Boyd's "Letters From a Skeptic"

This is my first post in two months. The reasons for this blogging silence are several. For one, it's summer and I have lots of other things to do . But I've also been taking a pretty deep dive into the NPP (by reading this book with a couple friends and also frequently sampling these three books.) I'm sure I'll blog on that later. Anyway, my apologies to all three of my loyal readers!

Another drain on my time has been my fledgling book business (the details of which shall remain a closely guarded secret). One side benefit of this enterprise has been the acquisition of some very interesting books at almost no cost. When I see something that piques my interest, or lines up with an already established interest, I get it. So today I acquired a book that I'm excited to read: Letters From a Skeptic - A Son Wrestles with His Father's Questions about Christianity by Gregory A. Boyd.

Although I've never read any of Boyd's books, I've heard plenty about him, and I've been meaning to grab one and page through it. Boyd intrigues me from two different perspectives:

On the one side, he has an approach to the Bible and to faith that really resonates with me. He believes in evolution, which shows me that he doesn't ignore the historical and literary contexts of the Hebrew Bible. His views on politics, (although I've not read The Myth of a Christian Nation and don't have much interest in politics) I agree with. His refusal to endorse Republican candidates from the pulpit and insistence that non-violence and love should be our national model (since that's what Jesus teaches) both ring true with me. Most interestingly, he is one of the leading proponents of open theism, a view of God's knowledge that suggests the partial openness of the future, where God's foreknowledge consists only of a realm of possibilities, since man, whom he created and endowed with the ability to choose, has not yet made these choices.

With that resume, one might expect him to be a pretty liberal Christian. But...

On the other side of the coin, he is a Baptist. [Gasp!] A member of the same Baptist affiliation (the BGC) as the uber-Calvinist John Piper, these two are sure to clash, (and have). Sure, as events at my church plainly show, the label "Baptist" doesn't mean much these days. But being a member of the BGC does mean something (as the scuffle between Boyd and Piper shows), it means Boyd isn't a liberal Christian. Boyd has also been an outspoken critic of liberal historical Jesus scholars, especially those of the Jesus Seminar.

In any case, the book is interesting to me for more reasons than it's authorship. First, although I'm true to my generation in that I shun labels, I think I would be hard-pressed to argue that I am not a skeptic. Second, the book is about a conversation between Boyd and his father where they discuss real, hard, honest questions about Christianity. My own relationship with my Dad has been similar, although more off-and-on and addressing different questions.

The most interesting thing about this book is that it addresses several (if not all) of what I've come to call THE BIG FIVE. In this recent post, I listed my top five "understandings I'm seeking;" issues with the Bible and faith that I don't understand and that often affect my faith. I was excited when I opened Boyd's book and immediately saw that at least three of the five were addressed directly, while the other two were likely discussed as peripheral issues in other chapters.

As I read the book (or at least the most relevant sections) I'll post on each of the BIG FIVE and how Boyd's thoughts in his book relate to each.

The god of liberal Christianity

In my last post, I wrote about what is probably the most difficult issue I have with my faith: The multiple voices in the Bible, and how we (conservative Christians in general) elevate certain passages to supreme status, and reinterpret all conflicting passages, effectively neutering them of their meaning. In particular, the voices of Jesus and Paul stand out in stark contrast, especially when asking the question "What must I do to be saved?".

In that post, I discussed this post by James McGrath over at the blog Exploring our Matrix. In it, he discusses this problem, stating that his transition to liberal Christianity is a result of just these types of problems. McGrath states:

My own Liberal Christian position is a result of struggling with these sorts of issues. It doesn't seem to me that there is a single voice in the Bible, and we can simply listen to it and do "what the Bible says"... And so whatever it means to be a Christian, it cannot mean "believing the Bible". Because part of the challenge of the Bible itself is that it presents us with conflicting voices, and in doing so forces us away from the easy path of simply picking texts and following them, making us instead recognize that we are part of a 2,000-year-old dialogue that requires us to figure out for ourselves what it means to be a Christian in our own particular time and context.

I tend to agree with McGrath, that the proof-text approach taken by fundamentalist Christianity doesn't do justice to the character of the Bible. Furthermore, I think that anyone that says "I just believe the Bible" doesn't read it very often. Or they don't read it and actually think about what it says. To those who say just that, I would ask (taking McGrath's example): When you read Matthew 28 and Luke 24, do you "believe" that the disciples first saw the resurrected Jesus in Jerusalem, or almost 70 miles away in Galilee?

For McGrath, the solution to the problem was liberal Christianity, the willingness to approach the Bible as one would any other historical document without any preconceived notion of inerrancy or divine inspiration. For liberal Christians, the Bible is seen as a record of man's experiences in interacting with God. It may seem that a similar destination is in store for me, but there is a problem with that: To me, it seems that it is much more likely that God simply does not exist, than for the god of liberal Christianity to be real.

If God does exist, and He is interested in communicating with us (As the Bible, read as a historical and divinely inspired document would suggest) than would He not act to communicate with humankind in some sort of transferable way? Would He not leave more of a mark than just the "experiences" of some people in history? To me it seems more likely that He isn't out there at all.

To be fair, it isn't quite true that the Bible is the only way God has provided for us to know Him. But the god of of liberal Christianity (to me) seems totally fuzzy and unknowable. I think that if these problems end up pushing me to something other than conservative Christianity, it will be to atheism (or more likely agnosticism) than to liberal Christianity.

Jesus didn't really mean that, did He?

So this is my first post in a while... I've kind of been on a break - a reading, writing, thinking break. Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed with things - with ideas - and just have to take a little break. So that's what that was.

So what's important enough to jerk me out of hiding? Well, it was this post by James McGrath over at the blog Exploring our Matrix. [Don't ask what I was doing reading a blog on a "reading break"] In it, McGrath is musing about what it would be like if fundamentalist Christians were to oversee a "final exam" that everyone must take before they were allowed to enter heaven. (He suggests two questions: Would you pass?)

This caught my attention because I recently had to complete a similar "exam": An application to participate in a local ministry contained the question:

If you died today and stood before God, and He ask you “Why should I let you into My heaven?” What would you say? This is not a testimony!

Now, I understand why the application included this question, and don't really have a problem with it. And that's not why I'm writing this post. I'm writing because the rest of McGrath's post hit a nerve. It perfectly describes the problems I'm having with my faith. In a nutshell:

It doesn't seem to me that there is a single voice in the Bible, and we can simply listen to it and do "what the Bible says"... And so whatever it means to be a Christian, it cannot mean "believing the Bible". Because part of the challenge of the Bible itself is that it presents us with conflicting voices, and in doing so forces us away from the easy path of simply picking texts and following them...

Yet this is exactly what "Biblical Christianity" (as it's often called in my context) does: It elevates certain passages to supreme status, and reinterprets all conflicting passages, effectively neutering them of their meaning.

Here's a good example: My pastor once gave a sermon on forgiveness, and at one point discussed Matthew 6:14-15 where Jesus makes the following statement:

[I]f you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

My pastor gave this as an example of why forgiveness is so important: because "God takes forgiveness seriously." He explained that this verse refers to "relational forgiveness": That our relationship with God is hindered if we do not forgive others.

I was puzzled at this interpretation because there is nothing in the context of Jesus' words that would indicate anything other than the obvious interpretation: That if we do not forgive, God will not forgive our sins. On the contrary, other statements of Jesus indicate that a lack of forgiveness will result in nothing less than hell: In Matthew 18:21-35, the unmerciful servant is sent to be tortured effectively forever for refusing to forgive.

When I questioned my pastor about this, he said that since we know (from Paul's writings) that we are saved by faith alone, we must interpret Jesus' words in light of this knowledge. Therefore, Jesus could not have meant that we will not be forgiven if we do not forgive.

This answer frustrates me to no end. In his post, McGrath addresses my pastor's answer:

[W]hile one might say "Scripture must be interpreted in light of Scripture", it still remains to be asked why one should start with the typical Evangelical prooftexts in Paul and John, and say that the others must be interpreted in light of them, rather than reversing the procedure and saying that the passages that seem to affirm "judgment" being on the basis of faith alone must mean something else.

I agree with McGrath. I would go one step further and ask: (as I have elsewhere) if God did become man, and that man is Jesus Christ, can't we expect Him to know what He is talking about?

I have more to say about this, but I'll put that in another post.