“As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, we first have a faith that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him and that He came in the flesh to redeem us. THEN we vest faith in the words as recorded in the Gospels.”
That’s not really what I said.
What I said was that if you’re going to use the Bible, start with the Gospels first and focus on them for a long, long time before branching out to the rest. Read the Bible through the prism of Jesus.
But your attribution to me of this thought: “we first have a faith that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him and that He came in the flesh to redeem us. THEN we vest faith in the words” is interesting, but it’s not what I would say at all.
Everybody’s spiritual journey through this world is different. I will describe a bit of my own because it will explain precisely where I am coming from and will correct your misimpression, expressed above.
As I said elsewhere, I was baptized as an infant, and I believe that this sacred rite put a seal upon my soul, such that my soul recognized God and sought him out.
However, although baptized Catholic, I lived in an enviroment that was either frankly pagan or rather stridently Protestant. I preferred the pagans and the Jews over the Protestants, and I will tell you why. Christianity was urged on me, in frantic Baptist missionary tones, by well-meaning relatives, rather relentlessly over a number of years. “Are you ready to be SAVED, Steve?” I always found this to be an extremely embarrassing question. Now, my proselytizers said that this was because my soul was aware of its sin, and was reaching towards the light of Christ while the demons of my sinful nature were wrestling it back. But that was not true. I had no desire to embarrass these people, or get into a confrontation with them. The reason I was not ready to be “Saved” by them and there religion was because I found it utterly preposterous.
They always hailed the Bible. Well, I made several game tries at the Bible. Like any other book, I picked it up and started reading. Before I reached the age of ten I tried, but found the English of the old King James Version to be too stilted, strange and archaic to be comprehensible. As a teenager, I tried again valiantly, and this time I was able to actually penetrate what the thing said.
I did not get past Genesis. What I was reading was absolutely ridiculous. The world created in six days? Man created out of clay? Woman being created from the rib of a man? Mount Everest and the rest of the world covered with rainwater and all of the animals, from llamas to aardvarks to panda bears to polar bears to koalas and kangaroos all in pairs, two by two, on a boat built by primitive men (funny that those animals don’t all live in a spread-out pattern from Mt. Ararat, isn’t it). A 6000 year old world? All flute players descended from one man, while all blacksmiths are descended from another. A tower being built to heaven that God tears down and scatters languages? The earth formed in a bubble in the middle of the surrounding water (that’s why the sky is blue!). These are fun stories. They’re like Greek myths. Trouble was, I was supposed to believe that these things were literally true, because this was, after all, the Bible, and the Bible was, I was told, the Word of God, and literally true. What utter BS! The first time I started to read the Bible, I got to the end of the Noah’s Ark story and sat it down and said “This is not true. I am not going to waste my time on this crap. How can anybody in his right mind believe this? What about DINOSAURS for God’s sake? Hello? McFly?”
So, my first effort to approach God the way I was told by my earnest Christian relatives, through the Bible, failed because the Bible we had was an archaic King James Version with its strange language that is confusing and essentially incomprehensible to anybody before he has had some classes in Shakespeare. And the second time the approach failed because Genesis is full of myths that did not happen. Man descended from primates. The earth is billions of years old. There may have been an “Adam” and an “Eve” in the sense that there was indeed a first human or breeding pair, but their parents were some sort of hominid apelike creature. Man was not formed out of a hunk of clay and woman was not formed out of a rib. There were worldwide floods at the end of the last Ice Age, sure, but there was never a world-covering flood, there was never a Noah’s Ark, all of mankind was never reduced to eight people on a boat with all the animals of the world. Everybody who is a blacksmith is not descended of one guy. These things are myths. Also, there was death in the world long before there were men or women, and human beings did not evolve immortal and only start to die when the first and only man and woman ate a piece of fruit from a tree. There was no talking snake. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a hundred million years before mankind, and they died. Death is a natural process that did not come into the Earth because of anything men did. Genesis is false. Factually untrue. The stories it tells about the creation of the world did not happen. Not even colorably. It is a book of Jewish myths of Creation. It is as true as the Greek myths of the creation of the world, which is to say: not. If Christianity rides on the LITERAL truth of every God-breathed word of the Bible, and Genesis 1 and 2, et al, must be taken as literally true verbatim, then Christianity is false because the Bible is patently false. The Genesis story of the Creation of the World is false in every detail. We know this through the fossil record. We know this through the geological record. It’s not even debatable.
But THAT was the test of faith that was put to me right at the outset of the Bible. I have to completely eliminate the rational, intelligent, scientific mind God gave me and believe a bunch of Jewish fairy tales. That was what I was made to understand is required to believe Christ, for that is “Scripture Alone.” Ergo, my second reading of the Bible taught me I could not possibly be a Christian, because Christians are ridiculous people who literally believe in Santa Claus. But I still talked to God, because that seal of Baptism was in my soul. God was nature, the REAL forces that REALLY built the world, and caused dinosaurs and man to evolve over eons. And God still really is nature, or the intelligence that sets nature in order and makes it run. But to know God, the REAL God, I went to my physics book and my chemistry book, my biology book and my astronomy and botany books. That is reality. Whatever set those laws running is God. God was obvious or not. Whether God was CONSCIOUS or not was a debatable point (after all, I am conscious, and I am part of nature, so to the extent that God is what drives nature, God is, empirically speaking, AT LEAST as conscious as we are, clearly). But the whole Christian God or Jewish God? Fails utterly right in the first two chapters of Genesis. They are factually false. If one is required to believe them as written, literally, because they are in the Bible, then I can never be a Christian, because I refuse to lie to myself, and I know those things are not true. Sure, they were not lies when written. They were myths of people who didn’t know any better. But TODAY we do know better, or I do at any rate, and for ME to say I believed in the Genesis story would be a lie. I do not. I cannot. It is obviously a myth. It even contradicts itself. (My evangelizers insisted that the bible CANNOT contradict itself, but it does within the first few sentences. Genesis 1 says the birds were all made on the fifth day, before man. Genesis 2 says the birds were made after man and specifically for man. That is a conflict. It compounds the lies, and is indeed lying to my face to assert, in the face of that textual fact, that the Bible doesn’t conflict with itself. It does from the start. So, here I had a text which ITSELF was telling stories that are patently false, and it is not even INTERNALLY consistent in its falsehoods. The Bible destroyed any possibility of faith for me for a good while. Read as ancient literature, Genesis is really interesting. Read as literal fact, Genesis is ridiculous, and for me to deny my very mind and pretend that I really believed it would both render me a liar and render me ridiculous.
But that seal on my soul, placed there at baptism, kept turning to God.
Late in High School, I tried again. I picked up the Bible again, as my proselytizing relatives and friends and caring televangelists insisted that I do, and I started reading again. I suspended disbelief as I read Genesis, determined to get past it. Exodus was more believable, and Numbers. The various dietary and other practices commanded by Leviticus and Deuteronomy seemed like a bunch of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but I kept on going.
And then I came to The Book of Genocide. In the story of Joshua, I read with revulsion how the Christian God ordered the genocide of a whole people, and how the Jews went about doing it and were righteous for having done so. I read to the end of the book, sat down the Bible and said: The Christian God, to the extent he exists at all, is in fact the Devil. Any being that orders the wanton destruction of all men, women and children simply because of their race and religion is a demon from hell, and nothing that I will EVER worship! Indeed, if the REAL God were like the genocidal maniac that one reads of in a literal first read of Joshua, then I hated him with every fiber of my being. I myself, fallible and weak though I knew (and know) myself to be, am infintely morally superior to the Hell demon genocidal Yahweh I first encountered on my first read of Joshua. And so I sat the Bible down again, convinced that (a) thanks to the falsehoods generalized in Genesis there was, in fact, no such God as the Christian God, and (b) fortunately there was no such God, because the genocidal Christian God described in Joshua, ordaining the slaughter of children etc, precisely conforms to the native concepts I had of the Devil: a relentless murdering bastard I would never, ever worship.
And thus ended forever any possible belief in the Christian God by way of the Bible. Three dips into that well, reading it from the beginning, convinced me that I did not want have anything to do with that strange cult of stupid demon-worshippers called Christians. Did they not believe in dinosaur bones? (A cousin explained that dinosaur bones were placed here by the Devil, to trick us into not believing the Word of God in Genesis. Horse manure. Genesis is false. Dinosaurs are real. Deal with reality. Get out of the fairy tales.) Did they not read Joshua and see the nature of the Hell demon they worship? Blech.
That was what going to “The Word of God” in the Bible taught me.
But the seal placed on my soul at baptism remained.
And so it was that in college, drawn to sing in the Catholic Choir because I like music and that was the way to express it, I decided to book some time with a Catholic Chaplain to go in and challenge him and beat him up about his silly religion. I could not, recall, really go for the jugular with my adolescent proselytizers - remember, they were friends and family - but I certainly could do it to some stranger no-name priest. So I went in very businesslike and sat down for my meeting with the priest. This was 1981, but I still remember his name: Father Condon. I explained that I was baptized a Catholic, but had not been brought up in the Church, that I had read parts of the Bible and realized that there was no way I could be a Christian, because it was false. He asked me what I meant. I said, ‘Well, just starting with Genesis and Adam and Eve...’ and expressed my disbelief in the whole business, the basic reality of evolution, and finishing up with a flourish: “...and because I have to believe THAT, I cannot be a Christian!”
To this day I remember his response. He smiled and said “Genesis tells us that God made the world and made us. Science tells us how he did it. We probably evolved from primates - that’s what we teach in the Catholic Schools - there is no conflict between science and the Church.”
I was flabbergasted, flummoxed, gobsmacked.
And my soul leapt for joy.
The obstacle to my believing any of it at all, the literal words of Genesis in the Bible, were swept away. They do indeed say that, but you don’t have to believe that literally. You have to understand what God meant to teach by it.
Within a few weeks I was a catechumen. Within a few months I had made my first confession, then taken first communion, and was confirmed.
NOW I can read the Bible and understand it, because I am not bound to a rigid rule of every-word literalism. It is true, the God of Joshua is hard on the Canaanites. But he was no less hard on the Jews who killed the Canaanites: they’re all dead too. Nor will he be any less hard, in that respect, on any of us: nobody gets out of here alive. Even Jesus didn’t.
Without the Church, with just the Bible Alone, Christianity was impossible for me. Jesus is swell, but Genesis cannot be taken seriously, and the Yahweh of Joshua seems very like a monster, and not a loving God at all.
This is why I say, with conviction, that if one INSISTS on going about Christianity without the aid of the Sacraments and the Teaching Authority of the Church, then start with Jesus. The New Testament makes the claim he was God, so clearly whatever God had to say when he walked the Earth is of primordial importance. To me that’s obvious.
But suppose you read the Bible another way...suppose you read it the natural way.
First, you are going to run into text that claims that virtually all of the discoveries of four hundred years of modern science are false. Then you’re going to run into the history of panda bears, kangaroos and llamas on a boat with the only people in the world. And then you are going to run into Yahweh the genocide.
If you can disregard natural science, history and fundamental reality all in order to believe in the literal Bible, well, then it’s a religion for you. I cannot.
But I certainly can accept Genesis as a moral-teaching poem on creation. The Catholic Church does not bind me to a literal belief in the text of Genesis. My evangelizers did. God didn’t give me a scientific mind in order to ask me to kill it, like he asked Abraham to kill Isaac in Genesis (and for the record, if God appeared to me and asked me to kill my daughter, I would tell him to go to hell).
So, that is where I am coming from. I would not abandon all reason in order to enter the faith, because I would not have been able to do it had I wanted to (and I didn’t want to, and don’t, and won’t). I have been told by many people that I must take Genesis literally, because it is The Word of God, and Every Word is God breathed. I am polite to those people, but the truth is that theirs is a perscription for killing faith in ones such as me, not nurturing it.