David Bentley Hart has pointed out that if you begin with the Calvinist ideas of a wrathful god and penal substitutionary atonement, you are going to end up with a mindset which is capable of doing the acts of torture and violence we sadly see in Christian history. But if you begin with what the New Testament actually teaches from a historical and scholarly point of view, then you will avoid all the problems that has occurred in Christian history.
Practical Christianity as I present it examines the New Testament through first, the academic and scholarly lens of historical analysis. My secondary lenses through reading the New Testament and interpreted of is what I call PEEL: the Progressively Evolving Ethical Lens. In short it is the view that the Bible is a museum of historical communities evolving a shared ethic in their letters, epistles and gospels, that became overtime their scripture. This New Ethic was expressed through parables, through stories, rituals, etc. Each different community in the Hebrew Bible kept progressing evolutionarily through their differing subcultures and culturally filtered unique insights, as they modified the Mosaic Law (in their stories of their ancestors) toward creating the modern ethic we value today.
The New Testament can be seen as an artistic creation based on a retelling or a figural reading of the underlying communal themes and growing ethic in the Hebrew Bible, and even in the New Testament documents undergo an evolutionary ethical progression. Looking at the Bible through this lens frees one from the atheistic criticisms of contradictions and crazy stuff. Instead of committing the fallacy of presentism and accusing the Bible of unethical stories and events from a modern ethical framework, the Bible reader instead has a more mature understanding that the very ethics through which they're criticizing the Bible came through the cultural evolution of the Bible itself. Therefore, the Bible becomes a library of documents and not a single how to manual written by one person. It becomes a museum of "transitional fossils" so to speak of the various literary artists who progressively evolved their ethic toward the ethic that most modern Christians follow today.
My PEEL method is informed by books like, The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg, and Dominion by Tom Holland; these authors provide historical scholarship showing a progressively evolving ethic that arises over time within the Hebrew Bible and the Christian texts. What this means for many scholars is that the morality we experience today as civilized citizens developed out of the stories of the Bible itself. So that to make fun of the Bible and disregard it is to judge it from the moral position that you got from the Bible itself.
I also like the acronym PEEL because it infers that the Bible contains many layers and as we peel away the layers we come to an underlying core containting a practical ethical value system; which informs and enforces our modern civility that all mentally healthy, law abiding, civilized, modern people value today.
"Peel" also implies peeling back layers and looking at the different layers through different lenses. For example, most Christians examine the bible through the hermeneutic (that is the lens) of a particular systematic theology and have been influenced by it whether they know it or not. For example most Christians are interpreting the Bible through the lens of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin and others. What allowed me to progress away from atheism was being introduced to different lenses other than the Evangelical and Catholic filters mired in Fundamentalism.
For example, when I examined the Bible, the New Testament in particular, through the lens of psychology and psychiatry for example (through the work of Jordan Peterson and Timothy R. Jennings MD) I began to see clearly how much more healthy Christian belief is than philosophical-pessimism, nihilism, and negative forms of atheism. I also begin to see that Christianity has a lot more to offer than I formally realized when I looked at the stories, symbols and metaphors through the lens of psychology and psychiatry.
The work of Michael Hardin and Water Wink, who take an anthropological and literary look at the Bible, also provided a greater understanding and appreciation of the satan figure as a metaphor.
When I discovered the book Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola, I began to look at the New Testament through the lens of the original organic church of the 1st century. This was followed by the work of Brian McLaren who in his book A New Kind of Christianity, does a good job of removing the institutional church traditions and instead reading the bible forward from the Old Testament writers to Jesus rather than reading it backward from the lens of Augustine and Calvin back to Jesus to Moses.
Then I discovered John Spong book, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel, and I begin to look at the Bible through the lens of creativity, as an emergemt phenomenon, and as artistic literary expressions of a real Christ-experience. This led me a greater appreciation of metaphor and midrash (or figure reading), and personification, etc.
I realized that there was a whole body of scientific and scholarly work that rejects Christian Fundamentalism and Christian dominionism. I realized that there were many rational science-based Christians presenting a Christianity for the 21st century.
The PEEL method is also matches with with the following interpretive methodologies:
The NT as Psychological Memeplex Lens:
> Jordan Peterson's jungian interpretive lens:
See his biblical lectures and his Maps of Meaning which mirror Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. In his 2018 discussion with Susan Blackmore (the Buddhist) on Premier Christian Radio, Peterson discusses how Christianity can be seen as memes (or I'd call a memeplex) which may have co-evolved with our biology (Meme-Gene Coevolution).
The NT through a Thematic Lens:
The thematic lens looks at the gospels as a form of theater. I am aware of scholars who have argued that the gospels were actually presented as theatrical plays for the stage. I have not researched it and do not know how valid this theory is. However, most scholars do think that the gospels are full of allegory and thematic elements. From this angle, we can view the gospels similar to the Rocky movies. I have written about the Rocky movies on this blog and their power to motivate and instill a will to overcome challenges with courage and integrity. One can make a similar argument for the Gospels.
The NT through a Scholarly Lens:
The advantage of the scholarly lens is that it avoids theological agendas and Fundamentalist distortions of the text. Bible fundamentalists often have a problem with scholarship but it is ironic that they focus their disdain toward biblical scholarship but don't seem to have a problem with say scholars of The Iliad or Odyssey or Shakespeare. In other words, the methods that objective scholars use in analyzing the New Testament are the same methods used to analyze every other religious book or mythology or religion. Hence the scholarly method or lens of interpreting the New Testament is far better in coming to an objective realization of the original meaning and intent than the more theological and creedal driven methods.
Some scholarly groups I recommend are:
> The Westar Institute
> the Society of biblical literature (SBL)
> Bible Odyssey (connected with SBL)
> Scholars Annotated New Testament NSRV
The NT through a Practical Results Lens:
> Paul Penley's Reenactment Model:
See his excellent book, Reenacting the Way (of Jesus).
> Michael Hardin's Anthropological Lens and Girardian mimesis Lens
The Theosis Lens:
The anti-human emphasis on depravity and being a filthy rag and wretched in Calvinist Christian circles is a certain lens through which to view the gospel and being human, which is miles apart from the Greek Orthodox Tradition and the concept of Theosis. It has been through reading and listening to David Bentley Hart, that I have begun to see that there is a more empowering pro-Humanity message in the New Testament which is about the divinization of human beings. I believe this interpretive Lens is more in tune with the original New Testament, and I think the Augustinian / Lutheran lens is a distortion.
The NT through the lens of a Loving God-concept and a more Rational and Humane Atonement Theory:
For example, if you begin with the point of view of David Bentley Hart in his book That All May be Saved, or Rob Bell's book Love Wins, and A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel by Bradley Jersak, and the atonement theories presented by these authors (as well as the Girardian theory of atonement, for example see the article, Redeeming the Atonement: Girardian Theory by Michelle Kailey), you are going to end up with a totally different way of seeing the New Testament and God.
Dr. Timothy Jennings also has a more humane atonement theory and God-concept and he argues in a YouTube video titled, How your view of Hell impacts your Brain, that your God-concept can actually impact your neurology, so for example the calvinist god of wrath and the inhumane threat of Eternal torture can actually damage the brain and cause ongoing psychological trauma and weaken the mind and body.
The NT as More Metaphorical than Literal History:
> Marcus Borg
> Brian McLaren reading backwards and his chart matrix in We Make the Road by Walking. As he wrires:
Many people think there are only two ways to read the Bible: their way and the wrong way. But there are many approaches to the Bible, as this matrix shows. The vertical axis goes from innocent (where we ask few questions about the text) through critical (where all questions are allowed) to integral (where we seek to see the text as a whole again, in a post-critical way, after having analyzed it during the critical stage). The horizontal axis spans literal (where the text is read for facts only) to literary (where the text is read for meaning). I describe this matrix in more detail in my book The Great Spiritual Migration, Chapter 6.
The NT as Midrash / Artistic Retelling of the Hebrew Scriptures:
> See Richard Hayes on figural reading
> John Spong on midrash
> John Crossan on fictional-parabolic reading (and the Gospels as "megaparables") in his book The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. Crossan distinguishes between factual-historical stories and fictional-parabolic stories in the NT.
The NT As Historical Library Not a Single-Book "How to Manual" for Today:
> See Andrew Perriman's narrative-historical framework
> Sean Mccraney's Subjective Christianity
Bible Translation Lenses:
Finally, what I have come to realize is that Bible translations has become big business for profit. The Bible translation companies know that if they put out a Bible translation that fits the theological agenda of most churches, the members of those churches will be more more likely to buy those Bibles. I've come to realize that I do not trust most Bible translations anymore. I recommend Bible translations at this blog post here. Suffice to say, the Bible translation you are reading and using has a huge impact on the conclusions you come to.
Conclusion
What I have realized is that when I adopted the "Let's debunk the Bible" Lens I always found something to complain about or criticize. But whenever I looked through the lens of the above methods, whether historical, metaphorical or anthropological lenses, or any of the others, the Bible took on a new depth of meaning and value. And I realized that the debunking the Bible lens is mostly the fallacy of presentisim. And that if I read the Bible forward As McLaren puts it or figuratively as Hayes put it and read the Bible in it's cultural context and judge and compare the bible's cultural developments ethically with its pagan competitors in that day (not judging from a modern perspective), and looked at it's cultural development from the first book to the last book of the Bible that was written, I began to see the it is an incredibly powerful book documenting our moral cultural development. When examined through a progressive enlightenment point of view and seeimg it's historical anthropologocal development in humaneness I can't help but deeply appreciate the Bible.
Meanwhile, I found that re-enacting the way of Jesus has profound practical value. I find the stories and parables enlightening and inspiring. I find that my life has more meaning and purpose and a direction. I'm able to name and label evil and fight for a just cause and the good ideal. I'm not lost in nihilism and moral relativism like with atheism. I have a firm foundation and a standard. I can appeal to principles and ideals and align with those who share those with me to become a more powerful unified team toward greater health, wealth and happiness.
Meanwhile, I found that re-enacting the way of Jesus has profound practical value. I find the stories and parables enlightening and inspiring. I find that my life has more meaning and purpose and a direction. I'm able to name and label evil and fight for a just cause and the good ideal. I'm not lost in nihilism and moral relativism like with atheism. I have a firm foundation and a standard. I can appeal to principles and ideals and align with those who share those with me to become a more powerful unified team toward greater health, wealth and happiness.
