Can the Bible be trusted?

It's with some irony that I begin the first of what will be many blog posts journaling my "crisis of faith" at a time of day when I'm normally at church. It just so happens that Angel & I needed to talk some stuff out this morning, lost track of time and saw it was too late to catch the second service. Oh well, it was time well spent. It's never fun to go to church when you're mad at your spouse, so it all turned out for the best. Anyway, I had been thinking this week about which question to bring out of the closet first, and so I settled on the question of the Bible. For evangelical Christians the Bible is the final source of truth, authority and revelation. It is infallible, meaning there are no mistakes in it. Its revelation is progressive, meaning that God began showing Himself to humanity in a gradual procession. It climaxed with the revelation of Christ, the personification of God Himself; then after His ascension the church formed the cannon, or standard by which the various books & letters were picked to become what we now know as the Bible.

Here's where things get tricky. The Bible can't just be taken out of history; it was written by people. You are making a leap of faith that the authors got it right and that the church fathers picked the right books. There's also the issue of inspiration. Over the years I've moved towards a theory of scholarship where the theology is correct but the historical accuracy is questionable. While archeology can back up the existence of certain people & events others, like the Exodus, have no such proof. The first 11 books of Genesis read more like poetry, myth and legend than history.  Mark's gospel tells the story of Jesus healing a blind man while leaving Jericho; in Luke it says was on the way into Jericho. No wait, it says in Luke and Mathew that it wasn't one blind guy, but two! The gospels also have varying accounts of the resurrection - the number of angels, the eyewitnesses involved, etc. This is problematic, because the argument is that if you can't trust the Bible historicaly you can't trust its doctrine. If God is at work in human history, as it claims, then it should have an accurate account of that history. But we only have manuscripts of that history dating back just two centuries before Christ's birth. Again you're making a leap of faith when you say that the Bible records events all the way to the beginning of history.

But does this really discredit the Bible? Here's where I doubt my own doubts. History is our reconstruction of the past, and may not be an accurate picture of what really happened. Do we then just dismiss history outright? And if we have solid evidence that the recording of the Bible is accurate (which we do from ancient manuscripts and what we know of mnemonic systems) can we say then that the Bible is inerrant in transmission? As for the lack of evidence for the Exodus, ancient historical records were more about propaganda than dispassionate documentation. The Egyptians would not have recorded how their Hebrew slaves got free from their captivity, nor would the Israelites invent such a humiliating history of their failures. And if you doubt the historical accuracy of the resurrection then the burden of proof is on you to explain the church's origins. Would the early Christians really let themselves be martyred for a lie? Someone would have let the "secret" out as to what really happened to Jesus (and no, that someone wasn't Dan Brown). There's also a pragmatic argument for the Bible, that good things happen when it's applied to people's lives. The Bible may not be God's Word; but why then do I feel like I come alive when I read it?

As an evangelical Christian I am a complete phoney, as far as the claims of inerrancy go. The discrepancies are there for all to see. Yet there's something compelling, powerful and life-changing about the Bible. I can't in good conscience turn a blind eye to both.

Questions

Yes, it's true. I'm back online. Did you miss me? I'm sure my countless readers are now rejoicing. Actually it's more likely the handful of relatives, friends & the odd stranger that have occasionally read my stuff finally have something new from me to read again. It's been 2 1/2 months since my last post, which expressed my confusion and uncertainty with life. I had intended to start blogging again once I had come to some sort of resolution. "So Hendrick, have you got things figured out now?" Well... no. But that's OK. Earlier this week the thought had come to me that I should start writing again. Blogging has been, in some ways, therapeutic for me. It's given me not only a way for me to look back on my life and see where I've been but it's also helped to crystallize my thoughts. I've gone through several journeys since I started blogging almost six years ago; selling the house we shared with Angel's mom and living on our own again, dealing with Clinical Depression, finishing my degree, leaving behind my dreams of vocational ministry and finally becoming a dad - which definitely was a dream come true. What I'm going through now is, I've realized, simply another journey.

This new journey is a crisis of faith. It's not the first one I've gone through though. In fact I've probably gone through dozens of small ones. But not since my early 20s, when I wrestled with the question of God's love being unconditional, have I had such a major shake-up in my Christian beliefs. It's hard for me to pin down, but I guess the closest thing I can come up in articulating this crisis is, "How does God fit into the real world?" I'm not sure if I'm asking the right question here, as you will come up with the wrong answer if you ask the wrong question. But questions I have nonetheless. So my posts are going to take a different tone from this point on, at least until I can come to some sort of resolution. I have no doubt that it's not going to come from finding all the right answers, but rather coming to a place where I can live with a certain level of certainty. That means, of course, making another leap of faith. And let's be honest here: whether you are a dogmatic Christian, atheist, agnostic, seeker, skeptic, or whatever it is you believe in, we all live with preconceived notions and assumptions. We all live by faith. Don't let anyone fool you about it, including yourself. So, as I start writing new posts and ask questions, maybe together we'll uncover those assumptions and see them for what they are.