Often in the past I’ve referred to various sections of the Bible, primarily the Book of Revelation, as fodder for the inner Dungeons and Dragons geek in all of us.  Finally, I’ve come across someone who actually agrees!

Calvary Chapel’s Apocalypse, however, bears a resemblance to the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons. Just as “D and D” players excel by learning complicated strategies and knowing arcane sub-rules of sub-rules, Calvary Chapel Christians win by following a set of instructions taken straight from the Bible. They must know the secret passwords, identify their enemies correctly, and understand what lies beneath the various layers of evil. False prophets will become popular in the end times, for example, and those who don’t want to be damned will recognize these poseurs and refuse to worship with them.

All har-harisms aside, churches like Calvary Chapel (a chain Mega-church, mind you) represent the fire that clears the forests of reason in this country.  Such hardline thought and such tiny vision is never healthy, but it is surely easy.  It’s so easy for many of us to just want the easy thing.  So many want the easy way out.  So many want the easy way into heaven.  Why not?  Why work while your time on earth filters through as the sands of time ring the clarion call for the Apocalypse?  Fuck the world, right?

Like many evangelical forms of Protestantism, Calvary Chapel preaches that everything a Christian needs is written, word by holy word, in the Bible. In Miller’s surveys, everyone from Calvary Chapel’s pastors to its recent converts said they took the Bible literally. If you read the Book of Revelation as the physical, material truth, then you come to see God’s game as one played in a swirling, planet-devouring vortex of blood and violence.

I learned of a new interesting word yesterday from a Peter Gomes book that was introduced to me: Bibliolatry.  In his book, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart he outlines the literal interpretation of the Bible as basically being idolatry.  This is an interesting, as well as very perceptive idea:

1.  The worship of the Bible, making of it an object of veneration and ascribing to it the glory due to God

2.  The worship of the text, in which the letter is given an inappropriate superiority over the spirit

3.  The worship of the culture, in which the Bible is forced to conform to the norms of the prevailing culture

Basically, what I was enlightened with yesterday as compared to what I read in this alternet article today force a clash of some very inflammatory ideas.  This is what is incessantly interesting to me about the Bible; the interpretations possible drawn from many sides.  The sad thing is that there are far more people interested in being told what the Bible says as opposed to people who look for the answers to why the Bible even exists in the first place and how it has been used to literally crush our very brothers and sisters.

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