What Is the Bible?

How fitting that toward the start of National Bible Week in the US last November, a new book by pastor, author, and public speaker Rob Bell should hit bookshelves and Kindles, urging people to read the Bible in a new way—honoring, respecting, learning from, and enjoying its hidden depths and enduring truths.

The full title is What Is the Bible?—How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything (HarperOne, 2017), with quotations from the New International Version.

With Bell-like clarity (and not-so-subtle mischief at times) he makes a strong case for the Bible’s lasting authenticity and significance in our lives today.

He builds on his customary foundations—zippy one-liners, and “look what I found!” delight—asking questions as freely and frequently as two-year-olds who have gone beyond their toes to the discovery of words.

Bell opens with a question on the front cover, and then averages about three questions a page. At one point he crowds eighteen questions onto two facing pages—but somehow manages to answer every question in the book by his closing on page 322!

Samples: Why should we bother with such an ancient book? Isn't it all myths and fairy tales? What about all that violence? And the contradictions? Isn't it dangerous to take it seriously? Isn't it only for Christians? Can it help us? Etc.

Bell answers such questions succinctly and with extraordinary patience: “This is a book about a library of books dealing with loss and anger and transcendence and worry and empire and money and fear and stress and joy and doubt and grace and healing, and who doesn’t want to talk about those?”

He answers many of the most persistent questions with characteristic simplicity.

What is shalom?

The Hebrew word for peace, wholeness, health, and blessing—the harmony God intends for the world. Shalom is how God wants things to be. … peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with the earth, with God.

What is sin?

Sin is culpable disturbance of shalom.
Bell answers a whole bunch questions by listing four pages of books about the Bible by other authors that he suggests will “blow your mind.”

He also guides us gently into self examination as a way of learning and revelation.

Why did people find it important to tell this story? What was it that moved them to record these words? 

What was happening in the world at that time?

What does this passage/story/poem/verse/book tell us about how people understood who they were and who God was at that time?

And then, What’s the story that's unfolding here, and why did these people think it was a story worth telling?

Bell has an easy knack of clarifying the purpose behind Jesus’ parables, as, for example, in his retelling of the “gut-wrenching” tale of two sons who have much to learn about forgiveness and a true sense of home. One has left and realized what he’s missing. The other hasn’t left and doesn't seem to understand what he’s had all along.

Bell describes this as a story about exile, about all of the ways we wander from the love that's been ours, looking for our worth and value in all sorts of things and people when we’ve been a child of a loving father the whole time (see Luke 15:11-32).

Similarly, with Jacob, in Genesis 32, which Bell describes as a story about a man becoming comfortable in his own skin, owning up to his true self. Time and again we are challenged to ask: What is it that was true about this Bible passage for people at that time that’s also true for us, here and now?

As you might guess, at the sound of the Bell that’s a question we plan to explore daily in this online “neighborhood.”