Faith Challenges: It Ain't All Comfort

Is there room in my faith for questions? Is there room for growth? Is there room for new conclusions? Is there room for deeper understandings that diverge from what I have believed in the past or hold to still? Should there be? At the heart of fundamentalism lies a basic concern with change. Is faith static, unchanging, and immutable, or is faith a growing appreciation of what may indeed be static, unchanging, and immutable. Must my set of answers or beliefs be defined together as one coherent whole, or is there value to faith when it is yet under development and I am not certain where it is eventually taking me? What is the relationship between my fallibility, my faith, and God who by definition is beyond my comprehension? Many have attempted to answer these questions by making the Bible out to be infallible or inerrant. They have claimed that in order for the Bible to be God’s Word, it cannot contain any kind of error, due to God’s immutability and inability to lie.

I grew up hearing many people disparaging science, especially evolution, as contrary to God, the Bible, faith, and religion in general. I’m pretty sure you have heard and seen the same. It is not simply a position we have inherited extending back to the Scopes Monkey Trial. It goes back to the days of Galileo, Copernicus, and before. Most every momentous new discovery has been attacked as a threat to society, to faith, to our understanding of the world. This is not really about faith in God. It is rather about clinging to a belief system. Most anyone will readily accept that they have limitations. There is only so much that we know, only so much that we can know, only so much we can understand. Accepting and stating that is simple. It is a bit harder, however, to recognize where those limitations lie. It matters little if we are talking about our understanding of the world around us or our understanding of God, the Bible, and other matters of theology. I recall being ta

I recently asked a few individuals younger than I about themes the church should be addressing, but of which they were not hearing anything. I came away with a lot of writing prompts, of which this post will be my first attempt as a response. There is a lot to say about hypocrisy. There are many angles from which we could approach it. It would take forever to list examples of hypocrisy in the life of the church, in the lives of all sorts of leaders, institutions, and human structures. The simpler approach might be to address the underlying issue in all the hypocrisy of which we are all guilty. We lack humility. Yes, we are all hypocrites. That much is inescapable. By virtue of thinking I am right and taking a position on something, I am making a determination that everyone else must be wrong. It matters little what aspect of life I approach, I both need to makes some determinations of truth and reality even as I maintain the humility of expecting that my ideas, prioriti

One issue that keeps coming to the fore is how we seem to be immersed in an understanding that the only way to read and interpret the Bible is through the inerrantist lens of literalism. Inerrancy is that idea that the Bible is one seamless whole and that as God’s word, every phrase has the same depth and authority over life. If it is God’s word, then it must be true in a literal sense, because God can’t lie. I had a seminary student in my classes who entered with the notion that every one of Jesus’ parables were actual stories of particular people who had lived and experienced exactly what Jesus describes in each parable. Thus, if Jesus compares the Reign of God to a woman who lost a coin, cleaned her house to find it, and then called her friends to celebrate, that must have happened to the T. If Jesus told a story of a shepherd losing a sheep, it was not a general story, but a specifically true event. It Jesus spoke of a lost son who found himself slopping pigs, then Jesus