This is the second guest post by Judy Siker, who explained in her previous post about her upbringing as a Christian in the South and then her move into the academic study of the Bible from a critical perspective. If you recall, Judy was my student in the (very secular!) graduate program in New Testament/Early Christianity here at UNC, where she did both a Masters and PhD in the field, focusing, in her dissertation, on the socio-historical background to the Gospel of Matthew, in particular as that involved the relations of Jews and Christians in the author’s community. She then had a rich and varied teaching career in a range of schools — private liberal arts, Catholic university, and Baptist seminary, among them!
In this follow up post Judy lays out her understanding of what the Bible is (among other things, a book that asks compelling questions about matters of faith) and is not (a book that gives us all the incontrovertible answers), partly in response to comments and questions she received. She is willing once more to address any others that come her way.
Again, she’ll be happy to respond to your comments.
Judy Siker is author of Who is Jesus? What a Difference a Lens Makes.
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… and you still believe? Part Two
Wonderful posts. Thank you!
This atheist is impressed with your two posts. Can’t and won’t argue with you. Thanks for them.
I have found both of your two posts intriguing and enlightening. As a person who was raised in a very conservative evangelical tradition, now nearly 70 years old with more questions than ever, you helped me understand how someone can really understand what the Bible is and isn’t and still believe. While I’m not in that place, I see how someone might be. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing all of this. I’m struggling a bit with your context. Philosophically, I can understand people who “believe that there exists some greater force than you or I . . . ” and I can accept your use of the term “woman of faith.”
How does this translate into your identifying as “Christian” and a Presbyterian, and not something more religiously general, such as Theist?
Perhaps this touches on what you mention the post is not, so I understand if it isn’t appropriate to respond.
(I was between the ages of 18 and 28 a believer in the theology of Sun Myung Moon and his Unfication Church. I became a materialistic thinker after that but got an MA in the study of the Anthropology of Religion after I left the church. I am fascinated by the role of beliefs in culture. Much of what you write about in this post is reflective of those studies).
Thank you. I appreciate your openness and your position. In lots of ways, it mirrors something of mine, though knowledgable about the critical approach to the Bible, even after 55 years of ordained ministry, I am only a student. Bless you.
Thank you. We all remain students for life, I think.
Thank you, Dr Judy, for these reasoned and reflective insights. And thank you, Bart, for allowing such an open and respectful forum.
Thank you for reading and for your gracious comments.
Rev. Dr. Siker,
Just so I’m clear, are you saying that your way of continuing to be a believer is to stay immersed in questions? I’m struggling to understand what exactly you continue believe from the Christian tradition, or why.
Second, when you said “In my tradition we call this force God”, do you consider the god of Abraham to be the, *THE* supreme being of all there is? To me there is no way to think the Bible was given to us in any way by a supreme being, let alone think it describes a supreme being. Infinite punishment, kill every living thing, show them no mercy, stone to death adulterers and unruly kids and people who pick up sticks on the Sabbath, bloodbloodbloodblood, failed prophecies, I could go on and on and on. That’s when my fundamental church of Christ faith dissolved – I just don’t see the god of Abraham as a supreme being, but rather a very man-made deity.
Thanks for your posts.
Thank you for your comments. Yes, continuing to live in the questions is very much a part of my continuing to adhere to my faith tradition.
I understand why you do not see the god of Abraham as a supreme being as you observe the atrocities described in the Hebrew scriptures. I view the God of the OT and the God of the NT to be an expression of the same God, but it is important to me to remember that the Bible was written by humans. It is an expression of their understanding of God in their lives and it is an honest and sometimes brutal interpretation. But there was something they experienced that led them to believe that there was a force greater than themselves guiding them. I don’t agree that God is a man-made deity, but I do believe that the human attempts to capture God are just that–human attempts.
Respectfully, Rev. Dr., when I listed “infinite punishment”, that was meant to be a NT reference. And I deliberately didn’t list Revelation because, well, I thought everyone sees the god of Revelation exactly, precisely as the god of Abraham. The god of the OT. He will commit atrocities in the future. The blood will be how many feet deep??? Same god. Hebrew scriptures AND first century Christianity scriptures. It’s the same god. The one promised in the future is the same one defined in the OT.
I agree the Bible was written by humans who were writing what they believed. From front to back, the authors of the Bible agreed that the god of Abraham was the god of atrocities. He just took a few hundred years off.
Rev. Dr., I’m not asking you to capture god. At least, I don’t think I am because I’m not sure what that means. I’m asking if you believe the god of Abraham is THE supreme being, should one exist?
Thanks for continuing our “conversation.” I understand your perspective, as you have expressed it, and the aspects of the biblical text that give rise to it. In answer to your final question about my belief concerning the god of Abraham, I would say this. I believe that the god of Abraham (and Isaac and Jacob and Jesus and Paul and …) is a supreme being which has become real to all of these named (and unnamed) characters in the Bible and on up to today. Just how that god is made manifest in the human world is (as you and I seem to agree) known to us today through human attempts to capture this “being” in words. All they had then and all we have now are words and words will always be insufficient but interesting and valuable attempts to comprehend what lies outside ourselves.
While I am neither an academic nor a cleric, you have captured my approach to the Bible exactly. I too was brought up in the church (Lutheran) but was taught to be a seeker and to question anything and everyone by my father who was an academic. I also come from a family of clerics who do not believe in questioning the Bible. Therefore, I am both an avid seeker and practitioner of my faith.
Thank you for your posts. I thoroughly enjoyed them and saved them to read again and again.
Pauline
Thank you for your comments. I am glad these posts resonate with you.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and personal insights/journey. I guess I approach the ultimate questions more from a scientific angle, at least in attempting to understand “what’s going on” – but I agree with those who think this Universe we live in cries out for an explanation. There is indeed a mystery at the heart of existence that perhaps will always be beyond our ability to comprehend. I think our individual existences must have something to do with our growth, learning, or evolution – spiritual, psychic or whatever term for our innermost being we wish to use. Perhaps the real trick is to be comfortable with the ambiguity and to live in the questions, as you say.
Thank you for your comments. I am indeed a real advocate for living the questions. In fact, one of my favorite quotes on this subject comes from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because yo would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” It doesn’t completely translate into our discussion but in large part it does. I actually think if we are not questioning we are not growing, not learning and without that, life would be so dull.
I really like how you refer to your faith development as “living in the questions”, that makes alot of sense to me, thank you!
Thank you.
I think you are running up against the warning expressed in James: “But ask in faith, never doubting. . . .” There are many who take these words literally, insisting that you are not allowed to doubt (and these days, trying to put that prohibition into law).
Another problem is that Christianity demands faith as its basis; works come secondary. This seems to be to be behind the inability of your interlocutors to understand how you can doubt and still have faith.
It’s a constant journey. Good luck with it!
In the early 1970s I was teaching at a liberal arts college affiliated with an evangelical denomination. We typically had a major figure from higher ed do a short workshop for faculty. One year it was Earl McGrath, if my memory is right. He made an interesting comment about higher ed, which I jotted down on a piece of scrap paper, put in a book, and forgot. Years later it fell out of the book and I liked it so much that to this day it is part of my email signature line. It goes like this: “Ask questions, seek answers, question the answers, question the questions.”
Very well put, in my opinion!
Thank you Dr Siker for sharing your thoughts. I particularly liked the Hallmark Shop analogy and your description of the Bible as a literary expression of the struggles of the ancients to get to grips with their notion of God. Brilliant!
Thanks.
Judy,
Thank you for the post. I have struggled with all the anti-[x] rhetoric between religions and against seekers. The various critical methods that have been done on the Bible, especially since the time of David F. Strauss, have shown me that there is still much to be discerned about all the mysteries the Bible presents us. Many of my questions on the Bible and God/Jesus have acceptable “we don’t know” answers – an answer that would not be accepted by me in the past, but I happily accept that answer now and have been able to develop some personal theories that I can support, with God (…and pending further archeological evidence.) The hard part, at first, was dealing with the realization that I had absorbed many unsupportable views that were also inflexible or intolerant. There is still much to be learned through historical and modern lenses. My hope is that someday soon one will be able to say that they accept things like the birth narrative or walking on water as a metaphor and still be seen/accepted as a Christian.
In a number of Christian circles one can say those things now.
Thank you for the blogpost. I am not a Christian, although I was raised as one attending Catholic school, Mass every morning before class. I like reading what is, in my opinion, honest NT scholarship: Raymond Brown and John P. Meier come to mind.
The only sentence I have an issue with is where you write: “… this body of writings that not only has survived all the centuries but has also survived all our pushing and probing, our analysis and dissections.” That “body of writings” has artificially survived in its current form because it has been protected through the centuries by an armor put up by people afraid of losing a ‘certainty’. If the ‘body of writings’ had truly been submitted centuries ago to “analysis and dissections”, its current composition would be quite different from what it is today and more like what the authors intended. Perhaps, even with the bonus of additional views (gospels, etc) in an expanded canon.
Interesting observation. I see it differently, however. I don’t think it has “artificially survived” because of protection of the kind you describe. And it is anachronistic to think it could have been submitted to the scrutiny you suggest when you suggest it because we can’t be pre-enlightenment thinkers before the Enlightenment. And the talk of authorial intentionality is tricky. I am not convinced we can recover the authors’ intent. Brown and Meier are fine choices for reading and who’s to keep us from exploring those non-canonical gospels? Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Reading and studying what biblical scholars have written and said has given me a deeper appreciation for the Bible and bolstered my faith.
I remember a speech someone gave about life and faith. He said some people enter religion to escape mystery while others enter religion to pursue mystery. He said pursuing mystery is healthier than attempting to escape it.
Thank you Dr. Siker for your wonderful post.
Thank you for your comments.
“…all we have are words…” and your words have come closer than you might think in “capturing” all that I have been thinking, believing, and feeling about the Bible these past six decades. Thank you for your very helpful words!
Thank you. Happy that my words resonated with you.
Thank You for your thoughts. This has been help full for me in coming to grips with my religious family. I will try to live in the questions. Lets bring on more questions. Thanks again.
Indeed. Bring on the questions and let’s be bold enough to live in them.
Thank you very much for this post. Our childhood church backgrounds are very similar. The church I was raised in from infancy was a Baptist Church which was mentored by what was then the California Baptist Seminary that was in Covina California, then became the American Baptist Seminary of the West till it was consolidated into the campus at Berkley. One of my still closest friends father was the dean and Greek professor of that seminary (Robert C Campbell). I was baptised by Dr Loren D Mcbain, the name sake of the seminary’s “Power of Preaching” award. Maybe you are familiar with those names. Obviously my church was very influenced by the seminary.
My faith has remained, but changed for the same reasons. I have been humbled by having to admit that I really cannot describe or even conceive what God is or isn’t, but recognize that there is definately a higher “Power” of some sort. That “Power” is the “seed” in which all the major religions of the world grew from. I have pretty much discarded “Christianity” as the being the “True” religion, but rather just one particular interpretation of God. I think Paul was closest in Rom 1&2
Thank you for sharing your comments. Our backgrounds are similar and I appreciate hearing about yours.
Judy Siker:
If, however, one comes to the Bible with the idea that it can only be considered sacred text if it is historically accurate, factual, without error or inconsistency, then by all means the scholarly approach is anathema.
Steve Campbell, author of Historical Accuracy:
Praying to a god for births, marriages, and burials–seeking holiness… is more than hit, miss, more questions, and giggles intrigue. Fields of study advance. It is a theological crime not to.
Praying to god for giving thanks for the glory and power of the earth means the object of prayer may not be the only god that exists and may not be the best god to address one’s concerns?
Thank you God for the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. The Grand Canyon is not in Judea or Israel but I want to thank Yahweh for the Grand Canyon. Yahweh was not even the top of the Canaanite pantheon. El was the top of the Canaanite pantheon. It is not right to give food for children and toss it to the dogs (inference to Canaanites). Jesus cannot even respect the people of his god’s pantheon nor respect Yahweh himself: what kind of father gives snakes to his children?
Dr. Siker,
Thanks for these two posts! They resonate so much with my experience. I have a question for you. Do you think that faith and doubt are compatible? I once was a fundamentalist and believed that doubt was basically sin. Now I’m more of the opinion that doubt is an essential element of faith. Can you share your thoughts? Thanks!
Yes I do think faith and doubt are compatible. And I definitely believe that doubt is NOT a sin. Doubt, or questioning, is often the pathway to a richer faith. That will sound heretical to some, but I don’t think we are exploring or examining our faith if that is missing. Thanks for you comments.
Thank you for your reflections. I can understand your believing in a greater force, considering the Bible as humans wrestling with ideas of God, not necessarily signing up to all the ideas. I myself really struggle now to believe anything from the NT in its detail, or representing anything that might actually be happening in a supernatural realm. I don’t know where to go from here. It feels a struggle to attend my place of worship which is traditional. I feel I am torturing myself about ‘what is true’ or ‘can it be true’? I value the gist we have of what Jesus was saying. I have learned about influences from the zeitgeist of the time, humans making bits up or using common cultural tropes or metaphor, putting words on the lips of Jesus. Further humans editing. People having ideas they thought were from God. Why should we believe Paul? I suppose I am asking in what sense would many Christian scholars say they are a Christian? How do Christian scholars in general frame their faith. Would most believe in a ‘greater power’ but be unable to sign up to Christian doctrines, or any or all that Paul/the apostles believed?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, concerns, and struggles. While I can only really answer your question from my own perspective as a Christian scholar, I will say that for this one (me) my faith is framed by a belief in a greater power or force of good in the world that was captured in amazingly powerful ways in the life of a first century man from Nazareth. I am fascinated by the impact he made on his world and even more fascinated by the fact that the wrestlings of those humans in that small place at that particular time were considered significant enough to pass on. I understand your unease in your traditional place of worship, especially if you feel that there is a requirement to know what is true or if anything can be true. For me, a place of worship should be a “sanctuary” where one can come as one is, with all the questions (and yes, doubts) to explore together what it means to be a decent human in this world in the time and place in which we find ourselves. I hope this helps, at least a little, to explain my perspective.