Several days after writing my first post on this topic, I started thinking about the things I wish I had included, so I figured I would write some of these out.
I don’t have an overarching message, really, I’m just going to put these thoughts into sections.
Reasons for Questioning Faith
So much of searching for truth hinges on your expectations of truth. Several years ago, it occurred to me that people often have different reasons for doubting Christianity, based on the natural perspectives we tend to approach the subject from. For some this stems from the question of suffering and why evil exists. A person may lose a loved one and struggle to believe how God could exist if he allowed such a thing to happen. Others might approach it from the lives of followers. They might look at Christians in general and find a lot of assholes, and from this conclude, “If it makes no difference among its followers, Christianity can’t be true”. Still others might approach it from the realm of experience. “I believed in God, but it didn’t change my life, and I never seemed to hear anything from God. How then could it be true?”
And these are all interesting avenues in their own right, though from my perspective, the existence of suffering never negated God (though admittedly, I haven’t experienced much suffering). That so many Christians can be terrible is pretty interesting, but I think that’s the curse of free will that affects everyone, and those who feel the most judged by churches are, strangely enough, often the most judgemental of people. Although God was silent for much of my searching, there reached a point at which he was very not silent, and it was pretty freaky because I wasn’t expecting that. For me, generally, most of my questions have come from the approach of, “Is the Bible true?” It’s just valuable to note that questioning faith comes in many different forms.
Dismissing Miracles
The one thing I forgot to address in my first post is that believing parts of the Bible are not literal should not mean that everything uncomfortable can be dismissed with this claim. The reason I don’t treat Genesis as literal history is because of its genre and overarching message and NOT because I simply don’t like it. Unfortunately, there’s this idea of “conservative” and “liberal” approaches to Biblical interpretation, in which “conservative” approaches are very traditional and generally quite literal, where “liberal” approach are more metaphorical or figurative. So you end up with a lot of conservative types who treat the Bible far too literally, and liberal types who want to pretend that the Bible has no power in it, and almost everything is just wishy washy and figurative. It’s best to avoid both extremes.
For example, I don’t believe Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Not necessarily because it’s a wild story to believe as being literally true, but because it’s a short book that represents something of a dialog between God and Jonah about the acceptance of people outside of God’s chosen. Back when I studied this stuff, I believe there was a lot of scholarly consensus that Jonah was written during the exile as an attempt to grapple with the question of how the Israelite were to interact with their captors as they slowly became more and more integrated. And the general message is…yes, go share the message of God with those people. Jonah doesn’t want to do it, at first, but after that time in the fish, he relents. And that’s the message to those in captivity. Sure, Jonah was a real prophet, but that doesn’t mean the story is about real events in his life. Of course, it is a bit wild to believe literally, but I’d be hard-pressed to simply dismiss it for this reason alone. Since it actually makes a lot more sense under the genre of something other than history, I really don’t feel the need to treat it like history.
But this doesn’t mean the sun didn’t stand still for Joshua, nor does it mean that Elijah didn’t call fire down from the heavens. It doesn’t mean Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead. There are things in the Bible that you simply can’t write off because they are uncomfortable or out of place. But you have to pay attention to genre if you want to explore what the text actually means. Assuming everything is literal is about as stupid as assuming everything is figurative.
Going Too Literal
It’s funny to me that most Young Earth Creationists believe the world was created in 6 days roughly 6,000-10,000 years ago and will staunchly reject anything implied by evolution, but if you asked them whether space is full of water, they will undoubtedly say no. Genesis 1 clearly describes the world as it was understood by much of the ancient near east, in that water was thought to be both above and below the earth. And it makes sense, right? The ocean…underwater springs…rain…. But, believe it or not, even Young Earth Creationists don’t take Genesis 1 perfectly literally. And why is that? It simply raises the question, “What do you expect from a creation story?”
Somewhere in the history of our received traditions, heliocentrism came to dominate over geocentrism, but evolution is still largely considered incompatible with other aspects of Genesis. Where do you draw the line? Or, more importantly, what kind of line are you trying to draw?
Borrowed Traditions
One common complaint about Christianity is that it “stole” various stories from other cultures. I believe the Egyptians had some story about a god being born in a basket, many cultures have flood stories, and the Middle Eastern creation stories have some interesting similarities.
On one side, anti-Christians might say, “Aha! These are simply stolen! They are not real. Silly Christians!” But this is stupid. Why would you knowingly “steal” a story that you didn’t believe to be true, just to repackage it for your own religion? [Granted, modern cults do this sort of thing, but that’s very different from national and cultural religions from 3,000 years ago] First of all, it would mean you might not be trying to create a story that is presented as being literally true. Second of all, your modifications would contain within them the key message, as people weren’t stupid and were likely familiar with the stories and mythologies of their cultural neighbors. More importantly, the scribes would have copied these texts themselves during the process to learn those languages. People knew these stories were related. But that’s also what makes them interesting: the message being communicated by the changes. And motifs are a thing in literature. Similar cultures almost always have similar motifs.
But on the other side are the Christians who are often dedicated to seeing everything, (fucking) EVERYTHING as literal. So they say, “Well, I’m right and you’re wrong, so…everybody else just stole it from the Bible!”
Wrong. Many of these Mesopotamian texts predate the Bible by thousands of years. Linguistically, archaeologically, textually.
I believe you have to look at the broader picture. For example, flood stories are extremely common because floods are quite possibly the worst of all natural disasters, and they happen pretty much everywhere at some time or another. Cataclysms make for important stories because they speak to danger, action, and causation, critical subjects in, well, being human. There seems to be no end to people trying to point to one key global “flood” when that simply doesn’t make any sense. These people had no idea how large the world was, but all it took was one generation experiencing something horrendous to get people to question the meaning of their flood and incorporate it into their understanding of the world.
But when you pay attention to the differences, that’s when you start seeing the meaning. In the Bible, it’s a message about the wickedness of man getting out of control and effectively causing destruction, which really is the nature of sin. I would need to revisit the text to dig deeper into it. Even if some cultures adapted their own stories from the Bible, that wouldn’t mean they “stole” it, either. You’d have to question why the adaptation was made if you wanted to understand the meaning. Having a degree in comparative ancient literature (if such a degree even exists) would beat Theology in this realm.
Theology
I don’t like theology , but only because my brain doesn’t work that way. I’ve come to accept that theology is very important, because you DO have to flesh out the implications of the Bible if you want to adhere to it, it can’t simply be the Wild West where everyone believes as they please. But back in college I took a theology that used a textbook on systematic theology, and it treated the Bible like a law book. “This passage says this, therefore x”. “This passage says this, therefore y”.
I understand that good theology programs do promote proper exegesis and all that, but the more you think of the Bible as law book, the further you stray from the Bible as ancient literature. It’s alive and relevant to this day, of course, but it also consists of many genres and has been written and even edited over time. There’s a lot to tweeze through. It’s not something you can apply haphazardly as if it were one solid A-Z, peer-reviewed history book.
However, my Old Testament professor once said, a text can mean many things, but it can’t mean anything. By which he meant, there’s a range of things which something can mean, but this can’t be used to argue whatever meaning you want. It’s never my desire to “genre”-ize things away, but it’s also why theology is frustrating to me when it acts in ignorance of archaeology, history, and literary studies.
Peter Being Crucified Upside Down
Every great now and then, I hear a pastor talk about Peter being crucified upside down. I’ve seen it in books, too. But I’ve never heard anybody talk in greater depth about this. A quick Google search shows this comes from the Acts of Peter, an apocryphal book, in combination with one verse that could be hinting at that being in Peter’s life. But I don’t think any pastor I have ever heard has really talked about this, it just gets thrown around. “And Peter was later crucified upside down!” It’s this sort of thing that bothers me.
I once had the Archaeological Study Bible, which was cool. But even it said things without providing many references, and sometimes you just get a circle of Christians citing Christians citing Christians, and not many people are actually going after the primary sources. I have a dream that one day pastors will actually do the research and share about it, but also…I get that there’s already so much to learn. I just wish churches had somebody on staff who specialized in this sort of thing. But I’m also an archaeology snob, and I understand that being a pastor is a lot harder than people think, so I’ll stop talking now.
Mythology Has Negative Connotations
Genesis has several stories that could easily be described as “myths”. But people don’t like this because “myth” has taken on a very negative meaning in English. I think this is unfortunate. Jordan Peterson has skyrocketed to fame through some of his more conservative political and psychological opinions, but oddly enough, also through his analysis of mythological meaning in the Bible. I haven’t watched all of those lectures, but what I’ve seen has been rather compelling. And one of his central beliefs is that these various cultural myths that have been passed down to us through time have survived as stories for some very important reasons. Now, I think he’s mistaken in treating the whole Bible as essentially mythological, but I do see the structure of early chapters of Genesis as very mythological in nature, sharing similarities with other Mesopotamian stories of the same genre. Rather than embrace this and analyze it, Christians just become offended that the stories they believe to be literally true would be labeled as such (and not wholly without reason – atheists use the world ‘myth’ as an insult), but I find it funny that we dismiss other myths as stupid and ahistorical, but ours, man, OURS are history. I think the subject deserves far more attention, though. And again, it’s the differences between myths that highlight the meanings.
I actually found a YouTube channel that does comparative mythology, and the guy who runs it has tried to analyze the macro-perspective of human history by analyzing mythology over time, geography, and social complexity. In short, myths have been with us a very long time, and I think it was especially important before the invention of writing. Interesting stuff!
Alright. That’s all I’ve got today.