What is Truth?

Readings
Revelation 1.4b–8
John 18.33–37

In an earlier epoch, we believed in God (or gods) as effortlessly as we believed in the firm ground beneath our feet and the expanse of sky above our heads. An ancient Greek poet expressed it like this in a hymn to Zeus (later reappropriated by the apostle Paul): ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.28). For the ancients, the divine was as immanent as the air they breathed. But that was before everything was on fire. That was before the conflagration of world wars, before the skies over Auschwitz were darkened with human ash, before the ominous mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the world witnessed twin pillars of smoke rising into the September sky over Manhattan, before long-venerated institutions were engulfed in the flames of scandal, before the scorched-earth assault on Christianity by its cultured despisers. Today, it’s harder to believe, harder to hold on to faith, and nearly impossible to embrace religion with unjaded innocence. We live in a time when everything is on fire and the faith of millions is imperilled. — Brian Zahnd, When Everything’s on Fire: Faith forged from the Ashes 

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A few months ago, someone said to me that they found it hard to imagine that I had ever been a fundamentalist. If you’re not sure what a fundamentalist is, basically it is someone who holds hard to a particularly strict interpretation of Scripture. That tends to mean things like believing Adam and Eve were real people, and that Jonah was really swallowed by a fish. 

I may once have been a fundamentalist, but I’m not any more. 

It hurts to stop being a fundamentalist. I worried about how to know what is true and what is not true. You see, as a fundamentalist I would say I just believed what the Bible says. The Bible was the word of God, straight from God’s mouth. I learned to say

God says it [in the Bible that is]
I believe it
That settles it

But what when I stopped believing the creation account in the Book of Genesis was literally true? What about when I realised the Book of Jonah is a farcical tale full of humour which declared God’s love for everyone, but not a history book? When I saw that Jonah wasn’t literally swallowed by a fish? 

And what about my doubts? In my fundamentalist church, a person with doubts was in danger of losing their faith. I was told — and I believed it — that if you doubt just one thing, you’re in danger of doubting more and more until you doubt everything. It’s like a stack of Jenga blocks, or a house of cards, ready to fall down.  

Fighting my doubts became a huge burden to me. 

Some people think this fundamentalist version of Christian faith is the original thing. But it’s not. Fundamentalism is not much more than 100 years old. (If you think that’s a long time, don’t forget: Christianity is a full 2000 years old. It got along for almost 1900 years without fundamentalism.) 

I can be a Christian without being a fundamentalist.