This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post:   I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God.   In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections.    But I really like the old ones as well.  So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was.   The all involve anecdotes about my past.  In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity.  My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them.  And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things.   But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 8. ***************************************************************************** It is always interesting [...]

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post:   I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God.   In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections.    But I really like the old ones as well.  So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was.   The all involve anecdotes about my past.  In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity.  My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them.  And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things.   But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 7. ***************************************************************************** I first began to [...]

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post:   I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God.   In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections.    But I really like the old ones as well.  So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was.   The all involve anecdotes about my past.  In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity.  My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them.  And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things.   But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 4. ***************************************************************************** I was raised in [...]

I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God.   IN the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections.    But I really like the old ones as well.  So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was.   The all involve anecdotes about my past.  In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity.  My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them.  And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things.   But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is from what was originally going to be my Preface; it is the opening gambit. ************************************************************************* The issue that lies [...]

I wrote chapter 7 of How Jesus Became God today, and started with this anecdote that will sound somewhat familiar to those who know my story.... ******************************************************************************************************************** I first began to have serious doubts about my faith when I was in graduate school. After I had graduated from Moody Bible Institute I had gone off to finish my undergraduate degree at Wheaton College, a strongly evangelical liberal arts college and the alma mater for Billy Graham. For me this was a step toward liberalism. I was a very hard core evangelical in those years. But even though the liberal arts did expand my horizons significantly they did not make me particularly liberal. I came to graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary firmly convinced that the Bible was without error in any of its teachings and that the doctrines I accepted as a conservative Christian were given by God himself. That began to change the more I studied the Bible. I had taken Greek at Wheaton as my foreign language, to allow me to read the [...]