I wrote this piece mostly as an open letter to the friends and family who knew me as a child and now watch aghast (presumably) as I practice what I recently began describing as a “Mystical Atheism”, which I plan on describing in a future essay.
The experience is so common, so universal that it’s become a trope of storytelling: the child leaves home for the first time (usually around the age of eighteen) and finds, with shock and confusion, that the Truths1 he was taught in his youth were merely social conventions or cultural norms and are not shared by the world at large. He learns too that the authority figures of his childhood hadn’t, in fact, cornered the market on this Truth. This was where I found myself in the fall of 1997.
I attended a small Christian college to study and prepare myself for entering the ministry and in one particular course the professor was lecturing on biblical authorship; topics included biblical inerrancy, inspiration, and canonicity.
Already doubtful I would receive a satisfactory answer, I knew I had to ask the question that had been gnawing at the back of my mind since I first began studying these topics a few years earlier.
“Excuse me, professor.” I said, raising my hand. “It seems to me like the reason we have sixty-six books in our Bible as opposed to any other number is because some guys sat in a room and decided it was so.” The bluntness of my question caught the youngish professor off guard.
“Well, Ben, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It wasn’t just one room, or one set of ‘guys’. But yes, that’s the gist I suppose.”
“How do we know if this count is correct?”
“Faith.”
This answer was wholly unsatisfying to me. The tiny evangelical church I had come from taught me, in no uncertain terms, that I had not only been fortunate enough to be born into one of two countries on Earth that God favored (the other being Israel), but I had also been taught the only right religion, the most biblically correct denomination, and even more than that the most right sect of that denomination. Other people were wrong, we were right. Full stop.
The answer this teacher gave was far too hand-wavy to me. I knew there had to be good, sound, logical reasons why these particular 66 books were the right ones, and all the others were the wrong ones. Of course, there were reasons. Lots of reasons. Reasons for 66 books, reasons for 73 books, and reasons for 80 books. To be fair, among the Protestant denominations most of the disagreements were about the Old Testament, the New Testament held steady at 27 books.
After this particular conversation with my professor I didn’t discuss the topic with anyone again for a very long time. “Just have faith” wasn’t the answer I was looking for; it was a cop-out in my mind. I saw the world in very black and white terms2. Everything was either right or wrong. Heaven or Hell. Good or evil. Democrat or Republican. Faith simply left too much gray area for me to be comfortable with. I wasn’t interested in faith, I was interested in Truth. I was attending this institution to sit under the tutelage of minds greater than mine so I might discover deeper Truths about God and the Bible. Paradoxically, the more I studied the less Truth I found, and the more faith I uncovered.
One thing that surprised me was that even within this tiny microcosm of biblical scholarship, the professors’ opinions on topics often differed greatly and they rarely agreed on much at all. In fact, most found a noticeable amount of joy in poking fun at one another’s theological “inadequacies.”
Naturally, as students we emulated these dialectical debates and frequently found ourselves debating biblical concepts in the same way. These conversations usually happened late at night while we were stuffing our faces with pizza and getting wired on Mountain Dew. I genuinely enjoy a good debate, and I regularly found myself flip-flopping on my views several times over the course of an evening, often while playing (and losing at) Command & Conquer LAN parties.
Debates commonly centered around topics such as: What does inerrancy of scripture mean? Is it OK to listen to “secular” music? And of course, how to debate using proof-texts from the Bible to defend any position we might want to hold at the time.
So what did I actually learn in Bible college? I learned that no one has the Truth, indeed there is no Truth at all. There are only smaller truths — individual and communal — that change, adapt, and morph as history marches on. I also learned that a person can use the Bible to defend almost any position they want, from slavery to segregation to totalitarian rule (cf. Nazi Germany).
In my view, Evangelicalism specifically has lost the ability to have dialectical discourse in American culture, becoming less concerned with loving their neighbor and more concerned with the theology of their neighbor. It is no longer 'by faith alone'; it is 'by theology alone' that a person is saved. How sad that the very things I learned in Bible college have become antithetical to the American “Christian-o-sphere.”
I learned that a video game voice saying “nuclear launch detected” can still cause my stomach to sink and my butt to clench.
But most of all I learned how to hold two (or more) opposing truths simultaneously without one negating the other. It’s time to leave the idea of Truth behind and rediscover the power and peace of faith alone.
When someone capitalizes the T in truth, they are referring to an absolute, universal, or objective reality that is considered eternal and unchanging, as opposed to "little-t truth," which refers to subjective beliefs, personal perspectives, or temporary facts.
It would be decades before I discovered this “black and white thinking” is a hallmark of autism… and fundamentalism.