#but i didn’t properly reject him i technically agreed just cuz i didn’t know what else to do | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ohhgingersnaps · 3 years

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can you explain what you mean by "questioning the validity of the bible"? cuz i thought the bible was flawless 🤔

(in reference to my tags on this post)

Hey anon! I really appreciate you asking this question. This got pretty long, and I apologize for that, but I feel like it’s important for me to really dig into this, because this is an area where I feel like I’ve had some really interesting (and if I’m honest, deeply uncomfortable and difficult) spiritual growth.

TL;DR I place a lot of value on being encouraged to ask fundamental questions, fully allowing for the possibility of discovering you’ve been wrong. Truth-seeking, although sometimes painful, is a natural part of one’s spiritual growth and development, and it ultimately leads to deeper faith and understanding. I personally have gone through this process with questions about the validity of Scripture, hence the tag.

Background (and a bunch of explaining) under the cut!

First, I think most Christians will agree with your sentiments. I vividly remember sitting in the college dining hall with a friend and being asked whether you need to believe the whole Bible to be a Christian, and it stopped me dead in my tracks, because most Christians I know do, but do you, technically? (Biblically, I think the answer is actually no; faith in Jesus is sufficient, per Romans 10:9. One does wonder where a person is getting their ideas about who Jesus is and what he taught, so there’s definitely some inherent dependence on the historical accuracy of the Gospels there... But all of this is kind of beside the point.)

Overall, I think the exact starting point of The Bible Question was my trip a couple of years ago to the Museum Of The Bible in DC. It was a really interesting experience overall, but the one thing that really stuck with me was The Shepherd Of Hermas. This is an apocryphal book that was generally accepted as canonical Scripture by many early Christians, but was eventually left out of the Bible itself.

Now, I’m sure the Catholic church had perfectly good reasons for rejecting it, but it occurred to me that I, personally, did not know what those reasons were! I was suddenly hit with the irony that despite being Protestant, I had never questioned the validity of the Catholic-constructed canon of Scripture. To be clear, I absolutely don’t mean this as a knock against Catholic folks: I mean that in the Protestant circles I grew up in, we put absolutely no stock in church tradition, in every single case besides this one. The texts themselves are authentic, historically speaking, but which books “belong” in the New Testament portion of Scripture was decided in 1500 AD, and how much faith do I have that those council members were right? The Protestants removed a bunch of apocryphal books when they left, so why did they decide to keep the remaining text?

Hence, the question: Could the church have been imperfect in the construction of Scripture?

I was also absolutely terrified to ask this question.

Because, here’s the thing. If you are a Good Christian Girl Who Got Saved At Five™ you go to church and you maybe Ask Hard Questions every once in a while, but usually those questions aren’t fundamental faith-shaking questions! They are questions that are important and cerebral and sometimes difficult to answer, but not necessarily faith-essential. They are questions like, Do people still speak in tongues? or How much free will do human beings have? They are absolutely not questions like, Hey, um, we don’t know who wrote Hebrews? Why is it part of the canon of Scripture??

But here is the other thing: This question did not leave. I was scared of it, so naturally, I tried to ignore it. I had so much shame about it, too! I kept thinking like, Normal Christians don’t have questions like this, this is such a fundamental thing, why am I struggling with this! What’s wrong with me! So I repressed the question as much as I could, but it festered, and my relationship with God ended up suffering, because God wanted me to take this out in the open and deal with it properly, and I refused.

(Disclaimer that I was also dealing with some pretty bad burnout, which didn’t help, and of course even under normal circumstances my brain is generally kind of... Easily thrown into havoc by stuff like this? I like having things in a framework and do not like when that framework is disrupted, but also I have to properly vet and interrogate everything, so you can understand where the conflict here is.)

After six-ish months of bottling everything up, I finally broke down while I was home for the holidays. Obviously my parents were deeply concerned, both for my spiritual and mental well-being, but it was through talking with them that I realized that my question wasn’t inherently bad: At its core, it’s seeking truth, which is inherently good.

What I’d characterized as this horrible, faith-breaking thing was just spiritual growing pains. God was calling me to engage with Scripture more deeply, in a new, different, exciting way, and I was too scared and ashamed of asking the question to even think about following him there. It was taking me outside of what I felt was safe and well-established, but when has God ever stuck to what we know as safe and well-established, right?

Honestly, I’m still in the process of working through this. I’m taking the canon of Scripture at face value for the moment, because “go through each individual book of the Bible and figure out why it was included, and also go through the Apocrypha too just for good measure” is a pretty big goal and I don’t want to put my actual Bible studies on hold! And I feel like as I go through the books, I’ll end up saying, Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense more often than not, and I’ll be glad to be fully convinced in my own mind about everything once this process is done... But I’ll have my answers, and I’ll be more certain of those answers than I was before, because I’ll have fully interrogated that question.

So I place a lot of value on not only being allowed to ask fundamental questions, but being actively encouraged to do so, fully allowing for the possibility of discovering you’ve been wrong. Seeking after the truth will never lead us away from God, only towards a deeper understanding.

I know this got super long (and maybe a little heretical?) but I hope it helps clarify where I was coming from with that particular tag. Thanks again for asking, and I hope this is useful!

#christianity #faith #thanks again for asking anon!! i hope this wasn't too info-dump-y #and i also hope it's not like. too heretical lol #ok to reblog #as usual lmk if any of y'all need this tagged #also feel free to engage with this!! i'm open to dialogue about it

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