The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I heard the other day about a youth group who had been challenged in this anniversary year of the King James Bible to read our special book from cover to cover. But it seems the idea backfired! The young people refused to go any further when they reached the book of Joshua, where its writers claim that God ordered what amounts to ethnic cleansing and a glut of divinely sanctioned killing. This wasn't what they expected of God, or from the special book, and so angrily they abandoned the challenge.
In many ways, I don't blame them. At least it was an honest reaction and one that most of us have had from time to time when we have read some of the stories in the Bible. You might argue that they should have been better prepared. The Bible is after all about real life and that can get pretty ugly at times. Or, you might suggest, they should have been helped to put these stories into their bigger context. Or, others might say, they had swallowed a distorted idea of what is meant by the description of the Bible as 'the Word of God', which maybe doesn't necessarily mean every word is true but rather that every story contains truth from God for us today.
Whatever might have been said in response to those young people’s bewilderment, it does beg the important question of whether perhaps we ought to avoid some bits of the Bible, at least until our children and young people are much older. And this is an issue that children's workers face constantly: which stories do we choose to use and are there some that we should possibly never cover with the young ones in our care.
‘Cherry-picking’ from the 'good book' - and there's a classic description of the Bible that perhaps is less than helpful in this debate - 'cherry-picking' itself has its dangers. Dr Keith White in his book The Growth of Love (BRF, 2008, p. 93 ff) writes this:
‘For the growing child getting to grips with the Bible narrative from an early age, there are descriptions of people wrestling with moral boundaries: what is right and wrong; what is praised and decried and so on. So Adam and Eve transgress a moral boundary and suffer the consequences of being expelled from the safety of the garden of Eden; the people of Noah’s time are disobedient and find themselves excluded from the ark… some kings do what is pleasing in the sight of God and are blessed as a result, while others do what is displeasing and, in time, evil results… the Bible is a remarkable source of material for this purpose in many ways, not least the way in which it invites the reader or listener to become part of the overall story. The child’s story intersects in time with the biblical narrative.’
In other words, we need to present the whole story, warts and all, if we are to help children grow up and make sense of this world; to find out what God is really like and who they are meant to be. To pretend that there isn't such a thing as pain, suffering, violence and death, along with all that belongs to the dark side of human nature, is to do our children a grave disservice. Of course, this doesn't mean that we should frighten young children into faith or feed them with every gory detail of the terrible stories, but they do need to know the Bible is about the real world, about pain and loss, as well as joy and hope.
I've been interested to note that some of the negative responses to this special year of the Bible from the atheists and the sceptics have often focused on this aspect of our precious book. 'The language may be exquisite but look what a terrible book it is,' they say, 'with talk of God-sanctioned murder, exclusion of people who just happen to be different and the cursing of those who don’t believe.' Here's what Sam Harris has to say about the Bible (The Moral Landscape, Bantam Press, 2011):
‘As a work of moral, metaphysical and historical instruction, the book has had a disastrous influence on the western mind. Every sane reader of this text must actively "bowdlerise" it, ignoring the countless passages in Leviticus, Exodus, Deuteronomy and the letters of Paul that sanction slavery, honour killing and other barbarism.'
And Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, Bantam Press, 2006) describes the Bible like this:
'…[the Bible is] just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and "improved" by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.'
Now, it's not as if all this should be a surprise to us as Christians - that somehow we hadn't noticed the Bible's negative side. We know the Bible is not a neat, cosy story - it never claims to be such. It is the story of a people who struggle to respond to and understand God. At the same time, it is also the story of God gradually revealing himself to a people and through them to the world. And people often got it wrong. They misunderstood God, just as we often do today. How patient God is in dealing with our slowness of response. It's not just in Genesis 3 that God calls out sadly ‘Where are you?’
I was recently making my own way through the Bible for this anniversary year and, like the young people, found myself struggling with part of the story, but this time in Judges. Have you ever read its last chapters? By then, the twelve tribes of Israel have descended into bloody civil war; there is gang rape and murder, and the slaughter of thousands of innocent people; and even Moses' own grandson ends up worshipping idols made of silver. And he thought he was doing the right thing! But he had got it wrong. In fact, throughout Judges, we read about the chosen people struggling to understand why God wasn't with them anymore. Was it because they had failed to conquer the whole land, or had God deliberately left their enemies there to test their faith? They articulate both these views in their struggle to make sense of it all.
As Christians, we need to read these stories within the context not just of a particular culture and time in history, not just within the unfolding story of what God had already said and done, but also against the even more glorious backcloth of how God reveals himself fully to us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. I want children to read the Bible with this sort of approach.
There is plenty of dark material to cope with in our world - both on an international scale, about which children are often so passionately aware, as well as personally in their own lives. There is light and dark everywhere, and people of faith are called to ask questions and to struggle with their doubts rather than just take words literally and often out of context, which can so often then lead to a blinkered faith or sadly no faith at all.
So what do we do with the terrible stories? Well, first we need to be honest as leaders and not ignore them but think them through ourselves. And we also need to be ready to tell the children in our care that we don't always know the answers, but assure them that we are still thinking and praying about these things. They will respect us for saying that. And then we need to be open with the children and say that what happens next in this or that story is really horrible, puzzling and disturbing; things didn't go on to be 'happy ever after', despite the great miracle or the wonderful revelation of God they have just read about. The truth is that the people soon forgot and often ended up blaming God for their mistakes, or worse still claiming God was on their side when quite clearly he wasn't. And this can still happen today!
I really hope that the youth group didn't give up completely on God because of what they ran into in the book of Joshua. And I hope a thoughtful leader helped them to make sense of what really is our special book: special, not because we are special or it's writers were infallible, but because the special love of God is always the inspiration within, through and beyond its stories. The scriptures help us through its grim as well as its glorious stories - the good, the bad and the ugly - to catch a glimpse of what God is like and who we are really meant to be. If we can encourage our children's groups into this way of thinking then they will truly become 'people of the book'. And it is the people - our children - and not the book who will go on with God to change the world.
