And the Sea Was No More: Reading the Bible in the Deep

Being overwhelmed is not spiritual failure; it's part of being a creature.

When panic attacks shattered his world, leaving him drowning in a chaos he couldn't name, biblical scholar Dave Nienhuis discovered something unexpected: Scripture itself offered language for his anguish. The Bible's recurring image of the catastrophic Deep--the watery chaos that threatens to overwhelm--spoke for him when he had no words of his own.

Both confession and Bible study, And the Sea Was No More traces the image of the Deep through Scripture, from the Spirit hovering over primordial waters in Genesis to Revelation's vision of a time when the sea will cease to exist. Through childhood trauma and EMDR therapy, through the Psalms and the prophets, through Job's complaints and Jesus asleep in the storm, Nienhuis discovers that God meets us not above the chaos but within it.

This is biblical scholarship written from the body--theology that knows how to flinch, exegesis shaped by trauma, faith that has learned to breathe again after being sucker-punched by the Deep. Writing as both a scholar and a sufferer, Nienhuis offers no explanations for suffering but gives readers permission to cry "How long, O Lord?" without shame.

For anyone overwhelmed--by trauma, grief, illness, anxiety, depression, or simply the weight of living in a troubled world--And the Sea Was No More offers both a lifeline and a liturgy. And it reveals that the only way through the Deep is to follow the slaughtered Lamb who went down into the waters and came out the other side, scarred and singing, follow me.

"When we cry out How long, O Lord? we're confessing something very important about us, and about God. . . . We proclaim to the world that an end is in fact coming. The crying won't last forever."

Dave Nienhuis is a teacher, speaker, and writer serving as professor of New Testament studies at Seattle Pacific Seminary. He has authored and edited several books, including A Concise Guide to Reading the New Testament: A Canonical Introduction.