The following is an excerpt from an email I sent to a friend that details some of my current thought regarding Christianity's sacred book.

Basically, I’ve been taking a long, hard look at my faith and I’ve decided that it’s an inherited faith, full of suppositions given to me by the environment in which I grew up, based on an extremely narrow view and a giant bias. The “answers” to hard questions I’d been given, and have been giving, are really the shoddiest sort of justification for the Christian faith that I think could be constructed. I no longer believe the Bible is an actual manuscript dictated by God and preserved through all the generations in its pure form – the whole “inerrant, inspired Word of God” creed. I actually think it was really naïve of me to believe that – there is so much evidence showcasing the biases with which different authors wrote, plenty of documented translation errors, the councils of people who took a popular vote on which books and letters (among hundreds) would become canon, and studies showing how much of the Bible is folklore and myth – how even the creation story is probably a Hebraic retelling of the Babylonian ‘Enuma Elish’ tale detailing the origins of the world.

That’s not to say that I no longer put stock in the Bible. I had a professor in college who taught that the Bible is “true to its genre,” meaning that the Psalms are valuable for their aesthetic, poetical insight, the law defines the values of the culture in that time, the epistles chronicle the birth and growth of a fledgling faith in Roman society, etc. I believe the Bible is the human narrative of God’s story. To me, that means the authors wrote about what mattered to them, their interpretation of God’s work in their lives, and those stories are framed by their own beliefs and biases. Just as we have shelves and shelves of Christian books today in which authors derive meaning from history and experience, but do it through the use of their own faculties and base it on a deep-rooted belief system, I believe that the stories that were passed down and retold and rewritten through the generations inevitably harbor their authors’ slant.

I don’t think that taking this perspective has to diminish the wonder and awesomeness of God. I base it on how I experience God today. God is not a dam-builder who, as a rule, constantly dictates where a stream will flow. He is certainly involved and interested in the movement of things on this planet, and I feel cares a great deal about what goes on in individual lives. But though I’ve known God to influence (even to points of pain & brokenness), I do not know a God who uses irrevocable curses or controls the hearts of people like a puppeteer. I simply do not think it is in his character to mandate a book that perfectly represents his nature to us. The Bible tells many of the innumerable facets of God’s character, but it still asks that we seek, in order to find. The pleasure of God is to be pursued willingly by us, and to see us earnestly striving to exhibit the holiness of his nature in our lives. In a world where everything is boiled down to numbers, where reduction rules, God is the last great mystery. We need that in our lives – mystery makes it meaningful.