Many different factors may lead a Christian to deconstruct their faith.
For some, it is the feeling that God couldn’t actually be like they have been told. He couldn’t really be as angry as the Old Testament sometimes portrays, could he?
But how do we know what is God like if we can’t fully trust the Bible? Can the Bible still help us know God? Are there other ways of seeing God from a Christian perspective than what we may have been taught?
Our intuitions about God
Most of us have intuitions about God. We resonate with Christian teaching that God is love, and he is just. Not only that, but he couldn’t be less loving and just than we can be – he must be more.
We feel he would cry when a child suffers, just as we would. That he would smile when he sees genuine love between people. That he would approve of someone bringing peace into a troubled situation, regardless of who that person was.
But also that he would be angry when blatant injustice leads to deep harm. That he feels hurt when we destroy his beautiful world unnecessarily.
So we find it hard to relate ….
…. when it is other Christians who cause the harm. When it is strict doctrine or pedantic rules which hurt and alienate.
When Christianity and the church push people away from God. When doctrines like hell seem to negate everything we believe about God.
But this opens up some difficult questions
We like to think that God is loving but not judgmental. But justice for one person may mean judgment for another.
We’d like to see God stop evil, but do we want him interfering in our lives?
We’d like to believe in acceptance and tolerance. We don’t like it when people arrogantly believe they are right and everyone who disagree is wrong. But does believing in Jesus mean disbelieving in other gurus and teachers. Are they wrong?
What do we do with those places in our holy text, the Bible, that portray God as angry, judgmental and even murderous?
It’s not easy being consistent!
Many Christians (and believers in other religions too, I imagine) avoid these dilemmas through being inconsistent.
The holy writings are true, just don’t think too much about the terrible texts.
Only the people we think are really bad will actually be judged and condemned by God, even though the Bible seems to say otherwise.
God is a great big alien being
A useful starting point is to recognise that God is “a great big alien being“. Philosophy can give us evidence that God really exists and created this universe, but it struggles to tell us about God’s character, what he is like.
Our knowledge of God will always be incomplete, and knowledge of him (or her) will depend on her (or his) self disclosure. Or revelation, to use the theological word.
God’s self disclosure
How would a great big alien being reveal themself? We’d be unwise to totally rule anything out.
Most religions have holy texts that claim to reveal God. The world God made should show us something of him. Perhaps she would choose to make contact directly. Maybe we can see God’s actions in history, perhaps through a guru or teacher.
Christianity claims all of those, with special emphasis of Jesus and the Bible. But that leads us back to some of the difficulties we’ve already looked at.
The Bible contains lots of dilemmas and ambiguities. It’s an ancient text, how can it relate to the twenty-first century? How can we learn from the good bits while dealing honestly with the difficult bits?
So how can we not just have some reason to believe, but actually better know God’s true character?
Honest questions – a good place to start
Doubts and questions can be the gateway to a new and better understanding.
So hopefully some of these questions are helpful in your thinking.
But the purpose of questions is that they be answered (if we can). So in the next few posts we’ll explore some of them. Can we understand and know God through Jesus? How do the mixed values of the Old Testament actually reveal God’s character? How can we know how to please God?
Please watch this space!
And if you have your own questions, or ideas on answers, please leave a comment.
Graphic: a cartoonish way of viewing God, generated by NightCafe.
A lot of good questions.
Can we know what God is like when we can’t trust the Bible? This forces me to only consider answers outside the Bible and I don’t think it is exclusively a matter of trusting the Bible as trust assumes it contains truth and accurate historical narrative. The Bible is an assemblage of 66 books that a cultural and political community of men with deep seated traditions agreed to canonize into what they believed to be most representative of God. Were they inspired by God? To me, this begs another question; how could God take ownership of these 66 books IF they were all exclusively written by man? I like to think of God as the ground of all being. If this is true, the Bible could only have been imagined within the means of a God-sustained consciousness in the minds of the men who wrote it. Perhaps the Bible is holy in that He is a witness to, and has a shared consciousness with, the story of man’s attempt to understand who He is. I like to imagine God admiring the Bible similar to a crayon drawing that a parent proudly posts on the refrigerator of their child’s first artwork. But perhaps the Bible is more of a thought provoking narrative that God uses to draws us in to a space where we wrestle with Him, whether critically or charitably. But I can’t see why God would be considering the Bible to be the end of the story. The story certainly continues because here we are, still writing the story.
Hi Dean, you raise some pretty important matters.
I have two thoughts here. (1) As you say, the Bible is a collection of 66 books written over maybe a millennium, different authors, different purposes, different audiences, different situations. I don’t think we can make a blanket statement about not trusting. (2) I’d rather say we need to understand how to interpret each book. My understanding is I generally trust Luke’s Gospel as historical while I don’t generally “trust” (as historical) Jonah, though I accept it has a message that isn’t historical.
My feeling is that we need all the information we can get – from the Bible, from experience, from science & history, and from the Holy Spirit.
I’m currently reading a book on this to verify what I have been thinking. I’m still working things out but I currently think we need to ask what “inspired” means. Many Christians believe God led the writers so that they made no mistakes, based on 2 Timothy 3:16. But the Greek word used in that passage doesn’t mean “inspired” but literally “God-breathed”, and at that time this meant something like “life-giving”. In the Bible there are several examples of God breathing into something or someone, and it always means giving life to what was already there. So I believe people wrote the Bible, and God, who had oversight of the process, breathes life into it as we read it – meaning God’s Spirit uses it to speak to us.
This used to be a popular phrase a while back. I think it is true, but incomplete. I think God is also “personal” (or super-personal) and approachable, and communicative, etc.
I feel the truth lies in between the more literalist view and the more liberal view. God is the author of every good gift, and the Holy Spirit the catalyst of every good thought. So I believe that the gospels and the words of Jesus are guided by the Spirit. And because the OT was Jesus’ scriptures which he respected, but also corrected, I think it can’t be treated as perfect nor can it be totally dismissed. Much of it is based on incorrect understandings of the day, but God still wanted it to be recorded – at least the main story, if not all the details.
I think there is a deep principle here of God giving autonomy to the universe and to people. The universe grew out of the big bang and wasn’t created fully formed as in Genesis. Likewise the human race evolved and wasn’t created ex nihilo. The church has evolved via many twists and turns. So I think God allowed the Bible too to be a human document with mostly subtle influence from the Spirit except for some special occasions like Jesus.
This means it has faults but still gets the job done (the Spirit can use it to teach us, and it includes the revelation in Jesus), just as the process of evolution has faults and difficulties (like predation) but nevertheless got the job done of creating spiritual beings.
So I think we can bel;ieve the at the Bible is a joint human-divine set of documents, and we can make our own assessments of how much of each there is at each stage.
Does that make sense?
Thanks Eric,
Yes that makes sense. I appreciate your analogy with evolution and the idea that God gave autonomy to the universe and to the writers of the Old Testament.
And I really appreciate the book of Luke as being one of the most reliable gospels, because in the first paragraph the writer explains how and why he is writing it; to carefully research all the accounts of Jesus that were handed down from eyewitnesses so we could know the truth (a paraphrase). And he was writing it to an individual (Theophilus) which suggests a very personal account where he wouldn’t have been writing the gospel for the masses to please their religious expectations. This seems more authentic and trusting than the other gospels.
Also I believe that there was something very profound and powerful that happened in the early first century CE that caused the Jews — and then the gentiles — to follow a man’s teachings. I believe that the gospel writings contain some words that Jesus never said and likely some embellishment but something profound inspired those writings. It’s the inspiration that I find compelling that Jesus was a person and possibly “the Christ”. And I see Jesus’ teachings mirrored in humanity which is even more compelling that the Bible has something to say about God.
Hi Dean,
I agree with you about Luke. He was almost certainly writing later than Matthew & Mark, so he was further from the events. But he had time to collect lots of eyewitness reports, some of which would have been written down (including Mark & Matthew). Maurice Casey says he was an outstanding historian by ancient standards.
I feel we can say with confidence a lot more about Jesus than the cautious summary you give. It is tricky. There are full-on believers who trust everything is exactly true, and full-on sceptics who doubt that Jesus even existed. If we avoid both extremes, we still have to consider whether the historical sceptics are right and we can “know” very little history with confidence, or whether we can trust the gospel writers/compilers.
I think I have too little knowledge to make a fully informed decision, so I have to take notice of the historians who have studied these questions at length. So for me, it comes down to which historians I trust. Among sceptics I most accept Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey, while among Christians I most accept Richard Bauckham and NT Wright. And most of all I trust Dale Allison, who is both Christian and sceptical as a historian.
Casey: while there are individual sayings and events he doesn’t accept were historical or are not recorded accurately, and he has alternative explanations for the miraculous, he believes a lot of what is recorded is accurate (he particularly takes account of whether sayings have a clear Aramaic basis).
Ehrman: his book titles suggest scepticism about what we can know, his details are much less sceptical, though obviously he doesn’t believe in the supernatural..
Bauckham & Wright accept a lot as genuine and reliable.
Allison: is very cautious about what we can know about history, and really only deals in shades of probability, but he eventually comes down to cautiously endorsing the key facts about the resurrection.
So I feel happy to say that the major features of Jesus’ life and teachings are historical, even if some individual sayings and events are not. There is enough evidence of his miracles and resurrection that it will be philosophy & science (and maybe bias) rather than history that lead us to decide against them. Whether we believe he was Messiah, divine, actually did miracles and was resurrected is a personal choice. I feel the choice to believe is on a sound basis.
That’s how I see it.
Thanks Eric,
I appreciate your well-balanced response. I am quite familiar with Ehrman and Wright but not the others. My understanding of the Bible resonates with both Ehrman and Wright but I think I land somewhere in the middle. I have kept my responses to this article in the context of how we find a “way forward” after deconstructing — which is what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years.
So back to my original question I commented on, “can we know what God is like when we can’t trust the Bible?”. I was thinking that the Bible doesn’t make the claim that it must be trusted in order to know God. We often think in terms of “the Bible tells me so” as a catch-all for the validity of the Bible. So my way forward to believing in Jesus has been to try to “ground” the Bible in my own experiences, in creation, and in humanity rather than “the Bible tells me so” or what my local church says, or what apologists or Bible scholars say. So my very “cautious” acceptance that the Bible accurately tells the story of Jesus is because I have discovered that many of the traditional fundamentalist teachings from the pulpit were a misinterpretation of scripture. So I have replaced the [dangerous] belief that we must have certainty in doctrine with my personal experiences with Divinity, e.g., God in creation and Jesus in humanity. It has been so liberating to just let the Bible be historically inaccurate and tell the story of a people group’s very messed up journey of discovering who God is and often who He isn’t.
Thanks for this space to share
Hi Dean, yes, I think we are pretty much in agreement about all that you say here. I think it is reasonable for Christians to trust their teachers on many matters (and not right when they can’t), but that means some Christians, especially teachers, must do due diligence and have good reasons for what they teach. So they (and I include myself) can’t just assume the Bible is true in every respect.
I’m interested that you name “personal experiences with Divinity, e.g., God in creation and Jesus in humanity” as the evidence that leads you to believe in God and Jesus. I would agree, but also add history – which is why I think I feel slightly more confident than you may be (at present anyway) about the gospels. But I think we are fairly close in our conclusions.