To my mind, there is a basic negative assumption that crops up in conversation after conversation. The assumption is basically this: the Bible is boring. Recently, this basic assumption or credo has cropped up in three varied forms:
1. The Bible is unreliable and boring. This assumption cropped up in a conversation I had very recently. The conversation veered around to the Book of Mormon (of all things) and I happened to mention its general and pervasive unreliability as an historical text. In response my friend insisted that the Bible is as full of inaccurate and skewed historical information as any other book. Who was I to say the Book of Mormon was inaccurate? The Bible is just as unreliable. And anyway, it’s much better to rely on what science can tell us, she went on, because only it can offer us an accurate account of the origins of the universe. I challenged her by mentioning a few more (proven) inconsistencies in the Mormon text book and then underlined the fact that science and Christian faith are not incompatible. Science in no way discredits Biblical truth, I insisted. She wasn’t convinced. But she didn’t argue with me. Instead, she simply insisted that the Bible is a boring book anyway, as if this was a crucial and decisive observation that somehow settled the debate. This uninformed assumption about the Bible seemed to be her trump-card, a kind of unassailably reasonable assertion that could not be contradicted. She was convinced that the Bible is boring and because the Bible is boring it is discredited and worse than useless. As far as she was concerned, this observation settled our short debate.
2. A second assumption that has cropped up over the past months in conversation is that the Bible is a barbarous and unenlightened book. Furthermore (you guessed it), it’s boring. An acquaintance of mine (who has probably read a minute portion of Scripture) is more or less convinced that the Bible presents only a grumpy, vindictive deity who is utterly passé in our present age of scientific sophistication. Basically the Bible is laughably out of touch with the way things really are but above all, it’s boring.
3. The third and last assumption I have encountered in recent conversation is the following: the Bible is a refuge for intellectually stunted evangelicals who can’t understand Jesus properly and can’t stomach any kind of thrilling literary and philosophical discourse whatsoever. Only fundamentalists accept the assertions of Scripture as true and trustworthy statements about God. Because Bible-believing Christians are generally hollow, intellectually anaemic and above all, boring creatures, they require a boring scripture with no unexpected turns and no shocking dénouement. The boring Bible is for boring Christians.
These are three instances which reflect different attitudes but underlying them all is that bastion of respectable, modern prejudice: the Bible is a boring book. Amongst the second-hand and blindly borrowed criticisms that the bible is scientifically outdated, presents a morally questionable deity and it is only read and believed by intellectually weak (and/or religiously intense) people, the assumption that the Bible is a boring book underlines them all.
The assumption that the Bible is a boring book is an old and time-worn prejudice. It’s crops up again and again. By way of response to an unbelieving culture at large, before we go about demonstrating the historical veracity of the Bible, its truthfulness, its perspicuity and general reliability, I think the first port of call is to disabuse people of this persistent (uninformed) prejudice that the Bible is a boring book.
In fact, before we even begin to mount all those minute and sophisticated arguments for the intellectual credibility of the Bible and the nature of the God it presents to us, we should instead make much of the lush, unexpected, oceanic, nuanced, layered, grotesque, sublime, symphonic, polyphonic, untidy, multi-genre, heaving library that is the Biblical narrative.
Before we press home the historical reliability and accuracy of Scripture, there has got to be a case for emphasising its mesmerising aesthetic quality, its literary richness and the accompanying undulations of plot; in other words, the epic and shocking beauty, the sheer polyphonic assault that is Scripture. We may thereby assist people in shedding that age-old (and it is getting old) myth of the monochrome Bible.
The Bible is not a monochrome book.
It’s more a glimmering polychrome with flashing lights.
It’s more Gothic than Romanesque.
It’s more a multi-textured, lumpy tapestry than minimalist steel.
Think bleary, loud Technicolor. Not black-and-white.
Call it anything but boring.
The Bible is not a boring book.
To those who will yet insist on capping off any conversation about the Bible with the insistence that it is boring, I can only respond with the chanted words which moved Saint Augustine to open the Bible for himself: tolle lege. Take up and read. Take up that rumbling, uncomfortably vast and heart-stoppingly dramatic Book and actually read it.
As you become ever more aware that the borrowed assumptions of the pundits and nay-sayers regarding the unreliability and/or barbarity of the Bible are wearing thin and you are about to flee into the bastion of comfortable and unexamined prejudice (“ah well, the Bible is a boring book anyway”), pick it up and actually read it first.
Yours,
The Scribbling Apprentice
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