I’ve never thought of myself as an adventurous type. Books have always been my preferred method of exploration. When I was a young reader, I set out for fantasy lands like Narnia and traveled through time on a covered wagon with Laura Ingalls, but I also took up the predictable comforts of Nancy Drew’s River Heights, where mysteries all have tidy explanations. In time, my high school English teachers opened doors that allowed me to journey wider and deeper. I began especially to appreciate those books which asked something of me as a reader. I suppose if I were forced to give a definition of great literature I would offer that. Great literature doesn’t hand us meaning neatly tied in a bow but instead involves us, drawing us in to participate as we connect the dots of meaning that have emerged intentionally through the author’s effort and unintentionally through the creative spark of language. When I find a writer I can trust—not trust to tell me what I want to hear but trust to realize her own artistic intentions well—then I love nothing more than puzzling over what I read. If something doesn’t make sense or seems to stand out or asks questions I cannot yet answer, my whole self becomes engaged and excited. Reading a well-written book is like a deep sea dive, a treasure hunt, an epic journey, a telescope pointed at distant stars. It thrills me.
I was never invited to read the Bible in this way. Were you? For many years, I did not even know it was possible. I was raised in a church that honored the Bible and emphasized Bible teaching, but somehow this environment communicated to me that my elders had already extracted the core meaning of the Bible’s message. This message was the gospel, and I didn’t need a Bible to engage with it. I could find it condensed and accessible in paper tracts with only a few words and simple sketches. I could encounter it through wordless books (perhaps you also remember those books given to children? They told the salvation story with symbolic colors like red for the cross and gold for heaven and had no words at all). Or, I could hold the Bible’s substance in my hands when I read my church’s belief statement on the back page of our Sunday leaflet. Any sense that our Scriptures were strange and strangely alive and might offer depths of wisdom was unknown to me. By the time I was an adolescent my reading of good books and my reading of the Bible had diverged to follow two very different paths. Reading literature was like going on a quest across the sea. Reading my Bible was like holding a goldfish bowl in my hands.
While I was encouraged to meditate on Scripture by the faithful Christians in my life, somehow I assumed this meditation would never invite theological questioning or deep thinking. It must be a “quiet time” in every sense of that phrase. Nothing I read should disturb the smooth surface of my theological commitments. I have a vivid memory of a thought that once bubbled up in my teenage mind: I know what Christianity is all about, but I don’t really understand what most of what Jesus said and did has to do with Christianity. Why did he talk about the kingdom of heaven so much, and we only talk about salvation? I wish I had voiced this question out loud, but my personal bent has always been to assume that confusion or uncertainty are my fault, and that if I simply persist, I will one day understand what those around me already understand. And so, while I read the Bible dutifully in the early years of my life, and while I read it to hear the voice of God in the middle years of my life (and so often did!), I have only recently begun to read it in the same way I read all great literature: like this book is an endless sea, and no matter how deep I swim there is more and more and more and all of it connects.
One of the things I have discovered over all my years of reading is that great books offer up layers of meaning. I do not mean that great books can be interpreted in multiple ways though there is some truth to that. Rather, literature invites us inside a complex world of significance. A single word can send us off in a dozen different directions which is why the best books give us more to ponder each time we read them. When we read, we discover meaning through the straightforward definition of words but also by chasing allusions, studying symbols and literary forms, or simply by allowing sounds and rhythms to wash over us and carry our hearts and minds to new places. To read a good book is to step into a world where everything pulses with significance.
The Bible is like this, but the implications are far greater—for our own lives, for the church, and for the world we live in. In his wonderful book on the “art of spiritual reading,” Eugene Peterson writes this:
"The Holy Scriptures are story-shaped. Reality is story-shaped. The world is story-shaped. Our lives are story-shaped. ‘I had always,’ wrote GK Chesterton in accounting for his Christian belief, ‘felt life first as a story, and if there is a story, there is a story-teller.’ We enter this story, following the story-making, storytelling Jesus, and spend the rest of our lives exploring the amazing and exquisite details, the words and sentences that go into the making of the story of our creation, salvation, and life of blessing. It is a story chock full of invisibles and intricate with connections. Imagination is required."
I read the Bible for years, but now I am reading with imagination. Reading in this way, to borrow words from CS Lewis, I have been “surprised by joy.”
Whether or not you love books as I do, I believe this joy is possible for you, too. I believe this because unlike most other books, we do not read the Bible alone. We read Scripture from within a community, and we read Scripture as a community. Together we read Scripture aloud, we hear the Word preached, we pray and we sing from our sacred book. We receive the teaching of the church across the centuries, and we receive the teaching of our own leaders in a Christian Formation class. We bring our questions to others (Alpha will soon begin again!), and we gather in small groups and attend Bible studies. Most of all, we dive deep in regular reading not in order to see the Bible better, but to see the One whose life—in all its goodness and beauty—is revealed in its depths.
