December 31, 2020
Like many of you, I went through a “liberal Christian” phase before I fully deconverted.
Liberal Christians are difficult to define because they “pick and choose” which parts of Christianity and the Bible they like while discarding the rest.
Fundamentalists call this “Cafeteria Christianity” and while I once agreed that it was wrong, I later resorted to doing just that for a very short time before leaving the faith altogether.
Some aspects of liberal Christian ideology are:
- No longer believing in hell as a physical location of eternal torture.
- Acknowledging that the Bible has mistakes and that some of it is literal while other parts of it are metaphorical.
- Believing that God still exists but looks nothing like the Christian God as described in the Bible.
There are, of course, many other characteristics, but that’s the general gist.
When I was doing my cover-to-cover read through of the Bible, I was meeting regularly with a mentor. This mentor was (and still is) a great guy who was very knowledgeable about the Bible. What I admired most about him (and still do) was his willingness to say, “I don’t know” when I asked him about confusing passages of Scripture.
However, at that time in my life, I wasn’t willing to entertain “I don’t know.” Me not knowing what the Bible said was the reason I’d committed to reading it in the first place. The last thing I wanted to do after all that time invested was to come out on the other side still not knowing what the Bible said.
As a result, I consulted sources outside of Christian thought to fill in the gaps. These ideas made a lot of sense to me, and it didn’t take long before I found my inerrant view of Scripture quickly unraveling.
I didn’t jump directly to being a non-believer. I tried out being a liberal Christian for a while.
After I’d finished reading the Bible, I was ready to admit that it did, in fact, have errors and inconsistencies.
I’d also changed my view on the Bible from being one single book to being a library of collected manuscripts that spanned centuries. As a result, there was no way these books could all hold together seamlessly. Therefore, I was willing to admit that some sections were history, some myth, and others simply boring documentation of the laws of an ancient culture.
My mentor taught me that the best way to read Scripture was to find a way to apply it to my daily life. I talked about this here when I analyzed the formula for modern day sermons.
In that article, I explained how all sermons end with the pastor trying to shoe-horn an application of Scripture to daily life even when it doesn’t fit.
Sure, the sayings and parables attributed to Jesus can be quite easy to apply to normal life in the modern era. “Do unto others” is great advice. But this falls apart in the Old Testament. How do I apply, say, the Book of Leviticus to my daily life?
My mentor told me that Leviticus is a list of stuff that I would have to do if Jesus hadn’t died for me, but since he did, then I can read it and be thankful.
I just couldn’t connect those dots. I just couldn’t make myself believe that Leviticus was anything more than merely a documentation of ancient laws.
During this time, I found the writings of Marcus Borg to be helpful, particularly his book Reading the Bible Again For the First Time. This book helped formulate the thoughts that I was already having myself as I read through the entire Bible: that it doesn’t all need to be literally true to still contain truth and meaning.
There’s a reason slippery slopes are called that. It didn’t take me long before I came very liberal.
- I was willing to admit that Bible characters such as Moses and Adam and Eve never existed in history.
- I was very happy to believe that the book of Job was not literal, but rather a myth.
- I was able to accept the general story of Jesus in the gospels without getting hung up on the inconsistencies.
It eventually got to where I realized that the only thing in the entire Bible that literally needed to be true was that Jesus died and was resurrected from the dead.
During this time period, I felt like I grew a lot. In a way, I had grown because I was finally able to let go of some of the fundamentalist ideals that had been indoctrinated into me over time. Many people never even get that far.
But it didn’t take me long to realize that what I was doing was the same thing fundamentalist Christians do—I was looking for a way to explain away the more problematic parts of Scripture and the Christian religion.
And when I really contemplated on the stance that the Resurrection was the only thing that needed to literally be true for Christianity to be real, then I was finally forced to admit what was actually happening.
I was losing my faith. I was deconverting.
I realized that I needed to put the Resurrection to the test in the same way that I’d put the rest of the Bible to the test. Of course, it didn’t take long to strip away the tenuous grip I’d maintained on the truth of the Resurrection.
And the rest, as they say, is history.