Not a sign of a sudden conversion, but more of a gentle steering back into faith. For the last 8 years I have been an avowed agnostic – with occasional lapses. But recently I have had to admit to myself that I believe more than I doubt, so agnosticism is untenable. But just what do I believe now? I have always had problems with the view that the Bible was inerrant (“100% without error” as one Church web-site claims), but I have also had problems with calling it all irrelevant to faith whether the Bible stories are historically true and accurate.
If the Bible has to be “demythologised” then what remains distinctively Christian? What remains the “message” (kergma in Greek) of the Gospel?
Rudolf Bultmann gave a name to the demythologisation craze of the 20th Century, but really people had been rationalising over the Bible stories way back to Isaac Newton and Baruch Spinoza in the 17th Century. Unlike Newton or Spinoza I personally want to remain Orthodox in my doctrines, but even then that is a pretty broad target.
The first step, I think, is deciding what to make of the Bible. Nowhere within the text itself does it claim the books we call “The Holy Bible” is totally without error. Instead it is said to be “God-breathed” – i.e. the Spirit moved prophets and preachers to write the books that make it up. But all of them came to the task within a particular historical context – the Bible is not just history, but has a history. And that history has to be understood.
Also if the Bible is inspired – as Orthodoxy preaches – then reading it and gaining an understanding relies on the Spirit’s action as well. In fact I would make the claim that all error – heresies and so on – stems from exalting human understanding over the meaning the Spirit wishes to convey to us. That doesn’t mean Dogmatic Theology – writing bulging books of “god-talk” – can’t be done systematically or without use of scholarly techniques, but it should always remain open the moves of the Spirit.
More importantly the Bible isn’t the living Word of God without the Spirit. You can’t read it as God’s Word without listening to the Spirit’s voice. Else it’s just “The Bible” – a fallible product of fallible humans. And, unlike Jesus, the Bible didn’t have a Virgin Birth.
As the Book says “Why do you say I am Good? Only One is Good.”