I sat on my top bunk, theology books strewn across the bed and classic Steven Curtis Chapman playing in my headphones. My giant NRSV study Bible turned to a rainbow of yellows, pinks, and greens as my highlighters did their work. I became a religion major during the second semester of my sophomore year of undergrad, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. “This will be just like extended church camp,” I thought, completely ignorant of the fact that the floor was about to fall from beneath me. It started really small – with tiny nagging questions about authorship. “You mean, Moses himself may have not actually written the Pentateuch?” My margins were filled with symbols and question marks and other confused scratchings of a twenty year old.
I had just never asked questions about what my church had taught – at all. Even seemingly innocent questions, like, “How could Moses have written about his own death,” were earth shattering because I wasn’t used to asking those questions. Sure, I had asked questions about what passages meant, “how far is too far,” and about God’s “will for my life” – but I never actually asked questions about the things that appeared in the liner notes of my teen study Bible. When I started to ask these small, benign questions, I realized that asking questions is part of the process…Someone has to ask these questions, right? I mean, this was first-year religious studies material. So, I started to wonder, if “they” didn’t tell me about these authorship controversies, what else did they leave out?
Cut to canonization (If you don’t know what that means, here is a really concise overview). As I wrestled with the idea of a bunch of people (men…specifically) that chose what was in and what was out, the neat, tidy, handed down letter from God metaphor started to fall apart in my mind. There was just so much human involvement…and I had never thought about that before. Why did we use words like “inerrant” and “infallible” to describe a library of books written and collected by a bunch of different guys long ago to make moral and ethical decisions today? How could we trust that they chose “the right books” and what if there is something they left out?
For a while, I placated myself within my understanding of God’s sovereignty…that God somehow divinely orchestrated the process from afar…
But the questions continued to burrow deeper and deeper. I was no longer able to just take the words in my Bible’s liner notes as fact…I had to do (…wait for it…) some of my own research. I was overwhelmed, a little miffed that I had to revise previous understandings, and terrified about the rabbit hole my questions were leading me into. But alas, I continued to journey deeper.
Photo by Vladimir Kramer on Unsplash
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