14. How Did We Receive the Bible?
Essentialism, a Hunter’s Theology — Chapter Two: The Bible
We received the Bible the way we receive any other book.
Through trial and error.
Through first attempts, revisions, and drafts.
Through stories that were told and retold, written down, collected, preserved, translated, and passed from one generation to another.
Through side stories that never made it into the final collection but remained beloved nonetheless.
Through editions that were corrected, revised, and reconsidered as people learned more about the texts they had inherited.
And through the work of people who believed those stories were worth preserving.
As an independent publisher, I understand something about this process.
Books don’t simply appear.
They are made.
Someone has something they want to communicate. They begin writing. They discover that their first attempt doesn’t quite express what they intended. They revise it. They reorganize it. Sometimes they remove something they love because it doesn’t serve the larger work.
Sometimes a side story becomes its own publication.
Sometimes a passage that seemed perfectly clear to the writer confuses the reader.
Sometimes an error survives all the way into publication.
And sometimes a later edition corrects something the earlier edition got wrong.
None of this necessarily means the original work was worthless.
It means that communicating something important is a process.
The Bible has a publishing history, too.
And understanding that history helps us understand how human beings preserved the record of their relationship with God.
The Bible Is a Collection
The Bible is not one book written by one person at one time.
It is a collection of writings produced across many generations.
It contains histories, laws, genealogies, poetry, songs, wisdom literature, prophecy, letters, biographies, visions, and stories.
Some passages describe events.
Others offer instructions.
Some preserve prayers and arguments.
Others use symbolism, metaphor, and extraordinary imagery to communicate ideas that might be difficult to express through ordinary descriptions.
There are talking animals, enormous beasts, dragons, angels, demons, and trees that speak.
There are accounts of wars, marriages, betrayals, births, deaths, political conflicts, sexual relationships, and encounters with the supernatural.
There are observations about the natural world made by people who understood it differently from the way we understand it today.
And then there’s Revelation.
If you’ve ever wondered whether fantasy belongs in a theological discussion, I would invite you to spend some time with Revelation’s beasts, dragons, strange creatures, and extraordinary visions.
The Bible uses an enormous variety of storytelling methods.
Why?
Because human beings learn through an enormous variety of experiences.
A historical account can show us the consequences of someone’s decisions.
A poem can help us recognize an emotion.
A law can reveal what a community considered necessary for its survival.
A parable can make us reconsider something we thought we understood.
A fantastic creature can represent a danger that would be difficult to describe through ordinary language.
And a prophetic vision can communicate hope to people living through circumstances that appear hopeless.
These forms do not have to function identically to communicate something meaningful.
The purpose of the story determines how we should approach it.
And in Christian Essentialism, I believe the Bible’s many forms contribute to one continuing account:
God’s relationship with humanity, His struggle against Greed, and His intention to establish a future in which Greed no longer governs our lives.
The Bible Is Not Respectable Literature
Let’s establish something before we go any further.
The Bible contains sex.
It contains prostitution, incest, adultery, rape, sexual exploitation, and descriptions of human bodies that would make some modern religious audiences extremely uncomfortable.
It contains violence, bodily functions, insults, accusations, and language intended to shock.
And it does not always use polite language to communicate its point.
In Philippians 3:8, Paul uses the Greek word skybala to describe what he considers worthless compared with knowing Christ.
The word can refer to refuse, dung, or excrement.
Some scholars argue that its force is considerably stronger than the polite English translations commonly used today.
Jesus calls religious authorities whitewashed tombs in Matthew 23:27.
The image is deliberate.
Something beautiful and respectable on the outside conceals death and uncleanness within.
Ezekiel 23:20 uses explicit sexual imagery involving genital size and ejaculation.
Genesis, Judges, Samuel, and other biblical books preserve accounts of sexual relationships, sexual violence, exploitation, and family conflict.
The Song of Songs celebrates erotic desire.
And Revelation contains imagery that would be considered grotesque or disturbing in many other literary contexts.
The Bible is not afraid of the human body.
It is not afraid of sexuality.
It is not afraid of describing cruelty.
And it is not afraid of using uncomfortable language when that language serves the account.
So why are we sometimes taught that religious literature must be sanitized before it can be considered sacred?
In Essentialism, sex and profanity are not inherently sinful.
Obscenity and vulgarity are cultural constructs.
What one community considers offensive may be ordinary speech, humor, intimacy, or an appropriate expression of anger in another.
That doesn’t mean every use of language is harmless.
Words can be used to humiliate, threaten, deceive, or exploit.
Sexual behavior can involve consent, pleasure, affection, and connection. It can also involve coercion and abuse.
The distinction matters.
Sex is not the same as exploitation.
Profanity is not the same as cruelty.
And politeness is not the same as Kindness.
Someone can say fuck and treat another person with extraordinary care.
Someone can speak in perfectly respectable language while deliberately destroying another person’s life.
The Lens asks us to examine the conduct, the circumstances, the consequences, and the responsibilities involved.
Not merely whether someone used an approved vocabulary.
This is also why the presence of something in a story does not automatically mean the storyteller approves of it.
A story can depict rape without endorsing rape.
It can depict murder without endorsing murder.
It can describe exploitation to expose its consequences.
And it can use shocking language to confront people who have become comfortable with cruelty.
The story needs to be told.
Sometimes the Truth is uncomfortable.
Sometimes it is vulgar.
Sometimes it is sexually explicit.
Sometimes it makes respectable people angry.
That does not automatically make it wrong.
Respectability Is Not a Virtue of the Lens
Respectability politics become dangerous when a dominant group’s cultural preferences are treated as requirements for dignity, credibility, or belonging.
People are told that they must speak correctly, dress correctly, behave correctly, worship correctly, or express themselves in approved ways before their concerns deserve attention.
Meanwhile, someone who meets those expectations may be allowed to exploit others without facing meaningful accountability.
This is Greed.
It uses cultural standards to establish superiority, control participation, and avoid responsibility for the suffering those standards create.
It allows people to confuse the appearance of goodness with the practice of Love.
And it gives those who control the standards another way to punish people who refuse to conform.
Essentialism rejects that arrangement.
The Lens demands integrity, not respectability.
That principle matters when we read the Bible.
If we dismiss a passage because it is vulgar, disturbing, or uncomfortable, we may miss the very thing its author was trying to communicate.
And if we assume that someone is righteous simply because they speak politely and observe religious customs, we may overlook the harm they are causing.
The Bible repeatedly challenges that mistake.
So should we.
The Stories Had Histories Before They Became Scripture
The writings that eventually became the Bible did not all begin as parts of one completed collection.
Some traditions circulated orally before being written down.
Some books drew upon earlier records.
Some writings were edited or compiled over time.
Communities copied manuscripts, preserved accounts, debated their significance, and passed them to subsequent generations.
And different communities did not always agree about which writings belonged in their sacred collections.
That is one reason Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Bibles do not contain exactly the same books.
There are also ancient religious writings that remain important for understanding the cultures and beliefs surrounding the Bible, even though they are not included in every biblical canon.
Their absence from a particular collection does not automatically make them worthless.
It means they occupy a different place in that community’s understanding of scripture.
The Bible was not assembled at one universal editorial meeting where everyone agreed upon a single final edition.
Its formation took place across centuries.
And its transmission continued through handwritten manuscripts, translations, printing, and modern textual scholarship.
When scholars compare ancient manuscripts, they sometimes discover differences.
Some are spelling variations.
Some involve word choices.
Others are more substantial.
Those differences are studied to understand how the texts were transmitted and what their earlier forms may have said.
This is not unlike examining multiple drafts or editions of a work to understand how it developed.
Of course, the Bible’s history is considerably more complicated than the publication of a modern book.
But the principle remains useful.
The Bible reached us through human participation.
And I do not believe that participation is something we need to be ashamed of.
God Works With Human Beings
In Question 13, we established that the Bible is the journal and historical log of God’s relationship with humanity.
We also established that God listens, responds, and adjusts His methods as humanity develops its understanding of Greed and the consequences of its choices.
That relationship includes personal responsibility.
Repentance, in Christian Essentialism, means accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s choices and demonstrating that responsibility through change.
God demonstrates that principle when He listens to Moses and changes His announced course of action in Exodus 32.
Humanity is expected to learn and change as well.
So why would the preservation of this relationship be completely separate from human participation?
The people who recorded these accounts were not standing outside the relationship.
They were living within it.
They understood God through the circumstances of their lives.
Their cultures shaped the questions they asked.
Their experiences influenced what they considered important.
Their languages affected how they described what they witnessed.
And the people who inherited their writings brought their own circumstances and understanding to the task of preserving them.
This gives us something valuable.
The Bible does not merely preserve accounts of God’s actions.
It also preserves different human perspectives on those actions.
And that matters because God has never been working with only one kind of person.
To a Roman, Speak as a Roman
Consider the difference between communicating with a Roman, a Greek, and an Israelite.
A Roman might understand an argument through citizenship, law, government, and imperial authority.
A Greek might recognize it through philosophy and reasoning.
An Israelite might understand it through covenant, ancestry, and religious law.
These are not interchangeable cultural experiences.
And communicating effectively requires understanding the people receiving the message.
Paul understood this.
In 1 Corinthians 9:20–22, he describes adapting his approach to different audiences.
He became as a Jew to reach Jews.
He adapted his approach to those living under the Law and those living outside it.
His purpose was to communicate his faith in ways his audiences could understand.
To a Roman, speak as a Roman.
The principle is simple.
If you want someone to understand what you’re saying, you must communicate in a way they can understand.
That does not necessarily require changing the underlying message.
It requires understanding the audience.
And I believe this principle is essential to understanding why the Bible contains so many different perspectives.
The people receiving these accounts lived in different cultures, faced different problems, and understood the world through different experiences.
The variety of biblical writings allows us to examine similar questions from different directions.
And this brings us to a much older biblical story.
Why Did God Change Humanity’s Languages?
In Genesis 11, humanity is described as having one language.
The people gather together and decide to build a city and a tower.
Their stated intention is revealing.
They want to make a name for themselves.
And they want to avoid being scattered across the earth.
God intervenes.
He confuses their language so they can no longer understand one another as they previously did.
And the people scatter.
This is the story of the Tower of Babel.
It is frequently taught as a warning against human pride.
I believe it also deserves examination through the Lens.
Why were the people so determined to remain together?
Why was making a name for themselves important?
And what might have happened if all humanity had remained concentrated around one center of power?
Genesis does not explicitly describe Babel as a centralized government.
But it does describe a people attempting to consolidate themselves around one city, one language, and one collective ambition.
That concentration presents an important danger.
What happens when Greed gains control of a system that governs everyone?
If one authority controls access to resources, information, movement, and participation, the consequences of its corruption can reach everyone under that authority.
There may be no independent community capable of resisting it.
No alternative institution.
No other place to go.
And if the people controlling that system decide that their status and power are more important than everyone else’s well-being, Greed can become extraordinarily destructive.
Through the Lens, I understand God’s intervention at Babel as a protection against that possibility.
He disrupts humanity’s concentration around a single center.
He creates linguistic divisions that prevent the project from continuing as planned.
And humanity spreads into different communities.
God interrupts the possibility of one human authority controlling humanity’s future.
That does not eliminate Greed.
Separate nations can still become exploitative.
Different cultures can still develop cruel institutions.
But the existence of different communities means that humanity’s entire future does not have to depend upon the decisions of one ruling center.
And this connects to something else God desires for us.
Joy.
Different Cultures, Different Ways to Flourish
In Essentialism, Joy is the recognition of goodness worth protecting.
Happiness is the expression of that Joy.
God desires a future in which everyone has the opportunity to flourish.
But flourishing does not require everyone to live identically.
Different cultures develop different forms of art, music, food, storytelling, celebration, governance, and community.
They discover different ways to solve problems.
They develop different traditions for recognizing what is valuable.
And they create different expressions of happiness.
These differences can enrich humanity.
They can also give us opportunities to learn from one another.
A world containing many cultures offers more than one way to experience goodness.
And no single human culture needs to possess every answer.
In my reading of Babel, dispersal is therefore more than the interruption of a dangerous project.
It also creates the conditions in which many distinct communities can develop.
Unity does not require uniformity.
And God does not need to erase human diversity to accomplish His intentions.
But there is another consequence of Babel that I find particularly important.
God changed humanity’s languages.
That meant He would also have to communicate with humanity across those differences.
And because God accepts responsibility for the consequences of His choices, communicating across those differences became part of His continuing work.
Babel and Pentecost
Now consider Acts 2.
At Pentecost, the disciples begin speaking in other languages.
People from different regions hear them proclaiming God’s works in their own languages.
Notice what does not happen.
God does not require everyone to return to one language.
He does not insist that everyone become culturally identical before receiving the message.
He makes communication possible across the differences that already exist.
At Babel, languages divide humanity. At Pentecost, God communicates across those divisions.
The differences remain.
But they no longer have to prevent understanding.
And this is consistent with the principle Paul later demonstrates in his ministry.
Communicating with people requires meeting them where they are.
God works with humanity within the circumstances of human life.
Different languages.
Different cultures.
Different histories.
Different ways of understanding the world.
And He continues making Himself known.
This is one reason I believe the Bible’s many languages, literary forms, and cultural perspectives are important.
They reflect a relationship that cannot be confined to one human culture.
No Nation Owns God
This brings us to another consequence of Babel.
If God deliberately interrupted humanity’s concentration around one center of power, what does that tell us about systems that claim one group of people should rule everyone else?
Consider white supremacy.
White supremacy is not simply an individual’s dislike of people from another race.
It is a system that establishes whiteness as a standard of human worth and uses that hierarchy to justify unequal access to power, resources, safety, and opportunity.
It creates advantages for one group while imposing disadvantages upon others.
And it frequently develops explanations for why those arrangements should be considered natural, deserved, or even divinely ordained.
Through the Lens, this is Greed operating through institutions.
It seeks status and domination while refusing responsibility for the suffering that domination causes.
Greed breeds cruelty.
And white supremacy demonstrates what happens when that cruelty becomes embedded in a society’s laws, institutions, traditions, and expectations.
I believe the biblical narrative provides grounds for dismantling such systems.
Genesis 1:27 establishes that humanity is created in God’s image.
That image is not assigned according to race or nationality.
Genesis 11 describes God disrupting humanity’s attempt to consolidate itself around one center.
Acts 2 shows God communicating across linguistic and cultural differences rather than eliminating them.
Acts 10:34–35 records Peter’s recognition that God does not show favoritism.
Galatians 3:28 challenges the idea that inherited social distinctions determine one’s standing in Christ.
And Revelation 7:9 presents a multitude drawn from every nation, tribe, people, and language.
These passages do not all address modern racial ideology directly.
But together they establish principles that are incompatible with racial supremacy.
No race possesses exclusive ownership of God’s image.
No nation possesses exclusive ownership of God’s attention.
No culture possesses exclusive ownership of God’s Love.
And no human institution has the authority to make another person’s worth conditional upon their race.
If God’s intention is for all humanity to have the opportunity to experience Joy, then systems that deliberately restrict that opportunity must be confronted.
That includes white supremacy.
And confronting it requires more than changing individual attitudes.
It requires repentance.
Not merely apologies.
Not declarations that people are no longer prejudiced.
But accepting responsibility for the consequences of harmful arrangements and demonstrating that responsibility through change.
Institutions must examine how their decisions affect people.
Communities must recognize where advantages depend upon someone else’s disadvantage.
And those arrangements must change when they perpetuate exploitation.
Repentance is responsibility made visible through change.
This is how the Lens challenges institutional Greed.
And this is part of what it means to make Joy possible for everyone.
All Nations, Not One Nation
The Bible repeatedly presents a future in which people from many nations come to God.
Isaiah 2 describes nations streaming toward the mountain of the Lord.
Revelation 7:9 describes a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language.
What interests me about that vision is that the people remain recognizable as coming from different places.
Their diversity is not treated as something that must disappear before they can stand together.
They are united in worship without being described as one earthly nation.
That distinction matters.
God’s desire for all nations to come to Him is not the same as a desire for one nation to rule them all.
The biblical vision of unity does not require one human empire.
It does not require one earthly government to claim divine authority over everyone else.
And it does not require one culture to become the standard by which every other culture is judged.
In Christian Essentialism, I understand this as part of God’s continuing work against Greed.
Humanity must learn to cooperate without domination.
We must learn to recognize goodness beyond our own communities.
And we must learn that another person’s freedom, dignity, and happiness do not diminish our own.
Why Essentialism Is Deity-Agnostic
This brings us back to the Lens.
Essentialism is deity-agnostic because practicing Love does not require agreement about the identity, nature, or existence of God.
The Lens consists of five virtues:
Empathy. Truth. Kindness. Joy. Anti-Greed.
A Christian Essentialist understands these virtues as the image of God within humanity.
Someone practicing another religion may recognize them through their own spiritual traditions.
An atheist may understand them through ethics, human relationships, and the observable consequences of human behavior.
These people do not have to agree about the Source of the virtues to practice them together.
And none of them must adopt another person’s religion to belong to Essentialist culture.
This is not an attempt to make all religions identical.
Different traditions make different claims.
Sometimes those claims contradict one another.
But people do not have to resolve every theological disagreement before they can agree that cruelty should be resisted, Truth matters, and everyone deserves the opportunity to experience Joy.
The Lens belongs to everyone.
Christian Essentialism is one way of understanding its Source.
And A Hunter’s Theology explains why I understand that Source as God.
It does not make accepting my explanation a condition of practicing the Lens.
That distinction matters because religious agreement can become another instrument of Greed.
When people claim exclusive ownership of Love, they can begin demanding payment for access to something that was never theirs to sell.
That payment may take the form of money.
It may take the form of obedience.
It may require surrendering one’s culture, identity, freedom, or conscience.
And it may be enforced through shame, exclusion, or punishment.
But Love is not something humanity has the authority to place behind a paywall.
God does not require us to share a religion, a culture, or even a belief in Him before we can recognize and practice Love.
And no religious institution gets to appoint itself the gatekeeper of the Lens.
The Message and the Messenger
Understanding how we received the Bible requires recognizing the difference between a message and the ways that message is communicated.
The Bible contains many voices.
Those voices emerged from different historical circumstances.
They used different literary forms.
They spoke different languages.
They addressed different audiences.
And their writings were preserved through generations of human effort.
We should study those circumstances because they help us understand what the authors were communicating.
We should examine translations because language affects meaning.
We should consider historical context because a statement made to one community may address circumstances very different from our own.
And we should ask questions because understanding requires more than repeating words.
The Bible is not diminished by having a history.
Its history is part of what allows us to understand it.
And the diversity of that history reminds us that God’s relationship with humanity has never been limited to one people, one language, or one way of experiencing the world.
The Distilled Story
We received the Bible through a long process of human storytelling, writing, editing, preservation, collection, and translation.
Not every story survived.
Not every writing became part of every biblical canon.
Not every community agreed about which accounts should be included.
And not every generation understood the texts it inherited in exactly the same way.
But through that process, we received a collection of writings that preserves the continuing story of God’s relationship with humanity.
It tells us what people understood about Him.
It records what He did and how humanity responded.
It reveals the consequences of Greed.
It shows us God’s efforts to restrain those consequences.
And it points toward His intention to remove Greed so that humanity can live without the suffering it creates.
The Bible is the distilled story of our relationship with God, His fight against Greed, how He sees us, what He has done for us, and what He intends for our future.
And it tells that story through many different voices because humanity has never been one uniform people.
We have different languages.
Different cultures.
Different histories.
Different ways of understanding.
But we share the responsibility to recognize and resist Greed.
And we share the opportunity to practice Love.
The Bible’s history reminds us that understanding does not require uniformity.
God can speak to humanity through many voices without requiring humanity to become one voice.
And we can learn to practice the Lens together without requiring everyone to explain its Source in the same way.
That is the promise of a culture built around Love rather than domination.
Not that everyone must become the same.
But that everyone should have the opportunity to flourish.
Questions for Comprehension
- How did human participation shape the writing, collection, preservation, and transmission of the Bible?
- How do Babel, Pentecost, and Paul’s approach to different audiences illustrate the importance of communicating across cultures?
- Why does Christian Essentialism understand the Bible’s cultural diversity as consistent with God’s opposition to Greed and domination?
Questions for Personal Reflection
- Have you ever understood an important lesson more clearly because someone explained it through your own culture, experiences, or interests?
- Where have you encountered the expectation that everyone must adopt one group’s beliefs, language, or customs to be considered worthy of belonging?
- How can you practice the Lens with someone whose religious beliefs or understanding of the world differs from your own?
Save your faith for God. Ask me questions.
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