Speaking with a friend (or acquaintance, or however you term that in-between state where you do not speak so often as you would like but are probably more than just-acquaintances) on these matters, he made the observation that I am ‘definitely peering over into the abyss.’ I thought these things merely evidences that I am, at heart, a better skeptic than believer (or to put it kindly, a ‘scientific rationalist’), but his words had a greater poetry to them than mine, and it is nice to know there are others who are prone, at times, to approach the same abyss.

I questioned whether to voice these thoughts, but in the end I have found too much doublespeak in Christianity, people affirming in public what they do not really affirm in private, going along with the crowd mostly to save face, asserting confidently that they have no doubts while, among those they know, confiding that they are haunted by doubt, and I at least do not find that hiding one’s beliefs or thoughts for the sake of popular acclaim to be an altogether healthy or worthy enterprise. Simply put, I typically find it cowardly. My intention is not to cause others’ beliefs to crumble – far from it – but to articulate the doubts of my own. So if at any point in reading this you feel an uncontrollable urge to call me a heretic, shout out that this is proof that people cannot be both gay and Christian, or simply feel too uncomfortable, please jump ship and hit that X button or back button on the browser window (though you are of course free, as always, to skip it all and leave feedback). But if reading this is not of any benefit to you, and it is a harm to you, then there is no point in continuing. So with that said, let us walk boldly into the realm of doubt…

My problems with the Christian religion are twofold, though I do not say this to limit the tremendous problems this religion faces to a mere number of two (I am quite sure there are those I have not yet thought of or encountered), but I mean to say that these two are of sufficient magnitude and seriousness to disturb the foundations of what I believe, or what I thought I believed. And the problems are these: the text of Scripture, and the existence of evil. The problem of Scripture is that it is not inerrant, it discusses differing concepts of God amongst its various books and authors, sometimes making contradictory claims in these, others portraying God in radically different manners; the problem of evil is that the world contains evils of such magnitude and distribution that, on the surface, are incompatible with a God who is omniscient and omnipotent, as well as good. While the first is Christian-specific, the second applies to all theistic and deistic systems, and neither is negligible in terms of constructing one’s view of the world, or considering the possibility, probability, or reality of God. And so while a complete answer to either is not necessary (though a sufficiently partial and reasonable one is), I do not feel I can honestly proclaim God with these left outstanding. I am splitting these two issues into two posts, since they are each the size of a baby rhinoceros, and if I combine them in a single post, their combined weight might cause a singularity in my database and collapse my blog.

I. The Text of Scripture

Examining the Christian Scriptures thoroughly, it is difficult for me to understand how claims of inerrancy can be made outside of ignorance. I do not mean this to suggest that all those making such claims are ignorant or that they are stupid – they may well have attained an understanding of Scripture which my mind has not – but that I simply do not comprehend how this is possible. Sticking to the New Testament (which is more my stomping grounds than the Old), I think it will be sufficient to show, from my understanding, a lack of literal, moral, and foundational inerrancy.

Literal inerrancy

The matter of literal errancy can be shown in cross-references (such as the infamous Mark 2:26 debacle), but a trivial, yet important example, can be taken from the three Synoptic accounts, in the sending out of the Twelve:

Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.
(Matthew 10:9-10)

He told them: ‘Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.’
(Luke 9:3)

These were his instructions: ‘Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic.’
(Mark 6:8-9)

The Matthean and Lukan accounts agree in what they say, but Mark is at odds with the other two.

If we are to say, along with most scholars, that Mark is earliest, are Matthew and Luke working with a corrupted version of the story, or do they correct the error contained in Mark? Whatever the case is, I think the contradiction is pretty evident in the text and it is not possible to work around it. There is no manuscript data of which I am aware that harmonizes these. I have heard with surprising frequency from those holding to biblical inerrancy that the original documents were inerrant, but what we have are not those originals, so that the documents at first agreed on all matters, but later were corrupted (even if there is no evidence for specific cases, we may take on faith that God inspired them perfectly, though we cannot tell in every situation how that plays out). But whether this is just me or whether it is a more important consideration, I do not understand the practical difference between an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon. Was God just negligent in his upkeep of the text (being sovereign one moment over its inspiration but not over its preservation)? And how does it mean anything to appeal to a hypothetical, largely imaginary inerrant original when we do not have that original nor any way of appealing to it besides the critical methods which have gotten us even this far? That is, I see no way that the interpretation of an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon differ from one another. And I further fail to see how an inerrant canon now-corrupted makes anything but a mess out of God’s interaction with mankind for the sake of his self-revelation.

But this error is pretty negligible, right? I mean, none of this affects the interpretation of the passage but only that some details may not be exact. This is a fair assessment, but this example cannot be passed up, I don’t think, without conceding the literal errancy of the Scriptures.

Moral Inerrancy

But what about moral matters? Surely there is agreement there. Again, for sake of simplicity (and sticking to where my knowledge is more complete), I will only look at New Testament examples, for considerations about Old Testament moral commands, their relevancy, and the scope of what is called Covenant Theology is very complex. But let us take one issue: the eating of meats sacrificed to idols. The first instruction concerning this matter comes in the book of Acts, in the letter from the Jerusalem council to the Gentile believers.

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

I think it is clear from the context this occurs in that this was more of a command from church authority than a suggestion. And I think it not without reason (as some do on other matters) to say that ‘contextually speaking’ we cannot affirm eating meat sacrificed to idols without bringing the morality of sexual immorality into question.

Paul, however, takes another view of this altogether, alluding to this matter in Romans and more fully addressing it in 1 Corinthians, essentially saying the same thing in both places:

Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall. So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.

Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.

Paul is saying, clearly, that eating meat sacrificed to idols is a non-moral issue, but that those who do this need to be sensitive to their fellow believers who do view it as a moral issue, for these persons and their consciences are more important than an individual’s freedom. But in saying this, does he not explicitly flaunt the decree given only a few years earlier by the council at Jerusalem? Is he not suggesting that those who made this ruling were brothers with ‘weak consciences’? And what of the other matters in that decree? Or do the Scriptures not always speak with one voice on moral matters?

But the New Testament is not done addressing this topic, for we have two more mentions on this from the mouth of Christ himself, in the book of Revelation, first to the church at Pergamum and then the church at Thyatira:

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality.

Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.

In the above passages from Revelation, as is arguably the same in the Acts passage, eating food sacrificed to idols is inextricably linked to sexual immorality (I suspect, particularly given the OT references in the Revelation passages, that this refers to the context of pagan mystery cults). However, there is not an out in the passage to say that food sacrificed to idols is wrong only when it leads to sexual immorality, but both are unequivocally condemned. Like my friend from whom I stole the title of this entry might say about other matters, it is not that eating causes sexual immorality per se, but that there is a link between rejecting giving thanks to God by eating food sacrificed to pagan gods, and rejecting the true God’s instruction on other matters, including sexual ones. Only because of Romans and 1 Corinthians can we, strictly within the scope of Scripture, seriously question this reasoning. So what are we to say? Shall we say that Paul disregards the clear instruction of the church and the Lord Jesus Christ? Or shall we say that Christian thought developed on this matter over time, to approximate the truer morality of the matter, and that likewise the commendation in Acts did not represent God’s perfect will, but a first attempt thereat, hedged by invisible (in the text) cultural constraints, even though the council claims this ‘seemed good to the Holy Spirit’? (For we cannot easily contextualize away the command given in Acts, seeing that it was to the whole of the Gentile communion.) Shall we also then say, despite the most straight-forward hermeneutic of the Revelation passages, that food sacrificed to idols is condemned only because of its fundamental link, in that context, to sexual immorality, and it is not condemned for all people at all times, such as to the Corinthian and Roman churches to whom Paul wrote? My purpose here is to show that despite clear moral injunctions, Scriptural commands change, are reevaluated, and evolve over time and in the minds of its various authors, creating anything but a clear moral standard on all issues, but a complex and altogether human dialogue between authors, authorities, and congregants, at the very least obscuring, if not destroying, any universal moral inerrancy inherent in the text.

Foundational Inerrancy

Surely then, if literal and moral inerrancy are in question, we can depend on Scripture to tell us without erring the most important matters. The Resurrection, which along with the Incarnation and the Atonement forms a necessary trio for the Christian faith, would fall easily within this category. This, I fear, I also find more complex than meets the eye, and quite possibly lacking in inerrancy. The post-resurrection accounts have, to say the least, given me great pause concerning the validity of Christian claims. The variance in the accounts are rather infamous, including who was at the tomb and what they saw there, whether there was an earthquake, whether holy men from the past wandered around Jerusalem in-between the Lord’s death and resurrection, as only Matthew mentions – a rather noteworthy occurrence one would think for the other gospel writers! But there is one fairly large discrepancy I want to hone in on. Matthew, Mark, and John all have appearances by Jesus to the apostles in Galilee. Though the original ending to Mark is lost (that note in your Bible that ‘the earliest manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20’ is quite correct, though the details are outside the scope of this document), the trajectory to Galilee is evident from 14:28 and 16:6-7:

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he [the angel] said, ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” ’

Matthew and John have similar accounts at the end of each of their gospels, which I (rather grotesquely) abbreviate here:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said […]

Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples by the Sea of Tiberias [Galilee]. It happened this way: […]

It is striking to notice agreement between two Synoptics and John with one Synoptic missing out, for usually the Synoptics agree and John is the odd man out. One might say there is a gap in Luke except for the way he recounts Jesus’ first (recognizable) appearance to the disciples at the end of his gospel:

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. [… Jesus speaks, eats a fish to prove his corporeality …] Then he [Jesus] opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’

(emphasis mine)

Luke-Acts does not record any apparition of Jesus in Galilee, though the other three gospels say there was such an apparition. Furthermore, unless we are to assume the disciples disobeyed their risen Lord (which does not much fit the literary mood at the transition from Luke to Acts) or that their Lord rescinded his command and led his followers to Galilee (which does not much fit the description of him), there is not much room for Luke’s account to agree with the other three. The geography makes sense within the thematic scope of Luke-Acts – a Jewish messiah and his message spreading from the Jews to the world (thus beginning in Jerusalem, the center of Judaic life) – but I’d rather not think the evangelist altered the story to suit his theme. And as I mentioned, there are other notable discrepancies on the matter of the Resurrection. How could God, in a divinely-inspired writing for the purpose of giving men and women his truth, allow such contradiction in narratives seemingly necessary for his message to lodge themselves into his canon?

The Upshot of All This

The examples I have given are only that: examples of a class that exceeds the particular instances given here. I did not even touch authorial issues in the New Testament, which are another very difficult can of worms. But the gradual accumulation of examples – an umbrella I think it is fair to call ‘textual criticism’ – has wreaked on my faith a damage I did not anticipate, and has crept up on me and surprised me unexpectedly. I should not attempt to say anything other than that I was raised in a fundamentalist belief system that placed highest possible value on the inerrancy of Scripture, and that this background has, no doubt, significantly shaped how I have handled all this. Like every human, I am influenced by my upbringing. But the result is that the faith that I was brought up to have – that what the Bible says is true and beyond doubt, and it is the only source from which one can truly come to know God – is no longer tenable. The Bible is all too much a human document, containing our errors, our disagreements, our disputes…

This leaves me, hermeneutically, on unsteady ground, or rather on ground that has already collapsed and left me nowhere. In order for me to still consider the Bible ‘of God’ in any real sense, it must hold to a certain set of standards, and while it may be a mixture of human and divine elements (much like orthodox voicing of Jesus’ dual human and divine natures), it must at minimum speak about true interactions between God and the physical world. The Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection are non-negotiable: for any of these to be less than real material interactions between God and mankind, to which we have some reliable testimony, Christianity is ruined (for the Atonement, the material interaction may possibly be postponed to a future, glorified state, alongside the present experience of the Holy Spirit). I am not content to water away the narrative as internal personal experience, for internal personal experience is notoriously subjective and tells us more about ourselves than it does about God. No: we are material beings and as such any story giving glimpses into the character of God must ground itself in the same matter that our beings are made from, so that it becomes approachable to us.

What such a hermeneutic, or such a requirement, looks like when it pertains to the Christian Scriptures is quite beyond me. But I certainly know that if it is synonymous with the old requirements, then the very religion flounders before them and is thrown out altogether. I think that, to pursue this, I might be well-advised to pick up some Karl Barth (perhaps ‘Church Dogmatics’), for he along with many neo-orthodox theologians of the 20th century is one of the few who I know to have taken this matter seriously, and he and his kin may offer the only way of answering such questions. Nevertheless, at present this matter remains to me an incalculably high impediment to a conviction on Christianity containing the remotest degree of certainty.