(10 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)
Loading...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
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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.
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.