*Warning: this will make some readers uncomfortable. However, it is important to engage thoughtfully and respectfully with perspectives that differ from your own.
Introduction
Hi, friends.
I know, I know. I’ve been absent for a while. We’ve been packing and preparing for our trip back to the United States. We’re spending time with our families, and then we’ll be touring the country visiting churches and sharing our work in France. As a result, I’ve been extremely busy.
Personal Faith Journey
This won’t be a follow up to my series about my own faith journey, but it will touch on a topic that is tightly interwoven with it. I want to share something that has deeply affected me and, I believe, hundreds of other people who have deconstructed their faith.
Since we’re in America at the moment, we took some time to visit some old friends of ours, people that we have known for many years and love dearly. I know that the wife has gone through an incredibly traumatic deconstruction journey, but I didn’t know that her husband ended up traveling the same path. While we were visiting with them, he told me that he is no longer a Christian. When he shared what caused him to lose his faith, I understood. I had similar questions myself.
The Problem with Biblical Inerrancy
You see, he was told his whole life that the Bible is inerrant, that there cannot be any contradictions or falsehoods, that the Bible is the literal Word of God spoken to humans. In this view, the Holy Spirit moved the hands of people who wrote the Bible to record exactly what he wanted. God is all-knowing; therefore, the Bible cannot be wrong.
Imagine my friend’s surprise when he discovered a contradiction in the Bible. He was unable to reconcile this contradiction, and so this began to lead him down a path of deconstruction.
Unfortunately, this is an incredibly common problem that young people face. This is especially true for people who grew up in a tradition similar to ours, where the Bible is held up as almost a fourth member of the trinity. In fact, many doctrinal statements begin with the Bible, instead of talking about God or Jesus first.
Contradictions and Deconstruction
Our whole early lives are spent in an environment where we attend church several times a week, and most of us are homeschooled or attend schools that are affiliated with our denominations. And so we spend much of our lives having the idea that the Bible must be the inerrant word of God. This is a fact that cannot be questioned. We often hear that if science disagrees with the Bible, then the Bible is right. Anytime there are any perceived contradictions in the text, they can’t really be contradictions; it’s simply a problem of our own understanding.
The Impact on Youth
As a result, when young people grow up, graduate high school, and move on to become adults, they are encouraged to attend colleges or universities that are closely connected with the denominations. The fear is that, if a young person attends a secular institution, the institution will corrupt him or her.
The thing is, they’re not wrong.
Isolation is a key signifier of a cult. And isolation is an important part of fundamentalism. Think about it: they control all information, treat outsiders as scary, corrupting influences, and claim to have absolute truth. I won’t mince my words–Christian fundamentalism is a cult. Each sect believes that they have the truth and that all other sects aren’t truly Christian.
When young (or old) people leave the cult and venture outside, they discover that the world isn’t as scary as they’ve been led to believe. Science may actually have something to contribute to society. And, devastatingly, the Bible does, in fact, contain contradictions that cannot simply be explained away.
When confronted with these things, the most common response is to leave, to walk away from the church and the faith. And I understand it. I had moments of crisis like this as a young adult. We spend so much time being indoctrinated to believe that this book contains all the answers to life’s problems and questions, and that it is the absolute truth and final authority, that when we are confronted with the fact that these beliefs are wrong, we can’t handle it. We’ve never been given any other framework with which to interpret the Bible. And since the Bible is the foundation upon which all other doctrines are built, the rest of our faith crumbles with the cracks in that foundation.
So we have no choice but to leave. If we can’t believe the Bible, what can we believe?
And therein lies one of the fundamental problems of fundamentalism. The framework of our faith collapses just like that.
I was one of the lucky ones, if you can call it that. My faith didn’t completely collapse as a result of my questions. I remember finding a seeming contradiction in the Bible and then running to apologetics websites to find an explanation. I remember sitting in church and reading the gospel accounts of the resurrection of Christ. They’re all very different. So I had to find a means of synthesizing these accounts. Many of my college years were spent this way.
A New Perspective on the Bible
The only thing that kept my faith from collapsing completely was my deep fear of going to hell. That’s another issue that I won’t get into right now. It may sound like I’m exaggerating, but I had undiagnosed depression and anxiety at the time, so I had a deep-seated fear of eternal punishment.
Here’s the problem–according to the Bible itself, the Word of God is Jesus. It’s stated as such in John chapter 1:
“In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
The Word was with God in the beginning.”
And so the Word of God is a person, the one who was there at the beginning and who is revealed as the very expression of God on earth. Through Jesus we see who God is. And if something, even something in the Bible, doesn’t look like Jesus, then it very likely doesn’t look like God either.
And the Bible was written by people trying to understand what God was doing. As the theologian William Barclay says, “The Bible is the story of God acting and men interpreting, or failing to interpret, the action of God.“
In fact, there are many, many problematic parts of the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. God commands the murder of entire towns. God encourages the genocide of the Canaanite people. Slavery is assumed, and even encouraged at times. What we have in the Bible is people reacting to how God was working in their particular culture and society. Sometimes their interpretation is wrong. Yet, they always assume that God is on their side.
And then there are beautiful moments where the God that we recognize in Jesus breaks through. Consider one of my favorite passages from the book of Micah:
“With what should I approach the Lord
and bow down before God on high?
Should I come before him with entirely burned offerings,
with year-old calves?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with many torrents of oil?
Should I give my oldest child for my crime;
the fruit of my body for the sin of my spirit?
8 He has told you, human one, what is good and
what the Lord requires from you:
to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God.”
This passages drills down to the essential aspects of God’s character and his (or her) expectations of us who follow him (or her).
This is a short version of my new perspective of the Bible. There is much more to it than that, and it has taken me years of deconstruction to become comfortable talking about the Bible in this way. I know that some of my readers will be uncomfortable, even enraged, by what I have said here.
And that’s the problem.
The cult of Christian fundamentalism places too much emphasis on what the Bible exactly says. They claim to interpret the Bible literally, specifically when it comes to the Genesis creation story or verses about homosexuality. Yet their literalism fails to serve their own purposes when Jesus tells us to love our neighbor and to turn the other cheek. Suddenly they claim a spiritual individual interpretation. And so, like my own, their hermeneutic (way of understanding the Bible) is inherently inconsistent and contradictory. The difference is that I’m at least willing to admit that I can be inconsistent.
People will accuse me of having a low view of Scripture now. And perhaps I do, if I allow the phrase to be defined by Christian fundamentalists. What I do know, however, is that I will place everything in my theology below the center of my faith, Jesus Christ. Through Jesus I will interpret the Bible. Through Jesus I see who God is.
Perhaps if the church allowed young people to think of the Bible in this way churches wouldn’t be shrinking the way that they are now. Perhaps they wouldn’t need to send people to their own colleges and universities and isolate them from broader society.
Perhaps my friend would still be a Christian.
Encouraging Open Dialogue
If we look for Jesus in the Bible, suddenly things become gray instead of black-and-white. It’s scary at first, because it means that grasping final authority and absolutes is significantly more difficult. But maybe wrestling with these things is part of the purpose of the Bible, to encourage conversation among people who disagree to try to understand what God is like.
The point is that it’s ok not to have to have answers for everything. The great mystery is part of the allure of faith for me. It has allowed me to love and serve with Christians from a variety of different faith backgrounds, even people with whom I disagree profoundly. The truth is that we’re all on this journey together, the journey learning how to fulfill the greatest commandments as Jesus spoke them, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
These two commandments are the central message of the Bible.
Conclusion and Call to Action
And now it’s your turn. How has your view of the Bible changed and developed as you’ve matured? What would you encourage Christian youth who are grappling with this issue to do?
Recommended resources:
–Introducing the Bible by William Barclay
–The Bible for normal people podcast by Pete Enns and Jared Byas
–How the Bible Actually Works by Pete Enns
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Coffee & Theology 