Growing up church of Christ meant I was raised in the one True Church. The church I was raised in believed that the Bible is the word of God, that it was the perfect, inerrant word of God, that God caused the writers of the Bible to write what they wrote, and every single word of the Bible was from God. What follows is a sort of ‘well of course, duh’ conclusion: if you want to please God and be saved by God you better damn sure do what he tells you to do.
What happened at the Wewoka Church of Christ, and the withdrawal of fellowship, stunk. It seemed clear to me that the anger of the Elders was aimed at Stormy Winters, first because he dared to take some precious parking away from the church goers. The beer sold in the store was the perfect justification to get back at Stormy.
There was a rumor that we had a member who owned half interest in a liquor store, but he was never considered as a Disfellowship candidate.
After I resigned from my job with the church of Christ and started selling ads for the Wewoka Daily Times, I had time to think about stuff. The church had used scripture to justify what they did, and if I believed in the scriptures how should I behave?
There was the question, IS SELLING BEER IN YOUR STORE A SIN? I wasn’t totally convinced that it was. The Bible has that story where Jesus goes to a wedding where the host runs out of wine, and Jesus performs his First Miracle, of turning water into wine.
We know it was alcoholic wine, and not just plain ole grape juice because of this passage:
John 2: 9 & 10
“. . . and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside 10 and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”
The logic is clear. If you have expensive wine, and cheap wine, you let people get their buzz on and once they are a little drunk, you bring out the cheap stuff and the people will be too drunk to notice the switch. This passage makes no sense if Jesus turned water into Welches.
I began to wonder if the Bible was actually perfect and inerrant.
The story of a talking snake has always bothered me. If the Bible was to be taken literally then there was a time when snakes walked and talked. After the sin in the Garden of Eden God curses the snake to crawl on his belly and, I assume, God also took away the snake’s ability to talk since they no longer seem to talk.
Science classes and the theory of evolution did not seem to fit with a 6 day creation story. What else is there about the Bible that I needed to question?
If you read the Old Testament carefully, you will come across passages where the Hebrew conquerors used captive women for sexual sport. How does that jive with Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery?
Before the Hebrews left Egypt Moses told the people to steal all the gold and jewelry from their Egyptian Masters. How does that jive with Thou Shalt Not Steal?
In Exodus 15 God rejoices over the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. Yeah, these drowned Egyptians had been chasing the fleeing Hebrew, but still, wasn’t the God of the Hebrews the God of all humans?
Later in the Old Testament God tells his people that the children of the Edomites should have their heads dashed against stones.
The Bible justified slavery: In Exodus 21:20 & 21 it states,
20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.
If the Bible is inspired by God, and it is inerrant [or perfect] then the passage quoted above is exactly what God meant: slavery is OK, beating a slave is OK as long as the slave doesn’t die because a slave is property.
There is the worst test of marital faithfulness ever made part of the law: In Numbers 5:11-31 it states that if a man gets this feeling that his wife has been unfaithful, he can take her to a priest and the woman would be ordered to drink poison. If the woman died from the poison she was assumed to be guilty. If the woman survived drinking the poison she was presumed to be innocent.
Did this sound like something God would support? If God supported this, would I be out of line to not support God?
This Unfaithful Wife Test was part of God’s law, inspired by God, part of the Bible and the Bible was perfect. I was starting to have serious doubts.
I could not understand how I had read all this stuff year after year throughout my life and I had never really questioned the Godliness [or lack thereof] inside the Bible.
Read Numbers chapter 31. God ordered Moses to kill the Midianites and Moses does kill all the male Midianites but the Hebrew soldiers spared the women and children and took their cattle, flocks, and goods [Numb. 31:9]. Moses was angry when he found out the soldiers only killed the male Midianites so he ordered that all the male children also be killed. Then Moses ordered that all the females who were not virgins were to be killed. Oh yeah, Moses also told the Hebrew men that they could keep the Midianite virgins for themselves.
In Deuteronomy 14:21 there is a very interesting passage about road kill and sick animal meat. The scripture says:
Do not eat anything you find already dead. You may give it to the foreigner residing in any of your towns, and they may eat it, or you may sell it to any other foreigner.
Are you kidding? We can take animals that just die from old age or sickness and we can give that contaminated meat to foreigners but to be safe God’s chosen people are not to eat that stuff.
Does any of this sound like stuff that would come from a God you could admire? I was actually disgusted by what I was noticing. It was like scales had fallen from my eyes and I was able to see the ugly parts of the Bible. I no longer read the Bible using Rose Colored Spectacles, and without the filter, a lot of this stuff sounded evil not Godly.
Now when you are raised to believe that your church is the ONLY true church, and your church claims that the Bible is word-for-word dictated by God, and that the Bible exists without errors, that it is the perfect word of God, and if you then stop believing that the Bible is perfect, well, the walls of faith fall faster than the walls of Jericho.
I had heard all of my life that the Bible was perfect and that if any part of the Bible was found to be imperfect then all of it was imperfect. My father told me dozens of times that the Bible was perfect. He said if some of the Bible was from God and some of the Bible was from the opinions of men, then we should shut the doors of the church and go do something else. How could we know what God’s will was unless all of the Bible, 100% of the Bible was from God and perfectly preserved for us?
There is a danger in believing that you and your members are God’s specially chosen people. Even if you don’t realize it, if you believe your members are perfect that implies that those who do not agree with you are the enemies of God. The next thought is that we must hate, or fear, or guard against anyone who does not agree with the truth as your group understands it to be. If we are chosen, then everyone else is UNchosen.
Of course all this was from the Old Testament. Were there contradictions in the New Testament that would call scriptural perfection into question?
The search was on, and I was a skeptical searcher.
Right off the bat I found contradictions.
In Matthew 1:6 Jesus’ lineage was traced through David’s son Solomon, but in Luke 3:31 the lineage of Jesus is traced through David’s son Nathan.
According to my father, one contradiction calls the whole Bible into question. But I kept looking.
In Luke 1:26-31 the announcement of the special birth of Jesus came BEFORE conception.
In Matthew 1:18-21 the announcement of the special birth of Jesus came AFTER conception.
In Matthew 2:13-16 Joseph, Mary, and Jesus flee to Egypt while King Herod orders the slaughter of all males age 2 and under in an effort to kill the King of the Jews as reported by the Wise Men.
Luke 2:21-39 also covers the period of the birth of Jesus and the time just after his birth, and in this part of the New Testament Jesus and his parents do not go to Egypt, and the slaughter of babies is not mentioned.
The more you look the more you see and what I was seeing was conflict upon conflict.
Scribner errors, or errors that crept in by accidents made by the people hand copying the scriptures could not explain away these conflicts because the church of Christ taught that even with all the potential for scribner errors, God ensured that mankind would get the exact Bible He wanted us to have.
I remembered back in OCC and in Preacher School there had been a course called How We Got The Bible. In that class I learned that in AD 325 the Emperor Constantine called the First Council of Nicaea. The Emperor, who is sometimes reported to have been the first Christian Emperor, gathered 300 religious leaders. The Emperor ordered that he receive four copies of the Bible. Some of the theological controversies that threatened to destroy Christianity were arbitrated by Constantine, and in some cases the Emperor just picked a position and made it the position of the Church.
To create four copies of the Bible for the Emperor was a problem. There was no printing press. You go pick up a copy of the Bible and imagine you have to hand copy the whole Bible and you have to do that not once, but four times.
Well, before the copying began the leaders of the Church decided they had to decide what books belong in the Bible and what books could be excluded from the Bible.
They created a criteria for the New Testament, one of which stated that the Book had to have been written by an Apostle, or by someone Christ had appeared to after his resurrection and ascension.
Since the Apostle Paul came AFTER the ascension of Jesus, church leaders agreed to accept his writings because Jesus had appeared to him on the Road to Damascus.
When the group was debating the Book of Hebrews it was accepted because the leaders of the church, at that time, believed Paul was the author of Hebrews. Today biblical scholars are mostly in agreement that Paul did not write the Book of Hebrews.
I also learned that there were some very popular writings used in the early church that were excluded from the Bible because the author was not a witness to Jesus. One book that I remember was called the Shepherd of Hermis.
I remember saying, “Then shouldn’t we either toss out the Book of Hebrews? And if non-witness writers could be included in the Bible then shouldn’t we reconsider those books that Almost Got In?
I was told that despite the errors the people made at the First Council of Nicaea, God made sure that the right books got in, and the wrong books were kept out.
My faith in the church of Christ collapsed.
Was at least part of my loss of faith linked to my anger at the Wewoka Church of Christ elders? Sure that was probably a big part of my loss of faith, but I did lose faith in the Bible.
Kathie and I were not going to any church, and we were working at the Wewoka Daily Times. Life was treading waters.
The Wewoka Daily Times was owned by a company called DonRay. They owned the Holdenville paper, among other newspapers across the state of Oklahoma. They had a division called DonRay Outdoors that owned Billboard signs across Oklahoma.
One day the central vice president of DonRay came to visit the Wewoka Daily Times and he met with me. He explained that DonRay tried to hire and promote from within, and that advertising was the path you needed to follow to become a General Manager of a newspaper. The Central Vice President told me if I would stay another year at the Wewoka Daily Times that he would promote me to be a general manager of one of the DonRay papers.
“How much money can a General Manager of a paper earn in a month?” I asked.
“As much as $600 a month.”
A week later I resigned. A $600 a month job did not sound like a secure future to me. Kathie and I decided we would go back to school. This time we would go to East Central in Ada, and we would get teaching degrees. We enrolled for the Fall Semester of 1974.
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