Blogocentric Formulations

The Struggle is Real

"Take up Your Cross"  | August 9, 2023

What is your greatest struggle with Christianity?


My greatest struggle with Christianity is the book it's based on.





It's a remarkable text, there's no question about that. And while I do believe that the words are more or less "divinely inspired," there's a lot of uncertainty about just how much of it one should accept at face value. Some believe the Bible is inerrant, while others believe the Bible is infallible. Some think the Bible is meant to be taken literally (as a science text, historical text, etc.) while others think the Bible is to be interpreted in terms of its storytelling (narratives, themes, etc.). Some argue that the Bible is the faithful and true word of God, while others believe that - in the passing of stories down through generations - certain authors took added their own interpretations or perspectives to the text, just as any translator does.

There are over 100 currently in-print versions of the Bible in English, and many of them interpret the original-language texts differently. And while there is a lot of general consensus about what the original-language texts say due to consistencies from one to the next, who's to say that the original text is one hundred percent authentic? The four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were written - at the earliest - approximately one generation after Jesus had been crucified, and yet tell stories of exactly what Jesus said during his time on Earth. Given that stories in those days were largely passed down by word of mouth from group to group, are we certain that the writers of those gospels (and the books of the Bible that came after) were word for word transcriptions of what happened with no editorializing or creative license?

Some Bibles include additional books that others don't consider canon. Most Protestant Bibles contain the standard 66 books (39 from the Old Testament + 27 from the New Testament), but the Catholic Bible contains 73 books (adding Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch). There are also additional books in the Apocrypha which are deemed to be non-canonical (1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, Manasseh, and any number of less popular epistles and other religious writings), but then raises the question of who decided which books were relevant to include or exclude and what their motivations were.

None of this is meant to invalidate the Bible as a holy book, which I happen to think it is. It's worth studying and worth following; but I do struggle with it frequently. I wonder if the parts of it I read and don't agree with are just me being stubborn and thinking I know better, or if it some monk transcribing things two thousand years ago was like, "I'm going to infuse a little of my own interpretation of what I think this means" into the text. I think it's always dangerous to presume that God thinks exactly like you think and agrees with you on every single matter (that probably means you're not really trying all that hard to understand Him) ... but it's equally dangerous to presume that every word in the Bible is to be accepted without question, discernment, or interpretation of some kind (that probably means you're cherry-picking the parts of the Bible that match what you want it to say and ignoring the contradictions or other pieces of it).

The Bible is something I'm pretty sure is meant to be struggled with. It's meant to be challenging and something that you spend a lifetime trying to better process and understand and derive insight from. So I guess it's no surprise that the Bible is the thing I struggle with the most.