword. It soon divides us, exposing our thoughts and intentions.

The message

In a thoughtful well written story, the end can affect the beginning. We’ve all read a story that reveals something at the end that changes the way we view everything that previously transpired. All the pieces snap into place. We see the characters for who they truly are for the first time. This is possible because the author sees the complete story in their mind from beginning to end. Remarkably, the Bible manages to pull this off. The Redemption puts everything in perspective. It’s as if it were part of the story from the beginning. This is hard for any writer to pull off. It’s is all the more remarkable considering the many authors and editors making their individual contributions to the Bible over hundreds of years.
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Some point to this fact of the many authors and editors to insinuate that canon was established arbitrarily. It is true that the Bible is a collection of writings from many different authors over many years. It’s also not a secret. The word Bible comes from a Latin root biblia which is akin to a collection of books. The Bible is essentially the Christian library. Let’s be upfront, scripture is not as settled as some would have us believe. The Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Churches do not agree completely on canon. A lot of this is related to how individual books are divided and ordered, but there are admittedly some substantive differences. These differences, while not theologically insignificant, are generally not the source of most disagreement, however.¹¹ No one is hiding the fact that the Bible consists of various works written over many years by different people. I would argue that this fact only makes the internal consistency we find in the larger Story that much more remarkable.

Likewise, the process for determining New Testament canon was not as heavy-handed as some imply. It is worth mentioning that canon was more or less settled by 367 A.D., and was recognized at the Council of Rome in 382 A.D. The general standard they used was whether the authors of accepted writings actually interacted with Jesus, or in some cases with his close disciples. Their writing could not contradict what other apostles had written, and their manuscripts needed to be accepted by the entire church, from Jerusalem to Rome. Earlier letters and reports were generally considered more credible than later works. Notice, this is objectively verifiable criteria, not just some arbitrary whim. Yes, a group came together to decide, but they were not merely picking and choosing what they wanted to include. In fact, there are things in the Bible that are difficult. Things that make ardent believers cringe. It would have been easier if they had left out certain difficult passages. But they were looking at evidence to decide if the requisite criteria was met, not necessarily shaping God in their own image as some would have us believe.

The so-called Gnostic gospels popularized by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code did not meet any of these criteria. They generally appeared much later than the Bible and were not definitively attributable to Jesus’ apostles. Many Gnostic writings argued that Jesus did not appear in the flesh, as the Gnostics considered the flesh evil, in direct opposition to the writings of Paul and other New Testament authors.

Old Testament writings were already compiled by Jesus’ time. Jesus regularly referred to the Old Testament scriptures¹² Jesus himself acknowledged that the Old Testament was divinely inspired¹³ and attributed God as the source of scripture.¹⁴ Christians often have a tendency to dwell on the New Testament writings and avoid some of the difficult material in the Old Testament. It is worth noting that the scriptures Jesus directly affirmed consisted strictly of what we know as the the Old Testament since obviously the New Testament was not yet written. Jesus affirms many specific accounts from the Old Testament directly, including the destruction of Sodom and the death of Lot’s wife¹⁵; the murder of Abel by his brother Cain¹⁶; the calling of Moses¹⁷; and the manna given in the wilderness.¹⁸ Just like the New Testament, the Torah, the Prophets, and the writings that make up the the Masoretic texts have long, well-established histories within the Jewish tradition. In other words, these did not come out of thin air. Contrast this with something like the Book of Morman and you can understand why many tend to be more skeptical of the later.

So what is the larger story of the Bible? Ultimately, it’s the story of God’s loving pursuit of rebels like me through Jesus. God creates the World, Satan takes over, God sends man to take it back, but man quickly falls into cahoots with the devil. So God himself goes in to win man back and completes His hostile takeover. In a nutshell, ‘God saves.’ It’s the name of Jesus. In this Story Jesus is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.¹⁹

The Story is full of rebellion and treachery. Thankfully, the Creator doesn’t treat the rebellion as something remote and unimportant. Instead He launches a “daring raid into the universe’s seat of evil.”²⁰ God enters into the struggling mess of humanity to set things right.²¹ He selects Abraham and sets him apart as the father, not so much the father of a race, but rather the father of a faith. C.S. Lewis describes the winnowing process:

One people picked out of the whole earth; that people purged and proved again and again. Some are lost in the desert before they reach Palestine; some stay in Babylon; some becoming indifferent. The whole thing narrows and narrows, until at last it comes down to a point, small as the point of a spear – a Jewish girl at her prayers.²²

Death comes into the world through a man. God overcomes it through another.²³ He takes Satan’s best shot, and turns everything around on it, wrestling the weapon of Death from Satan’s hand. Through Jesus, God goes straight for the jugular. This is the Story of the Bible.

Like any good story, there is a tension throughout. Even up through today there is a tension between God’s promises and our current circumstances. There are dramatic reversals and cunning surprises. Taste and see how God comes through.

Creator

If we concede that the Bible is more than a collection of individual works, that it presents an overarching internally consistent Story; then we have to presume there is a Story-Teller. For the longest time I boxed God into familiar categories of existence. I conceptualized God as somewhat of a craftsman fashioning the world together, a heavenly being coming somewhere after the law of gravity but before the present universe. He was some grand carpenter nailing together the cosmic edifice. God was the first agent in temporal history. Contrary to virtually all the great religious traditions, my conception of God reduced Him to the initial secondary cause within the universe rather than the prime cause which He rightly must be, and that the Bible claims He is. I know enough now to say that my version was a false god. And this false god is who fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists typically argue over.

Trinity

Like the story-teller, God transcends the Story. The Christian tradition holds this really odd concept of God as a Trinity. There is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one. We find a similar unity in any creative endeavor. There is idea, activity, and the subsequent effect that results from a work of art. The timeless Creative Idea conceives of the whole work at once from beginning to end. This is the Father. Then there is the Creative Activity, or the Son, begotten of the Idea, working in time with sweat and passion. The Activity of writing a book occurs in space and time, yet the writer knows it as a complete and timeless whole. Finally, we have the Creative Power which proceeds from the Idea and the Activity, representing the indwelling Spirit, which provides meaning to the created work flowing back to the writer from his own activity, making him the reader of his own book. This is “the means by which the Activity is communicated to other readers and which produces a corresponding response in them… from the reader’s point of view, it is the book.”²⁴ So which is the real book from the author’s perspective; the book as Thought, the book as Written, or the book as Read? The three are inseparably one. None exists without the others. So it is with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.²⁵

Light

Unlike created things, God depends on nothing and isn’t subject to change or dissolution. We need not even think of God as having plural attributes. When we use words like ‘goodness’ and ‘wisdom,’ to describe God these are merely ways of naming the single undifferentiated divine reality upon which goodness and wisdom in us depend. David Bentley Hart invokes the light metaphor used by God Himself:

If one wanted a metaphor for this ontology, one might imagine God’s infinite actuality as a pure white light, which contains the full visible spectrum in its simple unity, and then imagine the finite essences of creatures as prisms, which can capture that light only by way of their ‘faceted’ finitude, thus diminishing it and refracting it into multiplicity. It is a deficient metaphor, of course, especially inasmuch as prisms exist apart from light, whereas finite essences are always dependent on the being they receive and, so to speak, modulate.²⁶

The candle is another common metaphor that describes this sort of ontological dependency which all great religions tend to share. Our relation to God is similar to the relation of a candle’s flame to the light it casts into darkness. If the flame were extinguished everything would fall dark.

Creation

God speaks

Naturally, the Story has a beginning. According to Abrahamic tradition, God speaks the world into existence. And it was good. Here we find creative expression of a moral and intellectual strength that summons something out of nothing, and abundance out of whatever is available. Like any creative endeavor, the universe has real existence in the mind of the Creator apart from its translation into material form.²⁷ God is not some grand carpenter nailing together the cosmic edifice. He is the prime cause, standing over and above the created universe. He is the source from which being is derived. As David Bentley Hart says, God is…

a metaphysical force capable of generating the physical out of the intellectual… able to produce all the material properties of the cosmos, a realm of pure paradigms that is also a creative actuality, an eternal reality that is at once the rational structure of the universe and the power giving it existence… the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things… God, in short, is not a being but is at once ‘beyond being’ (in the sense that he transcends the totality of existing things) and also absolute ‘Being itself’ (in the sense that he is the source and ground of all things).²⁸

God speaks the universe into existence as the poet produces a sonnet.

Day of rest

And on the seventh day God rested. This is the basis for the Jewish Sabbath. And it points beyond itself toward a new Lord’s Day.²⁹ The Sabbath is nothing like “the modern version of ‘relaxation’ which is merely the absence of work, it is the active participation in the Sabbath delight, in sacredness and fullness of divine peace as the fruit of all work, as the crowning of time.”³⁰ Petty legalistic prescriptions and taboos eventually obscured the meaning of the Sabbath. Later, our Lord would have something to say about that.³¹

It is good

God surveys His creation and declares it good. There was evening and then morning, and each time it was good. This is echoed several times. God repeatedly creates order out of chaos and each time it is good. Good implies fit for a purpose. He created a universe with value embedded in each object. In other words, this was an intentional act.³² What makes an object good is its fulfillment of a purpose. A watch is good if it keeps time. That is its purpose after all. Likewise, creatures like us have a purpose bestowed on them by the Creator.

Created for what?

God places man into the walled garden. Here there is a balance between wild chaos and a walled refuge. The Garden of Eden is the optimal combination of nature and culture.³³ Man is charged with naming everything. To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it. It acknowledges the created thing’s position and function within the cosmos. When we give something a name it allows us to more easily contend with it. Things that are unnamed have a frightening aspect to them. It turns out man is relational just like the one who’s image he bears. He needs a companion, a complimentary helper. Woman is synthesized from man, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. He even names her, recognizing her unique purpose and value.

We are God’s image bearers. We were made to relate, to reflect, and to rule with God.³⁴ In a sense, we get to be participants in creation. We get to confront the potentiality of the world with truth and courage as God did. And the order we extract is good. We are capable of transcending the hell that we are also capable of producing. In other words, we have the ability to tilt things towards heaven or hell. And we have agency. We all have the choice whether to aim up or to aim down. And we make this choice with every action that we take.

God gives man the responsibilities of cultivation and creative expression. This includes working the land and populating the Earth. Responsibility is a gift. For we need meaning in life to sustain us through the catastrophe of life. Otherwise life is just meaningless suffering. And that inevitably results in degeneration. Meaning is to be found not in your impulsive pleasure or your rights or even in your freedom, but in your responsibility. We take responsibility for ourselves. We take care of ourselves and do not become a burden to others and that’s positive. And if you get reasonably good at taking care of yourself you might take responsibility for a family. And maybe you’re taking care of your family in a way that’s been a benefit to your community. We see this chaotic potential in front of us and we want to make things better and that’s the way we participate in creation and bare the image of God and that’s the meaning of life.³⁵

The Fall

Enter Satan, sower of deceit, who questions whether God has man’s best interest at heart. He directs their attention to the one thing not offered to man as a gift. “When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, knowing good and evil just like God.”³⁶ Eve took some fruit and ate it. It is fair to say that Eve was deceived. But in a sense something more sinister overcame Adam. There was a brief moment when Eve was fallen and Adam wasn’t. And in that moment man choose woman over God, choosing to eat of the fruit. And man keeps repeating this choice right up to the present day. Alexander Schmemann describes it this way:

Having tasted a good wine, man preferred and still prefers to return to plain water; having seen the true light, he has chosen the light of his own logic… The sin of all sins — the truly ‘original sin’ — is not a transgression of rules, but, first of all, the deviation of man’s love and his alienation from God. That man prefers something — the world , himself — to God, this is the only real sin, and in it all sins become natural, inevitable. This sin destroys the true life of man. It deviates life’s course from its only meaning and direction.³⁷

Everything that exists is a gift from God, evidence of God to make Himself known to man and put man’s life into communion with Him. This meal is more than a bodily function. It’s a rite, the last natural sacrament of family and friendship. But we took that one thing “not offered as a gift to man, not given, not blessed by God. It was the one thing whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It’s an image… of life understood as an end itself.”³⁸

In God’s mercy, He does not allow man to live in this fallen state for eternity. He banishes man from the garden so he may not eat from the tree of Life. And in another act of mercy He covers their shameful nakedness.

Self-awareness

Both Adam and Eve were naked and they felt no shame.³⁹ Initially man and woman are not aware of their nakedness. In other words they have not yet discovered their own vulnerability. We see this type of innocence in small children. But eventually they discover their nakedness and they are cursed the rest of their lives trying to hide their most delicate parts, self-consciously covering themselves. We are alone in our shame, the only creature that wraps themselves in vestments, most precious species, unique throughout all of creation. Clothes are worn for “dignity or decency or decoration” even when they aren’t needed for warmth.⁴⁰ Something transpired making Adam and Eve ashamed of their nakedness.

Man disobeys God. In disobeying God, man becomes aware of his nakedness. He is self-aware. Part of becoming self-aware is realizing one’s limitations. He is vulnerable. Vulnerability is a precondition of our being.⁴¹ The price you pay for being is limitations; and the price you pay for limitations is suffering. In being vulnerable we are subject to tragedy.

Knowledge of one’s vulnerability and impeding demise makes man conscious of his need for work in order to get ahead, to stockpile resources as insurance against calamity.⁴² Man now understands he is going to die someday. He discovers the future. He discovers time and causality. The idea of sacrifice follows. Something better might be obtained by giving up something presently valued. This leads to the uniquely human notion of work. We set aside food for someone who isn’t present; we stockpile things for the future; we keep records; we institute currencies and create banking institutions to save money. Society is organized around work and the the social contract. It all depends on trust, i.e. promises to others. But this self-knowledge comes at a cost. Childbirth is traumatic for women due to the size of the human head.⁴³^,⁴⁴

Knowledge of good and evil

In discovering his limitations, he also gains knowledge of good and evil. When one understands his own limitations, he recognizes limitations in others. Awareness of his own motives allows him to anticipate the motives of others. He may lie to manipulate. Only now is he in a position to exploit the vulnerabilities of others. He knows how to hurt someone. He is capable of evil.

The reality of evil is contingent on good. Just as darkness did not exist prior to light, neither could evil precede good. Evil only exists in the context of good. The good, by merely occurring, inevitably creates its corresponding evil. It is in this sense that God creates evil in addition to good because the creation of a category of good necessarily creates a category of ‘not-good’. “We must not, that is, try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a Good Thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act. That, according to Christian doctrine, is the way that God behaved, and the only way in which we can behave if we want to be ‘as gods.’ The Fall had taken place and Evil had been called into active existence; the only way to transmute Evil into Good was to redeem it by creation. But, the Evil having been experienced, it could be redeemed only within the medium of experience — that is, by an incarnation in which experience was fully and freely in accordance with the Idea.”⁴⁵

Evil is never good, but it is good that evil is (e.g. Good Friday, Joseph’s sale into slavery). It turns out that vulnerability is not weakness. The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.”⁴⁶ Vulnerability is what makes courage a possibility.⁴⁷

Redemption

Incarnation

The fall was a precondition for the greatest event in human history. This is the context in which God, the author of life, writes Himself into the Story. Jesus came in the form of a babe, in all its vulnerability, subjected to disease, neglect, and abuse. Who “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!⁴⁸ He put on the fragile suit of mankind as the epitome love, courage, and sacrifice. There is something truly and incredibly beautiful in pouring oneself out in this way. “God chose what is foolish according the world in order to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”⁴⁹ Father Schmemann explains this wasn’t so much God fixing what went wrong as it was completing what he started.

God acted decisively: into the darkness where man was groping toward Paradise, He sent light. He did so not as a rescue operation, to recover lost man: it was rather for the completing of what He had undertaken from the beginning. God acted so that man might understand who He really was and where his hunger had been driving him.⁵⁰

Like any good story, there is tension throughout. In a truly great story there are twists and turns. The ending reveals something that radically alters our understanding of the beginning. In this case, most unexpectedly, the sovereign stoops to save. Instead of treating man’s rebellion as something remote and unimportant, the author of life puts on humanity. And instead of playing the part of the king, he takes on the role of the suffering servant. His jealousy reveals a boundless mercy. His way is uncompromisingly narrow and exclusive⁵¹ and yet it is unfathomably broad and inclusive.⁵² The God who fiendishly allows suffering and death suffered to put an end to suffering and died to destroy death.

Gift Giver

Salvation is a gift. God gifted the universe and all that is in it to us. Man is God’s crowning achievement, there to unwrap God’s gift of the world. Light and darkness, the Earth and the heavens are all gifts. And in His image we were made to be gift givers ourselves. That was, as still is, our purpose on this earth. But instead we took what he didn’t offer us. As a result, we became exiles. He responds with yet another gift, salvation. So what is our salvation for? Many Christians tend to emphasize personal atonement. That is one aspect of it. Yes, God has a plan for you. But it isn’t about you. Salvation is for the life of the world.

Salvation has a purpose. “We were created to make something of the world, ruling God’s place for His glory (creation); that we have rebelled, that human sin brought death into the world (fall); that Christ imaged God as Adam failed to do, obeying and exchanging His righteousness for our unrighteousness and accomplishing salvation on our behalf (redemption); that redeemed image bearers are called back to their full humanity as both messengers and agents of the risen Christ who is ‘making all things new'”⁵³ Contrast this salvation with the new cosmology‘s version of “personal salvation via consumption and self-construction, romantic nationalism, and brutal global corporate survivalism.”⁵⁴

Faith is not once and done. “In Christ sins are forgiven once and for all, for he is himself the forgiveness of sins, and there is no need for any “new” absolution. But there is indeed the need for us who constantly leave Christ and excommunicate ourselves from his life, to return to him, to receive again and again the gift which in him has been given once and for all.”⁵⁵ A.W. Tozer takes exception with the ‘mechanical’ and ‘spiritless’ formulaic approach to salvation:

Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God… Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God… Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all… Now, if faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us…

The doctrine of justification by faith — a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from the sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort — has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be “received” without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is “saved,” but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.⁵⁶

It is God who sets things right. We merely receive this gift much the same way we received the gift of life. All that is left for us is to cultivate and prepare the soil. We have the privileged of being His stewards, His house managers, and His priesthood. His mission becomes our mission. Following the example of Christ the proper response to these gifts is to give ourselves up for others;⁵⁷ “to testify to the truth”;⁵⁸ to “seek and save the lost”;⁵⁹ “to glorify the Father”;⁶⁰ and “to preach that the kingdom of God is near”⁶¹ so that others might have life “abundantly”⁶² and “eternally.”⁶³ The Westminster Catechism sums it up pretty well, “The chief aim of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”⁶⁴ The world caters to selves. The church is to form souls. We might as well disavow the notion that suffering must be eliminated at all cost. If suffering is a necessary precondition for any limited being, then we must learn to exist in a manner that justifies the suffering.

Restoration

Now but not yet

The Bible tells us we are living in between two worlds. God’s kingdom is upon us now, but it has not yet fully arrived. Father Schmemann described this ongoing tension between the sinful and redeemed states of man. Christ died once and for all…

And yet sin is still in us and we constantly fall away from the new life we have received. The fight of the new Adam against the old Adam is a long and painful one, and what a naive over-simplification it is to think, as some do, that the ‘salvation’ they experience in revivals and ‘decisions for Christ,’ and which result in moral righteousness, soberness and warm philanthropy, is the whole salvation – is what God meant when he gave his son for the life of the world. The one true sadness is ‘that of not being a saint’ and how often the ‘moral’ Christians are precisely those who never feel, never experienced this sadness, because their own ‘experience of salvation,’ that feeling of ‘being saved’ fills them with self-satisfaction; and whoever has been ‘satisfied’ has received already his reward and cannot thirst and hunger for that total transformation and transfiguration of life which alone makes ‘saints.’⁶⁵

Only after we die and go to heaven can we become saints. For now, that hunger must remain unfulfilled. The Bible talks of a day when there will be no more tears, no more sorrow, and no more death.⁶⁶ Obviously that day is not yet here. And no one knows when it will be.⁶⁷ The Author promised an encore.⁶⁸ But the next time he comes will be very different. He will come like lightning.⁶⁹ And instead of a babe we may expect Him to more closely resemble a tatted up warrior prince.⁷⁰ For now, we wait; not as idlers but as stewards tending His garden.

Epilogue

We often fail to appreciate just how radically Christianity turned the world upside down. Here we have a deity born as an outcast. This changes our conception of duties to the poor and the downtrodden. In one sense, there could no longer be slaves. Of course, people still bore the title. But individuals became far too important. Man could no longer be a means to an end, at least not another man’s end. For all the rationality of the ancient Greeks, theirs remained a world that could not imagine a world without slavery. Christ also lived in a world that took slavery for granted. He didn’t specifically denounce slavery. But as Chesterton put it, “He started a movement that could exist in a world without slavery.”⁷¹ People today have a hard time imagining the world before Christianity. It was a world not only with slaves, but a world as Tom Holland describes in which deformed infants were ruthlessly discarded and “sex was nothing if not an exercise in power.”⁷² Holland explains that, “proclaiming the body ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’⁷³ was not merely casting as sacrilege attitudes towards sex that most men in Corinth or Rome took for granted. He was also giving to those who serviced them, the bar girls and the painted boys in brothels, the slaves used without compunction by their masters, a glimpse of salvation.”⁷⁴ Christian society recognized what seems obvious to us today, “that feeding slaves to ravenous lions for the entertainment of the populace was wrong, even if many barbaric practices still existed. It objected to infanticide, to prostitution, and to the principle that might means right. It insisted that women were as valuable as men.”⁷⁵

It’s an unfortunate fact that people use scripture not a s a scalpel, but as a weapon. They use the Bible, of all things, to justify the ill-treatment or subjugation of others.⁷⁶ You’ll find a common thread among those who employ the Bible this way. They all treat the Bible as if it were a collection of thousands of self-contained phrases that can be picked out and combined arbitrarily.⁷⁷ This fragmented approach to scripture makes it fairly easy to argue that God’s word says whatever they want it to say. They twist it to fit a particular narrative. It is easy to read scripture selectively and to ignore, downplay, or rationalize the parts we find unpleasant. People have been doing that for thousands of years. They set out looking for affirmation, ignoring passages and the entire elements that contradict their predefined ideas. This is not unique to the Bible though. Deconstructing texts is quite popular these days. This is the modus operandi of critical theorists for all texts outside their own genre.

But a collection of individual passages is precisely what the Bible is not. Chapters and verses are a modern invention added 1,500 years after the Bible was written to make it easier to navigate. These markings were never meant to break the Bible into pieces, treating scripture like tracts from a fortune cookie. Context matters. Each chapter and verse should be interpreted within the context of each book, and within the overarching Story.

It isn’t just those with an agenda, or an ax to grind, who fall into this trap. It’s embedded in how we introduce our children to the Bible. We teach them bible stories, but somehow overlook The Bible Story. Children grow up to view the Bible as a collection mildly interesting stories with moral lessons that we can apply to our lives — in other words fables or worse, fairy tales. The story of Redemption is not like a fairy tale, but all great fairy tales are like this story in some way.⁷⁸ Virtually all fairy tales, or at least the one’s worth reading, mimic this one great and true tale of Redemption.

Is it true?

Is it a true story? That’s the real question. It’s entirely reasonable to have an aversion to God in response to the tragedy and violence that permeates our world. We might condemn God on grounds that evil permeates His creation. But we need not like the Story to concede that there is an Author behind the Story. If there were no Story, there would be no Author to condemn. David Bentley Hart expounds:

As an emotional commitment or a moral passion — a rejection of barren or odious dogmatisms, an inability to believe in a good or provident power behind a world in which there is so much suffering, defiance of ‘Whatever brute and blackguard made the world,’ and so forth — atheism seems to me an entirely plausible attitude toward the predicaments of finite existence; but, as a metaphysical picture of reality, it strikes me as a rank superstition.⁷⁹

As Dorothy Sayers says, “The proper question to be asked about any creed is not, ‘Is it pleasant?’ but, ‘Is it true?’”⁸⁰ We have to decide whether or not the Bible is pure fiction. People come down on both sides of this argument, and of course agnostics answer the question of God with a resounding “Maybe.” But there are ways of knowing. And deciding not to decide is itself a decision.
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We gain knowledge through two forms of revelation. General revelation entails discovery. This involves natural means including observation of nature, philosophy and reasoning. First, there is the real existence of the phenomenal world which attests to God. Then we have the power of the human intellect to accurately reflect that reality and the perfect lawfulness of nature.⁸¹ The Bible itself supports general revelation.⁸² There is arguably enough right in front of our faces to establish belief in God without ever picking up a Bible. And history bears this out. Nearly all cultures have a concept of God. Atheism is a relatively modern development that can claim a consensus only if it ignores nearly everyone who came before the present. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it should give us pause.

We don’t have to rely solely on our own faculties to discover truth. We also benefit from direct revelation as another means of knowing. Instead of figuring everything out from our own direct observations, others can share their experiences. This is how we receive most of our collective scientific knowledge. We gain knowledge both by general revelation and from what others reveal to us. We figure some things out. Someone sees something we don’t and explains it to us. Their explanation fits our experience so we accept it. This furthers our understanding and allows us to figure out additional things and explain those findings to others. The Bible purports to be God’s direct revelation. If true, God is telling us how things are. But the Bible isn’t true simply because it claims to be. It does not speak for God simply by claiming as much. People unconvincingly employ that circular argument all the time. But, unlike a lot of documents, the Bible self-authenticates. We find objectively verifiable claims rooted in space and time and accurate foretelling of future events. We also find the texts themselves have a well established provenance. This sets the Bible apart from all other religious texts.

Jesus is ultimately the linchpin. Jesus lived but no one has been able to produce his body. Not only that, but Jewish scriptures foretold Jesus’ birth and death. Of course most Jewish people today do not accept this. That wasn’t always the case. The first people to get onboard as followers of Jesus were Jews. Shortly after Jesus’ death in Jerusalem, the epicenter for Jewish activity at the time, a rapidly growing movement of Jesus followers, most of whom were themselves Jews, sprung up. No serious scholar denies that Jesus existed. There are references to him in secular⁸³ and Jewish traditions.⁸⁴ These sources affirm that Jesus was killed for claiming to be God. We may call him a liar or a lunatic, but regardless we have to contend with his sensational claims and not simply consider him as just another notable moral teacher among many.

_{Photo Credit: “Open Bible with pen Antique Grayscale” by Ryk Neethling is licensed under CC BY 2.0}