Who am I to judge whether or not someone is really a Christian? Good question. Now, let me ask you: Who are you to define what a Christian is or is not?
Barna Group’s recent Study of Religious Change Since 1991 revealed some fascinating changes amongst “self-identified Christians” over the last 20 years. Whatever you believe about Barna (and there are some that question the group’s methods and findings), it is hard to dispute the fact that the face of Christendom is radically changing.
This recent report reveals many fascinating statistics. Like this one:
“Most Americans – roughly four out of five – consider themselves to be Christians.”
Let me suggest that how you respond to this “finding” will determine a lot about how you approach other faith issues, and may be directly related to this:
The largest change in beliefs was the ten-point decline in those who firmly believe that the Bible is accurate in all of the principles it teaches. Only 43% of self-identified Christians now have such a strong belief in the Bible.
So not only do more Americans consider themselves Christians, less of them consider the Bible as “accurate in all of the principles it teaches.”
Let me just come out and say it: There’s a correlation between how one views the Bible and how one defines Christians.
People who dispute what the Bible says often do so because they don’t like what the Bible says. Which begs the question of whether or not we should believe it. Nevertheless, if our objective is to make our own set of rules, then questioning the absolute Rulebook, would be step one.
The Bible is where we derive our understanding of Christianity. Christian conduct, doctrine, and ethics are expounded in Scripture. We primarily learn what a Christian is supposed to be, not from watching TV, reading Christian blogs, praying, meditating, attending seminars, even watching other Christians. As the early creeds, church fathers, and Reformers saw it, Scripture is our primary rule of faith and practice.
But if the Bible is where we derive our understanding of Christianity from, then doubting Scripture gives us the freedom to determine our own “authority.”
And define what it means to be a Christian.
So we can be one.
So can someone really be a Christian and doubt the Bible? I suppose if you define “Christian” as something other than what the Bible teaches, then yes. Which, apparently, “roughly four out of five” Americans do.
Great post, Mike! Thanks for the food for thought.
Personally… I have never so much doubted the Bible, as I have wondered how much of it was written as parable and been misinterpreted for absolute truth.
Like what parts, Renee?
Pretty much any lesson that any of the prophets or Jesus himself taught their followers. (All the the stories they teach from the old testament.)
Jonah and the whale, healing the blind man, the good sameritan…
Its hard to glean historical evidence to support everything that occurs in the Bible…so who’s to say they werent fables…meant to teach a moral lesson like the boy who cried wolf, or the emperor’s new clothes?
The issue with some of them—like Jonah in the big fish—is that they’re referenced as if they’re historical events. Jesus referred to “the sign of Jonah”: as Jonah had been “dead” for 3 days (lost in the belly of the fish) then tossed out of his grave, so would Jesus be dead for 3 days but then alive again.
Others, like the good samaritan and the prodigal son, are obviously fables from the contexts. They completely contradict the proper behavior dictated by the culture at that time.
Renee, I addressed this in a recent post entitled The Myth of Fact. It’s a huge subject and one that’s critical for Christians to grasp, as it influences everything else we believe. It’s also slippery because, if we have no consistent means of distinguishing Myth from Fact, then we are free to tinker with things we don’t like (i.e., saying Jesus’s death was symbolic, not literal). So it’s super important to resolve.
A good general rule is that, when the Bible tells us something is a parable, it’s a parable. Like the Good Samaritan, which was described as such. So whereas it may not be historically founded, we can trust that it illustrates a Universal, Absolute Truth. Yes, some books / stories are not easily cracked, like Revelation which seems to be part vision, part apocalyptic, and part Fact. Other stories, like Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, etc., are presented in the context of history and, as Caradee mentioned, later referenced by real historical figures (like Jesus). So if we believe Jesus REALLY existed, it’s hard to believe Adam and Eve were a fable when He speaks of them as Fact.
The Bible is the most authentic ancient historic document on earth. We possess more manuscripts than any other ancient document. It’s a fun study and much is written about it. Here’s a couple links if you’re interested. Authority of the Bible and The Amazing Historical Accuracy of the Bible. Happy research and thanks for commenting!
My analogy for something like this is:
There’s this amazing game I and my friends love to play. It’s a game played on a field (often called a “diamond”) where teams take turns trying to score ‘runs’. A player from one team comes up to the home square of the diamond-shaped running track, and attempts to hit a ball thrown his way. If he hits it, he starts running on the track. Based on other factors of the game, this batter, if he hits the ball, gets to choose which of the other three ‘bases’ he runs to first. If he is able to make it to the farthest-away base, then that scores two runs. If he is then able to run to either of the other bases without being tagged, that scores an additional run. If he then makes back to the home base, that’s an additional two runs. If there are already other teammates standing on the bases, once he touches them, they are also allowed to run to other bases and score more points.
We call this game Baseball.
Of course, anyone reading this would roll their eyes and say “That’s not baseball”. It certainly LOOKS a lot like baseball and uses the same tools and field and basic rules, but it’s not baseball. It’s something else. It should be called something else. Why? Because the rules for Baseball clearly state what makes baseball baseball. It may be narrow-minded to say that only the old, traditional rules of baseball are accepted, but if you want to go somewhere and play baseball with other people, you are going to have to always run to first base first.
Like it or not, the only reason we know about God and Jesus is because of the Bible. To say I believe in Jesus, but not the same one as portrayed in the Bible is ridiculous. Call yourself something else besides a “Christian.”
No. No. A thousand times no. You may be ” spiritual ” but if you doubt the core doctrines of the Bible then you are not a Christian. We can, and do, have disagreements on secondary issues, but we cannot dispute the Bible simply because we disagree with it.
Thank you, Mike.
I hate that people found Christianity interesting enough to desire to be a part of it, but were too lazy to actually become a part of it. Instead they shaped it around themselves. Ironically, in trying to reach something beautiful and unique, they made it normal, common, almost ugly.
I’ll never understand why someone would want to be part of a religion only to change it. Why follow something you don’t believe? If I wanted to be Wiccan, I’d want to know what Wiccans truly are. Traditionally. The essence what they believe. Because that’s what makes it unique. That’s what makes it interesting. Same with any other religion. I honestly cannot understand why someone would feel differently.
I think you can become a Christian while doubting the Bible. Accepting Jesus doesn’t require all those doubts to be erased. If that person is willing to be open-minded about the Bible and let it speak, the Bible is excellent at defending itself. However, if the person chooses to harbor those doubts, never seeking beyond them, then their Christianity is not likely to have much affect on them or the people around them, and it brings to question the authenticity of their decision in the first place.
Great summation, Jessica! I would agree that a person can be a “real” Christian and doubt a lot of things. The issue is where doubt becomes denial. If a Christian is a “Christ follower,” one cannot be a Christian if they do not actually… follow Christ.
What she said.
Doubting isn’t a sin. It simply means you don’t have enough evidence to make up your mind. Once you have that evidence however, to insist otherwise or deny it means you’ve strayed into defiant unbelief.
Thomas gets trashed a lot, but Jesus didn’t fault him. Instead He gave him what he needed. And if tradition is correct, he traveled the furthest of any of the Apostles, dying in India.
The baseball analogy is perfect. Victor is my new American Idol (for this week at least)
I’m highly skeptical of surveys. They’re so easy to skew, that when you name that “4 of 5” figure, my first question is: who was the group surveyed, how large was it, and where specifically did they live?
P.S. Yes, I know my “first question” is a compound of 3 questions.
“Christian” means different things to different people. It means, in its most basic sense, “A follower of Christ”.
But then you’ve got this world where we call this a Christian nation, where we use “Christian” to mean “Not Jewish or Muslim”, where the cultural pressure to self-identify as “Christian” is extremely strong. So when people answer a survey with vague operational definitions of their main points, you’re going to get a mishmash.
I know a lot of people who call themselves Christian but have never set foot inside a church.
That being said, yes, I think it is possible to be a full-on, completely dedicated Christ Follower and still have doubts about The Bible. I think God knew that would be the case. Look at how many Christ Followers have been through their periods of doubt in the Bible itself. I think that’s why we’ve gotten the magnificent gift of the presence of the Holy Spirit and the chance to dialogue directly with God. Have your doubts? Talk to God and you’ll get them straightened out. No big deal.
Harping again on my old horse of Mysticism, allow me to say that it is our own disservice we’ve done ourselves to have Christ Followers going about thinking that various Bible Stories are myths. (“It was really the Sea Of Reeds and more like a pond that dried up…”) We purged the great belief in the mystical nature of God, wrung all the miracles out of the Faith and now here we are. Of course we can’t get rid of that pesky dead-man-come-back-to-life thing. Other than that, the end result of the demystification of our religion has been to have people scoff at the virgin birth, the flood, the creation.
We put God in custom-designed boxes that make God just big enough to be what a person needs at one point in time and not any bigger, not any more powerful and certainly not capable of sending a shark to keep a man alive in its belly or halt the sun in its tracks.
As for the historical evidence of these things: There isn’t much of it. Okay. There is also not much written proof or historical evidence that my great-grandfather was a good man who provided for his family. No historian documented this fact. His name comes up in some census documents and on a grave stone and that’s it. But we have the words he left in letters to his children, the stories those children told and the things they wrote down. That’s the sort of “documentation” we have. Not unlike the documentation we have about God. We have what God told us, what God told the people around Jesus to write down, the people God contacted, the prophets, the kings. The people who knew God wrote about their experience with God.
We call this The Bible.
And unlike my great-grandfather, we’ve actually got, as I said before, the Holy Spirit. It’d be as if my Great Grandfather left some sort of very young wife behind or some Superman Fortress of Solitude Crystal we could dial up and ask questions about him. “Tell me about how he escaped from Turkey.”
So doubts, sure. I just think it’s sad that so many of us don’t care to take the extra step to talk about those doubts with the God who made himself lower than the angels just so we could talk directly.
Amen! Have you considered a career in preaching, Katherine? 😉 Seriously, I agree with your point about being a Christ Follower and still having doubts. But at some points, doubting the “real” Christ would radically impact who or what we’re actually following. But as to your suggestion that there’s not much “evidence” for biblical history, I’d have to disagree. There may not be much evidence that Moses actually spoke face-to-face with God, but there’s lots of evidence that a guy named Moses actually lived, that some people called Jews really existed, that they got entangled in a place named Egypt, that there truly was a body of water called the Red Sea, that there were many surrounding wildernesses to choose for “wandering,” etc., etc.
Ah. I suppose I once considered it but I belong to the no-women-preachers tradition. Wrestled with that for awhile. Then realized one doesn’t need a pulpit to teach the Gospel.
As to “historical evidence”, that’s a big phrase for doubters and detractors alike. While I consider the amount if historical evidence to be plentiful/ample/abundant, it’s a sliding scale. One person’s “ample” is another’s “barely there”. And if you’re already looking for reasons to invalidate scriptural teaching, this always seems like an intellectually sound one. So I think the best way to debate a point is to first, if the point is on a sliding scale, take the opposing party’s evaluation as a starting point. In this case I’d rather examine the reality of an unbroken 6,000+ year old oral and written tradition (itself a miracle) than quibble over radiographs, carbon dating and archaeology.
Doubting isn’t sin. It’s what we do after the doubting…
In any case, I always default to the belief that God loves me despite my imperfections – whether these be ‘doubts’ ot not
I believe doubt has it’s place as long as it leads us to dig deeper for truth. Jesus didn’t toss his disciples out of the boat because they doubted that He was who he said He was and thought they were all going to die. It was an opportunity for Him to teach them in a real and tangible way the truth of who He claimed to be. I understand that when we are in Christ that His Spirit will lead us into all truth and believing the Bible is a part of that leading experience. After all, one is hardly going to learn from anything written by someone else if that person doesn’t believe it’s true. When Jesus taught from parables, the people He was teaching understood they were exactly that. No one said, oh, come on, cite me the place and time this or that happened. It’s important to know what defines expository and teaching tools, which means using the old noodle along with being taught by the Holy Spirit. To me this then becomes a circular arguement: Is a Christian a Christian because he “believes” this or that or because he is possessed of the Spirit of God teaching him what a Christian is – which is what the Bible tells us? (I hope I haven’t altered the course of this discussion by introducing this aspect.)
Good subject today, Mike
I think we need to distinguish between doubt and disbelief. Doubt is “a feeling of uncertainty or a lack of conviction.” Disbelief is a “refusal or reluctance to believe.” There’s a huge difference. Christians may feel uncertain at times and I think some even deal with chronic doubt, but struggling with belief is very different from refusing to believe or being reluctant to accept the Bible as absolute truth. It’s when doubt in the Bible’s authority leads us to disbelieve that authority or reinvent it to suit our tastes that there is a serious issue.
Another area where we need to distinguish is in what we are doubting: are we doubting the Bible or what has previously been man’s common interpretation of the Bible? There is a difference.
I’ll use the “days of creation” in Genesis as an example. Historically, the church believed that the days of creation were literal 24-hour days, but now there is a growing segment of the Christian population that believes that creation could be old, that the universe may be billions of years old, and that perhaps God actually used “evolution” as a tool to create man. To them, the creation story still reflects that God created, but the timing isn’t meant to be taken literally.
Are these “Christians” doubting the Bible, or are they doubting the traditional interpretation? I do believe that people can have beliefs that go against the mainstream of opinion and still be authentic Christians. Unfortunately, I think a lot of true believers are pushed away from the church because they are told their “doubts” reflect a lack of faith.
I think there are a lot of areas where traditional church teaching, though it is biblically based and is “what the Bible plainly teaches”, may actually be off the mark of what is “true”. Jesus had to confront a similar issue with the Pharisees — the traditions that had been built upon and added to God’s word were being treated as if they were God’s law, when they weren’t. We need to be careful so that we are not guilty of the same “traditionalizing” of the faith that the Pharisees were.
I forgot to mention — I agree with you 100% that just because someone wears a Christian label doesn’t mean that they are an authentic Christian. Believing in Jesus and his resurrection would seem a minimum starting point. Actually basing how we live on following him seems an obvious next step.
The nuts and bolts of what it means to be born again and living as a disciple? Lots of gray area there, as we have a lot of “freedom in Christ” — I don’t want to assume someone is a heretic just because they approach their faith differently than I do. (Matt 7, you know….)
I’m a Christian. I have doubts about whether the bible is true or not. I read the bible to understand the history of the times of the writings and lessons to be learned. I follow the teachings of Christ. I’m skeptical of some of the things his apostles and Paul did after his death. I find myself questioning their motives sometimes.
I speak to Christ about my doubts. I seek understanding about my doubts. I think you guys did a great forum here addressing the issue.
One thing to keep in mind – at the time Apostle Paul was writing his letters the New Testament didn’t even exist yet – with that we are left with the first 5 books..now this too is good news..as there is a complete fulfillment of the Old Testament – this really seems to be an invald question is the point. What is meant by ‘doubt the bible’? We need to put in the historical context and social climate Paul was writing his letters to and the situations that were involved that he was addressing – it’s not a matter of ‘believing the bible ‘ so much as it edifying what the Spirit is Teaching us. If my Faith consists of putting together pieces of what others are saying and is based on reading the bible, that is not faith…at least not The Faith of God that is Given to thos in Christ Jesus. I remember when I REALLY Knew God in the sense of Being Fully Known..and then saw scripture that matched perfectly with my experience…there was no doubt the same things were being written about by Paul. Now, if you mean ‘believing the bible in the sense that if someone commits adultery they should be booted and given over to Satan’..well I believe that happened but that has nothing to do with Faith. Jesus was not politically correct, religiously correct at least when it came to moralism…he refused to be pigeon holed with musts and have tos as many would like to think being a Chirstian is. That turns it right back into works based belief and not a Faith based on the Grace of God. Point being, ‘I don’t believe in the bible, I believe God…and the bible shows me how consistently the Spirit Speaks since the foundation of the earth and how God’s Promise is fulfilled in His Person, Christ Jesus. If we turn it into something moralistic the inevitable occurs..self-righteousness all over again..I in and of myself have nothing to give him, nor can I ever be ‘good enough’..because good enough doesn’t exist. Only God is Good..though we can ‘conform not to the patterns of the world but be transformed by the renewing of our minds’ by ‘being in the world but not of the world’ from day to day as we ‘die daily’ away from the old man so that the Light of Christ might be made Manifest as we are the salt of the world and He is the Light of Man..so to we are lights in this world (at least in theory…though herein lies another issue. How many Christians actually read the bible? Shudder the thought.
I disagree with this. I believe it is perfectly okay to doubt with the bible and search for answers in order to strengthen your faith. But I believe doubting it because you want to live your life is where the temptation of the devil comes in.