The Bible's diversity is the key to uncovering the Bible's true purpose for us.

they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encouraged to explore or revisit a few other writers, including Richard Rohr (Adam's Return and The Naked Now), Thomas Merton (Thoughts

Literalism is a hermeneutical decision (often implicit) stemming from the belief that God's Word requires a literal reading.

I believe these ancient people experienced the Divine. But how they experienced God and therefore how they thought and wrote about God were filtered through

Rulebook Bible reading" shortchanges the depth and raw reality of Israel's own journey of faith in God.

I'VE BEEN ON A JOURNEY of rediscovering the Bible and the God behind it for over thirty years and I don't see that journey ending any time soon.

These diverse stories of the past that we find in the Bible are not a problem to be solved. They model for us the spiritual immediacy of the present.

Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific times and places is made possible by its flexibility and adaptive nature—one of the many paradoxes we need to embrace when it comes to the Bible.

That kind of Bible works, because that is our story, too. The Bible "partners" with us (so to speak), modeling for us our walk with God in discovering greater depth and maturity on our journey of faith, not by telling us what to do at each step, but by showing us a journey of hills and valleys, straight lanes and difficult curves, of new discoveries and insights, of movement and change—with God by our side every step of the way.

What I discovered, and what I want to pass along to you in this book, is that this view of the Bible does not come from the Bible but from an anxiety over protecting the Bible and so regulating the faith of those who read it.

the Bible is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.

I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bible's true purpose is—and the need to align our expectations with it.