Don't Read the Bible (in the Same Old Way)

Brian McLaren has tried to show us that it is hard if not impossible for us to remove the rose-colored glasses through which we view our world, and which make it hard for us to see the doom we are facing. We will need help. We will need help from people who have and do look at the world differently.

He chooses the Bible – the tribal wisdom of the Hebrew Bible - as a source of that help, that new view. But not the Bible as we have been reading it. “The Bible is the sacred text most often used today to buttress civilization’s dominating worldview.” (pgs 112-113)

“The conventional approach to the Bible generally interprets the Bible in service to our civilization’s power and profit. It does so by distracting us from the Bible’s indigenous roots and this-worldly message of embodied life on this side of death. Instead, it shifts our focus to a disembodied life after death. As a result, conventional Christianity has too often been little more than a pious religious bumper sticker or hood ornament on the gas guzzler of our unsustainable civilization. To the degree it continues in this role, providing moral cover (and even superiority) for a suicidal project, it has become one of Earth’s primary forces of doom.” (pg 124).

McLaren suggests that we need to read the Bible in an alternative way. “This alternative approach, rooted in indigenous values and narrated from the vantage point of those who have been oppressed and marginalized by extractive and exploitive civilizations*, could help create the conditions in which we might imagine a new arrangement, a post-colonial and ecological society, a new beloved community that learns what the old arrangement wouldn’t or couldn’t accept.” (pg 124)

In this chapter, McLaren provides a brief summary of the themes of the Bible read through this lens. He begins with the creation story of what he calls “Earth children”. These “icons of human dignity” are made from the earth on the same day all other living creatures of the earth are made. Together with all other animals they are given the breath of life. And yes, they are given dominion. “But why should we let the colonizers define that word in their own image, as if it means domination? Why assume that dominion in Genesis means a license to kill, exploit, torture or drive to extinction? Why not assume that dominion means ‘to exercise the same tender, loving responsible care the Creator has, as the Creator’s image bearers’?” (pg 113)

McLaren skims through the Bible, naming names and referring to stories, reading all from the perspective of the struggle between the “imperial love of power and the primal power of love”. “For Jesus, (to whom money is the ultimate danger) money is the currency of the Roman civilization that is oppressing the poor and vulnerable. Money is the empire’s symbolic language by which it shapes people to live by its unsustainable and unjust values. Money is the admission ticket. Money is the measure of value. Without money, to the empire, you are nothing. The civilization of God, according to Jesus, runs on a different currency altogether: love.” (pg 121)

This way of reading and understanding the Bible does not come easily. It requires work. It requires changing our way of thinking. It will not happen without (radical) effort. That’s why McLaren recommends that we stop reading the Bible for a bit – at least in the same old way. “Don’t read your Bible with your civilized, industrialized, supremacist assumptions unchallenged. Don’t read the Bible from the vantage point of the colonizers and oppressors. You’ll see only what an exploitive civilization in overshoot has trained you to see!” (pgs 124-125)

For the past five years or so I have decided to greatly reduce my reading of white male theologians and Bible commentators. I deliberately choose books on the Bible written by women, people of color, indigenous people. The change in approach to the Bible is not easy to measure. I cannot say “I read this writer and that changed everything.” But over the years I notice that my perspective is changing. I much more quickly listen for – and hear - the voice of the oppressed and marginalized. I see more often the impact that injustice has on communities and on the environment. I am slowly learning to take off my rose-colored glasses and view the Bible and our world from a more realistic perspective. I believe that when I do that I am beginning to actually take the Bible seriously for what it – and the God who inspired it - wants to tell me, not what I want to hear.

One final comment: you may be wondering if McLaren is too negative about western civilization. Is there nothing that western civilization and its values – even Christianity - have produced that has benefitted the world? That will be addressed in the next chapter.

*I will note that the Bible also tells stories of those - God's people - who have been exploiters and oppressors. That is what most of the judgment in the Bible is directed at.

For all posts in this series on Life After Doom, click here or on the Life After Doom box below)