Deconstructing and losing faith by reading the Bible?

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm out doing some errands today, and while I was at the gym, I decided to check my messages on social media and email, and I often do that to try to kill two birds with one stone, save some time.

And I had a message that linked to an article in the Christian Post by Dan Kimble, who writes an article called Deconstructing and Losing Faith by Reading the Bible, and I thought this is such an interesting topic.

I'd love to just do a short podcast on it because it's such a short article, and it's in layman's terms, which is great, and it describes something, a phenomenon that's happening everywhere. And it's not just a problem for conservative evangelicals.

It's a problem for anyone in Christendom. You could be, you know, in a mainline denomination, very much on the progressive left, engaging in all kinds of false teachings, and this is something you're also concerned about.

And the article gives some remedies for this, but I think it misses the heart of—it has some good things. I should say it's very well-meaning, it has some very good things, but I think it misses something that's very important.

It leaves out the main reason behind why this is happening, and that will affect how we answer it and how we think about it. So the problem is, people are leaving the faith, and they're doing so not just by leaving because they're converting to another religion or something.

They're deconstructing their faith, right? It's a postmodern kind of—there's a postmodern element to it, the ex-evangelical craze, that kind of thing, and they'll say as much. And one of the main ways that this happens, or at least the off-ramp, is they end up reading the Bible, and they see, hey, there's a lot of stuff in there that I didn't know was in there.

I didn't realize that the Bible talks about slavery in a positive way ever, anywhere. I didn't realize the way it talks about women in some places. I didn't realize that polygamy's in there and horrible judgment from Noah's flood, and the list just goes on about things that modern egalitarians would have an issue with.

And so the obvious question, which really isn't asked in this, but the obvious question I have first is, if someone's leaving the faith, what kind of a faith were they in? I mean, they never read the passages on those things?

They were just unaware? That's pretty shocking to me. How can you be unaware of what the Bible teaches if you go to a church that teaches the Bible? And I think the answer is—or answers is, one, they didn't go to a church that taught the Bible, perhaps, and that's part of the problem.

They were never converted, and so they're leaving a faith they never really had. They thought it was this man-centered thing that gave them motivation for life, maybe positive thinking or something, but that's not really what Christianity is.

So that's number one. Number two is, they may be looking for an excuse. They may think, okay, I want to leave now, I like my sin, and this gives me moral superiority. I can leave the faith, I can blame it on the morality of the Bible because it's inferior to my morality, and I don't need that to be good.

I can be better than the Bible is. That kind of thing, right? So you get that, which is more arbitrary. It's just you're positing your own moral standard, and it's just a way of trying to justify it. And then I think one other, maybe, I'll put it as, I guess, point three.

Point three would be this. You go to a church, and you do learn those stories, but you were never really given a way of connecting them to God's law. You didn't understand why there were prohibitions against eating shellfish or mixed fabrics, and you didn't understand how polygamy could possibly fit in with the plan of redemption or you didn't see how God could tolerate such a thing, and it was never discussed, and you never had those hard conversations.

So those are the three things that I see, the possibilities for why someone would give that reason for leaving the Christian faith. But what I want to do is, it's a short article, let's read it, and I'll just make some comments as we go, and then at the end, kind of tie it all together with what I think the main response should be to all of this.

Reading the Bible as an Off-Ramp from Faith

So it starts off with, it's January, and that means many Christians have started the year with a fresh goal to read through the Bible. In the past, this has generally been celebrated and seen as positive when someone decides to do that.

However, there is a significant change happening out there. Many are starting to claim, as they read the whole Bible, that it is not the good book, but it is the evil book. Is the good book actually an evil book?

Now this is the heart of it, I think. I mean, if you really want to put it in layman's terms, you can get past all the postmodern mumbo jumbo. Is the Bible good or is it evil? Now what's the premise behind that?

It used to be, in pre-modern cultures, that the reality was something external that we would all have to live in, and we were judged by. And we didn't get to set the parameters for what is good and bad.

Those just simply exist, and we either abide by them or we don't. Well, now today, morality is not set that way. Morality is something that's far more set by individual perspective or group perspective, but the point is that it arises from man.

It's not part and parcel to the created order. And so if you start off with that assumption, then you get to be the judge of the Bible. You can say, well, there's this moral standard that stems from mankind somewhere, and we can compare the Bible to that and judge the Bible.

And that's the root assumption that this article doesn't really get into. That is where probably the majority of the focus ought to be. But there are some good things in the article, so let's keep going.

David, Noah, and the Problem of Presentism

It talks about social media and how there's all kinds of stories about people turning from agnostics, turning to agnosticism and atheism. And the story goes that they grew up in churches, heard nice stories.

They were told about David and Goliath and Noah and the happy animals in the ark. But that wasn't so great when they realized those stories actually depict things like David being a polygamist with eight wives and concubines, killing 200 men, removing their forage skins as a bridal gift to one of his wives.

Noah, and that whole story with the massive death that is so, you know, all of humanity dying except him and his family. The idea that the story of him getting drunk and passing out naked after he gets off the ark.

I mean, this is in the Bible, right? And so these are hard to square with a very simplistic understanding of God's law, where God's law is very focused on the betterment of man. And of course, God's law is good.

It is. I mean, look, God doesn't just lay down his law in an arbitrary fashion because he could care less about man, but just wants these rules followed. There is a benefit to following his law. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul.

And so some of these challenging things that we find in Scripture challenge, I think, what amounts to an oversimplified and distorted view of God's law. That God's law is there for us, and we put a value on, and when we inject, honestly, value into things like love and charity, tolerance now, justice now, of course, with the social justice movement, we kind of inject these terms with our own meaning and then read them back into the Bible and assume that love your neighbor is what it's all about.

And that's honestly, I think, one of the reasons even a lot of secularists like that is because if you don't, if you separate it from the rest of the law, it can just be like, it's so, you can portray it as very man-centered, like, love my neighbor as myself.

How would I want to be loved? Well, now it's up to me. Well, there's parameters that that sits with it. That's a summation of the law that God has laid down, not, it's according to the law of God, how would I want to be treated?

There's more definition to it than just simply an arbitrary, how do I feel? So people have been, I think, given a very weak, watered down kind of understanding of God's law. And so when they're confronted with this stuff, it's like, wait, how does that work?

So, yeah, David was a polygamist. Now, it's very important to realize that is very descriptive, not prescriptive. You don't find God saying, go be a polygamist. I challenge anyone, go find me the verse where God says, be a polygamist.

Closest you might find is, I think it's when Nathan the prophet confronts David. He says, look, you committed adultery. Did you not have enough horses and wives and all the things God's blessed you with?

Did you not have enough of that? God would have given you more. That's the closest you'll find. But that's not an endorsement of polygamy. You go back to the created design and it's one man, one woman that carries through the Bible.

You have deviations from that. And I will say, yes, you don't find God ever calling it a sin. You don't find that in the Bible. But what you do find is every example of polygamy that's given in the Old Testament is negative.

It's always negative. You can't be a polygamist and be a church leader. This is a real problem, by the way, for those on the mission field who go into tribal areas where polygamy is still practiced. What do they do, right?

Do they say to go divorce your wives? Because that's wrong, right? If it's not, you know, there's no grounds for that divorce. So what do you do? It's a real problem that needs to be thought through. And and so I've come down on it here.

It's not part of God's created design. He didn't intend for polygamy. It's an advance in Western civilization and Christian civilization that that has been done away with. That said, though, it's not a sin in and of itself.

Does it lead to sin? Is it associated with sin? Yeah. Yeah. How in the world can you fulfill your responsibilities to a wife, right, if you have three of them? Like, how does that even work? Let alone Solomon and all his concubines and wives, you know, a thousand.

I mean, how do you how in the world do you follow God's law when it comes to those responsibilities? You can't follow God's law. That's the point. You can't. But at a time and by the way, it was also said kings were not to multiply wives.

That was a rule laid down and David disobeyed it. So you have an example of David disobeying God's law, and that's supposed to now shake someone's faith. Well, they haven't read the whole thing. That's part of the problem.

And they probably don't realize the historical context. A lot of times you engaged in polygamy, especially if you were a king, because you're creating alliances for protection. And this is another presentist kind of attitude.

We don't realize we live in Disneyland. All the conveniences we have, all the amazing things that we have, the modern technology, we can go get food whenever we want. We can have someone bring it to us.

We can travel so far. We we have far beyond the luxury we have is far beyond anything that even kings would have had 200 years ago. And before that, I mean, the most rich people in the world would not have had the luxury of running water.

And we are so blessed is what I'm trying to tell you. We have so much. And it's hard to get into this mindset of life is actually very hard. Very difficult. A struggle every day to survive. I mean, surviving isn't necessarily even always possible.

And things like slavery are I mean, every society pretty much had it up until a few hundred years ago. For some, it was a necessity. They couldn't survive without it. How would you make a way for yourself to live without attaching yourself to someone who had the means to provide for you and your family?

So polygamy is similar to that. And without without understanding these ancient cultures or even cultures a couple hundred years ago, it's very I'm just saying that the scales that we use to judge these other cultures and the past specifically is not they're not equal weights and measures.

We're not looking at it and putting ourselves in their situation. So if there's a presentist lens going on, assuming, hey, the world's always been like it's been. No, it wasn't possible to arrange societies the way that they're arranged now, even 200 years ago.

So. All right. So, you know, I don't want to go through each of these. It'll take way too long. But, you know, obviously, God judging the world, God judges sin. I mean, there's talk of hell in the Bible.

Like, you know, for someone who's a Christian to have a problem with this is very interesting to me, because if you heard a basic gospel message, you should know about judgment. You should know about hell.

These are just that's just part of the Christian message. Article goes on talking about a college kid who went to college, found out the Bible talked about slavery in a positive light in certain sections, left the faith, wondered why slavery is OK, but you can't get tattoos or eat bacon.

So that's an attack on God's character, that he's a hypocrite. There's an inconsistency. That's the attack. Of course, the person making that claim, they are failing to see or they are ignoring the fact that even that the law of God can be separated into ceremonial, into moral, into civil laws.

And when it comes to ceremonial laws that are specific to the nation of Israel, because they are a chosen people who are supposed to be different and set apart to the Lord, those laws are not, they don't necessarily have a moral dimension that we're aware of other than, and I should say, I know some say there's dietary benefits and these kinds of things.

I know. But at best, those would be secondary if you even think those are valid. The main thrust behind those ceremonial laws were to point towards Christ. All right. The sacrificial system and all of that, and to designate that Israel is a special people chosen by God, their culture, traditions, habits, customs.

These are all important things. And it was forming those things in this unique people that God was using as his light to the Gentiles, that this is what it looks like to follow my law. These are the people who represent my law and who I am and the message of salvation.

So, if you understand the purpose behind it, it's no longer as big of a mystery. It talks about, yeah, women having to submit in first Corinthians. Of course, that's just abhorrent. But again, it's all depending on the assumptions that you start with.

If you start with the assumption that there's a created order and God has designated different roles for men and for women, it's not that abhorrent. But if you just jettison that and you just say, no, we're all egalitarian, in an egalitarian way, we're all equal, and, you know, you would ignore created order, then, yeah, of course it doesn't make sense.

Reading Scripture in Context and Seeing the Whole Story

So, the Bible is anti-woman, anti-science, pro-slavery, pro-violence. I mean, that's the objection. And so, here in the article, now, this is the attempt here is to try to answer these things in four basic ways.

Number one, the Bible is a library, not a book. When opening a Bible or reading it digitally, we don't read it like a normal book. It's a library of books written over 1 ,500 years in different genres.

And it goes on. And so, the point is, you've got to read it in context. The point is that, you know, this is not some, you can't just import all your assumptions about what, you know, a narrative, like something in a narrative that's describing an event.

You can't just import moral assumptions into that because it's not necessarily endorsing that. So, you have to make fair distinctions based on literary genres and the context and situations that they were written in.

Okay, that's fair. Absolutely. I've even talked about some of that. Number two, never read a Bible verse. Pulling out single Bible verses on their own is bad. You need to read the full context. Okay. Very true.

Number three, the Bible is not written to us, but for us. Some parts of the Bible are written to everyone, and some parts are written to specific people at specific times for a specific purpose. Well, I would say this to be more clear.

It's all written for Christians benefit from every single verse of the Bible. There's no verse that wasn't written for us in some way. The Old Testament was written for us as an example. And so, the point, though, I think the valid point that's being made here, though, is that there's not a direct command, let's say, on eating shellfish that's for Christians today.

Fair enough. And then number four, all the Bible points to Jesus. And so, there's this, the point of this, I think, is there's this beautiful story that underlies the whole thing. I actually heard Jordan Peterson trying to make this argument with Sam Harris in a debate that they had of, you know, hey, Sam, you're focused on these specific laws in the Old Testament.

You're reading them literally. And can't we just kind of like see, I'm not saying this author is saying that, but the greater point is, can't we see that there's this big overarching narrative that's so beautiful, this tapestry that you're just looking at the individual thread and, you know, look at the big picture.

And there is some truth to this, that if you don't understand the big picture, it's hard to connect the individual parts. That's very true. But all four of these points is missing something. They're missing, there should be a fifth point here.

There's something left out. And that is what I said at the beginning. Who are you, O man, to judge the Creator? Shall the thing that is made judge the Creator of the universe that made it? Shall the clay say to the potter, why have you made me this way?

By What Standard? The Creator, Moral Authority, and Human Arrogance

That's what's missing from this. Who are you, O man, to talk back to God? You're nothing. You don't even have the leg to stand on. What arrogance. And that's, I think, where this whole thing needs to start.

I'm not saying you can't get into those things. We should. We should get into all of those things as there's humility, as there's a willingness to do Bible study. But if it's all trying to be a lawyer for the Bible, to get biblical morality off the hook, then I think the game's already been played and Christians have lost.

If that's the effort, the effort instead needs to be by what standard? How are you going to live in this life? And also at the same time, motivate others to live in such a way that you can live the life you want to live.

You know, you want to, you want to enjoy all these freedoms, O man, right? O woman. But why can't others come and treat you any way that they jolly well please? Where is the standard going to come from?

How does it have any validity? Why should civil governments enforce any part of it? Why should even tradition and habits and customs be formed and social mores so that these things are enforced, even if they're not enforced by the sword, but enforced through social pressure?

Why? Why? On what basis is there social pressure and manners and everything our whole entire society operates by? On what basis? Or are you just being arbitrary? You see, if someone doesn't actually have a moral standard of their own, if they have no way for judging between good and evil, if they can't transcend their own situation to adjudicate between one culture and another culture, one set of values and another set of values, how in the world are they able to judge the creator of the entire universe?

And that's where things need to start. That there's a creator. If you can't get past that there's a design and a creator, then this whole discussion is kind of, it's, it's a moot point. It's just, why have it?

Why have it? The real discussion is, is there a creator? Is there a God? If there is a God who created this place, then there is an intention behind it. There's a way things were designed. There's a way they're supposed to operate.

If we can get to that point, then you can start getting into the specifics of how and how we know and what those things are. But if you can't even get off the ground there, then you have someone who's frankly a fool.

They're a fool. If they're leaving the Christian faith because, man, it says this stuff about slavery and I don't like that and I got to leave this faith and you have nothing to fill, no, um, you know, no, not nothing to fill the void that you've just created for your own life, then you're a bundle of contradictions walking down the street.

You're just waiting to fall apart. There's nothing, there's no way you can point to anything and call it good or evil if you have, if it's just your arbitrary opinion at the end of the day. So this is a very simple podcast.

Most of you know this already. I think, I think the reason I wanted to just talk about this is by way of reminder and, and to show you how these questions are being pursued, um, often. Cause I see this all the time and I thought this was just a good example of it, this trying to just get God off the hook.

And look, I'm not saying that this is all bad. I'm not saying you can't explain what the Bible teaches on these things. I'm not saying you can't try to shed some light on things for people who are reading it wrong, but you got to understand what you're dealing with and what the root issue of it all is, or else you're not going to actually get anywhere.

And unfortunately, I've been a part of those conversations before. And, and I always try to drive it right back. You know, if I give an explanation, I'll be like, well, this is, this is what the situation was at the time, or this is, you know, how I think about this.

This is how I think it connects to other parts of the Bible. But let me ask you this, by what standard are you judging the Bible? And, and that will get you back on track. Some, you got to grapple with that at the end of the day, somehow.

Um, and, and good luck coming up with a standard. It's going to be from social convention or, which is arbitrary, or it's going to be from a personal morality, which is arbitrary, or it's going to be some kind of a, a biological determinism.

Some people try to appeal to that, which again is very arbitrary because, uh, you know, you're, you're approaching this, uh, reading it, you know, with your own sense perception, trying to come up with something, um, a pattern, if you will, in nature from, and, and look, non-Christians can correctly identify some patterns.

There's no doubt about that. They can, there are, you know, there's a reason that even people who aren't Christians can function sometimes according to biblical morality. I told an atheist friend of mine once, I said, you're a better Puritan than I am on, on many things.

But you have no basis for it because your own stated belief contradicts it. So, um, so if you're just, you know, saying that it's evolutionary or something like that, and that's where you get your morality is this development biologically over time and the habits and customs of primates that were transferred to humans.

And there's a reason behind it. Well, it doesn't give you, uh, actual morality. It doesn't give you an ought. It gives you, at best, it can tell you that this is the way something functions, but it can't tell you why it would be good or evil.

There's no value judgment there. So you have to impose that yourself, which again, makes man the standard. So, um, at the end of the day, when people do this, they are, and they convert to atheism or agnosticism, secularism of some variety, what they're saying is I'm the judge.

I want to live in my world and I want to operate by my rules. And when someone does that, uh, they have to be confronted at that level. Uh, they, they can't be confronted on, uh, well, you know, did you just, you just don't understand the Bible.

It's really, it's all explained. And no, cause even look, look, I, you think they're going to accept most people. Do you think when you really explain Hebrew slavery to them or Paul's admonitions about slavery, uh, or Jesus's parables about slavery in a pagan Roman system, do you think they're really going to say, oh, that makes a lot of sense now.

I didn't realize that. Well, no, I'm back to being a Christian. Cause you know what? No, they're of course they're not. Their offense is not the result of a misunderstanding at the end of the day. So, uh, and maybe that's kind of discouraging.

I didn't mean to end on a bad note like that, but I wanted to think through this again, cause we're, you're going to have to deal with it over and over and over. I am sure. And it's just helpful to, to realize what the actual issue is so that you have something to say when it comes up.

And I think the by what standard question is probably the first question and the best question to ask someone like that, to even get into a discussion, um, on that topic. A lot of great things, by the way, I should say in closing that Christianity has given to the world that we just don't even, we take for granted, uh, the eradication of the slave trade.

Um, this, this is a unique thing that happened in countries affected by Christianity. And, and part of it was, uh, just like the eradication of polygamy, this idea that, um, people ought to be self-sufficient that the law of God, how can one follow God's commandments and the responsibilities one ought to have before their creator when they're enslaved or when they're in polygamous relationships?

Uh, it, there's just all kinds of barriers to it. You can't really do it. It leads to sin. And, and so, um, there, it is preferable for people, uh, when it pertains to slavery to be governing themselves, to be self-sufficient, uh, it's there, there's, um, a responsible population is a population that will guarantee freedom continues that religious freedom included in that.

Uh, and you know, there, there's, it's just all around healthier. And of course the biblical commands against man stealing and these sorts of things, uh, you know, on the, the, the front end of the slave trade were, um, also served as motivations.

So, um, I will say Christianity doesn't, there is an incomplete narrative. Christianity doesn't get the credit, but you know what? I wouldn't start with pointing that out. That wouldn't be my go-to when I'm talking to someone of this opinion.

And that's most people's go-to. They just want to say, you don't understand that, you know, you know what? That's not the thing they're offended by. They're going to be offended no matter what. They're going to be offended that any slight deviation from what they think should be moral.

And of course they're hypocrites themselves. Every person is, they can't live by their own law. And so, uh, there needs to be a return to the fear of the Lord, fearing God. That's, that's what our whole country needs.

You want to solve the problem of why men aren't stepping up? You want to, you know, pretty much every problem just about today seems to come back to, we don't fear God. There's, there's no fear of Him whatsoever.

We fear government, right? Uh, but we don't fear God. And I think a fear of Him will restore a reverence for His law and an understanding of we're not the ones that make the rules, it's Him. So anyway, I've gone almost half an hour.

I wanted this to be short. So, uh, at the risk of everyone accusing me of going long, I'm going to end it. Uh, more coming later this week, like always. And go check out, uh, the tour dates. I never called it a tour, but I guess I inadvertently called it a tour.

Sure. Tour. Go to worldviewconversation .com and you can go to speaking engagements and I'll be in Kentucky and Tennessee very soon. And we'd love to see you there. There's RSVP's information is all there.

I'll be in near Louisville and Bowling Green and Nashville. So we'd love to see you. God bless. Bye now.