(OPINION) I hear from readers across the religious and irreligious spectrum. They ask all kinds of questions and express all kinds of opinions.
However, more than anything else, I seem to hear from people who grew up in evangelical Protestant churches, like me. They were taught a rigid set of doctrines to which they were expected to adhere without reservation.
Often these people tell me that the faith into which they were baptized did not stand up to them. They became disillusioned. They stopped believing in God.
“I’m trying to find my faith again,” one woman wrote the other day. “I’m not sure I necessarily need to believe in Christianity, but I want a relationship with my higher power.”
She had studied the complex origins of the Bible. Her faith had been “deconstructed” by what she had learned.
“I think it’s a book created by a man with patriarchal messages and probably no God at all,” she said. “I guess I feel lied to after all these years (39) of believing that the Bible is the (inerrant) word of God and that a person must believe in Christianity to go to heaven.”
She asked me for my answer.
Like I said, this is a common situation, if my mailbag is any indication. So I will respond here, publicly.
There are several threads in what she said, such as a loss of faith, questions about the reliability of the Bible and whether or not God inspired the Bible and whether Scripture discriminates against women and about who enters paradise or not.
I can’t begin to address all of this, so I’ll try to highlight a few highlights.
In my experience, having our faith deconstructed – or even blown to pieces – is often the best thing that can happen to us. Until you’re forced to let go of your past assumptions, it’s really hard to learn something better.
We Americans have Westernized ideas about religion, just as we have Westernized ideas about politics, education, or economics. We want our theology to be summarized in three small, precise points, illustrated with a careful anecdote, crowned with a prayer. Give us the answers and we will memorize them. We value few things more than certainty and having a list to check off.
Fortunately for us, God tends not to play along. Sometimes God creates real discomfort for us, I think, to shake us out of our laziness and complacency.
Christianity and its spiritual predecessor, Judaism, originated in the ancient Middle East, where the way of thinking was radically different from ours. And much richer.
There, having faith did not mean having all the right answers, but taking an oath of allegiance to your Lord and even embarking on a long, uncertain and winding journey according to His orders.
You would probably get frustrated along the way. You would be angry. You would be afraid. You would feel lost. It was all part of the plan. Faith was about the journey more than the destination.
We still find this idea in the works of certain Catholic mystics.
“The answers are irrelevant,” said Thomas Merton.
Read in this light, the Bible – a companion on our journey – is not an impeccable new geology text or even a Rand-McNally map. Its authors were not concerned with compiling journalistic facts. The Bible is a spiritual anthology designed to help us survive long periods of confusion sometimes punctuated by encounters with the sublime. Followed by more confusion.
I once asked a rabbi if he thought the creation story in Genesis was literally true, as many evangelicals claim. He told me that to read the creation story literally was to completely miss the point.
I finally understood what he meant. In my church’s adult Sunday school class, we use a podcast in which the host explains in detail the Construction of Genesis in Hebrew.
He shows how the first chapters, at least, are poems employing a literary form called chiasm, which is a set of verbal parentheses. It’s complicated, but at the exact center of each chiasmus there is buried a treasure, a mystery, that the reader must discover. This is the key to the story.
The treasure buried in the creation story, he says, is the repeated mention of the Sabbath, the day of rest. The creation story is not a literal introduction to how the earth was formed. It is a poem. It reminds us that from the beginning, God wanted us to find rest.
This may seem confusing, but when the presenter breaks down the text, it’s revealing. The first time I listened, I shuddered at the complexity of these poetic verses, their motifs inaccessible in our English translations, their hidden and difficult-to-discover treasures, even in ancient Hebrew. If everything seemed to me to be the hand of God.
I’m not sure I would have learned this if I hadn’t, at some point, been ripped out of my previous indoctrination, in which we fought over what was created each day and whether those days lasted exactly 24 hours. I would have been happy with what I had, maybe even enough. I wouldn’t have gone looking for other ways of seeing.
And that would be my response to the lady who wrote to me. If your faith has been deconstructed, or even blown up, raise your hands to the sky and shout hallelujah.
God is not gone. You may be preparing for a glorious new journey. Sometimes you have to let go of your past truths. Sometimes it’s incredibly liberating to not have simple answers, to embrace the mystery and unknowing, to just join the journey.
