Is God Relevant? : THE GOOD BOOK: Reading the Bible With Mind and Heart By Peter J. Gomes; Morrow: 384 pp., $25

One consistent challenge during my 30 years as a professor and a minister has been to carry out an informed, friendly conversation about the Bible with people of various Christian denominations. These conversations about biblical stories and metaphors inevitably turn to matters dealing with anthropology, archeology, interpretation and so forth. I’ve found that instead of welcoming the newly acquired information as an enlightening experience, many react the same way: “How dare you!” New interpretations are taken as a threat to firmly ingrained beliefs.

Now comes “The Good Book” by Peter Gomes, minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard University. It is a welcome, though sometimes uneven, addition to the debate over the Bible’s relevance today. With many years of rich experience as a preacher and scholar, Gomes presents a colorful picture of the Bible as the product of intimate, multifarious relationships between God and men of bygone days. He also tries to show the ancient book’s position as a sacred source from which human beings still draw answers to their complex existential problems.

Throughout, the author is witty and honest. Readers may find this honesty almost as invaluable as the book’s scriptural insights. We are not presented here with an academic exercise performed from the safety of an ivory tower. “The Good Book” exposes Gomes’ own personal struggles in the search for a more enlightened treatment of the Bible.

Gomes describes the Bible as possessing a uniquely universal message. It is an interesting idea, even though Islam’s Koran or the Hindu Rig-Veda can claim the same. Gomes doesn’t mention that the Bible’s universal applicability was helped by Greek philosophy: Plato and Aristotle provided, so to speak, a pair of rails for scholars like Aquinas and Augustine to carry Christian teachings to the West. The Bible’s universality was greatly enhanced by interpretation through the lens of classical philosophy.

And this so-called universality, Gomes points out, excludes many people, as he relates his own difficulties “as the university’s pastor and preacher, as a Christian and as a homosexual.” He recalls a heated controversy between gay Harvard undergraduates and a conservative undergraduate periodical. “A line in college civility had been crossed,” Gomes writes, after student articles viciously attacked gay students for their lifestyles. When he discussed his own sexual orientation at a rally--hoping this would demonstrate the honesty and understanding all Christians must have--his gesture backfired and there were angry, but unsuccessful, calls for Gomes’ immediate resignation.

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Gomes’ personal struggles have not ended here. As an African American and a Southern Baptist, he has agonized over the relationship between scripture and slavery. Citing passages like Paul’s statement in the First Epistle to Timothy that “[t]hose who are under the yoke of slavery must regard their masters as worthy of full respect,” Gomes acknowledges painfully that such passages laid the foundations for “slavery, segregation and apartheid.” His solution is provocative: He asks that enlightened Christians use their moral imagination to see how slavery is reprehensible despite its apparent approval by certain passages. This appeal to our “creativity” is a helpful step away from the literalism still practiced by many Christian preachers today.

This concept of the “moral imagination”--a spiritually enlightened sense of what is humane and just--is the kernel, the jewel, of this book because of the way it broadens one’s concept of being a Christian beyond, as Gomes says, “slavery to the literal text.”

But this can be an extremely difficult position to sustain. Many times I found Gomes stumbling, as we all must do in matters of faith. Asking for a bold new understanding of some scriptural passages, Gomes rests with literal tradition on others.

Concerning the creation story and the doctrine of original sin, for instance, Gomes’ thinking is strictly traditional. He repeats the long-held view that Eve, deceived by the serpent in Eden, caused mankind to fall into sin. It is too bad that he does not challenge this idea, as modern theologians like Paul Tillich have done, to assert that Eve’s gesture was a supreme act of freedom, of individual dignity, not sin. He might have completed the unsuccessful battle that Pelagius waged against Augustine in the 4th century on this interpretation, which has shaped concepts of guilt for centuries.

But that is an enormous job. What Gomes does show in this book is the need for scriptural rethinking, especially after describing how Southerners felt that slavery was simply in accordance with divine will. He is right that the scriptural texts must find a special meaning in the hearts of every believer. “The Good Book” is a noble, though sometimes ambivalent, attempt to suggest how one can live by God’s law in a complicated, secular age.