How I Changed My Mind - 2

From the comments on Facebook, I see that this is going to be a bit of a delicate exercise! So I reiterate that my only aim is to tell my own story, not to debate. The ending of the story may please a few people, but will likely disappoint many others. Whatever you may think of my journey, I am still your friend in real life, and hope you will be mine.

The more I studied the Bible, the more I discovered that it did not say what I had been told it said. The work of Evangelical New Testament scholar N.T. (Tom) Wright played a key role here. For example, he shows that the gospel is not the widely used four steps to God (Billy Graham) or four spiritual laws (Campus Crusade, now renamed Cru), but is rather the message that Jesus is Lord. Wright shows that what Paul means by "justification" is not what evangelical theology claims it means.

Moreover, I began to admit that the Bible, and even just the New Testament, does not have just one teaching on any given subject, but many. At one point I counted thirty-some books on Amazon with titles such as four (or five, or three) views of hell, heaven, God's foreknowledge, the Rapture, the resurrection, the meaning of Jesus' death, homosexuality, divorce, etc. In all these books, several differing viewpoints were advocated by authors claiming the Bible as absolute truth and the final authority. But they could not agree on what it said.

What to make of this? Was God incapable of communicating clearly? It became apparent to me that what Evangelicals do is pick out those passages that they agree with and use them to explain away other passages which appeal to advocates of other positions. Historian Mark Noll, in his The Civil War as Theological Crisis shows how both North and South appealed to the Bible to support their position on slavery. The credibility of the Bible to resolve vitally important ethical issues was seriously undermined.

In fact, every reader of the Bible brings to it their own preconceived lenses of concepts and values, and reads the Bible through them. The result is that we cannot see what is actually there in the text if it doesn’t fit with the mental scheme we received from pastors, teachers and authors. 

Evangelical Christians often say that without the Bible there would be no moral absolutes. That may be true, but there are none with the Bible either. Even one of the ten commandments, the one about consecrating the seventh day as the Sabbath day of rest, turned out not to be absolute, since Christians generally worship not on the seventh day but on the first. And the rite of circumcision, which preceded the law of Moses and was given to Abraham as an eternal covenant, was tossed out as worthless (Galatians 6:15) in the New Testament. I would like to say that the Bible teaches love as an absolute. But I cannot, for the Book of Revelation describes God, and even Jesus, as taking vengeance on their enemies, whereas in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says to love our enemies.

Here is how I reasoned: If God gave us the Bible and all its details, what is God trying to tell us through all these details and many, many additional challenges the Bible gives us?

My conclusion is that the Bible is calling us to think for ourselves. Just as Adam and Eve in the Genesis story were given no instruction manual on how to cultivate the garden, but had to figure it out for themselves, so we have to figure out for ourselves - together - how to live a good life. That is in fact what I had always been doing as an Evangelical, but without being aware of it. I just assumed that what I had been taught about the Bible was correct, and that those who disagreed were simply rejecting its authority.

Next time, how following Jesus led me to completely rethink the Christianity I had been taught, and that I myself had taught to others as a pastor and missionary.