When Christians start to doubt their faith they normally turn to Pastors, Bible Study leaders and/or Apologetic books. Doubting Christians hardly ever go to atheist or books arguing against religion. Why is that?
In his opinion, Pastors, Bible Study leaders and books normally reaffirm things Christians already know, but secular sources give Christians a completely different viewpoint.
Now the question is this:
If truth is what we aspire to know, then how come when Christians doubt they only search for truth in things that will further support their faith?
Is because we as Christians would rather have security and hope than have truth? And is that the way it should be?
Or
Is it for a completely different reason they choose to seek Christian sources opposed to atheist ones?
Friends, lend me your thoughts.
26 comments:
honestly, it's scary. I've never read a book by an atheist or any detailed attempt to tear down the faith because i'm afraid i may end up agreeing with him. i'm not saying this is the way it should be, but i feel like my head should have a working definition of what my heart believes before i investigate other alternatives to the Christian faith.
another thought, isn't the notion of Truth a purely Christian phenomenon? If we learn something in conversation with an atheist I wonder if it is stripping away precepts that we have regarded as Truth but are merely tradition. I believe there are some doctrines we must hold tightly to and others we must be willing to be humble and wrong about for the sake of Truth
i think that there is something that i could learn from every human, regardless of creed or anything else. why?
an atheist bears no less of the image of the Living God than i do.
postmodern thought holds that there is no such thing as absolute truth, whereas it is modernity that believes in absolute natural laws.
we have much that we can learn from modernity. this school of thought reminds us that God is stable and largely absolute and unchangeable. modernity comforts us with a solid foundation. modernity is pretty much a faith based philosophy, as the modernist is always assuming solidity and permanence will be discovered around the corner. i think largely as a modernist because i have a science background.
postmodernity as i understand it (not very well) is largely a reaction to modernity. the postmodernist who reads the Bible will interpret it pretty much however he wants. if you read the same passage and interpret it differently, he likely won't argue with you, but may listen to you with interest. disagreeing is okay, because we are both right. i don't think they have "wrong" in postmodernity.
postmodernity, while seemingly much more heretical to you and i, brings a lot to the table as well, but neither system of thinking is "Christian". we Christians don't believe primarily in absolutes, although we wish we did because that is much easier. we believe in and follow the God of Israel, and it is much more difficult to follow a person (indeed, three persons) than it is to follow a set of beliefs. people, like God, are much more complicated than a philosophical system. when Jesus says, "Follow me," you have no idea where he's taking you, as opposed to a system of belief which gives you all of that up front.
as far as what this means for someone who is doubting, it really depends on where they are. using hoose's comment as a starting point, i feel like there are things that i hold onto in faith that i don't want to give up. i know something of the Living God, because at some level I've met him. i won't give him up. this is probably my best excuse for why i never reached for explicitly atheist material when i have struggled with doubt in the past. if you struggled with doubt about your relationship with your wife, would you seek counsel that would try to bring you together or rip you apart? do you give up and start sleeping with different women to find a new one, or do you chase after her? i guess that has a lot to do with your relationship to your wife, and i would say that what you do with doubt also depends on where you are in relationship with God.
i think we should engage with atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Muslims and anyone else we can find. read difficult, challenging books. play with ideas and beliefs that are counter to your own, not to find where and why you disagree with them, but to find out who they are and how they got there and to be surprised by the common ground you find. love them as Christ would while you read.
but this takes a ton of maturity and may be inappropriate for some people who are trying to resolve some doubts.
this feels convoluted and really quite long. that, and i'm not even sure i answered the question. thoughts? ponderings?
Cabe - Good thoughts. A few questions though. Is marriage really a fair analogy? When you start to doubt a marriage I feel like it's much different than when you doubt as a Christian.
1st, in a marriage, you do not doubt the existence of the marriage, because you can prove easily with your five sense that the marriage did happen. Furthermore, there are witnesses proving that the marriage did happen (people at the wedding).
2ndly, to go along with the 1st, I don't think reading atheist sources or going to agnostic friends can be compared to cheating on your wife. By searching within secular sources Christians are not actually giving up on your faith or sinning; they are just exploring what else is out there.
Back to the question: Truth is what we all aspire for and it should be. Because why would we want to believe something that is fake. Ignorance may be bliss and a false peace of mind might sound enticing, but choosing to live in ignorance, though peaceful, can be dangerous and unhealthy.
Imagine this analogy:
Imagine a Country A that supposedly did something bad to the US (bombed a ship, killed their president). So, the USA does their research and looks at their intelligence, and all the information they receive lean towards Country A doing the act. The US government whole-heartedly believes that their sources are accurate, so the US goes to war with Country A. However, time passes, and the US start to doubt their belief that Country A really did do this bad thing. What should the US do?
Would they 1) look at their own records and intelligence again searching for things that will strengthen their belief or 2) ask other nations (that disagree with them) including Country A for their proof that their belief is incorrect.
I think both ways can be useful approach to the problem; they can both lead to more truth. However, when Christians doubt, process #1 is the only process they choose to investigate. Process #2 is never explored.
If the US government took this same approach when dealing with politics and war, wouldn't it just be called narrow mindedness, arrogance, and ignorance?
Matt Leung
are you married to God? have you met him and encountered him in a way in which you know that you cannot give him up? if you answered yes to these questions, then i think sticking with purely Christian sources can be justified, not because you are running from them but because you are running towards God.
if the answers to those questions is no, then you should go and explore all of your options. find truth. real truth. for the Christian, however, the goal is not truth, but a return to relationship.
marriage is the most common metaphor in the Bible for our relationship with God, and so i think it is more than appropriate. you can certainly read an atheist book in a way that is tantamount to adultery.
if you're in love you're going to run to your lover. if not, then go searching for truth. my answer may be wholly inappropriate for the kinds of doubting you and your friend were talking about. i don't know if you can speak with generalities about these things.
i don't advocate ignorance, but faith. there is a fine line between the two, and it is definitely easy to justify your ignorance by calling it "faith". i would rather not throw faith out of the window in order to get rid of ignorance. a person might have encountered God at some point, or at several points, in their life in such a way that they fell in love and they have effectively been married to him. that's more or less what faith is in this context: remembering when you have met the Living God and holding on to those moments. those moments are true, and though oftentimes he feels distant, faith is remembering that there is the potential for him to be close. faith is remembering when he brought you up out of Egypt, and how he fed you as you wandered through the wilderness. faith comes not from seeing truth, but from you interacting with a Being, the Being. it is true, but not for the sake of being true; it has bigger fish to fry.
as for your analogy, i enjoyed the political, "hypothetical" undertones. i also think you have a really good point. if someone is trying to find Truth with a capital T then they should watch Fox News and read the Washington Post. they shouldn't surround themselves with people who think and act the same as they do, but they should instead surround themselves with people on all sides of the issues in pursuit, because all people have something to teach, something that is worth even more than a conversation over a cup of coffee. i think that's great, and this is at least a part of how i would like to live not just my moments of doubt but the rest of my life as well.
but if God is in question - whether his goodness or his existence or whatever - and he means more to you than simply dogma and if you cling to him for better reasons than because that's what you have been conditioned to do by your family or cultural background, then you might want to do whatever it takes to keep him close and to not give him up, and i think that's okay.
thoughts?
Your arguing from the standpoint that Christianity is 100% True, but in a doubter's mind I don't think it is that simple.
Are you saying you would rather have faith than truth. Even if the faith is in something false?
What if someone clung to Islam, Buddhism or Scientology for the exact same reasons?
Would they ever find Truth(Christ)?
I love analogies, and this is one that popped into my head. Not sure if it is entirely fitting, but few analogies are: If I am doing research into the effects of heroin, I'm not going to risk my life by shooting up in order to gain the perspective of a user. This may indeed be the best way to examine the drug firsthand, but it is possible that even this first use can kill me. I would love to be able to read a book like Dawkin's The God Delusion in order to gain his perspective on Christianity, but I would have to be firm in my convictions beforehand as not to be easily swayed. In the same way, if I am facing sexual temptation, I'm not going to go strolling through the red light district. I believe there is a time and a place for gaining other perspectives, but it is not when we are at our weakest. Is this narrowminded? Probably. Is this showing a lack of faith that God will carry me through my doubt no matter what I expose myself to in the process? I don't know
if you run from other perspectives in a time of doubt, are you running from them out of fear that you might discover the truth and you will have to change, or because you feel like you've already discovered the truth and you don't want to be distracted from it? i still hold that you and i are speaking of different kinds of doubt, or perhaps different people who are doubting. i also hold that a person can be in a place where their relationship with God is about much more than truth. what is perceived to be true can change, including your perception of God, but if you truly love something or someone, that is something of permanence.
Hoose - I remember seeing you in the library a while back and telling you to have a nice life, thinking in my head I would never talk to you again. I'm glad I was proven wrong, even if talking consists of lifeless pixels on a computer screen.
Good thoughts on everything. The consequences of heroin and loss of faith are pretty accurate, but are the benefits of the two equal. No one thinks good comes out of heroin; there is no truth in heroin, but according to many non-Christians, in doubting Christianity, truth may be able to be found.
I think the main difference is that when we are Christians (which most people on WitBrev are) it is easy to say Christianity 100% True, and that we will not find it anywhere else. But from a non-Christians perspective, it is horrible ignorant and silly. And that’s the point I think I wanted to make... doubting Christians that go to pastors, apologetic books, etc. seem to be acting counter intuitive. Why is that?
Another analogy:
Suppose I knew someone that joined a society that believes humans have an implant in their heads from aliens that existed long ago, and these implants controlled our head and the only way we could get rid of it was to give a whole lot of money to John Travolta and Tom Cruise. If that person starts to doubt, it would seem stupid for the person to go back to the people that taught him this story. We would probably ask the person to look at other religions, sources or people that don’t believe the same thing they do. Yes, it would rock their faith, but it will also free them.
(This assumption of this analogy is that we do not have implants inside our heads from aliens. However, if you disagree with me on that premise… you can ignore the whole thing)
True, comparing Christianity with Scientology is a little contrived, but I think many non-Christians see Christianity as we see Scientology. And I think they would argue that embracing doubt and searching is not wrong…. And if anything will prove your faith stronger (if it is true).
So back to the question: why do we do that?
I think the doubt he was talking about is this:
doubt in fundamental Christianity (whether there was a Jesus, whether this Jesus can actually grant us salvation, whether Christianity is TRUE)
What doubts are you talking about?
matt
i don't think i have really disagreed with anything that you've said. what i'm saying is that there is a possibility of something happening that is much more abstract than simply a search for truth, at least in some cases. don't take me as disagreeing with you, because i think that Christians, whether doubting or otherwise, spend far too little time with those that disagree with them.
in a time of doubt, is the person looking for truth, or are they looking for God? those are probably the two different "doubts" we've been talking about.
when i was looking simply for truth about the creation account in Genesis vs. that of science, i read a book by a Jewish physicist, a Christian astronomer, and a Nobel Prize winning physicist. even then my quest wasn't, "is there a God?" but rather, "can a person hold to science and still believe in a God?" My conclusions were that these two fields seek answers to similar questions that are fundamentally different. science is much more about truth and "how" questions as opposed to the more "why" oriented questions of religions. Christianity, as i see it, answers those why questions with a personal being, therefore making it much more than a simple quest for truth. Christianity comes to truth, but it's truth that has skin. many people try to toss out the skin, because that complicates things, but they miss God. Christianity is not about Truth that is a key to get you into heaven and keep you out of hell, that is almost incidental: it is about communing with the God of the universe who wishes to adopt us as sons and daughters, and indeed to marry us as his bride. he is our husband and lover, he cannot be summed up by any amount of Truth, in the same way that you cannot describe your mom to me in a way that would make me know her as well as i would if she was my mom. she's a person, and writing a book about her would not do justice to all of who she is.
if your quest is for truth, seek truth with all of your heart and explore all options, for in a quest whose goal is logic and fact you would be an idiot to not explore all sides. but if your quest is for God, seek God with all of your heart and explore God. this is a lifelong task, and involves a lot of truth, logic and fact, but if you limited yourself to those things you would miss the vast majority of who God is.
Cabe - It's nice to argue with you again. It's like we are back at the stadium again arguing about trivial crap. For everyone else, we really aren't mad, we're just argumentative...
In situations of doubt where you question the existence of a relationship with God you're still questioning "belief." Why do Christians then go toward things that will bias you and pull you toward the relationship your questioning exist? Because it's important?
Then what if this relationship is false (like other religions).
My friend, who isn't a believer, thinks it's because Christians don't want their world rocked and rather stay safe, opposed to free and confused.
This isn't just a question about Christianity but about religion in general.
could you address THIS question (on what your argument is on other religions share the fundamental idea of a relationship with their God)
Matt
this is a sidenote and may be steering a bit off topic (since I am sticking to purely Christian doctrines), but maybe it is more accurate to view Truth as a Person rather than a set of precepts or statements. If Jesus is Truth (John 14:6), in Him is all that is true.
When I was at a youth specialties convention I heard Tony Jones say that "truth does not exist in a vacuum" meaning that all interpretation of truth is subject to the interpreter's bias, context, and frame of reference.
I disagree strongly on this point because I believe God is Truth and is transcendant of all culture or time. He may enter our timeline in the context of humanity (whether as Jesus or an angel of the Lord or a burning bush), but that does not mean He does not exist seperately in an eternal state.
All this to say, I believe the search for Truth is the search for Jesus. Yet, perhaps it is time to broaden the scope of Truth beyond either/or and enter the realm of and/yet still. I believe Truth does exist in a vacuum because God exists outside of the world he has created.
Again, maybe this should be the subject of a new post in my blog, but Cabe, I wanted to address some notions of truth you were presenting (again, I reserve the right to be wrong, these are just some unresearched thoughts I've been thinking) and Matt this comment probably does not relate much to the question at hand, but I too am glad we have achieved virtual contact (also I think we said "i'll never see you again" about 5 times)
*sorry about the constant deletions, but i keep finding typos after i submit the comment
hoose-
don't lose sleep over typos - if we minded them we would have called it "witty brevity" or something else. if a typo makes the meaning of your post cloudy, you can clarify it, but otherwise don't worry about it.
matt-
i think your friend is right. i think you are right. at one level i think it's okay to hold onto a belief or a relationship with God because you love it. is there a better reason? it's similar to Life of Pi - he didn't need another reason to believe in God other than the fact that he loved God.
as for other religions, i don't know. whether in Christianity or any other religion flee our tendency towards dogmatism. God cannot fit into any paradigm, and as soon as you try to fit him into one, you might see parts of him more clearly, but other parts of him not at all. at some level, all of creation is a text that is to point us to God, much like the Bible. even human creations, such as art and architecture and literature, also lead us towards something of the Almighty. all that to say, people of other religions and people like you and i can learn a lot about the God of Israel outside of explicitly Christian sources.
also, i don't know that other religions would take the same views of relationship with their god or gods, but if they did, i might speculate that they could come much closer to worshiping I AM than many people who merely claim the name of Christ.
first of all, there's a difference between 1) listening to foxnews and also reading the washington post and 2) doing so while doing without already assuming fox or post is absolutely right. if we are going to talk about wanting to really know what's true, i think the best way to approach it is not as rupert murdoch's unconditionally-loved child reading bob woodward just to figure out what's wrong with him and reassert how awesome bush is. it's a silly analogy, but you guys brought it up so it was my job to make it even more ridiculous.
but that's besides the main subject. i think the original question is a good one not because it says anything about why you should doubt per se, but because it gives you the chance to see how heavily slanted your objectivity might be. to be fair it would apply to a lot of people of course, but it's always good to get the planks out of own eyes before we try to get the planks/splinters from someone else. so perhaps you have never really considered your 'marriage to jesus' from the tabula rasa perspective of humanity, from a perspective that acknowledges all the knowledge available to us now, and from a perspective that truly values the perspective of other people the same way we value our own. for me, the last one was a beginning of a watershed.
i agree that if i were in your position i would not be motivated to weigh other perspectives. you have faith, you have truth, you have a life in front of you waiting to be lived for something transcendent. even though you don't know the future, you're pretty much set. to doubt would be sin (tisk tisk thomas). why question a god who has done so much? etc etc. the fact is that if you really believe something is true, then there's really nothing more to say.
that's why the scenario had an important qualifier, which is when a christian is TRULY doubting and perhaps the most open to considering other views. a lot of the opinions expressed were just regurgitations of universally accepted christian rhetoric. something we already know, so no need to say it so much because it detracts from uncharted discussions.
the main talking point that i thought would arise from the question is really not as crucial. put simply, is it really 'harder to be a christian' like many like to think? many have expressed this opinion repeatedly, followed by buzz words/phrases such as 'persecution' 'slave to righteousness' 'take up your cross' and we all know i could go on. in my opinion, just as muslims want to stay muslims, christians want to stay christians. it's quite frankly the easiest thing either of them could possibly do, especially if you're not one to fuck around with eternity and eternal damnation. and if it really were easier to fall away from the good book, you'd think the majority of doubting christians would be willing to seriously examine the counter arguments. but in most cases they just talk to their christian constituents or keep it to themselves and let the doubt pass. and i don't think there's any holy spirit at work here, either. it's just the same thing the muslim or the jew might do.
so that's it. it was a small point to make really, just that it's easy to believe something when you've heard it so much without really scrutinizing it, especially since it sounds good and is coming from another christian. i think when you look at actions perhaps there are some other assumptions that probably should go as well, but like this one they are more details rather than cornerstones of faith.
as for things that a truly doubting christian should consider, i feel like things really worth pondering and exploring are, for example: the lack of fidelity of the bible (look at david and solomon in the kings compared to the chronicles), the gerrymandered collection of texts from the early church that have become the new testament compared to all of the gradations that existed, the surprising unoriginality of the entire gospel compared to old religions and religions of the time, the lack of consistency among all of the fractured 'christian' genres in the world today, the lack of afflatus to christians from a historical perspective while you believe he reveals his truths to you all the time, the fact that if the world ended anytime soon the majority of people hitherto will be suffering in eternity in hell, the fact that if you always told someone everything we know about christianity now besides just the four spiritual laws almost no one would believe it were true.
i think there are many other good points to ponder, but some of them are smaller specific details and other are too bulky to put in just a sentence or two. you have probably heard all of the aforementioned, but perhaps you've heard it too much to the point that you forget the significance it carries. you see the world through faith, but perhaps if you really began to think about how all these things exist in apposition to jehovah, something would begin to break down the way it did in me. but maybe it's just me.
maybe you gave your doubts to god the same way you gave him your sin and you chose to trust him with it and not ponder the things that question god's sovereignty. well, i guess in a way that's fair. in the end the only thing any of us can do is what we think is right, and for some that is where the road ends.
you say you don't need proof because you can feel the effects of the wind, but i feel like that warm familiar current is just humanity. good, bad, nonsensical, unconditional. i see it swirling in the bible and in everything around me in the world. it's almost like the matrix. i gave up christianity because i felt like there were just so many things wrong with it that didn't quite fit together or feel just right. it wasn't that it was too good to be true. maybe it wasn't good enough to be true.
the odd part is that i can remember exactly how it was to 'live according to the spirit,' and i'd like to think i can imagine some what you are thinking when you encounter opinions like mine. i know that my side of the fence might not look like it has much to offer compared to yours, but in the end you have to go wherever you hear truth calling.
i know i've said a lot which makes me fear that i might have said something ignorant. please don't disqualify me on a technicality and reply by making a big deal out of some detail that you know i probably didn't mean or maybe said in a lapse of fairness/respect. i hate having arguments on things we agree on.
Andrew-
I agree with most of what you’ve said, and it seems like in many ways only our conclusions differ. That being said, I feel a lot of presumption and almost accusation in your tone. I’d like to kindly ask you to not put words in any of our mouths, and kindly correct me if it feels like I put words into yours.
I don’t think that doubting is a “sin”. On the contrary: I would hardly trust anyone in any matter in which they have not wrestled with doubt. Israel actually means, “wrestles with God”, and I think this is indicative of the degree to which God treasures our wrestling.
The problem with truth and logic is that people who wrestle with truth come to different conclusions. A Christian who was really into apologetics literature might point to C.S. Lewis or Lee Strobel or Josh McDowell as people who wrestled with facts and questions and evidence, beginning as atheists and ending up as believers. It seems like your journey sort of took you the other way, and I would imagine that you considered much of the same evidence that those three men did. Can we know “beyond a shadow of a doubt”?
In my struggle, it wasn’t(/isn’t) objective evidence that convinced me, because I don’t think there is enough to definitively prove these things objectively, and I don’t think there is meant to be. The fact is that I can’t prove that God exists, and you can’t prove that he doesn’t. Both of us could throw lots of corroborative evidence back and forth, but in the end we would look no more civilized than a couple of monkeys throwing around our shit, and I think we would both rather have a more mature dialog than that (I’m up for a shit-fight some other time though).
At the end of the day I still hold that truth is only a part of the picture. Important, but incomplete, lacking. I believe that my faith is true, but it is more than that, and I’m not a Christian just because I think it is an accurate way of thinking, although I do. I’m a Christian because of relationship. You can trivialize my “marriage to Jesus” (or the blankness of my slate) if you’d like, but as cheesy as you might make it sound, isn’t marriage (and indeed, sex) at its best a beautiful picture of intimacy and love that transcends intellect and any modernist attempt to describe it?
This is how I view what religion is meant to be: like a marriage. It’s a metaphor. I would contend that it is this, rather than mere logic, which wooed Strobel, Lewis and McDowell, regardless of how ridiculous some of their apologetic arguments might seem sometimes. They seem ridiculous because you can’t confine faith to the realm of logic. Doubt is great because it pulls us away from comfort towards reality, towards God himself. Any faith that is comfortable is wrong, whether that faith claims to be “Christian” or not.
Does anyone understand what I'm saying? It's difficult to articulate.
first of all, i’m pretty sure that doubting the truth of the bible/jehovah would be considered a sin to the majority of believers in jehovah besides you. there are a lot of definitions out there floating for sin, but the one i feel was always sufficient was not acting in faith in jehovah. Unless you have some better fitting definition, i think it suffices here as well.
i’m sorry that you heard presumption in my tone. however, i am not sure how it is more presumptuous than you reducing a potential discourse on ‘corroborative evidence’ to something that is ineffective in the end only because neither of us can definitively prove a metaphysical realm. there is more to it than that. i think this is the path a lot of christians take, to say that neither can be proven and then feel that they’ve somehow addressed the issues against holding onto their faith. it is usually subtle, but in their minds this tie somehow translates into dealer wins when there really are some really good points to consider. if you want to embrace modernism then you should distance yourself a little more from your postmodern mentality of finding truth.
i’m not sure who’s perspective you were speaking from when you said the apologetic arguments of strobel, lewis, mcdowell etc seemed ridiculous at times. i think they offer good points to consider, but they are entirely just one side. for example, all of the sources strobel goes to are vociferous professional christians. in addition, they are somewhat repetitive. all three have talked about the ‘lord liar lunatic’ argument, perhaps a well crafted one, nonetheless one that is heavily flawed considering i don’t even fall into any of the categories they present. this is the problem, all of these apologetics aren’t really sources for unbiased information. It’s really just a quick fix for your shield of faith or your belt of truth. You might not be looking for truth, maybe just affirmation.
i like how you stated doubt (though being a sin) as having some positive result. it allows change. unlike the usually assumed quality of sin however, doubt is not something that is as easily brought about. it is more of a product of your momentary cognizance of facts, faith, memories, feelings that all weigh into your perception of truth. if you don’t have doubts in your heart now, you couldn’t make yourself truly doubt in a minute no matter how hard your sinful self wanted to.
from my own experience it seems like christians who usually engage in this kind of talk will just do it and then not think about it more as i initially expected. i think it's more like, 'i've gotten my quota of faith challenging. now let me go recover and think of something else or resolve this easily by talking to a christian or making some quick desire-to-stay-christian driven generalizations.' i hope you realize that there are lots of people sincerely knocking on the door of truth, and it wasn't jesus who answered.
anyway i hope i said something meaningful to consider. i guess it's not apparent, but i've been trying to retire myself from a lot of this jehovah commentary. besides, the way you view your social milieu is usually several times more determining than any facts or reasoning in what you choose to believe. and also, just like you, i am trying to live what truth i've found.
awesome. except i still don't think that doubt is a sin. doubt isn't even the opposite of faith. i would say that you can never really have faith unless you have had doubt. if the majority of Christians disagree with me, then i disagree with them right back.
i've struggled with all of those questions and discrepancies, and i'll level with you - i probably don't have answers to those questions that would be satisfying to you. furthermore, those questions aren't even the ones that i've struggled with most. i've wrestled with the book of Job (for instance) a lot, and it has haunted me. it asks some really profound questions about moral causality and the goodness of God. now i've grown to love this book, because it's so messy. in the end, the answers to all of these questions is God. not truth, though he is true, or any sort of grand moral or natural law - the answer is a person. i am not a modernist who demands natural law, nor am i a postmodernist who would through truth out of the window. i'll keep truth, but i'll claim that it can come from something other than mere reason - it can come from relationship. can't it? is there no truth to be found in your love for your mom or wife or dear friend, or is that merely chemicals in your body? it is chemicals, but isn't it so much more? science doesn't have a monopoly on truth, for there are great truths to be found in poetry, but they are not of a propositional nature.
i could engage in an apologetics discourse in the way that you seem to want me to, but it would be inauthentic to who i am. i'm not going to transform myself into someone i'm not so you can have a good conversation with someone who believes that doubt is a sin and who will refuse to go to the hazier places in the Bible or Christianity with you. i'll go there with you if you'd like, but just know that it's not really a scary place to me. not because i have all of the answers that would satisfy you, but because at the end of the day the character of the God is not effected by the differences in the narratives of Kings and Chronicles.
the typos, as hoose mentioned.
sorry, but i really shouldn't spend any more time debating religion for this round. maybe in the future. it's not my job to discount christianity with my time, just like it's not your job to do so to agnosticism whenever you take your coffee breaks.
talking about this sort of thing is, in a way, my job, because i'm a seminary student. i was enjoying the conversation, and i'm sorry you're going to leave it. feel free to stop by again anytime. i really enjoyed having your perspective, even if it was only for 2 comments. thanks.
good post. if i were a christian i would probably choose to see a lot of things the way you do. you're very passionate about what you believe, and i think that's good, too. the best parts of christianity can compete with the best parts of anything. i just hope you see the entirety of what you've accepted, to see the roots the foundation the evolution and maybe some of the sour to the beautiful story you have now of christianity. even though you might not have examined everything underneath, it doesn't seem like you need to because you're happy with what you know.
i would say that it's good that you're fulfilled, but maybe that you're no different from a muslim or a roman who believes mythology.
i have promised myself to at least not look at this for the rest of the day.
i have examined only some of the underbelly of the Christian tradition, and there are some really ugly parts. the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the ways in which it has been used to justify slavery and violence against women, and far too many other deplorable things (current events notwithstanding) where those claiming the name of Christ used him to do things that would likely make a Prince of Peace weep. the Church has too often forgotten that hers is meant to be a life of sacrificial love, rather than a life where she forces others to sacrifice themselves to her. sometimes she looks more like a Whore of Babylon than she looks like a beautiful, unblemished Bride. she'll be washed clean someday though, and that's really the beauty of grace and love - that even though we often play the part of murderer or whore, we are still loved.
maybe that's not the roots and the history that you're talking about, but in the end i find these sorts of things more difficult and problematic than matters of historical criticism of the text, and also more redeemed in their eventual conclusion.
"There are also diverse others to whom we need to listen and from whom we need to learn. This includes critics who charge us with ideological captivity rather than fidelity to God."
From Davis & Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture
this reminded me of Andrew's comments. I appreciate them, thanks.
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