I present this piece as an accompaniment to the devotionals that recently finished posting on a biweekly basis here on Substack (the devotionals now post “live” every nine weeks alongside my local church’s schedule). This piece was first requested by the same source that asked I publicly produce those devotionals. The request was to give an account of my journey with the Christian faith, beginning with my first confession as a Christian within fundamental evangelicalism, leading through and up to the different confession of the Christian faith I give today. Thus, just as those devotionals were written with the local congregation in mind, this apology is particularly written with those who have personally known me from a young age in mind (“apology” here is meant in its ancient meaning of ‘to give an argumentative account’).1 This is my attempt to satisfy that request.
It is in the spirit of obedience that I undertake this venture, to answer the question posed to me since my return to the United States four years ago.
How did a small town nondenominational evangelical Christian girl come to renounce many of the core tenants of that faith, and yet still claim to be more Jesus-loving and Christian than ever?
This story is of course much longer than I can relate here, both of myself and of the theological points that will soon arise. Every omitted detail of this story is for sharing in the Eschaton. For now I will be as succinct and faithful to the story as I can be, with the possibility for further question should a reader wish to personally seek me out.
To answer this question I need to break it down and address it in bits. Starting with, what are the core tenants of the evangelical faith? Here I can only speak to what I was raised with, though I do believe what I’ll articulate expands to cover much of the broad and varied world of evangelicalism. I must stress that I do not claim to speak for all, or even for anyone beyond myself. I only speak to what I’ve seen and experienced. The second question is more personal—how do I claim to be more Jesus-loving and Christian than ever? This is such a fearful question to answer! And of course, a confessional one. My story is ever unfolding and in process, just as it is with you.
When I speak of the core tenants of the evangelical faith, I first think of the stress placed upon one’s personal relationship with God. Evangelicalism is proud to be the striped down, just-the-bare-essentials approach to Christianity. This means that as long as you claim Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior by grace, and put some sincere effort into having a personal relationship with his, you are good to go—that is, you’ve been saved by Jesus, and you’ll be seeing him in heaven when you die. You need to sin as little as possible as you go through life, but when you do sin, ask for God’s grace and then lean upon it moving forward. You are “good to go” in this way.
What is so fascinating about this story is how much is simultaneously so right and so wrong about it. Yes, Jesus Christ is indeed Lord and Savior for you, and even for you specifically in your individuality (I struggled so hard to believe this as a teenager). Yes, having a “personal relationship” with God is important, indeed paramount, to having a flourishing life. Yes, God is an abundant giver of grace. All three of these truths are deeply wonderful, deeply important. But what exactly is this notion of “good to go,” this bare-essentials approach to Christianity? Let us revisit the story again, in more detail.
The story begins with the basis that we are all sinners. Depraved sinners, actually—we’re morally, spiritually, utterly corrupted, so that there is no true goodness in us at all. Being totally depraved, we are all rightly going to hell when we die. Hell is a really terrible place, because there you exist forever, eternally, in a torment that is conscious. Each of us deserves this because we are each depraved from birth, and so all of us are going there unless something happens. This is where Jesus comes in: God the Father sent His Son Jesus to die for you, and by dying for you Jesus took on both your sins and your sinfulness. With Jesus’ death you are released from your sins, and Jesus then rose from the dead because he was sinless to begin with (being God), and also because Jesus could not really die (being in fact God), which is what is meant when it is said that ‘death could not hold him.’ Since you are yourself an eternal created being (as that is what it means to be created in God’s image), your existence of being freed from sin can now be a happy one where you spend the rest of your time in the presence of God, which is what heaven really is. All you must do, as a one-time and sincere affair, is to ‘confess with your mouth and believe in your heart’ that Jesus is your Lord.
If you are told this gospel, and if you choose to believe that it is true, you are saved by God and allowed to go to heaven. If you don’t choose to believe, you are going to hell because you’ve spurned God by not accepting his free gift of life. This is the evangelical gospel message, the core tenants of its faith as a “bare-essentials approach” to Christianity. In essence it is believe, or die.
I said earlier that there is simultaneously so much right and so much wrong about the evangelical accounting of faith and the story of God. Let me first highlight what is so wrong about this story, which will then frame the personal telling of my story. I will then end with what is so right about evangelicalism’s stress points on the story of God and faith. The issues with the evangelical story come down to two criticisms: it provides both a logically incoherent and a historically estranged telling of the gospel (and often, these two issues are related to each other).
Evangelicalism’s theology is logically incoherent in many ways, but one critical example is evangelicalism’s loss of Trinitarian theology. This loss has then had a direct effect upon evangelicalism’s explanations of salvation, or even better said, on its telling of the atonement (that is, God’s work upon and through the cross of Christ).
My evangelical upbringing was with a tri-theistic approach to God, where God acts like three gods with distinctive personalities who happen to get on really well with each other. We have God the Father, who is the bad-tempered guy in the Old Testament who is sometimes nice and sometimes not. Then we have Jesus the Son, who is the nicest thing about God the Father because it was the Father who decided to send the Son to earth in order to solve the human problem. Then there is the Holy Spirit, who we know is important but who is also a bit strange, and most importantly is only active in our lives if we are Christians. Evangelicals call this Trinitarianism, the belief that God is triune and Three-in-One, and yet functionally this is not Trinitarianism at all. We reveal ourselves to be tri-theists by the ways we both speak about and interact with God.
I cannot get into all of the details of this here (hours of discourse could be taken to unpack this subject), but for now let us use this litmus test: of what you say about one person of the Trinity, do you say about the other two persons? It starts to sound scandalous rather quickly, but such are the claims of Christianity. The Father and the Spirit are nailed onto the cross with the Son. The Son and the Spirit are the creators of the universe just as much as the Father is. The Father and the Son are renewing your life today just as much as the Holy Spirit is doing so in this present moment.
Consider that the triune God is the creator and founder of the world, and that there is no separation or disunity within Him. It is therefore literally impossible for “the Father to turn His face away” from the Son on the cross. This also means that God did not pour out his wrath onto his Son on the cross, unless we mean that God pours his own wrath upon his own self (and this is never what evangelicals mean).
Now wait, stay with me dear reader! Let me quickly affirm some things. Yes, the Father sent the Son to the cross, and the Son obeyed the Father by doing so. But notice that Jesus’ obedience was not under duress, like the ‘Father sent the Son to experience wrath’ story suggests, going like ‘Hi Son! You must stand in the place of humanity if you want to see them have a chance at life. They’re all doomed to hell if you don’t do something. You Jesus, are the only thing standing between Me and my wrath.’ No no…if Jesus’ will and the Father’s will are indeed one (John 10:30), then there was no coercion or manipulation on the part of the Father when the Son submitted to death on the cross. Jesus was acting in free will obedience to his Father when he went to that cross.
Consider too that since Christians confess that Jesus is fully God, this means that he is the full and complete revelation of what God is like. This means that Jesus is the full revelation of what God the Father is like, and this means that the “Old Testament God” is the Trinitarian God, is Jesus the Christ, which means that what we see of Jesus is what is true of the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God the Father is exactly like Jesus the Son in his character, his will, and his being.
Specifically on God’s wrath, we can speak about it at another time; it is an important subject. For now, it is imperative to understand that the foundations of the Christian faith knew nothing of the evangelical doctrine that Jesus experienced the full wrath of God the Father through crucifixion on the cross. God’s wrath had nothing to do with the imperative work that he was accomplishing with his incarnation, his life in the flesh, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension. What God was doing was reconciling a broken creation and a lost humanity to himself.
Let me affirm some more: the unsleeping, energetic activity of evil has had its undeniable effects upon this earth, effects that we human beings are entrenched in through both our own choices as well as through the inheritance we were born into, unchosen.2 A great need existed to purge, heal, and finally restore all of the created order to its proper goodness. This is what God was all about when he became incarnate, and this is what God was about when he went to die on a cross—to be the slayer and victor over sin and death, for the life of the world. “For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.”3
There is a different but equally serious example of evangelicalism’s historical estrangement from the ancient Christian profession of faith. It is common amongst evangelicals today, going by the official name of Nestorianism. Nestorianism argues that Jesus had two separate and unrelated natures within himself—one that was human, and one that was divine.4 This understanding of Jesus was considered detrimental to the gospel by the ancient Christians, as it fails to properly claim our own broken humanity into God’s own self. Without Jesus having taken all that is human into his divine personhood, there is no hope for human beings to know or be reconciled to God—that is the Christian hope of salvation.
When Jesus was following his Father’s will to the cross, he was not merely doing so because he was God and shared the exact same will as his Father, but also because his human will had learned and earned what it means to follow and love God as God. It’s incredible, I know. Jesus had one will that was (and is) unified in himself as both human and divine. How we understand and hold this tension are fun theological weeds for another time.5 But for us Christians, we do not need to be trained in philosophy and theology in order to claim and live out this ancient, traditional confession that Jesus of Nazareth—the Jewish man who walked the earth 2,000 years ago and is today seated in heaven at the right hand of the Father—that this Jesus was utterly human and utterly God at all times, and in all respects. This means when we read the gospels by the lens of faith or confessional theology, we do not say to ourselves “well, in this situation Jesus acted in this way by virtue of his being God rather than his being human [and therefore I can’t be expected to act like Jesus did in this case!]”—we cannot say this, as that is to treat Jesus like a Nestorian would. Nor can we say “well, Jesus was human after all, and wasn’t being very God-like in this situation [and therefore my idea of God gets to be untouched by this particular episode I’m reading about]”—this is not permissible, as Jesus did not switch his humanity or his deity on and off like a light switch. He spoke, walked, taught, acted, lived, and died as God and man fully, from start to finish. This is astounding, incredible, and yes, difficult news to believe. It is also liberating, offensive, and salvific news.
My story of personal extrication from evangelicalism is a journey I didn’t know I was on until many years had passed. By the time I did realize it, I was already past the event horizon, being ever pulled towards the beckoning life and mystery of Christ. I hope we will see in my story that there is great roominess within each of our journeys…that it is not so much about “who you belong to” as much as whose you belong to. It is also true we must make peace with our past—God is about redemption, not erasure. He is about bringing all of us to his table together, rather than segregating us by our self-selected tribes. Nevertheless, it remains the case that by trying to be an evangelical Christian I was led outside of the confines of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism herself led me away, as she was the one who first taught me to love and seek the Lord with all of my heart, my mind, my soul, and my strength.
While being influenced by books such as Richard Foster’s The Celebration of Discipline and J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, I did as I was taught and looked to Scripture for my spiritual education. And, having been converted to Christianity by the threat of eternal damnation as a young child (I knew very well how wicked I was!), I was quite comfortable with the proposition that if not for the grace of God, I was destined for eternal conscious torment in hell. I see now that this is what stemmed my acute agonies years later, on the heels of personal experiences and assurances that God was active love in the world. For me it came down to the puzzle of predestination and election. Like a good Christian girl who read her Bible with great earnestness, I elevated the writings of Paul highly, and was keen to understand and live by his expounding of the gospel through his epistles, which for evangelicals culminates in Romans. The question and the deep fear of whether I belonged to God’s elect overshadowed my life. With great energy did I try to rationally answer this question, before eventually watching it fall to the background as a haunting, unsolved problem. I proceeded through life with a fear and trembling that all I could do was hope for God’s mercy upon me. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been a troubling but helpful guide in that process, putting into succinct words the “cheap grace” I feared too many Christians lived by, all the while being deluded that they held and experienced the real grace of God.
I’ll pause for a moment, and ask this of us. Let us be aware of the person who intellectually and spiritually suffers. Such suffering is as much of a crisis and as painful a process as physical suffering is.
I have also come to recognize more and more that when you are in agonies, you can only last so long. Therefore you climb to plateaus, you find alcoves to recover in, or you find bedding to line a resting place in order to gain some reprieve. Sometimes God himself leads you to these places, as he knows when you need to rest and recuperate. It is not wrong to need breaks; it is human.
But there is an eventual danger. After a time you will be tempted to listen to the voices that wish to convince you that this alcove, with its moderate vistas and satisfactory amenities, is the best that life has to offer you. What your inner drive and soul tells you is mere compromise, your argumentative side (which likes to posture as your “rational” side) starts to object, coming up with any and many justifications to establish the reasonableness of this shack of a home. In this way we fool and shortchange ourselves. If we stay too long in what was once the necessary respite from the screaming agonies, agonies that since then have been readied to be re-addressed (and redressed), we suffocate ourselves. We entrap, starve, and lie to ourselves; we live shadowy half-lives, hiding from ourselves, and also from the others who surround us.
“Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.” — Blaise Pascal6
It was the inability to see anything but sheer contradiction in the claim that God loves you, but that you are also inherently depraved and therefore inherently unlovable, that led me out of the Calvinist versions of evangelicalism. Is to maintain that God loves the utterly depraved not calling evil good? How can God really be good, or really be love, if he arbitrarily chooses to love that which is deplorable, wicked, dark, and to its core evil?
There was a related problem too—how could we give such agency to human beings, where we fall from goodness to sin in such a way that it cancels out what God himself called “very good”? No no, total depravity must be dispensed with, and what a good riddance too! I was miserable believing I was worthless, and tragically I was unable to receive the love of others because of this doctrine.
At the same time I could not reconcile other contradictions present in evangelicalism, such as between the claim that God saved us on the cross, but that we must also believe that he did so in order for each of us to be saved. Did or didn’t God save us on the cross? Is it or is it not the case that it is not me or anything that I do, but rather God who saves me? How then can it be said that my belief in God’s death on the cross is what saves me? Truly, belief matters, but it has nothing to do with saving! Logically and theologically this does not work out, because it puts your salvation in your hands, rather than in God’s.
Now, let me hasten to clarify. Yes, your beliefs matter. Profoundly. If you believe your grandmother loves you, this makes a terribly significant difference upon your life than if you do not believe your grandmother loves you. But notice that your belief does not make it the case whether your grandmother loves you or not. Your belief radically affects your life (and your grandmother’s!) depending on how it correlates to the objective truth that stands outside of you—that your grandmother does indeed love you.7 Belief has nothing to do with saving regarding the inherency of your being (your “ontology”). That is what it means to say that the work of the God-man on the cross, Jesus the Christ, is finished (John 19:28-30).
From an emotional and experiential perspective, however, belief does play an irreplaceable, totally transformational effect upon your life. It is very much the case that we experience the transformation of being saved when we acknowledge the work of the cross upon our lives. It is very much the case that this experience is not replaceable or replicable by anything else, and that it is the highest of goods. It is probably owing to this power and preciousness, this “irreplaceability,” that evangelicals have gone on to over-tire the words “accept” and “acceptance” when speaking about the saving effects of the Gospel on a person’s life. When a person “accepts” that God personally loves them unto death in spite of themselves, this acceptance has a powerful, core-altering affect upon one’s life, from the inside on outwards. We feel liberated, we feel saved…because we are! I celebrate all of this; I do not disparage it.
I am, however, pointing out the deeply serious issue of calling this experience “being saved.” Saying so connotes two meanings at once, one that is true and one that is false. It is true that one subjectively experiences salvation as they undergo the process of meeting with and following God, that they have “been saved” by Him in this way. It is not true that one’s subjective experience of salvation is what brought that salvation, this “being saved,” to begin with. God loves you and saved you through the finished work on his cross whether you like it or not, whether you “accept” it or not.
With the sorrow of predestination lurking in the corner, I went on to study philosophy, first in California and later in Australia. Amidst those studies I always took a special interest in epistemology and skepticism, both of which are interested in how belief and knowledge operate in our lives. Those were many years. I discovered Alvin Plantinga at a critical moment under the gum and fig trees of Sydney’s parks, before I later heard Plantinga openly celebrated at the Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology.8 Ludwig Wittgenstein exploded my world (in a good way), and then Søren Kierkegaard unexpectedly appeared too. It was thanks to Kierkegaard that I was able to leave the shores of Rationalism and Fundamentalism permanently behind.9 Kierkegaard showed me you could be philosophically honest and Christian at the same time—he was my bridge, my glue. He was the person who could fight with the best of them when it came to the different fancy philosophies out there, all while holding to the personal, loving God who made you in his image rather than being a God who in truth was only made in your own image.
All this time my faith was resting in an alcove, away from the griefs of predestination. And from that alcove I was watching and learning. I was being faced with fears and gaining strength, even if sometimes being dragged through them. I saw beautiful, equally true yet different ways to be a Christian, and through church, many friendships, and being granted leadership and responsibility, I softened and grew. With a now enriched appreciation for Reason’s strengths and pitfalls, and a nuanced understanding of how complicated Reason’s role is in the arch of our individual human lives (as well as in the arch of societies, nations, and eras of history), I set sail with Kierkegaard to Scotland, and moved back into theology-land.
There in theology-land, as an MPhil student at the University of St Andrews, I was faced professionally with the questions and problems I’d been haunted by for so long. It was there that I met Karl Barth, the great twentieth century theologian who was an influence on Bonhoeffer and a crucial part of the counter-movement against Nazism in the church.10 Encountering Barth was like lightning from heaven…or, no…it was more the nail in the coffin. With one deft motion Barth drove that much-longed for nail into the coffin of Calvinism, providing a thorough, Scriptural, nuanced and philosophically elegant account of predestination and the doctrine of election.11 Sitting under N.T. Wright’s lectures provided a gentle way into biblical studies “proper” (of which before I’d only engaged through my study of history, ancient philosophy, and gnosticism). Wright reminded that the goodness of God’s work is for all of creation, and exists beyond the exclusivity of our human lives. With Wright’s teachings heaven was brought back down to earth in the ways most familiar to the contemporaries of Jesus.12 Learning through the Torrance legacy was a gift I did not know I was being given until I was at St Andrews too, learning of the reclamation project they had undertaken through St. Athanatias to bring non-hierarchical Trinitarianism back into theology and the church.13
These are just glimmers of a unique time, one in which each year felt distinctly different from the last, each feeling like “the best of times and the worst of times.” Being in St Andrews was like drinking from a fire hose. It was receiving what I was ready for, and it was being knocked over by what I was not. It was the chrysalis stage.
As my degree wrapped up and finally ended, the journey continued on. I “met” Julian of Norwich, who broke into my life in much the same way that Kierkegaard had done, in the critical moment where the Spirit knew I needed someone.14 Julian assured me afresh that God was love—a love that suffered willfully for me, on my behalf, and who in his wisdom was continuing to suffer until the end of time comes. Julian showed me that God was co-suffering love, and that it is this love that is the power of God which ‘the Greeks call foolish and of which the Jews stumble over’ (1 Corinthians 1:22-25).15
Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life was a helpful companion at that time as well, all while I continued my personal instruction by reading and listening to teachers from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, especially Alexander Schmemann through his book For the Life of the World, and the ongoing work of the patristic scholar Father John Behr.
All along this messy intellectual and spiritual journey I came to know God better, including just how much “his ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). Yet in spite of encountering and learning more of God’s strangeness, he became even more so the God who loves me in my particularity, in real time.16 It is here where it will start sounding strange to speak in the past tense, as what happened as a type of event upon myself is still very much playing out and occurring in real time.
I learned and saw just how much God loves to hear from you, dear reader: how much God loves to talk with you, how he truly cares about every part of you. You, reader, exist in this moment because of God’s abiding love for you, and this same God wishes to go through life with you as intimately as you will dare to draw towards him. I’d always suspected and hoped that this was more than just abstract knowledge (or worse, a pipe dream), and I stand in testament today that the gospel is true, and so much better and more interesting and more life-giving than I’d imagined before. He truly is the God who “is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).
I see too how one of the most famous theologians who ever lived, Thomas Aquinas, could sincerely say of himself that all “I have written [the Summa Theologica] seems to me so much straw.” Theology is essential to the flourishing of our minds, and hearts, and lives. But it is not and was never meant to be an end unto itself, as is the case with all theories of knowledge, all rational projects. Theology is ultimately about worship, encounter, co-existence with the living God who is exciting, true, and new every day—who is wise, wonderful, and making all things new.
There are a few gifts that evangelicalism instilled within me, and I only grow in my appreciation of them as time goes by. This is what I consider to be “so right” about evangelicalism’s story, which I mentioned toward the beginning of this piece. Two of these gifts are the insistence that a friendship with God is the greatest pursuit a human being could wish to undertake, and also remembering that it is only God revealed in Jesus Christ who saves you.
It is true, that friendship with God is the wildest and most important part of one’s existence. Yet evangelicals stress an importance on this friendship to the point of placing a person’s very salvation upon it—you must have a “personal” relationship with God (which for the evangelical boils down to a combination of personal Bible reading, prayer, and church-going, which then increases your personal knowing of God). This is where so much well-intended goodness crashes into so much pain, trauma, and woundedness. Pursuing friendship with God is glorious, a highest good, yes!17 But this pursuit must not be confused and mistaken with God’s being in relationship to you. Consider the psalmist in Psalm 139, or consider Jonah. Consider John’s prologue (John 1:1-5), or Colossians 1:15-23. You are already related to God in many ways, and these different types of relationship are all significant in their own right. I still agree with evangelicals that pursuing a friendship with God, which is a very particular and special kind of relationship with God, is the greatest of pursuits and is utterly life-changing. I even agree that all human individuals ought to pursue this friendship with God. But I deeply disagree with the evangelicals’ way of recommending this friendship. I know many who have been deeply wounded by the false message that one is saved by their personal friendship with God, rather than saved by God Himself. Claiming that one’s personal relationship with God is salvific is a confused, mixed message.
It is true too, that only God saves you and that it is by his grace and his giving-ness that he does so. It is true we can easily fall into “legalism;” one ought always to remember this, as we’re each prone to discouragement and forgetfulness on this point. The fear of legalism and the emphasis upon God’s grace does not mean, however, that all of the “extra stuff” that other Christians do are just the optional cherries on top of the Christian’s life. To claim that ‘faith in Jesus Christ by grace alone’ means that activities such as fasting, or confession, or the communion meal are secondary matters is a crossing of the wires. What one does has an intimate relationship with what one has faith in. This “extra stuff,” this taking of communion (Eucharist), getting baptized, saying confession, giving alms, fasting etc. is all a part of one’s relationship with God. The evangelical is right to stress that these activities are not what save you, but they are wrong to imply that they have no saving effect upon you.
I am not trying to be tricky with words here—the point of our lives is not to get in or out of hell by what we do or don’t do, or by what we believe or don’t believe. The point of our lives is to live in communion with God, to be taught by him and to be co-workers and co-heirs to his kingdom, which is not of the world of the devil but is of the world that is already dawning upon us (1 John 2:8; Romans 13:12). The “extra stuff” are opportunities for us to meaningfully engage in this life in companionship with God, being transformed by that process.
Now, I acknowledge that there is an elephant in the room. This elephant is the subject of the Bible. All of an evangelical’s theology and understanding of the gospel can be traced to Bible verses, which are rightly taken very seriously. So, what role does Scripture play in our lives, and how do we read Scripture?
For the evangelical the answer has been instilled at a young age—the Scriptures are God’s Word, which is inerrant, infallible, and inspired by God. It is therefore the rulebook of life, and where you turn to in order to get your questions answered and your needs met; it is the meeting place with God, and the only final, trustworthy source to be relied upon for the meaning and revelation of God’s will. When the evangelical says they want a “biblical” answer, they mean they want to be assured that what is being claimed about God is found somewhere in the Protestant Bible.
Here I am only mentioning the elephant in the room rather than delving into this subject, complex and very worthy though it is. Something I still firmly hold to is the deep conviction that Scripture is unique, indispensable, and worth prayerfully studying throughout your life on a daily basis in communion with the Holy Spirit. It is true, however, that I align with the early church Fathers and the Eastern Orthodox church on this matter, only recognizing the inspiration of Scripture by the Holy Spirit and denying its inerrancy or infallibility. Rather, it is the Holy Spirit himself who is inerrant and infallible. To claim that the Scriptures are inspired by God is, to my mind, an amply mysterious and wonderous proclamation on its own, and enough of a reason to maintain the preciousness and importance of the Scriptures in the life of the individual and the church.
I hope this does not shock or horrify you, my reader, but it is true—ask any biblical scholar worth their salt, and they will tell you that it is only within the last couple hundred years that the concepts of “inerrant” and “infallible” were attached to the Bible. What about Sola Scriptura, you ask? Ah yes, a delightful can of worms…for now, it is sufficient to say that Sola Scriptura does not at all equate to the modern concepts of inerrancy and infallibility as dictated by the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy of 1971. A close study of the politics and history of Martin Luther and the Reformation will yield a better understanding of what Luther did mean by that coinage.
We both agree, the evangelical and I, that the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and is indispensable to the life of the Christian and the church. Indeed, this counts as a third precious gift that evangelicalism gave me. We disagree on how to hermeneutically approach these Scriptures when it comes to inerrancy and infallibility, but this disagreement is not a big enough one to obscure our ability to love and recognize Christ in the opposing other.18
Finally, then, I will deliver on my last promise and answer how I can claim to be more Jesus-loving and Christian now than when I was an evangelical. And here I will provide bottom-of-my-heart answers that will almost certainly be unsatisfactory. Namely, that while I do believe of myself that I love and know Jesus far better than I ever have before (since I’ve had to live with myself, and have known what was and what is in a way no other can know), and while I do believe that in knowing Jesus better I am “more Christian”…ultimately, I cannot and will not say that I am in fact more Jesus loving and more Christian than ever before.
Truly, how could I claim that of myself, when life is not that simple and my story is far from over? And how could I expect myself to be other than I was before in the past; how could it be fair or reasonable to expect anything other than the sincerity of heart and the trials of my mind that were present then, and of which God was lovingly present to? Only God himself can judge whether I am a Christian or not, whether I am a good disciple of Jesus’s or not. He is the living God who is vested in each one of us, who wrestles with us, asking nothing less than our deepest honesty with him and ourselves, nothing less than our greatest sincerity in seeking what is true. He taught me long ago that he leads his people in many ways, and that nobody gets to claim an intellectual or spiritual monopoly upon him. It is humbling to me, too, that while I was raised evangelical and ultimately had to leave and currently find a home in the Episcopal church, my father was raised in the Episcopal church and left as soon as he was out of the house, only to hear the gospel while at college and come to know the personal love of God amidst the evangelicals. Why there is so much leave taking and swapping between churches and denominations is, yes, by this point you’re saying it with me: a huge and worthy subject for consideration at a different time.
Brad Jersak rightly says that “deconstructing” your faith is actually an ancient part of what it has always meant to have faith.19 Kierkegaard stresses this point too, that what we start out knowing about God eventually changes from its first iteration into either a deeper, truer sense of what it was before, or otherwise into something so different that it is foreign to what your former self clung to.20 “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see” John Newton sings, and not just of a singular moment in our life, (even if some of us can point to such a moment!). With Bono I say in the same spirit, “If I was in a café right now and someone said, ‘Stand up if you're ready to give your life to Jesus,’ I'd be the first to my feet. I took Jesus with me everywhere, and I still do.”21
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A postscript on comments: due to the sensitive nature of this subject, and my sincere concern for those who find themselves at odds with what I have related here, the comments section is turned off on this post. Instead I really hope that you, potential commenter, will directly message me to share any thoughts or concerns. This piece is not intended to start a debate, or to act as an invitation to pull out weapons and start an online theological fight. I am fully capable of engaging in such a fight, but what would be the benefit of it? Whoever “wins” (if such a thing is possible), both, in truth, lose. I have no interest in engaging by such means, or distracting away from what this piece is intended for—a partial confession and summary explanation of why, and how, I am what I am today.
Note that I intentionally do not say “original sin.” This is because it is impossible for most Christians (that is, most Western, Protestant, Reformed, and Evangelical Christians) to hear the phrase “original sin” and not assume the version of original sin that says all human individuals inherit the corruption and guilt of Adam and Eve’s first sin. Until we can re-learn that “original sin” can refer to many different accountings of what it means for sin to have entered the world through Adam and Eve, it is better to use different language while we readjusted our ears. You can read the sentence this footnote is appended to without interpreting it as original sin meaning original guilt. Note that you can be an orthodox Christian (that is, a Christian that is not a heretic) and not believe in the doctrine of original guilt. What all Christians agree upon is that sin entered into the world through the choice and subsequent action of Adam and Eve, and that sin ever since then has been a grievous, pernicious, corrupting problem of bondage.
Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, Chapter 2 #10.
Nestorianism was first condemned as a heresy at the third ecumenical council of 431CE, popularly referred to as the Council of Ephesus, and later again at the fourth ecumenical council of 451CE, known as the Council of Chalcedon.
The technical term for the union of Jesus’ two natures (which include his will) is “the hypostatic union.” It is through the hypostatic union that the church fathers were able to claim that Jesus is “of one being with the Father.” The writings and teachings of Cyril of Alexandria and the Cappadocians (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nysa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and also Macrina the Younger) are where the meat of this philosophy comes from, though they were the inheritors of the teachings of St Athanasius and others, and were not the originators of these concepts. As an autobiographical note, Timothy Pawl’s In Defense of Conciliar Christology was my first introduction to the weeds of philosophical Christology. Pawl was a visiting scholar at the time I was beginning at St Mary’s Divinity School in St Andrews, Scotland. The book is extremely technical, but also very good.
Pensées, no. 131.
Yes, it gets even more complicated than this story. Welcome to the fun world of epistemology and the philosophy of knowledge, belief, and reasoning. For now, let the example stand for the illustration it is making.
Plantinga’s essay “Advice to Christian Philosophers” was that timely encouragement I needed. At the University of St Andrews we were all encouraged to read Kevin Diller’s Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response, which at the time was very helpful.
Two notes: first, fundamentalism here does mean anything like the political sense of the word today. It’s a philosophical approach of investigation. Fundamentalism either seeks to understand and establish the fundamentals that govern the world first, before then going on to answer other questions. Or sometimes Fundamentalism sheerly identifies the world’s fundamentals by brute acceptance before building theories of knowledge from them. Second, please do not Google “Rationalism” and believe what you read there—the dictionaries are giving misleading and truncated definitions. Rationalism is much of what it sounds like, being an approach to inquiry that centers around and elevates the reasoning mind’s ability to ascertain truth by the same means (i.e. reason) in all subject matters of inquiry. Human reason, for the rationalist, will always get the final say on any matter, which then of course leads to very interesting questions about what it means to be human, the limits of the mind, and of knowledge itself. Rationalism has had a long history, and will always be a belief system in some form as long as human beings are around. (I could explain more, but hope for now this suffices).
There are copious amounts of material online, but Wright’s book Surprised by Hope is considered one of the best starting points on this matter.
It is hard to find accessible introductions to the Torrances, but starting with the fellowship’s page is a good place. I studied with Alan and Andrew Torrance, who are the son and grandson of J.B. Torrance. J.B. and T.F. Torrance were students of Barth, and each were a significant influence on Scottish theology and church life.
Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) was a theologian, mystic, and anchoress who lived during the Bubonic Plague in England (an anchoress or anchorite is someone who dedicated their life to prayer, meditation, and counseling others from literally within the walls of a church—a cell was built for them to stay in for the rest of their lives).
On the subject of God’s “strangeness ”I have appreciated how Martin Shaw, a recent convert to Christianity, articulates how Jesus is unpredictable and “wild.”
Friendship with God is also costly, painful, and hard, which is not spoken about as often. This is a subject dear to my heart, and perhaps one day I will write more about it.
For more on the subject of how to read the Bible, including the subject of inerrancy and infallibility, I recommend starting with Peter Enns work, as well as that of The Bible Project.
e.g. p. 53 in Jersak, Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction.
For example, Kierkegaard notes in his journal that “so it is with every human being who truly engages with God―there come moments when he must say, ‘You deceived me, O God’―and he is not immediately able to say, ‘but it was for my own good that you deceived me, O God―but into the truth.’ That God must use a deception is not because he is not faithful or because he has changed―no, he is eternally unchanging and educating love. But it is inherent in us to be so reluctant to venture forth. We very much want to fob God off with the assurance that we so very much want to know the truth, as well as assuring him that if only we understood what is right, we would surely do it. This is deceit. Therefore God, like every educator, must use cunning.” SKS/KJN NB24:52.
Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, p. 48