The Crude and the Eloquent
By Andrew Goins
Watauga County
The Bible is a stage crammed with complex characters whose actions are motivated by desires and dreams, hopes and hurts expectations, and miscommunications. The Bible is a stage stuffed with stories that are coarse and crude, eloquent and beautiful.
Abraham, motivated by paralyzing fear, gave his wife away to another man to save his own skin—twice. Laughing Sarah exiles Hagar out of cruel jealousy for her husband’s attention, affection, and heart. Jacob and Esau scramble and tussle to earn their father’s favor; the actions of both brothers drip with the desire to hear Isaac say “My son, I am proud of you, I love you.” Potipher’s wife, driven mad with frustrated desire, has Joseph wrongfully condemned “to the pit”. And all this takes place in the bible’s first book.
The Bible sets the table, inviting us to inhabit the world we live in. The Bible is a bad host; it does not sweep the dirt under the rug or stuff the clutter into the closet. It tells the dirty truth about living life on earth: murder, rape, fear, political injustice, national tension, racism and prejudice.
The Bible is earthy and “dirty” but the Bible also reveals the stuff of heaven, the stuff we long to be true yet cannot prove to be true; the stuff we cannot taste, touch, or feel; the stuff we cannot comprehend through reason or logic; the stuff that we can only apprehend through metaphor and myth, through legend and imagination.
C.S. Lewis writes “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history…by becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”
The Bible uses the vehicle of myth to subvert our expectations, confound our cynicism, and communicate what could have never been predicted—God assuming 46 chromosomes and ignorance, wrapping himself in an amniotic sac and flesh, suffering hunger and “middle school”, receiving splinters and mothering lectures, stubbing his big toe and hitting his funny bone. All of this is the stuff of myth, the stuff of legend, and the stuff that descends from heaven and unfolds in history as fact.
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For too long the church has attempted to tidy up the bible, sweeping the dust under the rug and stuffing the clutter into the closet. This is partly because we don’t know what to do with the “dirty stuff”. Is Samson a good guy or a bad guy? Is Solomon a good guy or a bad guy? Samson and Solomon are easy compared to addressing Israel’s slavery and attempted genocide. Here is the problem that arises when we fail to address these parts of the bible: when we mute the bible’s complex and crude stories we inevitably mute the bible’s myth that materializes in Jesus Christ, and therefore mute the breadth of redemption. We must hold together the crude stories with the eloquent myth so that we can know the breadth of God’s redemption through Jesus Christ.
Historically, the church has used the clearer parts of scripture to interpret the more opaque (hazy) parts of scripture. The gospels (which tell the gospel) are considered to be the most clear parts of scripture; they tell the story of Jesus, who is the bible’s living center, the Word of God incarnate. For example, how do we use the gospel to interpret God’s one-time command to commit genocide?
It is not simple. We must know that these crude stories are complex. We must read, teach, and preach these stories in a way that acknowledges their complexity. If we don’t, we run the terrible risk of oversimplification which is often disguised as sophistication. Remember, God will speak in these stories, not because of your sophisticated bible-reading or ingenious interpretation, but through the power of his Spirit. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:9-10 “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”—the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.” Neither common sense nor brilliance is sufficient to understand these stories. We need the Spirit of God to illuminate and reveal the story’s substance, and content. When we know that God will speak, despite our brilliance, we can say “I don’t know…but look to Jesus!”
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Andrew Goins is on staff for a campus ministry at Appalachian State University called Ratio Christi. He also works as a youth leader and worship leader at Arbor Dale Presbyterian Church in Banner Elk.
Andrew is committed to simply and thoroughly loving his wife Bethany, growing in his bible nerdiness, delighting in good books (theology, poetry, and select fiction), music, photography, creation, and in gathering people together for bible studies, a shared meal, or making music.
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