The Bible as a Guidebook on the Journey into the Heart of God

Last week I published a piece on reading the Bible: five suggestions for reading with joy. My (first) five were:

1. Read it. The Bible is not beyond you. You don’t need special training.
2. Don’t read the commentaries, not at the beginning. Form your own mind about what the text is saying. Read it for yourself. 
3. Find out what you can about the text, but only after you have read it. Bible readers are often saddled with misinformation about the text. Becoming acquainted with the range of scholarly opinion about such things as when the text was written and by whom is helpful for reading it well.
4. Argue with the text. There’s a long rabbinic tradition of arguing with the text (and other readers of the text). Bring your whole self to your reading—your whole 21^st century self with all you know and believe. Be willing to ask of the biblical writers hard questions: Is that true? How is it true? Is it still true? Better to engage with the Bible than to walk away. You may discover that the biblical writers are more subtle and insightful than you thought.
5. Expect God to show up in your reading, perhaps in surprising ways. The Bible is primarily a book of witness by those who have encountered God. In their testimony, we hear not only their voices but the echo of the voice that called them once and calls us now.

So, five suggestions. They are not the last. I have more, to which I’ll come in future posts. But first before going on to more suggestions for reading the Bible, we should talk about God. Lying behind the trouble with reading the Bible is our trouble with reading God. We could frame our difficulties in terms of expectations: false expectations of the Bible and equally false expectations of God.

Start with the Bible. We expect the Bible to be a certain kind of book, the kind of book we would write if we were God. We expect instructions, wisdom for life, preachable stuff (especially if we are preachers). We expect to find underlying those instructions a consistent moral and theological system. We expect a kind of perfection, sometimes expressed as “inerrancy”: the idea that Bible can make no errors. 

But much of the time the Bible is not like this. Vast stretches of the Bible seem to offer little in the way of moral or theological instruction. Or give instructions but instructions that seem dated or worse. Was it, for example, ever moral, or worse, will of God, to stone to death disobedient children, as the people of Israel are instructed to do in Deuteronomy 21:18-21? Or, in the New Testament, was it proper to instruct enslavers merely to be kind to those they’ve enslaved (Ephesians 6:9)? In these examples and countless others, the Bible seems embedded in culture (or, better, cultures) from which it comes.

Worse are passages that seem to portray God as scarcely moral. Take the flood story in Genesis. If it is to be taken “literally”—something that happened in history—as generations of Bible readers have insisted that it be taken, does it not make of God a monster? Someone who for the sake of failure condemns all terrestrial beings to death by drowning. (On this see Marilynne Robinson’s recent Reading Genesis.) Or, to bookend this with the last book of the New Testament, is it any less monstrous for God to throw those not written in his book “into the lake of fire,” as the book of Revelation has it (20:15)? 

I’ll not belabor the point: the Bible has a way of defeating the expectations we have set for it. I suspect that many people who say that they can’t make sense of the Bible have this in mind. They go to it for moral and theological instruction, and they get instead the book of Leviticus with its endless rules about sacrifices and Joshua with its bloody battles and Revelation with its crazy visions, and they despair of it.

We who have read the Bible all our lives have ways to read around these inconvenient passages, of course. We have been taught that the moral and theological truth of the Bible emerges over time. By these lights, some passages can be safely ignored; they are merely historical noise. Others must be highlighted, held up as essential biblical truth. This is not entirely wrong—we will need such an approach to read the Bible well, which I will come in another post—but I wonder if the problem is not the Bible so much as our expectations of it. And not just our expectations of the Bible but our expectations of God. Do we get the Bible wrong because we get God wrong?

I began this essay by saying that we expect the Bible to be the kind of book we would write if we were God. And there’s the problem. We expect of God what we would be if we were God. We make God in our image. And the God we make is a god of rules, a hectoring parent, a divine busybody.

But what if God is not like this at all? What if God is not a God of rules so much as of relationships. Granted that relationships require rules—I’ll come to that presently—but they don’t begin there. This is the point of the New Testament teaching (with ample Old Testament parallels) about grace. Or, if you want to be more specific—avoiding the trap of saying that the Bible says this or that, as if the Bible were all one thing, which it is not—this is the point of Ephesians 2: 

. . . we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, rich in mercy, out of the abundance of love with which he loved us, even when were dead in our failures, brought us to life in Christ—by grace you are being saved. . .. (2:3-5)

The point of the passage is that the relationship does not begin with keeping rules. Even immersed in our ample failures—this is the meaning of “children of wrath”—God loves us.

Start there, with grace, with God’s love. This relationship is profoundly, historically, almost biologically transformative. One way to think about God is as the Voice—the one who calls us out of our animal slumbers into a new kind of consciousness. This fits with what we know of human history. When did we become human, thinking in theological terms? The simplest answer is that we became human when we (as a species) heard the Voice. To hear the Voice is to become aware of the transcendent, the call to truth and beauty and goodness. What we are as humans—our promise and peril—is caught up in hearing the Voice.

These are not new thoughts. Already in the Old Testament, the qôl yhwh, “the voice of YHWH,” acts as the living presence of God (Psalm 29 and many other passages). In Numbers 7:89, “the voice” addresses Moses from the “mercy seat” in the Tent of Meeting. These references to the Voice are adumbrations of the Trinity, anticipations of the logos theology at the beginning of the gospel of John. 

Perhaps the classic exposition of the Voice is found in the writings of the 4^th century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, especially his Life of Moses. Gregory begins his exposition with a rather startling claim: “. . . It is impossible for those who pursue the life of virtue to attain perfection.” What makes this statement startling is that it is not about the human incapacity to get things right. It’s not the usual theological bromide that our best efforts fall short. It’s not about our human capacity at all but about the nature of virtue. Virtue, so says Gregory, by which he means goodness in all its manifestations, is unbounded. We never get there because there is no end to goodness. “The one limit of virtue,” Gregory says, “is the absence of a limit.” The life of virtue is a life of continuous discovery.

Gregory is thinking of this limitless journey into goodness as the pursuit of God: “Certainly, whoever pursues true virtue participates in nothing other than God, because he is absolute virtue.” He adds:

Since, then, those who know what is good by nature desire participation in it, and since this good has no limit, the participant’s desire itself necessarily has no stopping place but stretches out with the limitless.

Note that this open-ended pursuit of goodness is not law. With these comments, Gregory is about to launch himself and us into a reading of the life of Moses, the great lawgiver, but it’s not law he has in mind. Law is a stopping place. It sets a limit on goodness: goodness is this and not that. For Gregory, as for the Apostle Paul, this is the problem with law. When you reach it, you are there. You have arrived. But for Gregory, there is no stopping place. Goodness forever reveals itself to us. The more we learn, the more we press on to learn even more.

It’s the journey that is at the center of Gregory’s theology—the journey toward and into God. He thinks of this in trinitarian terms. In Christ, we enter the relationship between the Father and the Son through the Spirit. Participating in this relationship is an open-ended journey of discovery. We are not yet what we can and will become. Thus, being human is open-ended, open in the direction of divinity. If conventional theology is backward-looking, focused on what we have lost, Gregory’s theology is forward-looking, focused on what we have to gain.

It is the antidote to nihilism. In his farewell as a New York Times columnist, David Brooks names nihilism as the dominant mood of our time.

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. Selfishness, egoism and the lust for power drive human affairs. Altruism, generosity, honor, integrity and hospitality are mirages. Ideals are shams that the selfish use to mask their greed. Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. (“A Time to Say Goodbye,” NYT, January 30, 2026)

For Gregory, it’s the opposite: higher is the more real. In our time, we need more of Gregory.

There’s more to be said about this, but I’ll leave it there to return to the Bible. If we take Gregory’s perspective, the Bible is the book of the journey. It’s a travel book. There are two kinds of travel books: reflective books written by travelers about what they saw and learned, and proper guidebooks, books with directions for those who are about to travel. The Bible functions as both of these.

Much of the Bible is written by travelers about the journey: what they saw and learned. The gospels fall into this category. They are written so that we can see and experience, even if second-hand, what the first generation of Christians saw and experienced. Other parts of the Bible are written as proper guidebooks: instructions for how to find our way on our journey in the direction of goodness. As is always the case for guidebooks, we need to take into account what has changed since the writing of the book. Guidebooks are never intended to replace experience on the ground. They give us an orientation: see this, don’t miss that, be careful of this other thing. 

When we think about the Bible in this way, we bring a different set of expectations both of God and of the scriptures themselves. God is no longer the hectoring school master, the God of do this and do that. God is the Voice who calls us into a limitless future. Of course, there are do’s and don’ts involved in the journey.  The journey requires discipline. There are many ways to fall off the path. But the point is not the discipline; the point is the journey. 

We’ve been on this journey ever since we humans first heard the Voice. It’s in the scriptures that we meet some of those who have gone before us, who have heard the Voice and responded to the call, sometimes with alacrity and sometimes reluctantly. In learning their stories and hearing their reports, we thrill to the sheer adventure of it, to the journey, and we despair at all the ways we humans have found to get it wrong. For this reason, much of the Bible is about how to start over when you fall.

But always the Bible is about the journey. Read the story of Jacob. It’s a story of discovery. Of getting it wrong and wrong again and finally getting it right. Or the story of Paul. Paul’s rules for the journey always have about them a provisional air. He says, “This one thing I do: I press on to toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” 

I’ll stop here for now, but clearly this is not enough. If you have been following me to this point, as I hope you have, stirred by the idea of a limitless journey into the heart of God, a nagging question will have occurred to you. It’s the question of the right path. In a world filled with wrong paths, how do we know we are on the right path? It’s a question of direction, Thomas’s question in John 14, when after Jesus says, “You know the way” (verse 4) he replies, “We don’t know where you are going; how can we know the way?” 

The question is the question of authority, biblical authority. It’s a question raised often in the Bible itself: how do we find the right path. It’s to that I’ll turn in the next essay. The answer may surprise you.

Clay