Studying your faith as an academic pursuit is dangerous, period. To be clear, that danger isn’t always a bad thing. When survive danger, we generally come out stronger, wiser on the other end…though that’s not always the case.
In one of my first semesters at Lee University I found myself sitting an an Old Testament class as a part of the mandated minor in Biblical Studies. I wouldn’t consider myself a history buff, persay, but I do really enjoy learning about ancient cultures and tying that into my faith was an added bonus. I was learning new things on a regular basis, and for the first time in my life I found the Old Testament exciting! The book of Judges gives any modern gory action flick a run for it’s money. There is some pretty crazy stuff in Judges.
As the semester wore on, though, some of the ideas and concepts that my professor addressed started to make me a little uncomfortable. See, I grew up in a home where the Bible was the God-breathed, historical and scientifically perfect, 100% infallible word of God.
Imagine, then, my discomfort when I learned that 1st Kings and 2nd Chronicles list a different number for the amount of horses in Solomon’s army. Taken further, that even though those numbers differ in the earliest manuscripts that we have, that some modern Bible translations changed the number themselves because they wanted to remove what they considered to be an error from the original scribes. Suddenly, not only is there a contradiction within the Bible itself (heresy to me un my understanding of my faith at the time) but then I learned I couldn’t even trust the Bible I was holding in my hand to tell me the truth of the original manuscripts. What. The. Crap. It was such a minor thing, but because my faith was built on the “God-breathed, historical and scientifically perfect, 100% infallible word of God” I got worried. I got scared even. How many other things in scripture weren’t as infallible as I’d been led to believe, and what did that mean for my faith?
As if that wasn’t bad enough, as time went on we started discussing books like Job and Jonah, and I learned most Biblical scholars agree that it’s likely that neither of those books ever actually happened, but were rather allegorical, meant to teach us something about the nature of God as opposed to a literal history lesson.
I remember sitting in Sunday School as a kid and learning all of the “science” about how a big fish or whale could have actually, literally swalled someone and then spit them up three days later. I was taught these texts as historical, scientific fact! What I was learning here was heresy! As time went on, though, I learned that while there was a great deal of extra-Biblical evidence for a lot of the stories found in scripture, Job and Jonah specifically had none to back up any of the claims in the books.
I learned more and more about how the Jewish people never interpreted these stories as literal, and that they’re widely understood to be about the nature of God and not a literal, historical account. This matched up perfectly with what I’d been taught about Christ most of my life…that he taught in parables because that’s how the people of His time best learned about the God they feared. Somehow, though, I wasn’t able to accept this excuse in the Old Testament (even though I’d easily made the same allowance in the New Testament.) If the Old Testament…the foundations of our faith….if it can’t be taken literally what do we have? What are we left with? What is true? What is a lie?
WHAT DO I EVEN BELIEVE ANYMORE!??
One afternoon I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I camped outside of my professor’s door before his office hours. I was torn apart inside. I thought this was a Christian school? Why are they teaching these things? Don’t they know what they’re doing? Why are they trying to convince me that Christianity is so full of holes!?
When he arrived for his office hours, I confronted him almost in tears. He smiled…not condescendingly but caringly…leaned back in his chair and let me rant for a moment. In hindsight, I realize that this was not his first rodeo. I was not the first student and would not be the last to go through this experience. I was in the best place I could have been to find myself in this crisis of faith.
“Zach, if you were to look in the newspapers of ancient Samaria, if there were such a thing, and you opened that paper to the police blotters, would you find the story of the Good Samaritan? Of a man brutally beaten and robbed on the highway, helped by his enemy?” he asked me.
“Of course not,” I said. “It was a parable.”
“So, what you’re saying is that it’s likely that the story of the Good Samaritan never happened, factually/historically speaking. Does that mean that Jesus lied?”
“No, Jesus couldn’t lie, that would be a sin. It was a parable…Jesus was using it to teach his followers an important lesson about how we should treat each other,” I rebutted.
“So what you’re saying then, is that even though that never actually happened, that it’s still truth?”
BAM. I could imagine from his point of view that I looked like an android who’s brain was being rewired, rebooting. In an instant, my perception of the entire Bible began to change, to shift. I no longer questioned it’s truth. In fact, that change in my understanding of truth…that truth could be found even without literal, factual historical and scientific accuracy…was what saved me and my faith. Not only saved me, but has helped me grow so far beyond that place since that time.
To this day, I believe that the Bible is 100% God-inspired, and that every page, every scripture, is truth. What I don’t believe, and what I don’t view to be incompatible, is that the Bible is a science book, or a 100% true to life historical text. The reality is that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be historically or scientifically accurate to be truth, just the same as Christ’s parables.
I saw other students in my class burn out. The few that burnt out the worst were the PK’s (pastor’s kids) who when, faced with the idea that not just their faith but their family lives were based on something they now determined to be a lie, abandoned the faith altogether. Their faith seemed strong on the outside, but in the end was built on a foundation that was not their own. These were people whose faith was their pastor’s faith, or their parents faith. Like a house of cards, the framework of their entire faith was, ultimately, based on a thin, flimsy understanding of the nature of scripture. When they were forced to confront that their view wasn’t as rock solid as they believed, instead of making it through that experience to try and strengthen their faith, they let the entire house collapse. My heart breaks for them, and I hope they’ve been able to work out their own faith in the interim. I don’t think myself any better for making it out of this crisis…I’m just thankful to have had my crisis in such a loving environment, with a faculty who understood how to guide me through that scary transition of my faith from that of my parents and pastor to my own.
If you were to go to the writer of Jonah and ask if it were a factual, historical account of this man named Jonah, I think they might slap you for missing the point…that God cares about EVERYONE, not just who we want Him to care about.
In some ways, Jonah is the perfect allegory for this entire faith crisis. In the end, Jonah learns that his own bias towards the people of Nineveh doesn’t matter to God. That God’s truth is different from Jonah’s truth. In fact, the entire book of Jonah…his entire journey up until that point was set up to prove this very thing. Despite being a prophet and a man of God, Jonah’s goal and God’s goal, Jonah’s truth and God’s truth, were different.
The day of my faith crisis, I learned that God’s truth is always above and beyond what we can understand, and the pursuit of God’s truth over my own has changed my faith journey forever.