Inspired
PRAISE FOR INSPIRED
“Besides being such an intelligent, often whimsical teacher on something as complicated as the Bible, perhaps the best endorsement I can give Rachel’s book Inspired is that before I was even halfway through, I told my teenagers I wanted to read it with them. This is the Jesus and the Scriptures I want them to love. This is a brilliant, beautiful offering.”
—Jen Hatmaker, author of New York Times bestsellers Of Mess and Moxie and For the Love
“Rachel Held Evans models a spiritual journey that many are yearning to take: growing into adult readers of the Bible without feeling as though they are leaving the faith of their youth in the process. With her characteristic honesty and warmth, Rachel gives many the language and permission they desperately need to leave behind their guilt and fear, and to read the Bible anew with the joyful anticipation the sacred book deserves.”
—Peter Enns, author of The Bible Tells Me So
“Rachel Held Evans has taken the stodgy, ancient bundle of work we call the Bible and makes it accessible without trampling its ancient origins or cultural contexts. In doing so, she subverts the strange, modern assumptions we too often bring to its pages. Inspired is both delightful and essential.”
—Mike McHargue, cofounder of The Liturgists, host of Ask Science Mike, and author of Finding God in the Waves
“Inspired is a love letter to scripture. Evans takes what has been weaponized against so many of us and she beats it into a ploughshare. She shows us how to love the Bible; how to see its flaws, beauty, strength, and spirit at the same time. That’s love. Not worship. Love. I’m so grateful for this expertly written, timely book.”
—Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor and author of Pastrix and Accidental Saints
© 2018 by Rachel Held Evans
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ISBN 978-0-7180-2231-0
Epub Edition May 2018 9780718022327
ISBN 978-1-4002-1107-4 (Custom)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963332
Printed in the United States of America
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For my mother-in-law, Norma Evans
Did he believe that God wrote stories with only one kind of meaning? It seemed to me that a story that had only one kind of meaning was not very interesting or worth remembering for too long.
—CHAIM POTOK, DAVITA’S HARP
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE TEMPLE
1: ORIGIN STORIES
THE WELL
2: DELIVERANCE STORIES
THE WALLS
3: WAR STORIES
THE DEBATE
4: WISDOM STORIES
THE BEAST
5: RESISTANCE STORIES
THE WATER
6: GOSPEL STORIES
THE SEA
7: FISH STORIES
THE LETTER
8: CHURCH STORIES
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
“ONCE UPON A TIME . . .”
Once upon a time, there lived a girl with a magic book.
Like many other books, this one told tales of kings and queens, farmers and warriors, giants and sea monsters, and dangerous voyages. But unlike any other, it cast a spell over all who read it so they were pulled into the story, cast as characters in a great epic full of danger and surprise. From the book the girl learned how to be brave like the shepherd boy David, clever like the poor peasant Ruth, and charming like the beautiful queen Esther. She memorized the book’s proverbs, which were said to hold the secret to a rich and happy life, and she sang the book’s ancient songs, just as they’d been sung for thousands of years. She learned that with enough faith, you could topple a giant with a slingshot, turn water into wine, and survive three days in the belly of a great fish. You could even wrestle an angel. She learned, too, how to defend the book against its enemies, those who said its story wasn’t true. She could fashion the book into a weapon if she wanted, and wield its truth like a sword. Rumor had it the book was divinely inspired, and she believed it, for every word she read echoed with the voice of God.
When the girl met a teacher named Jesus in the story, she heard that voice even louder than before, so she promised to love and follow him forever. Jesus taught her to care for the poor, be kind to the lonely, forgive the bullies, and listen to her mother. He healed the sick and raised the dead and said those who followed him would do the same. The girl never healed the sick or raised the dead, but still she believed.
Then, one day, the story began to unravel. The girl was older now, with a mature and curious mind, and she noticed some things she hadn’t before. Like how God rewarded the chosen patriarch Abraham for obeying God’s request that he sacrifice his own son. Or how God permitted the chosen people of Israel to kidnap women and girls as spoils of war. After the famous walls of Jericho came a-tumblin’ down, a God-appointed army slaughtered every man, woman, and child in the city, and after Pharaoh refus
ed to release his slaves, a God-appointed angel killed every firstborn boy in Egypt. Even the story of all the earth’s animals taking refuge in a giant ark, once one of the girl’s favorites, began with a God so sorry for creating life, he simply washed it all away. If God was supposed to be the hero of the story, then why did God behave like a villain? If the book was supposed to explain all the mysteries of life, why did it leave her with so many questions?
Deep down she knew there was no such thing as crafty serpents and talking donkeys, and that you could never fit every kind of animal on earth on a boat. Science proves the earth wasn’t made in seven days, nor is it held up by “great pillars” as the book claimed. There were contradictions in the various accounts of King David’s reign, and even the stories of Jesus’ famous resurrection didn’t read like reliable newspaper reports.
Perhaps, the girl reasoned, the story wasn’t true after all. Perhaps, she feared, her book wasn’t magic.
With each question, the voice of God grew quieter and the voices of others grew louder. These were dangerous questions, they said—forbidden questions, especially for a girl. They told her to fight against her doubts, but her sword grew heavy. They told her to stand strong in her faith, but her legs grew weak. Words that once teemed with life nettled her mind, and stories that once captured her imagination triggered her doubts and darkest fears. It was as if the roots of beloved and familiar trees had risen up to trip her on the path. There was no map for a world suddenly rearranged, no incantation to light the road ahead.
She was lost.
And yet the spell remained unbroken. The characters, many more sinister now, wandered in and out of her life just as before, interrupting her work, her relationships, her plans. Old stories continued to be told. Old battles continued to be waged. She couldn’t get the ancient songs out of her head.
She was still caught in the story. Like millions before her and millions after, she couldn’t run away. In her unguarded moments, she found herself wondering, Is the magic of the book really divine blessing, or is it, in truth, a curse?
And that’s when the adventure really began.
Controversial. Sacred. Irrelevant. Timeless. Oppressive. Embattled. Divine.
The Bible conjures all sorts of adjectives among modern-day readers, and yet its “magic” is indisputable, for every time we tease about “forbidden fruit” or praise a good Samaritan, we betray our fascination with this ancient collection of stories and poems, prophecies and proverbs, letters and laws, written and compiled by countless authors spanning multiple centuries and cited by everyone from William Blake to Beyoncé. The Bible has been translated into more than two thousand languages, its tales inspiring the art of Shakespeare and Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston and Blind Willie Johnson. Its words are etched into our gravestones, scribbled onto the white posters we carry into picket lines, and strategically incorporated into our dating profiles.
Civil rights activists quoted heavily from biblical texts, as did the Christian segregationists who opposed them. The Bible’s ancient refrains have given voice to the laments of millions of oppressed people and, too often, provided justification to their oppressors. Wars still rage over its disputed geographies.
Like it or not, the Bible has cast its spell, and we are caught up in the story.
My own life got grafted in the moment I first drew breath at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, and was named Rachel. In Scripture she is the beautiful shepherdess who stole Jacob’s heart, defied her father, nursed a bitter rivalry with her sister, and begged God to give her children right up until the birth of her second took her life. In Birmingham, Alabama, in the hairspray haze of the Reagan era, this Rachel was an intense and imaginative kid with severe eczema, knock-off Keds, and political opinions. When I first learned in Sunday school, at age seven, that my biblical name means ewe, I came home crying, certain my parents had taken one look at my naked baby body and declared it gross. Learning a ewe is simply a female sheep did little to cheer me, especially when my friend Sarah’s name meant princess.
As a child, I imbibed the stories of Scripture as a fish imbibes the sea. The evangelical subculture of the eighties and nineties produced no shortage of Bible-themed books and videos, so along with the cast of Sesame Street and a relentless cavalcade of Disney princesses, the figures of Moses, Miriam, Abraham, and Isaac marched through my imagination. My first Bible was one of those Precious Moments volumes that boasted blond, doe-eyed David on the cover, two baby lambs resting in his arms, and a sparrow perched on his staff, the shepherd boy blissfully unaware that in a few short years he’d be delivering two hundred Philistine foreskins to his father-in-law as a bride price. Inside were all my favorite biblical heroes and heroines depicted as children. (Well, almost all of them. The artists failed to include Jael, whose precious moment involved assassinating a general by driving a tent peg through his skull.) These characters occupied a similar space in my brain as Abraham Lincoln, Bear Bryant, and dead relatives whose antics were conjured up at family gatherings from time to time. They were mythic yet real; true yet more than true. The Bible’s stories were the ones in which every other story belonged, the moral universe through which all of life’s dramas moved. So convinced was I that I inhabited the same reality as Lot’s wife, I refused for years to look out the rear window of our Chevy Caprice for fear of turning into a pillar of salt.
By the time my family relocated to one of the most famous notches of the Bible Belt—Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925—my evangelical roots ensured I drank deep from the waters of Scripture. I’d memorized large portions of Psalms, Proverbs, and Romans before entering high school, where I served as president of the Bible Club and a leader in my church youth group. (You know you’ve found your place in the world when you make it to the homecoming court . . . representing the Bible Club.) The pages of my Ryrie Study Bible bled yellow, orange, and green from highlighting, and I never missed my morning “quiet time” in the Word. If the Bible of my childhood functioned primarily as a storybook, then the Bible of my adolescence functioned as a handbook, useful because it told me what to do. I turned to it whenever I had a question about friendships, dating, school, body image, friendship, or any number of adolescent concerns, and it never failed to provide me with a sense of security and direction.
Every evangelical teenager was expected to choose a life verse, and mine was Philippians 3:8: “I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ” (NASB). (It’s funny now to think that the words in a two-thousand-year-old letter from an imprisoned ex-Pharisee to the members of an obscure religious sect convinced a sixteen-year-old girl in 1997 to choose going to a Bible study over seeing Titanic in the theater, but such is the strange power of our biblical text.)
No one was surprised when, after graduating from high school, I enrolled in the English literature program at a conservative Christian college that promised to teach every discipline—from psychology, to history, to economics—from a “biblical worldview perspective.” If the Bible of my childhood functioned as a storybook and the Bible of my adolescence a handbook, then the Bible of my young adulthood functioned as an answer book, or position paper, useful because it was right. The Bible, I learned, was the reason Christians voted for Republicans, rejected evolution, and opposed same-sex marriage. It was the reason I could never, as a woman, be a pastor, the reason I should always, as a woman, mind my neckline. A biblical worldview, my professors assured me, would prepare me to debate atheists and agnostics, and would equip me to engage the moral confusion of postmodern culture still reeling from September 11, 2001. The more I learned about Scripture, they said, the more confident I would grow in my faith and the better I would be at answering the world’s questions.
But their assurances, however sincerely intended, proved empty when, as a young adult, I started asking those questi
ons for myself. Positions I’d been told were clearly “biblical”—young earth creationism, restrictions on women’s roles in the home and church, the certainty of hell for all nonbelievers—grew muddier in the midst of lived experience, and the more time I spent seeking clarity from Scripture, the more problems I uncovered. For example, why did my church appeal to Paul’s letter to Timothy to oppose women preaching from the pulpit, but ignore his instructions to the Corinthians regarding women covering their heads (1 Timothy 2:12; 1 Corinthians 11:6)? How could we insist the Bible is morally superior to every other religious text when the book of Deuteronomy calls for stoning rebellious children, committing genocide against enemies, and enslaving women captured in war (Deuteronomy 20:14–17; 21:18–21)? What business do I have describing as “inerrant” and “infallible” a text that presumes a flat and stationary earth, takes slavery for granted, and presupposes patriarchal norms like polygamy?
It was as if the Bible had turned into an unsettling version of one of those children’s peekaboo books. Beneath the colorful illustration of Noah’s ark was—surprise!—the violent destruction of humanity. Turn the page to Joshua and the battle of Jericho and—peekaboo!—it’s genocide. Open to Queen Esther’s castle and—look!—there’s a harem full of concubines. Gone was the comforting storybook of my childhood, the useful handbook of my adolescence, and the definitive answer book of my college years. The Bible of my twenties served only as a stumbling block, a massive obstacle between me and the God I thought I knew.
My parents responded to my questions with compassion, but the evangelical community around me treated them like a wildfire in need of containment. Friends, professors, and Sunday school teachers rushed to offer explanations, often referring me to Gleason Archer’s massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a five-hundred-page tome that promised answers to all the Bible’s most challenging puzzles, but which proved less than helpful to a reluctant skeptic previously unaware half of those puzzles existed in the first place. The harder my fellow Christians worked to minimize my objections, the more pronounced those objections became. Beneath all the elaborate justifications for Israel’s ethnic cleansing, all the strange theories for where Cain got his wife and how Judas managed to die in two different ways (he hanged himself and then fell headlong onto the ground), I sensed a deep insecurity. There was a move-along-nothing-to-see-here quality to their arguments that only reinforced my suspicion that maybe the Bible wasn’t magic after all, and maybe, deep down, they knew it. Instead of bolstering my confidence in the Bible, its most strident defenders inadvertently weakened it. Then when a pastor friend asked me what personal sins might have triggered my questions—“sexual immorality, perhaps?”—I saw that my journey through these doubts would be a lonely one.