Approaching the Bible

An excerpt from Opening the Bible by Thomas Merton - 1970

We have to be perfectly clear about what to expect in the Bible. We do not go looking for metaphysical insights into the ground of reality, moral insights into the ethics of every possible human act, still less methods of con­templative discipline or of self-transcendence by trance states and mystic illumination. Nor do we go looking for theological and philosophical systems and articulate explanations of how the uni­verse works. Those in the past who came to understand the Biblical cosmogony as a substitute for scientific knowledge ran into immense difficulties, and their errors of judgment were great enough to be a permanent humiliation for their spiritual descen­dants.

In the long run, every attempt to find in the Bible what is not clearly there leads to a one-sided reading of the sacred books and ultimately to distorted and erroneous vision. This is the kind of thing that has ended by making so many modern men and women suspicious of the Bible, so that even believers are sometimes afraid to get involved in it. But there should be fewer problems if we would simply read what is there, even with its many-sided, perhaps con­fusing, view of things. To accept the Bible in its wholeness is not easy. We are much more inclined to narrow it down to a one-track inter­pretation that actually embraces only a very limited aspect of it. And we dignify that one-track view with the term "faith." Actually it is the opposite of faith: it is an escape from the mature responsibility of faith that plunges into the many-dimensional, the paradoxical, the conflicting elements of the Bible as well as those of life itself, and finds unity not by excluding all it does not understand but by embracing and accepting things in their often disconcerting reality.

We must not therefore open the Bible with any set determina­tion to reduce it to the limits of a preconceived pattern of our own. And in reading it we must not succumb to the temptation of short­cuts and half-truths. All attempts to narrow the Bible down until it fits conveniently into the slots prepared for it by our prejudice will end with our misunderstanding the Bible and even falsifying its truth.