I read a lot of books, some of which are actually good. Lately, I read a book that was titled Good Book, which I took as a good sign. Had it been titled something like Smelly and Awful Book, I might not have picked it up. The subtitle to this one is “The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible,” and that is also a good description of what can be found here. The author, David Plotz, describes himself as someone who believes in God, “but only in a please-please-please-desperation-prayer kind of way.” Coming from a place where he freely admits a lack of knowledge and understanding of the Bible, this book represents Plotz's attempt to read it as someone who may be seeing it for the first time.

The interactions he has with the Old Testament scriptures are pretty funny, and there is too much good material to share here, but here's a summary:  God is a bit flighty, inconsistent, cruel, childish, kind, enigmatic, distant, and too close. Women are almost always portrayed as prostitutes of some sort. Family life and various laws are often poorly defined and not well-followed. People are not very nice. Various writers are obviously glossing things over.  Genocide is often given a free pass. In short, he thinks that the Old Testament, as scriptures go, is “messy.” Plotz likes a “messy” Bible, as opposed to a “vanilla-pudding version I was fed by Sunday school teachers and the popular culture.” However, a lot of readers may be put off by the fact that, instead of telling us that finally reading the Bible has changed his life and helped him make sense of his religion, he instead seems to come away with a sense that his resistance to God is more justified and he has grown in that he is now engaged in debate with God. As he puts it,

“I came to the Bible hoping to be inspired and awed. I have been, sometimes. But mostly I've ended up in a yearlong argument with my boss. This argument as weakened my faith and turned me against my God. Yet the argument itself represents a kind of belief, because it commits me to engaging with God. I don't have the luxury that the Christians do of writing off all the evil parts of the Old Testament....”

The only real problem that I have with Plotz is that, like everyone, he has parts of the scripture that he emphasizes over others. Thus, one of my favorite passages, Micah 6, is given less than a sentence of commentary. Beyond that, I think that it's both entertaining and constructive to see David Plotz wrestle with the scriptures, and even though he shares some of the hard-won truths that agnostics hold for other people of faith -- which are so hard for us to hear --they are good ones. Moreover, Plotz comes away from his experience with a firm conviction: “I'm actually shocked that students aren't compelled to read huge chunks of the Bible in high school and college, the way they must read Shakespeare... How else can they become literate in their own world?” So, Good Book is a very good book. It entertains, amuses, and disturbs people. It raises some troubling questions and causes readers to reevaluate some things that they might take for granted. Hard to be much better than that!

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment