How I Changed My Mind - 8: Have I Lost My Faith?

In my way of seeing things for four decades of my life, I would have regarded my current self either as having lost my faith, or as never having had genuine faith in the first place, depending on whether I was in one of my Calvinistic seasons. 

But I didn’t lose my sincere and deep faith. I followed through on it. 

You can see in the New Testament how Jesus, Paul, and others show how the Old Testament deconstructs the traditional Judaism of the time. They quoted Scripture to undercut sabbath observance, circumcision, temple worship with its sacrifices, dietary laws, and despising of non-Jewish peoples. These were the life-breath of Judaism’s identity in the first century. (Judaism has since evolved in some very positive directions, I hasten to point out.) 

Jesus was rejected by his own nation because he pointed out that their own Scriptures contained radical criticism of their religious teachings and practices. 

I came to see that following Jesus doesn’t mean believing everything that others said he said or said about him. The most radical way to follow Jesus is to learn from his way of thinking. 

When I did that, with help from numerous works by competent scholars, I saw that the New Testament deconstructs traditional Christianity just as the Old Testament deconstructed traditional Judaism. 

Gerd Thiessen, in his book Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach, observes that faith believes something because the accepted authority (a church, the Bible, a person) says to. Science, on the other hand, believes something on the basis of confirmed evidence. When I was 18 and a new Evangelical convert, I was asked if I believed that Christ would return again to Earth. This was a new idea to me, so I asked if the Bible said so. I was shown a verse that affirmed it, so I replied, "Yes, I believe it."

But the New Testament challenges that way of thinking. It invites us by its example to think critically about what we are told on the basis of authority, and to ask if it really is so. It ultimately supports critical, scientific thinking rather than automatic submission to traditional authorities and their requirements.

I suspect that this may be one important reason that science and democracy and secular philosophy developed in countries that were heavily influenced by the Bible. It was the natural outgrowth of the mind and spirit and method of the New Testament. And this would be why Christian colleges and universities that are founded to train young persons in devout service to Christ tend to become secular over time.