The Bible is Uninteresting

That’s how I felt Sunday morning. I was hovering over my bible, reading through Luke 19:12-26 getting ready to substitute for a buddy who’s away with a few students for a retreat. I wanted to be familiar with the passage enough to guide the discussion. I had the idea of doing an imagination exercise over Jesus entering Jerusalem for the week leading up to his crucifixion, but this passage one chapter before that event felt more appropriate.

The more I looked over the passage, the more disconnected I felt from scripture. The story felt old and tired. I could flex it if I wanted to, and force it to fit with where I live every day, but why do that? In that moment I felt the weight of every time I’ve tried to make the Bible mean something just so it would make sense to me, or provide me with something to write or teach about.

That mindset grew pretty quickly into this honest realization. I’m genuinely uninterested in studying God’s word.

Those are tough words to write. I want to want to read it. I believe everything I’m “supposed to” believe about scripture. I know it’s inspired. I have issues with the conservative concept of “inerrant”, but I still believe that it speaks the truth about God’s character and who Jesus is. I believe that God has been (and still is) revealing himself throughout history, and we have a collection of the most accurate writings, ones that tell the truth about the existence of God who is screaming out his presence and his desire to be in an intimate relationship with his creation.

And yet, even as I type that…uninterested in reading it.

I thought about that all day yesterday, trying to capture the why behind that emotion. I’ve taught it at the university level for about fifteen years. I’ve written about it for about that long too. I’ve read it several times. I know a lot about the background and formation of it, as well as the other books that ultimately didn’t find a home in the canon. Maybe those contribute to the why.

There’s no neat-and-tidy way to tie all of this up. I felt like I just needed to put this down and reflect on it for a while.

TWeber

I love how honest you are.
Troy

Its most interesting when you believe it from the point of a child. Some children will look up at their dad in awe as he tells the same story year after year, while adults might grow bored after the first telling. But the child that sees his dad as the hero of not only the story but also of his own life is the child that will never grow tired of his stories. Some children grow up and begin to doubt whether their dad was actually telling the whole truth or if he had embellished the story a bit to make it more entertaining. But some people can sit, as 42 year old adults, on their parent’s death bed, hearing the same story once more, just as excited as ever for two reasons. They know the one in the story, and they believe that what he says really happened.

Matthew 18:1-4 says something about this.
Fr. TimmyD

I wonder if part of the problem is how we’ve been taught that we SHOULD respond to Scripture. Sometimes when I’m in a group of Christians I get the feeling that if I don’t find each and every word and punctuation mark the direct word of God to me personally, I’m somehow not “spiritually mature”. Perhaps the problem is in how we utilize Scripture. I mean, for a thousand years or more, most people didn’t even have access to a full bible.
Timbaker

I think for me it’s a problem of familiarity, access and knowledge. I’m not a regular devo person, but I’ve spent nearly my entire adolescence and adult life reading the Bible. The result is that there doesn’t feel like there is anything new to discover. There was definitely passages where my soul camps out (Lamentations, Ecclesiastes) where even if I read them a thousand times they’ll feel meaty and valuable. And Tim, I resonate with the idea of feeling like I’m supposed to find certain things in scripture. More to the point, I feel like there are ideas that I’m NOT supposed to see in scripture, or at least contemplate ideas that “God is most definitely not saying”. The cart (“correct” doctrine and “correct” theology) feels like it’s pushing the horse around. Not sure that makes sense.

Tim Baker

The Bible is Uninteresting

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