I don’t think we need the Bible.

Because I don’t think we need the Bible, I’m apprehensive when any Christian insists that it, or the God it refers to, is in any way necessary.

Now, I’m not completely naive when it comes to Christianity; I know that there is a wide range of interpretations for scripture. When I was a Christian and engaged in reading and many late-night conversations with Christians of different stripes, I saw that “true” Christianity was very elusive; there were thousands of ways to interpret the Bible. For example — I spent several long hours discussing whether God knew ahead of time if the actions he performed would result in sin, and discussed the views of open theism (God keeps himself from knowing the future to give man free will — Gregory Boyd was a major theologian here), Arminianism (that God saw the future in one way, and we saw time in a different dimension, so that God knew the future but, in our dimension, we still had free will — CS Lewis held this view), and Calvinism (there was wide variety of views here, but the basic view is that God did know the future and, according to many proponents, worked for the best possible good — of course, this came from John Calvin but there are several other popular individuals, like John Piper and many others, who hold this view).

I spent hours arguing these views and searching the Bible for the “right” view of these things because it deeply mattered to me what kind of God I was serving. I loved God at the time; I thought He existed, He was the most important being in my life, and I wanted to get to know Him better. I spent a lot of time with him in prayer and occasional fasting — not out of obligation, but because I wanted to get to know Him, as you would want to spend considerable time with any close friend. I did not worship the Bible, but I thought it was a way to get to know Him, so the pages were well-worn and marked.

I’ve heard that many ex-Christians were the ones who were most devout. I think this is the case — the most devout Christians, the ones most eager to get to know God, are also those most likely, in many cases, to find out that there is no one at the center of the machinery that creates the appearance of God, save human beings. Much like the one who is most passionate about the Wizard of Oz may be the most determined to run towards him, only to find smoke and mirrors.

Once I found myself, after thousands of arguments with atheists and agnostics, and several years of research, come to what was, for me, the indisputable conclusion that the Bible’s description of God was fundamentally unreliable, I realized that I had a choice to make. I could leave Christianity wholesale, or I could remain a Christian and embrace a more mystical picture of God. Although concepts like hell, Paul’s views on women, the Old Testament, and much of the commands and laws in the Bible seemed fundamentally unhelpful, every once in a while I found — or so I thought at the time — a part of truth that was helpful to people.

I also knew that there were ways to interpret the more uncomfortable verses so that they didn’t have their fundamentalist interpretations — without giving up the concepts of inerrancy, infallibility, or inspiration regarding the Bible. Perhaps this sounds somewhat arrogant, but by the time I left Christianity I had memorized so many verses and knew so many different interpretations of the Bible that I was fairly confident I could, in most cases, correlate its verses with the doctrine I wished to correlate them with.

Let me give you an example.