How Uncle Bob reads the Bible

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How Uncle Bob reads the Bible

Posted by Robert Billing on 2000-01-11
John Ross wrote:

> Can you tell us why you once believed that way, and what happened to
> change your view?

 Very briefly, I initially approached the bible as I would a textbook of
mathematics, or a Haynes manual. I thought that I could look up "sin" or
"prayer" in the same way I could look up "matrices" or "steering". It's
very comforting to have that sort of certainty when you are young, and
alone on a strange planet. And this can be a *very* strange planet at
times. Basically what I wanted was instant, definitive answers.

 But then I noticed that I was occasionally getting absurd results.
Particularly when, as a spotty youth suffering from TMT[1] I was trying
to work out from first principles exactly how I should react to the
opposite sex.

 Then I twigged that the bible isn't supposed to work that way. What it
does do is to address very complicated, many variabled, things. It talks
about good and evil, love and hate, personalities and relationships, God
and creation, and it doesn't do it in a formal mathematical way. It
works by telling stories.

 Then I realised how clever God had been. I could write a million words
trying to codify exactly what a man who falls for a married woman should
and shouldn't do. God tells us the story of David and Bathsheba. Stories
don't have to be told in exactly the same words to get the meaning
across, they don't have to be translated exactly. As long as the parts
are in the right places, and you get to the right ending for the right
reasons, it doesn't matter how you do it. If Mary and Joseph substitute
a motorbike for their donkey, if the magi turn into three kings, or you
call Jesus "Aslan" instead it still works.

 In short, I moved from thinking of the bible as inerrant, to thinking
of it as "fault tolerant". It still works even if we get things wrong.
Now that is the sort of brilliant design work I'd expect from someone
who came up with a universe that gave birth to everything from galaxies
to ducks.

 But there is a caveat. Fault tolerance only works for the bible as a
whole. Read lots of Sam and Kings and Chron and you come away with a
feel for the sort of things God won't put up with. Read lots of Psalms
and get a feel for the glory and majesty of God. Read the gospels as a
whole, and the personality of Jesus comes through. If you look closely
at the bible, one verse at a time, you miss the broad sweep of the
stories. Look even more closely and the words themselves vanish, all you
can see is the ink-stained fibres of the paper.

 There is of course something else that helps. I write. I know a certain
amount about how to put a story together, how characters interact, and
how much you must leave out. I know when I'm being ironic, or conspiring
with the reader to have a giggle at those not in the know. For example,
there is a passage in the novel I am working on where Jane is on a space
liner, and she meets a nice young man called Alan who thinks she is
nervous about space travel. The reader knows that Jane is nervous
because she is a pilot, and would rather be in the captain's seat, or at
least able to check up on what he is doing. But Alan doesn't know this,
and for a moment the reader should, if I have done my work correctly,
get a little smile from his mistake.

Now read Genesis 1 again. We have mornings and evenings before the sun.
You can construct complex and fanciful explanations of how this
happened, most of which would have driven William of Occam to grow a
beard in despair. Or you can join in the fun and accept it as a joyous
poem about the writer's struggle to explain the inexplicable. "God made
world, he made it in six days. About half way through he made days so
that he would have half a dozen to make it in. He had mornings and
evenings and sunlight, so that he could see to make the sun. Er, perhaps
not... Let's try that again in Gen 2."

 I suppose it's called growing up, progressing from milk to corned beef
sandwiches. But only little children, the sort that can set the video
recorder, get into the kingdom. So live a little, love a lot, and
cultivate your sense of fun.

[1] Too much testosterone. A condition which affects male students who
want to get on with their work but... Mmmm, she's nice.