The Living Word

Reading literature with a Protestant ethic.

I hated the Bible as a teenager. I hated being being asked if I had “read my Bible” that day, or “spent time in the Word” lately—though thankfully my parents, usually the ones asking, didn’t use that phrase that I found irritating even then.

I don’t think I hated the Bible itself; I was unnerved by the lack of guidance I had for approaching it, the uncertainty about whether what was “supposed to happen” actually would. Sometimes more intellectual or zealous evangelical men would become Bible nerds in their old age, reading alongside a Greek or Hebrew commentary. I certainly had a teen-marketed devotional or two throughout the years, and my family had a copy of My Utmost for His Highest I would sometimes pick up instead of the Bible. But generally speaking evangelicals reject outside authority over their reading of scripture.¹ You aren’t supposed to need an extra book, or expertise, for God to speak to you through his word. It’s supposed to be a direct, mystical connection that can come alive no matter what you know.

And sometimes that would happen. I would be struggling, feeling sad or alone or sinful, and some passage would seem like it was speaking to exactly what I was feeling, like I had somehow been guided to it at that particular moment. It usually didn’t happen—that was the frustrating part—but sometimes it did. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how that worked: when you are already conditioned to understand your feelings through the themes, tropes, and vocabulary of Christian scripture, it’s no surprise that you’d find them reflected there. The books of the Bible I read most often—Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—are aphoristic wisdom literature onto which one can easily Rorschach your thoughts. But nevertheless, even if I didn’t always find it, maybe rarely did, I thought I was supposed to have this dynamic interaction with the text, for it to come alive and speak something to me. To come away changed, with new inspiration and direction.

I thought about this recently while mulling over the intense, almost devotional way I tend to read fiction, and, in a more general sense, the Christian residues in my soul that I do not always recognize as such. I used to think of these in terms of ideas and propositions: for all its supernaturalism, fundamentalist evangelicalism is a modernist form of Christianity that took shape as a rationalist, argumentative response to the rise of American Progressivism. From there flowed all of the presuppositions that shaped my early beliefs: the Bible is not just spiritual, it’s not sacred literature, it is a total intellectual system, a repository of scientific fact and irrefutable argument.