As I mentioned in my last post, before diving too deep into exploring the two major areas of struggle along my journey thus far (the nature of the Bible and the nature of faith), what I’d like to do first is to help set the stage a bit by giving a high level overview in the next few posts that will hopefully highlight the gist of how I used to see things and how I see things now. My aim in doing so is to help provide a general outline of sorts that I can then fill in with more detail as I progress in unpacking my story. Since I will start by summarizing how I used to see the Bible, I should probably note for the sake of clarity in advance that I still see the Bible as inspired, sacred, and authoritative scripture and, as the author of 2 Timothy puts it, “useful for teaching, reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16). I only say this because although I still see the Bible as those things, the way in which I see what it means for it to be all of those things is much different than the way that I used to (and, hopefully, more biblical as well). As such, if what I say in the next couple posts seems confusing at first blush, or seems as if I’m denying that the Bible is all of those things, or makes you wonder what it is exactly I do believe about the Bible, just hang in there. I plan on covering that in much greater detail not too far down the road. But with that little clarifier in mind for now, let us go ahead and begin.

Despite being raised both Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist throughout my childhood, my understanding of Christianity growing up was fairly simple and straightforward for the most part, being relatively free from any awareness of the degree of differences inherent in the theology and practices of those traditions. Although my understanding undoubtedly deepened in many ways as I grew older and became more interested in matters of faith (especially during my high school and college years), the gist of how I viewed Christianity was, at bottom, relatively unchanged for the first two and a half decades or so of my life. It really wasn’t until I immersed myself into the fascinating world of Christian theology, philosophy, and apologetics that I began to truly appreciate the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition (a place where I have thus far spent the better part of a decade exploring, and which has impacted my faith over the years in truly immeasurable ways). Yet even then my views early on remained relatively unchanged for the most part. Deepened and enriched, absolutely – but relatively unchanged at first. Looking back, I think the primary reason for this was likely because my initial interest in exploring the intellectual side of faith was not primarily to question or explore my own beliefs, but rather to find ways to support and defend them against the objections of others. It wasn’t until much later that my own intellectual integrity led me to question and deconstruct my own beliefs to the same extent and degree as I had learned to do so well with others, a critical point in my journey where my approach definitively transitioned from a posture of ideological defensiveness to one of genuine theological exploration.

In any case, for most of my life (from childhood all the way through college and beyond), if you were to ask me what served to ultimately anchor my understanding of the Christian faith, I would have likely (or at least eventually) appealed to some form of divine authority. It was, at bottom, this notion of divine authority that served as the foundation for my faith. In my early years as a confirmed Catholic, this notion of divine authority was understood to reside in the infallibility of the Pope and/or the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, however even then (and especially after my family left the Catholic church around the time I started high school and began attending a local Baptist church – where my faith really began to take root) the notion of divine authority that resonated with me the most was always the notion of divine authority as expressed, not in the Pope, but rather in the Bible. It was the Bible that was the ultimate authority for me, the “be all” and “end all” of my faith. And although I never really read much of it during this phase of my life (that came much later), I nevertheless (and ironically) absorbed quite a variety of fairly strongly held beliefs about it. For a long time I simply thought that these beliefs reflected what all Christians everywhere believed, and so it was only later that I discovered that perhaps the most distinctive features of what I had come to believe were not so much a reflection of what all Christians everywhere had always believed, but rather what a fairly large subset of Christians from a very particular set of traditions believed – the two most influential of these traditions often being referred to as “fundamentalism” and “conservative evangelicalism.”

Although I no doubt absorbed many of my beliefs about the Bible from these two traditions (and later learned to defend many of those beliefs with significant intellectual rigor), perhaps the view that I absorbed most deeply of all was the view that the Bible was, at its very core, a divine product. Although I also viewed it as a human product as well (I never believed that it simply fell out of the sky in Ye Olde English, fresh off the finger of God), seeing it as a human product wasn’t what was most important. Rather, what was most important, despite its having a variety of human authors, was that it ultimately had one very important divine author – namely, God. As such, the Bible wasn’t just any other book but was a divinely sanctioned book of sorts that came from God unlike any other – it was the unique revelation of God and the inspired “Word of God.” Indeed that is not only why we called it the “Holy Bible” (it was “holy” or “sacred” because it came from God), but that is also why it had divine authority (as a divine product it had a divine guarantee to be true). Thus, how I viewed the Bible’s status as holy or sacred scripture and how I viewed the nature of the Bible’s authority were both ultimately grounded in its origin – namely, its divine origin. 

As you can imagine, seeing the Bible as a divine product with a divine guarantee to be true had a pretty major impact on how I read it – or at least on how I knew I was “supposed” to read it. For most of my life, this way of seeing the Bible led me to believe in a fairly hard-lined version of what is often called biblical “infallibility” or “inerrancy.” The way I saw it, since the Bible was inspired by God and had a divine guarantee to be true, then no matter what it says – whether about the origin of the universe, about world history, or about God, Jesus, theology, ethics, etc. – whatever it says must be true (no ifs, ands, or buts). In short, the Bible was “God’s truth” and therefore told me, not primarily how its human authors once saw things (although that may also be true), but (most importantly) how God sees things. Indeed, calling the Bible the “Word of God” basically meant that it was the actual “words of God” (it may not have been dictated by God, but the end result was more or less the same as if it had been). As such, I saw the Bible as a kind of holy autobiography or encyclopedia of sorts, a place where I could look up information about God or get God’s perspective on pretty much any given topic that it covered. Consequently, questioning the Bible was a big no-no. Question or disagree with what it says and you better watch out, as doing so is tantamount to questioning or disagreeing with God (something I was pretty sure he didn’t take too kindly to). 

Although such a hard-line view probably best captured the heart of how I saw the Bible from childhood through high school and probably most of college, my view did soften considerably in a sense over time and through further study – at least on a surface level. Although I still saw the Bible as a divine product that had divine authority and a divine guarantee to be true, I began to realize that the hard-lined way I had more or less uncritically absorbed as a child was only one way (although quite common) out of a wide variety of ways that Christians have historically viewed the Bible. Although I don’t have time here to take a detour through all the “ins and outs” of various approaches to biblical inerrancy and the (often heated) debates that have ensued amongst (primarily evangelical) theologians over the past several decades, suffice it to say that I eventually came to dabble with the idea that just because the Bible is a divine product didn’t mean that everything in the Bible necessarily had to be true. As I saw it, God may have guided the writers of scripture in such a way so as to prevent them – not from making any errors whatsoever – but rather to prevent them from making any serious errors (namely, about anything that matters for our salvation). 

This way of looking at the Bible still held much in common with my previous view, but it was a much more flexible view that allowed that some parts of the Bible may just reflect the views of its ancient authors (rather than God’s views), particularly those parts having to do with pre-modern science, archaic laws, etc. That being said, and although there is still a part of me that resonates to some extent with this view, in the end it is not altogether that much different on a foundational level than the view I held before it. Although different in many respects on the surface, both views (as well as all of the views I explored in between) still shared the same underlying foundation. Namely, that the Bible is a divine product and as such has divine authority and a divine guarantee to be true. To put it another way, both of these views held that the Bible has authority because it is true, and that the Bible is true because it comes from God (they may have hashed out the details differently, of course, but this much they agreed wholeheartedly on). Yet it was this underlying view in particular that I began to struggle with the most. Although I felt fairly competent in clearing away almost any possible objection against such a view (typically objections based on alleged errors in the Bible, or alleged philosophical incoherencies about the Bible being both human and divine in its origin, etc.), it was in trying to argue for the view (initially to others but later to myself) that I really began to struggle. It was a struggle not simply because I was slowly beginning to lose my belief in such a view over time, or because I increasingly found the typical arguments in favor of it to be uncompelling (although that was all true), but primarily because I felt an enormous burden of obligation to restore that belief if I was to be “truly Christian” or – and most importantly – if I was to truly please God (a sense of obligation brought about more by my understanding of what it meant to have faith than anything else, and something I will no doubt cover in more detail very soon).

Yet, that wasn’t the only aspect of how I viewed the Bible that I would eventually struggle with. There were two other elements in particular about the way I approached the Bible that served to add to that struggle, elements I hope to give a brief overview of next time.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.

Cheers,