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 set the stage by giving a high-level overview in the next few posts. Hopefully, this will highlight the gist of how I used to see things and how I see things now. My aim is to provide a general outline that I can then fill in with more detail as I progress in unpacking my story.

Since I will start by summarizing how I used to see the Bible, I should note for the sake of clarity in advance that I still see the Bible as inspired, sacred, and authoritative scripture. I only say this because, although I still see the Bible as those things, the way I understand what it means for it to be all of those things is much different than it used to be – and, hopefully, more biblical as well. As such, if what I say in the next couple of posts seems confusing at first blush, or makes you wonder what I actually do believe about the Bible, just hang in there. I plan on covering that in much greater detail down the road. What follows isn’t meant as a dismantling of my former perspective for the sake of criticism, but as an honest tracing of how my thinking has changed over time. And my aim is not to replace one rigid framework with another, but to invite you into my journey of discovery – a journey that has been at times exhilarating, at times unsettling, but always deeply formative. And so with that clarifier now in mind, let’s dive in.

Despite being raised Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist throughout my childhood, my understanding of Christianity growing up was fairly simple and straightforward for the most part. It was relatively free from any awareness of the theological and practical differences among those traditions. Although my understanding undoubtedly deepened in many ways as I grew older and became more interested in matters of faith – especially during my high school and college years – the gist of how I viewed Christianity was, at bottom, relatively unchanged for the first two and a half decades or so of my life. It really wasn’t until I immersed myself into the fascinating world of Christian theology, philosophy, and apologetics that I began to truly appreciate the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition. I have thus far spent the better part of a decade exploring that world, and it has impacted my faith in immeasurable ways.

Yet even then my views early on remained relatively unchanged for the most part. Deepened and enriched, absolutely – but relatively unchanged at first. Looking back, I think the primary reason for this was likely because my initial interest in exploring the intellectual side of faith was not primarily to question or explore my own beliefs, but rather to find ways to support and defend them against the objections of others. It wasn’t until much later that my own intellectual integrity led me to question and deconstruct my own beliefs to the same extent and degree as I had learned to do with others. And that became a critical point in my journey, a point where my approach definitively transitioned from a posture of ideological defensiveness to one of genuine theological exploration.

In any case, for most of my life – from childhood all the way through college and beyond – if you were to ask me what ultimately anchored my understanding of the Christian faith, I would have likely, or at least eventually, appealed to some form of divine authority. It was, at bottom, this notion of divine authority that served as the foundation for my faith. In my early years as a confirmed Catholic, this authority was understood to reside in the infallibility of the Pope and in the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. However, even then – and especially after my family left the Catholic Church around the time I started high school and began attending a local Baptist church, where my faith really began to take root – the notion of divine authority that resonated with me most was expressed not in the Pope, but in the Bible. It was the Bible that was the ultimate authority for me, the “be all” and “end all” of my faith.

And although I never really read much of it during this phase of my life, I nevertheless absorbed quite a variety of fairly strongly held beliefs about it. For a long time, I assumed that these beliefs reflected what all Christians everywhere believed. It was only later that I discovered that the most distinctive features of what I had come to believe were not so much a reflection of what all Christians everywhere had always believed, but rather what a fairly large subset of Christians from a particular tradition believed – a tradition known as “conservative evangelicalism.”

I no doubt absorbed many of my beliefs about the Bible from this tradition, and I later learned to defend many of those beliefs with significant intellectual rigor. Perhaps the view I absorbed most deeply was the belief that the Bible was, at its very core, a divine product. I also viewed it as a human product – I never believed that it simply fell out of the sky in Ye Olde English, fresh off the finger of God – but seeing it that way wasn’t what was most important.

What mattered most was that, despite having a variety of human authors, it ultimately had one very important divine author: God. The Bible wasn’t just any other book but was a divinely sanctioned book unlike any other. It was the unique revelation of God and the inspired “Word of God.” Indeed, that is not only why we called it the “Holy Bible” – it was “holy” or “sacred” because it came from God – but also why it had divine authority. As a divine product, it carried a divine guarantee to be true. Thus, my view of the Bible’s status as holy or sacred scripture and my view of the nature of its authority were both ultimately grounded in its origin – its divine origin.

As you can imagine, seeing the Bible this way had a major impact on how I read it – or at least on how I knew I was “supposed” to read it. For most of my life, this led me to believe in a fairly hard-lined version of what is often called biblical “infallibility” or “inerrancy.” The way I saw it, since the Bible was inspired by God and had a divine guarantee to be true, then no matter what it says – whether about the origin of the universe, world history, God, Jesus, theology, ethics, and so forth – whatever it says must be true. No “ifs,” “ands,” or “buts.”

In short, the Bible was “God’s truth” and therefore told me, not primarily how its human authors once saw things, but how God sees things. Calling the Bible the “Word of God” basically meant that it was the actual words of God. It may not have been dictated by God, but the end result was more or less the same as if it had been. As such, I saw the Bible as a kind of holy autobiography or encyclopedia, a place where I could look up information about God or get God’s perspective on any topic it covered. Consequently, questioning the Bible was a big no-no. Question or disagree with what it says and you better watch out, because doing so was tantamount to questioning or disagreeing with God.

Although such a hard-lined view probably best captured the heart of how I saw the Bible from childhood through high school and most of college, my view did soften considerably over time and through further study – at least on a surface level. I still saw the Bible as a divine product with divine authority and a divine guarantee to be true, but I began to realize that the hard-lined way I had absorbed as a child was only one approach, albeit a common one, among a wide variety of ways Christians have historically viewed the Bible.

I don’t have time here to trace all the “ins and outs” of various approaches to biblical inerrancy and the often-heated debates amongst theologians over the past several decades. But suffice it to say that I eventually came to dabble with the idea that just because the Bible is a divine product didn’t mean that everything in it necessarily had to be true. As I saw it, God may have guided the writers of Scripture in such a way as to prevent them, not from making any errors whatsoever, but from making any serious errors – particularly about anything that matters for our salvation.

This way of looking at the Bible still held much in common with my previous view, but it was more flexible. It allowed that some parts of the Bible might just reflect the views of its ancient authors rather than God’s views, particularly those parts dealing with pre-modern science or archaic laws. That being said, and although there is still a part of me that resonates to some extent with this view, in the end it is not altogether that much different on a foundational level from the view I held before it. Although different in many respects on the surface, both views – as well as all of the views I explored in between – still shared the same underlying foundation: that the Bible is a divine product and, as such, has divine authority and a divine guarantee to be true. To put it another way, both of these views held that the Bible has authority because it is true, and that the Bible is true because it comes from God.

They may have hashed out the details differently, but on this much they agreed wholeheartedly. Yet it was this underlying view in particular that I began to struggle with the most. Although I felt fairly competent in clearing away almost any possible objection against such a view – typically objections based on alleged errors in the Bible or the logical incoherency of the Bible being both human and divine in its origin – it was in trying to argue for the view, initially to others but later to myself, that I really began to struggle.

This was not simply because I was slowly beginning to lose my belief in such a view over time, or because I increasingly found the typical arguments in favor of it to be uncompelling, although both were true, but primarily because I felt an enormous burden of obligation to restore that belief if I was to be “truly” Christian or – most importantly – if I was to truly please God. That sense of obligation came more from my understanding of what it meant to have faith than from anything else, and it is something I will cover in more detail very soon.

Yet, that wasn’t the only aspect of how I viewed the Bible that I would eventually struggle with. There were two other elements that added to that struggle, elements I hope to give a brief overview of next time.

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