As you can tell from the title, the book is my attempt to show how we can read the Bible—Genesis to Revelation—as a "book of love."
In the Introduction—entitled "The Sermon"—I tell the story of a sermon I preached in college that, in many ways, was the start of my spiritual wanderings. The opening lines of the book:
Some days change your life. One of those days, in my life, was the day I faced a long line of very angry people.
I was at church and had preached the sermon that Sunday morning. Immediately, at the conclusion of the service, people jumped out of the pews to meet me as I came off the stage. Open Bibles in hand, each person had book, chapter, and verse ready to rebuke and correct me. I was a college student, after all. Young and impressionable. This was an opportunity to correct my errors before I became a heretic.
After the Introduction I have thee chapters in a section entitled "Daring to Trust." Before we can get to reading the Bible as a book of love, we have to deal with some preliminary issues. First, you have to recognize your hermeneutical (interpretive) commitments and assumptions. Readers of Scripture often like to imagine they are seeing "literal," "plain," and "clear" readings of the Bible. But as I point out, there is no single literal reading of the Bible. There are, in truth, many literal readings of the Bible—Biblical literalisms—and they don't agree with each other. And if that's so, you have to face the fact that literal readings of the Bible are, at root, interpretive. You can't avoid hermeneutics. I cover all this in the chapter "Don't Be An Ostrich."
After hermeneutics, I turn to attachment theory in the chapter "You Can't Read the Bible Scared." In my estimation, this issue—our attachment to God—is the real issue rumbling underneath our debates about Scripture. People cannot explore Scripture with an open heart and mind if they are fearful that God is going to damn them should they make a mistake.
The final preliminary chapter is "God Is Better." Simply put, your view of God determines your view of the Bible. So I push us to imagine God's love as being infinitely better than we can imagine and insist upon reading the whole of Scripture in light of that vision, and to never let a reading of the Bible fall short of that beauty and grace.
After the introductory chapters, we move into the Bible. The first section covers the Hebrew Scriptures. I then turn toward the Gospels. And we end with Acts–Revelation.
What should you expect in these chapters? Nothing predictable! This isn't a book that will fit comfortably in our culture wars. Here's what I say in the Introduction:
Our problem is that we read the Bible from within our echo chambers. We are no longer surprised by Scripture. And books about how to read the Bible preach to their choir, sermons for the already converted. We go along with this. Since we already know what we believe, we read authors who confirm what we believe. The Bible becomes tribal, always voting on my side of the culture wars.
What most of us want when we pick up a book about how to read the Bible is cozy confirmation. We’re not interested in critical confrontation. We want authors on our shelves and podcasters in our ears who confirm our settled worldviews, political opinions, beliefs, and values. But when the Bible is always filtered through our beliefs and politics, it loses its holy capacity to surprise and startle us.
So, fair warning. The Bible you and I are going to talk about will unsettle and challenge you. Love refuses to be shoehorned into the box of our preferred politics. Neither progressive nor conservative Christians read the Bible very well. You and I will do something different.
There are chapters in The Book of Love that will unsettle conservative readers of the Bible. And there are chapters that will unsettle progressive readers of the Bible. This is not a good strategy for writing a bestseller! I expect every Goodreads and Amazon review will take a few stars off for the chapters they didn't like. But I am congenitally unable to write in an echo chamber or preach to a choir. So all I can say is that I do hope you find something in the book that will surprise and startle you.
Here are some of the things I talk about in the book: how the debates about Genesis and science are missing the point; how the Bible tells the best story about the problem of evil; how to read the violent stories in the Old Testament; how not to pit the God of the Old Testament against Jesus; how to take the death of Jesus on the cross seriously without that becoming moralistic (the progressive error) or forensic/penal (the conservative error); how best to read the apostle Paul; how to think about Judgment Day and hell; and, lastly, what to do with the book of Revelation.
I don't draw clear lines between readings of the Bible and doctrinal or political positions. I try, rather, to attack some of the knots within the Bible that prevent us from reading it, cover to cover, as a book of love. I try to open up the story of Scripture to let the story breathe. And my hope is that, in the generous spaces the book opens up, bright things might grow. One way to think about the book is that it's not a book about arrivals. It's a book about first steps. A book of beginnings rather than endings.
The book is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. It's also available as an audiobook.
And here's my ask for you today.
As you know, I don't charge or monetize my online writing. To be clear, I cast no judgment upon those who need such income streams. We got to do what we got to do to pay the electricity bill. But there is a cost to myself and my family, financially, to renounce so aggressively branding, self-promotion, monetization, paywalls, growth, social media presence, celebrity, and reach. Over on Substack I leave tens of thousands of dollars a year on the table. So, if you've ever wanted to support a Christian writer who takes such stands, today is a day where you can express that support.
And let me be clear about what I want by way of book sales. I don't care to make bestseller lists. But I do want to sell enough books so that when I pitch my next idea to my publisher, they continue to say yes. Simply put: I want to sell enough so that I can keep writing.
And so, it would be much appreciated, to either say "thank you" for my free online writing or to support my future book writing, if you could do a few things for me today, and in the weeks ahead, as The Book of Love makes its way out into the world.
First, you can buy a copy of the book. I hope you love it!
Second, give the book some social media love today. Share on your social media accounts that The Book of Love is now out.
Third, if there is someone in your life who is struggling with the Bible, put this book in their hands. I think it might help.
Fourth, if you like the book, give it a positive review on Goodreads and Amazon.
Fifth, recommend the book to your church, pastor, Bible class, or book club to read.
Sixth, invite me to come speak about the book at your church, university, or organization.
Anything you can do for The Book of Love today, and in the weeks ahead, would be much appreciated. And while sales are a metric of success for a book, I have my own way of judging success. As you know, there is a spiritual alchemy about books. A particular book finds you at a particular season in your life and magic happens. The words reach out over the waves and you cling to them like a lifeline. And the encounter functions to change your life.
People share stories like this about the books I have written—how something I wrote changed their life for the better, sometimes years after the book had been published. You write something and throw it into the sea, a message in a bottle. And the words wash up on the shore of a heart, offering companionship, guidance, and hope.
Today I throw another message in a bottle into the sea.
May it find those who need it.
Godspeed, little book, godspeed.
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