Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible
By Liz Charlotte Grant
Eerdmans, 272 pages
Published January 7, 2025
By naming her book from a Zen proverb (knock on the sky, listen to the sound), Liz Grant signals this book will not be in the mold of her strict evangelical background. “I used to be a good evangelical,” she opens. “I aced every Bible class in my private Christian high school and nearly earned a minor in Bible at my prestigious Christian college.” This award-winning religious essayist addresses recovering fundamentalists, many of whom are refugees from evangelical churches, inviting them to rediscover the relevance of Scripture throughout the pages of Knock at the Sky.
Grant tackles the problem of biblical interpretation, drawing on her personal history in a community where folks assumed that the Bible is inerrant. She writes: “For my peers who have rejected the Bible altogether, it’s not the Bible as a work of literature to which they object necessarily, but how people apply the Bible today that spooks them.” I resonated with her experience, having suffered through strident sermons attacking the theory of evolution, vilifying our LGBTQIA+ siblings, and even suggesting that the Revised Standard Version was part of a plot to undermine Christian orthodoxy. She makes a strong case against the assumption that everything in the Bible is literally true, from the numbered days of creation to the role of women in society.
She builds her case against biblical inerrancy by examining the narrative in the first 32 chapters of Genesis, forewarning her readers with this caveat: “I have written this book as an experiment in eisegesis, as in reading life into the biblical text.” Many readers will recognize eisegesis as the opposite of exegesis (scholarly attempts to determine the original and intended meaning of a text); eisegesis projects interpretive meaning into the text by introducing one’s own ideas and experience. While exegesis attempts to be objective, eisegesis is, by definition, highly subjective.
Her focus on eisegesis, however, almost recklessly encourages the reading of personal meanings into the biblical text without regard to the original intent. While biblical interpretation is always relative to the reader’s location, it should always include thoughtful consideration of Scripture’s intended meanings. I appreciate the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s observation that we must accept “the mature responsibility of faith that plunges into the many-dimensional, the paradoxical, the conflicting elements of the Bible as well as those of life itself.”
Knock at the Sky’s greatest strength is Grant’s creative analysis of 11 pivotal events in the pages of Genesis, from creation to Jacob wrestling with the angel. Her approach is personal and wide-ranging – at times bordering on free association – as she introduces examples from art, history, literature, and music (e.g., M.C. Escher, 1493 papal Doctrine of Discovery, Chekhov, John Cage). These wide-ranging examples, however, occasionally stray from the topic under discussion and detract from rather than enhance her analysis.
Readers looking for scholarly commentary on Genesis are unlikely to find this book useful or informative. But estranged evangelicals and others who find biblical inerrancy unpersuasive may not only find refuge in the author’s personal odyssey but be inspired to reopen their Bibles with renewed enthusiasm.
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