For former religious fundamentalists, their greatest sticking point to having a closer relationship with God, is often the Bible itself. I had the same problem, even though I was never a fundamentalist. I had to completely change the way I saw the Bible, because it was a hindrance, a stumbling block. The key is to abandon the way fundamentalist religion understands the Bible, and just see it for what it is: an imperfect book written by imperfect human beings, who were just trying to understand God like everyone else.
There are 3 things you need to let go of, if you are ever to make progress in reading the Bible honestly and without fretting every time. You need to give up the following beliefs:
1. that the Bible is perfect and infallible
2. that the way the Bible describes God’s personality is always perfect and true
3. that we can only learn about God and know God through the Bible.
None of these things is true. Did Abraham have a Bible? No. Then how could he possibly learn about God without a Bible? Same way we can – by reaching out to God directly. Talmidaism teaches us to have a direct, personal, close and loving relationship with God. As long as you continue to see the Bible as perfect, you will ALWAYS have a problem with the Bible, I guarantee it. For example, YHVH is a God of love, compassion, mercy and justice. In the Bible, God orders us to commit genocide. Both cannot be true. You can either accept the loving God, or you can accept that God is a genocidal God as it says in the Bible; both cannot be true at the same time.
The Bible describes the imperfect understanding of God, as ancient peoples understood God; it doesn’t always describe God accurately. Just because it’s ancient, doesn’t mean it must always be true every time. There is a lot of what human beings used to say about God which are not true and never will be. For example, the Book of Job records the arguments of Eliphaz (and as a result, it’s in the Bible, so it must be true, right?), but God says, ”you have not spoken the truth about Me” (Job 42:7) The same can be said about things that historical figures thought about God and recorded in the Bible, but God knows that they are not true.
These are things which are true about God, and will never change, in spite of what humans wrote in the Bible:
1. God is perfect love, who cares about all of us
2. It is not God who causes harm to human beings, humans hurt other humans
3. God doesn’t cause natural disasters in order to punish us; that’s just how nature works – more often than not, misfortune just happens, God doesn’t cause it
4. God lives in the actions of those who run to help whenever disaster strikes; God is in the words of those who speak kindness; God is in the sayings of those who teach us wisdom; God is in the embrace of those who love us; God is in the actions of those who heal us (too often, humans look in all the wrong places for God)
Here are some things that it is important to realise about the Bible:
1. The Bible was written in a time where human beings had a very different understanding of how the world works; their worldview was restricted, and their scientific knowledge was severely limited;
2. The Bible was written by imperfect human beings, with an imperfect understanding of God; although their understanding was not perfect, if we look past the errors, there is still much we can still learn from what they wrote
3. The Bible does not always describe God’s personality accurately – it often does, but sometimes not (we have to learn to know God directly, in order to tell the difference between the two)
4. The Bible is not God (that would be idolatry; seeing the Bible as perfect and infallible is idolatry)
5. Either the Bible is perfect, or God is perfect – both cannot be true, so we have to make our choice
6. The Bible contains mistakes, errors, and inaccuracies, but it also contains great spiritual truths, advice and revelations – again, learn to know God directly, in order to be able to discern the difference.
Here are some rules and guidelines for dealing with the Bible:
1. Learn to know God directly, because YHVH is a real, living, knowable God; only then will you be able to discern what things in the Bible are from God, and which are from imperfect human beings with imperfect knowledge and limited understanding
2. In Talmidaism, our second chief principle is to interpret the Bible honestly and responsibly
3. You are not required to agree with every word and every letter of the Bible; there is a lot in there that decent, good human beings would disagree with, but there is still a lot that we can agree with, and which is still insightful and valuable
4. Look at each book from the perspective of the ancient human being who wrote it, and the historical context they wrote it in – that will help you discern what is from human beings and what is from God (between what is temporary and what is eternal)
5. In Talmidaism, if God says one thing (show love and mercy to others), and the Bible says something different (kill and destroy), we follow God, not the Bible (as per the Universal Covenant, the original heavenly covenant of moral conscience, ’the Way of Righteousness’, which has ultimate primacy over every other covenant)
A different perspective on God causing the death of prophets in the Bible
God loves every human being equally, yet some of us die before our time. God loves all prophets equally, yet some of them died before their time. God is not a puppet-master, pulling our strings and making things happen – that’s not how God’s world works. If a human being kills another human being, the question from someone who believes in a puppet-master god will say, ”Why did God allow that person to be killed? Why didn’t God stop the murderer?” But the thing is, God didn’t allow the person to be killed, God forbade it by giving us laws telling us that murder is wrong, and told us to set up law-courts to judge those who have committed criminal wrongdoing. Furthermore, the blame is on the murderer, not on God.
Putting the blame on God, absolves the wickedness of the murderer, because it is effectively saying that the murderer is not at fault, God is at fault. I would personally ask, ”Why did those wicked people kill the prophets?” because I know that God did not kill the prophets, human beings did. God did not allow the prophets to be killed, because God forbade murder; it was wicked human beings who killed the prophets. In order to see and understand the Bible, one has to change one’s perspective, from blaming God for everything, to holding human beings to account for their actions.
Conclusion
The key to not fretting over the Bible is learning to distinguish what is directly from God, and what comes from imperfect human beings. Talmidaism does not require you to blindly accept everything in the Bible as true. Once you learn to know YHVH’s personality and will, you will be able to interpret the Bible adequately for yourself, and not need to get so anxious about it. This approach helped me enormously.
Fundamentalists insist that the Bible is perfect, because they erroneously think that once people start realising it is imperfect, people will turn away from God. However, the exact opposite happened with me. Once I realised the Bible contained mistakes, I started to rely on God more and more; I began to experience YHVH as a living Being, not as a dead fossil in the pages of a book.
Just like a person who loves someone, who loves that person in spite of (and sometimes because of) their faults and imperfections, so too, once I accepted that the Bible was not perfect or accurate, I began to have an unexpected affection for the Bible. It was a book of ancient literature, which contained frequent spiritual truths. I don’t agree with everything in the Bible, but I do agree with a lot of its values, principles, insights and aims.