Turned off by how churches use Bible to hurt people, pastor offers a different way
Book review: ‘Better Ways to Read the Bible: Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing’ by Zach Lambert, ★★★★☆
A new type of American Protestantism could be emerging — and a book by the pastor of one its churches shows both its promises and a potential weakness.
The movement has no name yet, although it might be called something like exvangelical Christianity, for it is made up largely of disaffected evangelicals, making a movement of believers that combines the LGTBQ-accepting nature of mainline Protestantism1 along with the fervor found in many evangelical megachurches. The movement is often found in social media, where believers, often ones sympathetic to liberal views, find value in the teachings of Jesus, whose teachings they find absent in much of evangelicalism, particularly its strain known as Christian nationalism.
The fact that there are believers in Jesus who find little appeal in the culture of the aging mainline churches but find exclusion and even toxicity in evangelical churches is why this strain of Protestantism exists — and why Zach Lambert, pastor of the 1,000-member Restore church of Austin, Texas, wrote his new book: Better Ways to Read the Bible: Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing. Lambert is a lover of the Bible, but for too many Christians, Lambert believes, faulty interpretations of the Bible have come to replace a Jesus Christ who welcomes all people, including those who have been excluded from evangelical churches, to the table.
As the title indicates, Lambert sees the Bible being used too often as an instrument for hurting people, such as by excluding them from the church, condoning emotional and even physical or sexual abuse by church leaders, tolerating or promoting homophobia, and, more generally, failing to show the kind of love that Jesus exemplified. And while many who lose or deconstruct their faith come to reject the Bible, Lambert believes that better ways of understanding the Bible can offer the kind of abundant or full life that Jesus promised2.
Coming in under 200 pages not counting footnotes, Lambert‘s book is a quick read, structured by chapters on what he sees as four harmful ways of reading the Bible followed four healthy ways. He selected the problem areas based in part on his personal experience:
At the megachurch where I worked, I often saw the Bible weaponized to justify bad behavior by staff members, cover up abuse, promote conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ folks, and much more. These incidents left me shaken and jaded, unsure if I could continue a career in ministry. After two years of watching pastors use the Bible to inflict harm on the very people they were supposed to be caring for, I knew I couldn’t be a part of it anymore. Without a clue as to what I would do next, I walked into my boss’s office and told him I was done.
I was at a crossroads. I still wanted to follow the radical, revolutionary Jesus, but he was nowhere to be found in so much of the Christianity around me. ...
A major reason people are avoiding the Bible is because they have experienced it not as a good book but rather as a weapon to shame and scold, judge and condemn, marginalize and oppress.
The eight lenses: four hurtful, four healing
Lambert calls the problematic ways of reading the Bible the lenses that are used in interpretation. The four lenses he critiques are the literalism lens, which, among other things, assumes that Biblical stories regarding history and science should be understood fully literally, a practice that can hide the spiritual truths in the text; the apocalyptic lens, which can be used to justify war and violence as well as unnecessarily frighten believers; the moralism lens, which can be used to punish and shame people, blocking them from giving or experiencing love; and the hierarchy lens, historically used to justify slavery but used more recently to keep marginalized people, including women, in their place.
Lambert then offers four alternative lenses, but it is clear which lens he sees as most important: the Jesus lens, a lens based on the life and teachings of Jesus. Christians have often been called “the people of the book3,” a term Lambert emphatically rejects. “Our faith is not ultimately in a text but in a person,” he writes, saying that Christians don’t believe in the Resurrection because of the Bible, but that the Christian Bible exists because of the Resurrection:
Far too often, we have elevated our preferred biblical interpretation over the work and way of Jesus Christ, and we’ve done so with major consequences. If we don’t shift the way we speak about and live out our faith toward being centered on Jesus, we are destined to see the continued rejection of Christianity in America at even higher rates. ...
Some evangelical leaders assert that people deconstruct so they can sin more freely and feel justified while doing so, because they are being held captive by Satan, or because it’s the “sexy thing to do.” But in my experience, people don’t deconstruct because it’s “sexy” or because they’re looking for excuses to sin. They do it because the Christianity they’ve encountered is so unlike Christ.
Key to Lambert’s understanding is that Jesus wasn’t someone who gave all the answers about how people should behave. According to Lambert’s count, the Gospels tell us that Jesus was asked 183 questions and answered with questions of his own 134 times — and with all those questions he answered only three times. So as Lambert sees it, being Christian or having faith isn’t about having the right answers and checking the right doctrinal and behavioral boxes but by following Jesus and his command to love God and neighbor, which includes our enemies — in other words, to love everyone. So, as Lambert sees it, if we aren’t loving someone because of the way we interpret the Bible, we aren’t interpreting the Bible correctly.
Two of the other lenses Lambert recommends are corollaries: the lenses of flourishing and fruitfulness. So “if the gospel does not bring good news to the spiritually and socially broken, then it is not the good news that Jesus preached,” he writes.
Lambert’s other recommended lens is the lens of context; if we assume that the Bible is endorsing the social constructs in existence when it was written 1,900 or more years ago, we will fail to see the radical ways in which Jesus taught something different.
Where the book may fall short
As much as I appreciated Better Ways and largely agree with it and am happy to recommend it — after all, everyone who reads the Bible does so through lenses of some sort — I couldn’t find it totally satisfying. But that may have more to do with me than with the book.
Lambert isn’t an apologist and wasn’t trying to be one, but maybe I would have appreciated the book more if he had, just a bit. Part of the problem is that the book was a response to what is happening in American Christianity today — where much of the church, especially evangelicalism, has lost its way and seems to focus on idols such as nationalism and the attitude of “we’re right while others are wrong.” The lenses that Lambert proposes are all fine, but he applies them in a way that seems like more of a reaction rather than as perspectives that can stand on their own. His intended audience is people who are already familiar with the Bible, so maybe it’s unfair to ask that he also write to people who don’t know about the Bible, but he never really asks or answers the question of why read the Bible at all?
I’ve read a few critiques of the book from readers far less inclusive than I am, and they seem to think that his Biblical interpretations involve cherry-picking the text to find what he wants. I’m not sure they’re totally wrong, but they too have their own lenses that they’re looking through, even if they won’t admit it.4 But when Lambert suggests that we read the Bible through a lens of flourishing, what precisely do we mean by flourishing? However we define that term will tell us what we get from the Bible; after all, a fundamentalist probably is unable to find flourishing in even the “best” gay relationship, so maybe our framing predetermines our interpretation.
That said, I don’t have a problem with how Lambert’s perspective on what flourishing is. I may be looking for some sort of spiritual or epistemological objectivity that doesn’t exist.
Despite my quibbling here, I have no problem recommending the book to disaffected evangelicals and even those who have become alienated from other types of Christianity: There are better ways to read the Bible than the ways many of us have been raised with, and Lambert’s four are an excellent start. As Lambert suggests, if we’re seeing the Bible as primarily a science book or a history book or a rulebook or even a theology book, we’re missing out on the richness it has to offer.
Among the mainline churches in the United States are the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ.
See John 10:10.
Along with Jews and Muslims.
If, for example, you use Genesis 1:27 (about God creating male and female) to denounce any kind of gender identity other than male or female, but then ignore passages that are accepting or commendatory of eunuchs, you’re cherry-picking the text.