Jonathan Edwards & John Piper: Sour Stomach

We were all still recovering from a sermon by Charles Finney at the beginning of Wisdom Booklet #4, when we moved on to the subject of history. Where we were assaulted by another sermon.

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is one of the most famous sermons in American history. But if there were such a sin as blasphemy, this sermon would be a fine example. From a Massachusetts pulpit in 1741, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards described the Almighty as an arbitrary monster and his creation as loathsome.

Here are some excerpts:

...Whatever some have imagined and pretended about promises made to natural men's earnest seeking and knocking, it is plain and manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction.

There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God, it would immediately burst forth upon you.

 The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep.

But when once the day of mercy is past, your most lamentable and dolorous cries and shrieks will be in vain; you will be wholly lost and thrown away of God, as to any regard to your welfare. God will have no other use to put you to, but to suffer misery; you shall be continued in being to no other end; for you will be a vessel of wrath fitted to destruction; and there will be no other use of this vessel, but to be filled full of wrath. God will be so far from pitying you when you cry to him, that it is said he will only "laugh and mock"…

Though horrified by Edwards' God, I was transfixed by the vivid imagery. Our family also had a dramatized biography of Jonathan Edwards ("Puritan Preacher and Philosopher") on cassette from Moody Bible Institute. Not only did the story cover the theological controversies of Edwards' time, it did not shy away from describing the aftermath of the Great Awakening--including a man in Edwards' congregation who committed suicide in despair after too many similar "revival" sermons. Between the audio version and the traumatizing Wisdom Booklet, spiders and hellfire became forever associated in my brain.

When Walt Disney needed lines for this over-the-top "hellfire & brimstone" sermon in the film Pollyanna (1960), writers tapped "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". In the movie, the preacher uses his pulpit to manipulate the town with fear and guilt. No one commits suicide (it's a children's movie, after all), but one character declares with passionate resentment, "Sundays around here give folks sour stomach for the whole rest of the week!" Though not delivered in Edwards' characteristic monotone, many of the lines are lifted directly from Jonathan Edwards famous message.

Jonathan Edwards has been John Piper's hero for decades, ever since Piper encountered Edwards' essays as a seminarian. Piper told a conference in 1988: "Alongside the Bible, Edwards became the compass of my theological studies." In 2006, Piper reprinted one of Edwards' books in a volume of his own: God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards. In the preface, Piper writes, "Jonathan Edwards is in a class by himself in American history, perhaps in the history of Christendom....I take my stand on his shoulders... It is an honor to be associated with an Institute devoted to exalting the God of Jonathan Edwards..." And so on.

This is the same John Piper who pastors a church in Minneapolis. The same Piper who posted these thoughts on the evening following the 2007 highway bridge collapse that killed thirteen people in his city and injured or traumatized hundreds of others:

The meaning of the collapse of this bridge is that John Piper is a sinner and should repent or forfeit his life forever. That means I should turn from the silly preoccupations of my life and focus my mind’s attention and my heart’s affection on God and embrace Jesus Christ as my only hope for the forgiveness of my sins and for the hope of eternal life. That is God’s message in the collapse of this bridge. That is his most merciful message: there is still time to turn from sin and unbelief and destruction for those of us who live. If we could see the eternal calamity from which he is offering escape we would hear this as the most precious message in the world.

...During our family devotions...Talitha prayed “Please don’t let anyone blame God for this but give thanks that they were saved.” When I sat on her bed and tucked her in and blessed her and sang over her a few minutes ago, I said, “You know, Talitha, that was a good prayer, because when people ‘blame’ God for something, they are angry with him, and they are saying that he has done something wrong. That’s what “blame” means: accuse somebody of wrongdoing. But you and I know that God did not do anything wrong. God always does what is wise. And you and I know that God could have held up that bridge with one hand.” Talitha said, “With his pinky.” “Yes,” I said, “with his pinky. Which means that God had a purpose for not holding up that bridge, knowing all that would happen, and he is infinitely wise in all that he wills.”

Talitha said, “Maybe he let it fall because he wanted all the people of Minneapolis to fear him.” “Yes, Talitha,” I said, “I am sure that is one of the reasons God let the bridge fall.”

I wonder how Jonathan Edwards would react to Piper's post today. I think it would give him "sour stomach". But I also like to think that the melancholic Edwards would preach quite differently if he could return to Northampton today.

Edwards was a thoughtful man, after all--trapped in the 18th-century, yet daring to test innovation. He was unafraid of change, of shaking up the status quo by implementing new ideas, of attempting to reconcile old ways of thinking with new understanding. He kept up with scientific advances, even submitting to smallpox inoculation as an example to the Princeton student body to risk the experimental new procedure. He died of complications, a sacrifice to the cause of science as well as to "the will of God".

The Jonathan Edwards of the 1700's would never make it as a preacher of the gospel today. For one thing, he purchased and owned Negro slaves, including a man and his wife who were sold by the executors of Edwards' will. I wonder what they thought of their master's god? But Edwards gave his sermon long before David Livingstone explored the African continent. Before William Wilberforce campaigned to bring down the slave trade. Before ex-slaver John Newton wrote "Amazing Grace". Before the Founding Fathers revolted against England. Even before the first performance of Handel's Messiah, which opened in Europe the following year (1742) with the words of a very different God:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.

Little wonder I developed anxiety issues after growing up with Jonathan Edwards' voice in my ear. Little wonder I was so relieved to find other theological viewpoints and to discover that others, as uncomfortable as I was, were asking the same questions!

Somehow, in my combined fright and abhorrence of a god who holds people over hell and lets bridges collapse, I had never considered (though Mark Twain had) the possibility of humans choosing hell for humanity's sake, or of turning down the invitation of heaven (as Desmond Tutu suggests) in solidarity with the world God is said to have loved. If hell is a place of hate, but one can choose it out of a heart of love, then is fear truly vanquished. Sour stomach must surrender!

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 4

In Which I Return to the Beginning

We had exhausted the church options in our own community; now we crossed county lines heading east, south, and west. We piled into our 12-passenger van and rotated directions each week, laughingly calling ourselves a "circuit-riding congregation".

The Church of Christ had fired their ATI pastor, and he was now leading a small fellowship of mostly homeschooling families who met on Sunday mornings at a public school to the east, near the lake. The school would rent them the library for something like $10 a week, and we could drag in a piano from down the hall to accompany the pastor’s guitar. This band of believers sang a lot of praise songs I remembered from my childhood. The pastor would print out his sermon notes and pass out copies to everyone. Then he would put the same notes on the overhead projector, stand to the side, and proceed to read them to us. But the homemade cubes of communion bread were nearly as delicious as the charismatic kind, and they served it every single week. On Sunday nights, many in the church liked to have bonfires, s’mores, and guitar-led sing-alongs on the beach.

In the opposite direction, we knew an ATI family pastoring an old country church. Their theology was more covenantal than ours and the congregation more blue-collar, but their music was safely conservative and I borrowed interesting books from the minister. Having connections to the Methodist tradition, they took their monthly communion at the altar rail. Until I asked the pastor to officiate at my wedding, I did not realize that Bible Methodists do not endorse jewelry—including wedding rings.

Other weeks, we drove south to join an eclectic "plain" fellowship meeting in a township hall. Some families were ex-Amish, having been forced out of their communities when they were "born again". One couple had been raised Catholic and now vehemently objected to the celebration of Christ-mass. Another had been Episcopalian, turned Amish (exchanging their minivan for a horse and buggy), and were now neither. When they decided to have a baptismal immersion service at a farm pond, no one knew how to do it. The baptismal candidates didn't even get completely moistened, though, as a female observer, I didn't tell them so. 

Everyone homeschooled, the girls all wore dresses, there was little interaction between the sexes, and the women all wore scarves around their hair, with only an inch or two revealed above their foreheads. The a capella singing was painfully slow. The men took turns preaching. I doubt anyone in the group had a college degree; some of the adults had not even finished high school. I cannot recall the fine points of their theology because it was primarily discussed at men’s meetings. As non-members, we would not have been allowed to take communion.

I was annoyed with the extreme patriarchy and made a point of wearing lipstick (gasp!) and my boldest pale pink dress (short sleeves, print of scattered full-blown roses, dainty lace collar, decorative brooch-like button, and wide belt). Though I enjoyed hats, I did not wear one there. I was accustomed to being the most conservatively dressed in any social group, so feeling like the "harlot" was a new experience! I suddenly realized how most normal women must have felt when they visited our family. 

After months of riding our little circuit on Sunday mornings, we settled at the fellowship that met at the school. The pastor was soft-spoken and kind, there were lots of other children, and the families were the most like us. In many ways, that church was a spiritual rehab center or halfway house, attracting the hurt, the lonely, the ones who didn’t fit elsewhere. It was, for the most part, a safe and quiet place for us to park while our emotional wounds healed.

I moved to Oklahoma (to work for Bill Gothard's cult) and fell in love with a Christian & Missionary Alliance Church there. For the first time since childhood, I looked forward to going to church. The people were friendly and the service combined all the elements I most enjoyed. Even though I couldn't remember the CMA church of my infancy, I had a feeling of returning to the beginning, of coming home to where I belonged, and for a year I participated to the fullest extent my cult involvement would permit.

Theologically, I liked the CMA teaching on the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts; after all I'd seen, it felt centered. One week the pastor prayed for a sick man to be healed. The man was anointed with oil and we all prayed. I went home for a visit and when I got back, the man was dead. I tried to understand. I wrote a poem for his widow, imagining the man in heaven and trying to put a hopeful spin on his passing. Faith was so mysterious.

One of my coworkers at Gothard's training center was confident she heard God’s spirit communicating with her. We talked about faith and what we wanted it to mean. During the lunch hour one day, we went up to my room and she prayed for me to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That afternoon I spoke in tongues for the first time. After decades of stories, curiosity, contradictory advice, and yearning to "experience God" in a physical way, this strange and awkward exploratory event felt like losing my spiritual virginity. I basked in a sense of fulfillment for a while.

But my job moved out of Oklahoma and CMA church in my new city wasn’t as inviting. The charismatics weren't down-to-earth enough; the Lutherans were too old or too certain; the Baptists far too stuffy. I kept exploring, learning from each church I was part of, but never able to put down roots. I married, and we eventually settled at a Christian church in our neighborhood that both my husband and I could appreciate. The music leader played with skill and gusto, though some of the more suggestive songs about Jesus made me giggle now that I had sexual experience.

Since Christian churches share a common ancestor with the Church of Christ, communion was a weekly ritual. Unfortunately, this particular congregation used tasteless minuscule crackers that got stuck in my teeth. I tried to think reverent thoughts, picturing the tiny cup of grape juice "blood" as an oral vaccine, passing Christ's immunity on to me and strengthening my resistance to various temptations. It helped for a while, but eventually I started taking two crackers at a time, to get a morsel big enough to chew. Then I switched to selecting the darkest bit on the plate, because at least Burnt Bleached Flour is a flavor.

Once in a while, I would pray in tongues again, sometimes because I felt overwhelmed by life, other times just to see if it still worked. This went on for years until one week, sitting in the sound booth in the back of an evangelical church in the middle of Kansas, my husband and I knew we didn’t belong anymore.

In an attempt to preserve what faith we had left in the God of the Bible, we found a Methodist church with a beautiful pipe organ and a heart of compassion. But even singing anthems with the robed choir, attending the pastor’s Bible class, and dipping bread in grape juice in his study didn’t help. One Easter Sunday, we helped the children’s department with the resurrection-themed crafts, then quietly slipped away. Even as an atheist, I found I could still speak in tongues.

Friends sometimes suppose that if I had ever met their Christ, I would have to love him. But I was presented to the Lord at two weeks old and have seen more of the Body of Christ than most. I found that we simply weren't compatible. For thirty-odd years, I thought we had a relationship; I even thought we were close. But after years of thinking the problems were all mine, his behavior at last began to trouble me.  Could he be trusted? Could he be schizophrenic? Was he cruel? Was he real? And I finally had to conclude: eternity would be far too long to spend with anyone so enigmatic.

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 3

In Which I Learn I am Not a Baptist

Now we were Baptists, or nearly so. Some of the men in suits were my Dad’s clients, successful businessmen in the petroleum industry. One man managed our grocery store, another the Christian radio station. Another dad sold computers at the local store. A retired public school teacher led the congregational singing, but many of the musicians we heard at church were professionals, some even affiliated with an internationally-renowned arts center.

I was mesmerized when a guest harpist performed one week. My heart melted when the pastor’s son accompanied his own voice at the piano on a visit home from college. The sound guys could have turned off the microphone when one of the deacons played a trumpet solo, but for the most part, Baptist music was crisply timed, properly rehearsed, and perfectly orchestrated. Only once did a soloist break down in the middle of her song and let the soundtrack run on without her.

The morning service, recorded and aired on a local radio station at night, ran on a fixed schedule. There was no open-floor "quiet time" and prayer was not spontaneous. The opening song was always cheerful, the closing song always introspective. Even altar calls were predictable, unless someone actually went forward and we had to sing another verse of the hymn. Personal testimonies and hymn requests were reserved for the evening service.

The Baptists were very sure about some things that we had previously left open. Jesus would return AFTER the Tribulation, and salvation was a permanent deal, unless you didn’t get the genuine article the first time. Baptism had to be by immersion, not for salvation, but as proof of salvation. They knew that God didn’t use "speaking in tongues" anymore, though they still prayed for healing for a long list of sick people on Wednesday nights. And their pastor had to write three sermons a week!

We finally left Bible Baptist because Bill Gothard had convinced my parents, who convinced me, that songs with a backbeat—even songs about Jesus—were tools of Satan. The elders were tolerant of our beliefs for a while, but they came to look with disfavor on a family of nine standing up and filing out of the sanctuary during the soloist’s "ministry of music" week after week, even if we returned to our pew for the sermon! It was a mutual break-up in the end, because the church introduced a "contemporary" early service, with a drum set up front, and my parents could not attend a church that resembled a rock concert.

So it was back to the church search, though we knew our options were very limited by now. Two other homeschooling dads in our town were followers of Bill Gothard (and members of his ATI program). One was the pastor at a Church of Christ, but their doctrine was suspect. The other attended a tiny IFB church close to our house. We started visiting there, and there was nothing offensive about the music if you didn’t care about quality, or the lyrics. The hymnal we used had been edited by John R. Rice, and the songs we sang were almost entirely of one genre (and almost entirely written between the years between 1850 and 1950). Here, there was an uncomfortable divide between the Gothardite homeschoolers (only two families now, but we made up more than half the minors in the church) and the rest of the congregation.

The pastor left shortly after we started attending, so we sat through repetitive interim preachers, guests, substitutes, and prospective young men interviewing for the position. In the end, the other ATI dad was "called" to the pastorate, which was convenient since his family was already living in the parsonage. He was a layman with his own audio-visual business, and it was odd thing all ‘round. My parents were not part of whatever voting process landed him the church, as they were waiting for the new pastor before they officially joined.

The new "pastor" ruled with a heavy hand. We didn’t know he was an abusive man at home—that would come out years later when two of his daughters escaped his house. We only knew he wore a somber suit and tried to make people feel guilty. We sat uncomfortably in those pews for two more years. All the normal people disappeared, leaving only the most rigid fundamentalists—and us. Since the former pianist had gone, I played the Gospel songs for the southern-style worship that emphasized sins, blood, and dying Lambs. Being a novice accompanist, I had some input on the song list, but the male leader had the final say, and his whims determined how many stanzas we sang. He typically announced, " e’ll sing the first, second, and the last!" I once told him I would hate to be a 3^rd verse in a Baptist church.

Much as we looked the part in our long, homemade dresses with our KJV Bibles, we weren't really fundamentalists. We were tolerant of dispensationalism, but not sold on it. We watched Billy Graham movies at home (sometimes skipping objectionable songs), we prayed with Presbyterians, we visited gloomy Lutheran Lenten services, we once attended Mass with our Catholic cousins, I read a New Testament paraphrase, and we didn’t think the evangelicals building the huge complex down the road were on the path to hell. Dad even read us a book about glossolalia—stories about people praying in tongues that were supposedly unknown to the speakers but recognized by others within earshot. Stories that directly contradicted the pastor’s sermon series on Acts.

At home, I dug out a songbook from the 70’s with familiar guitar tunes from the days of the Home Fellowship group and the Sunshine Inn. After Sunday dinner, I would play stormily, pounding out my frustration and wounded spirit in haunting minor chords. I sang "Our God Reigns", "God and Man at Table Are Sat Down", "You Are my Hiding Place", and eventually drifted to hymns like "Be Still, My Soul" and "Blessed Quietness".

One day the pastor and the one remaining elder asked my dad not to come back anymore. It was both a relief to me and a deep sadness. Other might talk of their "church home", but we were spiritual refugees again: too "Pentecostal" for the Baptists, too "plain" for the charismatics, and too "Baptist" for our Mennonite friends. Too full of emotion to know what to say, I wished I could pray in tongues.

Part 4: In Which I Return to the Beginning

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 2

In Which God and I are Friends

This particular group of Friends was unique in that they did occasionally celebrate Communion, with grape juice and fluffy white bread. Everyone tore off a piece as the loaf was passed down the row. The congregation was small and the old wooden meetinghouse drafty, so they set up chairs in the basement for services through the winter. The pastor was young, with a sweet wife and baby boy. Through every sermon he would remove his glasses, set them on the lectern, put them back on, take them off, and so on. There was no band, no overhead projector. In the middle of the service, everyone sat down, even the pastor, for fifteen minutes of "quiet time".

A short white-haired lady whose neck had gotten lost in multiple chins frequently filled the silence with stories or thoughts from her week. Other times a grandfatherly jail chaplain shared his thoughts about God in a reassuring voice. His daughter-in-law played the piano for our services. There were college students who occasionally attended in shorts and t-shirts, a one-armed man who frightened my mom, a blind mother of three who played the guitar, a dairy farmer who also worked as a nurse, and a dark-haired young outdoorsman with a beard that made my pre-teen heart beat faster.

Dad took us all to midweek hymn sings and prayer meetings at the parsonage, where I learned to follow along from a hymnal. Mom and I did a discipleship study with a small group at the church, which groomed my shy child-self to pray aloud with an adult partner. I recall a boring video series called Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald, former chairman of the board of World Vision. About the time we were watching MacDonald on a TV screen, he was resigning as president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship after admitting to an adulterous affair. But the Internet had not yet been born, so we knew nothing of MacDonald’s private world.

Another video presentation was more memorable. It warned of the AIDS crisis: the American population was forecast to be decimated in ten years’ time, or was it twenty? I didn’t really know what they were talking about, only that public restrooms could expose me to a deadly virus. The video had a lot to say about "homosexuality". Dad leaned over from his folding metal chair next to me in the dim room and whispered into my ear, "That’s when a man sticks his penis into another man's bottom." My eyes must have widened, but there was nothing to say.

I was twelve or thirteen the Easter that some of the church ladies decided it would be cute to have a children's choir. They taught us a Michael Card song (that included the line: "You can choose what not to believe in…"). There were perhaps eight of us on the stage. Standing there in the new skirt and blouse Mom and I had sewn for the occasion, I was painfully aware of being the oldest.

Changes came as more families followed us from the charismatic fellowship to the Friends church. When the congregation withdrew from the Quaker denomination, I joined the adults in voting for a new church name and was pleased when my favorite won out. "Cornerstone" soon voted to align themselves with the Evangelical Free denomination. We parted ways with them at that point, because the "E. Free" allowed divorced men to be pastors and my mother’s interpretation of the New Testament did not permit such low standards.

My best friend during this period was part of the local Mennonite church. Our family occasionally attended special meetings there, and we loved their potluck meals. Like us, Mennonite girls wore homemade dresses and eschewed make-up. Unlike us, the adult women all wore their hair tucked up inside pleated white caps. They sang unfamiliar hymns in four-part harmony from shaped notes. Marriage was a permanent bond. The pastors were laymen; women were homemakers who planted spectacular gardens and made their own ketchup. Their Anabaptist heritage ran deep; some couples spoke German at home. But the insurmountable difference was their approach to education: my parents were passionate about homeschooling, while the tight-knit Mennonite community expected all its members to support the church's one-room private school. So in spite of all we appreciated about the church, we could never really have fit in.

To his credit, my dad, despite homeschooling and delivering his own babies, never felt comfortable with home-churching. But hunting for a new church is a daunting process—all the more with five children in tow—so Dad and I formed a search committee and visited local Sunday morning services together, discussing their merits on the way home and reporting back to the rest of the family at lunch. Dressed in my mom’s hand-me-downs, I was mistaken for his wife more than once.

We settled at the Baptist church we’d driven past so many times early in my childhood: a traditional brick building with padded pews, a grand piano, and an organ. Dressed comfortably on our way to the charismatic church and gazing out the car window, I had always felt sorry for the proper, well-coiffed Baptists in their suits, Sunday dresses, and heels. They were obviously rich, and, I imagined, smug. I knew they didn’t dance or speak in tongues.

Part 3: In Which I Learn I am Not a Baptist

Circling the Christianity Buffet, Part 1

An abridged version of this article appeared as a guest post on the blog Ramblings of Sheldon.

In Which God and I Are Introduced

By age 23 I had made a full circuit of the American Christianity buffet table and if I hadn't tasted everything, I had at least gotten near enough to smell it.

I was dedicated to the Protestant God by my parents and a Pastor Dibble at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church in a college town in Pennsylvania. My parents, raised Lutheran from infancy, had been rebaptized there by immersion. They were enthusiastic about Bible study and campus evangelism.

I was wearing toddler sizes when I invited Jesus into my heart before bed one night. There wasn't a CMA church in our new town; my parents fellowshipped with a small, casual group that met in an old building named the "Sunshine Inn". I remember watching the adults perform skits for one another, sharing potlucks, everyone dancing to "Father Abraham", and a small printing operation in a back room. When the group decided to construct their own multipurpose church building, my dad was among the volunteers helping to lay block or hang drywall.

The church was young and charismatic, its members idealistic. Instead of hiring a single pastor, they attempted to follow the pattern of the book of Acts: a group of elders shared the responsibilities of leadership, sitting in front of the assembly together and taking turns teaching from the Bible. Our dentist was one of the elders--until his daughter returned home pregnant from Oral Roberts University and he resigned. Once when I was sick, a group of men from the church (some of the elders?) came to our house to anoint my forehead with oil.

During church services, people prayed out loud, prophesied in tongues, and danced or raised their hands in worship. Song lyrics were shown on the wall via overhead projectors and the song-leader was usually playing a guitar along with a handful of instrumentalists in the "orchestra". Against the wall were inconspicuous wooden boxes with mail slots in the top. Dad often let me slide his tithes and offerings envelope in—a treat I enjoyed and helped him remember. The envelopes were printed with a large Roman-style coin, cut into pie wedges to illustrate the ten percent that belonged to God.

There was a warm water baptistery off to the side of the sanctuary/gymnasium at the church, but my dad baptized me in the Great Lakes in a small ceremony with one other family. They sang “Our God Reigns”—my favorite. My friend’s mom wrapped me in my bath towel with the elephant on it, and I was excited because now Mom and Dad would let me share communion. Elders would stand in the aisles at church holding bottles of grape juice, ready to refill the the common cup as it passed down the rows. The cubes of homemade unleavened bread were fragrant with coriander and star thistle honey. I always tried to nonchalantly pick the biggest piece when the plate made its way to me. I still have the recipe for that bread; it’s one of my family’s favorite snacks.

I remember the men of the church being kind, and I was very aware of their contributions to the community. One was a Vietnam vet who became a veterinarian; he was renowned for his gentleness and good humor. My friends’ dad was an auto mechanic; his father served as principal for the church school and supplied bottled honey to local stores.  A craftsman builder with huge hands did the remodeling on my mom’s kitchen, and helped me ride a bike. When pipes in our house froze one winter, we called the plumber from our church; my brothers and I watched him work. Another dad built cabins from logs he cut himself, and showed my brothers how his bear trap worked. One couple collaborated on art and publishing.

Women and men seemed to participate freely and equally in everything but direct preaching. Except for the elders being an all-male group, I was never aware of restrictions based on my gender. Many adults, including my parents, took turns teaching Bible lessons to the kids in the school classrooms that doubled as Sunday school rooms. I can still quote many of the Bible verses I first memorized there, amid the alphabet posters, stacks of math workbooks, and cabinets of craft supplies. My teachers gave me The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a prize, but Mom made me exchange it at the religious bookstore. By then, all fantasy, not just witches, was banned from our home. If my parents had heard of C. S. Lewis, they had certainly never read him.

My parents came to object to sensuality in the church. The church orchestra became more of a band, and this made my parents uncomfortable. They were more concerned about several of their friends’ marriages falling apart and about two divorcees from the church marrying each other. This upset my mom so much that we left that church and started attending a Friends meeting.


Part 2: In Which God and I Are Friends

Growing Up: Other Mentors

Continued from the previous installment:


I was a wary and skittish reader in those days, fearful of teachers who would lead me further astray. But I felt safe with Phillips. Who could be more heavily invested in the truth of the scriptures than a Bible translator who had wrestled personally with its meaning and essence?

In Your God Is Too Small, J.B. Phillips gave me "permission" to grow up spiritually, as it were. To make sure my faith and my perception of God kept up with my adult mind and my adult responsibilities. I was startled by the first page:

"It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship the conception of God that exists in the mind of a child... unless he is prepared to deny his own experience of life."

Obviously? The concept of adulthood, or maturing as a process, had not been emphasized in our home. Adolescence as a stage was patently denied within IBLP. We were praised for our "maturity" and wise choices, which were more often based on ignorance and behavioral conditioning. Children were early expected to shoulder adult responsibility, but without adult motivation or evaluation of risk. I never felt that I "became", or was treated as, an adult.

Faith was based on truth, which was either-or, good-bad, true-false, black-white. A child could learn these distinctions, and ought to. For the most part, anything unfit for children was inappropriate for adults as well. Learning to drive was a rare exception; a milestone that meant one was authorized by the state to operate a vehicle. Similarly, through marriage God authorized two individuals to have sex with each other. Before a wedding, sex was bad. After, it was good.

Now Phillips was telling me it was healthy to be dissatisfied with my childish understanding of God. That I needed a God who could command my respect and cooperation. Who was bigger than my expanding knowledge of science and humanity. As Phillips expressed it in 1961, my need was "not for the God of the ancient Hebrews, nor the God of the early Church, nor the God of Victorian England, but the God of the Atomic Age--the God of Energy and Wisdom and Love". This quest was getting more exciting.

**********

I love libraries. Always have, from the time I could barely pronounce, "Lai-bur-dee-dee". Whenever I visit someone's home, or a new church, I like to pause to check out the bookshelves. Book collections give me a feel for the family or group's history, interests, and "slant", sometimes going back generations. I've found some unlikely treasures this way. And after I chanced upon Soul Survivor: How 13 Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church in my church's library, Philip Yancey was my new favorite author.

Like Elisabeth Elliot, Yancey introduced me to dozens of other authors, expanding my theological and literary horizons. But most of all, Philip Yancey gave me permission to ask tough questions, and to not put up with ineffectual answers. I devoured What's So Amazing About Grace? and Disappointment with God. I got The Jesus I Never Knew on audio cassettes for my husband. I pondered Rumors of Another World (now retitled The Skeptic's Guide to Faith) for a long time. I bought Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? for a women's church study group in 2009, but by then my questions were stronger and my doubt was growing. I got frustrated with his defense of prayer halfway through the book and never finished it.

I respect Yancey's courage and honesty and open-mindedness in the face of criticism from other Christians. He can even impress me with dreadful stories about the close-minded church of his childhood. I love his perception of irony; while he does not exploit it, you can't miss it where it exists. (And he introduced me to Flannery O'Connor, who must be the queen of irony.) Yancey writes like a journalist: always observing, making connections, telling the stories of how ideas affect real people. I learned so much from Philip Yancey. Which made it all the more strange when I felt I'd outpaced my mentor. Strange, and a little frightening.

*************

In 2006, I flew to Philadelphia to visit my grandmother and introduce her to my newest baby girl. On the way home, my return flight left without me and I was stranded at the Minneapolis airport for six hours. When I stopped crying, I found a bookstore and promptly lost myself in a riveting book entitled Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, by a journalist named Michelle Goldberg. It occupied my thoughts while Baby napped, and piqued my curiosity. How did this female outsider know so much about America's religious right?

Goldberg offered a perspective I'd never been exposed to before. It was as if we'd attended the same conferences, but her experience of the identical event was the utter reverse of mine. Inside was out, back was front, up was down, cold was hot, clothed was nude, red was blue, white was black. Her book reminded me of reading The Screwtape Letters; the angle made me mentally dizzy. The cultural and political movements I had grown up supporting genuinely disturbed her. The men I admired freaked her out. Goldberg was probably the first to describe Patriarchy to me as a negative thing.

When I finally made it home, I hesitatingly told my husband about the reading material I had chanced upon. I remember feeling sheepish and a little guilty, but I just had to read the rest. I looked up the book at the public library and the world didn't fit into the same box afterward. I couldn't say that Goldberg was right, but I knew that, like Elisabeth Elliot, she was being  truthful about what she saw.

**********

My grandmother, an avid reader, had a book sitting by her bed when I visited: What Jesus Meant, by Garry Wills. This interested me since I didn't think of her as particularly religious. I found that book at the library, too, and immediately admired the author's expansive knowledge of the Bible (rarely did I encounter a Bible scholar whose grasp of the scriptures exceeded my own) as he used his research to describe the historical context of each of the Gospels. A committed Catholic with criticisms of the Church, Wills had stuck on many of the same points of the Jesus biographies that I had (What is this "kingdom of heaven"? What about Judas?) and I loved reading the conclusions he'd reached. Like Yancey, he asked tough questions boldly.

Like Phillips, Wills did his own translations from the Greek texts. When I read What Paul Meant, a similar treatment of the Epistles, I was struck by how the vocabulary has evolved since we began reading these letters. The word we translate "church", what exactly did Paul mean by it? There were no church buildings, no denominations, no history. How can we fairly examine the Bible without the clutter of centuries of religious practices? Is it even possible to cut through thousands of layers of religious grime?

But for Garry Wills, I probably would never have watched The Last Temptation of Christ. Remembering the scandal of the 1980's, I felt sneaky and apostate bringing it home on VHS. The film, low-budget but incredibly artistic, is based on a novel written by a Greek Christian. The author focuses on the doctrine that Jesus was fully human, as well as divine, and has Jesus experience the same conflicts all humans do. We found it extremely moving, Willem Dafoe's Great Lakes accent notwithstanding. In fact, we watched it again that same week. Perhaps we weren't so far off, after all. Perhaps we just didn't fit the American evangelical mold anymore. Perhaps our God didn't.

Library Shelf: The Birth of Satan

Without Satan, why believe in God?

". . . it is hardly surprising that many monotheists have constructed the embodiment, in stories and art and imaginings, of the energy and forces in life that seem inhospitable, disorderly, fractious. This is the character we know as Satan, whose origins are the subject of this book. We cannot know, or at least we do not, whether there is a Satan beyond this Satan. But. . . [Satan] is worthy of our respectful consideration."

The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil's Biblical Roots, by T.J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, was earth-shattering for me. This library book kept me busy on a plane trip to Philadelphia, and I was so excited about it that I kept reading pages aloud to my sister on our drive to my uncle's Delaware beach house. 

For years I had been troubled by an incident in the life of King David. Like many David stories, this one is recorded twice: once in II Samuel 24 and once in I Chronicles 21. In both versions, the king gets in big trouble with God for ordering a national census and the whole population is punished. Only in the Samuel version, God is already angry with Israel, so he purposely incites David to order the census, and then everyone gets in trouble and 70,000 people die. In the Chronicles version (the later one), Satan opposes Israel by inciting David to number the people, God gets mad, the whole nation is punished and 70,000 people die. 

Now it seemed to me as a well-versed teenager that there ought to be a pretty big difference between Satan doing something, or God doing it. When I was young my parents liked to talk about putting God on the throne of my heart and not letting Satan sit there. We wanted to make God glad and that would inevitably disappoint Satan. They were polar opposites, right? Except for a strange heavenly scene in the book of Job, one wouldn't expect to find Satan and God hanging out together. So how did the Bible writers get these two characters mixed up?

A 19th-century commentary by the theologian Albert Barnes waves away the difficulty: "All temptation is permitted by God.... If Satan therefore provoked David to number the people, God allowed him. And what God allows, He may be said to do." Wow. That little sentence puts an awful lot of responsibility at God's feet. He committed the Holocaust. He burned witches in Salem and Protestants in Europe. He rapes women in Africa and altar boys in America. He infects people with AIDS, flies planes into buildings, and murders children in their schools.

As it turns out, monotheism is a very difficult balancing act. To make it work requires a devil so the one god left can be wholly good. Otherwise he's a monster, or bi-polar. The evolution of the Satan concept in Judaism pretty much blew my mind. The "satan" (common noun) shows up as a generic villain late in the history of the Old Testament, relieving Yahweh of some of the responsibility for his more "repellent" behavior. When the post-exilic Chronicles accounts were compiled, the scribes chose to make the satan responsible for tempting David.

Satan (proper noun) takes form as a character during the inter-testamental period, roughly around 200 B.C.E., and begins to be described as God's nemesis. The legend grew with interpretations of Genesis that accounted for the supernatural origin of demons. Followers of Jesus continued to develop this theme, supplying details and linking Satan to Old Testament characters and symbols that predated him as a personality. Dante and Milton added a great deal of color and shading to the picture, visualizing ever more horrific images in their descriptions of Satan and his infernal abode: Hell. 

Authors Wray and Mobley outline some of their findings in this fascinating WBUR interview, but the book's bibliographic notes are much more complete.

Somehow learning that Satan was only a solution to an ancient theological puzzle was a seismic shift for me. Ultimately, my faith in God required a cosmic enemy--an evil being trying to snatch my soul and longing to drag me into hell. A loving God didn't frighten me, it was God and Satan both ganging up on me--like they did with Job--that made me doubt my strength.

"In the end, the patronizing answer--'Satan is the source of evil'--never answers the question of the origins of evil. Because if God is initially, fully, and finally God, the Alpha and the Omega, then Satan is merely the Beta and the Psi. Satan may have emerged before time, but not before God..."

If Satan wasn't even discovered/invented till the Babylonian Captivity, who was that sneaky talking snake? My teachers always referred to him as an incarnation of the devil, a rebellious angel bitter because God threw him out of heaven, but the Jewish scriptures never refer to the serpent that way. And who introduced evil into that perfect garden? If God used his will to create Eve in his image, but chastised her for using hers... and we're back to the age-old puzzle of monotheism. Who is responsible for evil, pain, and suffering? Is God culpable for what he allows? Is he a monster? Is he bi-polar?

I was surprised to find that losing Satan meant losing God, too. But it was strangely liberating to take responsibility for all my own thoughts. To realize that my choices were simply my own, not tied to the outcome of some cosmic tug-of-war. My desires are merely the state of being a conscious human, not fed to me by angelic or demonic forces. And King David? Well, an epidemic happened to follow his national census. Bad things still happen, whether you're a monotheist, a polytheist, or an atheist. I just find that I can move on more quickly these days, relieved of the pressure to make sense of it all or figure out if God, or his satan, is trying to get my attention.

Mt. Moriah: Isaac's Journal?

Danish Cathedral Fresco (photo by Calvin)

And [God] said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took… Isaac his son… and went unto the place of which God had told him.

… And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.  

…And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham… now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

Genesis 22:2-12


I never doubted that my parents would have passed God’s test of loyalty. And like Isaac, my siblings and I bore the weight of the wood for our own sacrifice. The Genesis account never hints at what Isaac thought of this day. Was he permanently scarred? Did he ever discuss the trip with his mom? How did the memory of Mt. Moriah affect his relationship with his father? Did they ever go hiking together again? How did it influence Isaac’s understanding of parenthood?

Faith, Facts, and Fossils

A Matter of Life and Death
In my family's religious subculture, judgments were frequently made about a person's eternal destiny (i.e., heaven or hell) based on that individual's affirmation of evolution or creationism. Our dear grandmother was known to accept evolutionary scientific theory and to enjoy PBS nature specials, therefore we besought God to change her heart and save her soul before it was too late.

As children, our reading material was closely monitored for Darwinian concepts which would be exposed as false and countered with the truth of "God's Word". We were indoctrinated with publications and videos from ICR and Answers in Genesis in addition to our science textbooks from A Beka, Bob Jones University Press, and Christian Light. The sciences never interested me as much as history and language arts, anyway; I only learned enough to get by.

When I began raising my own kids, though, I found that smugness was a poor substitute for understanding. My son loved to find picture books about dinosaurs and astronomy at the library and I felt intimidated by the pages that referred to "millions of years ago". I began to encounter references to evolutionary history in an assortment of unrelated contexts and my curiosity was piqued. I'd never actually learned what scientists meant by "evolution", only that it was factually and morally wrong. As a homeschooling parent, I felt obligated to clarify and fortify my own understanding of science so I could better direct my children's curiosity.

The Biblical Record
A closer look at Genesis revealed two distinct creation accounts. In the first, men and women are created together, on the sixth day in God's image to rule over the other creatures and everything is good. The earth is shapeless and empty; light appears, and darkness, and day and night (preceding the rest of the galaxy). Photosynthetic plants show up on the third day, the sun and moon are added the next day. Men and women (or man and woman?) are created at the end of the sixth day to be the dominant life form and they are specifically instructed to eat the plants. Everything is good, and God takes a break.

Chapter 2 offers an alternate version: there are no plants yet, and no rain. God molds a man out of the earth and breathes life into him to give him a soul. God plants a garden near some rivers and puts the man in charge of it. The man is permitted to eat from all the trees save one. But the man is too solitary and that's not good, so God sets out to make him a helper. He forms the ground, like play dough, into every kind of animal and every kind of bird, and sends the new creatures to Adam to see what he will call them. When none of them prove satisfactory, God puts Adam to sleep and surgically removes a rib which he shapes into a woman. Adam is thrilled when he wakes up--since neither of them have heard of clothes--but "the woman" goes unnamed until the end of the next chapter when she starts bearing children.

For centuries, intelligent men attempted to organize the Bible's many stories (Creation, Noah's Flood, Abraham, the Exodus, the Promised Land...) into a workable historic timeline. One of those men was James Ussher, Archbishop of Ireland, who in the days of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth coordinated the biblical accounts with the best known history of other cultures to determine that the world must have been created in 4004 B.C. As scholarship advanced through the Enlightment and beyond, scientists (many of them Christians) began to talk about the age of the earth in much longer terms, and many in the Church kept pace with these new discoveries. At the same time, however, Ussher's calculations were printed in the King James Version as standard reference notes, where they remained for 200 years and eventually featured in America's Scopes Trial of 1925, a defining moment for  fundamentalist Christianity.

Christianity and Evolution
I first heard Dr. Francis Collins on NPR. A Bible-believing Christian who accepted evolution? I had to learn more. His book The Language of God opened a new world to me. Real scientists, he explained, are "anarchists", always seeking to revise theories and overthrow old research. One of the great revisions of the last century was the conclusion that the universe began at a single moment (14 billion years ago). To Dr. Collins, "The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation."

Dr. Collins writes frankly, kindly, and convincingly. He patiently answers the common creationist arguments ("the watchmaker", entropy, fossils) while pointing out that three types of radioactive carbon dating yield concordant results: 4.5 billion years for Earth's oldest rocks. He summarizes current scientific understanding about the descent of Homo sapiens. And as the director of the Human Genome Project, he includes some information that was most definitely not in the materials from Answers in Genesis or ICR twenty years ago.

As it happens, humans have 46 chromosomes while chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have 48. Interestingly, the second human chromosome has the appearance of being fused (parts midway in the chromosome resemble what are usually the telomeres, or ends) and the genes on that chromosome share the order of the genes in two smaller ape chromosomes (2A and 2B). Denisovan hominids had the same fusion we have, suggesting this change in chromosome number occurred previous to the first human. Scientific genetic evidence now strongly indicates a fusion of those two chromosomes took place a million years ago or even more. A rare mutation would later have reduced the number from 47 chromosomes to 46. Human life is no less amazing for having evolved--if anything, the wonder seems greater! I had to keep reading.

"You cannot get to Young Earth Creationism without throwing out the fundamental principles of geology, of biology, of chemistry, of physics, of cosmology, of paleontology."  

               --Francis Collins








  "No serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution to explain the marvelous complexity and diversity of life."   --Francis Collins



Scientific Evidence
In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist and researcher Pascal Richet traces mankind's attempts to determine the age of the earth, our solar system, and the universe. Beginning with mythology, religion, and philosophy and culminating in geology, astronomy, physics, and the discovery of radioactivity, the curious kept imagining, exploring, calculating, and reaching ever closer to an accurate chronology. Richet brings the names to life: from Aristotle to Isaac Newton, from Lord Kelvin to Percival Lowell. This book took me months to get through, but by the time I reached the end I was cheering each new scientific discovery and was convinced that our planet really did form 4.5 billion years ago.

Even if one does not accept that fossils can be dated by their location in the rock strata, there is the inescapable issue of "missing links". I was taught that there were none, that the fossilized skeletons we find today are simply extinct species, or variations of the same species that exist on earth today. Turns out there are plenty of transitional forms in the fossil record: a manatee with legs, serpent-like whales with tiny feet, walking whales, the Tiktaalik fish, the Dimetrodon which looked like a dinosaur but wasn't, toothed birds, a flatfish with an intermediate eye position, the early bipedal dinosaur Eoraptor, the mammal-like reptile Thrinaxodon, and so on.

Additionally, there is the beautiful and predictable sequence of life forms, from most simple to most complex, that unfolds through the rock strata. Mammalian fossils are not found in the oldest rocks, nor are flowering plants. The sheer number of fossils is staggering. If all fossils were formed during a single flood, the pre-flood oceans would have been crowded with an unsustainable number of creatures! Fossils remind us that humans have not always been Earth's dominant species. We are only the latest on the scene, at the top of an ancient and elaborate tree.

Ken Ham and other evangelical creationists have been emphatic in their interpretation that there was no death until after "the Fall". Nothing died until the woman first disobeyed God. Therefore, Adam and Eve and all the first animals, fish, birds, and insects were originally created to be vegetarian. The ignorance of this simplistic explanation came to mind when I took my first college course in biology and realized that plant cells are every bit as alive as blood cells. Life and death are so much more complex than eating forbidden fruit and suddenly beginning to age.


Facts and Faith
I gradually embraced evolution--not as a "worldview" that allowed me to do what I want, but as an evidence-based way of understanding the world I live in. Which is probably why the following blog post by Libby Anne resonated so strongly with me last year:

"If my parents had not elevated creationism to the same importance as the virgin birth, I would never have had my crisis of faith. Doing so gave my faith an Achilles heel. I’m not saying this happens to everyone raised to equate creationism with Christianity – it doesn't. What I am saying is that elevating things like capitalism and spanking to the same level of truth as the trinity creates a Christianity in a box. It shuts off questions and exploration. It closes the door to differences of opinion. It creates a situation where you are either in, or out. And, more importantly, it creates a situation where questioning something as simple as capitalism means rejection and changing your mind on something as little as anti-gay rights means potentially throwing everything from the trinity to the divinity of Jesus into question."

"My parents reacted negatively to me not because I had rejected Jesus but because I had rejected creationism."    --How Creationism Drove Me Out of the Church

Young earth creationism no longer makes sense to me. The universe is too immense to be contained in 6,000 years of history. Starlight finds us from millions of light years away. Fossils give us clues to secrets that are millions of years old. Rocks bear silent testimony to billions of years of atomic energy. Antarctic glaciers record over 8 million years of history in their frozen hearts. Life is a mystery, a puzzle to tease out bit by bit, each of us adding to the random but intricate and kaleidoscopic pattern that will cause future generations to marvel.

Library Shelf: Evolving in Monkey Town

"I was a fundamentalist in the sense that I thought salvation means having the right opinions about God.... Good Christians, I used to think, don't change their minds."

Two years ago I ordered this book from Amazon.com and immediately knew I'd discovered a kindred spirit. I devoured it over two days.

Rachel Held Evans is one of those authors who doesn't so much share new information as express what the reader is already feeling. Rachel is brutally honest with her questions, and doesn't have to wrap up everything up neatly at the end. Evolution, after all, is an ongoing process.
She talks frankly about her experience growing up in the evangelical world, and about the aspects of Christianity that posed a challenge to her belief as she matured. Every issue she brings up here--patriotism and war, Young Earth Creationism, the Religious Right, the cosmic lottery, hell, homosexuality, the Holocaust, the Taliban, pond-scum theology, Judgment Houses, poverty, prayer, hurricanes, Christian apologetics, feminism, fundamentalism--are subjects I was already trying to make sense of. I already knew the "correct" answers, but they weren't working very well, at least not well enough to pass them on to my children.

Evolving in Monkey Town may have been the first post-modern book I ever read; certainly it was the first Christian post-modern book. The freedom to ask anything without apology and to make observations based on subjective personal experience was intoxicating. Rachel gave me permission to think. And her unwillingness to accept answers that were frayed from trying to make them fit the question emboldened me to keep searching, too.

In addition to the book and her blog, Rachel pointed me to authors she was reading, and my trips to the library became a kind of scavenger hunt:  What was theistic evolution? Where did the idea of hell come from? How did the Bible get to us? What was the role of women in the early church?

Though over time I've reached different conclusions than Rachel did, I can understand the form of Christianity she clings to today and I respect her courage. It takes a lot of courage to adapt what you believe, and Rachel is more adaptive than most. Our lives--and beliefs--will continue to evolve, and that's a good thing.

Where Do Bibles Come From?

A collection from our bookshelves

• The evolution of Yahweh-worship from polytheism. 
• Worship of Yahweh and Asherah in ancient Palestine. 
• The Samaritan Torah. 
• The Masoretic text. 
• Babylonian influence on Jewish theology and culture during the Captivity. 
• The full emergence of monotheism and the philosophical difficulties it presented. 
• The Septuagint. 
• The development of Jewish tradition and scholarship following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.
• Rivalry between the early Christian and Pharisee sects. 
• The size limitations of papyrus manuscripts.
• The Council of Trent.

Each of these factors, and so many others, is bound up in the history of what we know as the Holy Bible. 

Children ask, "Where do babies come from?" and young Christians ask, "Where did the Bible come from?" Some teachers, and some parents, are more squeamish than others. But if one is to commit one's life to the words of the Bible, one may need more information than, "It came from God."

The books below are some that have helped me tease out the history of the Jewish/Christian scriptures. It became a sort of scavenger hunt, finding a piece here, matching it with a piece from there, until a clearer picture began to emerge. 

Most, if not all, of the authors referenced are Christian scholars. They handle the texts with respect without compromising their scholarship and I recommend them all to Christians and skeptics alike.

What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills

Wills is a historian, and a critical Catholic. In his quest to distill Jesus' meaning from the text, Wills treats each of the Gospels individually, commenting on its historical setting and intended audience chronologically, geographically, and politically. 

What Paul Meant by Garry Wills

This one gets intense. In a nutshell, Paul's letters are the oldest Christian documents, predating the organized "church", even predating the word "Christian". In his defense of Paul against charges of misogyny and anti-Semitism, Wills ends up telling us a lot about the controversial history of the New Testament, including  debate over the pseudo-Pauline epistles, later edits that changed the gender of Junia, and some interesting observations about Acts and Luke.

Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan

Pelikan was a professor, historian, author, and Lutheran pastor (who joined the Orthodox church late in life). His respect for the Bible and its Jewish heritage is evident throughout the work. Pelikan focuses mostly on the Old Testament here, and I found the parts about Genesis 1-3 especially illuminating. I only wished he had gone into even more detail.

The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil's Biblical Roots by T. J. Wray

Took this one along on a plane trip two years ago and couldn't put it down! Besides being chock full of interesting archaeological tidbits from the greater Palestine area, it made sense of several Old Testament passages that had puzzled me for years. The parts about King David and Job were of particular interest, and the bibliographical notes were very helpful.

From Brandon Withrow's excellent book review:

The rise of monotheism, which occurred between the 8th and 6th centuries B.C.E., presented a problem, according to Wray and Mobley. If God is good and the only real power, where do we lay the blame for evil? “Could it be that along with the development of monotheism is a growing existential frustration that makes it difficult for God’s people to accept a deity who is responsible for both good and evil?”

The solution to the problem of evil is Satan.

Initially, the word for Satan was “a function, rather than being a proper name,” argues Wray and Mobley. During the Diaspora, the Jews were exposed to other cultures, notably the dualism of the Persian religion. “Jewish communities were exposed to Ahriman [a Zoroastrian demon] during the Persian period, from 530 to 330 B.C.E.,” they write. “Satan as a divine opponent of the LORD and as author of evil does not appear until the second century B.C.E., by which time Jews in Babylon and Persia had been exposed to the dualism of Zoroastrianism and to its evil deity Ahriman for generations.”

The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong

Armstrong's weakness is detailing her sources; I had a lot more questions after reading this book. But it is a good place to start and full of information, especially about Judaic history.

Besides describing the sometimes surprising historical context of the various Biblical texts, Armstrong spends a lot of time explaining how the interpretation of and meaning ascribed to those texts changed throughout history. Bible study methods, for both Jews and Christians, have continually evolved to meet the needs of the time. Armstrong looks at how early rabbis and the Church fathers taught students to meditate on the text and draw multiple layers of meaning out: moral, metaphorical, literal, typological, mystical, and more.

The Book: A History of the Bible by Christopher De Hamel

De Hamel traces the physical history of the Bible, from individual manuscripts to multi-volume library, to single-bound volume. He writes as a historian, and this book is not quite as readable as the rest. I learned the most from the chapter about the St. Jerome's translation of the Vulgate and how he handled the Apocryphal books. 

Like biologists following DNA mutations, history scholars can trace the family tree of a particular manuscript Bible by noting minute errors made by scribes and faithfully transmitted by later copyists.

If the Bible is God's infallible gift to man containing all the answers we ever need to know, it will stand up to scrutiny. Don't be afraid to ask where your Bible came from. You may be as surprised and fascinated as when you discovered where you came from. 

What Happened on the Damascus Road?

I used to believe the Bible was God's letter to mankind. That it was truth itself and could never be contradicted. I accepted that the stories contained therein actually happened in the manner described. I was sure the books were recorded (and translated) accurately through the centuries. Any appearance of error or confusion was merely a faulty interpretation. 

This approach worked for me the first 15 times I read the Bible in its entirety. Until one day I reread the story of Saul's Damascus Road experience. And I was flummoxed. 

The story of Paul's "conversion" from Judaism to Christianity appears three times in the book of Acts. None of these agrees with the others, or with Paul's own account of his calling by Jesus in his Epistle to the Galatians. Let's compare the stories.


Acts 9, told by narrator:

First, Saul gets letters from the high priest authorizing him to go to Damascus and drag male or female Jewish Christ-followers back to Jerusalem for prosecution and imprisonment. (No word on how this was going to be accomplished. Were the Roman authorities in Syria in the habit of letting the Sanhedrin make kidnapping raids from Judea? The writer doesn't explain the political and legal details he so relished in The Gospel of Luke. We know the Sanhedrin there lacked the authority to put anyone to death.)

Anyway, "a light from the sky suddenly blazed around him, and he fell to the ground. Then he heard a voice speaking to him”. His companions “stood there speechless, for they had heard the voice but could see no one." Saul got up, but was blinded so they led him into Damascus where he remained sightless for three days until a disciple named Ananias came, at Jesus' request, so that Paul could see again and "be filled with the Holy Spirit."

Afterward, “Saul stayed with the disciples in Damascus for some time. Without delay he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues. . .proving beyond doubt that this man is Christ.” But “the Jews made a plot to kill Saul”, so the Christians helped him escape and sent him back to Jerusalem.  “When Saul reached Jerusalem he tried to join the disciples. But they were all afraid of him" until Barnabas properly introduced him and explained the situation.  

“After that Saul joined with them in all their activities in Jerusalem” until again there were “several attempts on his life”. At that point the brothers gave him a ride to Caesarea and "sent him off to Tarsus.”


Acts 22, told by Paul to a Jerusalem mob:

At the beginning of Paul's account, “a light from the sky suddenly blazed around me. I fell to the ground, and I heard a voice. . . My companions naturally saw the light, but they did not hear the voice." 

Saul ends up in the city: “I was blinded by the light. . . my companions had to take me by the hand and so I came to Damascus." A devout Jew named Ananias comes to visit and has a fuller message. "Get up and be baptized! Be clean from your sins as you call on His name.” No word on healing here. 

Paul doesn't say any more about Damascus: “. . . after my return to Jerusalem. . . I fell into a trance and saw Jesus. . . He said to me, ‘Make haste and leave Jerusalem at once. . . Go, for I will send you far away to the gentiles.”


Acts 26, Paul to Governor Festus and King Agrippa:

"I saw a light from the sky, blazing all about me and my fellow-travellers. We all fell to the ground and I heard a voice”. No remarks on blindness at all in this version. "... First in Damascus and then in Jerusalem, through the whole of Judea, and to the gentiles, I preached”.


Galatians 1, Paul's own account:

In this letter, Paul describes how he received the gospel “as a direct revelation from Jesus”. 
It “pleased God. . . that I might proclaim [Jesus]” to the Gentiles. “I did not even go to Jerusalem to meet” the apostles but “went away to Arabia and later came back to Damascus.” Not until three years later did Paul go “to Jerusalem to see Cephas” and met no one else save “James, the Lord’s brother”.

“All this I am telling you is, I assure you before God, the plain truth. Later I visited districts in Syria and Cilicia, but I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea. All they knew. . . was the saying: ‘The man who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.'"


So. . . what actually happened? 

Was there a voice? Who heard it? Was there a light? Who saw it? Was Paul near Damascus, or somewhere else? Was he alone or with companions? Did he go to Jerusalem next, or Arabia? Did the apostles in Jerusalem know him before as a zealous hatchet man for the Sanhedrin, or did they only hear of him as a Jew-turned-preacher up north? Did Barnabas introduce him to all the brothers in Jerusalem, or did he quietly meet with just Peter and James? 

If Paul was an actual person, then there are actual answers to these questions. The Bible does not give the facts, instead offering something more like "choose-your-own-adventure". If Paul was the author of Galatians, and if he wrote the truth, then the author of Acts wrote fiction. (And vice versa.) If Acts is a historical "novel", what can we conclude of the Gospel of Luke, penned by the same writer and the only book to bring up Mary's virginity? Paul's letters, after all, are the oldest documents of Christianity, and he never mentions Mary, much less makes a claim that Jesus was conceived without human sperm. Nor does Paul mention Christ's ascension into the clouds, a story only told in--you guessed it--Acts and Luke (and added later in a postscript to the Gospel of Mark).

What do you think actually happened on the Damascus Road?