Re-examining my faith

Earlier this week, I found myself sitting down to write about my beliefs as a Christian.  I’d had a rather vivid dream, in which someone said something that didn’t feel right to me, and I woke with the strong urge to write a response to what she’d said.  But I didn’t get far before I started to wonder if my counter-argument was, in fact, rather weak.

You see, I’m not what you’d call a bible-thumper.  Truth be told, I have a great deal of difficulty believing the Bible is “the divinely inspired Word of God” — a perfectly accurate and unalterable copy of God’s message to us.  There were just too many people involved in writing it — people with points of view, agendas, and human natures.  The gospels, for instance, that tell us of Jesus’s life, were written no less than 30 years after his death, and only two of the four by people who knew him personally.  That’s a lot of passed time, a lot of slow distillation of memory in a lot of heads, and a lot of second- and third-hand information.  Most of it wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, in other words.

As such, my faith is based on what I’ve found “reading between the lines”, sifting out the cultural and narratorial biases, and finding the common threads.  In the end, what I believe is simply what “feels” true to me, those parts that fit with my own experiences, and that remain consistent when all brought together.  And my spirituality, if you will, has been the constant testing of those beliefs, and their application in my life.

The problem is, as a result, I haven’t actually read the Bible in some time.  I mean, I was surrounded by it until I was in my teens.  I’ve heard the stories from both the Old and New Testaments more times than I can count.  They’ve become part of who I am.  As a child, I memorized many bible verses, some of which I can still quote today.  But like anyone else, the ones I remember the most are the ones that mean the most to me — the ones that underpin and reinforce my beliefs.  Everything else just fades away.  As noted in several passages, Jesus gave us first principles — Love God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your soul; and love your neighbour as yourself — and I just tend to work from there.

But this disconnection from the source text raises a question: what if, after so much time, I’m following only myself?

Of course, the “reductionist Westerner” in me points out that, in fact, that’s what’s everyone’s doing — that, as fault-tolerant, context-sensitive, experiential beings, we are not capable of understanding any given message exactly the same way as anyone else.  That, in fact, we change the message as we listen to it, filtering it through our experiences and our personalities, picking out the parts that feel relevant and discarding everything else.  That is, in fact, a necessary part of human nature — it’s how we cope with a world that is far too full of information.

But still, if I’m being honest with myself, I have to question even that point of view.  What if, contrary to my beliefs, the source text is more signal than noise?  What if my direct and personal experience of God has, in fact, been a figment of my imagination, and my beliefs a slowly drifting lie?

So, I’ve decided to go back to the texts.  I’m going to read them through, with as open a mind as I can manage, and see what I find now, some fifteen or twenty years later: the gospels, some of the Gnostic texts, and some modern texts, as well.  I read Luke from end-to-end earlier this week, and what I found there wasn’t entirely comfortable reading, as far as my relationship with God is concerned.  That said, Luke’s text seems internally inconsistent, and portrays a Jesus who is angry and irritated, more often than not.  And Luke never met Jesus personally.  I don’t know what to make of it, yet, but I’m trying to keep an open mind.  I figure I’ll need to read a few more of the gospels before deciding anything.

I’ll write about what I find.