A clergyman, whom I much respected but who is now sadly no longer with us, told me that he had a way of demonstrating that the Bible should never be treated as a textbook containing divinely given and inerrant facts all the way through.   To show this clearly, he would, with a study group, take the first nine chapters of Genesis and analyse them at depth.  A detailed scrutiny of these early Genesis chapters would quickly make any open-minded reader aware of an extensive list of anomalies that appear in the text.  These anomalies are there for all to see but are frequently missed by many readers who want to extract carefully selected sections but not attempt to place them in any sort of context.  Far too many have also adopted the habit of glossing over difficult sections of Scripture which do not easily support the assumption, widely presented in conservative churches, that we have a Bible totally devoid of error.  The questions that arise from taking seriously every verse of Genesis 1-9 are not only the sophisticated ones that can only be answered by a knowledge of Hebrew or years of university study.  No, the difficulties in the text which need some sort of explanation are often simple ones, as, for example, why do we have two versions of the story of Noah.  Why is there, in the text, an abrupt change of name to describe God?  Even in the first few verses of Genesis, there is one major anomaly which gets overlooked by most Christian readers.  I was reminded of this clear problem as it was read in church the other Sunday as part of the creation season.  Our common sense might well ask the question why the light, that God gives to the universe on the first day of creation, is apparently distinct from the light given by the sun and the moon to give light ‘upon the earth’.  These appear only on the fourth day.  A further question that arises for the conscientious reader of the first two chapters is the fact that the Bible contains two distinct creation accounts.  Human beings are created first in the second account in chapter two, while in the version in chapter one we have the creation of humanity right at the end of the creation process on the sixth day.

It would be easy, but perhaps not very profitable, for me to point out to my readers many other passages, even in these early passages of Genesis, that can present real problems to a reader who wants to study and understand the text as we have it in one or other of the many English translations.  Some of the explanations for the anomalies are highly technical while others are very simple.  When God is referred to as Yahweh or the Lord God (Genesis 2) this is material taken from a Hebrew source that used this name, Yahweh, to denote their God.  The sections of Genesis that speak of ’God’ (Genesis 1) are from another earlier tradition that used the name, Elohim, to refer to the supreme deity.  This describing of God using two quite different Hebrew words allows us to conclude that there is more than one source for the Hebrew versions of the creation story.  Needless to say, there is a lot more to say about these two traditions and the way they each understand the character of the divine.  These discussions are contained within countless studies, books, articles and research written by scholars over many decades of detailed study.  Few others will have the time or inclination even to begin to penetrate this material.  The theological training that is provided for clergy of the main denominations in the West should at least have given the clergy an awareness of this literature.  My experience of lay people in the pews over the years of my ministry has found that many are delighted to learn a little of the methods and findings of biblical scholarship.  Many of them are intrigued to learn about Hebrew words that are difficult to translate because their meaning has somehow been lost over the centuries.  They also warm to explanations of historical events which are illuminated by up to date archaeological or historical research.  Many, if not most, lay people are ready to move from the coercive preaching of the past that says, ‘this is what the Bible says’, and ‘this is how you must understand and follow the meaning that I, the preacher, give to it’.   In the Bible there is ambiguity and uncertainty even, but this makes it exciting and intriguing to study and discuss.

In recent years we have found a further reason to wish to wean individuals off an over-literal understanding of Scripture.   Maintaining that there is only one meaning to a verse or chapter means that there will be situations when individual clergy or preachers will claim the authority of the bible to pursue an agenda of their own making.  Thus, they will quote passages from Scripture to subordinate women or persecute homosexuals.  They will also, by never addressing the issue, give the impression that they do not think that there is anything repulsive about genocide, the mass killing of enemies and the rape of the opponents’ womenfolk.  A detailed reading of the Hebrew Bible can also be used to justify a range of other outrageous behaviours with the justification that it is ‘biblical’.  A recent book by Adrian Thatcher explores the theme of an abusive theology and how it is to be found in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.   A theological scholar like him cannot simply pretend that such difficult passages do not exist.  Thatcher’s book, Ending Abusive Theologies, is an attempt to understand what is being said about a God who appears, on occasion, to behave in a fickle, arbitrary and even immoral way.   The task is urgent because, to take but one notorious example, the abusive career of John Smyth was made possible by Smyth’s own distorted understanding of the place of pain and suffering as being part of the Christian route to holiness.  His understanding of the atonement as being a literal event involving divine anger against a child, created a  toxic, even dangerous, form of teaching.  The psychological domination he exerted over his victims was made possible by using the methods of biblical interpretation that he had learnt from those who taught him within the conservative evangelical traditions of the Church of England. 

This incontrovertible fact is that Smyth used Scripture, or his fundamentalist version of Scriptural interpretation, to achieve his dominance over his victims and justify his depraved actions.  This is a point that has never been fully owned up to by the Church.  The question that arises was whether this teaching was ever a legitimate reading of Scripture or whether Smyth was simply misusing the Bible text for his own deviant purposes.  Thatcher’s book takes the straightforward meaning of the biblical text and its insights seriously, so that he can see that actions of God directed at humankind and recorded in the Bible are, in fact, sometimes abusive, violent and cruel.  If we regard the avoidance of harm to individuals as being a core universal principle of ethical behaviour, it can be shown that this standard is not always maintained in the recorded actions of the God of the Bible.  Violence and abusive acts are found throughout Scripture, and some of these are ascribed to God or those claiming to follow him.  Also, rape culture or gender-based violence is commonly encountered in the Old Testament.  It is not surprising if women may find themselves feeing unsafe in a culture that at times appears to glorify misogyny and male dominance.

It is of course possible to want to read Scripture in a way that ignores the toxic and repudiates the violence conducted in God’s name, but this cannot always happen because, as Thatcher puts it, there is ‘excessive veneration of the biblical text in the churches’.  Such veneration makes it difficult for those conservatives wedded to this idea of inerrancy ever to contemplate the notion that some passages, which speak of God commanding abhorrent actions, might in fact be wrong or misguided.  The passage in Isaiah which speaks about the thoughts of God being ‘not your thoughts’ is one that sometimes allows or excuses blatantly cruel and malicious actions perpetrated by human beings because they are believed to represent the inscrutable will of God.  At this very moment the people of the West Bank are being persecuted, harassed and killed because this territory in Scripture was given by God to the Jewish nation.  Morality and the actual welfare of human beings is thus made subservient to the words ascribed to God, a God who appears in some settings and contexts to have abandoned the principles of justice and goodness.

The notion of ‘bad theology’ is one that will be disturbing and shocking to those who follow the principle of sola scriptura.  How can we in any way loosen our complete dependency on Scripture?  How else would we know what to believe or how to follow God’s will?   But, as Thatcher points out, the real core of the Christian biblical revelation is found, not in verbal statements, but in the person of Jesus.  He sums up this point when he says: ‘the self-communication of God is personal not propositional, a human being, not a book.’   The meat of his book is to explore afresh the insights of Scripture on this theme, to find a post-abusive theology and a post-abusive reading of Scripture while introducing the reader to some contemporary modern writers.  This basic Christian message is that, in Jesus, the creator God has chosen to make himself known and accessible to his creation.  Summarising this rich material is impossible without doing it an injustice, but I do commend the book to my readers.   They can then follow for themselves Thatcher’s fascinating journey of discovery to find again a God of love.  My purpose for writing an appreciation of this book is because it is the best I have encountered for helping us, the readers, to negotiate the conundrum of having a book possessing toxic content, which also points us to a God who invites to know him and be joined with him for all eternity.  To be a Christian believer does not make it inevitable that we must become biblical literalists.   I hope that some of my readers will buy the book to follow Thatcher’s remarkable exploration to see afresh what Christians understand when they say that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’.

Ending Abusive Theologies.  Beginning Again with Love, Adrian Thatcher, SCM Press 2026