I once loved the Bible. It guided my steps like a lantern in a dark tunnel. In college I would take breaks from Thermodynamics, pull out my brown NIV hardcover and study whole books lectio continua using This Morning With God, a daily guide to Bible reading and reflection.
I worked bit by bit through Luke, Genesis, Acts, Exodus, Amos, Hosea, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, Joshua, Galatians and Romans in the first year. This practice, continued for several years, formed the bedrock of my spiritual life and solidified my core beliefs. I knew the Bible by heart.
Then twenty years ago I went to seminary. The professors, leading lights of my church, more or less told me I didn’t understand the Bible at all. Their insights collided with my own in key ways, and afterward I never approached the Bible with the same serenity and confidence. The professors were gentle souls, but the nature of theological education puts students in the more vulnerable place.
People with similar stories praise this experience as an advent in critical thinking, but I mourn the loss of simplicity and an uncluttered faith. Critical thinking is overrated. Jesus never said, “Your critical thought has saved you. Go in peace.” To this day I waver on whether seminary helps or limits our spiritual development as ministers. I still have the Bible, of course, but it’s not the same. The bowl is broken. Maybe the loss of simplicity was necessary and inevitable. Writing about it, though, has stirred up feelings even twenty years later, and hearing people argue about the Bible or use it to advance an agenda makes me cringe.
But certain gains have arisen to compensate for the loss. My sense of nature as revelation has grown a hundredfold. For me, looking at an oak tree is a form of adoration and prayer. And when I warm my body in the sunlight, my thoughts turn toward the eternal one who is Light Itself. “Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.” (Psalm 34.5 NIV)
Even though my faith is more complicated now than in those uncluttered college days — which didn’t seem simple at the time — it’s a richer faith, not a lesser one. Faith intensifies in testing, as Abraham found in the land of Moriah.
Religious believers, I’ve found, tend to worship God Plus Something: God plus the Bible, God plus a building, God plus the family, God plus justice and nonviolence. These are worthy things, but they are not God, and perhaps in the end they elude us because God will allow no rivals in our affections.
Chris,
Thanks for this post, I particularly found the God plus something idea one that resonates. What you’re writing about here is some of the bittersweet nature of following the path of maturing faith it seems to me.
There is for, as I sense with you, a sort of lamentable loss. Uncluttered is really a good word to describe what I’ve been sorting through as well. Pastoral life has become much more cluttered and the tools I’ve used for establishing order, seem to work less and less well.
Maybe it’s part of understanding that the tools can’t keep all the threads of my life and faith from getting hopelessly tangled, and that only God can.
For what it’s worth…Scot McKnight’s “The Blue Parakeet:Rethinking how We Read the Bible” has been a good tool for me in helping folk work through the complicated relationship with scripture that comes with discipleship.
Peace and Blessings,
Warren
great post. my hermeneutic was also challenged in seminary, but i think for the better. i had friends who came to seminary and had it all figured out; they were simply looking for a degree and a stamp of approval; they were looking for an easy entrance into ministry…bad idea jeans!
however. i hear what you’re saying about a hunger for reading scripture that is stripped of word study, parsing, critical approaches and “the hidden meaning.” just this past year i’ve been on a bible reading plan that has forced me to look into the word with new eyes and greater clarity. it has forced me to ask, “how is my reading shaping my inner life and my ministry?”
great post.
The first thing a New Testament professor said to his class at the PCUSA seminary I attended was, “The Bible is fiction. You need to accept it.” Another professor, of the Old Testament, said in the first class, “The Bible is harmful. We should eliminate at least 95% of it.”
The first thing a distinguished Hebrew Bible scholar said to his class at an elite public university I attended was, “Let me show you the evidence that the writers of this book believed it was perfect.”
The PCUSA seminary I attended seemed to be afraid of the Bible and of people who take it seriously. Their approach to the Bible and theology was ideological – they called it radical.
The university was not afraid of the Bible. The approach to studying the Bible and its meaning was phenomenological, not ideological.
Chris,
Luke Timothy Johnson has written a little on criticle thinking and Scripture. His book “Living Jesus” comes to mind. I enjoyed it very much. Also, George MacDonald wrote and preached a good bit about how Scipture should lead us to Christ, not the other way around. That may not make a lot of sense. Just looking at it in words makes me doubt I’m relaying it to you correctly. But, it makes sense in my head.
Ken,
Speaking of MacDonald, he also wrote quite a bit about “dryness.” Those times when we feel spiritually dark. Your seminary experience has pretty much depressed me all weekend. I’m glad you shared, but nonetheless it has sent me to a place of “dryness.” Whenever I wonder if I’m perhaps resisting a call, I realize that if confronted with your experience, I’d probably end up in a bad spot. Forget dryness. More like dehydrated. Sometimes I think scholars try to take a different position on things just to take it. Gives them something juicy to write their thesis on. But last I checked, our Lord is too big for an academic thesis.
Thanks to all for the comments and book suggestions. I have benefited from your thoughts. Peace to you.
SRB,
The presentation of the Bible at the university was convincing. The case made against the Bible at the seminary was absurd. The Bible, whether by itself or by the Holy Spirit guiding the heart and mind of the reader, is convincing on all things in life, all things in heaven and earth, that really matter.
Ken
I’ve been going through this desert deal for a little over two years & I’m trying to get back the “hunger”.
It all started with my split with a church I helped build that started becoming more of a cult, when I stood on what I believed the truth to be and confronted what I thought to be sin, I was raked over the coals.
A church & Pastor I trusted just turned on me it seamed.
Now I question everything I stood for back then, was I right was I wrong, what if’s???
God’s bigger than all of that, but my studies of the Bible, my prayer times have shrunk to an all time low.
Marty, I’m sorry to hear of your struggles. You’re right, though, God is bigger than all these things. I pray that you are able to take that larger sense of God into a new phase of your relationship with him. Grace and peace to you today.
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