Essay #8: My Shakespearean Bible

How I Read Scripture

I read the Bible differently than do other Christian believers.

This has been repeatedly brought to my attention by online followers both friendly and not. They often complain that I do not read the text literally, or that my reading contradicts some cherished orthodoxy of their church. Recently, some were unhappy to hear that my ideas on evolution clash with the Genesis timeline. Before that, I was hate-swarmed by antisemites on X after I used scripture to show that non-believers can be redeemed by serving Jesus unawares. The antisemites were concerned they might meet Jews in heaven. Personally, I don’t think that’s going to be their problem.

To be clear, I don’t read scripture in a freewheeling way. I obey the Deuteronomic warning not to add or subtract anything. I believe the Bible is holy writ: the story of God’s unfolding revelation of himself to a people and, through them, to us all. I respect tradition and orthodoxy. And I rely on the wisdom of far greater experts than myself, C. S. Lewis and Joseph Ratzinger among my favorites. Yet it turns out, my approach to the text remains somewhat unusual.

Should this be a problem? Faithful Jews and Christians have frequently disagreed on scripture’s meaning. The first Christians had no official written gospel at all to guide them. Even if they’d wanted to, they could hardly have followed the doctrine of “scripture alone.” Nor could they rely on infallible papal pronouncements. The saints themselves disagreed, often fiercely. Pious readers sometimes try to gloss these arguments over, but they were deep and real.

In truth, I don’t even know what it would look like to read the Bible “literally.” Are the winds kept in storehouses? Was the good Samaritan a real person? When Satan quotes Psalms, do the words still mean what they “literally” mean?

Words are rude tools. No text is absolutely transparent, not even an inspired one. Never mind dishonest readers who twist words to their purposes, or uninformed readers who misunderstand them. Even learned minds with honest faith can read the same passages differently.

When Jesus said of the Passover matzoh, “This is my body,” was he speaking literally or symbolically? When he gave Peter the “keys of the Kingdom,” did that establish a line of succession or was it a unique gift? Did Mary give birth to Jesus’s natural brothers and sisters, or did Jesus trust Mary to John’s care because she had remained a virgin?

If this were some literary work, the uncertain portions would serve as interesting discussion topics. As it is, readers have too often sought to settle their differences with fire and sword.

There’s a reason for their passion. The Bible provides the story believers tell themselves about the unseen world. That story gives meaning to our seemingly random material existence. It sets the journey of life in an eternal context, changes the values of our aspirations and sometimes painfully sets our moral vision against prevailing beliefs. The way we view Mary affects the way we view women and indeed all humanity. Our approach to the communion bread and wine changes our understanding of matter, including our own flesh. Our beliefs can open a path to the unique image of God within each of us. Our attempts to walk that path turn life itself into a story, a play in which the things we do have meanings beyond the moment. Our faith is that those meanings are analogues of spiritual reality, the truth in action.

Imagine you were watching such a play, a truly great play — Hamlet, say. Imagine the actions and words of the characters were bringing your life into clearer view, the experience of the tragedy transforming you so that you might live in a more profound way. Now imagine some idiot bursts into the theater, and starts screaming, “This is a stupid story! Listen to me instead. I will tell you how it should go!” If you tied this heretic to a stake and set him ablaze, no civilized jury on earth would convict you.

Hamlet is very much to the point — because the plays of Shakespeare are the only texts I know that come anywhere near the Bible in revealing the invisible fabric of the real.

The central aspect of Shakespeare’s greatness is his invisibility. All authors play God to some degree. Shakespeare just does it better than the rest. He never appears to us. None of his characters speaks for him. He can be discerned only in the moral universe through which his creations move. When Macbeth decries the meaninglessness of existence, for example, we can’t say it is Shakespeare who believes that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Rather, we suspect that, in Shakespeare’s creation, Macbeth has severed himself from meaning by willfully embracing evil. So it is with all Shakespeare’s characters. We must deduce their creator’s intentions through their words and deeds, and the ends to which their choices lead. And we can never be absolutely certain we understand the creator and his creation rightly.

That is exactly how it is with life, too. So that is how I read the Bible.

I believe that the writers of scripture are inspired. But they are not magical. They are humans — created characters — with personalities and flaws. They report what they see as they understand it, and each of them sees things differently. If this were not so, we would not need four different versions of the gospels, versions that contain different events, different understandings of the events, and even — no matter what the pious claim — some irreconcilable conflicts. Well, of course. If four different people gave you exactly the same report of what they saw, you would know they had conspired to lie.

Saint Paul is a theological genius, but a man, too, for all that. He is given to moments of choler. He calls St. Peter a hypocrite. He wishes Judaizers would be castrated. He acts in the world of his moment. Frustrated with goings on in the churches, he gives some marching orders meant to ensure believers don’t ruin Christ’s reputation through their bad behavior. His disagreements with the other saints aren’t always matters of right and wrong. They emerge from a realistic Christianity that contains interpretive tensions, tensions that can only be resolved through living the faith.

I believe that flawed humanity and point-of-view are traits shared by all the inspired writers of scripture, as they are shared by all Shakespeare’s characters and all people. So to quote every biblical sentence as “the word of God,” is to miss the most salient difference between Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible. That is, in the Bible, the author does not remain invisible forever. He actually walks on stage and becomes a character in the drama.

What happens then is predictable but shocking. The author of the story teaches us how to read the text.

Did you think the rules for divorce were God’s immutable law? No, Moses just gave you those because he knew you were hard-hearted. Isn’t the holiness of the Sabbath one of the Ten Commandments? Yes, but it was made to serve the good of man, not the other way around. But surely, we can still stone an adulteress, right? After all, it’s the “word of God.” Yes, but there’s a transformative catch. It turns out that every line of scripture hangs on love of God and neighbor. If it leads you elsewhere — to hatred and cruelty, say — then it isn’t being understood as it was meant to be.

As both the author and the lead character of the biblical play, Jesus provides us a new way of reading, by the spirit not the letter, “mindful of the things of God,” rather than the things of men. He does this work during his natural life, and on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, and through the Paraclete after his ascension. He is doing it still today. The play of life is still unfolding onstage. So is our understanding of scripture.

The pages of the Bible are not blank. The Word cannot mean whatever we want or be twisted to serve the fancy of the times and our own desires. But if my biblical understanding seems unstable and vulnerable to error, I maintain that that is better than it being vulnerable to error yet written in stone. Mindful of the wisdom of tradition, the learning of the learned, and the guiding power of orthodoxy, I also remain open to the teaching of experience, nature, and art. They show me that the wild and glorious theater of God’s creation is more innovative, varied, tragic and hilarious than stern piety wishes it would be. All we know for certain is that the drama is meant to lead us to love then greater love, until our revels are ended and all our palaces and temples, and even the great globe itself, are melted into air.