"I've Got a Degree in Bible and You Don't"
Most of what I have written to this
point has been about family, places we’ve lived, humorous anecdotes about our
lives, etc. I’ve mentioned the fact that
Ann and I passed through some serious marital difficulties during the late seventies.
Suffice it to say that the stress
on our marriage produced deep questioning in my mind. I had just turned forty, a time that’s often
associated with male mid-life crisis. I
certainly had a lot of mid-life crises, but I wasn’t thinking about buying a
motorcycle, visiting bars to see if I could still find myself attractive to
young females, and trying to pretend that I was still 23.
My crisis was emotional,
psychological, and theological. As I
look back on it, I don’t think I ever became an independent thinker until I was
about forty. I was simply regurgitating
what I had been taught all my life. Of
course my thinking had changed somewhat with the passing of years, but I was
basically hanging on to the ideals espoused by those whom I considered to be
role models. Through the years my role
models changed, and my beliefs changed with them. Actually, any change of belief was safely
protected within the framework of what was considered acceptable to leaders in
the mainstream of the Churches of Christ.
Those who are outside that faith
community don’t always realize that we are not monolithic in belief, and there
has always been fairly wide spectrum of thoughts within the fellowship. It’s possible to change your mind about a lot
of things without running into any real trouble.
In any given congregation, a
certain belief system might predominate, especially if there is a leader who
appears to be well informed, and has a reasonable degree of charisma. It’s not hard for such a person to find
followers, and that still happens over and over again in congregations
throughout the country.
A good bit of that has gone away,
as communication techniques have improved, and the world becomes a smaller
place, thanks to electronic communication abilities. The day is probably past when one man can
control the beliefs of everyone in the congregation. By the time we faced a marriage crisis, I
pretty well knew how things were in the average church. I could identify the land mines and I knew
how to avoid them.
By the time the eighties came
around, I was questioning everything – starting with the existence of God, or
at least the assumption that we had God figured out. I no longer believed that I had the answers
to everything. I was willing to ask hard
questions of myself, and not always coming up with the answers. It was as if I had become a forty something
teenager.
Ann has always been willing to ask
the hard questions. I recall a conversation we had when we are dating. We were discussing the subject of whether you
can know you are saved. I didn’t think
so. I reasoned that you can desire to be
saved, hoped to be saved, and maybe someday God will let you into heaven, but
you can’t really know for sure. She
said, “Then why did John tell his readers that he was writing to them so they
could know they have eternal life in 1 John 5:13.” I was thinking, “I’ve got a degree in Bible
and you don’t. You wouldn’t know an
aorist tense from an arrow, and you’re going to tell me what 1 John 5:13
means?” I couldn’t bring myself to say
it, but deep down I knew she had just poked a hole in my theological balloon,
and she did it with book, chapter and verse.
That’s just one of many such conversations we’ve had.
But in the eighties, I was the one asking
the questions, and they were a whole lot scarier than the ones she was
asking. I think she began to get a
little bit concerned about my level of faith, and probably with good
cause. Looking back on it, I think it
was an essential part of cutting loose from an inherited faith and adopting a
personal faith. If you think it’s
difficult to have a teenager in the home, just think about how much that level
gets changed when it’s a forty year old husband asking the questions.
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