Culture War, Inerrancy, Tolstoy, & the Gospels: A Personal Journey

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Last week, I introduced the Becoming Christ aspect of the website, which draws from my forthcoming e-book The Anointed. In this episode, the time seemed right to share a bit of my personal journey. I hope it will shed some light on the book and the direction I’m headed. Since this essay is mostly personal, I’ll forego the usual footnotes and references.

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My formative years were spent in ultra-conservative Amarillo, Texas, during the 1970s. My family faithfully attended a Methodist church down the street from our house, and this being the ’70s, we piled into the car and drove to the end of the block to get there, rain or shine.

I had a children’s storybook Bible as a child, but my interest was confined to the pictures. Even then, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the story of Noah. I’d been to the San Diego Zoo and watched nature shows on PBS. How did Noah get elephants, lions, rhinos, and giraffes onto the Ark? It made no sense to me, so I mentally checked out whenever the subject of the flood came up in Sunday School.

Around the age of 12, I was snooping in my parents’ bedroom and discovered a book in my dad’s nightstand – Good News for Modern Man. This was one of the first “everyday English” translations of the Bible, and at that time it was New Testament only. I snuck the book out every morning and put it back every afternoon until I’d read the entire thing on the sly. Afterward, to the shock of everyone in our small congregation (including my parents), I grabbed my little sister’s hand at the end of a service and said, “Let’s get baptized.”

The next book I stole from my dad set the tone for my teens and twenties. The Late, Great Planet Earth was published in 1970 and went on to become “the No. 1 non-fiction bestseller of the decade,” according to The New York Times. I found it in ’74 or so and was immediately “caught up” (forgive the pun) in its vision of rapture, tribulation, Armageddon, and Christ’s return to a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem. It took years for me to outgrow this warped take on the “end times,” but one principle from the book stuck with me: Interpret literally unless you’re forced to interpret symbolically.

Armed with that litmus test, the now-disgraced duo of Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler launched their conservative takeover of Southern Baptist seminaries.

Soon, another book cemented that same thought in the evangelical consciousness. In 1976 the editor of Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell, authored his infamous Battle for the Bible. Lindsell claimed liberal theology was undermining the Scripture and would destroy the church. While inerrancy had previously been a matter of opinion rather than a doctrine, even among evangelicals, Lindsell argued that the Bible “does not contain error of any kind,” even (or especially!) in its references to history, cosmology, and science. Furthermore, any Christian who didn’t agree with this fundamentalist definition of inerrancy was not a “true Christian.”

Lindsell named names and took no prisoners in his crusade to expose “liberal theology” in evangelical seminaries and denominations. The next year, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy was formed, and in 1978 it brought together 200 evangelical scholars, theologians, and pastors to draft the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Armed with that litmus test, the now-disgraced duo of Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler launched their conservative takeover of Southern Baptist seminaries. That same year, Francis Schaeffer and popular Surgeon General C. Everett Koop debuted their anti-abortion documentary, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? The Culture War was on. I turned 18, cast my first vote for Ronald Reagan, and wholeheartedly enlisted in the army of Christ.

As the ’80s progressed and Armageddon failed to arrive on schedule, I became increasingly disenchanted with end-times speculation, and by the mid-’90s, I realized that Billy Graham’s evangelicalism had been co-opted by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and Kenneth Starr. The church I knew and loved had been swallowed whole by political powerbrokers. Looking back at the names of the men who bequeathed the Culture War to us, I’m not surprised that one-by-one they were embroiled in scandal. Jesus warned of wolves in sheep’s clothing. I lost interest in politics and burned my draft card.

About the same time, I started teaching a prison Bible study, and I discovered how little I really knew about the Bible and Christianity. This came as a bit of a shock. I’d sat in church for decades and read through the Bible more times than I could count. I thought I knew things pretty well. But the inmates had a way of asking questions I couldn’t answer, so I bought Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology for help and wound up reading it cover-to-cover. Luckily, I didn’t stop there. Grudem’s approach to the Bible is simplistic, as if it were a set of propositions just waiting to be assembled and harmonized into a perfect philosophy. Once that’s done, who needs all those messy stories? Grudem was wrong, of course, but he did impart a love of theology that sent me on decade-long spree of intense reading. I shed many false notions about the Scripture in those days, but inerrancy somehow stuck with me. I’d been taught that letting go of a perfect Bible meant letting go of faith itself, and that I could not do.

The tipping point arrived in strange form. Around 2004, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ debuted to much controversy, and I was reading a front-page article on the movie in the Dallas Morning News when the author said something that stopped me in my tracks. He said the gospels contradicted each other about the trial of Jesus. Now my journalism background broke through. “Hold on,” I said. “That’s an opinion. This is a front-page news story. You can’t pass off an opinion as fact in a news story!” I wrote a letter of complaint to the editor, but for some reason that wasn’t enough. I decided to prove to myself that the gospels were inerrant. By that, I meant that taken individually, every statement in them was literally, word-for-word true.

As my morning devotional, I began to compose a harmonized version of the gospels. Coffee in hand, surrounded by commentaries and translations, I wrote out a single narrative of the gospel story with a fountain pen in notebook after notebook. With the exception of the genealogies and later additions (such as the longer ending of Mark), my goal was to include every verse of every gospel and explain every difficulty in footnotes. I had some thought of turning the project into a book, but by the end of that years-long process, I no longer believed in inerrancy, and the project went into a metaphorical drawer where I forgot about it for years.

I decided to prove to myself that the gospels were inerrant. By that, I meant that taken individually, every statement in them was literally, word-for-word true.

Did I let go of the faith when I let go of a perfect Bible? Absolutely not! What I discovered about inerrancy is what Luther and Calvin discovered. When I found mistakes of detail or irreconcilable differences in chronology, my ultimate response was – “Who cares?” Nothing I found cast Jesus or his teaching into doubt. Where did that leave me on inerrancy? I came to conclude that Scripture is “perfect with respect to its purpose,” which is an old formula that Christians of every stripe can agree upon – from Catholic Vatican II to Reformed John Piper to Arminian Roger Olson. All of them agree the primary purpose of Scripture is salvific, or saving. In plain language, the Bible’s purpose is not to teach history or geology or biology. The purpose of God’s revelation is to show his prodigal sons and daughters their way home. In that regard, I‘ve found it more than perfect.

Years of immersing myself in the life of Jesus brought me to understand that Christianity can’t be understood apart from him. The evangelists viewed the entirety of the Hebrew Bible – what we call the Old Testament – through the lens of Jesus. When a person becomes a Christian, we don’t hand them a Bible and say, “Start with Genesis 1 and read through to the end.” No! We say, “Begin with the gospels,” because the ultimate revelation of God is seen in Christ. The Lord didn’t provide us with a philosophy to comprehend or a list of rules to memorize. He knows who we are and how we learn. He gave us a role model to imitate, a perfect image of himself. Christianity consists of following Christ, and he isn’t found in theological formulations or metaphysical musings. He’s found in the the gospels.

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Several years ago I quit teaching. I already had a book project, but the gospel harmony in the drawer kept creeping into my thoughts. I eventually pulled it out and looked it over, and reading it with fresh eyes, I saw something I’d missed when my mind was clouded by doctrine, inerrancy, and minutia. Jesus was entirely subversive. Seen against the backdrop of his own time and place, Jesus violated every convention and rejected every prejudice of his culture. Our present-day culture warriors seek to enforce Christian morality, as they understand it, onto America at large, but that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ and his message. Jesus didn’t come to build an earthly kingdom. He rejected political power and aligned himself with the outcasts of society. Rather than being irrelevant to the 21^st century, Jesus is more necessary than ever!

In the process of researching some additional material for the gospel harmony, I discovered that Leo Tolstoy also had written one, which he called The Gospel in Brief. Tolstoy converted to Christianity in his 50s after becoming depressed about the meaninglessness of life, an experience he described in My Confession. But Tolstoy being Tolstoy, he had to be an unorthodox Christian, so his Gospel in Brief resembled Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, which famously was missing all the miracles. Jefferson cut them out with scissors. My purpose was the opposite, but Tolstoy’s short harmony led me to Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century.

Wittgenstein came from one of the richest families in Europe. He rejected his father’s nominal Catholicism as a young man and began studying engineering, but he soon became fascinated with logic and philosophy and moved to England to study with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. Wittgenstein happened to be visiting home in Austria when WWI broke out, and he enlisted in the Austrian army. Stopping in a shop for a postcard on his way to boot camp, he bought the only book the store had for sale – The Gospel in Brief. Wittgenstein carried it with him everywhere during the war, to the point that the other soldiers nicknamed him “the Gospel Man.”

There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein spent the war as an artillery spotter often behind enemy lines. Amazingly, during the war he also wrote the one and only book he published during his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Logical Positivists of Vienna misunderstood his book to mean that nothing existed beyond what could be proven empirically. Ironically, Christian fundamentalists made the same mistake with inerrancy. Both groups view every proposition as a factual claim that is either true or false. Although the Logical Positivists took the Tractatus as gospel, Wittgenstein actually said the opposite in his book. He made room for religion, ethics, and aesthetics when he said, “There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” Here, Wittgenstein asserts that there are truths we cannot express in logically verifiable propositions. Such truths may appear obvious, but they can’t be proven by facts. What is mystical, for Wittgenstein, are those things outside the purview of science. “The sense of the world must lie outside the world,” he said. “In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value.” What is truly of value cannot be accidental. It is transcendental – an expression of something higher than mere facts can contain.

When the war was over, Wittgenstein horrified his relatives by giving away his share of the family fortune. By defining a proposition, he was certain he’d solved the fundamental problem of philosophy, so he gave it up to become a teacher in a rural school, reasoning that he could at least “teach the gospel to the children.” He was eventually persuaded that the Tractatus’ pictorial view of language was flawed, and he returned to Cambridge and philosophy in the late 1920s.

A fascinating man, a fascinating life, and possibly the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Would any of it have happened without that chance encounter with Tolstoy and The Gospel in Brief?

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Thanks also to Tolstoy, I happened to be reading Wittgenstein while I was learning about human evolution and the cognitive revolution. Everything seemed to revolve around language and symbolism. But what of morality and the tree of knowledge? Were they also related to the language question? Then I read a line in Philosophical Investigations that hit me between the eyes: “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” Here was the key to unlock the door.

From Jesus to Tolstoy to Wittgenstein. Welcome to my world.

Tagged as: Culture War, Inerrancy, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Harmony of the Gospels.