How Actually Reading the Bible Destroyed My Christian Worldview

As a teenager, I raised a holy fit when my Biology I teacher mentioned evolution in the classroom. But I really can't blame myself: I had been raised that way.

I wasn't a stupid child. In fact, I think that I had been trained very well in the arts of logic and persuasion as a result of attending church every Sunday of my childhood, not to mention the various revivals and weekly meetings I had suffered on countless nights. In those meetings, great emphasis was placed upon the logic of scripture. It was presumed, since scripture was God-breathed and inherently infallible, that anyone who attended to them with diligence would locate Truth. I also learned that translations, or "versions" of the text substantively influenced the meaning, and consequently, the Truth of the original, God-inspired scriptures. This served to increase my awareness of metalanguage in the study of scripture.

In retrospect, it really was a grossly effective manner of training a child in the arts of language. Many American protestant churches of the late 20th century were great melting pots of ideology in which expatriates of various faiths intermingled to share ideas in the wake of the institutional scandals of the late 60s through the early 80s. From Richard Nixon to Jimmy Swaggart, a distrust of any authority had forced individuals into a corner, armed with their own interpretations of scripture as a guide through the complexities of faith.

One immediate effect of this was the intermingling of the various versions of the holy book that were used in churches that were becoming increasingly interdenominational. It was common that a preacher would read scripture from a text that did not match the language of the text from which I was reading--and from which I was encouraged both to read and to take notes. The pastor of my church most often read from the New King James Version of the Bible. In elementary school, the Bible that I most often carried was a New International Version, but I did own copies of the NKJV and the Living translation from which I read at various times. In high school I was introduced to the Revised Standard Version, and in college I graduated to become a reader of the English Standard Version, of which a leather-bound copy now sits on my bedside table just inches from where I type these words (not that I ever actually read the thing).

Despite the particular translation that was used, there was always an understanding that the particular version used by a reader mattered little if the student were attendant to the fact that all versions were attempts at making the meaning of the original texts accessible to modern audience without losing the grist of the God-breathed message within Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew words. To a serious student of the Bible, it mattered little that the NIV was a thought-for-thought translation while the KJV was a word-for-word translation, so long as the student was constantly aware that these difficulties of translation were exigent, and that grappling with words such as elohim and logos was part and parcel to biblical study.

Where else are these skills demanded from 12-year-olds if not in churches? Where else do children learn to use reference such as biblical concordances to uncover the meaning of a translated word?

All of a sudden, the English teacher inside of me is getting a little frustrated.

I remember reading a passage in the Bible and--for whatever reason--taking notice that a particular word was used in a particular verse. If I had been reading an NIV translation, I would pull a KJV translation from the shelf to see if the same word had been used. If not, I really got excited and began looking at all sorts of translations to consider the various words that had been chosen as I considered what biases informed the choices of the various translators. Then, I would turn to my hefty concordance  to locate the word of the original text, studying where this word was used in other contexts in the Bible in order to achieve a fully circumspect understanding of the shades of meaning that must have been available to the writer who in his native tongue chose the word to express the thoughts of God. It really was a fantastically exciting activity for a child who was seeking nothing more than an understanding of the eternal truth of God.

But the people that were teaching me were also teaching me that God most certainly created the universe in six, twenty-four hour days, and on the seventh day He rested.

This fact (and many others) were presented so frequently and so dogmatically that I never was given opportunity to consider that any other possibility could exist, and that anyone who presented another possibility was almost certainly deluded by Satan, at least.

Then, at about the age of 17 or so, I decided to read the Bible from the beginning to the end for myself. But don't get excited: I didn't hardly make it through the Pentateuch before I had become distracted by less tedious inducements. However, it little mattered that I never made it though the Major Prophets because the damage had already been done in Genesis chapter two:

For the uninitiated, I will be brief: Genesis 1, the "Creation Story" that clearly outlines the anti-evolution, six-day creative process that culminates with the creation of mankind on the sixth day, very explicitly states that God had already created vegetation three days earlier (Genesis 1:11--13). Meanwhile, Chapter 2 of Genesis tells a completely contradictory tale. Either my training in the literal interpretation of the Bible had been misguided, or the Bible had turned out to be a crock of skubalon. In either case, my logical framework required straightening.

Here is the problem: The people who had trained me to believe that the universe had been created in six, twenty-four hour days also believed that any other interpretation of Genesis 1 would undermine other doctrines in scripture as well. And they were right.

It took a really long time (about 15 years), but gradually, and after many conversations with my brother David, I came to understand certain and objective truths about the universe. The universe is billions of years old. The Grand Canyon was not created by a massive, world-wide flood. Dinosaurs and mankind did not coexist. Homo sapiens very likely do have non-homo sapien ancestors. Despite the compelling notion that  fact that Nessie might really be proof for Creationism, unfortunately, I have finally come to face the sad reality that science actually works.

Once I was forced to confront the facts of science in contrast to the willful ignorance of religious dogma, I did have to question everything else. Why, for example, do Roman Catholics call their priests father? (Don't worry, they have a really long answer to that question, but I will not mention the grave similarities between the Roman Catholic priesthood and the Jewish rabbinical culture of Jesus' day). Why did John the Baptist baptize Jesus Christ for salvation before Christ shed his blood on Calvary? And puhLEASE don't give me any crap about perfected salvation that occurred for those who were baptized after Christ fulfilled his calling, because that really drives me into a state of confusion that I haven't experienced for a really long time.