My good friend William sent this interesting exchange my way; it’s worth checking out and somewhat related to my musings here.

Peter Leithart:

According to [Christian] Smith, Biblicists believe the Bible is God’s word and therefore has divine authority, that its plain sense is clear to every “reasonably intelligent” reader, that it covers everything Christians need to know, and covers everything in such a way that it is possible to construct a “handbook” on nearly any topic. . . .

Again and again, [Smith] directs attention away from theories about the text to the Bible itself.

It is on this last point, however, that Smith’s book is least consistent and satisfying, and this failure is evident especially in what he says about the universal scope of Scripture. . . .

Even on his own premises, it seems to me, Smith should admit the universal applicability of the Bible. The Bible is, as Smith insists, “Christocentric” and “Christotelic,” but the Christ on which the Bible centers and toward which it aims is the Creator, the one in whom all things hold together, alpha and omega. If the Bible everywhere speaks of this Christ, then it must, directly or indirectly, speak of everything else besides. To call the Bible “Christ-centered” is to make the most comprehensive possible claim about its contents.

vs. Christian Smith:

Those who wish to effectively refute my book’s argument might do one or more of the following. First, they might show that biblicism is in fact not widespread in American Evangelicalism. Second, they might show that biblicism in fact need not to produce fairly convergent readings of the Bible. Third, they might show that Evangelicalism is empirically not characterized by pervasive interpretive pluralism. Fourth, they might show that one or another possible explanation offered in fact successfully rescues biblicism from the fact of pervasive interpretive pluralism. Lots of luck with any of these. Making one and three stick require taking leave of reality. Two and four might only be demonstrated by eliminating some key parts of biblicism, which would turn it into a quite different theory. If someone can accomplish any of these, I’d like to see that magic performed. But I see none of it in Leithart’s response.

By the time Leithart has explained his own dissatisfactions, the main thrust of my book’s central argument also gets lost. What we deserve to see is Leithart or whoever else focusing on that central argument and explaining why my critique of biblicism as impossible is wrong.

Christianity being a revealed religion, we all come to it through revelation. That revelation is indirect; it comes through other people, who got it from other people, who got it from still other people, and on and on … It’s like the best pyramid scheme in human history. Except instead of phone cards–

–that analogy is about to become problematic, so let’s move on. The takeaway here is that people receive the Gospel; none of us finds it by himself. And even if he did, the Gospel as we have it today–the four canonical written accounts of Jesus’ life–is itself mediated by the four evangelists, not to mention the compilers, editors, copiers, translators, and teachers of their words through the centuries. Though Jesus could arrest each of us with a trance-like direct revelation of himself, he instead chooses to communicate to us by human means through human messengers. (It’s worth considering that if he used superhuman means to communicate himself to us, it might infringe upon our free will–which he refuses to do.)

The question then becomes: can we trust the messengers?

All orthodox (or mostly orthodox) Christians agree that the Bible is the infallible word of God. In other words, we all agree that it is an unfailingly true revelation of God and his will for us. Let’s look at a representative Evangelical expression of this, from Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago (my emphasis):

Our core beliefs are centered in Christ and His message, found and supported in Scripture. Ours is a biblical theology rather than a theology that is speculative or merely rooted in tradition. Our theology is derived directly from the gospel of Jesus Christ, as found in Scripture.

The sole basis of our belief is the Bible–the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe Scripture in its entirety originated with God and He revealed it to chosen authors. Scripture speaks with the authority of God while simultaneously reflecting the backgrounds, styles, and vocabularies of these human authors. We hold that the Scriptures, in their original manuscripts, are infallible and inerrant; they are the unique, full, and final authority on all matters of faith and practice. There are no other writings similarly inspired by God.

That’s a lot to unpack. I think there are some veiled references here to Christianity’s dark Catholic past, to wit: (1) this business of “theology that is speculative or merely rooted in tradition”; (2) the bit about “66 books of the Old and New Testaments”–remember that until the 16th century there were more than that!; and, maybe most significantly, (3) the insistence that the Bible is “the sole basis of our belief.”

In response to these claims, a Catholic might say: (1) the Bible itself comes to us through the tradition of the Christian community, and is the central but not the only part of that tradition; (2) we should be careful about discarding books of the Old Testament that Jesus and his apostles may have considered scriptural; and (3) if the Bible is the sole basis of our belief and “speculative” and “traditional” theology are off-limits, then Christians need to stop talking about a whole lot of things like abortion, polygamy, assisted suicide, and pre-marital sex, because the Bible is at best ambiguous and often utterly silent about these things.

So, here we have two very different understandings of the infallibility of the scriptures. Evangelicals say that God gave us an infallible Bible, through fallible human authors, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to guide us into all truth. Catholics say God gave us an infallible Church, through fallible human apostles and their successors, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to guide us into all truth–and that the infallible Church gave us an infallible Bible, through fallible human authors, compilers, editors, canonizers, copiers, translators, and teachers, inspired by the Holy Spirit, as a crucial part of the Church’s mission to guide us into all truth.

My gnawing question as a discomfited Evangelical was, if God can use fallible men to accomplish his infallible will, and if the Holy Spirit can protect an error-prone man from making errors when, say, recording an account of Jesus’ life, then why could not the same God use the same grace through the ages to protect his sheep from bad shepherds?

Besides, doesn’t the Evangelical claim demand as much credulity as the Catholic claim? Evangelicals ask us to believe that at least while they were stooped over their writing desks, quills in hand, the human authors of our sacred books were, by the grace of God, infallible. Because, after all, God is infallible, and these men were his messengers. Catholics ask us to believe that and the same thing about the apostles and now the bishops who shepherd the Lord’s flock: that inasmuch as they are God’s chosen instruments, the Holy Spirit will not allow them to fail.

I was loath to accept this logic, but I began to wonder whether the reason for my hesitation was, at least in part, that it’s just easier to trust the fallible authors of the infallible Bible because they’ve all been dead for at least two-thousand years. It takes more faith–and a good dose of humility, too–to trust an 84-year-old German in white robes half a world away who claims right now to be carrying on the Lord’s infallible work in the world.

And yet, from the very beginning, Christians have looked to the Church as the “pillar and bulwark of the truth.” And the bishops, the successors of the apostles–the Bishop of Rome first among them (more on this later)–are the pillars of the Church.

Don’t believe me? That’s OK, my feelings aren’t hurt. But consider the evidence, why don’t you:

A few years after the death of the Apostle John, around the turn of the second century, an early Christian named Ignatius was on his way from Antioch to Rome to be martyred. On his journey he wrote a series of letters to churches in various cities, saying things like this:

See that ye all follow the bishop, even as Christ Jesus does the Father, and the presbytery as ye would the apostles. Do ye also reverence the deacons, as those that carry out [through their office] the appointment of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as where Christ is, there does all the heavenly host stand by, waiting upon Him as the Chief Captain of the Lord’s might, and the Governor of every intelligent nature. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize, or to offer, or to present sacrifice, or to celebrate a love-feast. But that which seems good to him, is also well-pleasing to God, that everything ye do may be secure and valid.

Ignatius was himself a bishop, third in line from the Apostle Peter. According to the ancient tradition of the Church, even if not accepted as doctrinally reliable, should at least carry some weight as history–Peter remained in Antioch for seven years after his arrival there and the confrontation by Paul described in Galatians 2. Peter accepted Paul’s rebuke, and soon became the city’s first bishop (“patriarch” in the terminology of the Eastern Church). When he left for Rome he appointed Evodius in his place, and after Evodius’s death he appointed–evidently from his new position in Rome–Ignatius.

And so we have here an anecdotal account of the early church’s apostolic character. Ignatius clearly thought the office of bishop was essential to the Church, and he was quite literally a successor of the Apostle Peter.

Two hundred years after Ignatius was martyred, another bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea, undertook a painstaking chronology of the Church from its founding to his own day, including documentation of the apostolic lineage of the churches in all the principle cities of the empire. The significance of this for us is that we have a record from only a few generations after Christ, and before the supposed takeover of Christianity by Constantine, of the importance of apostolicity in the early church.

Apostolicity still matters. Indeed, one could argue that the more distant we get (temporally) from the historical life of Christ, apostolicity becomes ever more important. Apostolicity is the golden thread that connects 21st-century America to first-century Palestine; it is the lifeline between my church in New York City and the Church throughout the world and throughout history; it is the guarantee of sacramental unity and of doctrinal consistency; it is the “pillar and bulwark of the truth.” Because the Church is apostolic, we can trust the Bible. Because the Church is apostolic, we have the Bible.

Presented with these realities, how can one help but feel drawn toward the Catholic Church? Having now passed the midpoint of my own story (my story thus far, I should say!), this is the question we’ll pick up next time.

A friend asked me to elaborate a bit about my earlier assertion of “translation bias” in some Protestant (particularly Evangelical) versions of Scripture, regarding two words in particular: episkopos and presbyteros. In response, I want to back off slightly–”bias” is too strong a word for what I’m trying to describe. I simply mean to say that if you can’t read the text in the original language–which I’m not educated enough to do–you have to rely to some extent on the judgment of a translator.

Let’s take episkopos as an example. This is rendered in the NIV as “overseer” with a footnote that says “traditionally ‘bishop.’” Other translations, for instance the ESV, do not have a footnote but simply use “overseer”–and not without reason. “Overseer” is said (by people who know way more about this than I do) to be the more literal translation. Epikopos was a title used in first-century Rome for certain government officials who had oversight responsibilities. The English word “bishop” is a corruption via the Latin episcopus, later ‘biscopus in slang. By the time it was in use in English around the 10th century, the meaning of episkopos had evolved somewhat from its meaning in the first century–how much is a matter of debate. (The Oxford English Dictionary is my source for the etymology, but unfortunately I can’t link to it because it requires a subscription.)

Isn’t the NIV just being more accurate, then, when it says “overseer” rather than “bishop”? Well, yes, and no. To some Evangelical ears, including mine at one time, “bishop” carries some baggage that the innocuous “overseer” does not. Because when you’ve been raised in a completely non-hierarchical, non-denominational church environment, as I had, “bishop” isn’t reminiscent of Lutherans or Anglicans or Methodists or what-have-you, but of Catholics.

As an Evangelical I read the New Testament, then looked at today’s Catholic Church, and saw what looked like a lot of accretion over the centuries, a lot of man-made added stuff that gets in the way of the Gospel and doesn’t reflect the purity of the early church. I projected my understanding of church onto the text, rather than let the text inform–even dictate–my understanding of church. So for a long time I was able to persist in the mistaken belief that the early church looked pretty much like a modern Evangelical church, only in a different cultural context. In reality the early church was hierarchical, liturgical, and sacramental–evidence of which abounds in the New Testament unless you’re accustomed to glossing over it, as I was.

So, I would say, “bishop” has a Catholic ring to it because the term “bishop” comes to us from the New Testament church and the New Testament church has a Catholic ring to it.

There’s a wrinkle here that I should address: episkopos and presbyteros, it seems, are used interchangeably in the New Testament. The words were differentiated, however, by the end of the first century–either before or shortly after the death of the last apostle. We know this from the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, who died in 108. Episkopos became “bishop” and presbyteros became “priest”; bishops held authority over a number of priests who assisted the bishop in ministering to his flock.

As far as I can tell, everything I’ve said here is well within the  bounds of what is known about the earliest history of the church. If I’m wrong, someone please correct me.

What I’ve left unsaid–and what is also well attested by the historical record–is that by the time the terms were differentiated, bishops understood themselves as successors to the apostles in a way that priests were not. The question of apostolic authority ties in nicely with the next installment of my “crisis of authority” narrative, so I’ll pick it up there soon.

I’m trying to eat better and cheaper, which means cooking, which means upending my spendthrift New York City lifestyle.

So tonight, instead of apologetics, you get a recipe. Not a particularly exotic one, but one I’ve been enjoying.

Best tomato sauce you’ve ever had: really good first cold press extra virgin olive oil, four or five medium vine-ripened tomatoes, a couple medium red onions, as much fresh garlic as you like, 20 or so cremini mushrooms (older than white buttons but younger than portobellos–who knew?), fresh basil, freshly ground black pepper, kosher salt.

The key is to let the tomatoes cook down for a long, long time. Cut ‘em up and throw ‘em in once the onions are soft and the garlic a little brown, and make sure there’s still plenty of olive oil in the mix. Then let it alone for 15, 20, 30 minutes on low heat. Seems like longer is better; last time I did two hours. Stir once in a while so nothing burns or sticks.

Italian sausage (or Italian turkey sausage, which is leaner and otherwise indistinguishable, as far as I can tell) optional.

I haven’t had a chance to try throwing some cabernet or merlot in, but I have a feeling it’d work nicely.

And call me crazy, but this tastes great on broccoli instead of pasta, and broccoli doesn’t make you (by which I mean me) feel guilty.

My mother referred me to this, apropos of yesterday’s post on the Christian obligation to follow truth, no matter the personal cost:

Here’s a rough analogy: Let’s say that a woman was seeking God, and she came across a belief system that taught that it’s morally wrong to own a car; something about car ownership, they said, was contrary to God’s nature, and therefore objectively wrong. Naturally, her first reaction was, “That’s absurd!” But then she found a lot of other reasonable stuff in the belief system, so she took another look at that crazy car teaching. To her surprise, it ended up being not as unreasonable as she’d initially thought; in fact, she had to admit that some of the defenses she read really got her thinking.

But in the back of her mind there was always this voice that said, I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT A CAR! There was no way. She even thought through it a couple of times: She needed it to run errands, her husband needed his car for work. And she couldn’t just take the kids out of all their activities. Nope. The life that she had carefully crafted would completely fall apart if she gave up having a car.

As you can imagine, this line of thinking would bring her investigation into the anti-car belief system to an end. There’s this idea out there we can will ourselves into automaton mode and make evaluations about any kind of subject with perfect objectivity. But it’s not true (except maybe in matters of math or science, and even then I think our biases come into play more than we’d like to admit).

To use the example of the woman in the car, there is no way that she is going to accept the belief system that includes the teaching against cars, even if her rational mind believes that it’s true … unless she’s willing to let go of her car, and therefore her entire lifestyle.

The rest is here.

Monday and Yesterday I wrote about the beginning of a period of spiritual turmoil in my life that wound up lasting more than five years. From soon after the beginning till very near the end, though, there were no major developments along the way–for most of the time I was simply stuck in a spiritual no-man’s-land, the aridity of which almost drove me away from the faith entirely.

But today I digress briefly from my narrative to make an important point that is not always obvious: that to question and to explore and perhaps even to doubt one’s faith is sometimes a very good thing.

In particular, if you have noticed cracks in the foundation of your faith, it’s foolishness to ignore them. If you don’t investigate them, you’ll always have to contend with the nagging questions, no matter how deeply you bury them. If you do investigate them, you’ll either discover that your faith is true, and thereby come to understand it better, or you’ll discover it is false, and so be delivered from the illusions you had been believing.

You could legitimately ask whether it isn’t better to believe something false than to believe nothing at all. And maybe it is better. But that has little bearing on this conversation, because it’s Christianity we’re talking about, and Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The founder of Christianity seems to care a lot about truth. He even calls himself the truth. So the way I see it, if you want to be a Christian–if you want to follow Jesus–then you have to care about truth, too.

So, you’re nagged by doubts, by uncertainties about the very foundations of your Christian faith. And you think, “everyone struggles with these things sometimes, right? Isn’t that what it means to have faith–to resist the temptation to doubt?” Well, not quite. That’s the easy way out.

Maybe you fear the truth. After all, if you’re like I was, or like most Evangelicals are, you aren’t alone in your faith–you’re surrounded by friends and family who share the faith with you, who have helped and encouraged you along the way, and whom you’ve helped and encouraged, too. There’s no such thing as a solitary Christian; we can practice our faith only in community. Indeed, Evangelicals are great at this, and it’s one of the things I’m most thankful for in my Evangelical background. Nonetheless, it presents the doubter with difficulties: you’re afraid to rock the boat, or to upset the people you love. I’ve been there; it’s what kept me in no-man’s-land for five years–torn between the comfort of the things I’d found wanting and the difficulty of the things I’d found true. But as G.K. Chesteron writes, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Moreover, Jesus himself seemed to think truth would cost his disciples something:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Hard words, are they not? And so are these:

As they were going along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” But he said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

I won’t sugarcoat what Jesus wouldn’t sugarcoat: if you’re following him with reservations, you’re not following him at all. So pray, and wonder, and seek for truth, and when you find it, follow it–because to follow truth is to follow Jesus. And if it’s hard, you’re probably doing something right.

Yesterday I said I would write more about a lot of things, but the most pressing–and the next installment of my own story–is the canon of Scripture.

In Greek, “canon” means “rule,” in the sense of “ruler” or “measuring stick.” The canon of Scripture is the collection of books considered authoritative in the Christian faith. Other religions, including Islam and Judaism, also have collections of books that they consider authoritative, as well as other works that are considered valuable but in a different way than the holy text itself.

As a disclaimer, I must say that this is a complicated topic and I am certainly no scholar of it, except inasmuch as I have investigated it to answer my own questions and curiosities. Mark Shea has written a very readable account of his own investigation into the canon, which goes into far more detail than I can here. His story is eerily similar to mine at many points, and when I discovered the book recently I devoured it in one sitting.

The first thing to recognize is that the notion of a “table of contents” to the Scriptures is a product of the Protestant Reformation–it was not until Martin Luther began rejecting books that had long been considered scriptural that the Roman Catholic Church responded by carefully defining which books were “in” and which were “out” of the canon. However, that’s not to say there was no canon until the 16th century–only that it was not defined in any official document of any church. Instead, the books considered scriptural were those used in the cycle of liturgical readings of the church year. Even as Martin Luther was developing his canon, it wasn’t as though every Christian home had a Bible on the coffee table. The Scriptures were used liturgically, and were available for study only for a select class, mostly clergymen. So the questions of canonicity and liturgical use were one in the same.

The question is, why did Luther reject the books that now form what Evangelicals call “the Apocrypha”? Basically he thought the Hebrew Old Testament canon (the Masoretic Text)–which is the version accepted by most modern Jews–was more reliable than the Greek Old Testament canon (the Septuagent), which was the one commonly used during Jesus’ own life and ministry. Indeed, both Jesus and his apostles frequently quote, allude to, and demonstrate their knowledge of the “apocryphal” books of the Old Testament. Jimmy Akin has compiled a long list of such references (and possible references). (Keep in mind that what Evangelicals call the “Apocrypha” is called the “deuterocanon” by Catholics.)

What did all this mean to me way back in 2004? My faith was deeply shaken by the thought that the Scriptures were a product of human authorship, editing, compiling, and especially canonizing, even though all this would have been obvious to me had I ever stopped to think about it before. That’s not to even mention the tricky nature of translation, and the fact that translators’ biases often slip into the text–which isn’t such a big deal when you’re reading, say, Dostoevsky, but it’s a huge deal when you’re reading the book upon which you base your entire way of life.

To give one example of translation bias, the Greek word “episkopos,” which is found throughout the New Testament, is rendered in the NIV and many other Evangelical translations as “overseer.” “Presbyteros” becomes “elder.” All well and good, except that for the first 18 centuries or so of Christianity, and even after the Reformation, Christians had usually translated those words as “bishop” and “priest,” respectively. Changes things a little, doesn’t it?

And then there’s the fact that, despite the wrangling over the Old Testament canon, the New Testament has been pretty much set in stone since the third century (despite some abortive efforts on Luther’s part to modify it). How was the New Testament canon determined? Why was there relative certainty about it, but dispute about the Old Testament? And maybe most importantly, what did Christians do before they had the New Testament? How did they know what to believe, how did they know about Jesus, how did they know what it meant to follow him?

The answer–and I urge you to do some research yourself and see that I’m telling the truth–the answer is that the early Christians relied on the church, especially the bishops, to tell them what was true and trustworthy. And we do the same thing every time we read and accept the New Testament as God’s word, because it was the bishops of the early Christian church, several generations removed from Jesus and the apostles, who debated and pondered studied and prayed and argued and finally settled upon the 27 books that became the Scripture of the Christian religion.

Five years ago, reading the paragraph I just wrote would have made me sick to my stomach. But it seemed as sensible and obvious to me then as it does now. And that was precisely the problem.

To be continued …

My sophomore year of high school I saw the seamy underbelly of the Evangelical church my family had been attending for many years. The details of that story aren’t especially relevant here–suffice it to say that “church committees” should probably be put with “laws” and “sausages” in the category of “things you never want to see being made.”

My disappointment with the authority figures in that church, including the pastoral staff, prompted some uncomfortable soul-searching. I started to wonder: if this is how these men and women comport themselves, and they’re supposed to be the spiritual authorities in my life, then how reliable is their teaching? Can I trust the principles they’ve imparted to me, if their behavior exemplifies those principles?

I can answer those questions much more easily now, but that’s a subject for another post. More important were the questions I started asking next. Around that time I read Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews, in which the author casually dismisses whole swaths of the Old Testament as fictional and anachronistic. What’s more, when I started to look for ammunition against his dismissals, I found out that he was in the mainstream among scholars and even among many prominent Christian theologians and historians.

So, to summarize so far: I’m sixteen years old, and I’ve discovered that the bedrock truths upon which I’ve built my whole understanding of life, the universe, and everything aren’t very sturdy. Not only do the people who taught those truths to me do a terrible job of living up to them, but the Really Smart Guys in New York and Boston (and Oxford and Cambridge and on and on and on …) think those truths might not be very true after all. Who am I to argue with them?

Then I picked up Rob Bell‘s Velvet Elvis, of which I remember little aside from a footnote reference to an essay by N.T. Wright called “How Can The Bible Be Authoritative?“. It’s worth quoting at length to show why I still remember it, seven years later:

What are we looking for when we are looking for authority in the church? Where would we find it? How would we know when we had found it? What would we do with authoritative documents, people or whatever, if we had them? It is within that context that the familiar debates have taken place, advocating the relative weight to be given to scripture, tradition and reason, or (if you like, and again in sixteenth-century terms) to Bible, Pope and Scholar. Within the last century or so we have seen a fourth, to rival those three, namely emotion or feeling.

[...]

Most heirs of the Reformation, not least evangelicals, take if for granted that we are to give scripture the primary place and that everything else has to be lined up in relation to scripture. There is, indeed, an evangelical assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any tradition. We simply open the scripture, read what it says, and take it as applying to ourselves: there the matter ends, and we do not have any ‘tradition’. [...] There is an implied, and quite unwarranted, positivism: we imagine that we are ‘reading the text, straight’, and that if somebody disagrees with us it must be because they, unlike we ourselves, are secretly using ‘presuppositions’ of this or that sort. This is simply naive, and actually astonishingly arrogant and dangerous. It fuels the second point, which is that evangelicals often use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of evangelical, or Protestant, theology, since the assumption is made that we (evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible is saying. And, though there is more than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology. If we are not careful, the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ can, by such routes, come to mean simply ‘the authority of evangelical tradition, as opposed to Catholic or rationalist ones.’

[...]

It seems to be the case that the more that you insist that you are based on the Bible, the more fissiparous you become; the church splits up into more and more little groups, each thinking that they have got biblical truth right. And in my experience of teaching theological students I find that very often those from a conservative evangelical background opt for one such view as the safe one, the one with which they will privately stick, from which they will criticize the others. Failing that, they lapse into the regrettable (though sometimes comprehensible) attitude of temporary book-learning followed by regained positivism: we will learn for a while the sort of things that the scholars write about, then we shall get back to using the Bible straight. There may be places and times where that approach is the only possible one, but I am quite sure that the Christian world of 1989 is not among them. There is a time to grow up in reading the Bible as in everything else. There is a time to take the doctrine of inspiration seriously. And my contention here is that evangelicalism has usually done no better than those it sometimes attacks in taking inspiration seriously. Methodologically, evangelical handling of scripture has fallen into the same traps as most other movements, even if we have found ways of appearing to extricate ourselves.

The realization that there’s no such thing as “reading the text, straight” was a turning point for me. For the first time it was clear that the Bible I held in my hands had been written, pieced together, canonized (more on that later), copied and re-copied, translated (with all the interpretation and glossing involved in translation), and finally put into my hands–all by flawed, fallible men. Finally, everything I knew about the book, apart from the few insights I had on my own from reading it, I accepted on the authority of pastors–the same pastors who had so recently failed me so dramatically. I believed the Word of God was authoritative and trustworthy. But I didn’t really know what it said. I had only ever read it through the lens held up to it by men and women I definitely no longer trusted.

Then one more truth sank in: it has been estimated there are as many as 38,000 denominational flavors of Christianity. Presumably, each differs ever-so-slightly from each other on at least one point of doctrine, however subtle. Even if that’s not the case–let’s assume half of them are just redundant–there is still immense variation of belief among Christians. Why? Don’t we all read the same Bible? Well, not quite, but again, more on that later. Most Protestants do read more or less the same Bible, but they still can’t agree about what it says. From this I concluded something that would disturb me for years afterward: the best we can hope for is that one denomination out of 38,000 got it right. That somewhere, the truth of Christianity is intact and complete. At the time, sizing up the field, I wasn’t very hopeful.

Continued here.

You are not entitled to your own facts.

Christianity is the religion of the logos, of the reason, the rationality, the coherent Word of God. That means you’re not entitled to your own facts, and neither am I. Christians believe there is but one Truth, that of Jesus Christ, handed down to us in the words of his followers and his followers’ followers and his followers’ followers’ followers–etc., etc:

“I will see to it,” wrote Peter, “that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things. For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

You can make up stories about Jesus if you like (as Joseph Smith did) or you can edit his very words to suit your own philosophy (as Thomas Jefferson did), but you cannot then (legitimately) pretend that your cleverly devised fiction is fact.

You can even claim, as some do, that Jesus is not a historical reality at all. That he is himself a fiction devised by Peter and his compatriots in order to manipulate the gullible masses into following them. You are free to believe that invented version of history, but not as a Christian.

Which brings me back to the beginning: a Christian is not entitled to his or her own facts. In our efforts to follow the example of Jesus, we don’t get to pick and choose the parts of his teachings or the parts of his life that we want to emulate. Christianity is not a consumer religion: there is not a variety of flavors, each suited to a slightly different taste, because there is only one true Jesus, and we don’t get to decide for ourselves who he is.

Although there are some things we can only “know” by faith, these things will never be inconsistent with what we can “know” by reason. Thus Benedict XVI says (in that Regensburg lecture that got him in so much trouble):

Love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul – “reasonable worship,” worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.

If your religion is threatened by rationality, then it isn’t Christianity. If your Christianity is threatened by rationality, it isn’t Christian enough. If your Jesus is not eminently reasonable, then he is not the real Jesus of history. Says John Paul II:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth–in a word, to know himself–so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

On this foundation I hope to build an account of my faith that may be informative to the people I love and helpful to others who wander in. This blog is meant to be a chronicle of my continuing conversion to Christianity, my process of seeking, testing, discovering, adjusting, and beginning again, with many detours and false starts along the way.

I’m much less qualified to dabble in theology than many of my friends, so it’s with some trepidation that I make these musings public. I hope and expect that doing so will help me to discipline my thinking, with the help of critical readers–assuming there are readers at all. Thus, please, chime in often, and tell me how wrong I am. If I disagree I’ll defend myself, and we’ll see what comes of it.

I claim no possession of the Truth; rather, I acknowledge its otherness and hope only to know it better and to conform myself to it–to him, I should say–more and more.