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March 05, 2006

Another book to add to my Jesus reading collection

Instead of finding the roots to his former faith, Bart Ehrman crumbled the core of the one he was living in:

Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible "is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit."

But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith.

The dust crumbled away for me a long time ago. But I've never completely understood why--or why isn't hasn't crumbled for others.

I think Ehrman's book might be a piece of that puzzle.

When I set out on this effort to look into the history of Christianity and the Bible, I asked myself why I was doing it. Did I want ammunition to argue against the religion that I believed tried to squelch my intellect? Was I seeking revenge against a faith that I felt so damaged by?

In all honesty, I think I can't dismiss that possibility. I do think that a part of me wants to have the knowledge stored--to use it someday to verify to my family and friends that I was right in walking away and that they're silly not to.

But it's not the paramount or primary reasoning for this search.

I want to understand myself. I want clarification on the unraveling of my early belief system. And I want validation that on an intellectual and reasonable level--that I've done the right thing.

Its weird to want intellectual validation on a spiritual matter. But I don't care. I suppose because I feel the spiritual validation is already settled for me. But it gnaws at my need for academic understanding.

And so I keep on learning and studying.

Posted by Carla at March 5, 2006 11:19 AM