Engaging Creatively: A Review of Karen Armstrong’s “The Bible: A Biography”
Posted October 1st, 2008 by Lisa Clark Diller
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Karen Armstrong’s passion in The Bible: A Biography is clearly to call believers to engage prayerfully and creatively with their sacred text. She appeals to both Jews and Christians, reminding them that “midrash and exegesis were always supposed to relate directly to the burning issues of the day, and the fundamentalists should not be the only people who attempt this.” Her entire book is an homage to the Bible as a living document, made of passages which have infinite flexibility and call for constant reinterpretation.
I have appreciated Armstrong’s work over the years — she makes difficult subjects much more readable, if not always fully nuanced. In this narrative of the construction and use of the Bible from the time of the Davidic kingdom to the present, she focuses on how Christians and Jews have engaged with the books that have created their community. Her argument that the constant application of the Bible to the lives and contexts of the time makes it a living Word, a dynamic revelation of God, rings true to this reader, daughter of a Seventh-day Adventist minister. She all but calls this sort of personal engagement “present truth.”
In giving us a whirlwind history of how the Old Testament was formed, Armstrong emphasizes the context in which the texts were constructed and the flexibility with which they were used. Multiple views of God and creation and how society could best reflect him are included in Scripture, and Armstrong reminds us that this is because there wasn’t a rigid orthodoxy enforced among the Israelites until after the Babylonian captivity. In fact, it was the exile that pushed the priests and scholars to “canonize” the texts of Scripture and to draw borders around belief, consolidating what they understood as truth.
Especially compelling to me is Armstrong’s contention that the scholars of Torah believed that they were not only learning about prophecy, but that by their exegesis, by making meaning of Scripture, they themselves functioned as prophets. After all, it is by interpreting visions and dreams that prophets sometimes function, and those who find new meaning for the ancient texts bring the Scriptures to life for a new generation.
So it wasn’t especially strange that Christians built on this tradition when they made creative uses of Torah to find new meanings in Scripture, reinterpreting them in the light of their experience of Jesus and the early Christian community. The destruction of the second Temple kicked off a flurry of writings among Christians, just as the exile had done among Jews, and by midway through the second century nearly all the New Testament books had been written. The presence of Jesus was experienced, for these Christians, in the study of the Scriptures, both from the Old and New Testament.
In exploring the post-second-temple exegesis of Judaism, Armstrong again puts emphasis on the comfort given to believers by studying the Bible. Midrash had to focus on and be guided by compassion; practical piety went hand in hand with the study of Torah for Jews in the late Roman Empire. Scripture was thus “open,” according to Armstrong, and rabbis taught their students that the word of God was infinite and God’s spirit descended on scholars when they studied passages together, in a manner similar to what Christians had felt at Pentecost. The rabbis thus worked in community with each other as well as with Moses and David and Isaiah and the other prophets to form the constantly evolving and yet connected living Word.
In the early centuries of Christianity, scholars developed complex ways to study the Bible. They believed that by searching hard, Jesus could be found there, but it was difficult and had to be done by one living a life of prayer and virtue. However, the challenges of interpretation helped Christians look deeper into the Word, and thus served to push them to more creative applications. The personal application in many cases became more important than the “original” meaning of the verses. Like the Jewish scholars, these students of the Bible felt that anything that undermined charity was a misapplication or misunderstanding of Scripture.
Already in the European middle ages there were portents of the attempt to rationally understand the Bible in a literal, concrete sense — scholars who wanted to find common sense explanations of the fantastic, who developed specific systems for studying these texts as philosophy, in the process eliminating the most mysterious of their elements. As is usual with intellectual trends, the attempts to understand Scripture literally inspired a backlash, often in the form of both Jewish and Christian mysticism.
Armstrong is at her best when she shows that even as Reformation and early modern readers tried to get back to the “original” meaning of the Bible, they were doing so in novel ways that continued to allow Scripture to breathe new life and creativity into the Christian community. Neither Calvin nor Zwingli thought that it was useful to take the Bible out of its historical context and apply its literal words to the present day. They taught that God had continued to unfold himself to his people throughout time and so interpretation of the Bible was never final. The new scientific way of understanding the world continued to shape how people thought they should read their Bibles, and some of these early reformers worked to remind their congregations that God’s word required a different approach than a textbook on astronomy.
The creative new applications of the Bible allowed Puritans and other groups to develop a nationalism based on interpreting the Bible texts regarding Israel as applying literally to themselves. Sola Scriptura meant that people were supposed to take Scripture seriously, but there was still no code for how to interpret it — it remained flexible and infinitely applicable. However, Armstrong warns that “religious people were becoming acutely aware that the Bible was a confusing book, and this at a time when clarity and rationality were prized as never before.” (p. 182).
As the nineteenth century came into its own, common sense scientific faith argued for a democratic reading of the Bible. In other words, the texts meant exactly what they said and anyone who was literate could understand its points for herself. It became increasingly important to some believers that the Bible be factually, literally true in the same way that their chemistry books were literally true. With the rise of a morally indignant atheism, both Christian and Jewish conservatives found themselves on the defensive, and cast their conflict with liberal believers as well as secular thinkers in the most apocalyptic terms. It is clear that Armstrong’s burden is to show that our modern attempts to make the Bible literal and rational represent a new departure in biblical history, and that this is not helpful, is even damaging.
I was impressed with Armstrong’s reminder that it is how we treat Scripture that makes it sacred. Constant reinterpretation and the on-going process of studying the Bible demonstrate the fact of on-going revelation, even when we’re not adding texts to the canon. As a Seventh-day Adventist, raised with the idea of present truth and the continuing presence of prophecy, I resonate with her passionate fight against ossifying texts and drawing borders around their application, even as I acknowledge that her scholarship is narrow and perhaps self-serving.
I also think that even those fundamentalists who want to interpret the Bible literally are not quite as literalist as they think. They, too, apply texts to their lives in new ways and creatively choose to interact with a specific range of passages. They, too, engage with the God they find there in a dynamic manner. It just seems that they may miss out on the joy of recognizing the long tradition they are operating in, the community of people they are building on and with, and the way God continues to unfold himself in interesting and boundary-less, even law-less ways.
The love relationship that believers have with their God is demonstrated through our constant searching for him in the sacred texts — we are always learning more about him through the process of studying, searching, learning, analyzing. The best exegetical principle, Armstrong argues throughout her historical analysis, is practicing compassion and finding it in the God we discover in Scripture. Ultimately, she contends, it is impossible to experience what the Bible intended to convey without studying it prayerfully and waiting expectantly for the transcendent God to appear.
Lisa Clark Diller lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and teaches early modern world history at Southern Adventist University. She and her husband, Tommy, love being part of urban community organizations.
You can buy The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) through our Amazon affiliate account and support Spectrum with your purchase.
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Comments
Thanks for this review, Lisa. It's a fascinating history. I have been meaning to read this book for some time, and I think you've sealed the deal here! I was especially interested by the idea that the new literalist, fundamental approach to scripture is a relatively modern phenomenon. I love this idea: "Her entire book is an homage to the Bible as a living document, made of passages which have infinite flexibility and call for constant reinterpretation."
This reminds me of this week's Speaking of Faith podcast about the Jewish High Holy Days that are currently being celebrated. The rabbi interviewed talks about how she loves returning to the specific passages of the Torah every year that they always read for particular holidays because it doesn't mean the same to her this year as it did last year, and she realizes that next year it might mean something different. It's a living, breathing book that calls for our continual engagement and re-engagement.
Very hard for me to believe anything she has to say since my introduction to her was during PBS series Genesis with Bill Moyers.
In that venue she barely believed in God and if so he was and I quote, He (God) is "behaving in an evil way," effectively introducing mankind to the idea of genocide... says Armstrong"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101961028-134870,00.ht...
May be she has come off of whatever drugs she was on back then. But what do you expect when the guy putting it on (Former Southern Baptist minister Bill Moyers)said,
"I've had the experience of God," he says. "But there's a lot about God I don't understand and a lot about faith that I wrestle with. Faith is too hard. It creates too many conflicts. I think if I myself could do it over again I'd be a man of no faith."
Just the kind of people who we need telling us about Genesis huh?
Lisa, I also appreciate the journey you take us on through the points of the book. One point that I find most fascinating is when you say:
"Armstrong’s contention that the scholars of Torah believed that they were not only learning about prophecy, but that by their exegesis, by making meaning of Scripture, they themselves functioned as prophets."
I've often wondered what a "prophet" of today might look like, and I like the idea that they just might be those among us who deeply study Scripture and bring from it new "visions and dreams" for today's people and today's questions.
The first settlers to this country based much more of their religious beliefs on the OT rather than the New. This can be seen in reviewing their sermons and their strict control of those who disagreed with their literal interpretation of the Bible.
This is a rather new phenomenon as Karen says, as it is only in the last several hundred years that the absolute literal reading of the Bible has become an identifying mark of a true Christian.
While Christians should be freer to interpret their own texts on which their faith is based, they have bastardized the Hebrew Scriptures in re-interpreting them to show they prophetically foretold the Messiah and that Jesus was the embodiment of that. We would not have those Scriptures had not the Hebrews preserved them, and they interpreted them always as they read them; enscribing those interpretations when their Scriptures were copied, recopied, and finally translated. Christians have no permission to reinterpret and change or add new meanings to the Hebrew Scriptures any more than any person has the right to read the U.S. Constitution and interpret it to his liking. These Scriptures came to us, courtesy of the Hebrews, and while we may disagree with their perspectives, how dare we corrupt them with our literal reading today? They were far less literal in their interpretation of their own Scripture, and yet we, today, feel that we have the authority to change them at will. Certainly, we should defer to them for trusting their own words and not insert our opinions to those already canonized.
In my work with accreditation of colleges and universities, I have several institutions in my portfolio that require both students and faculty to affirm the literal inspiration and factual inerrancy of scripture. This creates a serious dilemma for peer reviewers who puzzle about the collision of epistemologies implicit in how these institutions determine “what is so” in the fields of biology, cosmology, paleontology, and the like.
Thank you, Lisa, for mentioning Armstrong’s historical overview which reminds us that this obsession for literalism is a recent construct. All who have grown up with Bible Readings for the Home Circle, however, suspect that early Adventism did not rise above the biblical literalism of the late 19th Century. I have wanted to believe that the notion of “Present Truth” was intended to allow for ongoing maturation of faith constructs; but I think it may have simply meant that Uriah Smith’s and James White’s literalism-based truth claims trumped those of the other literalists of the day, and thus were labeled “present truth” for that time.
I’m eagerly awaiting the publication of this most recent of Armstrong’s excellent works to downloaded it to my Kindle so I can see how she addresses the process by which persons came to determine that these sacred texts are final statements of reality for all times. Few of the doctrinal conversations on Spectrum address the assumptions of literalism that underlie the church’s theology.
Richard, you have raised questions, rarely asked for fear of being accused of heresy, about the literalism inherent and also the intransigent position of most evangelical Christians, SDAs included.
Having read half-a-dozen of Armstrong's books I always relish learning of new ones. An excellent book that addresses this topic is: "How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scriptures then and Now." It is a well-researched history of the Bible by an Orthodox Jewish professor at Harvard: James L. Kugel. He illustrates the original manner of reading with interpreting that has always accompanied the reading of the Torah, and was eventually incorporated into the final written version we have today. It was never considered to be static, as he traces the origins of many of the explanations that have remained standard over the millennia. He says that the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah were not, at their origin, about individual people at all but, rather, explanations of some feature of Israelite society as it existed centuries after these figures were said to have lived.
In the earliest version of the Exodus story, Moses probably did not divide the Red Sea in half; instead, the Egyptians perished in a storm at sea. Whatever the original Ten Commandments might have been, scholars are quite sure they were different from the ones we have today.
Such findings pose a serious problem for adherents of traditional, Bible-based faiths. Hiding from the discoveries of modern scholars seems dishonest, but accepting them means undermining much of the Bible's reliability and authority as the word of God. In searching for a solution, Kugel leads the reader back to a group of biblical interpreters who flourished at the end of the biblical period--and those interpreters hold the key to solving the dilemma of reading the Bible today. It offers nothing less than a whole new way of thinking about sacred Scripture.
The above was taken directly from the dust jacket, but this book cannot be recommended to highly; particularly because we would not have the Hebrew Scriptures were it not for those writers, interpreters, and scholars who so diligently cared for and passed it down to us. For Christians, it should serve as the most important source for understanding their Scriptures. We should carefully understand those Jews throughout thousands of years and not allow Christians to re-interpret and use their Scriptures in a way that would dishonor their original intent.
Currently, the SS class I attend will begin discussing inspiration, using Alden Thompson's book. That is a very timely subject but even more important, there needs to be open discussions as Richard suggests, regarding the literal reading of the Bible.
When most Christians, and SDAs could be classed as "literalists" it becomes almost impossible to have free discussions when there are so few people, outside of academic centers, who do not accept everything in the Bible as a literal record of long past events. How can that discussion begin? Or, is it even possible, except in places like Spectrum?
Michael,
Karen Armstrong has more recently described herself as a "freelance monotheist." In a Speaking of Faith episode earlier this year she talked about her experience of leaving life as a nun and wanting nothing to do with God, and how she later came back to faith through doing research for a television series intended to debunk it. You can find that episode here:
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/armstrong/
(Thanks for getting me hooked on SOF, Daneen!)
She also won a TED prize for 2008, and you can see her acceptance speech - and hear her TED prize wish - here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/karen_armstrong_makes_her_ted_prize_w...
-HW
Thanks HW
For a more recent look at Karens current beliefs.
I watched the video links and found her to be significantly less rancid to hear than on the Bill Moyers special. Her own mentioning of that time and series shows how poorly it was done.
Her attribution of where her popularity began was quite insightful. Starting in the UK which was a fertile environment for those debunking religious beliefs.
Still when one watches the path of a life and witnesses a person in phase 1 as a nun, then phase 2 as an anti religious crusader and now in the current phase as sort of a personal designer religion she calls freelance monotheist,
I begin to wonder if its actually all the same thing. What I mean is, It is not a person learning more and more which then modifies the current belief into a deeper and more complete understanding.
No, its still the same thing. Whatever I believe now is right and everyone else is less informed, wise, ect.
The title freelance monotheist puts who in charge? Self. This is postmodernism at its zenith.
One doesnt find truth, one assembles it. One selects from what appeals to one. Mix and match. Change it from day to day.
Does this then represent a return to God? I suppose it might if one could return to God and make him accept whatever are your terms.
In the end your God would still be the same. You. Whatever you think is right. Whatever seems good to you.
Freelance Monotheist is a term that could be applied to a few that frequent this website. Do you suppose the term will catch on?
She has demonstrated the journey that many of us take from naive assumptions to a long and often circuitous path that doesn't end. The more one learns in any field of endeavor, she will, undoubtedly gain new insights and deeper perspectives. Isn't that the benefit of learning and exploring, even the fear of becoming changed?
Those who are satisfied and have no desire to gain new insights have simply stopped pursuing anything other than adding to the accretions of their former concepts. This is why many Christians, when polled, are in favor of the Ten Commandments in public places, and yet cannot, for their lives, repeat even some of them: "Oh, yes, I believe in Jesus, and the Bible" but when asked about some biblical texts are knowledge they are speechless. People "believe in believing."
There is a fear, when confronted with new information, that it will deprive them of their security, much as the child on discovering there is no Santa Claus may be disheartened. When it is an adult who has believed something for decades and has much invested in it, that the new information may literally remove all the foundations on which he has based his life and what then? Most people cannot handle such dissonances as discovering old precepts are often built on very shaky foundations. Only those who, when confronted with overwhelming evidences once sacrosanct, have the courage to go where those convictions lead. Karen is still on that journey and she has found truths in all the world's great religions. Surely, no one religion is the entire source of all that is good and worthy, nor should we be fearful of knowing more about them,. We might discover great truths which have all come from the same source under different guises.
"She has demonstrated the journey that many of us take from naive assumptions to a long and often circuitous path that doesn't end. The more one learns in any field of endeavor, she will, undoubtedly gain new insights and deeper perspectives."
You miss the point Elaine.
She didnt go through this journey only to reach a final destination that she is only now telling us about. Her journey didnt keep her from telling everyone else what they were doing it wrong all along the way even while she reversed herself multiple times.
By your own admission and hers she has changed directions midstream at least 3 times. Why should anyone believe she has anymore insight now than whatever tangent she was on 2 turns ago? Is this the final evolution of Karen Armstrong or only a phase to be refuted by her in the future only to be off on another tangent again and that one now the "truth"?
Karen Armstrong is an excellent writer and a well informed
critic, but also a very confused person. Most of us are only one of the three- very confused people. I am not a fan, but I am a very interested reader--I reserve judgment on her opinion statements--but she generally has her history and her
characterizations of different religious bodies on target.
Very few things were finally settled in the minds of Martin Luther, John Wesley, or Ellen White. The dogmatic Robert Brinsmead changed his mind at least three if not four times.
Even Peter struggled with his world view (s).
Obvously Karen Armstrong is not canon.
Then again neither are any of us. Tom
Great points Tom.
Of the people you mentioned only Brinsmead flip flopped as many times as Armstrong.
May be that is my point.
Thanks for helping me condense it.
The only thing worse than changing one's mind, is never changing it.
I enjoyed the review. Armstrong is inspiring but certainly not for the faint of heart. She’s a former Catholic nun who had an absolutely horrible experience in the convent. Fortunately, her path led her to writing about theology and she has become a favorite amongst contemporary seekers of spirituality, though still very much iconoclastic and irreverent.
I think she’s brilliant, has much to teach, and can reinforce a faith that is truth grounded in sincerely seeking after God as opposed to childish idol worship, which characterizes too much of contemporary Christianity. Our idols are no longer made of wood but can be readily found in our many volumes of self-assured theology.
We may not bow down to Baal, but we all too easily bow down to our own hardened conceptions of God and fail to allow that others may have a different perspective on the God we know is higher than the human thought can reach.
My favorite quotation from this particular book of Karen Armstrong's is found on page 226, where she reminds us of the limitations that can follow from an overemphasis on propositional truth as opposed to relational truth: “The achievements of the historical-critical method have been magnificent; it has given us unprecedented knowledge about the Bible but has not yet provided us with a spirituality."
Those wanting to know more about Armstrong’s own biography need to read The Spiral Staircase. On p.60 you can hear the heartache and turmoil she experienced as she left the faith of her childhood and was compelled to walk a different journey than she had anticipated: “Poets and mystics had often spoken of the foul stench of hell. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be a disease, the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. If there is no God, then much of my life had been nonsense, and I should, surely, have felt more upset. But then, God had never been a real presence to me.”
I suppose in every faith there are zealots who fail to graciously represent God. While their motives may be pure, the damage they inflict is grievous.
Today she has returned to a faith of sorts. She's certainly not a traditional Christian. But she is thoroughly familiar with the sophisticated theological distinctions between Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox theologians. And her openness to learning from Hinduism and Islam is enriching even for those of us who are relentless in our Christian orientation.
Thanks to Lisa Diller for the review.
David A. Pendleton
Thanks for all the great information on Karen Armstrong, folks! i started reading her _history of God_ early on in grad school, realized I wasn't ready for it spiritually or maybe even intellectually, and put it aside for a few years.
Since then I have read (and assigned) her books on Muhammad and Islam and been blessed by her more recent work. I also received good insights on the shared temperaments of the three monotheistic religions from _history of God_. This book, The Bible, shares some of those insights, only she doesn't explicitly lay out the way Muslims share some of the scripture interpretation challenges and joys with Christians and Jews.
I can feel a softening in Armstrong and the way she articulates the joy of seeking after God inspires me--even if she isn't always the most credible witness regarding that search.
"The only thing worse than changing one's mind, is never changing it.'
Good point, Elaine. However, there is also the old saying:
"If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything."
Either extreme is not desirable.
Thanks...
Frank
I read "The Bible" some time ago have have long been a fan of Karen's for many years. She always opens up new ideas and ways of looking at religion with fresh insights. Her knowledge of religion and its history is astounding. I still have read only part of her tome: "The Great Transformation" which describes the origins of the major faiths between 1600-900 B.C.
From the dust jacket: "We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age (1600-900 B.C.) were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change....the sages [of the Axial Age] gave their people and give us, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action."
Because no religion springs forth untouched by former concepts, we should know from whence our beliefs spring, and our religious ancestry has many varied and deep roots in all the world's religious systems.
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