Monday, February 18, 2013

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time

I learned about the Bible in what a large swath of Christianity regards as the most apostate way possible: in the classrooms of a public university. The circumstances were that I had what the Evangelicals call a conversion experience (Episcopalians don't have a native word for it, regrettably) when I was 20. Among the first things I realized was that I didn't know anything about the Bible.

So to fix that, during my junior year at Indiana University I decided to pick up a Religious Studies minor. I took classes on the Old Testament, New Testament, the thought of St. Paul, the history of American Christianity, and because getting the minor required a course on non-Western religions, I took a class on Confucianism and Taoism, most of which I have forgotten aside from reading an improbably number of texts involving ingesting cinnabar (That sounds like candy, by the way, but it's not. It's mercury ore. Apparently a lot of these people died untimely deaths).

The experience was thrilling. My headlong rush into the Bible took me straight into the realms of textual criticism, taking apart Paul's letters for clues to early Christian liturgy, understanding the different audiences the Gospel writers were addressing, and learning that there were three accounts of creation (one of which involves tearing a sea monster in half - bet you didn't know about that one). All this came as a shock to my more fundamentalist classmates, who had taken these classes only to be blasphemed to on a daily basis. But the more I learned about how these texts came to be, the more I learned about how the original Christians wrestled with the question of who Jesus was and what he meant, the more I found company for my maturing faith (this had its limits: there was a class where we discussed the Jesus Seminar, whose mission may be well-intentioned but I think is futile and silly). I developed a particular affinity for St. Paul, who like me had a sudden conversion, who remained a plainly flawed individual post-conversion (more so than he would admit, I'm sure), but could also write inspiringly and movingly about the love of God.

I came out the other side of my state-school Biblical education knowing the Bible backward and forward, with a particularly astute knowledge of Paul's letters and Gospels. I have now let that skill atrophy for about 15 years.
Aside from the hit or miss periods when I read the Daily Office, I haven't read the Bible systematically for a good long while. The last time I meant to was when I wound up in the hospital for a few days with a broken ankle when I was 27, but it turns out, weirdly, that large quantities of morphine are not conducive to a careful study of Matthew.

So I'm excited that the Diocese of Indianapolis is launching the Bible Challenge today. The plan is to read the entire Bible in one year. I'm particularly excited because while in the course of my education at IU I read the New Testament multiple times, I've read most, but not all, of the old. I realize part of the reason for that is that IU didn't see the point in making me read both Chronicles and Kings; I won't be so lucky this time.

I'm not going to promise much: reading the Bible is challenging enough without committing to write daily about it, but I'm going to endeavor to say something, at least every now and then. So, onward!

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