An issue that the Christian guy iteratively raised was that for the things he didn't agree with in the Bible -- maybe it was violence, or God's commanded obedience to Torah, or God commanding Israelites to kill other peoples -- maybe, just maybe, these Scriptures weren't inspired. Maybe the guy who wrote it down got it wrong or just misunderstood God.
This phenomenon can be observed often when folks want to believe A, but reality shows B. Instead of accepting B, they continue to believe A and fudge B.
A concrete example: God is love and peace.
That's a nice theology. It's probably good theology. It's easy to wrap your head around, and it's politically correct to boot. The world won't persecute you for this theology. A lot of people subscribe to it.
Now you're confronted with the idea that God can do and has done violent things:
- God killed everyone in the cities of S'dom and G'morah.
- God commanded the Israelites to destroy all cultures and peoples occupying the land of Israel.
- God rewarded an Israelite king who killed the members of another religion.
- Messiah, in anger and violence, destroyed people's markets, called them names, and threw them out of God's house.
So here you are with your good, easy-to-think-about theology, and you're confronted with something that seems to conflict; here it seems God is not all love and peace. Do you:
a) Change your theology: God isn't all love and peace.b) Concede your understanding of love and peace is incomplete.c) Dismiss evidence contrary to your theology that God is all love and peace.
Too often, we chose option C. My Christian friend did.
His dismissal was this: Those parts of Scripture may not be inspired.
His play here fell in line with something I described in Taboo Facts from Scripture,
God's ways are different than this world's.
Really.
Think about that for a minute -- different than this world's.
So different, in fact, by the end of this blog post, I guarantee many of my secular readers will be saying, "That God of the Bible that Judah's talking about can't be God, because that God doesn't fit my understanding of what God should be!"
And for you religious folks who already believe God, you might be in for a little shock too. What I present here will go against some of your doctrines. You might question whether all of Scripture really is from God, because you too have been influenced by our pluralistic, secular western culture, and have your own ideas about who God is.
Yes, you will be determining whether God is real by what you want God to be. And because you will find out that God is not who you wish him to be, you will question whether he's God.
You start getting into dangerous territory when we say, "Well, I disagree with that theology. Therefore, I propose Scriptures supporting that theology are not inspired."
It's like a child who cheats at a game to win. When confronted, instead of stopping his cheating, he instead changes the rules so that his cheating is no longer cheating. It's quite childish.
When theology, rather than Scripture, is the driver of your faith, you get into man's ideas of religion and his own flawed ideas of who God is.
This isn't a new phenomenon. One early Church father was so convinced his theology was right, he forced it to work by creating his own version of the Bible, containing Paul's letters and nothing more. (Yes, he threw out Torah, the prophets, the Psalms and writings, the gospels.)
(With modern Christianity's magnifying-glass-emphasis on Paul's letters, I'm surprised no one has tried this again!)
We all have faulty theology at some point or another. Got that? If you're reading these words, you have faulty theology somewhere. So why fret about it? If you're confronted with evidence that your theology may be off, consider it. Don't retreat into a hole and assure yourself you can't be wrong.
2000 years ago, there was a big theology debate about how and where to worship God: the Jews in Jerusalem doing it right? The Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim doing it right?
Messiah's answer to this theology problem transcended both sides of the argument:
A time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.I suspect that many of our theologies will be blown away when God's kingdom comes to fruition. Until then, be correctable and teachable in accordance with Scripture.