The Bible Unwrapped: Making Sense of Scripture Today

by Meghan Larissa Good, Gregory Boyd (Foreword by)

Overview

Foreword by Greg Boyd

2019 Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year: Theology/Biblical Studies Category

 

Many people have questions about Scripture they are too afraid to ask. Are all the stories of the Bible true? What about all the books that got left out? What do we make of all that violence? What do we do when biblical authors seem to disagree? And what if we encounter situations the Bible doesn’t address? Drawing from the best of contemporary biblical scholarship and the ancient well of Christian tradition, scholar and preacher Meghan Larissa Good helps readers consider why the Bible matters. Known for presenting complex theological ideas in accessible, engaging ways, Good delves into issues like biblical authority, literary genre, and Christ-centered hermeneutics, and calls readers beyond either knee-jerk biblicism, on the one hand, or skeptical disregard on the other. Instead, The Bible Unwrapped invites readers to faithful reading, communal discernment, and deep and transformative wonder about Scripture.

Join an honest conversation about the Bible that is spiritually alive and intellectually credible. Read the ancient story of God in the world. You may even learn to love it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781513802350
Publisher:	MennoMedia
Publication date:	09/28/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	985,774
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Meghan Larissa Good is lead pastor at Trinity Mennonite Church in Glendale, Arizona. She has degrees from Gordon College, Duke Divinity School, and Portland Seminary. In addition to being a passionate preacher and storyteller, she is in demand as a speaker on biblical hermeneutics, Anabaptism, and contemporary preaching. She is also the author of The Bible Unwrapped: Making Sense of Scripture Today.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Great "What If"

A Good Place to Start

All knowledge begins with a leap of faith. The love a parent has for a child involves something more than pure biological self-interest. When I roll of bed tomorrow morning, the law of gravity will still be in effect. The neighbor's cats, however shifty-looking, are not actively plotting humanity's extermination.

I cannot strictly prove any of these assertions. But the evidence in their favor seems compelling enough that I am willing to believe them and to get on with living as if they were true. And ongoing experience continually reinforces my sense of the accuracy of these conclusions. Even the most committed scientist bent over her laboratory microscope must choose, as a condition of her work, to take certain things for granted: that her senses can be trusted; that her measurements correspond with something true within the shape of reality; that the natural laws that applied yesterday will apply the same tomorrow.

Every person approaches the world with some fundamental set of assumptions about reality and how it operates.

Some believe that the material world is all there truly is, that everything that exists must be open (at least in theory) to scientific observation and impartial measurement. The universe is a closed system in which no outside forces intervene. Religious claims are no more than the remnant of primitive superstitions.

Others imagine that there might well be a cosmic Designer who exists but who is functionally irrelevant to human affairs. This divine being, whoever he or she might be, is either utterly indifferent to the world or firmly committed to a policy of noninterference. Either way, human beings and human beings alone determine the course and outcome of history. If God enters into the conversation at all, it is only as inspirational ideal or existential guarantor of some universal intuition of justice.

Still others picture a God in heaven and humans on earth with a great chasm in between. Under normal circumstances, both parties remain cordoned off on their side of the cosmic divide. But on rare occasions, in response to prayers or when things simply grow desperate enough, God tears through the wall of time and space and nudges things around a bit in a rare, one-off occurrence often called "a miracle." In such a world, the primary goal of religious activity is to induce, or otherwise equip, God to break the barrier and intervene.

None of these descriptions of the world can be definitively proved or disproved — they can only be accepted as the best representation of the available evidence. Even skepticism itself is a form of belief; to doubt one picture of the world is to begin believing otherwise. No one, religious or not, escapes the orbit of faith.

Since all of us, one way or another, are already taking a leap on something, we have nothing to lose in conducting a simple thought experiment. Let's suppose, just to see where it leads us, that there were another way to put together the available evidence. Suppose the universe was animated, down to its bosons and quarks, by the very breath of God. Suppose that it's all this way — suppose that all of it is — simply because God sees it. Suppose superheated gas and stardust spun into the first cells of life beneath the hands of a masterful Artist. Suppose that Artist, who delights in new frontiers and changing forms, didn't want to go away and settle into distant observation but instead stayed on to relate, to communicate, to participate in an ongoing process of creative emergence.

This is the Bible's bold hypothesis, its grand leap of faith: that there never was any closed cosmic system from which God could be barred or into which God has to break as a stranger. From the very beginning until now, the Bible posits, the Maker's fingers have always been dug into the soil of creation. God is closer to the world than any of us have dared imagine, speaking to it and hearing its voice, moving it and somehow being moved by it. No human being has ever seen or known a world in the absence of God; we can't even begin to imagine one.

According to the Bible, God has made a choice to bind God's self to humanity — to love, listen, guide, disrupt, create, relate, and leave us room to choose. History is neither fated by some pre-formed divine script, nor is it given over to the tyranny of human whims. God acts, and we respond. God speaks, and we talk back. This communication, this interchange, is happening constantly, with ordinary people just like us. History is what takes shape on the wheel between our palms and God's as we both press the turning clay of time and space.

The world's story began with God's decisive action and it will end with God's decisive action, the Bible suggests. But everything in between is relationship, a dialogue, a dynamic dance between God and humans, responding to each other's movements. The dips and turns this story takes along the way vary greatly depending on the extent to which we tune ourselves to the divine music and on how well we learn to follow our divine Partner's lead.

There is no way to objectively "prove" this is the truth about the world. None of us has the luxury of standing at an impartial distance. We can only form our judgments as people situated in the middle of some story. The Bible mounts no elaborate philosophical arguments in defense of its great leap. Instead, it simply offers witnesses from the field — testimony from people who heard a Voice they weren't expecting that both broke them and remade them, people who watched with their own eyes as death suddenly turned, impossibly, into life. The testimony of a community who followed a cloud out of slavery and into freedom, a community whose experience could not be accounted for by the sum of its constituent human parts.

All knowledge begins with some leap of faith. Our journey with the Bible begins with willingness to entertain a simple "what if." What if God had something to say? What if human beings were capable of hearing? More than that, what if God was closer than our breathing? What if God wore feet and walked our streets, caked in the dust of our neighborhoods?

When we come to the Bible, we hear the stories of people much like us who dared to make the leap, to live as if all this were the truth about the world, and to see what resulted — people who found far more than they first set out looking for. If we sit with their stories long enough, engage with them curiously enough, we might find that our senses begin to pick up sights and sounds and scents we never perceived before. We might even catch ourselves walking around and glancing over our shoulder, wondering what such a God-onthe-loose could be up to now.

CHAPTER 2

Quantum Leaps

Reasons for Reading

For some who grew up in the Bible Belt — who cut their teeth on the back of a church pew and who could make out like bandits in hymn-lyric Jeopardy — a chapter on why the Bible matters might seem unnecessary at best, maybe even borderline heretical. But I'll let you in on a secret — you're not alone if you have doubts about the Bible's enduring cogency. A few weeks into a class I was teaching on interpreting the Bible, a woman who'd been a regular church attender for more than sixty years burst into my office. She threw her Bible on my desk, shouting, "I've been reading this, and it's outrageous! Do you even know what's in there?!" It turned out she'd just discovered the book of Joshua.

It's not uncommon for people to pull me aside and confess, with a spark of anger or tears in their eyes, that they gave up on the Bible years ago. Many of them are well-respected pastors and leaders in their local churches. The Bible's obscure laws and bloody tales seem irrelevant at best and offensive at worst. "Can't I just get on with loving God and doing good," they ask, "and let this outdated book go?" Perhaps the most common question teenagers ask me about religion is, "Why should I even care what the Bible has to say?"

If you are one of those who quietly (or maybe not so quietly) wonder if this ancient book deserves its hype, know that there are many people out there who share your questions. But despite the undeniable challenges involved, I'd suggest at least a couple key reasons why the Bible is still worth deep consideration.

First, seeking God without the Bible is sort of like trying to discover the principles of quantum physics ... from scratch. Since God is always at work in the world, it is certainly possible to learn real things about God through direct, personal experience, whether through prayer or reflection on situations you've encountered or simply by gazing on the mountains. There's no doubt about it — God shows up.

But here's the thing: if you started traveling today, using the fastest vehicle current technology can build, it would take you 225,000,000,000,000 years to reach the edge of the universe. And that's just the universe we know about. If it stopped expanding. If your mind rebels at even the suggestion of such vastness, consider this: it's safe to assume that the truth about God, well, that is even bigger. Even if we somehow manage to be exactly right in every conclusion we draw about God and the cosmos from our own experience — and religious history suggests that is an unlikely prospect — in one short lifetime we'll never personally manage to see more than a few grains of sand in the ocean of God. There are aspects of this vast universe of God that will always lie far beyond human access unless God chooses to reveal them, to bring them out of the reaches of space and directly into our view.

If every person had to rediscover gravity for themselves starting with Newton's apple, our knowledge of the world would be limited indeed. When we open the Bible, we stand on the shoulders of giants before us. As science has Galileo, Curie, Einstein, faith has Sarah, Ezekiel, John — people who didn't just possess acute spiritual sensitivities but were active recipients of God's own self-revelation. Above all, we have the witness of Jesus, who was uniquely positioned to reveal the mind of God. When we come to the Bible, we have a chance to lay our own small grains of insight along this larger shoreline. Instead of struggling one by one, lifetime after lifetime, to draw together enough tiny scraps of insight to ascertain some small truth that merits confidence, we start out with the fundamental principles already known, with a whole wealth of knowledge already in hand.

Second, it's crucial to remember that every individual, every community, every culture and every generation has its own biases and blind spots. Just as your own personal experience of God and the world opens you to particular insights, it closes you to others. Even pooling our experiences and ideas with a diverse group of friends is not enough to save us, because there are things in the water of history that all of us are drinking that impact us collectively whether we perceive their flavor or not. Those who set out in search of God independent of the Bible almost invariably end up finding a God who looks very much like themselves — a God who shares their tastes and politics, their assumptions and ambitions, the trending philosophies of their time.

When we come to the Bible, we look at God through the eyes of ages and cultures that don't share our own presumptions and preoccupations. When we interpret, we enter into conversation not just with the biblical writers but with thousands of years of readers who have their own experiences, concerns, and perspectives. In doing this — in humbling ourselves to engage this conversation — we are checked in our temptation to bow to a god who is no more than the spirit of our age, a god made in the image of our own particular distortions. We glimpse truths that our companions-in-time, who are blinded by the same modern lights and myths that we are, are simply not in a position to tell us.

Finally, and hardest to pin down, is the naked power of the book itself. Literature attains status as "classic" when it speaks in such a way that generation after generation reading it gains insight into the world or the human condition. The Bible is somewhat like classic literature in this, yet also qualitatively more. Millennia of readers testify that those who listen carefully find themselves addressed by a voice beyond the page that somehow penetrates and breaks things open. God, in some strange and unique way, actually talks here. And where God starts talking, chains are broken, wounds are healed, and whole worlds are upended.

If you haven't experienced this phenomenon for yourself, hearing other people talk about their experience with the Bible can feel a lot like looking at an autostereogram. More commonly known as a "Magic Eye" image, an autosterogram is a two-dimensional image containing a buried 3-D scene that emerges when the page is viewed with two eyes properly aligned. It's as if everyone around you is saying, "Look, there's a dolphin! Right there in front of you!" when all you can see is a blur of random colors.

You could, of course, doubt your witnesses, insist there's nothing here to see except what's inside people's own heads. But consider — when person after person standing on the same plot of land feel the ground shift beneath them, it's reasonable to ask if there's a fault line lying under the surface. If enough people over enough time sit before the same book and feel the earth surge under them, it's at least worth asking whether there might be a powerful force moving beneath the pages.

If you haven't yet seen the Bible "pop" for you yet — if you haven't glimpsed the dolphin — it's at least worth considering that what you might need is not new friends but a new approach to looking.

On this count, all I can really do add my own voice to the two-thousand-year-long chain of other witnesses. I have read many books in my life, some of them dozens of times apiece. But only one book has time and time again caused the earth to shift beneath me. Only one has made me laugh and cry and shout and fall in love. Only one has turned enemies into friends and fear into courage and despair into hope.

CHAPTER 3

Beyond Basic Instructions

What Kind of Book

In a church I visited regularly as I was growing up, a large banner hung on the wall by the stage. It boldly proclaimed, "BIBLE: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth." I stared at that banner for years and never thought to question its message. Its pithy statement captured exactly what I imagined the Bible to be — sort of like a Roomba owner's manual, only for the human soul. Applying the Bible was a matter of cracking the manufacturer's code so you knew which buttons to press, in exactly what sequence, to make this thing called life run right (and not choke and die on a rug).

The trouble was, like many Bible readers before me, I discovered over time that such a characterization of the Bible's nature was strangely mismatched with its contents. To begin with, it's hard to imagine any definition of "basic" that includes detailed directions for constructing gold lampstands or for determining the cud-chewing habits of your future steak. Yet both these subjects occupy significant sacred real estate. Meanwhile, topics that seem of rather fundamental relevance to faithful living — say, how to figure out what kind of work you were meant for, or how to raise a God-loving kid who doesn't hate your guts — aren't covered in any direct way at all.

This isn't to suggest that the Bible contains no practical directives relevant to everyday living. The Bible offers many helpful insights on such important subjects as managing money, maintaining relationships, and keeping your tongue from wrecking your life (counsel surely as relevant in the age of Twitter as it ever was). But still, if the primary purpose of the Bible were to efficiently convey the most basic, universally relevant knowledge to necessary to maintain a well-ordered life, most of us would expect a very different kind of book. We'd want a little more quick-reference index, a little less poetry; a little more guidance on romance and dating, a little less detail on how to build a giant ark without power tools.

One of the strangest things about the Bible is that, instead of sticking to grand universals, the Bible is often shocking particular. It regularly addresses this particular person in this specific situation, which might never again be precisely replicated. Exodus 23:4 explains what to do if your enemy loses his donkey — a situation with just slightly better odds of arising for a resident of Chicago than being gored to death by an ox (a scenario that Exodus 21 also helpfully addresses). 1 Corinthians and Romans both spill a great deal of ink exploring the ethics of eating meat that has been sacrificed to idols — a major dilemma for people navigating first-century Roman culture but not one likely to come up today in your average Brooklyn deli. The author of 1 Timothy instructs the recipient of his letter, "Don't drink water anymore, but use a little wine because of your stomach problems and your frequent illnesses" (1 Tim. 5:23) — a prescription whose universal applicability seems ambiguous at best.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted by permission of Herald Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Gregory A. Boyd,
Introduction,
PART I Opening the Book,
1 The Great "What If": A Good Place to Start,
2 Quantum Leaps: Reasons for Reading,
3 Beyond Basic Instructions: What Kind of Book,
4 The World in Color: Shaping Biblical Imagination,
Storytime: Unwrapping Joshua 5:13-6:27,
5 Becoming Batman: Biblical Origins,
6 The Breath Test: The Process of Canonization,
7 When Pets Rain: Selecting a Translation,
8 The Story: Act 1, The Old Testament,
9 The Story: Act 2, The New Testament,
10 Dining with Strangers: A Posture for Reading,
Storytime: Unwrapping Jonah 1-4,
PART II: Learning to Read,
11 Grabbing Buggies: Introduction to Interpretation,
12 Spliced: Literary Context,
13 Sea Change: Historical Context,
Storytime: Unwrapping Matthew 15:21-39,
14 Of Dwarves and Dragons: An Introduction to Genre,
15 Farewell to Cinderella: Old Testament Narrative,
16 The Lion Bleets: Hebrew Poetry,
17 Holy Haircuts: The Law,
18 The Outsiders: The Prophets,
19 How to Save Your Marriage: Wisdom Literature,
20 Shooting Snakes: The Gospels,
Storytime: Unwrapping Luke 16:1-13,
21 The Attic Box: The Epistles,
22 Backstage Passes: Apocalyptic Literature,
23 The Heavyweight: The Difference Jesus Makes,
24 A Saturday's Stroll: How Jesus Read,
25 Reading Cross-Eyed: The Character of Jesus,
26 Life in the Dark: Reading Backward,
Storytime: Unwrapping Genesis 6:5-9:29,
PART III: Bringing It Home,
27 Telescope Dissections: Reading for Transformation,
28 Why to (Probably) Not Preach Naked: Introduction to Application,
29 Yes, No, But, Maybe, Sort Of: Exploring the Biblical Dialogue,
30 You Can't Handle This: The Role of the Spirit,
Storytime: Unwrapping Acts 3,
31 The Dispute: A Case Study in Discernment,
32 Concordance Busters: Discerning Spirit and Scripture,
33 Seeing Blue and Green: The Role of Community,
34 Frozen Gods: Holding Convictions,
35 The Good Fight: How to Disagree Well,
Storytime: Unwrapping the Book of Job,
36 Natural Enemies: Living with Uncertainty Conclusion,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
The Author,

Editorial Reviews

Filled with humor, learned footnotes, and an abiding faith, The Bible Unwrapped is an accessible primer on Scripture and interpretation for college students and parishioners alike.

Reviews - John T. Noble

For all its popularity, the Bible is often misunderstood. Meghan Larissa Good skillfully reminds us that the messy and sacred world of the Bible is . . . a window through which we can view God’s story and encounter the living Christ.

Reviews - Derek Hogan

What the Bible is all about is best captured by this scholar-preacher’s powerful words: ‘a relationship, a dialogue, a dynamic dance between God and humans, responding to each other’s movements.’ Meghan Larissa Good’s heart and mind combine in a very special talent that will entice readers into this dance.

Reviews - Paul Borgman

The Bible Unwrapped makes an invaluable contribution to the literature that seeks to explain the Bible. It invites readers to see the Bible for what it is: a collection of sacred texts through which God has spoken and continues to speak.

Reviews - Safwat Marzouk

You need this book in your church, and in your work with people who are searching for answers. It is the missing piece for our discussions on current topics and the Bible.

Reviews - Dottie Escobedo Frank

I believe in the authoritative, infallible, inerrant Word of God—and his name is Jesus. I’m so very thankful for this book by Meghan Larissa Good! The Bible Unwrapped is a book about the Book that will lead you to the person who will change your life.

Reviews - Bruxy Cavey

In an age when the Bible is increasingly suspect, The Bible Unwrapped offers hope for followers of Jesus who are perplexed by the various issues that arise as they engage our sacred library of texts. . . . This book about the Book is a gift to the church!

Reviews - Kurt Willems

The Bible Unwrapped bears untold gifts, as rich and valuable in their own way as those brought to a child by wise ones two thousand years ago. Do not let this unique gift pass by unopened and unenjoyed.

Reviews - Leonard Sweet

The book you are about to read is a rare treasure. I have read countless books that introduce readers to the Bible. I can honestly say that I have found none as enjoyable to read—without sacrificing anything by way of biblical scholarship—as this one.

Reviews - Gregory A. Boyd