god is not the bible

and more wisdom from Liz Charlotte Grant

Friends, what a delightful treat I have for you today. My friend

Liz Charlotte Grant

is joining us to chat about her newly released book, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible. I have great respect for the way Liz engages Scripture, in all its mystery and all its horrors, with curiosity and flexibility. She is one of those theological writers with the uncanny gift of clearing the forest so we can actually see - and marvel at - the wisdom of the trees.

Paid subscribers can enjoy access to the entire interview, which includes discussion of Liz’s craft and the “behind the scenes” of her writing.

Tell us a bit about your process of developing Knock at the Sky. How did the idea start, and how did it take shape over time? I'm curious about what made you want to tackle Genesis specifically.

I wrote about Genesis ultimately because I enjoyed this strange book of the Bible. I'm a freelance writer, so when I'm not on assignment, I write to follow my curiosity, to play, and to grow in my craft. The joy of discovery is an enormous part of my process.

Before writing this book, my understanding of Genesis had generally been formed by white American evangelical talking points. But whenever I opened the pages of Genesis for myself, I did not read it that way. The poetry is striking, and so I also found the psychological realism of the characters compelling. And through the process of writing this book, I began to understand Genesis as a book of primordial encounters with the supernatural, a Deity who is unknown to the characters until the Deity starts speaking.

I also became curious about why my own religious ancestors decided these stories were important enough to pass on. Parts of Genesis are 4,000 years old! The fact that we have these writings means that our ancestors hand copied these words onto paper they made themselves, marking down letterforms with ink and pens that they made by hand. And they kept preserving these texts over and over, passing them to generations after them. Why?

Why does it continue to matter to us what these characters did and said? I took the question of historicity off the table and just decided to encounter the characters, the Deity included, allowing myself to be swept into the flow of the narrative.

Who did you write this book for, and why did you write it? What has the response been like so far?

I had two types of readers in mind as I wrote, and one of them was me as a twenty-something evangelical just discovering the wide world of mysticism, art, and science. In college I read Madeleine L'Engle and Henri Nouwen and Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott and Flannery O'Connor and Langston Hughes, and as my kids would say, "It was a mind blow." I can remember the visceral hunger I felt for good art back then, art made by those who took themselves and the world lightly, but who also asked metaphysical questions. I felt especially hungry for any other way of engaging God and Christianity. And as I wrote, I could see myself as a college student stumbling onto this work in a bookstore or a literature class, and finding life here, even if I disagreed with some of the theological assertions on the page.

The other reader I had in mind were those who would resist picking up Genesis on their own. Maybe they've had the book weaponized against them, they only learned to read it as fundamentalist propaganda, or they've deconverted but still feel an affinity toward these stories. That reader might be hesitant to pick up the Bible. And I don’t want them to be left alone with those fears any longer. I endeavored to be a safe guide for these folks, and I feel maternal toward them. So, I want to tell them the whole truth as I see it, to console them, and to give them new permission to engage God and the Bible however they can, in ways that feel emotionally safe and healing, rather than demanding and abusive.

I believe the Bible was always meant to be a gift to us from our ancestors. If we receive it in any way that does not make us more whole, I believe we're reading it wrong. Making the Bible a weapon is, in fact, the only wrong way to read the Bible. God is not the Bible. God is separate, God is beyond. And so, in my view, disagreeing with the Bible is only continuing a conversation with God that's been ongoing for centuries, including in the pages of the Bible.