The Dizzying Search for the Real Jesus

One man's journey wading through the sludge of liberalism and the contentiousness of orthodoxy

by guest contributor Brian F. Marks

Sitting in a classroom as a college freshman, in my heart of hearts, I knew something I’d just heard wasn’t right. It was this unsettled feeling unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I’ll never forget this day. 

I’d heard a professor say something in a religion class, a historical survey of the New Testament, and what he’d said was bizarre. I don’t remember exactly what it was but it wasn’t some esoteric fact or perspective about which I was unaware; it seemed “off” at a deep level. It troubled me. It carried an almost spooky vibe. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, a familiar phrase crossed my mind, a portion of a verse of Scripture that I’d read before but I couldn’t pinpoint the reference. The phrase was “hollow and deceptive philosophy.” The wheels in my head started turning. 

I walked back to my dorm room after class, mulling over what I’d heard. Sitting on my bed I picked up the Bible and started reading. Leafing through the pages of the Pauline epistles, I flipped through to Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and I stopped at Colossians. I read chapter 1 of this letter to the church in Colossae, this ancient city of Phrygia in Asia Minor. I kept going and read chapter 2.

And there it was. 

Verse 10 of Colossians 2, that very phrase that had suddenly landed in my head during class reads, in context: “See to it that no one takes you captive to deceptive and hollow philosophy that depends upon human tradition and the basic principles of this world and not upon Christ” (Col. 2:10).

It was as though the words leapt off the page and hit me like a ton of bricks.

“That’s it!” I said to myself. 

“That is exactly why what I heard in class was so ‘off’!”

Faith has to depend on Christ, the person, not on some set of lofty ideas or basic principles that might make sense but are, in fact, inadequate. But what does that look like? 

There I was, an almost 19-year-old undergrad, still searching for a major, doing my best to make my faith my own.

Was God trying to tell me something? Was this the still small voice of the Holy Spirit alerting me that something was amiss? 

Was this, as a Pentecostal youth pastor that I knew in high school used to put it, the Lord “pricking my spirit” with conviction through a bit of Scripture I’d managed to remember?

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Whatever it was, I found myself on an earnest search for truth, an honest pursuit of God. 

It’s quite one thing to encounter the Holy Spirit, to respond to the Gospel of Jesus and His Kingdom, hearing that unmistakable still small voice of the Lord. 

It’s quite another to realize the Gospel’s implications, observe how there are forces at work to distort it, see competing versions of “orthodoxy”, and then sift through what all of that means and what it requires of me.

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I was raised in a devout Christian family. 

My dad is the most selfless person I know, a genuine believer in Jesus if there ever was one. My mom is also a sincere Christian who prayed for me and my sister fervently. I always knew I could trust my dad. We’re still very close. Mom loved God’s righteousness, had no tolerance for wrongdoing, and she hated injustice and I respected that about her. I’ve definitely acquired her hatred of injustice and I aspire to acquire my dad’s godly selflessness. Neither Dad nor Mom are college-educated, but both were diligent in delving into the Bible and applying its wisdom to life wherever they could, however they could. They did their best. 

Following Jesus was the most important aspect of their lives, and they communicated that every core value that flows from that ought to inform how we think, act, and conduct our affairs in every area of our lives. God must not be tangential or sectioned off, merely compartmentalized to church on Sunday. Mom and Dad had a good, loving marriage. This was all part of the normal Christian life, I learned. There were the ups and downs, of course, but it all seemed mostly good. Life has its heartaches and joys, yes, but God is good. He’s Lord of all. He has overcome the world. And most importantly, He loves us. 

I encountered God powerfully as a child. I was baptized in a non-denominational church at age 8. Looking back I always had what I now call a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. At age 14 I experienced God in a powerful way that changed me forever. I felt His presence tangibly; it wasn’t merely psychosomatic. I’ll never forget that day.

And while I found reading and understanding the Bible to be challenging, after that experience as a teenager, I knew I wanted to know God more. I dove into reading the Bible and it took on a new life. If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed, John 8:36 says. Well, I felt free after that encounter with the presence of God, more free than I ever had and I’d experienced God in other ways previously. The fruit of experiencing that freedom was a desire to read the Bible more. That had to be from God, didn’t it? 

And even as the thrill of the encounter with the Holy Spirit wore off, I kept reading and rereading the Bible, sometimes out of rote obedience when it felt boring, other times genuinely hungry to learn more. And by His grace, I have. 

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Reading and understanding the Bible was (and in some ways still is) a struggle. It’s a good struggle though. Struggling is OK, right? Jacob wrestled with God and he was renamed Israel, which means “struggled with God”. If that’s a major theme in the Bible, and it seems to be, I figure I’m not alone.  

But as I pored over the pages of the New Testament over and over I was struck by how many times "false teachers” or “false prophets” were spoken of, and not in a good way. Jesus even warned against “false Christs,” (Matthew 24:23-24) and I didn’t have much of a grid for that. I had read about cults when a schoolmate became a Mormon so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar and I understood that spiritual deception was a thing but it really didn’t hit me until that college religion class that the false teaching was not off in the distance somewhere, out there in obscurity. It was real and present, right there in front of me, and I had to be watchful. The Bible doesn't mince words about how serious it is. What, then, should I do? 

I figured that the Apostle Paul’s words that the Colossians should not be taken captive by deceptive and hollow teaching was still good advice. So were his words to Timothy, pastor of the church in Ephesus, to “watch your life and doctrine closely” (1 Timothy 4:16). Years later at a church gathering before a Sunday service, I remember hearing a prolific New Testament scholar (Dr. Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary) answer in the affirmative a congregant’s question: “Do you believe that it is truly possible for a person to abandon faith in Jesus after having experienced the presence of God and having cultivated a relationship with the Holy Spirit?”

“Oh yes, there would be no warnings against being deceived by false teaching were it impossible,” he replied unequivocally. He then referenced Paul’s warning about “making shipwreck” of one’s faith (1 Timothy 1:19).

I’ve never forgotten that. 

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After that encounter with the Colossians 2 passage in my dorm room

I kept reading and would learn about the many ways in which theological liberalism distorted the Gospel. Suddenly the ancient words of Jesus and Paul about false teaching now seemed rather relevant and applicable. 

I learned about the uber-liberal Jesus Seminar, which decided what words Jesus said by using colored beads. No, really. Christ’s miracles? They didn’t really happen. To actually believe in the supernatural is foolish, this crowd and their ilk surmised. 

I learned of another professor at my alma mater who attended church not far from campus and he reportedly believed that the resurrection of Jesus was a metaphor, that Jesus didn’t literally rise from the dead. 

Isn’t that kind of…basic? The main point of the Story? I mean, what even is the Gospel if, of all things, you miss…that? If his resurrection wasn’t physical, then his body is still in the grave and he died in vain and sin defeated Jesus. And this professor had a Baptist (I think) seminary degree and was a regular churchgoer. What even was this? Some kind of sick joke? 

And then I learned that he wasn’t alone in his views. He wasn’t some random oddball. Some seminaries and mainline liberal denominations actually taught this, with some variations here and there. What? Many people in this university environment and in his denomination thought similarly. I was appalled. Gobsmacked, really. 

I also soon noticed that this same set of people who believed themselves to be intellectually enlightened and have such sophisticated theology that they could also find ways to either wink and nod (if not outright embrace) at certain sins, especially sexual ones, which seemed to be their pet favorites. 

They’ve managed to acquire some sparkly academic credentials, you see, and because of that they can perform all kinds of fancy exegetical footwork or locate some mysteriously hidden “context” that was not discernible from a plain reading of the text. In so doing they then were able to articulate that the beliefs of the rainbow flag wavers hold, to name just one example, are peachy keen, even biblically supported. But it was all so lazy too and seemed as though all of their arguments could be reduced to “And at the end of the day, Jesus was all about love and kindness”. It was insipid. Sure enough, he supports same-sex unions and all sorts of other secular progressive boilerplate items and if we want to be good, reasonable, educated people, we should support them too. Believing otherwise is backward and you wouldn’t want to be like those oogedy-boogedy right-wing hillbillies from the countryside (did they mean folks like my parents?) who can’t muse with the philosophers and truly understand the deeper, layered, textured meaning they did. 

On and on it went. The arrogance was off-putting. 

Such was the vapid, blasphemous sludge of theological liberalism. The more I encountered it the more I spurned it. 

But I was young, and I didn’t know all the lofty ideas these professors spouted. I’m the first in my family to go to college. What could I even say? I had a decent-sized vocabulary for my age but I didn’t know some of the large words they were using so who was I to object? 

Yet somehow, that unshakable internal sense I couldn’t explain that the “gospel” they were promoting was severely twisted stayed with me. At times everything in me just screamed, ‘No, no, no. This just isn’t right. It’s convoluted.”

I’d eventually also learn that everything that they believed wasn’t new, even though it was new to me. 

Come to find out, plenty who believed as I did had been resisting this sludge for many decades. While I’m neither Presbyterian nor do I adhere to Calvinist soteriology, when I learned about Presbyterian preacher  J. Gresham Machen’s book “Christianity and Liberalism,” it was like that day in my dorm with Colossians 2:10 all over again. Another light bulb went on inside my head. 

Indeed, so-called liberal Christianity, with its denial of the supernatural, is an alternative religion altogether, he argued compellingly in the book, far removed from any semblance of the historic Christian faith. He was shining a light on the deception of his age, and quite effectively. And Machen paid a price for his views. In 1936, He wound up defrocked by the church for his views. The next day, news of his being ousted was on the front page of the New York Times. 

In short, theological liberalism may be many things, but it isn’t Christian. It’s an example of the false teaching about which Scripture repeatedly warns. 

And it is not just a misguided interpretation; it’s actually evil.

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So whatever I was, I was definitely not theologically liberal. How could I be? 

On that day in my dorm reading Colossians 2 I remember thinking that if I’m going to live my faith I'm going to have to do my best to distinguish the truth from lies, and not only that but resist lies no matter how cleverly they were argued. Not resisting would dishonor God. Lies help no one in the end. To do this I was going to have to strive to know the Bible well enough so as to discern the truth. All of it, from Genesis to Revelation, is “God-breathed”, I would read in 2 Timothy 3:16 so it behooves me to know it well. 

I remember reading God’s words to the prophet Ezekiel: “When I say to a wicked person, ‘You will surely die,’ and you do not warn them or speak out to dissuade them from their evil ways in order to save their life, that wicked person will die for their sin, and I will hold you accountable for their blood” (Ezekiel 3:10). 

Yes, that’s in the Old Testament so why should I care about that command? We’re under grace in the new covenant, not the law, I’d learned in church. We’re on the resurrection side of the cross now. But that’s because of Jesus. And Jesus didn’t abolish the law but fulfilled it (Matthew 5:17). Moreover, what Jesus accomplished on the cross at Calvary – his death and resurrection – provides the way for humanity to be restored to a right relationship with the Father. How much more, then, could I not stay quiet? How could I not, like Ezekiel, also try to dissuade others to turn from evil and turn to Jesus, who longs to forgive, heal, and restore? And perhaps more pressing, how I could not turn from my own sin and shortcomings? 

For if God’s Word is the plumbline by which I should measure all things,  and if I deliberately hide it in my heart (Psalm 119:11) that should be enough, no? That way I’ll steer clear of any gross error and I’ll remain faithful to God, right?

Well, yes and no. 

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I’d soon find out that as much as I believed theological liberalism to be deeply wrong, the search for theological orthodoxy was not easy. It was confusing. Theological “orthodoxy” means a lot of different things depending on who you ask. It troubled me in a whole new way. 

And what do I do when people who know how to say a lot of truthful, biblically “orthodox” things but turn out to have terrible, ungodly character? When they don’t live what they say they believe? That’s an enormous mismatch and the betrayal when that becomes evident in real life is tremendously jarring. Could false teachers dress up as “orthodox”, furthering evil covertly while sounding good? 

In the years after college I learned of two pastors I knew personally and learned from, both of whom were “orthodox” in their theology and in the span of a few months, they both became mired in scandals of their own making. One was defrocked, the other was released from his current station and started ministering in a different church and I never learned all the details of what happened. But it rattled me so hard it shut my emotions down for several months. I was numb and zombie-like, trying to process the brain-breaking cognitive dissonance that I couldn’t sort out, while battling some painful struggles of my own. 

Was I, as a sincere Christian, destined to have a catastrophic moral failing like they did? Would I be able to overcome my own issues so as to avoid something like that, particularly if I ever dared to enter full-time ministry? But even if I didn’t serve in a ministerial capacity in the church, I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. The key thing that I’d always believed about the Christian faith – thanks largely to my parents' faithful witness –  was that it must be lived, not just declared. It’s an incarnate faith.  

What about when church dysfunction splits a congregation even though, technically, on paper, it seemed they had the basics of the Gospel – the core substance that matters – expressed and upheld? And many seemed to be genuinely living it out as best they could. Shouldn’t a vibrant and robust orthodoxy yield a vibrant and healthy orthopraxy, even in this fallen world full of flawed human beings? Complicating matters even more, the course of a few years before I turned 30, I was part of two separate dysfunctional churches and a parachurch group that, as best I could tell, was doctrinally fine on paper, but it was disappointingly unpleasant, relationally speaking. Why was this? Doesn’t the Gospel bring life? What was missing?

Then I dared to try and peer into the unknown world of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. In my American, low-church evangelical upbringing, these were largely foreign to me. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox men and women were religious people who did mind-numbingly dull and boring rituals, or so I thought. They may have had stunningly beautiful cathedrals (and they did) but their faith was spiritually lifeless, it seemed to me, and the average parishioner didn’t study the Bible like the average evangelical Christian did. I wasn’t entirely wrong on that in some cases, but I was ignorant. Many Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, I would learn, had a very deep faith, much deeper than mine. 

The Catholics and Eastern Orthodox defined “orthodoxy” and “truth” differently than I did as an evangelical, emphasizing tradition along with sacred Scripture. Tradition gave us Scripture, they would say. But they differed amongst themselves too. And I met a few Catholics and Orthodox who seemed to believe most of the things I did. As far as I could tell, they were sincere Christians, unlike the Protestant liberals I had met in college. But there were also things which confused me about their theology then and still do. What to make of all of this? All I wanted was to be a theologically orthodox Christian. Was that really so difficult, so complex? Did it have to be? 

The most earnest evangelicals I’d meet would recognize differences in opinion on certain aspects of faith and they would graciously offer something like: “In the essentials (primary doctrines), unity; in the non-essentials (secondary doctrines), liberty; and in all things, charity.” 

That sounds nice, I suppose, and I generally agree with that. But who gets to determine what is essential or non-essential? How do we rank these theological issues and determine if they are primary or secondary? Isn’t it all important? At least these evangelicals seemed to have good, honorable intentions, stemming from a noble desire for ecumenism and unity in the Body of Christ. We need more togetherness in this troubled world. And the Bible is a thick book, so of course there would be some minor differences among believers. That shouldn’t such be a big problem, right? Right? 

Oh, no. 

On and on, the pursuit of a deeper and more robust faith that emphasized truth and theological orthodoxy continued, and according to the other voices I found who claimed to value these things as much as I wanted to, the issues that the ecumencially-minded evangelicals assured me were secondary or non-essential for salvation were, for them, a deal-breakingly big deal. 

To name just a few, how does the interplay between man’s free will and God’s sovereignty work together? Are all 5 points of Calvinism true? Should we regard Martin Luther as a terrible human because he spurned the book of James and also said despicable things about Jews while also appreciating what he did to decry the corruption in the Catholic Church, namely Tetsel’s selling of papal indulgences? What about the earth’s age? Or the exact nature of the atonement? 

What about Mary? Should I revere her more than I do? She’s not God and the Catholics insist there’s a difference between veneration and adoration but by all appearances it sure looks and feels like they worship her. And that bugs me. How do they make that distinction in their minds that I don’t seem to be able to as an evangelical? Am I missing something? Where is that in the Bible? I’ve read about their typological arguments about how Mary is the Ark of the Covenant and Jesus is the Bread of life. The Ark carried manna in the Old Testament and She carried the Living Bread in the New Testament. I suppose I can see that parallel, and that’s interesting, but I don’t find it convincing. Shouldn’t something so important be explicit? It was all so disorienting.

What about the end times? Pre-mil, Post-mil, Amil, preterist, partial preterist and more…proponents of these views are making what seems to be solid arguments from the Bible and tradition about which is in keeping with Scripture. Seriously though, just try interpreting Revelation. Many layers and symbols to consider, and the genre is apocalyptic literature.  It's not easy to comprehend even if you read it many times. I know because I have. Accomplished scholars who value orthodoxy have pored over it for centuries and they still differ on what it all means. 

And did the sign gifts of the Holy Spirit cease with the death of the last apostle as some sincere theologically “orthodox” Reformed people insist? I think that’s ridiculous. Did those who believe and practice them “blaspheme the Spirit of God” by offering Him “unacceptable worship” as the revered pastor John MacAruthur said in 2013 at his “Strange Fire” conference? Blaspheming the Spirit is the unpardonable sin, Scripture says (Mark 3:29). He’s definitely not among those evangelicals talking about “in all things, charity” and yet he was very influential. He’s written tons of books and a study Bible.

Or are the Reformed evangelicals, despite their fierce insistence that they possess a watertight, pristine orthodoxy, misinterpreting the phrase “when the perfect comes” in 1 Corinthians 13:10 to mean the closing of the canon of Scripture and the gifts ceasing to be in operation when it seems to clearly refer of the Second Coming of Christ and restoration of all things at the end of time? Dare I even suggest that?

What gives? We’re reading the same Bible, are we not?

Some “orthodox” Catholics I knew would crow about this difference of interpretation and sneer that this is why there are 30,000 Protestant denominations and that the split from Rome has been wrong and rooted in rebellion against God from the start. You see, they, the members of the One True Church, have their Magisterium to speak authoritatively and decisively and establish these things and thus it’s settled once and for all. But that church has a pedophile priest problem, I’d learned in 2002 from news reports emerging from Boston, and they also had many layers of church bureaucracy that covered these abuses up even if their doctrine was intact on paper. Can I really trust them? 

Meanwhile, even if they have their doctrine officially delineated in their Catechism, in many parishes it wasn’t so in practice. Some of these Catholics were distorting the Scripture in an uncannily similar way as the liberal Protestants that I had met in college had, in defiance of their church teaching. But many still insisted they were good Catholics. Fast forward several years later, in one of the most unexpected and strangest surprises in life, I wound up going to graduate school at an authentically Catholic university.

I also learned about historical disputes; the religious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts; the Spanish Inquisition; other religious wars in Europe over doctrinal issues; and how English reformer Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake for heresy. Many who committed these crimes genuinely thought they were acting to preserve theological “orthodoxy”. 

And then I learned about the plethora of isms and the importance of sound doctrine from contemporary voices. But they all had a different vision of what “sound” doctrine was.

Most people debating these isms were not arguing for a promiscuous theological liberalism that was undermining what the ecumenical evangelicals would call the essentials so that was good, I guess, but on other truths, it was so thorny. Let’s have some of that much-needed unity, pretty please.  

But some professing Christians with controlling personality types seemed to stake their lives on a few of these isms. This was quite odd to behold but they were totally serious, fully convinced of the rightness of their religious cause. For some it seemed almost existential; they were so psychologically invested in having this well thought out, firmly understood faith. Every doctrine had to be nailed down and perfectly expressed down to the letter. A slightly furrowed brow during Communion was the most vulnerable emotion you’d get out of them at Church. Heaven forbid they give anyone the slightest indication that they have a weak mind. They’d read Mark Noll’s blistering book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” and, by George, they were not going to be one of those intellectually benighted, “fundie” simpleton believers. It was a different flavor of arrogance I’d seen from the liberals but it was still arrogance.

I read in Proverbs that it’s the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out (Proverbs 25:2). But does it really have to be so hard? 

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Amid all this swirling confusion it struck me that in some of these disputes someone is…wrong. Can you be “orthodox” and wrong? Maybe being wrong on a “non-essential” doctrine so it doesn’t matter but it’s still wrong. If I’m wrong on a non-essential one am I at risk of eventually distorting a primary doctrine? When does it cross the line to being a false teaching? If it’s wrong it’s also “false”, right? Aren’t “wrong” and “false” synonyms? Or is there a material distinction from being earnestly misled and mistaken versus willfully furthering something distorted?

One quickly learns that theologically orthodox people, or those who are aiming to be, really really don’t like being “wrong.” They don’t do “wrong.” They can’t possibly be “wrong” because they aren’t like the morally dirty liberals who openly distort the faith and twist Scripture. They’re the real Christians. 

Theologically orthodox people like being right. Like, a lot. And some of them fight to be seen as right. Sometimes the discourse about what constitutes theological orthodoxy, especially in online forums, gets downright ugly and vituperative. But some say it’s all “iron sharpening iron” (Proverbs 27:17) and the raucous debates are a good thing. But if studying theology is about loving God with the mind, the way it manifested among some of these people sure didn’t feel very loving. Much of it was heady and stifling. Over the years I’d observed some people who were raised in a theologically “orthodox” Christian setting abandon their faith or become theologically liberal. They were treated so badly by the ugly and vituperative orthodox fighters I almost couldn’t blame them even though I knew I disagreed with the liberalism and their conclusion. 

My heart broke for them. 

God doesn’t want His children so confused about His Word on the things that really matter, no? He’s not the author of confusion, right? 

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How do we do life together as Christians? Christian faith can’t be hyper-individualized; it’s communal. We can’t forsake the gathering together (Hebrews 10:25).

How the Church is structured matters, especially how we govern our affairs as a people. God doesn’t seem to be indifferent to that. They call this “ecclesiology” and the opinions on this are as wide as they are long. From the Baptists to the Anglicans, there was no agreement about this despite their determination to derive a godly order from Scripture. 

And what do I make of theologically orthodox Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and some Anglican voices who say Scripture blesses women to be in pastoral leadership versus the Southern Baptists and Reformed Presbyterian types who insist, among other things, that 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; she must be silent”) is basically an open-and-shut case against women teaching in any authoritative ministerial or leadership capacity in the church. 

And what about the scholarship of theologically orthodox scholars like the meticulous Philip Barton Payne, an Anglican, who points out that “to permit” was conjugated in the Greek in the present-continuous verb tense, and that when it is read in the original language it more accurately reads: “I am not presently permitting a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man” because of the kind of women who’d been in the occult in that region of the world and therefore they shouldn’t be teaching but learn first. In other words, the passage was not a blanket restriction for all of time. Context and original language and grammar conjugations matters when interpreting the Word, no? His research was so thorough and he was right-on in terms of what many would call the “essentials.” 

Yet this issue bitterly divides Christians. 

Indeed, even when he presented the receipts, other “orthodox” believers would go so far as to say that women leaders in the church constitute “sin” or “rebellion against God’s clear command in His Word”, and that it paves the way toward enabling sexual perversions, which absolutely does twist the Gospel. And unfortunately, the liberal theology in the mainline churches in the United States and other Western societies seemed to follow that trajectory of ordaining women and then sanctioning the blessing of sexual sin, so they absolutely do have an understandable reason for thinking that and resisting what they see as a destructive trend. It made my head swim. 

Agree to disagree about the non-essentials, you say? What a nice little thought. If only…

What should I do? 

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I’ve heard some people say that as Christians, we walk in the light we’ve been given. 

Is that enough? 

Because in the middle of all the ongoing theological conflict it feels really…lonely. Very, very lonely. Scripture recounts how the apostles fought. Paul rebuked Peter sharply because he was wrong about something, and Peter walked with Jesus in the flesh! (Galatians 2:11-19). 

But is this and should this be the norm? 

It sure seems to me that the pursuit of theological orthodoxy had as many problems as theological liberalism, though a different kind. 

If truth is your foremost priority, our North Star, isn’t it theoretically possible to be correct and make everything fit together and prescribe a biblically-derived solution to all of life’s problems? Many seemed to think so.

Because if we can apprehend truth, doesn’t it have to be possible to have most of the important things largely figured out, you can develop a comprehensive worldview that is shaped by and faithful to God’s Word?

What sincere Christian who wanted to be faithful wouldn’t want to strive to have that? Doesn’t one kind of follow the other? Isn’t this part of discipleship? How do we know when we’ve arrived at such a point, or at least enough to have a substantial grasp on the core truths?   

Or is all of this some unnecessary, self-imposed pressure? A lot of these evangelicals read the Bible obsessively. Still the doctrinal divisions remain, some of them extremely pointed. 

Moreover, where is God in all of it?

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The earliest believers in Jesus had their tradition and, of course, the Old Testament, their history, the moral Law and the words of the Prophets. They had problems then as we do today. The Corinthians were sexually immoral and abused the Lord’s Supper. The Galatians were foolish and were bewitched. Writing from Patmos in the book of Revelation, the Apostle John rebukes several churches for tolerating things that God hates. 

The human condition is inescapable this side of eternity. But the early church didn’t have a completed New Testament. Acts 15 even records that the earliest Christians ran into issues where they didn’t know, in their human mind, what to do but in the most famous example, “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements.”

But since we do have a completed canon we face the hermeneutical challenge of interpreting it, harmonizing it with the Old Testament, teaching and proclaiming the Word under the anointing and guidance of the Holy Spirit. This is how it’s supposed to work, no? 

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I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read it many, many times. I learn something new each time I read it. I’ve encountered God there. I’ve committed portions of it to memory. Maybe I could study harder (who couldn’t?) but I’ve been diligent. And I do it because, at base, I want to know God more. That’s my primary motivation and it’s what drives most sincere Christians I know. 

But I still know so little. I still see through the glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12). 

It’s hard for me to think that any one Church (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or any variation of Protestant evangelical) has every theological i dotted and t crossed. So where should I go? Where can I obtain the fullness of truth? 

Am I subjecting myself to a rationalist, Post-Enlightenment epistemology and standard of accuracy that the worldview of the Bible does not presuppose? Am I thinking about “truth” from a Western mindset (I am, after all, an American, so I don’t know any other way to think) rather than an ancient Near Eastern one? Which is more honest? Which is purer? Am I neurotically chasing after something in vain? In some settings, Christianity didn’t feel like the intimate presence of the God I encountered as a teenager; it felt like a kind of exhausting spiritual hamster wheel.

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I sort of understand the point that I’ve heard some atheists snark about when they say things like “Man, if only God were clearer!”. Given the competing cosmological visions and interpretations over things that do indeed matter, it seems that at any given moment in history, the theology that becomes prominent in Christian culture and in broader society is that which can be articulated with the most robust substance and can be enshrined in influential institutions. Marketing and branding sure helped popularize certain doctrines too. 

I wouldn’t want to make a hard doctrine out of this, but perhaps the journey of faith is coming to realize that maybe, just maybe, that even as the pursuit of deeper academic knowledge is objectively good, the basics actually are…enough. 

And maybe one of those basics is that however one may approach the text of Scripture, however sophisticated their hermeneutics, whether the highly educated Bible scholar or the simple auto mechanic with a high school education, can read its pages and encounter Him in it…because the Bible reveals who God is. The lofty eloquent prophet Isaiah knew God. So did Amos the simple farmer. 

Maybe there’s more wisdom in Paul’s words in Colossians 2 than we realized. To not be taken captive by both the liberals who twist Scripture and the religious “orthodox” who obsess over its particularities, insisting they have the most untainted version of the truth. 

Faith must depend not on the deceptive and hollow philosophy nor the basic principles of the world but upon Him, on Christ. A person. THE Person. 

The Truth is a Person. His name is Jesus, the hinge of history. 

And not to reduce the fullness of the Gospel to a simplistic truth claim but I’m being as honest as I know to be, I must ask myself this: Can I look back at the grand scheme of things and think that Jesus Christ being crucified (and, I believe, resurrected) is, in the grand scheme of things, unimportant and historically insignificant? 

No, I cannot.  

He’s simply made too much of a mark not to trust Him that He meant what He said and that He was who He said He was.

Yes, there sure is false teaching that must be resisted. But if He said that the Holy Spirit would come and lead us into all truth, then the journey is part of the process. And He’s not scared of it. 

And maybe that’s more than OK.

Soli Deo Gloria.