of many little steps over the next few years. Those initial and timid movements away from fundamentalism were psychologically more traumatic than the intellectual flying leaps that came later. When you are raised to believe that every word in the bible is God-inspired and inerrant, you can’t lightly moderate your views on scripture.
I was about 30 years old when I started to have these early questions about Christianity. Not doubts, just questions. I was working on two more musicals for Manna Music— Everywhere That Mary Went and Penny , about the one lost lamb that was missing from the fold of 100—which I never finished because my views were changing as I was trying to write. The continental plates were shifting imperceptibly. I didn’t have any problems at that time with Christianity. I loved my Christian life, I believed in what I was doing, and it felt right. However, my mind must have been restless to move beyond the simplicities of fundamentalism. I had been so involved with fundamentalist and evangelical matters that I had been ignoring a part of myself that was beginning to ask for attention. It was as if there were this little knock on my skull and something was saying, “Hello! Anybody home?” I was starving and didn’t know it, like when you are working hard on a project and you forget to eat and you don’t know you are hungry until you are really hungry. I had been reading the Christian writers (Francis Schaeffer, Josh McDowell, C. S. Lewis, etc.) and really had not read much of anything else besides the bible for years. So, not with any real purpose in mind, I began to scratch this intellectual itch. I read some science magazines, some philosophy, psychology and daily newspapers (!), and began to catch up on the true liberal arts education I would have had years before if I had gone to a real college. This triggered what later became a ravenous appetite to learn, and produced a slow but steady migration across the theological spectrum that took about four or five years.
I was not aiming for doubt or atheism. I thought each little move was the last one. “Ah, I’m growing more mature in my beliefs,” I told myself. I originally thought my faith was being strengthened by this additional information, when it was actually my knowledge that was being strengthened. I had no sudden, eye-opening experience. When you are raised like I was, you don’t just wake up one morning, snap your fingers and say, “Oh, silly me! There’s no God.” It was a slow, sometimes wrenching, halting, circuitous process.
Since I had become an independent evangelist, with no local congregation to answer to (the church in Standard did not end up functioning as a home base), I perhaps felt freer to experiment intellectually and to investigate what other Christians believed. I didn’t study nonbelief (how would I know how to do that?), I studied other believers. As I visited different congregations that represented many varieties of faith, it slowly dawned on me that there is no single Christianity—there are thousands of Christianities. (There may be as many Christianities as there are Christians.) There are many hundreds of denominations and sects, and each one of them can open the bible and prove that theirs is the correct interpretation and the others are all off in some way, either slightly aberrant or grossly wrong. They can all do that.
Paul wrote that “God is not the author of confusion,” but can you think of a book that has caused more confusion than the bible?
Jesus still had not returned, obviously, and I began to realize that it was not going to happen . Every generation of Christians, including the first, has thought they were living in the “end times.” Jesus is reported as telling his disciples, “There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:28) He promised, “Behold I come quickly.” (Revelation
I was about 30 years old when I started to have these early questions about Christianity. Not doubts, just questions. I was working on two more musicals for Manna Music— Everywhere That Mary Went and Penny , about the one lost lamb that was missing from the fold of 100—which I never finished because my views were changing as I was trying to write. The continental plates were shifting imperceptibly. I didn’t have any problems at that time with Christianity. I loved my Christian life, I believed in what I was doing, and it felt right. However, my mind must have been restless to move beyond the simplicities of fundamentalism. I had been so involved with fundamentalist and evangelical matters that I had been ignoring a part of myself that was beginning to ask for attention. It was as if there were this little knock on my skull and something was saying, “Hello! Anybody home?” I was starving and didn’t know it, like when you are working hard on a project and you forget to eat and you don’t know you are hungry until you are really hungry. I had been reading the Christian writers (Francis Schaeffer, Josh McDowell, C. S. Lewis, etc.) and really had not read much of anything else besides the bible for years. So, not with any real purpose in mind, I began to scratch this intellectual itch. I read some science magazines, some philosophy, psychology and daily newspapers (!), and began to catch up on the true liberal arts education I would have had years before if I had gone to a real college. This triggered what later became a ravenous appetite to learn, and produced a slow but steady migration across the theological spectrum that took about four or five years.
I was not aiming for doubt or atheism. I thought each little move was the last one. “Ah, I’m growing more mature in my beliefs,” I told myself. I originally thought my faith was being strengthened by this additional information, when it was actually my knowledge that was being strengthened. I had no sudden, eye-opening experience. When you are raised like I was, you don’t just wake up one morning, snap your fingers and say, “Oh, silly me! There’s no God.” It was a slow, sometimes wrenching, halting, circuitous process.
Since I had become an independent evangelist, with no local congregation to answer to (the church in Standard did not end up functioning as a home base), I perhaps felt freer to experiment intellectually and to investigate what other Christians believed. I didn’t study nonbelief (how would I know how to do that?), I studied other believers. As I visited different congregations that represented many varieties of faith, it slowly dawned on me that there is no single Christianity—there are thousands of Christianities. (There may be as many Christianities as there are Christians.) There are many hundreds of denominations and sects, and each one of them can open the bible and prove that theirs is the correct interpretation and the others are all off in some way, either slightly aberrant or grossly wrong. They can all do that.
Paul wrote that “God is not the author of confusion,” but can you think of a book that has caused more confusion than the bible?
Jesus still had not returned, obviously, and I began to realize that it was not going to happen . Every generation of Christians, including the first, has thought they were living in the “end times.” Jesus is reported as telling his disciples, “There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:28) He promised, “Behold I come quickly.” (Revelation
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