Today I'm posting Ed Babinski's Foreword. Enjoy & Please Share!
John W. Loftus is a former conservative Christian apologist who at some point admitted that he could no longer honestly use the term “Christian” to describe his present beliefs or state of mind since he now doubts many Christian doctrines, beliefs, and biblical interpretations he once formerly accepted as rock-solid truths. His book is a clear, honest, and concise summary of some of the questions he encountered along his spiritual, theological, and philosophical journey. Neither is it as isolated and fearful a journey as some conservative evangelicals may think, because many of today’s top biblical archeologists and biblical scholars from William Dever to Bart Ehrman and Hector Avalos (including many professors in the Jesus Seminar) all began their own journeys as conservative Christians with few doubts, only to discover more questions and uncertainties.
Hence a diversity of opinion exists in modern-day scholarship. In fact, the majority of the world’s educational institutions, though founded originally as conservative Christian seminaries, have also taken journeys similar to John’s when engaging the learned opinions among scholars. Within two hundred years of Calvin’s death, the very College of Geneva that John Calvin founded became open to all sorts of Enlightenment ideas and doubts concerning how literally to take the Bible and Christian doctrines. So John’s experience not only parallels that of other individuals, like Dever, Ehrman, and Avalos, but also seminaries once founded to promote conservative Christian views. Yale, it must be remembered, was originally founded in reaction to the “theological excesses” of Harvard, yet today look at Yale!
Meanwhile, the types of institutions that continue to defend the “inerrancy of the Bible” are all relatively young institutions. In time however, if they grow and attract the brightest and the best, they will have to interact with the scholarly world and read not simply evangelical or inerrantist publications, but engage with ongoing worldwide interdisciplinary biblical research and questions. If a conservative evangelical Christian pokes his nose in theology books, journals, Bible dictionaries, and Bible commentaries published by Oxford, Yale, and/or Cambridge University—to name just a few (not to forget the Anchor Bible series of commentaries)—he or she is bound to begin running into the diversity of opinion among scholars concerning the meaning and relative importance of passages from Genesis to Revelation. Even evangelical scholars at Wheaton College like Professor Walton are beginning to catch up with scholarly questions concerning how literally the ancient Hebrews probably understood their own “primeval history” in Genesis and conclude we need not take them so literally today.1
Another service John’s book provides is demonstrating to many who are having doubts that there are others out there like them. His book helps support others making the sometimes difficult transition, which usually involves some isolation and loneliness, since your former best friends in church have little idea why you need time away from church to read and reconsider your beliefs, or why you might not feel right about repeating the creedal affirmations aloud or singing the old choruses.
Again, speaking as someone who has himself spent years of his former Bible-believing life trying to hold on to every word of the Bible “without error,” I wonder today just what conservative Christians do believe, or even if they themselves really know. There are probably a lot more unspoken doubts going on in the Christian world than anyone cares to personally relate. For instance, do conservative Christians imagine a literal talking serpent was “the shrewdest beast of the field God created,” but then God cursed it to “go on its belly”? (Not much of a “curse” to put on a serpent, come to think of it.) Do they all believe in the story of forbidden edible fruit, and that all the natural causes of suffering on earth and throughout the cosmos—including volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, as well as diseases, poisonous microbes, and insects—were all simply the result of one human couple’s disobedient hungering for a piece of fruit? Do they believe a woman named Eve was cloned directly from Adam’s rib? Do Christian apologists really doubt none of those old mythological tales out of Israel’s primeval history in Genesis? Do they plead that Lot’s wife must have indeed turned into a literal pillar of salt? Or do some of them simply make embarrassed excuses for the tale of Noah, admitting, “it was only a local flood.” Do they accept the true scientific age of the earth, regardless of what the “ages of the Patriarchs” adds up to, and regardless of the fact that Genesis states that the first light of the entire cosmos was created simply to accommodate “days/nights, evenings/mornings” as measured on one tiny planet, the earth? (How geocentric, that is, the whole cosmos created to suit earth’s “days,” the time of revolution of only one planet in the whole cosmos.)
If Christian apologists do not imagine such things, or have even the barest of doubts concerning them, then what exactly do they believe, and how can they tell others they are so sure? It’s the old crossroads that even Christian conservatives eventually come to: either try to compress all of geology and cosmic astronomical time into the thimble-full of years of the “primeval history” portions of Genesis, whose names of patriarchs and events of their lives even Jesus alluded to, or admit that Jesus was merely repeating back the prejudices of his day just so others would understand him? But by doing so, did Jesus know that he’d be legitimating today’s “young-earth creationists” two thousand years hence? Can the Old Testament language in the primeval history easily be interpreted to make room for a cosmos billions of years old, with the earth created later in cosmic history, with humanity appearing very late on earth geologically?
All Christians also have to face the evidence of changes in teachings over time, or explain them away as progressive revelation or “different dispensations,” because the Bible’s views of God, Satan, the afterlife, and what you needed to do to please God changed over time, from the oldest Old Testament works to later ones, and from the Old Testament to intertestamental works, and from those works to the earliest New Testament writings. There are changes internal to the Gospels themselves that can be seen when you compare and contrast stories of, say, the resurrection from Paul to Mark, Matthew, Luke, John (not to forget the later Jesus tales in the apocryphal Gospels concerning the resurrection and heaven and hell, because Christians did not cease writing stories of Jesus after the four Gospels were finished, but continued composing tales).
Two thousand years and forty-five thousand separate Christian denominations and missionary organizations later, we have modern-day “Christianity,” including everything from Trappist monks and Quakers who worship in silence, and meditating Christians dialoging with Eastern faiths, to hell-raisers and snake-handling Christians. We have damnationists and universalist Christians, and many more groups besides. Even after the Roman Empire adopted and enforced Christian faith, Arian and Athanasian Christians rioted, killed, and persecuted each other, as did Donatists and Catholics. And none of the older ideas ever fully die out, because some of the Bible verses and arguments used by Arians were much later revived and used by deists and Unitarians, while the Donatists never gave up their fight to appoint their own priests rather than Rome, kind of like today’s ultraconservative Catholics who think the papacy is wrong but the rest of Catholicism is good. And there are many differences of opinion on everything in Christianity today from social issues to religious issues like tongue-speaking; baptism; miracles; when and how to best honor the Sabbath; what Old Testament laws ought to be enforced today for the good of society; what signs to look for in the “saved,” including “short hair in men”; or using the King James Bible above all other translations. Meanwhile some things that the early church emphasized are little emphasized today, except among the Catholics, by which I mean clergy celibacy, as seen in the words of Jesus and Paul and the author of Revelation. Christianity continues to evolve and branch into further new rival denominations and suborganizations as time goes on. How Darwinian of the churches!
Those like John who finally do climb off the Christian merry-go-round are indeed dizzy after leaving and wonder why others choose to stay. There is, after all, something to be said for self-reliance and allowing one’s inquisitive mind to ponder questions for a season, even if doubting can make one feel less secure and less ecstatic than riding the merry-go-round. At least you begin to feel more like yourself, less at the mercy of your brain, which mindlessly pops out proof-texts, or fearing hell for even spending time away from church. You begin to feel more, well, “human,” and hence begin to view others as having similar doubts and fears and also similar hopes and joys.
Edward T. Babinski
author of Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists
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