A journey of discovery

The road less travelled

Christian churches can be conservative about their teachings. They tend to disapprove of any members who question the teachings or depart from them. And this despite the fact that the different denominations can differ significantly on some of these matters – which is why I recommend visiting different churches if you want to get a more complete picture of Christianity.

But whether you are a questioning Christian or a questioning agnostic, we can think differently. To misquote Robert Frost:

Two roads diverge in a Christian wood, and we —
We can take the one less traveled, see,
And that can make all the difference.

Taking the less travelled path can, if we remain open-minded, give us new insights that can change our lives.

Here’s a few examples I have found.

The unexpected Jesus

There seem to be two main ways that churches see Jesus. Either he’s the Jesus whose whole life can be summed up in the fact that he died and rose again – even the early creeds (e.g. the Apostles of Nicene Creeds) jump from his birth to his trial and death, saying nothing about his life and teaching. Or they emphasise the exalted Jesus, “high and lifted up”, far above us in heaven, worthy of worship.

You can find these Jesuses easily enough in the Bible – the first mainly in Paul’s and Peter’s letters, the second in the letters but pre-eminently in Revelation.

But when we read the gospels, we get a different story. The Jesus of the gospels walks dusty roads and gets his feet dirty. He hangs out with lepers, tax collectors and sex workers, which respectable people just didn’t do. He got tired and sometimes a little frustrated. In his youth he made things with his hands.

He healed people. He taught them in ways that the common person could appreciate – often with stories. But he could also match it with the teachers of the law in complex rabbinical theological argument.

And while his death featured occasionally in his teachings, he mostly focused on the here and now. God was doing a new thing through him (he called it the kingdom of God) and his hearers could get on board. But they might have to change the way they lived – the famed Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) gave us the blueprint.

Shockingly (for evangelical Christians whose belief is based on faith, not good deeds) he zeroed in on behaviour that harmed the poor and vulnerable and said how we behaved towards others was a key to our fate in the life to come (Matthew 25:31-6). I’ve heard evangelical Christians try to explain Jesus’ teachings in ways that fit their doctrine that salvation is by faith alone, but surely there’s something wrong with a follower of Jesus trying to correct his clear teachings.

If instead we embrace the idea of entering the kingdom of God and following Jesus, our lives can become very fulfilling. We can still have all that the other Christians believe, but we also have a radical hope and life now. I think this has been the single largest and most meaningful alternative path I’ve walked.

In the beginning …. folk tale

If you start reading the Bible at the beginning (which I don’t recommend, because it gets difficult quite quickly), you immediately find yourself in some rather odd and ancient stories.They can feel normal for a while, because they are familiar to many of us, but their unreality hits us if we stop and think.

Was the world really created in just six days, and not all that long ago? Did all humans really come from one ancestral couple (which would require God to do DNA miracles every birth to get the genetic complexity we see in humans today)? Did God really flood the entire world, and could two of every terrestrial animal on earth fit into the ark (or even get there from the other side of th world)?

The experts may have fancy names, but to me these stories read like folk tales. There is an almost magical garden that has never been found since, with trees with magical properties. Like good folk tales, they explains things – why snakes slither along the ground and why we hate them, why men have to work hard and women have pain in childbirth.

It’s not all that controversial these days, but accepting that these ancient stories in the Bible are folk tales sends us further down an alternative path.

Things get weird

Persevering with the early books of the Bible reveals some very strange and sometimes alarming things.

• Moses is one of God’s real heroes in the Old Testament, but in Exodus 4:24 God intends to kill him, until this attack is prevented in a very strange way by Moses’ wife.
• We are used to monotheism – there is one powerful God. But the Old Testament seems to portray a world where there are many gods, one for each nation or tribe, sometimes with a consort. Israel’s God, Yahweh seems to have been such a tribal god, but only gradually became seen as the one all-powerful God. To confuse things further, early Israel seemed to also have the god El, but later the two beliefs seem to have been combined. Such development was common in the ancient middle east, e.g. in the gods of Egypt.
• There are so many laws in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy that all but the most patient reader will be tempted to skip some of these chapters. But reading them all shows some very strange laws – many of them understandable in that ancient context but difficult to accept as laws given by an all-knowing God, and certainly not applicable today.

So what do we do with all this weirdness? If we accept it all as the writings of ancient people seeking to understand and explain their place in a brutal world, and how their belief in God evolved, then it is all explicable. But of we believe it’s all “God’s Word”, detailed reading presents difficulties.

Some parts of the journey are really tough

The olden days were violent, and, unsurprisingly, that brutality is seen in the Bible. People fight and kill and cheat and lie.

But when we see God apparently endorsing or even ordering some of this behaviour, any decent reader faces a dilemma. Could a good God really do this?

Some Christians argue that God was bringing fair and just punishment on evil people, but this argument terrifies me with its weakness. Were these small nations which God ordered to be eliminated (literally every person) any more evil than other tribes in history, or some nations today? Was violently killing them all a just punishment – even the grandmas and babies? Could God order the same today?

Most readers reject that. Either God didn’t order this, or he’s not good or he doesn’t exist. (Fortunately, the historical and archaeological evidence suggests these genocides didn’t actually happen.)

This awful dilemma is a major fork in the road of Bible discovery. Either we accept that God did indeed command these atrocities (and we also believe the folk tales are true and the ancient laws are just), or we walk down a different road and try to find other explanations.

But that’s only half the story

We don’t have to focus on the negative. There are also lots of positive aspects to the Old Testament.

• People love the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd”), and even non-believers like to have it read at funerals. Many other Psalms bring people comfort and peace (though other Psalms are revengeful).
• The beautiful words of Isaiah 9 (“Unto us a child is born ….”) are often read at Christmas, and are the inspiration for a wonderful piece of music in Handel’s Messiah.
• Many of the prophets speak strongly about God’s concern for justice and care for the poor and oppressed.
• The story of Ruth is a tender expression of family love.
• Throughout the Old Testament, God is portrayed as fiercely loving, tenderly caring for his people and opposed to those who bring harm and injustice. It is hard to reconcile this with the violent commends we noted above, but the two exist side-by-side.

When we consider the negatives with these positives, it is easy to be confused. Fortunately, there are ways those of us on this journey can go some way to resolve the dilemma.

First century Jews interpret their scriptures

As we continue on our journey of discovery, if we have an inquisitive mind, we may start to notice something very interesting. When Jesus and his early followers refer back to their scriptures (our Old Testament), they don’t always take the original meaning, but half the time they alter it. They may take it out of context, change a few words, or even totally change the meaning.

There are many examples, but some of the most significant of them change violent and revengeful meanings and replace them with more peaceful meanings. For example, in Luke 4 Jesus quotes Isaiah, but omits some vengeful words. In several places Paul does much the same.

From this we learn two things.

1. For Jesus and the apostles, the scriptural meanings weren’t set in stone. They were apparently comfortable with “correcting” or updating some parts of the Old Testament. (It seems this was acceptable practice among first century Jewish teachers. Similar practices of updating old beliefs for new times explain some of the apparent inconsistencies in the Old Testament too.)
2. For followers of Jesus, the violence in the Old Testament appears, on the authority of Jesus and his apostles, not to be the attitude of God. If they moved on past that violence, so can we.

This is some of the most exciting new information we can have on our journey. It leads us to a new understanding of the whole Bible.

A different kind of holy book

It seems to be easy for people to assume that holy books must be perfect in every way, the very words of God. Certainly that is how Muslims see the Q’uran and Mormons see the Book of Mormon. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

One outcome of this alternative journey through the Bible is that we get to see this alternative. The Bible may still be (and I believe it is) a major vehicle of God’s revelation to humankind. Non-believers may still see it as the scriptures of the Christian faith, even if they don’t believe it.

But I can believe that revelation, those scriptures, come to us via fallible human beings reporting what they believe. Those beliefs changed as the times changed and as they gained new understandings.

Christians believe God created the world, but these days most of us (I think) believe he did that via the big bang and lots of time for the universe to expand and form.

Christians believe God created human life, but these days most of us (I think) believe he did that via evolution and lots of time for natural selection to do its work.

In both cases, the process was far less direct than Christians once thought.

So it wouldn’t be at all surprising to me if God created the scriptures in a similar low key, slow process

Keep journeying!

Whether you are a curious unbeliever or a questioning Christian, if you’ve come this far on the journey, keep going! There’s sure to be new insights ahead.

Enjoy the journey!

And you may be interested in a page that gives a little more information and analysis on this topic – Reading the Bible with an open mind.

Photos by Petra Reid (Bible) and Adrien Olichon. Mash-up by unkleE.