An Idol Falleth

I am suspicious of most people who declare the Bible to be the infallible and inerrant Word of God. I grew up with that doctrine, defended it most of my life, went off to Bible college where I soon discovered that even within the same denomination, people could not agree on the most foundational doctrines. I wasted hours on debate after debate over doctrine with my fellow students, each of us using the Bible as a club to beat those with whom we disagreed.

Stringing together a bunch of proof-texts could be used to defend even the most inane claims. I often did this to defend something I really didn't believe in because it was so easy to do, and it distracted me from my newly realized confusion. The Bible was not the black and white book I had previously believed it to be.

Using Greek and Hebrew only confused the matter more. Because, I discovered, even translation is subject to interpretation. So I could use any pet translation of a specific word or phrase to change the meaning of the text I was using to make my point in a debate, or to better fit my own preconceived ideas, and sometimes just to frustrate my more dogmatic friends. I'm not implying here that I wasn't dogmatic. I was very much so, but there were those more so than I, if that can be believed.

I had equated others' dogmaticism with self-righteousness, but had not yet my own.

At the end of my first and last year of Bible college, I went away convinced that the Bible was an impossibly confusing book and that it did not have magical answers for the many nuances of life. This crippled me for years because I had placed the Bible on a pedestal equal in stature to that of God's. My world was undone.