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The journalist A.J. Jacobs, an agnostic New Yorker, sets out to ‘live the ultimate biblical life’ by following the Bible as literally as possible.

Soon to become a film, this comic and gently cynical approach may lead to far more misunderstandings about how God works than Dawkins ever could. A recent article in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine summarises its message.

72 pages of commands

Last Saturday I was settling down happily to a huge cappuccino in the lovely cafŽ at Mudchute Farm on the Isle of Dogs. Amazingly, the kids were playing quietly and there was an enormous pile of unread papers set out on the next-door table for customers to read. This cafŽ isn’t stupid, I thought. Needing inspiration for this month’s column, I was excited to see a picture of Charlton Heston as Moses on the front of The Guardian magazine. The leading article was by a man who claimed to have read the whole Bible and tried to do what it said. It put me to shame. I haven’t read the whole Bible despite many attempts. This man had spent five hours a day for four weeks reading solidly from Genesis to Revelation, typing ‘every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice’ into his PowerBook as he went along. His resolve was to do what so many religious people claim to do. ‘Millions of people say they take the Bible literally’, he says, ‘but my suspicion was that almost everyone’s literalism consisted of picking and choosing the parts that fitted their agenda. That would not be my approach’.

He ended up with a list of biblical commands which ran to 72 pages. He leaves his beard unshaven for a whole year, avoids clothes of mixed fibres, tithes his income and tries to stone adulterers. ‘I mentally check every word before allowing myself to utter it. Is it a lie? Is it a boast? Is it a curse? Is it gossip?’ He refuses to sit on seats on the subway or in cinemas in case a woman in an ‘impure’ stage of her cycle has sat there before him. He herds sheep, he wears a white robe and sandals and goes to dance like King David with a group of Hassidic Jews. To an evangelical Christian, this experiment doesn’t seem to be working very well. A.J. Jacobs seems to be missing the point. Or is he?

Things get a bit better when he gets to the New Testament. He picks up on 1 Corinthians 13: ‘[Love] is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs’. He has a file on his hard drive listing times when he was right and his wife was wrong which he shows to his wife before erasing it. He joins a DVD rental service called Clean Flicks, which erases scenes with ungodly content. He finds himself becoming a better person as he stops gossiping, tries to tell the truth and works on his vanity, coveting and anger. He finds it difficult to pray so he recites some of his favourite prayers from the Bible.

Big problems

Yet with all his hard work to do what the Bible says, he is still left with some big problems. How can he love God just because he is commanded to? ‘Can I just turn on a belief as if it flows out of a spiritual spigot? If I act like I’m faithful and God-loving for several months, then maybe I’ll become faithful and God-loving’. His article is also filled with failure. He fails to tell the truth all the time, he reads an email on the Sabbath, conjures up all sorts of lustful images in his mind while watching a heavily edited DVD and becomes haunted by his ‘most violated rules list’. He concludes that he cannot believe in a traditional biblical God ‘who rolls up his sleeves and fiddles with our lives like a novelist does his characters’.

Without understanding

Sadly, A.J. Jacobs has read the word, but not understood what it says. There are, of course, issues as to what ‘taking the Bible literally’ means, particularly with regard to different types of literature.

But, more importantly, he has not grasped the doctrine of grace and forgiveness that shouts from every page. He knows the law, knows that he cannot live up to it, but gives up there. I wish he were in my Bible study group because we are reading Romans and we’re on chapter 8. ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do’.

It made me think about why I read the Bible. Jesus himself says in John 5: ‘You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life…yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life’. As A.J. Jacobs’s experiment has shown, it is possible to be ultra-religious, to read the Bible, yet still to completely miss out on the freedom of knowing Jesus.

Eleanor Margesson

© Evangelicals Now - March 2008
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