Pastor Jason’s review of Inspired by Rachel Held Evans is part of our Pastor’s Summer Book Club series. Join with the discussion in the comments below and look for our next book discussion post on July 29th.
There is a kind of naïveté in the pages of Inspired, the final book by Rachel Held Evans. (Evans passed away tragically just last month). She writes with a particular buoyancy – with joy, really – that conjures youthful reminiscence, even when she’s tackling difficult subjects.
I don’t mean that Evans writes with a “childlike faith.” Quite the opposite. It’s clear from her writing that hers was a battle-hardened faith, no longer shaken by simplistic answers to complex questions or simplistic judgements of complex people.
An expert storyteller, Evans recounts her own complex journey of faith, weaving it with the stories of scripture in a way that welcomes our stories too. Like many Christians, Evans’ journey started with the enthusiastic naïveté of childhood; delighting in the tales of giants, floods, and the miracles of Jesus.
But as she grew, she questioned – like all people must. And when she questioned, her pastors and Christian college professors warned her to simply believe. The Bible, she was told, is the Word of God, and not to be questioned.
That didn’t sit well: “How could I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength while disengaging those very faculties every time I read the Bible?” Soon enough, she discovered the biggest problem with reading the Bible naively is that it is subject to those who interpret it: “The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say. You can bend it until it breaks.”
Or until the believer breaks. For Evans, as with many enthusiastic young Christians, that breaking occurred when she discovered how much of the Bible had been used to justify evil:
“Slave traders justified the exploitation of black people by claiming the curse on Noah’s son Ham rendered all Africans subhuman. Many Puritans and pioneers appealed to the stories of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan to support attacks on indigenous populations. More recently, I’ve heard Christians shrug off sins committed by American politicians because King David assaulted women too. Anytime the Bible is used to justify the oppression and exploitation of others, we have strayed far from the God who brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, “out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:2).”
The beauty of Inspired is that it tells this story of liberation for the author and invites readers to join her in that same exodus toward freedom.
And that is not everyone’s story. The journey out of fundamentalism often further enslaves or even breaks people. Boxed-in by the narrow boundaries of strict belief, and facing social rejection from their community, many choose to remain in the naïveté of their childhood Christianity – leaving them stuck spiritually, or worse, vulnerable to abuse. Others, unable to live with the cognitive dissonance required by fundamentalism, experience a shattering of faith, leaving them disillusioned, sometimes traumatized, and nearly always sheltered beneath the cynicism of unrealized ideals.
But Inspired beckons us down a different path with a better destination. For Evans, the breakthrough came partly from realizing that the question wasn’t whether or not the Bible was true, but how it could be true:
“For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We’re all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?”
This turn from the rigid literalism of her youth and toward a more open, critical, and intellectually-honest reading of scripture, paved the way for Evans to experience what philosopher Paul Riccoer called the “second naivete.” We accept the diversity of voices and perspectives reflected in scripture as good. We embrace its cultural influences, the subjectivity of reading, and the vulnerability of the words themselves as part of the divine design. We enter the tension of the biblical discourse without trying to resolve it. Then, in faith, we allow all that tension and complexity to speak into the brokenness and possibilities of our current lives, relationships, and societal challenges.
In this way, we leave behind a less mature relationship with scripture-as-monologue and enter into a more mature dialogue with the authors of the Bible and the divine presence they reveal – a conversation between them and us, between the ancient community of the biblical tradition and our own modern communities as evolving iterations of that same tradition. The Bible then ceases to be an authoritarian dictator and becomes, paradoxically, more authoritative, more alive, and more true.
Yes, more true. The Bible can be more true than literally true. Evans puts it this way:
“Author Neil Gaiman often noted, quoting G.K. Chesterton: “Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” […] This is what scripture taught me: that a boat full of animals can survive a catastrophic flood, that seas can be parted and lions tamed, that girls can be prophets and warriors and queens, that a kids lunch of fish and bread can be multiplied to feed five thousand people.”
Imagine what could be possible in our world if we truly believed, perhaps naively, that dragons could still be beaten.
Rachel Held Evans was an enormously gifted, inspiring, and impactful thinker, speaker, and writer for a great many people on this journey…myself included. But in this, the final chapter of her writing, I can think of no better witness for the Church moving forward than the one she offers in these pages. Like the author herself, Inspired is a gift and a treasure to the 21st century Church. I highly recommend it.