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The Bible as Idol

Introduction

Not everyone has heard the buzzword “deconstruction,” but a great many people know the experience it describes. Many of us begin studying the Bible in a focused way because we are motivated by our faith. When that faith has told us that the Bible is inerrant and that it teaches certain things consistently, it will happen sooner or later that we discover the truth. The Bible is a human product. It is a diverse collection and does not include only one viewpoint. James McGrath’s recent book Beyond Deconstruction is about navigating that experience of discovery and coming out the other end with a faith and an appreciation for the Bible that is better informed, more robust, and more fulfilling.

Dr. James McGrath is an American scholar of religion. He is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University. He has a diploma in religious studies from the University of Cambridge, a BD from the University of London, and his PhD from Durham University. His interests include the New Testament, Early Christianity, John the Baptist, the Mandaeans, religion and science fiction, and religion and science. He is the author of many books and articles (as well as a few science fiction short stories) and the editor or co-editor of several volumes.

His newest book, Beyond Deconstruction: Building a More Expansive Faith, is the main topic of this Bible and Beyond Discussion.

You can visit his Amazon author page to learn more about his publications, and you can follow him on X, BlueSky, YouTube, and elsewhere.

Texts

Mark 10:1-12
Matthew 8:5-13
Genesis 1
John 1:1-18
James 1
Mark 5

 

Transcript

Shirley Paulson

We’re really happy to welcome you to the April 2026 Bible and Beyond Discussion. And we’re very happy to welcome back Dr. James McGrath. And for those of you who have been with us for a while, you know that James has been with us several times, and he always has something encouraging and thought-provoking to share with us. Our topic tonight is “The Bible as Idol.” And we’re basically talking about our relationship to the Bible and, in particular, what happens when our Bible studies show that things really aren’t the way we thought that they were. So I’m especially happy to have James come and talk to us because as far as I can tell, James is a scholar who is still a Christian. And despite his scholarly research, he still has faith. So let me tell you just a little bit more about him.

Dr. McGrath is a professor of religion at Butler University in Indianapolis and was appointed Clarence L. Goodwin Chair of New Testament Language and Literature in 2010. He’s the author of numerous books and articles, both public-facing and scholarly. And he’s been with our Bible and Beyond Discussions several times talking about John the Baptizer, the Mandaeans who followed John, how Jesus learned from women, what 1 Timothy says about women, questioning our assumptions about the Bible, reading outside the Bible, and now what do you do when reading the Bible shakes your faith? So we’re really glad to have you back, James. Thanks so much.

James McGrath

Oh, thank you. This is such a wonderful group. I always enjoy the time that I spend with you. I always enjoy the questions that you come up with.

Shirley

Great. This is a great conversation with you. So no matter what denomination we may be affiliated with, there’s always some new scholarly discovery that doesn’t quite square with everything we’ve been taught growing up in our various Christian communities. Some people just give up and say, “Well, that’s proof it’s not for me!” But somehow you keep searching. So you’ve written, now, another new book, and this one is called Beyond Deconstruction: Building a More Expansive Faith. And it is chock full of ideas on how to read the Bible with an open mind to what it must be saying in antiquity and what that could mean for us today. So I think it would help if you would start us off with what you think is the value of critical studies of the Bible or even any other sacred text. Let’s start there.

James

Great. Thank you, Shirley. And I should probably say now, upfront, that if you watched the news and saw the weather, I am in a region where there’s a line of severe thunderstorms coming through. So I should preface everything by saying there is a slim but non-zero chance that I’ll be struck by lightning at some point while I’m speaking. And as somebody who embraces modern science and meteorology, I don’t think it will be because of anything that I say, but it seems that’s worth mentioning. As somebody who did have a tree fall on his car in the church parking lot while he was running a meeting, and that was not that long ago. So was that a warning about me, or was that God blessing me with a new car? And so through the insurance payments, but I’m somebody who’s wrestled with these things.

And I think the value of critical study of the Bible—I mean, obviously if you just find these texts interesting, then trying to understand them, finding out about their background, and all that can seem inherently interesting.

If you’re somebody who likes puzzles, including historical puzzles and seeking the truth, can we figure out what happened because there’s so much here that’s mysterious, things that are uncertain? Can we answer any of these questions? But I’m persuaded that it’s that critical study of the Bible, not just biblical study of the sort of devotional sort that oftentimes people in faith communities are more familiar with, but critical, rigorous academic study of the Bible with all of that detail can be and should be but at least has the potential to be beneficial to faith and to spirituality.

Shirley, in her introduction, said, as I’m sure at least some of you are thinking, “He’s a Christian despite being a scholar.” And often it feels that way, particularly if you’ve come through a particular type of faith that sets you up with misleading assumptions about the Bible. And that really was my journey. I got into the academic study of the Bible, motivated by a personal faith that had misled me about what the Bible was and what to expect from it. And there’s nothing like engaging in academic study of the Bible to shatter that, to challenge it. And when your faith is in the Bible, then that whole thing can come collapsing down, and it leads to a loss of faith.

And that only happens, I think, if we’ve been misled in our assumptions to begin with. And if our faith is in the Bible, then if we’ve made the Bible an idol, and that’s what gave us the title this evening, then of course, when that idol is revealed to have feet of clay, as it were, to be something less perfect than we thought it was and less definitive, less absolute than we thought it was, then it’s not just that we have to rethink the Bible, but our whole structure for making meaning can fall apart.

And so my answer to the initial question—”What’s the value of critical study of the Bible?”—is that if we can let go of the Bible’s idol and seek after God with all the uncertainty that comes with that, with our whole heart, discovering the Bible as this human product by other people who were seeking after God and who had profound religious experiences and so on and so forth makes these texts come alive in ways that fundamentalism will rob you of. Constantly treating these texts as a puzzle and what you’re supposed to do with them is figure out how to harmonize them all into a systematic theology. Actually, it flattens them, it silences some of the voices, and it robs them of their richness. And so if we can discover a faith that gets away from treating the Bible as an idol, the Bible doesn’t become something less interesting. It becomes something that actually starts to make sense as we stop trying to force it into the predetermined mold that we were handed.

Shirley

Wow, that is quite a lot to think about—and encouraging to hear from you. I have to say, I don’t know how many people have had this happen to them, but when you go to seminary, a lot of your fellow seminarians say, “I can’t go to church anymore, so it’s over for me.” And so I really appreciate your saying, “Well, probably dig deeper rather than less,” which is what I did too. But I want to ask also, why do you think these studies so often challenge what we thought the Bible was in the first place? In other words, why do you think we didn’t learn it right from the beginning?

James

Yeah, and that’s the key question, isn’t it?

It’s what I’ve given a lot of thought to. So I’m actively involved in a church. If any of you are in the Indianapolis area, you’re welcome to join us. I teach Adult Sunday School at Crooked Creek Baptist Church here in Indianapolis. And unless you’ve had a rather unusual experience of church life, it’s probably not like your typical adult Sunday school class. We are constantly chasing side topics and pondering questions and wrestling with things and doing it in a much more exploratory discussion format.

But I know that we’ve had people who are members in the church who’ve come along to the Sunday School, maybe even come a few times, and then stopped coming because it wasn’t what they were looking for. They were looking for answers, and we were exploring questions and figuring out how to start people off.

I also have pondered this as a parent to a child. You start off just telling the stories. And it’s not a given, I think, that just because you start off telling the stories, they will then struggle with the fact that these stories sometimes are symbolic and they have these facets to them and there are questions about their deeper meaning and their interpretation. And some of them are ones we may have assumed were historical when we started out because we assumed everything was just a true story. But for the most part, most of our stories are oversimplified explanations of what an atom is like or something like that. When we find out more, we don’t usually say, “I can’t believe I was lied to. I’ve lost all my faith in education.” We say, “Okay, I’m learning more, and I’m getting a more accurate picture and going beyond it. I understand that I was given something simple to begin with, but now that I’m older, ‘When I was a child, I saw as a child.’”

Paul talks about maturing. It’s there in the Bible. And so I think the reason why oftentimes we’re set up to have a crisis of faith when we discover what the Bible actually is and what’s in it is because we’ve been told to cling to that initial, not just simple but simplistic, understanding and to not depart from it. And we’re often told that learning, that growing, that maturing is backsliding, that it’s falling away rather than making progress.

And the ‘why’ question, I think, digs deeper. And often when I talk about childlike faith, I often point this out. Anyone who thinks that childlike faith is accepting whatever you’re told without question has never had children. No way. It’s like, “But why? But why? But why?” That’s childlike faith, one that dares to ask questions that are like, “But the emperor doesn’t have any clothes on, but why?” So it’s this desire for certainty. And it’s something that I think as children, we don’t wrestle with, at least if one has very, very young children. But as we become mature, one of the challenges that we face is that the world seems far less certain than we initially assumed. It’s much more complex. It’s difficult.

And our desire for certainty drives us towards idolatry. We look for something that will provide certainty, and we don’t actually achieve certainty, but if we come up with an idol that appears stable, we can give ourselves the illusion of certainty, and we find that comforting. And so having the idol collapse, it can lead to a loss of faith, but it can also lead to realizing that the Bible actually says we shouldn’t cling to idols. Trust in God, who is liable to surprise us and transcend our understanding. And so wow, maybe it meant it when it said, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,” rather than “Lean not on your understanding, but trust in the Bible with all your heart, and then you don’t need to because it’ll tell you everything.” That’s not what it says. But so often we don’t even realize the meaning of these things because they’re quoted as these verses in a context, in a framework that directs us to have a particular type of belief.

Shirley

That’s so interesting about the context that directs us to a certain belief. That leads me to think also about the people who wrote the Bible and other texts that we’ve come to appreciate. So it feels like the Bible came into being because God spoke to various people like scribes to record what God wants us to know. What would you say is the role of the people in transmitting these important words?

James

Yeah, so the people are central. Paul put his name on things. He didn’t say, “Paul, on behalf of God.” The times when he actually tells the congregation, he’s like, “I, too, believe I have the spirit of God, so take what I say seriously.” He often tells them to judge for themselves. If you understand yourself to be writing inerrant scripture, maybe you would put it in there and say, “Judge for yourself.” But if so, then it’s an errant scripture that’s directing people to do something that most people who claim it’s an errant scripture don’t say. But we hear the human voices, sometimes more so than others. In a letter, you get it. In erotic poetry, you get it.

I think the place where we can most directly wrestle with the question of inspiration and the character of these texts as potentially inspired and what that might mean is in texts like those of the prophets, where you get the “Thus says the Lord,” and you get these people who have apparently had interesting experiences.

And on the one hand, I regularly direct students to look at them. Sometimes I’ll even hold up a Bible and show them, “Look at all this Ezekiel where it looks like prose; look at all this Jeremiah where it looks like poetry.” You can tell just by the formatting. We take a look at the early part of the book of Micah, and if you look at the footnotes, he’s just making a series of puns. And as somebody who likes puns, I’m like, I like this Micah guy. He’s doing this thing that I appreciate. Why does Micah make a whole bunch of puns to an extent that nobody else does? Because Micah was a person who liked puns.

We get these different personalities. Their vocabulary is different. The way they speak is different. And Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, a famous rabbi but also a scholar, wrote two volumes on the prophets that really helped me see them in a new light, which I highly recommend. It’s an older work of scholarship, but I think it is still valuable and worth revisiting. It talks about prophetic inspiration in terms of either sympathy or empathy with God.

And if you want to think about that, it’s that feeling that what’s going on in the world fills you with such a sense of righteous indignation and that this cannot stand, and disaster has to come upon this people for what they’re doing. Apologies if there’s anyone who can’t relate to that in our own current context, but you feel this sense of “this cannot stand. Something has to happen to hold people accountable.”And they were persuaded that this was not just something coming from within themselves. It seemed to so grip them beyond anything and seemed to compel them to speak out in a way that they really didn’t want to, because it cost them in terms of their societal relationships and in terms of how people viewed them. But they felt like they were gripped by something outside themselves. And so they were convinced that what they were feeling, God was feeling.

So more than it being a case of, “Oh, I heard a voice and I repeated it.” You read through the book of Jeremiah, and he does not sound like somebody who has heard something and is repeating it. It’s full of this pathos. It’s like, “When I say I will not speak anymore to the Lord’s name, it’s like a fire shut up in my bones”—that famous expression. There’s so much passion and pathos there. And so I think it’s not a coincidence that so much of the poetic material in the Bible is in the prophets.

It’s people who’ve written poetry and people who’ve written music; the creatives are those who give us a vision of what a future might be like, are able to imagine, and are able to see the present in a different way. And often they speak about inspiration as feeling like there’s this thing that’s just coming through them because it’s not something that’s coming out of their conscious mind. Ultimately, those of us who were, like myself, who went into academic study of the Bible, hoping we’d get certain answers, sooner or later realize that whether it’s your own religious experience, or you’re thinking about the prophets of ancient Israel, any encounter with God, or any divine revelation, it’s going to come through our human persona and psyche and things like that. And so the element of human subjectivity is never taken out of the picture, whether we’re talking about the Bible or our own lives, and I think we have to accept that.

And once we do, we can, on the one hand, be open to these ancient people being people more like us. But also, the thing that can be encouraging to the faith, I think, is that we can also see ourselves as more like them. And maybe we can play a similar role to what they did. It’s not that they walked and talked with God in this very literalistic fashion and said, “I’ve never experienced that thing,” so then I just have to rely on their experience and get it second or thirdhand.

I think when we discover their humanity and their experience, it invites us to seek that and to live that for ourselves in our own time.

Shirley

It’s so helpful to think about people that way. And that leads me to the question about our teachers, the people who’ve shaped us along the way. Religion is a funny thing. I think the way teachers shape our worldviews is how we understand the way the whole universe works. And sometimes we’ve run across other interpretations or facts and new scholarship that undermine these basic beliefs. Do you recommend we just change our minds and abandon these beliefs, or how do you recommend we deal with these things that are so big in our lives?

James

Yeah. So in the book Beyond Deconstruction, I share a thought experiment, or at least I think I do. And I know I mentioned it also in an earlier book, Theology and Science Fiction, but I remember having a conversation. I’ve been blogging for a very long time and having a conversation with somebody who’s reading my blog who was an atheist and who was pretty sure that if he gave me this thought experiment, it would force me to realize that my beliefs were unfalsifiable. They basically had no substance to them, and I would lose them. And so he said, “You can have a time and space machine”—and if you know my love of sci-fi, you’ll know I was like, “Oh yes, great. I’ve got a TARDIS now. I can go anywhere, anytime, anyplace; this will be great.” But he gave it to me with this imagined scenario with the question, “What could you see sometime in the future, in the past, that would cause you to lose your faith?

And so I immediately start thinking, okay, first stop: Jerusalem around year 30. Hang out outside Jerusalem; see if I can figure out which tomb and wait outside and see if anything interesting happens. I eventually realized that if I can’t keep track of, let’s say, Jesus’ corpse in those crucial moments or something like that, it’s like, does that tell me whether God could or could not have justified him beyond death? Does that tell me about his significance? I realized that actually going back earlier and seeing what kind of person Jesus was was more likely to throw my beliefs a major curveball. Even then, I realized that what I’d be doing was changing my beliefs, changing my mind. And I realized that wouldn’t actually be the same thing as losing my faith.

We often hear people say, “Well, if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead physically in the way that’s described, then I’d just be an atheist.” It’s like, why not Jewish? Why not Buddhist? Why not Taoist? Why not a deist? There are so many options, and we treat them as binary in those moments.

And the theologian Paul Tillich talked about faith as the ultimate concern, which is putting God first and making the search for God and the wholehearted quest to know God, the nature of our faith, and the focus of our faith. And when we do that, then not only is changing our mind not contrary to that, but when we realize how prone we are to deceive ourselves that others, maybe without intending to, may have misled us about things. So it’s important to be discerning and ask questions. Questioning even our own beliefs and assumptions can be part of that wholehearted quest for God. And asking questions, searching, and changing our minds when we feel the evidence demands that we do so—or at least suggests that we do so—can be an expression of faith rather than something that’s counter to it. Changing your mind is only counter to faith if faith means assent to doctrine and dogma rather than faith being trusting God.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that nowhere in the Bible is there even the slightest suggestion that there’s final judgment! And everybody’s there. It’s like, “Okay, everybody take out a pen and paper; here are some blue books, and you’re going to get this theology exam,” and that. And yet that becomes so central to so many. It’s like you are saved by faith, and that means affirming the right doctrine. And not only is that problematic in a number of ways, but it’s not what the Bible says.

Shirley

That’s so helpful, James. I think you’ve given us something to trust in ourselves as we’re finding ourselves wrestling with these questions and recognizing the difference between hanging onto something and leaning towards something that’s guiding us. It’s just really helpful to think about this.

I’m wondering if you could help us also understand a little bit about reception history. That was kind of a new term for me when I was in seminary—to realize that the Bible didn’t mean the same thing to everybody throughout history. So I just wanted to ask you, do you think that this implies that throughout history, people receive an understanding of God that keeps on changing? Does this mean that we’ll never find the truth? Or what do you make of reception history?

James

Yeah, I mean, you hinted at a larger question, which is how our theological ideas have changed over time. And reception history: there’s a reception of the Bible in theology that is more directly connected to that, but there’s also art and music and the history of interpretation and how people have preached this and what popular culture has done with it and what theologians have insisted on, sometimes trying to do something really, really good. But the general public has paid no attention. And sometimes theologians have said something that’s like, “It’s just as well that it didn’t catch on.” But ultimately, reception history is about the fact that in every generation, these texts come to us across a gap, and as time passes, an increasing gap of time, of space, of culture, and of language. And whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, each generation is engaging with it in a way that is, on the one hand, fresh because our context is at least slightly different than anything that was there before. And on the other hand, it is heir to all those prior interpretive judgments and all those influences.

And so I often, when I’m talking with students about the influence of art and music and other things in ways that they don’t even realize, I ask them, “What shape was the cross on which Jesus was crucified? And they always do this (James is holding up his two hands and crossing his fingers) because it’s always good to know this in order to ward off vampires; they always do something like this. And I’m like, how do you know? Where does that information come from? The text doesn’t say so.” I mean, our word ‘cross’ sounds like something X-shaped. If you go to London, you have King’s X, King’s Cross, but the Greek word doesn’t actually have a shape associated with it. Often a stauros, the thing that was used did have a crossbeam, but not always. It was any kind of pole that you affix someone to as a means of torture, execution, or exposing their body after execution.

And so it did not have a very specific shape attachment, but we do have an ancient bit of graffiti where somebody was mocking somebody else’s Christian faith. That’s one of our earliest depictions of it, and it’s much more of a T-shape.

And so when I asked them, “What shape is it?” They all give an answer. It’s like a T-shape, but then I ask them, how do they know that? Where does that information come from? It’s not something that’s described in the text. The Greek word that we translated as “cross” is a particular shape for us. The Greek word doesn’t have that connotation. It was just a pole, sometimes with a crossbeam, but not always, that was used for execution, torture, and exposing bodies after execution. And so we know that from the history of art. It’s from other descriptions from other places.

And this is not to suggest that somehow the aim should be to escape all prior interpretations that we could read without any baggage. It’s to be aware that we are so entangled in influences and past interpretations that we can’t read the text just with our own two eyes and have all the issues that have come up before be completely set aside. Instead, it’s to realize that the only way that we’re likely to see beyond our own limited perspectives and our biases and things like that is to read in conversation and to recognize that voices from the past, even if sometimes they may lead us in unhelpful directions, may also open up possibilities that we might’ve missed coming from our own cultural context, listening to people from other parts of the world reading the same texts today, people whose socioeconomic experience was different from our own.

And so reception history is about really bringing that history of interpretation, of doing things with the text, of embracing the text and engaging with the text front and center and acknowledging it and bringing it into the conversation.

Shirley

That’s really, I think, so helpful for us to think about how we are not reading by ourselves in a little private place. We’re reading with history already on our shoulders, and we have to recognize that when we understand the context that we’re reading in, it helps us to know why we’re thinking the way we’re thinking. And how to keep moving. Really helpful.

I have a lot more questions, but I promised everybody that it is their turn now. So we’re just about ready for others to join the conversation.

And I do want to take a moment to announce another exciting step forward for Bible and Beyond. We have just opened a new Bible and Beyond Substack, and we’d love to have you join us there for more scholarly updates on early Christian studies. If you’re not familiar with Substack, it has become a very popular new way of having public conversations that bypasses some of the difficulties with social media.

Anyway, we’re planning to use it for Bible and Beyond as a means to provide another step in scholarly background. So we’re offering summaries on important new books and articles, some updates on what’s going on with various scholars in the field, information on important conferences that may relate to what we’re studying, and so forth. So whether you’re familiar with Substack or not, just please go check it out. You get the same information if you join for free or pay. Either way, we’re happy to have you with us. So go to bibleandbeyond.substack.com. Anyway, we’d love to have you signed up. All right, so now it’s your turn. Starting with Zuzu and Tony.

Zuzu Freyer

Hi, James. And thank you so much for your talk. My question is kind of like how to respond to someone who says—and I had this happen; it was before I had gotten into the early Christian texts, but it was some other book that I was suggesting that could be read for inspiration. And the person pointed to the last chapter in Revelation. And it’s like one of the last verses. It’s like, I think 18, and it says, “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book.” And it went on about… Anyway, at the time it was like, “This is too large an answer for me to respond to.”

Do you have some type of succinct response to that type of question or answer?

James

Yeah. “Don’t add to or take away from the words.” That’s why the Book of Revelation actually is not grammatically polished in Greek. And I think one reason why it hasn’t been fixed more than it was by the scribes who came after is that there’s a warning.

But yet what’s interesting is that the Book of Revelation struggled to be accepted by Christians globally. The Western Church had as part of its canon or pretty much as the canon was taking shape. But in the Eastern churches, it took so long, and they eventually, I think, begrudgingly said, “Well, all these other Christians have it. I guess we’d better go along with them.” But it doesn’t feature in their liturgy precisely because of how long it took for it to be regarded as scripture. And then the churches split, the big schism, the great schism around the year 1000. And then go a hundred years, a few centuries more, and then you get to the Protestant Reformation.

And you might want to do this with somebody because they’re undoubtedly Protestant (if they have that view of the Revelation of the Bible) and show them the table of contents of Martin Luther’s—the Protestant reformer’s—New Testament. And I think even without understanding German, they’ll be able to make sense of what’s there. You have all these numbered books of the Bible there, and then there are these four at the end. And Revelation is one of them that Martin Luther— if you read his introductions and his commentary—he had reservations about it.

What I think is fascinating is even though he used the slogan “Scripture alone” (Sola Scriptura), he was like, “We have to get back to these early sources rather than allow the authority of current leaders or church tradition to override them.” But he recognized that the church had defined what the canon is and what is scripture, and there was no bypassing the need for judgment to be made about that. And he said, “Okay, I’ll keep it in here because everybody else wants it in, but I just don’t see it.” And it’s just fascinating to see that. So that ending to Revelation was not the ending to a Bible when it went in.

By definition, this book of Revelation was a separate work. And that’s in a lot of ways the key question when it comes to this claiming this authority for the canon is that people keep pointing to this thing in this text or that text. It’s like, okay, when that text was written, it was either referring just to itself if it was saying anyone who takes away from this book or, if it talked about scripture having this or that status, it was talking about this collection in which that work that says this was not yet included. And so just thinking through that—if the person will give you the chance to, and sometimes they’re not receptive to that—may help them realize that this whole thing is messier than they’re claiming. And that’s the thing—what they’re trying to avoid is the messiness of reality, which includes the messiness of fate.

Shirley 

Yeah, that’s a great question and answer too. Thank you so much for that. Very helpful.

Pat, you’re next. Go ahead.

Pat Nester 

Yes, I remember thinking that since the Protestant Reformation, many of us are identified as “people of the book,” and I’ve always considered myself a kind of person of the book. But as I’ve studied the book over the years, it’s such a mishmash of ideas and experiences. It has errors, obvious errors in it, historical errors, contradictions, and all kinds of things. But to me, that gives it a kind of credibility because it is more like our actual human experience, which is also full of all of these difficulties. But the thing that I find in the Bible that keeps bringing me back to it is it also has many really inspiring passages and inspiring ideas and ways to think about problems that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. So isn’t the fact that the Bible is a kind of Russian novel of experience giving it more credibility than less?

James

Yeah. I mean, so on the one hand, when you pay attention to the details, you realize that these are people of their time expressing themselves in ways that made sense for their time. And one of the key things that was a major turning point in my faith was going from, and this is another thing that I emphasized in the book like, “Well, I’m still a Christian. I just don’t think …” I’m apologizing for these things to realize I’d never been a biblical literalist, even though I might’ve claimed otherwise.

Just you don’t get past Genesis chapter one. It’s like I have to take the days literally. So you start reading, and it’s like, “And God said, let there be a dome.” [King James translates it ‘firmament.’] Oh, shoot. Now what do we do? It’s like, well, it doesn’t really mean “dome.” It’s like literalism goes out the window whenever the text says something inconvenient. And so don’t apologize for not being a literalist.

Tell these people you need to apologize for pretending to be a literalist. And if that one doesn’t work for you with the dome, how about Jesus saying, “No one can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.” None of us have done that. If we had, we wouldn’t be on the Zoom call, presumably.

On the other hand, it has these beautiful principles, as you said, Pat. And I think it was Rabbi Harold Kushner, the one who wrote the famous book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. But in one of his books, and I don’t think it was in that one, he said that the Bible contains and gives expression to our loftiest ideals and our highest aspirations, and it sets the bar so high that its characters and its authors regularly fall short of that.

And recognizing that there are these core principles that are not fully implemented in every passage is something that’s a historic part, again, of Christian interpretation. My church is an American Baptist church, so it was one of the ones that the Southern Baptists broke away from because they wanted to keep other human beings enslaved. But the debates about slavery were about this passage, that passage where the law clearly acknowledges enslavement of others as a thing that’s legitimate, this and the other. And the abolitionists were saying, “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself. Do to others what you would want done to you. Would you want to be someone else’s property?” No, don’t make someone else your property. It’s like the principle was allowed to override the fact of this passage or that passage. And so I think you’re absolutely right. And one reason why I’m still a Christian is that it’s not because there aren’t all these difficulties and these historical questions I continue to wrestle with.

It’s because, gosh, this teaching, it challenges me, it speaks to me, it resonates with me—not always resonates with me because it’s like I’m doing it; it’s saying what I’m already thinking. It’s saying things I should be thinking, and I’m challenged by it across all this distance and time. And so that’s the kind of discovery that helps invigorate and reinvigorate one’s faith, I think.

Shirley

Wonderful. Thank you. Gosh, I’m enjoying this conversation so much. Thank you. Leigh Ann and then Peggy and then Honor.

Leigh Ann Lindsay

So this may be a bit outside of the scope of your book. I’m wondering, so I feel like I’ve been through this deconstruction phase that you’re using that phrase there, and I definitely still have faith in everything, but I feel like I’ve come to the point where I see the Bible as basically a series of different people’s interpretations of things and not as necessarily a specific truth. With that in mind, I find it very difficult, then, to look at church. And so I’m kind of curious, since you’re saying you’re teaching Sunday school and everything, how do you approach working with the church from the standpoint of not feeling hypocritical about the fact that so many churches are based on dogma and strict doctrine as opposed to really looking at just exactly what you’re talking about: the idea of the context, the interpretations, and the fact that it’s not literally the word of God?

James

Yeah. So one of the things that the book is trying to help people do, and there’s no expectation that anyone else will do it quite the way that I did or end up in quite the same place. But I know that for a while my identity was mostly, “This is what I’m not any longer,” or “I’m still a Christian, but those kinds of things…but I don’t believe this anymore, or I don’t hold to that view.” And getting to the point where we’re able to make a positive articulation, even if we’re saying this is entirely symbolic language and you should not take it literally, but these are the symbols that I think point in the direction of this transcendent reality that I feel like I’m gripped by and have had an encounter with. Being able to articulate those is, I think, a helpful step as we work through those things.

We’re always defined by what we’ve been through in the past, but we can allow it to define us in ways that are sort of positive as we say, “Okay, so I used to be this, and now I’m this.” Or we can say, “Yeah, I used to be … Now I don’t know.” And I say that again as somebody for whom a certain level of agnosticism I think is appropriate. Anyone who thinks they’ve got a handle on God has an idol and doesn’t have the real thing. But as far as church is concerned, I do think that having community, including some in-person communities, even though I found some really rich and rewarding online communities, is important and helpful. And looking at the church where it says that Paul was preaching so long that poor Eutychus fell out the window, the word that’s used implies dialogue.

And so they were eating and talking about theology, and there’s value in doing that. It doesn’t have to be a bunch of people sitting in a pew. Nobody was doing that at this point in quite the same way. Maybe in some synagogues there were some, but even then the configuration was usually a little bit different. And so making room for community, even when it’s very different. I remember my church; at one point, some years ago, we wanted to come up with a new vision statement, and so we had these discussion groups, and there was some back and forth. And I remember this table of women who were like, what about, we say “We’re Bible-believing. And I was like, a lot of people would say that if we’re Bible-believing, then you women should not have a say in how we define our vision statement.” This is the irony of that coming from that table.

But in the end, the only thing that was kind of universal there was grace. And I remember the pastor was disappointed that we spent this day working on this, and that was the only thing that everybody agreed on. And I was like, are you kidding me? That’s beautiful.

Having that is the one thing we agree on. But yeah, realizing that there can be a unity that is there rather than policing the boundaries of who believes this and who doesn’t. And if you don’t believe this, then you’re excluded. We’re a bunch of people who are trying to follow Jesus and seeking after God. And so it’s a unity focused on a center rather than focused on defining edges. And it’s a different way of thinking about unity, and it doesn’t give you clear-cut answers. But I think exploring that even something like community, something like thinking about unity, what we have in common in different ways and in new ways, even if the ways that I think about in the book are not helpful to you, hopefully thinking about those options will help you figure out where you want to place yourself, how you want to see your own point in your journey, which is not over yet, but figuring out where you are now is useful as we make our way through these things.

Shirley

I’m hearing so many wonderful ideas here from you, James, in the sense that you are looking forward instead of backward and that you’re finding grace instead of problems and that you’re finding that there’s something to articulate that’s good rather than what I’m not. This is a very encouraging way to think about how to move forward. It’s just very, very encouraging. I really appreciate that. I’m going to go on to Peggy and then Honor.

Peggy Williams 

I mostly wanted to remind you that we’ve got a few questions in the chat that I think would be good to bring forward. And I answered one of the questions, and I want to be sure I answered correctly. So when I was asked about the church, and I said it was in Indianapolis, Crooked Creek Baptist, is that right?

James

Yep.

Peggy

The Crooked was a good hook for me to remember. And I used to be in Indianapolis. I would love to go visit your Sunday school class sometime. And I had a little difficulty putting in the link to your latest book, but I believe I got the Amazon link in there for Beyond Deconstruction, and it looks really interesting to me.

Shirley

And here’s what it looks like in case you want to see it.

Peggy

Beautiful. Beautiful cover.

Shirley Paulson

And it’s not even too long. It’s readable.

Peggy

Oh, I like that.

James

I’m getting better at that.

Peggy

Did I mention there’s a coupon on Amazon? So go now.

Shirley

Very nice. Thank you. So Peggy, thank you. You are keeping us on the ball here. So let’s go back to some questions here. Let’s see.

Rosalinda Johnson

Why would any believer transfer their love of and faith through the scriptures to some disbelieving scholar who has stopped attending church?

James

I don’t know. That’s not what happened to me, but …

Yeah. I mean, certainly I think, and I don’t know what’s behind that question. I do know that there are … Oftentimes, if you get online, because there has been … I think there was a bigger online atheist community before some of the Christian groups other than the fundamentalists got represented on there. And so you had all these people who probably felt like they thought they were the only ones who were having these doubts, and they’re oftentimes in the context of fundamentalist Christianity themselves and found one another online. And for a lot of them, they found biblical scholarship and found people like Bart Ehrman who were explaining these things to a general audience, stuff like that. And I think there are a lot of people who think that critical scholarship is this atheist thing. And in fact, it’s a thing that was really pioneered by liberal Protestants and deists, and the atheists borrowed it from us.

And so it is very much a liberal Christian undertaking as a result of the Enlightenment, raising all these questions about how we know things. But it wasn’t just people questioning after rationality. That was also an era when there were all these huge archeological discoveries and textual discoveries. It was like, “Wow, this could be older than the Bible, and it’s got a flood story in there too.” What do we do with that? And so it wasn’t people trying to find fault with the Bible. It was people making discoveries in science but also in literature and in history that raised questions and tried to answer them and to answer them seriously. And all those critical approaches, the source criticism, things like that, it’s not like people are saying, “This text is so simple. Let me see if I can complicate things.” It’s like this text; there are these tensions here.

How do we make sense of them and explore possible ways of doing so? And so if you don’t want to listen to unbelieving scholars, then don’t. There are plenty of us out there who are Christians who will share a desire to explore and explain and understand, but also share your faith.

Shirley 

Yeah. And I think you’re bringing up a really good point there because we have had several atheists in these conversations who have come to talk to us. And I think the question is, well, why would we listen to them if they don’t have any faith and I want to have faith? But I think your point is very important for us that they’re not necessarily looking to take away your faith. They’re looking to help us to explore and learn and study. And the fact that they’re atheist really has nothing to do with just the exploration of history or of the knowledge of the text. So I think that we need to sort out the difference between those who are just trying to deconstruct. And those people are not necessarily the ones we’re looking for but those who are truly helping us to study and to learn and to think.

And then you can do with it what you’re inspired to do. That’s, I think, the message I’m hearing from you.

James

And I think just the only other thing I would add is that if you’re ever only listening to people who you already think will say things that you will already agree with, I recommend adding some other voices to the mix. So if you’re a person of faith, then add an atheist in there. But if you’re an atheist, add some thinking Christians in there, because I mean, atheists have been known to caricature and pick the worst examples of the Christians who are very narrow rather than some of the thinkers who are really engaging with the evidence in interesting ways. And we’re all prone to do that. And we’re in an era when technology will help us get into these bubbles, information bubbles, and hear only like-minded voices. And yet we’re most likely to learn, even if it’s to become persuaded of reasons for what we already believe; unless we open that to challenges, we have our assumptions that are unexamined.

And one thing that I’ve noted more and more is that you look at the kind of conservative, narrow religiosity that says we need our own schools and we need to homeschool; we need to shelter all our kids from these viewpoints that they don’t … If you can’t encounter different viewpoints and have your faith survive that, that’s not faith; that’s doubt. You’ve got a house of cards that’s unstable and really should be swept aside. And if you do that and come through the other end, I think you will discover something that is more worthy of being called faith, this thing that has the courage to explore and that trust that God is so big that my questions are not going to … It’s not going to bring the whole thing crumbling down.

Shirley

Wow, that’s really, really helpful, as all of these things are. I wish we had 10 more hours. We don’t, but let’s move on to Honor and then Sarah.

Honor Haase

Dr. McGrath, thank you. I think your ideas are just exciting and liberating. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re preaching to the choir, but you said at one point you were talking about making new discoveries, either archeological or just individual from reading texts; that changing our minds is what’s in order. And it occurred to me, as you were saying that, the Bible says a whole lot, and I think more in the New Testament than the old “repent.” And repent doesn’t mean grovel. It means rethink. And Jesus said, “Repent,” a whole lot. So maybe we could take it that he was saying … Well, like my dad often said, “Daily, we choose to be a Christian. Daily, we discover Christianity,” and maybe Jesus was saying that when he told us to repent. Thank you.

James

Yeah, no, that’s wonderful. And I think repentance is there actually all throughout. Scholars and commentators and preachers have sometimes struggled. It’s hard to find a unifying theme when the Bible’s so diverse, but “repent” is one that is probably there pretty consistently throughout. And I think the challenge is the reason why that’s sort of rejected, because fundamentalists will say “repent,” but it’s just to everybody else, as though there’s no more need once you are on this side of this dividing line. But imagine what Paul would’ve been saying, something like, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” It’s like “God can raise up children, Abraham for these sons. [King James translation: “God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” Just stick with what I’ve already got. Time and again, that would be the wrong choice. And yet modern fundamentalists are so sure that they have already arrived and have no need to learn anything further or change their mind about anything that they are unrepentant. And the Bible has some very, very serious warnings about that.

Shirley

Very interesting. Very interesting. Oh, man. Okay. So Sarah, let’s go with you. And I hope, meanwhile, people should also be reading the chat because we have a lot going on, but I do want to hear from Sarah too before we close out. So go ahead, Sarah.

Sara Barnacle

Okay. I get kind of a kick out of telling people when they complain about contradictions in the Bible that the Bible is the most honest book I’ve ever seen. And that’s because they put in the two stories about Noah and the ark, and they’ve got I and II Kings; they’ve got I and II Chronicles. They got the four gospels that tell you all kinds of different things, and they’re in there on purpose. They know that they didn’t have blind eyes when they put together the Bible, for goodness sake. Anyway, I heard toward the beginning that you have an interest in science fiction, and I don’t know if this is going to start a whole new hour of talk, but in my newsfeed from YouTube lately, there’s been an awful lot about quantum theory and religion or quantum theory and the Bible, and also the role of consciousness is a big change.

Is there anything you’d like to say in two minutes on those themes?

James 

Yes, except maybe the two-minute part. So I mean, I have wrestled with this, and even going back, I’ve written quite a bit about both religion and science fiction but also a bit about religion and science. And even though I’ve done less with it, because my main field of study is New Testament scholarship, I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about theologians who engage seriously with what we know of the universe. And one of the models that is sometimes used to think about how to fit what we know from science and cosmology with the existence of God. People use the terms “entheism” and “panentheism,” the ideas that everything that we see and exists is part of something greater and subsists within something even larger. And so I’ve sometimes said that if God is the ultimate reality, then God has to encompass everything else. And we often, one of the things that the Bible does, and fundamentalism sometimes does, is talk about God as basically God was Agath, maybe the strongest God, but just this entity that might or might not exist within the universe.

Whereas if God is the ultimate that which simply exists and upon which the existence of everything else depends, then there’s no question that that reality exists. And that’s one of the things that was really a remarkable discovery, that the existence of God is basically no longer something that is open to question. You could be like, “Yeah, but we don’t know if the ultimate reality is personal or not.” It’s like, “Okay, sure, we can discuss the attributes of ultimate reality, and we can talk about which language points in the right direction.” But that’s a question of attributes, not existence.

And that was just such a helpful realization that actually one of the things that oftentimes when you’re coming out of fundamentalism is one of the big things, “Wow, I don’t even know if I believe in God anymore.” And discovering that actually you can set that whole question aside and focus on other things. It’s nice to know that there’s at least something that you can feel confident about. Again, it’s not answering all your doctrinal theological questions, but there’s still something reassuring about the reality, even while knowing it transcends our understanding. And whether it’s the universe, the multiverse, or a God that encompasses all of those and much more beyond is a different sort of question. No matter which of those is the case, it’s beyond anything I can hope to grasp from my limited perspective. And I actually find that incredibly comforting and awe-inspiring rather than worrying. But I could say a lot more about science and science fiction, and I hope we get a chance to talk more about that at some point.

Shirley

Oh, I do. Thank you. We’ll definitely invite you back again, that’s for sure. But tell us, where can people find your stuff besides the book that we’ve been talking about tonight? Where can we find you?

James

So I’m on most social media as “religionprof.” If you type in religionprof and when Google asks you, “Did you mean ‘religion-space-prof’?” You say no, then you’ll find me. There are also other people; James McGrath is a pretty common Irish name, but I’m still very active online. And so you’ll probably find me, especially if you add a word like “Bible” or something like that. It’s almost guaranteed. And as you can probably tell, I’m very interested in these things. I care about them. I think they’re important. And so as somebody who blogs and is on social media, if there’s something we didn’t get to or a thought you had and you want to share it, you can find me, and you can share it, and we might even be able to continue the conversation there.

Shirley

James is very, very out there. You can’t miss him. Which is why I will have to have you come back and talk about science. I think that’s a fabulous topic. And thank you. So I just feel that you have given us a real uplift. In addition to our searching and questioning and asking deep questions about these things tonight, I’m grateful that you can give us something to feel lifted about. I just think that’s a wonderful, wonderful gift that you’ve given us tonight.

I have to close us out tonight. I want to thank everybody for the discussion titled “The Bible As Idol,” with our guest scholar, Dr. James McGrath.

And I want to tell you that if you join the Patreon folks, you are welcome to come to a conversation next week to talk about this. So join us on Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/bibleandbeyond. And that’s where you can join us for Patreon.

Okay. So these discussions are led by a knowledgeable scholar once a month, and the scholar provides us with a thoughtful overview of some early Christian texts or issues. And in the second half hour, participants have a chance to ask their own questions.

We usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 8:00 to 9:00 Eastern Time, but next month it’ll be on the 3rd Monday because of Memorial Day. So we’ll be meeting on May 18th. And let me tell you who’s coming next month! We have Professor Matthew Goff, who’s going to talk about demons and monsters in antiquity and why that matters in our understanding of these ancient texts.

So again, that’s on May 18th, the third Monday.

And so now let’s just please join me in a great big thank you to James for helping us to think about a healthy relationship with the Bible.

Thank you so much, James.