I grew up in a conservative Christian household, I don't use the f-word very often, but it very accurately describes my upbringing, Fundamentalist. Now I don't thnk there is anything inherently bad in that word, but in this day and age it amounts to relegating you to the dark ages.
I want to make it very clear from the beginning that I'm not on a warpath against the way I was raised or against my family who raised me in the way that they thought was right. Like any child who grows up, leaves home and encounters new ideas, theology, world views and information I have naturally changed and altered my ideas from those of my family. So this is me just documenting what I have found in my journey.
One of the things about a fundamentalist Christian mindset is that you take the idea of sheltering very seriously, in a very real way your job is make sure that worldly ideas do not find much of an audience. This is a task that every parent in some way is trying to fulfill, even the most non-religious parent tries to shelter their children from something at least until they reach a certain age. So the end result if the parent is successful there are some things their children have never heard about. One of the things I was never been exposed to was scriptural criticism.
I'll be honest when I started hearing about how there are different and conflicting accounts in the Bible, debates about when the Bible was written and who had the most say in the editing process, and how it contained literature that was best read figuratively I wanted to retreat back into my naïveté. However as I have eased myself into this scary, foreign place of Biblical criticism I have found much that has enriched my understanding of the book that I grew up reading.
Now that I have eased my recovering fundamentalist self into this area of study, the ideas make perfect sense. An important principle in any historical study is that history rarely gives you what you expect from it. The unified narrative that we commonly hear from any part of history is almost never that simple, we should expect no different from a historical study of the Bible. Now that is an important distinction to make, this is a historical exploration of the Bible not a theological one. Not that one doesn't have serious ramifications for the other, it most certainly does. I have been seriously challenged by a historical reading of Genesis, but that's a subject for another blog. The point is and this applies to any area of history, especially ancient history; there is a difference between the theological narrative we commonly understand and what the physical evidence we possess can support. This is true for copies of the scripture that we possess and archeological evidence for things like the worldwide flood and the Exodus. Those are also topics for another blogpost.
So I have shared an overview of my journey and I hope that has been helpful, I'm still a recovering fundamentalist and honestly a lot of what I see still scares me, but I see a path now that involves grappling and understanding the facts instead of ignoring them. That is what I find to be the most exciting, I want to know the real story behind the Bible because that will help me make the most informed interpretations. I don't intend on being a full blown Biblical scholar, but I certainly intend on becoming an informed student of both the theological and historical Bible
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