Letters From Timothy

In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.

-Isiah 29, 13; Mark 7:6

Greetings to you! This will be my first official letter.

I think I will begin addressing you with a broad, controversial subject, because it will lay the foundation for every letter to follow. It is an issue that is particularly in focus today, from controversy on evolution to controversy on homosexuality. This issue is fundamentalism. I will define fundamentalism in my letters to be the belief that the Bible is the Word of God, word for word, and is to be interpreted literally as written.

Since my beliefs are personal to me and are a product of my life, the place to start would be my youth. When I was young, I was a very curious child. I would pester my parents with question after question about how and why the world works. My parents responded by indulging my curiosity with a multitude of science books, which I eagerly devoured. Early on in my life I learned about the solar system, the interior of the earth, the ecosystem, and even deep-space phenomena. I of course found everything I read fascinating, and believed every word of it. I was a child; how could and why would informative books and television shows that explained how the world worked possibly lie to me? I was also raised Catholic by a devoutly Catholic mother. I went to mass and Sunday school, and had more children’s Bibles than I can remember. While my mother observed uninteresting rituals and listening to boring sermons, I was feasting on colorful, simple stories from the Old and New Testament. I learned the story of creation: God created the world in seven days, he made Adam and Eve from the clay placed them with all the world’s plants and animals in a happy garden, where they were tricked by Satan disguised as a serpent. At the same time, I knew that the earth took millions of years to form and was billions of years old, and that humans were only another kind of animal, related to primates. These apparently conflicting descriptions of the world’s creation never seemed to actually conflict with each other in my mind. I remembered something I had heard: one second is a million years, and a million years is one second to God. So if that was the case, then what were seven “days” to God could have easily been millions or billions of years to us. My mind meshed the two explanations into an odd patchwork that served as both my scientific and theological explanation of the world. I would look for evidence of science in scripture and evidence of scripture in science. For example, when I read about the human skeleton, I expected that the male skeleton would have one fewer rib than the female skeleton because, of course, God had made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. When I read about how there was first nothing and then the Word, I thought of the birth of the universe in the Big Bang. This sort of thinking served me reasonably well until high school, when I first realized that evolution was a public controversy.

The idea of interpreting the Bible literally was one I did not know that even existed until I grew older. When I was in high school, I had my first exposure to “Intelligent Design.” It was a presentation titled “Adam and EVEolution” given at a Christian club at the North Carolina School of Science & Math. I thought that the presentation would draw parallels with scientific facts and Biblical allegories. In fact, the presentation described how evolution was supposedly unable to account for complexity and diversity of life. When I saw the presentation and listened to the ideas and “evidence” the speakers presented, I admit that I was excited. I had been struggling with my faith after being exposed to more and more naturalistic philosophy. I remember the sense of spiritual desperation I felt when I read an article about how the belief in God might simply be simply a genetic mechanism. I embraced Intelligent Design and trusted that its proponents really had sound arguments and that evolution was not such a certain thing. Real scientific evidence of God was the jackpot for me at that time. Everyone needs some sort of certainty in what they believe, somehow. But the more I learned about it, the more I realized that “Intelligent Design” was not a sound scientific theory. And as I grew stronger in my faith, my beliefs about science and religion matured and I realized that my theological beliefs had to be more flexible. Science is the closest thing mankind has to truth, I decided. It’s tested and verified by evidence, whereas there is no way to prove Biblical assertions. I would therefore have to mold my theological beliefs around scientific evidence.

As I moved through the echelons of education and teenage culture, I was exposed more and more to atheism and atheistic arguments. I found that many arguments of atheists, and their examples of Biblical hypocrisies were sound. As my faith started to crumble and I desperately tried to hold the pieces together, I had to again make my beliefs more flexible. As I did so, I came to realize that interpreting the Bible literally, fundamentalism, was impossible to reconcile with reality.

Allegory, metaphor, symbolism—these were the things Jesus used in his parables to teach his disciples and his many followers. There were no actual virgins waiting to be married. There was no actual prodigal son. Your right hand never knows what your left hand is doing because your hands do not think. But these stories and examples were the most helpful way to understand what Jesus was actually trying to say. Parables and fables are still useful today to teach children moral lessons; I remember enjoying Aesop’s fables as a boy and absorbing their wisdom. Why, then, is it difficult to accept that perhaps many, if not most, stories in the Bible are only that—parables. Fictional stories with nonfictional morals. To borrow a phrase from the brilliant novel, “The Life of Pi,” the Bible is written mostly in parables rather than actual events because they are “better stories.”

How can the Bible be the perfect word of God if it was written by man? I do believe that the Bible was inspired by God, but I cannot believe that it was dictated word for word. Man is too prone to sin, too prone to mistake, too prone to temptation. The Bible is littered with “teachings” that seem pointless, or contrary to the will of a loving God. The Bible seems “spun” in places to justify man’s actions in terms of God. We certainly see this phenomenon today, so it is not a huge stretch of imagination to imagine that it happened in Biblical times as well. The most pointed evidence of this is actually in the Bible itself. In several places in the New Testament, Jesus seems to directly contradict, or to improve on, teachings in the Old Testament. The most notable of these is when Jesus notes that “nothing that enters one from the outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” a statement that Christian scholars interpreted as Jesus freeing God’s faithful from the laws of Kosher. Even more interesting is in Matthew 5:38-39 where Jesus actually flatly contradicts an Old Testament teaching. He says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.” Either God changed His mind, or the original teaching was not the perfect will of God.

As I wrote before, everyone needs some kind of certainty in their beliefs, somehow. Fundamentalism looks for that certainty by making strong assumptions. The Bible is the word of God, end of story. No matter what happens in your life, you know that there is that one source of truth. But sadly, life, and the Bible, are just not that simple. No matter how tempting it is to embrace fundamentalism’s wholesale, comprehensive explanation of the world, one must resist that temptation. Fundamentalism, full of good intentions, is often a detriment to society. Islamic fundamentalism has given birth to terrorism. Christian fundamentalism has often obstructed scientific progress and resulted in hate. In fact, historically, Christian fundamentalism resulted in the Spanish Inquisition, one of the most horrific events in human history. History abounds with war, hate, and strife tied to dogmatic and fundamentalist religious beliefs. Some atheists today argue that these historical events are excellent reasons to dispose of religion in the first place, and fundamentalism today still causes the once-faithful to abandon God or organized religion completely.

The Bible is open for you to interpret. Two people will read it and come up with different ideas about what it teaches. But its core teachings, I believe, are rock-solid. In fact, I believe they can be boiled down to the “Golden Rule:” Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. From this simple phrase, the wisdom of the Bible flows forth. Believers and non-believers alike attack this “cherry-picking” of Biblical teachings, as they call it. But I tell you that this is the only way to read the Bible. Your faith is as unique and personal to you as is your relationship with God. This is the core of my message to you, and I hope that through my letters I can help you decide what you believe by explaining what I believe. If you decide to open your mind to me, I will try to help you in your spiritual quest as I ramble down mine.

-Timothy