Stumbling Over The Truth

This book was written for everyone who has struggled with their faith. Those who have asked difficult questions and have sought hard for honest answers. It is for those who seek a relationship with God that is rooted in honesty, confession and trust with the confidence that God does indeed understand that even in our struggle to reconcile faith and reason, history and myth, parable and probability we are indeed seeking “in Spirit and in Truth”. This book is about my “faith journey”. No, perhaps “sojourn” is a better description in this context. A journey is typically from point A to point B. In a sojourn there might be occasional stop-overs but they are only temporary. Life is like that. We go along down a course that we have set and by and large we encounter changes in that course that impact its direction. We may move from one house to another, one state to another, one country to another. We go to school and then we get jobs, sometimes several of them in succession. We get married, perhaps we have children. We experience loss, we suffer, we rejoice, we grow older, we enter into new relationships and a host of other diverse experiences. I suppose in one sense our lives are like a journey from point A (birth) to point B (death). But in another sense we are sojourners because our experiences and situations are constantly in flux and we gain new understandings of ourselves and interpret ourselves and our world in light of these understandings. We see in different ways, we comprehend with different appreciation and we “do” life in a dynamic rather than static manner. I see faith in the same way because faith involves my body, mind and spirit (my complete life) and therefore it is always dynamic as well. My understanding of faith is one that is holistic in nature (from the Greek word “holos” meaning all, whole, entire, total. – no New Age affinity implied). There are “stops along the way” in my life that just may move me come to new understandings and re-interpretations my goals, purpose and direction. Not only this, but because we live a spiritual life, a life in which we are encouraged to relinquish self and live by the spirit, it is certain that we all will lead a dynamic rather than static life of faith. The motivation or inspiration for this book was an interview that I had read in an issue of “Biblical Archeology Review”. Four prominent men in the fields of archeology and theological studies were asked the question “Has scholarship had a negative impact on your faith?” It was a very revealing and honest discussion that followed. One of the four is now an atheist, another switched faiths from Christianity to Judaism, another switched denominations, and the last was able to work through the struggle between modern scholarship and faith with only a few cuts and bruises. Though my book does discuss certain theological and doctrinal issues, I have tried to present them in the context of a story about my struggle with faith and reason that resulted from the theological and critical scholarly training I received in seminary. This book is about finding faith and wrestling with God, and it is for all those who struggle as well.