First impressions
The Bible has been part of my life as long as I remember. In Sunday
School there were texts relevant to the day’s Bible story to colour in; at home
my father read morning and evening the appropriate page from Daily Light, each page containing Bible
verses on a given theme; at bed-time when I was a young child my mother took
the Scripture Union Bible reading notes for my age group (Stepping Stones I think they were called) and worked through them
and the relevant Bible passage with me. When I grew older, I was left with
first Quest and then Keynotes to use myself, which I did in a
desultory fashion – a quick read and an even quicker prayer.
But even when not physically open or present, the Bible was never far
from mind when I was a child and young man. Its stories and verses, in the
language of the Authorised Version remain ingrained in me. It was the book
through which God spoke to us. It was without error, and absolutely
authoritative, the guide for all aspects of life. I was dimly aware as a child
of different interpretations of Scripture, but was convinced that ‘our’ take –
articulated by church leaders, and reinforced by reliable authors and magazines
– was the ‘correct’ take, the only one which expressed God’s ideals and pleased
God.
By the time of my 21st birthday, I had already begun to do
some preaching, and my parents gave me (no doubt at my request) a ‘Preachers’
Bible’ in the Authorised Version – leather bound, printed on India paper with
generous margins for notes; loose-leaf so that pages of sermon outlines could
be interleaved with the text. But soon afterwards I moved to using more modern
translations – I bought a Revised Standard Version Bible in 1974 and a New
International Version when it was published in 1978.
I enjoyed preaching, finding it fulfilling. My models in preaching were evangelicals such
as John Stott and George and James Philip, expository preachers whom I heard at
the annual Christian Medical Fellowship conference in Crieff. When I had a sermon
prepare, I’d reflect during the week before on what was the right passage to
speak on, until after more or less struggle and reading an idea, or a verse or
a story came to me with a sense of ‘givenness’. I would then unpack that idea,
explore the Bible passage in the light of my evangelical beliefs, and apply its
message to everyday life.
Even at that stage though, I was moved more by symbols than ideas. I
remember speaking one Christmas to the Youth Fellowship at Ebenezer Hall in Coatdyke
in the 1970s on St Paul’s thought about Christ being ‘formed in’ us (Galatians
4:19) and drawing a parallel with Christ’s gestation in Mary’s womb. This
new-to-me idea I found both evocative and powerful. I found equally powerful the comparison of
Old Testament stories with New Testament events and teaching which they
symbolised. Thus, for example, I would reflect on the life of Joseph in
parallel with the life of Jesus. Joseph’s words of self-revelation to the
brothers who had rejected him, ‘I am
Joseph’ seemed to me to be possibly the most moving phrase in the whole Bible,
symbolising Jesus’ revelation of himself to those who are open to him.
At this point I still retained a thoroughly conventional evangelical
view of the givenness of Scripture. Evangelical Christians believe this book is
inspired by God. This is not to say they think that its contents were in some
way dictated word-for-word by God to its human authors – it’s understood that
the writers’ own personalities, experiences and literary style shaped what they
wrote, and that the historical works in the New Testament were the fruit of
conscientious research.
It’s also accepted (although in my experience little discussed in the
pulpit) that in the case of some of the biblical books work was done by editors
subsequent to their original writing. But central to the definition of
traditional evangelicalism is the belief that God was been so involved in every
stage of the process of composition and editing of the biblical books that the
end result is a Bible whose contents are, word for word in the original
manuscripts, what God wants us to hold in our hands and to treasure in our
hearts. It is God’s word for us, today and always.
Some Christians have gone a step further than this, arguing that because
God is perfect, any project in which God is involved must be considered to be
perfectly executed. Hence the Bible is held to be inerrant, containing no
factual errors or mistakes in its pronouncement on any of the subjects it
touches on. The Bible, to put it another way is God’s word as it stands, as
well as becoming God’s word for an
individual in a particular situation when God takes a verse, or phrase, or idea
from the book and makes it come alive in their hearts in powerful,
life-changing and compelling ways.
It was of course understood that passages from the Bible had to be
interpreted in their context, but the kind of evangelicalism I was familiar had
literal interpretation as its default mode.
It was allowed, for example, that the six days of creation in Genesis
might be symbolic rather than literal but not that the story of Jonah’s sojourn
in the great fish was anything other than a factual record of an actual event.
By the end of the 1980s I was questioning this received orthodoxy. I
remember the uncomfortable shock one Sunday of having to admit to myself that I
found the preaching of one minister, a kindly and utterly genuine man whom I
heard regularly in the late 1980s to be simplistic in its approach to the
Bible. I could not suppress the new thought that he was taking at face value
truth claims and narratives which cried out for deeper questioning and
examination.
Questioning orthodoxy
The issues which troubled me relating to the Bible’s content in the late
1980s and 1990s included
The portrayal of God in some passages in the Old Testament as vindictive
and genocidal
For example, the prophet Samuel passes on words from God to King Saul in
1 Samuel 15:2-3:
I have decided to
settle accounts with the nation of Amalek for opposing Israel when they came
from Egypt. Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalek nation – men,
women, children, babies, cattle, sheep, camels and donkeys.
I reminded myself you can argue on the basis of the Bible’s teaching
that since as a result of Adam’s sin the human race as a whole is deserving of
the death penalty, it is only by God’s grace that any of us continues to exist,
and that it is God’s prerogative to exercise judgement on any of the human
race. But I grew desperately uneasy with these commands to exterminate others
which the Bible claims God gave God’s people – they seemed cruel and
undiscriminating, unworthy of a God whom we are told elsewhere in the Bible
loves the whole of humanity passionately and gives time for people to repent
since he ‘does not want anyone to perish.’ (2 Peter 3:9)
The account of Abraham being instructed by God to sacrifice his son
Isaac
God had promised Abraham a son through whom he would become the father
of a great nation, despite his wife Sarah’s apparent inability to
conceive. After many years, the
humanly-impossible conception takes place, and in due course Isaac is born. But
when this longed-for son is in his mid-to-late teens, God commands his father –
‘Take your son, your only son – yes, Isaac, whom, you love so much – and go to
the land of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the
mountains which I will point out to you.’ (Genesis 22:2)
It is with growing unease that Isaac heads for the highlands with his
father. They have wood for fire on the altar; they have a knife to kill the
sacrifice; but where is the animal which will be slain? ‘God will provide a
lamb,’ says Abraham doggedly, and we are told in a later interpretation of the
story (in Hebrews 11:17-19) that so firm is the old man’s confidence in the
Lord’s original promise that he is always certain that God in one way or
another will allow Isaac to live.
Perhaps he imagines that Isaac, once sacrificed, will be resurrected by this
God to whom nothing is impossible.
Father and son reach the summit, and still there is no divine
intervention. Isaac, with what fears and protestations we can only imagine, is bound
to the altar. Abraham raises the knife high, ready to plunge it into his son’s
chest.
‘At that moment the angel of the
Lord shouted to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Yes,” he answered. “I am listening.” “Lay down the knife,” the angel said. “Do not
hurt the boy in any way, for now I know that you truly love God. You have not
withheld even your beloved son from me.” ‘
Abraham looks up, and sees a ram caught in a scraggy bush nearby. God
has indeed provided a sacrifice. The animal is killed; the precious son walks
free.
This story is central to the Christian and Jewish faiths. It
demonstrates the father’s naked faith in God, his unquestioning obedience, his
unswerving conviction that God has not gone mad, that he is present in the
situation and will bring good from it. For Christians, the ram caught in the
bush is one of the Bible’s pivotal images, reminding us that though we human
beings deserve judgement and death because of our sinfulness, God has in his
mercy provided a sacrifice in Jesus Christ so that as Isaac did, we too can
walk free. For Jesus, Father God’s precious son, there was no substitute. He
and none other must die to win humanity’s liberation.
Yet I found this Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac increasingly
perplexing. I had no problem with the concept of sacrifice when it described a
costly yielding to God of yourself and your time and talents and resources, or
even a letting go of your children to fulfil God’s dreams for them. But I
shrank from the idea that anyone would believe, contrary to everything they
knew about God, that God would test their faith by asking them to physically
sacrifice to him a precious child. Surely human sacrifice and child sacrifice
in particular was abhorrent to followers of the one true God? And I was deeply
aware of the psychological and spiritual pressure which walking up the mountain
must have placed on the son. It seemed to be a kind of abuse. Whereas Jesus
willingly participated in the Father’s plan, Isaac could only have glimpsed
with increasing horror the agony which lay ahead.
The need for theological sleight of hand to harmonise some Bible passages
It didn’t trouble me that some Bible verses emphasised faith as the way
to salvation while others stressed the need for ‘works’ – practical expressions
of goodness and love. I could see how these two concepts fitted together, since
how you live is inevitably an expression of what you really believe. Nor did I
have too much trouble in harmonising those passages which suggest that it is
possible for a Christian to fall away from faith and lose their salvation with
others which suggest that once you have become a true believer you are
eternally secure. I accepted the synthesis of these positions which proposes
that God is at work in those who are open to God, granting them the grace of
determination and courage not to fall away.
But lesser things troubled me – such as the two differing accounts of
creation in Genesis 1 and 2, both of
which clearly could not be factually true. Or the two accounts of the numbering
of the Jewish people during the reign of King David. The version in 2 Samuel 24
indicates that God, as an act of judgement prompted David to undertake the
census, while in the parallel account in 1 Chronicles 21 it is Satan who is
behind the king’s enumeration of his people. The theological synthesis accepted
in evangelical circles claims that the difference between the two accounts
illustrates the truth that Satan is God’s devil – although the census was
prompted by the devil, perhaps as a temptation to trust in human resources
rather than in God, it was in fact all part of the divine plan, and in this
sense God was the author of what happened. But does this really explain the
discrepancy satisfactorily? Doesn’t this raise more problems than it resolves
in proposing a view of God which makes God ultimately the author of all the
devil’s action? Isn’t it more straightforward, and more honest simply to assume
that one of the chroniclers simply got it wrong? But the widespread evangelical
belief that the Bible is inerrant denied one the option of acknowledging this.
It troubled me when people insisted that there were no contradictions in
the Bible, and spoke of opponents of this view being silenced when asked to
point out sample inconsistencies. Because of course there are discrepancies in
the Bible – between the two accounts of creation, for example, or the two
numberings of Israel, or between the different ‘takes’ on events which you find
in the gospels.
A reluctance to suspend my disbelief
A high view of the Bible’s inerrancy compels you to suspend your
disbelief over accounts which in any other context you would question and
assume were legendary and this troubled me. I am sure it is possible to have a
profound belief in a God who can suspend the normal divine way of working in
the universe and intervene in clearly miraculous ways, while still having
honest doubts as to whether God would choose to make an axe-head float (2 Kings
6:6) or whether a man would be raised from the dead when his body was
temporarily concealed in the tomb of the dead prophet Elisha. (2 Kings
13:20-21) If we came across accounts
like these in any other context, we would be very doubtful of their
authenticity: should we accept them as actual, factual truth simply because
they appear in the Bible?
The black-and-white nature of much evangelical teaching on moral issues
I also grew concerned about the black-and-whiteness of the views on
moral issues held by many evangelical Christians and agencies. For example, many
Christians argue on the basis of the Bible’s teaching on the preciousness of
human life that abortion is in fact murder, and sinful in every situation. Yet
while agreeing absolutely that abortion is normally wrong, I felt there were
situations – for example where the pregnancy has resulted from rape – where it
might be the preferable option. And given that in the natural course of things
many, many fertilised eggs are never implanted in the womb, I couldn’t see any
strong moral objection to a ‘morning after’ pill. Again, in the case of
euthanasia I felt that despite the benefits of palliative care, there may be
situations where the patient’s pain is so intense that it is preferable to help
bring their suffering to an end.
I had questions about the fact that though in the Bible marriage is used
as a powerful symbol of the relationship between Christ and his Church, there
seemed to be little in its pages about the ceremony of marriage or of marriage
as a formal contract. I recognised the huge benefits of marriage, and the
security which comes from knowing that your partner has made a solemn,
long-term commitment to you. But surely, I argued to myself, it is this
commitment that matters, and partners can have an equally strong commitment in
a long-term relationship as in a marriage: if this were true there was surely
no room for the concept of ‘living in sin.’
I also found myself with deep concerns about Christian attitudes towards
gay people. The view widely held among evangelical Christians, based on some
Old Testament passages and on St Paul’s writings is that any physical
expression of homosexual or lesbian love is inherently sinful. This was true,
it was felt, both in the case of those who have adopted a gay lifestyle while
being naturally heterosexual, and those who have been conscious for as long as
they can remember of having a gay orientation.
There was some recognition among evangelicals that this gay orientation
was not in itself sinful but it was believed that in many, if not in all cases,
this could be reversed through prayer and counselling as wounds inflicted on
you earlier in life were healed. If your same-sex attraction remained, then it
was considered that the proper Christian response was to live with your gay
orientation while, by God’s grace, seeking not to express it physically.
To me, this seemed hard. I was aware of the sexually promiscuous
lifestyle led by some gay people – but some heterosexuals are equally promiscuous.
But I was aware too of other gay people who were Christians, and who were
desperately wounded when ‘exodus’ ministries failed to re-orientate their
sexuality. I was also concerned about the injunction not to express your gay
orientation physically. Jesus taught that sinfulness in the heart was just as
offensive as sinfulness in action. If the expression of gay sexuality is wrong,
I reasoned, then surely it must be equally wrong to feel strong attraction to
someone of the same sex as it is to express that attraction physically.
And it seemed to me that to acknowledge that this is the case was to
condemn homosexual Christians to a perpetual inner civil war. If you are told
that somehow you must fight against this deep and ever-present desire in you
because it is wrong and offensive to God, then it must be hard not to feel that
you yourself are somehow unclean. I respected those Christians who were able to
affirm their worth as God’s precious children while doing battle with this part
of their personalities which they regarded as the enemy - I supposed it was similar
to the battles many of us had with anger and other destructive inner forces.
But nevertheless, my heart called me – in fact, to use an evangelical
term, I ‘sensed a burden’ - to affirm gayness, and to stand with those Christians
who were supportive of gay and lesbian people, including those evangelicals who
argued that the Bible’s strictures related to unbridled expressions of lust in
the context of worship of gods other than the one true God, and that it did not
extend to committed gay relationships, which could therefore be affirmed in
line with the Bible’s emphasis on the primacy of love.
The role of evangelical interpretation
I came to realise that a good number of Bible-based beliefs were in fact
interpretations of what was in the Bible, and that you could arrive at
different conclusions according to the use you made of the evidence. I was
aware, for example, of the many different views of what will happen at the end
of time, each position defended by its supporters with great plausibility. And
should the children of believing parents be baptised as babies, or in New
Testament terms was baptism only to be administered to those who have made an
appropriate faith commitment? And was the re-marriage of divorced people in line
with biblical teaching, or should people in this situation remain forever
single? I was confused by disagreements over these issues and others, and on my
bleaker days I wondered if everything was a matter of interpretation, and if in
fact there was any firm ground to stand on.
The limitations of systematic theology
I came to recognise the limitations of many of the books of systematic
theology I was familiar with. When I worked with Scripture Union I bought a
thick, red-jacketed volume in small print by Louis Berkhof entitled Systematic theology, confident that in
its pages I would find a summary of all I would ever need to know about the
Christian faith. Berkhof and other writers of systematic theologies attempt to
construct a coherent overview of the Bible’s teaching on significant topics by
scrutinising and harmonising all biblical references to a particular theme. The
rationale behind this process is that since the Bible is God-given, since one
great Mind was at work through the minds of its many human authors, we should
expect to be able to extract from its pages a clear understanding of faith
issues.
I remember being asked once at Celt Street Evangelical Church in the
late 1990s to give a talk about the work of the Holy Spirit. As well as dealing
with the familiar topic of the Spirit’s input into each Christian’s life, I wanted
to begin by considering the Spirit’s activities out-with the Church. I was
convinced that if God is God, then the Holy Spirit is at work in the world, and
in the lives of people who do not yet believe in God, speaking through the
beauties of creation, inspiring creativity and prompting people towards
goodness and truth and joy, despite the fact that they may have not yet
consciously engaged in the quest for God. I confidently opened Berkhof to see
what he had to say, and was disconcerted to discover that his pages were
virtually silent on the subject, not because the Bible has nothing to say on the
subject of God’s work in God’s world, but because that issue must have been off
Berkhof’s radar.
It was this issue which led me to question the whole concept of
attempting to systematise theology. Was this attempt to capture and display
beliefs about God in dense prose really the way to go? Or was it akin to
capturing butterflies, pinning them in a display cabinet, and watching as what
when alive was vividly colourful become drab and dusty and grey in its
lifelessness?
And I began to question the merits of attempting to build a coherent
picture of truth about God from a book (the Bible) written over many centuries
during which the insights God had given into his nature had developed. Were
references from different parts of the Bible to be given equal weight, or did
some give a more accurate picture of God than others?
The way forward
These thoughts devastated me. I had been taught that the way of
interpreting the Bible I had grown up was the only faithful way of handling it.
My understanding of God and of faith was so closely tied to this particular
view of interpreting the Bible that it seemed as though if I could no longer
hold with intellectual integrity to this perspective – and on my wiser days, when I allowed myself
to be real, I longer for intellectual integrity – then what lay ahead for me
was atheism, or at best agnosticism.
I remember standing at the bus stop in Oldtown Road in Inverness one
grey morning in the late 1990s wrestling with the implications of God’s
absence, as all I had ever tried to believe crumbled in my heart. Was life on
earth simply an exquisite, mocking cosmic accident? Was the great story which
had come alive for me as I studied the writings of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the
great story in which I had invested so many years, so much energy simply a
delusion?
I hoped that if this conclusion kept pressing upon me so that it became
irresistible I would be able to find the courage to be real, the courage to
walk away no matter the cost from the faith to which I had clung so hopefully
for so long, finally admitting that it had failed me. I was afraid that to
avoid the pain of realising that life has no meaning other than the meanings we
ourselves create, I might manage to bury the doubts and surround myself with
the shell of my former faith, persuading myself against all the evidence of my
deepest self that I still believed.
But I still did not stop asking questions. On holiday in Carlisle one
summer, I picked up a copy of a book by Professor I. Howard Marshall of
Aberdeen University’s department of Divinity and Religious Studies on The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture.
This underlined for me that there were scholars who knew intimately the process
by which the documents in the Bible came to be written and assembled, but who
were still able to believe that it was a unique God-given book. Marshall’s book
discussed the issue of inerrancy which was troubling me, and yet I finished it
with a sense of dissatisfaction. I had, I suppose, been hoping to be utterly
persuaded by the evidence that the Bible had divine origins, but it seemed that
there could be no absolute proof. Factors such as the coherence of the Bible’s
overall message and the giving and fulfilment of prophecy suggested a strong
likelihood of divine involvement in its composition but to be convinced of the
uniqueness of the book seemed to be a matter of making a faith choice on the
basis of personal conviction.
Much as I appreciated the work of Marshall, and of younger evangelical
academics such as Alister McGrath and N.T. Wright, I did not want to believe in
the uniqueness of the Bible simply because other people did, and told me I
should too, but because I was convinced myself, and there were times it seemed
to me that the evidence failed to convince. In my search for evidence of the
Bible’s divine origins I was perplexed by the fact that it was so clearly a
human book, and grew almost afraid to open it in case I came across something
else seemed to undermine the traditional story of its givenness.
I read several books by Christians on the subject of doubting, hoping
they would help resolve my difficulties, but to my dismay they dealt with
doubts about specific aspects of the Christian faith (such as ‘How can God
permit suffering?’) and about the individual’s personal connection with the
faith (‘How can I be sure God loves me?’,
‘Can I lose my faith?’) and not with the doubts about fundamental tenets of
Christian faith which I was struggling with as I asked ‘Is God there?’ and ‘Can
I trust the Bible?’
I had read many years before of the crisis of faith over the question of
the Bible’s uniqueness which Billy Graham, the American evangelist had experienced
while he was a young man. He has described this again in his 2006 volume The Journey: how to live by faith in an
uncertain world. It was 1949, and he was preparing for a city-wide outreach
in Los Angeles. A fellow-evangelist, whom Graham ‘respected greatly’ had begun
to express doubts about the Bible, urging him ‘to change [his] belief that the
Bible is the inspired Word of God,’ telling him that ‘people no longer accept
the Bible as being inspired the way you do. Your faith is too simple.’
In a cabin in the mountains east of L.A. Billy Graham revisited the
Bible’s own teaching about its divine origins. The prophets, he reminded
himself, ‘clearly believed they were speaking God’s Word.’ Archaeological discoveries had repeatedly
confirmed the Bible’s historical accuracy. And Jesus himself clearly regarded
the Old Testament as the Word of God. Graham concluded ‘Shouldn’t I have the
same view of Scripture as my Lord?’
Finally, he went for a walk in the moonlit forest, and kneeling down
with his Bible on a tree-stump in front of him, began praying. ‘O Lord there
are many things in this book I don’t understand. There are many problems in it
for which I have no solution, but Father, by faith I am going to accept this as
Thy Word. From this moment on I am going to trust the Bible as the Word of
God.’ And he comments ‘When I got up from my knees, I sensed God’s presence in
a way I hadn’t felt for months. Not all my questions were answered, but I knew
a major spiritual battle had been fought – and won. I never doubted the Bible’s
divine inspiration again, and immediately my preaching took on a new
confidence.’
I wished I could do as Billy Graham had done, allowing my doubts to be
washed away by faith. But I simply could not with a good conscience accept the
Bible as inerrant as I assumed from his description of his experience that he
had done. I attempted to deal with these doubts by repressing them, until
finally I had to accept that I was quite simply not the uncomplicated
evangelical I longed to be.
* * * * *
That I was able to move forward was due to books I came across which
validated my questioning, and encouraged me to think that after all I might be
on the right track. I came across an
older book in the mid-1990s in a second hand bookshop in Inverness, a work by
Raymond Abba entitled The Inspiration and
Authority of the Bible. Abba was clearly a man of deep personal faith, and
I was glad to have him as a guide. He showed me that it is possible for us to
approach the Bible with our critical senses alert. He showed me that it can be
seen both as a human book (with the potential for human errors) and also as a
unique gift to us from a God who was both actively involved in its composition,
and who encounters us as we read it.
Another ‘Yes! Moment’ came when I read a book by Dr Anne Townsend in
1999. She is 14 years older than myself, and I’d been aware of her writings
from 1970 when her first short book Once
bitten, an account of her work as a missionary in Thailand with the
Overseas Missionary Fellowship was published. Subsequently, she published a
series of books giving an honest take on Christian issues – Prayer without pretending, Marriage without pretending and Families without pretending. I was aware
that, having returned to the UK Anne Townsend became editor of the Christian
magazine Family, and subsequently Director
of Care Trust, which co-ordinated practical Christian responses to help people
in need. I was also aware that she had faced a personal crisis in the late
1980s.
In her book Faith without
pretending, Anne Townsend describes how she came to question the
evangelical position on the inerrancy of the Bible – questions which, once she
began to bring them into the open, wouldn’t be silenced. She describes an
insight she had while sitting on a gloriously beautiful Thai mountain.
it was [she wrote] not difficult for me
to see that my faith did not depend absolutely on my own human mind being able
to accept the English….translation of the Bible I owned as being totally and
comprehensively flawless: ultimately my faith rested on the massive, rock-solid
security of Jesus Christ. I had assumed that it would be necessary for me to prove
to myself that the Bible held no contradictions which I could not understand or
explain to my own satisfaction. And yet I knew perfectly well that I was not
sufficiently trained to be able to do this. Realising that my faith was greater
than my ability to use my mind to prove certain things about the Bible suddenly
set me free. Yes, I knew that I could and should use my brain to understand my
faith but my faith did not depend totally on my own intellectual grasp and
understanding of the truth. My faith depended on Jesus Christ, God made man,
who to me was a historical person and not mere myth.
These words both inspired and troubled me. My concern was this: Anne
Townsend’s knowledge of the Jesus Christ in whom she found ‘rock-solid
security’ came from the Bible. How, I wondered could she maintain that faith
while at the same time beginning to deconstruct the sacred text? It was all
very well, I thought, for her to suggest that ultimately our foundation as
Christians lies in the perfection of Jesus and not in the perfection of the
Bible. But how, other than through the pages of the Bible, do we form an
impression of who Jesus is? If you begin to question its unshakable accuracy,
how can you be sure that your mental picture of Jesus has any grounding in reality? How can you be sure that your faith is built
on something solid? How can you know
that the Shepherd whose voice you are following is the authentic God?
A couple of books, Roger Hurding’s Pathways
to wholeness: pastoral care in a postmodern age (1998) and Dave Tomlinson’s
The post-evangelical (199?) introduced
me to the idea of ‘paradigms’ – the windows through which we view, and explain
reality – and the process by which we re-think the paradigms we are using when
the increasingly evidence doesn’t fit our preconceptions. I realised that the
fact that I could no longer regard the Bible as an inerrant, perfect book did
not mean that I must abandon faith in God as a delusion. I realised that there were different ways of
looking at the Bible and reality, different paradigms in which there was no
inconsistency between recognising the humanness of the Bible and acknowledging
the reality of God.
Another ‘Yes’ moment book which confirmed that I was not alone on my
perplexing spiritual journey was Alan Jamieson’s A churchless faith, subtitled ‘Faith journeys beyond the churches’
which was originally published in New Zealand in 2000, and released in the UK
in 2002. This volume was the outcome of a research project which looked at the
views of people who had left evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic churches
not because they had abandoned their faith, but because they were questioning
the relevance to their own lives of the churches they had been attending.
This book also helped me in my thinking about the Bible. Jamieson
describes a phase in spiritual growth which is ‘rich in the mysteries and
presence of God, where teaching and Scripture give, and the reality of life
interprets.’
This last phrase in particular impressed me. I had always been taught
that as a Christian you should interpret your own inner experience and the
events of your life in the light of the teaching of Scripture, and that any
resistance to that teaching was sinful. Indeed I had frequently been blessed
(and continue to be blessed) by ‘choosing joy’, by believing that what the
Bible said was true of me as a Christian whether or not I felt the reality of
it at that particular moment. Jamieson’s words helped because they gave me
permission to ask questions, to wrestle with what the Bible seemed to be
teaching when it was at variance with what I saw around me in the world, not to
accept unquestioningly the answers I was given by tradition and by those around
me, but to arrive at answers which I myself had tested and proved.
Other books kept prompting me to go forward into the new paradigm including
The Radical Evangelical by Nigel
Wright now the Principal of Spurgeon’s College, and Brian Maclaren’s A new kind of Christian, a fictionalised
description of a Christian pastor asking many of the same questions which were
troubling me written by one of the leaders of the Emergent Church movement in
the United States.
By the summer of 2002 I knew that to maintain my integrity I must move
to this new way of looking at the Bible, but it was another four years before I
finally had the courage to accept myself and to admit to others that this was
where my journey was taking me.
The temptation to regress
The books I was reading provided authentication of where I was at, and
yet it was very difficult for me to accept that the way my journey was taking
me was a valid one. My upbringing and my church background screamed at me
‘Beware of questioning and unbelief.’
I had been invited to join a leadership support team at the church my
wife and I were attending and discovered that the church’s statement of faith
to which I would be expected as a leader to subscribe included a commitment to
the inerrancy of Scripture. The pastor lent me some books to read on the
subject, and it seemed to me on reading them that inerrancy was a mammoth
intellectual construct based on the premise that if God inspires something then
it must be perfect. I think this is a flawed premise, and on this ground alone
I should in honesty have declined to join the team. But I persuaded myself, or
allowed others to persuade me that I could accept the ‘inerrancy’ word as long
as in a private way I reinterpreted it as ‘trustworthiness.’
In the summer of 2005 our pastor had a deep experience of the reality of God
which revitalised his ministry and gave him a new and continuing sense of the divine
presence in his life. As we shared lunch one day, he told me he prayed and
trusted that I too would soon experience God’s touch in a deeper way.
Torn as I was between an inner sense that I had to follow my own
instinctive journey into an uncertain territory where some of the familiar old
evangelical landmarks were growing hazy, and an equally profound longing to
belong, to suspend my questions and unbelief, to let the warmth of
unquestioning evangelicalism enfold me, I wondered what a deeper encounter with
God might bring. Would it draw me forward into new pathways, or enable me to
live comfortably with the old certainties?
In the autumn of 2006 our church began to use in small groups material
produced by Freedom in Christ Ministries. This organisation was the UK arm of a
similarly-titled American ministry, established by the US pastor and author
Neil Anderson to disseminate the teaching which he had expounded in a series of
books – that freedom from any of the multitude of things which bind us
inwardly, restraining us and stopping us from fulfilling our full potential as
God’s children is to be found in Jesus on account of his victory over the
spiritual forces of darkness.
Anderson’s work restated what I had learned so many years ago in volumes
of sermons by Martyn Lloyd-Jones minister in the mid-20th century at
Westminster Chapel in London, especially his Spiritual warfare, sermons on Ephesians
6. I found the Freedom in Christ Ministries material helpful, and certainly
I felt myself in need of spiritual liberation. And yet I noted that the
theological context in which Anderon’s teaching was presented was very
conservative (as indeed were Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ writings). He had, for
instance no issues whatsoever with accepting Adam and Eve as historical
figures, and rejected the theory of evolution in any form, even as a
description of the means through which God worked.
If I were to experience once again the liberation of which Anderson
wrote, would it be necessary, I wondered, to embrace his theological position
in its entirety, to make a positive regression to where I had been 20 years
previously, to acknowledge that two decade’s worth of struggles and awakenings
had been a wrong turning? Could I could gain a sense of belonging and freedom
by denying, ignoring, burying, labelling as false and destructive the questions
which had been challenging my thinking?
One Sunday morning around this time, the pastor preached a fairly
traditional evangelical sermon at the conclusion of which, he urged his
listeners to make a response. Those who were not yet believers, he challenged
to seek and find salvation; those who already had a Christian faith he
encouraged to appreciate more fully the wonder of salvation. He had begun by
telling us that the most important question any one could be asked was this –
‘Are you saved?’ But as I wrote later
that day ‘To me the most important question of all is “Is God there?” – everything
else follows from that.’ This highlighted the theological differences between
us.
Sitting in church, I continued, I had reflected on my sense of being ‘on
the edge’, and on my questioning whether I had lost my way and must retrace my
steps.
Over the last few weeks the church’s take on experiences and activity
and the way divine power works has been so dominant. I see that once again I’ve
been thinking as I did in the past that the fault is mine. If only I could find
the faith, the disciplines, the genuineness in prayer then I too would become
as they are. And so I have been miserable trying to be what I couldn’t be,
seeking the key to open the door, aware that it could be said that if my
experience is not as theirs is then I could be blinded by the devil.
The challenge which God seemed to be presenting to me at the end of the sermon
was to acknowledge my distance from some aspects of the teaching and experience
of the church, and perhaps even to leave it all together.
Supposing God is saying something like “Different people have difference
experiences of Christianity. And you are not called to have the same spiritual
experiences as the official line at this church suggests should be standard.”
Of course it is very hard to envisage God saying “This church, or this style of
church is not for you,” and yet that seemed to be what I was hearing this
morning. Perhaps this truth is what I need to set me free.
Once this thought had connected with me, I instantly felt freer. The
insecurity and sense of failure that I didn’t fit God’s expectations as
projected by the model of Christian living held at that church dropped away.
Then, to reassure myself, I stated what I did believe:
I affirm that I believe in God the Creator; I believe he was present in
Jesus in a unique way; I believe that friendship with God is made possible
through the death of Christ; I believe that God is present in his people and
his world. I believe God hears prayers and answers, although I have difficulty
with his silence. I am trusting in God for everything. I believe.
And I added something which was not completely true at the time, but
which became true of me in the following years, ‘When I acknowledge both my
faith and my doubts then I feel secure.’
I recognised that my life’s journey was teaching me that I did not
belong in the conservative evangelicalism in which I had been raised and from
which I had drawn much nourishment. Could it really be, I wondered, that God’s
call to me at the end of the sermon that Sunday morning was to acknowledge the
lessons of the journey? I wrote: ‘I find
myself gasping even to write this. Could God really be calling me away from
evangelicalism? Something deep in me says ‘Yes!’’
Going public
A few weeks later I went public about the thinking I was now embracing
in my Christian Viewpoint column in
the Highland News:
Throughout the 1990s I became increasingly aware of my problems with the
view of the Bible which, up until then, I had held without question – that
since it was inspired by God there could be no errors in it. I had, for example, begun to see
contradictions between different accounts of the same events. More
significantly, I grew concerned about the fact that in some passages in the Old
Testament, God urges the Jewish people to eliminate their enemies with a
genocidal thoroughness.
I fought hard to suppress thoughts like these, which I considered to be
‘unbelieving’ but they would not go away, and for a while I seriously wondered
if I would have to turn my back on the faith around which my life had always
revolved.
I remember standing one evening in the kitchen reading The Post-Evangelical [which I’d referred
to earlier in the piece] and saying ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Here was an author who
understood and validated my concerns, giving me permission to have doubts and
to ask questions. Dave Tomlinson introduced me to the idea of ‘paradigm
shifts.’ A ‘paradigm’ is a mental window
or belief-system in which we frame, and try to make sense of all the stuff
which happens to us. When however too many things occur which don’t fit
comfortably into the ‘paradigm’ we’ve been working with, we begin reluctantly
to wonder if we need to find a different window on reality which fits better
with our new insights.
This book confirmed that because I found it hard to fit my thoughts into
the old paradigm didn’t mean that I had to give up on faith. There was another
paradigm, which saw the Bible both as a God-given book through which God
speaks, and also as a thoroughly human book. Since it is a human book, there is
no threat to our faith if we find in it inconsistencies or even errors of fact.
Reading this book and others like it brought great relief – I was not
alone. Yet I found it hard to inhabit this new paradigm which was at odds with
what I had been brought up to believe, and with what many of my friends
believed. Surely I must be wrong? I tried to force myself to look through the
old paradigm, to tell myself that the Bible was after all inerrant, and if it
wasn’t then at least I could live as if it were. But this led only to
unhappiness and tension as I denied my ‘Yes!’ moments.
I have come to realise quite recently that I need to release myself – or
rather to allow God to release me to be the person he wants me to be. I have found some release from the fear of
going forward in case I am misunderstood or rejected and from the fear of not
fulfilling other people’s expectations of me. This new freedom brings the great
joy of more sustained encounter with a God whose bigness can only be hinted at
in the words and symbols which point to him.
This series of events marked a new beginning. It was not that from them
on I was constantly aware of God’s presence – although in the first few weeks the
divine whispers were frequent – simply that I knew I had taken a step I must take,
and God was still there. I had foolishly always feared that he only loved you
if you were a conservative evangelical, and that if I once stepped beyond the
safe, enclosing boundaries of evangelicalism I would somehow put myself beyond
his love. Yet having taken this step, I realised that he loved me none the
less. I realised that it was indeed possible to experience the inner liberation
of which Neil Anderson and Freedom in Christ Ministries and many other pastors
I’d heard and books I’d read spoke while not necessarily buying into the full theological
context in which their programme was presented.
For a long time, it
remained hard to read the Bible. On the one hand, I would see constant signs of
its human-ness, while on the other I would be constantly reminded of the ways
of interpreting it which I grew up with, and stricken with guilt at questioning
them. I probably now have more questions about the Bible than ever.
Looking at my heart, I
wonder if I shrink from the Bible because I dislike being told what to do, but
I think my ambivalence towards it relates more to the fact that I hear so many
voices in it, sometimes conflicting – the voices of thousands of sermons, down
the decades, the voices of different interpretations and theologies - that at
times I feel paralysed and wait for the still, small voice of God to speak
through other channels.
But now, on my
clearer-seeing days, I realise what a wonderful book the Bible is, giving us in
story and in teaching inspiration and enrichment.
I am comfortable with the
knowledge that the Bible books are shaped by the personalities of their writers
and editors, by the reason which prompted the writing of each book and by
contemporary literary forms. I acknowledge that some of its authors wrote at
times with a clear sense of having been ‘given’ words by God, while others
simply poured out what was on their hearts. I believe that as the centuries
progressed, God revealed more of the divine nature to humanity, culminating in
the fullest possible revelation in Jesus Christ.
I believe that the gospels
give a powerful presentation of this man who embodied the divine in a unique
way, and that something unprecedented, and physical took place in the garden
that first Easter morning. And in the story arc of the Bible, from paradise to
paradise, I see a simplicity and a ‘givenness’ which in my view would be hard
to view as simply the fruit of human imagination.
I realise that there is no
need for me to have fear when approaching the Bible that I may be judged for
having a defective theology of the Bible. My faith rests in Christ, and not in
the Bible’s sometimes perplexing pages. It is surely right that we approach the
Bible with both faith, and honesty, coming to it with all our questioning, all
the things we don’t understand, all the ‘voices’ which have shaped our
perceptions of it.
We explore the background
to the Bible books, we wrestle with the text, seeking in it the wisdom of the
ages which helps shape our living today, always open to the God who is writing
through the story of the church what Malcolm Muggeridge called ‘the third
testament.’ I believe that God was present in the
humanness of the writers prompting their thinking, at times awakening insights
within them, giving them words to say, and I believe that the same God is
present with us as we read.
Here’s another Highland News
column, this time from late 2014, in which I returned to the theme of the
Bible, summarising my journey:
At the lunchtime service at Inverness Cathedral one day last week,
Father Mel Langille told a joke. It was the day in the Church Calendar when
Richard Hooker, a hugely influential churchman and theologian in the 16th
century is remembered.
Said Mel:
‘Roman Catholics see the Pope as the source of authority, Protestants the
Bible, while to Episcopalians the final source of authority is….’ ‘God, I
hope,’ interjected a voice from the congregation. But Mel concluded ‘the last
vicar!’
He was
reminding us how much important individuals in our lives can shape our thinking
about what we believe and how we live as Christians – and how we interpret the
Bible.
Back in the
1950s and 60s, I grew up in a church where the Bible was regarded as the one
source of authority, uniquely inspired by God. It was to be taken literally,
except for obvious figures of speech. Adam and Eve were unquestionably real
people. The Bible contained all we need to know about God, all the guidance in
living we could ever require.
I was
comfortable with this, believing and defending this viewpoint. The Bible must
not be questioned. But as the years
passed, I realised that my thinking had been shaped, not by the last vicar, but
by those I looked up to in churches and in the wider evangelical community.
I discovered
different interpretations of Bible teaching on some fundamental issues. I
became concerned about, for example the extensive violence in parts of the Old
Testament, some of it sanctioned by God, and the fact that I was expected to
accept as literally true events which in any other book would be read as myth.
I also began to
realise how big and incomprehensible must be the God whose energy lies behind
the universe, and how words and symbols and events in a book can only point to,
and not define God.
I felt the
tension of seeing these things while at the same time trying to hold on to the
inherited view of the Bible, until I realised that it’s OK to ask endless
questions about the Bible, and OK too not to know many of the answers.
I’ve come to
see the Bible as a very human book in which God is present as God is present in
our lives – it is not a perfect book, any more than we are perfect. There is a
growing sense as the Bible progresses of who God really is.
There has never
been a time when the words and stories of the Bible have not spoken to me and
blessed me. But I still feel at times a residual guilt at having abandoned the
more fundamentalist approach, and a strange fear as I read the Bible of seeing
yet more evidence of its humanness.
Last week,
Father Mel continued by explaining the four sources of authority in the
Anglican tradition – Scripture, Reason, Tradition, to which some add Experience. This spoke to
me powerfully, for it affirmed my questioning approach to the Bible. It sets
you free to think, to reason, to learn from what others – both inside and
outside your own tradition – have thought, and to measure your understanding of
the Bible against what you see around you.
Very few people
take the Bible as literally as I thought I was expected to. Even those basing
their thinking on the Bible alone use reason to understand the Bible’s cultural
context and apply its teaching in 21st century culture. Thinking is
shaped by great figures of the Protestant Reformation such as John Calvin.
And experience
does shape interpretation: for example seeing God blessing the ministry of
women has challenged many who believed women should not lead; and despite
Jesus’ prohibition of divorce, reflection on grace and forgiveness and new
beginnings has moved many churches to accept the remarriage of divorced people.
But with my
many questions about the Bible where am I to take my stand? What source of
authority helps me live well and with conviction?
I believe God
spoke into and through the lives of the Bible writers. But in Jesus God did
more than simply speak. In Jesus God came among us. In his teaching and
miracles; his life, death and resurrection; his love and compassion; his fierce
commitment to justice; his grace and continuing presence, God speaks to us,
challenging and empowering us to reflect God’s reality.
The voice from
the pews during Mel’s story last week was right – God is our ultimate
authority, God revealed in the life and teaching of Jesus.
I have many
questions about Jesus, just as I do about the Bible. But it is the voice of
Jesus which helps me evaluate all other ideas, all other teaching. Jesus is the
Rock on which I stand.
