For most of my life, reading the Bible primarily meant trying to get something out of it. Sometimes that was doctrine, sometimes guidance, sometimes reassurance, and sometimes just a verse to prove I was right (I mean, who hasn’t?). But Read More …
My understanding of the Bible once rested on a fairly simple assumption: taking it seriously more-or-less meant taking it literally. Well, not everything literally, of course. I knew God wasn’t actually a rock, nobody expected the trees to start clapping Read More …
I knew for a long time that the Bible came from another world. I knew it was ancient and that the people behind it lived thousands of years ago, spoke languages I don’t, and saw the world very differently than Read More …
If the Bible’s authority isn’t ultimately found in itself but in the One to whom it points, then what does it actually look like to read it faithfully? That’s the question I left hanging last time, and if I’m honest, Read More …
If the last post was about what inspiration means, this one is about what follows from it (or, perhaps, what doesn’t). Because once inspiration stopped looking like a theory about how these words arrived and more like a description of Read More …
If there’s a single word that’s held my sense of the Bible together more than any other, it’s probably the word inspired. Not in the Hallmark sense of saying, “this verse really inspires me,” but in that big theological way Read More …
If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, you’ll know I’ve been tracing the arc of how my relationship with the Bible has slowly changed: the framework I inherited, the assumptions I absorbed before I knew they were assumptions, Read More …
If the last post was about stepping past the warning signs concerning the dangers of critical scholarship, this one is about what I found on the other side. As I hinted at last time, I had braced myself for a Read More …
If you read the last post, you know I ended it with something of a confession. Stepping into critical scholarship felt less like an intellectual exercise and more like quietly opening a door I’d been warned my whole life to Read More …
It took me a while to realize that the way I was reading the Bible wasn’t the only way to read it. It was one approach among many, already shaped, guided, and constrained by assumptions I didn’t know I was Read More …
When I look back on how I first learned to read the Bible, what strikes me isn’t so much what I was taught as what I wasn’t. No one ever pulled me aside and explained that Christians have understood this Read More …
For most of my life, even asking whether the Bible was “God-given” would have felt borderline scandalous. Not heretical exactly, but close enough to make people shift uncomfortably in their seats. It simply wasn’t a real question. Asking it felt Read More …
I didn’t begin by questioning the Bible; I began by defending it. Not defensively or angrily, but with the earnest confidence of someone who really wanted this whole thing to hold together. Faith mattered to me, and I wanted it Read More …
I’ve been surveying the ways in which my approach to the Bible has shifted, and offered a glimpse last time of what that shift looks like in practice – something I hope to spend a significant portion of this series Read More …
So far in this series, I’ve been exploring the different ways I’ve approached the Bible. From an airtight System where every detail must fit perfectly, to a sweeping Story whose power lies in its narrative coherence, and now to a Read More …
In my last two posts, I sat with the earlier ways I once viewed the Bible, tracing the arc I was taught to see: sweeping, unified, and divinely orchestrated. I looked at why those views once carried so much weight Read More …
I’ve always loved stories that hold together. Whether in books, on television, or on a movie screen, there’s something about a narrative that threads every twist and turn into a larger whole, where every scene eventually finds its place and Read More …
When I look back at how I first held the Bible, the image that comes to mind is a System. Like a towering and impenetrable fortress, within its walls lay treasures of timeless truth. Each verse a stone cut with Read More …
It’s strange to look back and realize how much the Bible has changed for me. Not in its content, of course, but in the way I see it. Both the way I’ve carried it and the way it’s carried me. Read More …
Welcome back, friends – it’s been a while! It’s hard to believe that more than five years have passed since I first shared my story and started this blog. An honest space where I could put words to the personal Read More …
It feels a little unusual to write this post, knowing it will be the last one here for a while. I’ve been at this long enough to sense when it’s time to pause, to step back for breath. In recent Read More …
In my last post, I began to trace the ways my understanding of belief has shifted over the years. I focused especially on how I now see the relationship between belief and the will. For a long time, I assumed Read More …
Given everything I have explored so far, and the recurring theme of my earlier struggles with belief that runs through it all, a natural question arises. Why was it, and in some ways still is, so difficult for me to Read More …
A few posts back, I shared the view of faith that shaped my life for many years, the one that eventually became a source of struggle. In that view, faith was almost entirely bound up with “belief,” and belief meant Read More …
It took a long time to admit, but the way I once imagined faith was far too narrow for the kind of life it was meant to hold. For so long, I thought faith was about belief – about collecting Read More …
In my last post, I began exploring other ways of seeing faith besides the familiar lens of belief. These alternative perspectives were not only crucial in helping me endure my own crisis of faith, they have continued to reshape how Read More …
Having spent much of my focus so far describing how I once understood the nature of faith – primarily as “believing the right things” – and exploring some of the historical insights I’ve since learned about that framework, I now Read More …
In my last post, I sketched the outlines of two great turning points in Western history – the Reformation and the Enlightenment – and how they quietly but profoundly reshaped the way faith has been understood ever since. I didn’t Read More …
Although I’ve already explained in broad terms how I once understood faith, I think it’s worth spending more time looking at it in detail. I don’t just want to describe the basic form it took in my life but also Read More …
As I’ve mentioned a few times already in some of my previous posts, although there were several areas I once struggled with and which eventually led up to my crisis of faith, the one area I struggled with more than Read More …
In the last post, I began sketching out one of the early turning points in my journey, the moment I realized that what I had long assumed to be “traditional Christianity” was, in fact, just one thread in a much Read More …
Having given a bit of background on how I used to see things before my crisis of faith, along with an overview of the two areas where that crisis eventually reached its sharpest edge – the nature of the Bible Read More …
Having spent the last two posts offering an overview of how I used to see the Bible – something I hope to expand upon in greater detail down the road – I’d now like to shift to the second major Read More …
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 Read More …
As I mentioned in my last post, before diving too deep into exploring the two major areas of struggle along my journey thus far – the nature of the Bible and the nature of faith – I first want to Read More …
With a new year already upon us, I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and go through with something that’s been on my mind for quite some time now – namely, start a blog! A year ago, I wrote and Read More …