A second blog on Questioning the Bible

This is the second in a series of blogs dealing with a book called Questioning the Bible. The author, Jonathan Morrow, is taking on some of the most difficult challenges facing the Bible today.

Toward the end of his introduction, the author points out something that a lot of people don't seem to understand. He says seeking is hard work. It will require courage, effort, and diligence. He warns the readers that some of the items he will be covering may make them a bit uncomfortable. But he quotes C. S. Lewis, who said, "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth – only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair." His point here is that we need truth rather than wishful thinking to build our lives upon. So many people are quick to declare there is no truth out there--an easy copout so they don't have to think and weigh alternatives.

So let's start with the first major challenge he deals with – is the Bible anti-intellectual? I love his opening comments where he says today our society has an over emphasis on emotion and the devaluing of reason. One of my favorite sentences says, "Our culture worships at the altar of sound bites, slogans, and quick updates." He is so right. Whether it's advertisements or politics, everything is aimed at our hearts and not our heads (remember "Hope and Change"?). This results in making it difficult to have sustained thought and critical reflection. We spend way too much time on the trivial and dismiss the meaningful.

Morrow says there are three spiritual dead ends we must avoid as we start on our search for spiritual truth. The first is, "People are free to believe whatever they want about God." Of course, our society reveres religious liberty and freedom of conscience. We talk much about tolerance in our society, but we have it all mixed up. Real tolerance, he says, is where we extend to each other the right to be wrong. He compares that to false tolerance, which naïvely asserts that all ideas are created equal. We are not allowed to disagree anymore. His main point is that simply believing something doesn't make it true. People are entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own truth. The author indicates belief is not what ultimately matters – truth is.

A second spiritual dead end is this – "All religions basically teach the same thing." This statement, of course, is an attempt to avoid offending people. But if we are trying to find the truth out about God or ultimate reality, then he believes this myth has to be dispensed with quickly. He claims the differences between religions are worth debating because they are huge. Just think about how religions see God, Jesus Christ, sin, the solution to our problems, the afterlife, what makes a moral life. They each have very different answers, and it belittles them to suggest they're pretty much the same. The truth is that religions of the world make exclusive and mutually contradictory claims.

More to come in a future blog.