1.  Peter Gomes began his book, The SCANDALOUS gospel of JESUS (HarperCollins, 2007) with a bang on the Bible.  The whole first chapter is in the link.  But let me give you some of my heated engagement.

. . . when I had been warned by my pious old Sunday school teacher, for whom I had memorized vast quantities of the King James Bible, “Don’t take a Bible course; they’ll give you criticism and you’ll lose Christ!” “Bible 101,” a staple in every required liberal arts curriculum in those days, did introduce us to a more complicated biblical universe than the one that most of us had left behind in Sunday school.  I had never noticed, for example, that there were two creation stories, that the second version was older than the first, and that Moses could have written the first five books except posthumously” (13).

I, however, did not know when to quit and went on to divinity school.  At Harvard in those days we had the benefit of the teachers of our teachers, for our biblical professors, including Krister Stendahl, George Ernest Wright, Frank Moore Cross, Jr., Helmut Koester, and Amos N. Wilder, were the men who wrote the books that everybody else used.  We were schooled in the fine arts of textual exegesis, the history of criticism, the close study of particular books, and the debates about authorship.  Barth, Bultmann, and Tillich were as relevant to our biblical studies as were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John . . . (14)

And then after lamenting the lack of preachers sharing higher criticism with their congregations and re-igniting Fosdick’s famous question for fundamentalists (LDS readers, the last phrase of this sermon should connect you to the title of an LDS blog, Weightier Matters of the Law) he writes . . .

If to this state of affairs one adds the iconography of most Protestant churches, which gives pride of place to an open Bible propped up between flowers or candlesticks, and the declaration that “This is the word of the Lord,” then we have given the Bible a position that does not permit criticism or examination.  In those circumstances the reticence of the pulpit is understandable, but the result is costly, for an ignorant people and a reticent pulpit are the recipe for theological and biblical disaster (15).

Excuse me?  What is the impending disaster?  That laymen might actually believe and trust their Bibles?  For the record, our church family has a large, open Bible sitting below the pulpit on the communion table. 

2.  Tony Jones in a new book, The New Christians:  Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (Jossey-Bass, 2008), immediately picks up on this theme of higher criticism at the beginning of his book (Notice that these liberal authors always begin their books with Bibliology, sort of like the first article of faith in those congregational statements of faith which they dread.)

At the same time, a new kind of biblical scholarship was in its ascendancy in Europe:  German professors were using critical literary and historical methods to investigate the veracity of the biblical texts, culminating with Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1906.  Scweitzer concluded, famously, that Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t God after all but instead a wild-eyed apocalyptic rabbi who threw himself on the wheel of history only to be crushed by it.

The majority of leaders in American church embraced these academic trends.  These were the mainliners, and they were in the majority.  The only other choice in American Christianity was fundamentalism, and this was the backwoods, snake-handling, poison-drinking, Bible-thumping version of fundamentalism (12).

Ha ha, very funny.  Wait a minute.  I thought Tony didn’t like mischaracterization.  At the end of the book, he expresses unhappiness when conservative evangelicals do this to him and his buddies. Go figure.  (And though Schweitzer was a genuis – three earned doctorates – he shared poppycock about Jesus.  He never honestly accepted Jesus’ claims in John’s Gospel.)

Tony did manage to pull himself somewhat out of the hole with this definition of Fundamentalism:

A particularly rigid adherence to what is considered foundational to a religion.  In American Christianity, fundamentalism began in the early twentieth century as a reaction to modernism and codified the “Five Fundamentals” of Christian belief: the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Jesus, physical resurrection at the end of time, individual atonement of the believer by Jesus’ death, and the Second Coming of Jesus in the future.

Isn’t it naïve of people to even see those heart issues in the scriptures?  Don’t those ideas just come from comic books?

But then Tony says it is pretty well hopeless for conservative evangelicals:

For the conservative, the sacred text of Christianity is indubitable, established by an internal and circular reasoning:  “The Bible claims to be God’s truth, so therefore it’s true.”  Many evangelicals have a more sophisticated view of scripture than this, but they’re still destined to a life of establishing the veracity of the Bible in the face of contravening evidence and opinion: (19)

For support, the author provides a stupid conversation on the page.  It gets even worse in the dialogue exchange between the True Biblicist, Brain, and Emergent (124-129).

3.  But the silent sobs really rack my soul when looking through this book:  God’s Problem:  How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (HarperCollins 2008) by Bart Ehrman.

It’s sad.  It is more than sad.  It is awful.  I ache.

Bart writes,

If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?  The problem of suffering has haunted me for a very long time.  It was what made me begin to thing about religion when I was young, and it was what led me to question my faith when I was older.  Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith (1).

I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian.  The subject of this book is the reason why.

In an earlier book, Misquoting Jesus:  The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I have indicated that my strong commitment to the Bible began to wane the more I studied it.  I began to realize in its very words (the view I had at Moody Bible Institute), the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different countries and writing for different reasons to different audiences with different needs.  But the problems of the Bible are not what led me to leave the faith.  These problems simply showed me that my evangelical beliefs about the Bible could not hold up, in my opinion, to critical scrutiny.  I continued to be a Christian—a completely committed Christian—for many years after I left the evangelical fold.

Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether.  I did not go easily.  On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward.  But I came to a point where I could no longer believe.  It’s a very long story, but the short version is this:  I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life.  In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things.  For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering.  I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it. (3)

Thanks for the honesty, Bart, in front of all the American people. 

Bart saw this paradox fully spelled out in the Bible, and he couldn’t accept it.

1.  God is all powerful.

2.  God is all loving.

3.  There is suffering.

It is difficult for any human heart to humbly bow to the biblical mystery and simply trust the Lord.  There must be a supernatural intervention.  Bart’s intellect could not surmount the biblical data, and it (his intellect) crushed his shallow faith.

At 2:29 a.m, I mourn.  I weep.

And I pray for American readers of the Bible.