Will intellectual inquiry kill your faith? Is that a concern? If the entire bible is God’s inspired word, shouldn’t the entire volume stand any authentic scrutiny? None of us believe that God wants us to set our intellect on ‘dumb’ simply to maintain faith do we?
Many believers accept the bible as God’s inspired word and have accepted in principle that it shall be believed in its totality. I also observe that there are Christians who believe the core gospel elements concerning God, sin, penalty, Jesus, and salvation, yet who struggle with some of the extreme narratives of scripture and what they suggest about God. Simple trust becomes complicated by a requisite need for credible explanation.
For instance, I was virtually bald at age 26 and convincingly bald since age 30, and if some teens humiliated me by calling me ‘chrome dome,’ ‘Mr. Clean,’ ‘cue ball,’ ‘baldy,’ I might swear at them. I haven’t but it may have been a possibility before I stopped caring. But what if God dispatched bears to chew a few of the teens to death as a lesson to others? That is precisely the substance of a story in 2 Kings when some young people offended Elisha the prophet of God. That’s severe.
And what if some attendees at church want to investigate or question such narrative? Can the rest of the church handle that without censuring them as heretics?
You raise some good questions. I think it may be very difficult in many Evangelical churches to raise questions about the sort of narratives you mention. Of course the order for the slaughter of infants in the Israelite invasion of Palestine raises just such a question because, on the face of it, that order seems to portray a God of a different nature than that shown in the New Testament, and in part of the Old.
ReplyDeleteChurches understandably want to be faithful in defending the revelation of God as found in the Bible. But how can they do that and at the same time respond to honest questioning, without making the questioner feel he is making himself an outsider with his questions? Does anyone out there have an answer?