When the Good Book Goes Bad (Or, How the Story of Noah Floods People of Faith)

Last updated on: April 6, 2014 at 6:18 pm by Guest Contributor

When the Good Book Goes Bad (Or, How the Story of Noah Floods People of Faith) 2014-04-06T18:18:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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I’ve spent a lot of time over the years talking to Christians who have lost their faith or who are wavering in what they believe and considering for the first time a life without faith. Many of these tales follow a similar pattern:

1. I was raised Christian or I’ve been a Christian for [insert large number] years.

2. At some point, I realized I had never read the Bible — at least not closely. So I decided to read it.

3. Holy crap! Have you seen what’s in the Bible? Now I don’t know what to believe . . .

I can relate. When I was 19 and a very zealous evangelical, I took a job running the lights in an auditorium, which on some nights meant I had a stretch of hours with very little to do. So, with my newfound piety close at hand, I read the Bible. And in short order, I became very, very confused about what was in the text and what I had been taught about the text — and why those two things did not seem to align. I became filled with questions that the text wasn’t answering. I had started with the New Testament, and before I got halfway through the Gospel of Matthew, I became scared of the Bible. Jesus was enigmatic (intentionally so?) and fierce in ways I had not been led to expect. The footnotes didn’t help and the concordance invited more confusion.

I just wanted to believe in and love Jesus, but the Bible was making it really, really hard.

It’s even harder for my friends who start in Genesis, especially if they’ve grown up being taught that the Bible is a work of exact history. Once they read it, they find that it doesn’t conform to their expectations. It doesn’t even feel historical — a talking snake appears on one of the first pages, and then “giants in the land” a few pages after that, just before a worldwide flood from God destroys all he created so lovingly in the beginning; a little later, God inspires a diversity of language in order to confuse and separate people. In addition to presenting a God who doesn’t seem much like the one you’ve been singing to in church, these first few chapters just don’t read like history. They read more like the ancient myths you studied in English class or like another kind of storytelling altogether.

When you’re a believer feeling confused about these things, that’s a pretty troubling thought. That’s the kind of thinking that could lead to Jesus not being real.

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