Book Recommendation: What To Read When You've Lost Your Faith But Still Love The Bible

I've recently received a letter from a very cool guy who has lost his faith in strict biblicism but is deepening his faith in God through Buddhism.   After many years he wants to come back to the Bible: doubtless his motivations are very complex, but he hints that he has a little unfinished business with those pages, and says (among many other very good things) that it would be helpful to know what resources might shed a little light on it from outside the strict fundamental, religious commitments that governed his earlier reading.

Naturally, that book-list could go on until it more than tripled the number of pages in the Bible itself.  And I should probably start to put together that annotated bibliography.

But if I were to choose one best book for a person in that condition it would probably be The Bible As Literature: An Introduction, edited by Gabel and others.

It's an unassuming book: it isn't going to blow anybody out of the water.  It's not going to win you your faith back or lose it if you haven't lost it.  It quietly absorbs a great deal of scholarship and really doesn't show it off much.

But it's incredibly useful for giving the reader a taste of what the Bible likely meant to the writers and original readers.   It treats the Bible as the product of a human mind in a particular time and place in history, obeying the rules of its genres, committed irrevocably to history. 

Under those circumstances, I think it's really easy to find peace with the Bible.  It's filled with very human hopes and fears.  It has simple aims, like delighting an audience, pleasing a king, or rallying people to a cause.

The Bible's a book from people who, though not entirely like us, were enough like us to build a bridge between us.

This book, The Bible as Literature, helps build that bridge.