‘Scared by the Bible’ author stops by the ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’ virtual studio
Dr. Brandon Grafius, who normally writes academic books, has produced one that’s both informative and fun to read
LOUISVILLE — Just as we can’t get to Easter without slogging through Lent, we must sit for a while with horrific stories included in the Bible in order to learn from them.
Dr. Brandon Grafius, who wrote “Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture,” was the most recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” hosted each week by Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Listen to their 53-minute discussion here. Grafius is Academic Dean and Professor of Biblical Studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit.
The hosts asked Grafius what we miss out on by skipping over the Bible’s horror stories and what the scarier aspects of scripture might have to teach us.
“It’s a multi-part, large question,” Grafius told the hosts. “It’s what I’ve been wrestling with in my research and honestly my faith life for about a dozen years now.”
The first thing to know, Grafius said, is that the Bible “is wise enough to try to incorporate all of life into it.” Part of life is experiencing horror, he said, although “most of us experience it in more mundane ways,” especially “those of us who are privileged to live in places that are relatively safe. But we still experience the horror of aging, of watching our loved ones go through illnesses, the horror of worrying about our finances or our purpose in life.” Bible authors were “smart enough to recognize that we have those experiences of horror in life, and that [the Bible had] to do something to address that.”
By incorporating these passages of horror, “I think the Bible is telling us this is part of our experience — part of what it means to be alive — is that we can learn how to think through those issues and face the horror rather than run away from it,” he said.
The scariest parts of the Bible are the places where we get closest to God, according to Grafius. “I think horror is all about exploring what it is we don’t know and what we can’t process in our minds as humans,” he said. “For me, the Bible often uses the genre of horror as a way to help us think about God … in ways we couldn’t think of if we were just getting rational propositions like ‘God is this’ or ‘God is that.’”
In the book, Grafius employs an expansive definition of horror. “I certainly look at Bible passages that are gory or where characters’ lives are under threat from other people or from the Divine,” he said. “But I also feel like anyplace where a character is intended to be scared or if the passage is trying to scare us as an audience, that’s enough for me to call it horror.”
He explores “some of the violence” in the Books of Kings and uses portions of the Book of Job as well as “places where there are monsters,” like the Book of Daniel, which he pairs “with some old Godzilla movies and how they’re trying to help us think through empire and those kinds of questions. For me, anything that is trying to scare us is horror.”
When Doong brought up the horror of Egyptian people suffering because Pharaoh would not listen to Moses, Grafius noted that “we often try to domesticate these stories and take the horror out of them.”
“It baffles me that we treat Noah’s Ark as a children’s story and focus on stuffed animals and ‘rise and shine and give God the glory, glory’ and just sweep aside that this is a mass cataclysm event for the whole world,” Grafius said. “We’ve seen movies like ‘Noah’ that really emphasized the horror of the flood” where viewers “get to see the cataclysm of the people outside the ark and what that might have been like.”
There are more kinds of apocalypses than the end-of-the-world variety, Grafius noted. “At the heart of apocalyptic narratives — zombie or plague apocalypses or whatever flavor you might have — is the question of where do we find hope when everything we think of as being the scaffolding of our life has fallen apart? What new thing might emerge from this devastation?”
This is what the religious genre of apocalypticism is all about, he said. “For the author of Daniel, for the author of Revelation, the world was in such a bad place that we can’t imagine it being reformed,” Grafius said. “The only way we can imagine a way forward is for God to directly enter into the world and make things new.”
When Catoe made a Frankenstein reference, Grafius said many people flash on the 1931 film when they hear that name. In that movie, soon after Dr. Frankenstein has brought the monster to life, he says, “Now I know what it feels like to be God.” “That was a line that was deemed a little edgy in 1931,” Grafius said, and it was edited out of many versions of the film.
“But it brings to the forefront the relationship between a creator and its creation,” he said. “It brings in that question of ethical responsibility.” Dr. Frankenstein is a creator “who feels no responsibility for his creation, and what terrible consequences that brings,” Grafius said. In contrast, “the Creator in the Book of Genesis is deeply involved in Creation.”
In response to a Doong question about sanitizing the Bible, Grafius said that as they enter adulthood, many Christians “become more adept at taking the Bible as it is, rather than the book we wish it was. Sometimes I wish it was a book that didn’t have anything but flowers and rainbows and nice people treating each other well, but that’s not the book we have.”
“I feel like we would be wise to trust the wisdom and the inspiration of our faith ancestors and recognize they wrote the book they did for a reason,” he said. “We should take that book seriously.”
Horror works on at least two different levels, he said. We can be afraid of a masked man with a knife and also be afraid of a ghost. The former might be pointing out “our family units are not as secure as we think they are,” he said, while the latter is a reminder that “there is something in the past that has been left undone that continues to reverberate in the present.”
Those monsters in the Book of Daniel “are scary because they’re stomping and gnashing their teeth. But they’re also scary because they’re representations of empire and representations of how we don’t have the autonomy over our own communities that we wish we did.”
We sit with the horror in the Bible instead of jumping to a more pleasant portion “because we know that process is important,” he said. “There’s a real parallel here with Lent. As people of faith, we know that having those ashes imposed on us is important and living with those ashes — living with the walk of Christ for those 40 days — that’s important. We lose a lot if we jump straight to Easter.”
“It’s not always about the ending,” he said. “The journey also matters.”
New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Watch previous editions here.
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