In two areas of public discourse these days it is quite acceptable to be both opinionated and ignorant: politics and religion.

Politics can look after itself but where religion is concerned some people make a virtue of this trendy phenomenon. They apparently believe that to dismiss religion with contempt marks them out – at least in their own eyes – as intelligent, rational and obviously superior to the church-going herd. This is most obvious in slighting references to the Bible as if it were way past its use-by date, and as if the fundamentalist conviction that it is divinely dictated and therefore infallible were the only current option.

It isn’t. The past 200 years of intensive study have produced new depths in biblical understanding, interpretation and perspective, and it is time everyone caught up.Scholars have always known the Bible to be a complex book – or rather, a collection of 66 books. So much so that in the early Christian centuries they resisted translating it into vernacular languages lest ordinary folk should interpret it in ways the church did not condone. 

Written between about 950 BC and 150 AD, the collection is a multi-layered, multi-textured mix of history, law, myth, narrative, poetry, politics, songs, social commentary, prophecy, philosophy, folk wisdom, visions and letters. The early church took over the Hebrew scriptures as its ‘Old’ Testament, and added a slimmer selection of Christian writings in Greek (the ‘New’ Testament) to make up the Bible as we have it now.

These days there are two broad approaches to the Bible. Christian literalists insist it is inerrant because God inspired every word; that makes it God’s truth and authoritative for every time and place. Muslims say the same about the Qu’ran. This literal approach is strangely shared by those Christians who regard the Bible almost as God in print, and atheists who find parts of it so unbelievable that they reject the lot. 

Liberal and secular Christians find a more credible way in. They see the Bible as the product of many human minds wrestling over hundreds of years with ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of life, values to live by and their relationship with the God of their history, culture and worldview. Accordingly, it reflects the science, cosmology and worldview first of ancient Israel then of the early Christian movement. It could hardly be otherwise.

That does not make what it says irrelevant. Rather it gives a perspective that allows people alive to the possibilities to say: “That’s how they saw things then. That’s how they experienced the sacred. That’s why they expressed themselves in the way they did. There are times when we too, experience the sacred (or transcendent, or spiritual) today. The question for us then, is how we will express that in terms of our 21st-century history, culture and worldview.”

Recognising the historical and cultural circumstances from which the Bible sprang has two advantages. It strips away the aura of superstitious reverence that has sometimes surrounded it. And it makes it a much more human book.

In line with this, American biblical scholar Marcus Borg suggests that people today can engage with the Bible as a “conversational partner” as they in turn wrestle with the same ultimate questions about the possibilities inherent in our humanity, and what stops us from getting there. This approach invites people reading the Bible to accept its characters as people as real as we are, with hopes, fears and failings as contemporary as our own. It helps to bring the past imaginatively alive. Meanings emerge that would otherwise lie hidden.

But that is not enough on its own. Alongside the history, it is also necessary to read the Bible metaphorically, looking for meaning beyond the literal words of the stories of Jonah and the big fish, for example, or of Jesus’ birth. That’s because myth and metaphor are also vehicles of truth. They appeal to the imagination which is the prime religious faculty. To literalise such stories is to reduce them to fairy tales or nonsense, inviting their dismissal. Reading them metaphorically unlocks the insights about Godness in the human condition which they were written to convey.

In other words, awareness of how people lived and thought all those years ago grounds the books of the Bible among real people in the real world. The metaphorical approach helps to bring them imaginatively alive for real people in the real world of the 21st century. The trick is to take the Bible seriously but not literally.