Why I Still Love the Bible
or
My Unusual Journey toward Progressivism
I’m attending Wild Goose Festival next week. Wild Goose Festival is “a transformational community grounded in faith-inspired social justice.” The organizers say about it:
We are rooted in progressive christianity. For us this means moving beyond belief to center ourselves in justice and compassion, to walk toward those in need and to solidarity with the marginalized and the oppressed, acknowledging our own privilege and actively working to use our power to alleviate suffering and achieve wholeness, and striving to create a world that works for all.
This description is where I’d like to say I am. I’m presenting an “experience” there in the Writing tent, where I will lead participants in writing their own psalms of lament. I’ve got a book about writing your own psalms, which my agent is seeking a publisher for. And all this is steeped in Scripture.
So how does something so steeped in Scripture fit with progressive Christianity?
I think of myself as an exvangelical – but I still love the Bible deeply. Are those things compatible? I want to describe how it happened.
In fact, I believe wholeheartedly that it’s because of my love for the Bible that I have left evangelicalism. They planted the seeds of their own destruction, so to speak.
Because yes, what got me started loving the Bible was from very performative evangelical Christianity – memorizing Scripture.
My Mom got the idea from Bill Gothard’s seminars. First, she encouraged us kids to memorize Scripture, then she started paying us. Then it got systematized to ten cents per verse if we recited an entire chapter word perfect. But the real money was made in reviewing. If we waited a month, we could recite a chapter we’d done before for five cents per verse. This was hard the second and third times, but after a bit, it turns out that repeated memorization makes it stick in your mind for good. There was a summer when I wanted to earn money for a trip, and I didn’t actually earn enough, but I made sixty dollars from memorizing. And the Bible got into my heart.
Memorizing the Bible made me love it. To this day, I spend ten minutes per day most days memorizing Scripture. I’ve memorized the entire New Testament, Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, and some other books. So I do feel like I know what the Bible says.
One of the first ways I remember that making me challenge what I was taught was from the story of the blind man in John 9. I think I was in eighth grade when I first memorized it. And even so young, I noticed that the Jewish leaders proved from Scripture – their interpretation of it, anyway – that Jesus was not from God. They said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.”
But the blind man answered that he didn’t know anything about that. “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know: I was blind, but now I see.”
And so I learned to always take it with a grain of salt what people said they could prove from Scripture.
The next thing I remember challenging was politics. I went to a couple of churches that passed out scorecards from “The Christian Coalition” or “Focus on the Family” that claimed to rate congresspeople on how “biblical” their votes were. But wait a minute! How can they say it’s “Biblical” to vote against gun control (for example)? Isn’t “Thou shalt not kill” in the Bible? When Focus on the Family rated congresspeople lower for supporting the Family and Medical Leave Act (I think they said it was bad for small businesses.), I couldn’t take the hypocrisy anymore. My first votes as an eighteen-year-old were for Republicans, following my family. But that didn’t last long, and calling things “biblical” or “Christian” that Christians and Bible scholars had plenty of reason to disagree about – that drove me in the other direction. The thing is: I knew the Bible. And I knew that using the Bible to support political positions depends strongly on how you interpret it. Which drove me harder to thinking for myself, studying the issues for myself, and searching the Scriptures for myself.
Later, in the 1990s, reading sermons of George MacDonald, a 19-Century Scottish preacher who clearly loved the Lord and knew the Scriptures, it dawned on me that he believed that God will save everyone, that hell is not forever, that God’s punishment is always restorative. I wondered how he could believe that when he knew the Scripture so well. So I read through the New Testament, asking if it could be interpreted that way. Remember, these are passages I had memorized and knew well. I was surprised to realize that they could be interpreted that God will save everyone. In fact, with many passages, it seemed like the plain interpretation. Romans 5 – “As in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be made alive.” Philippians 2 – “At the name of Jesus, every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” I looked up places where the word “All” appears and found many more verses supporting this view.
And there’s much more to say about that. I’ve got a whole page of reviews of books on Universalism that I found later. The reason I bring it up here is this is the first significant way my beliefs changed from what I was taught growing up. And I came to believe it from reading the Bible for myself, with guidance from George MacDonald.
I thought I could quietly believe that all will be saved and continue attending evangelical churches. I didn’t want people to worry about my salvation, so I didn’t talk about it much. But I had accepted Jesus in my heart, so I knew I was still saved even by their definition. When I moved to Virginia after my husband left me, I joined a church and for full disclosure told the pastor my beliefs but that I wouldn’t stir up conflict.
Well, that was only the beginning of my free thinking. It turned out, George MacDonald also thought differently about the atoning work of Christ. That the idea that Jesus has to save us from God is monstrous. I did more reading and began to agree with him, and then found myself picking at the sermons my pastor preached, finding things I didn’t agree with. It’s about God’s love, more than about our sin. God is not angry with us! We’re the ones who need to be reconciled to God, not the other way around.
Over the years, I began to have some gay friends and coworkers, so I began to wonder about the view I’d always been taught that this is wrong, which did make sense to me from my knowledge of Scripture. To give them credit, it was when my pastor did a series of sermons on political issues that my views began to change. I cringed when I heard about the series, but when it happened, they really did present both sides of the issues and made it clear that on all of them, Christians could disagree. One week, they talked about same-sex marriage (this was before it was legal). Even though the pastor clearly didn’t agree with it, he told the case that people make to say that same-sex relationships are not inherently sinful. That was enough for me! By then I knew enough gay people that I could no longer believe they’d chosen to be gay. And I also didn’t believe a loving God would create them that way and expect them to be celibate their whole lives. Further reading helped me better understand that this, too, is a matter of interpretation.
When Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, but I thought it through. Trust me, there is nothing in the Bible against transgender people. Yes, the Bible says God made us male and female, but isn’t that what transgender people are saying? And if physically intersex people exist, then isn’t it possible that gender in ones brain can also be different from the typical? But how can someone different from the person themselves possibly say that they know best what gender the person is?
And then my adult child came out as transgender. So it got very personal.
I was glad I’d already thought it through. If she says she is female, as far as I’m concerned, she is female.
But then my church built its own building – and decided to add a “Christian Living Statement” to its Constitution. Among other things, the “Christian Living Statement” says that LGBTQ people are sinning.
I tried to advocate against the change. I wrote a whole blog series, Transcending, about why I think churches should support transgender people. And notice that my reasons are steeped in Scripture. I can understand where they’re getting the case against gay marriage, but I do not agree there is any Scriptural basis for condemning transgender people.
But I felt like I was silenced. At the very least, my voice was minimized. The pastor did offer to let me meet with the elders, and that was when I realized that I was no longer comfortable with the church having a male-only elder board. (The church did not allow women to be pastors or elders.)
So that was when I switched to a United Methodist church. On my first day at the new church, I greeted the man who’d sat next to me. I said I’d left my former church because I have a transgender daughter, and he said, “I do, too!” Yes, I’d found the right place.
Not only does the new church have a choir – but it turns out their views on the atonement are much closer in alignment with mine. And I’m not considered a heretic for believing hell is not forever! It’s delightful to have stopped noticing things in every sermon that I disagree with.
So, yes, I still love Scripture. I’m very aware that you can interpret it different ways, but I like leaning toward the ways that emphasize God’s love.
And then, when the pandemic hit, I thought I’d use the time to write a book. It was coming off of my time on the Newbery committee, so I needed to work on something completely different from children’s books. So I wrote Praying with the Psalmists. Something that bothers me in evangelical teaching is when people act like you have to put on a happy face to come before God. From memorizing Psalms, I knew that’s simply not true. The goal of the book is to show you how to write your own psalms. And I tell my story as I go through the ten types of psalms, from Psalms of Trust that were helpful when my husband left me to Laments when I lost my job to Psalms of Thanksgiving when I survived a stroke.
It’s taken time since writing it to find a publisher. I now have an agent working on my behalf, so I’m hoping it will happen. But meanwhile, I started doing workshops taking people through the parts of a Lament to write their own laments. Next week at Wild Goose Festival!
I don’t think I’m the only one who loves the Psalms – and I hope that love will spread.