In my last post, I began tracing the contours of how I once saw the Bible – not merely as sacred, but as a divine work, stamped with God’s own authority and carrying what I believed was an unbreakable guarantee of truth. That framework wasn’t something I held casually. It was a view I not only believed but labored to defend with all the intellectual firepower I could muster. Over the years, I studied, wrote, and argued in support of that understanding, trying to hold together a vision of Scripture that felt firm, unshakable, and complete. And yet, as with many convictions that seem solid, there was more going on beneath the surface. My view of the Bible’s divine authorship shaped not only how I saw the text, but also how I believed it ought to be read. More specifically, it deeply influenced my assumption that the Bible was meant to be interpreted, first and foremost, literally. That assumption, while rarely articulated, colored everything. I wasn’t just holding onto Scripture – I was holding onto a particular way of reading it, one that felt faithful, certain, and safe, but would later prove far more complicated than I ever imagined.

Of course, there were exceptions. I never thought Isaiah’s trees literally clapped their hands or that Jesus was actually a wooden door. I had a category for poetic license. But as a general rule, if a passage could be taken literally, it probably should be. Especially if it described a historical event or miracle. Genesis, Exodus, the Gospels – these were historical records, I thought. Eyewitness accounts. To suggest otherwise was to flirt with dangerous ideas. What’s interesting in hindsight is that I never consciously connected this literalist reading with my belief in divine inspiration. But in practice, they were inseparably fused. To say the Bible came from God was to read it with literal weight. Biblical inerrancy and biblical literalism went hand in hand. Even when I started softening on inerrancy later, literalism remained – if not as doctrine, then as instinct. I couldn’t imagine God speaking metaphorically about things like creation, miracles, or resurrection. Somewhere deep down, I had come to believe that if God speaks, He speaks plainly. Not in riddles. Not in stories. Not in symbols. And so I read the Bible accordingly – with reverence, yes, but also with a kind of rigidity and certainty that felt almost protective in my early faith, and in a way I didn’t yet recognize.

Yet that rigidity wasn’t born of arrogance, but of loyalty. I wanted to be faithful. And faithfulness, I had been taught, meant affirming the text in its most straightforward form. I was aware, of course, that some Christians read parts of the Bible metaphorically. But to me, those were Christians who, I believed, didn’t take the Bible seriously (if they even counted as Christians at all). So I held the line. I insisted, both to myself and others, that the Bible meant what it said. And the more miraculous the story, the more important it felt to read it as literal truth. Not just truthful, but true. In fact, I came to embrace a specific kind of literalism – what I might now call a “literalism of the spectacular.” I didn’t struggle with miracles. I believed God could do them. I still do. But I eventually started to wonder why I – and others like me – were so deeply invested in proving that the spectacular events in Scripture had actually happened exactly as described. Why was the literal reading of the most miraculous stories the line we refused to cross?

Looking back, I think part of it was that the spectacular functioned like a badge of divine credibility. If God was real and the Bible was His word, then surely the proof was in the biggest, most unexplainable events. The Red Sea splitting, the sun standing still, the dead walking out of tombs – these were the tentpoles holding up the whole structure. If any of them wobbled, it felt like the entire tent might collapse. The irony, of course, is that the same stories meant to inspire awe also created pressure. They weren’t just wonders to be received with joy; they became tests to be passed, benchmarks of belief. To question the historicity of one was to risk unraveling all of them. And so it’s no wonder I clung so tightly. In a way, I think I feared that losing the spectacular would mean losing God – as though His reality depended on the historical accuracy of every jaw-dropping scene. That fear kept me from asking certain questions for a long time. Yet when I finally did, they felt far more destabilizing than they might have otherwise.

Over time, just as my view of inerrancy softened, so did my view of literalism. I began to entertain the idea that maybe not everything in Scripture had to be read as historical record. Maybe the six days of creation represented long ages. Maybe Jonah was a parable. Maybe the point wasn’t always the facts, but the meaning. That shift didn’t come all at once – it came slowly, like light finding its way through a fogged window. Even then, I still held tightly to certain stories. Adam and Eve, Noah’s flood, the Exodus – and of course, the virgin birth, miraculous ministry, and bodily resurrection of Jesus. I couldn’t imagine letting those go. They were, to me, the pillars of the whole structure. I could allow metaphor here and there, but those big stories had to be literal. Otherwise, I thought, what’s the point? I didn’t yet realize that this insistence – that the most powerful stories must be factual to be meaningful – was itself something I would only learn to loosen through years of wrestling and reflection later on.

The struggle, however, wasn’t ultimately about whether miracles were possible. I wasn’t bothered by the idea of divine intervention. I was far too steeped in philosophical and apologetic arguments for that. I’d read all the books and could answer all the objections. So the issue wasn’t whether the stories could be true. It was why I believed they had to be true. Why I had come to equate faithfulness with affirming the literal truth of these stories – sometimes at almost any cost. Why did I feel obligated to defend their factuality? Why did I believe that my relationship with God somehow depended on emphasizing their literal historicity? Those were the deeper questions that became the source of my unease. I didn’t stop believing in the possibility of miracles. I just began to wonder if my theological framework had become more about protecting ideas about God rather than pursuing God. That shift marked a turning point. The tension was no longer about intellectual arguments; it was about the quiet spiritual pressure I had carried for so long.

What made the shift especially disorienting was the strange middle ground I found myself in – a place where I still believed my old views were reasonable, even defensible, and yet found myself increasingly unsure whether they were true. It’s not a place people often talk about. But it’s real. And for a while, it was home. I could defend the literal reading of Genesis. I could build a case for the historical Exodus. I could explain the resurrection as a rational, historical claim. But I no longer needed to. And once the urgency to defend disappeared, so did the necessity of belief. I didn’t reject my former views with bitterness. I simply began to hold them more loosely – not because I no longer cared, but because they no longer held me. There’s a difference, I’ve learned, between being able to argue something and being able to trust it. And that gap – between what I could intellectually sustain and what I could spiritually embrace – became the quiet space where my view of Scripture began to unravel and reweave itself.

Yet, as that shift took root, another long-held belief began to crack – the assumption that the Bible’s teachings were not only literally and factually true, but absolute. That every doctrine, every ethical command, every line of instruction was not just true but timelessly true. I had grown up with the familiar line: “The Bible is the ultimate authority for faith and practice.” And I believed it, wholeheartedly. The Bible told us what to believe and how to live. That was its job. That was the point. Any other view – any attempt to nuance or question or contextualize – felt like the first step on a slippery slope toward relativism. And if there was one thing I had learned to fear in my evangelical formation, it was relativism. That was the bogeyman behind every theological or moral compromise. The sin behind all other sins. If you picked and chose, if you treated the Bible like a buffet line, you weren’t being faithful. You were being faithless. So I stood guard against that slope – fiercely, sincerely, and without a shred of irony.

Because eventually, I started to see what had been in front of me the whole time: we all pick and choose. Even the most conservative, most literal, most doctrinally precise Christians make choices. Some verses get emphasized. Others get softened. Some texts make it onto the bumper stickers and worship slides. Others get conveniently left out of the sermon series. The truth is, Scripture is vast, complex, and diverse. And no one approaches it without filters. What changed for me wasn’t the realization that picking and choosing was happening – it was the shift in how I saw that reality. I stopped seeing it as a moral failure. I started seeing it as a human inevitability. And that realization didn’t push me toward cynicism. If anything, it brought a kind of freedom I hadn’t known before. It pushed me toward honesty. Because if we’re all making choices, let’s at least own them. Let’s do so thoughtfully, humbly, and in the light.

Lastly, that shift also affected how I saw the creeds as well. For most of my life, I treated them like mini-Scriptures – short, distilled, and absolutely binding. To recite the creed was to agree with every line. No hesitation. No mental reservations. No crossed fingers. The language was metaphorical, yes – but the truth behind the metaphors was factual, absolute, and non-negotiable. That’s how I had been taught to hold them. But as my understanding of language, culture, and history deepened, I began to see the creeds differently. Not as cages, but as windows. Not as tests of loyalty, but as historical reflections of sincere belief. And like all reflections, they carried the fingerprints of their time. That didn’t make them less meaningful. In many ways, it made them more so. But it also meant I could hold them with reverence and curiosity – not rigidity. I could let them shape me without demanding they define me.

And so that is, at a high level, how my view of the Bible began to change: from inerrant to complex, from literal to layered, from absolute to situated. It was the first and most foundational struggle I faced. And, somewhat ironically, the more I loved the Bible, the more I studied it, the more those struggles intensified. But Scripture wasn’t the only place where tension rose. There was another layer – deeper, more personal, and ultimately more destabilizing. It was my understanding of the Christian life itself. Of what it means to follow Jesus. Of what it means to have faith. That, more than anything, became the axis around which the whole crisis turned. And so that’s where I want to turn to next.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.