Last night I listened to that podcast on Rhett’s conversion from Christian to hopeful agnostic. I found it painful, mainly because it seemed so unecessary. Young-earth anti-evolution teaching led him to see the transition to accepting an old earth and evolution as letting go of the truth of Scripture. But maybe it didn’t matter, so set that part of the Bible aside and move on. While he wasn’t entirely clear on what he saw as the second option to taking Adam and Eve literally, it seemed that the alternative he chose was erasing them from his faith as well. Then with Israel’s history, the challenges again caused him to drop that part of the Bible, but keep Jesus. And when he realized even the gospels don’t proceed in a straight-forward just-the-facts way without mixing in artistry and rhetoric, even Jesus started slipping through his hands.
Throughout, his guiding conviction seemed to be that the Bible’s value equalled how well it preserved records of the past. I agree that some things need to be historical truth for Christianity to make sense. But I think the reason none of his areas of tension led to a faith crisis for me is that I gained a different view of the Bible’s purpose before I gave up those various concordisms.
Before I let go of creation in six literal days, I saw the artistic beauty in the two triads of days where God first forms and then fills three realms, conveyed in human terms of six days of work with the nights and seventh day off. That God tells the earth to produce creatures – something evocative of a natural process like evolution – was gravy, not all that remained of the main course. Before I gave up on an individual Adam, I saw how Adam is defined as humanity, male and female, in both the end of Genesis 1 and beginning of Genesis 5, so the story between should be read in that light. When Adam’s story is humanity’s story, its importance no longer depends on whether we can trace our ancestry to a real man named Adam or articulate how we inherited his sin.
Before I gave up on a straightforward take on the conquest of Canaan, I was confronted with how ancient interpreters read the conquest accounts as speaking of killing your inner Canaanite, how different biblical accounts are all over the map in how they describe the historical details of the conquest, and how Joshua was likely compiled while exiled Israelites were coming to terms with life under a foreign power. Once I rid myself of the expectation for these stories to reveal God’s omniscient perspective of events that no human alive at the time of their writing had witnessed, their diversity made sense, and I could see how they would encourage exiles under Babylon’s thumb to resist syncretism. Whether the stories showed them successfully eradicating the Canaanites or resisting the seductive pull of the Canaanites all around them or seeing that some Canaanites are Israelites (Rahab’s household) and some Israelites are Canaanites (Achan’s household), the stories all seemed to use spotty historical knowledge spun in different forms to picture how present exiles needed to kill their inner Canaanite if they were to remain as God’s people. And when I finally learned that the Hebrews are actually a Canaanite splinter group – that they really did begin as Canaanites – then the stories came full circle to revealing some historical truth, but with so much else besides, such as the power to inspire exiles under an imperial thumb wherever they may be, even picking cotton in the USA.
The gospels weren’t much different. I was confronted with so much more in the stories before I had to let go of one way of reducing them to snapshots of physical reality. I doubt I read more than Rhett or studied more or prayed more, but somehow I stumbled into seeing all these different facets of beauty and truth throughout Scripture: in the poetry, the symbolism, the piling together of physically conflicting but personally convicting narratives. I continue to believe that Jesus shows us God in our flesh and he really died and really rose, but not because the gospels tell the story without any mixture of artistic license or theologizing. (One of my favourite stories in the gospels, where Jesus heals a woman’s daughter after she shows herself to be more clued in about the abundance of Jesus’ kingdom than disciples who had picked up baskets of leftovers from stuffed crowds, rises to a higher level due to Matthew’s artistic license of labelling her as one of those people Moses had said to exterminate along with their children.) I believe because the same historical truth that inspired their art and reasoning and compelled them to trace connections, probe impacts, delight in counterintuitive upsets – because that same truth inspires me too.
