Lighting Out for the Wild West

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A number of significant personal “revelations” mark my way in life. Among them is one that occurred in college during a combined history/literature class. It was literally a turning point for me.

Among the books we read in that class were the Pioneers by James Fenimoore Cooper and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. All the books we read explored the line between wilderness and civilization, the tension between man’s indomitable quest to conquer and civilize nature and his longing to be free of modern complexities and problems and return to nature.

Cooper wrote the Pioneers in 1823. It was fiction based on the “western frontier” of his time, with the setting in upstate New York in the finger Lakes area. The main character (the Leatherstocking, Natty Bumpo) was a grizzled old man who was more comfortable with the Indians on the other side of the lake than “his” people. His people were recklessly intent on taming the wilderness. He had more of a kinship with the Indians who respected nature and did not desire to tame it.

Cooper was among the earliest environmentalists. He was concerned about preserving the wilderness. In one of the most memorable segments of the book, he described the wanton abandon with which the pioneers heartily shot the slow Passenger Pigeons for sport, leaving destroying entire flocks at a time. The Passenger Pigeon has since gone extinct due to that kind of behavior.

Bumpo was not comfortable with his own crowd. He yearns to leave “civilization” and live in the wilderness. The book ends with him heading west to find untamed land.

Huckleberry Finn, of course, is the story of a young man cut out of a similar cloth. The time period is 1845, and the setting is much further west – along the Mississippi River. Just twenty something years after the Leatherstocking left upstate New York to find untamed country, Huckleberry Finn is struggling to conform with the “civilized” society of Hannibal, Missouri.

Huck had no more affection for the polite society of Hannibal, Missouri than the Leatherstocking had for his kind in Upstate New York. To Huck’s chagrin, the sliver of wilderness that he knows, the Mississippi River, is increasingly congested with paddleboats, commerce, and the constraints of civilized society. At the end of the book, Huck is last seen “lighting out for the west” just like Natty Bumpo, seeking untamed territory where Huck can live in peace the way he wants to live.

These books stirred a similar longing in me, but I realized that Huck’s westward trail would become a well-beaten path. The pioneers blazed the trail, but wagon trains and the Pony Express followed, then the railroads, then the transcontinental roads, then the highways, and then airports and jetliners. The sadness of having nowhere to run to hit my viscerally, and that visceral reaction led me to a turning point.

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The Bible and the Historical Provenance of Christianity

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The Dead Sea Scrolls on display at the caves of Qumran that located on the edge of the Dead Sea in Israel.

Many people say they “do not believe” the Bible. But, what does that mean? The Bible is an ancient document that has been around in virtually the same form for centuries. For instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that the Old Testament has changed very little since well before the tie of Jesus. Less than 1% of the substance of the Bible has changed since the time of Jesus.

Some people argue over which writings should be included or not included in the canon that we call the Bible. The writings that are included in the current iterations of the Bible have been established for at least 1600 years. They were largely settled by consensus for at least a couple hundred years before that,

The Bible is an historical record of people and places. Many of those people and places and some events have been cross referenced by other sources, including Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Roman, and other sources. Archaeological finds have also verified many of the people and places in the Bible. People may argue whether every person and place referenced in the text is actual, accurate and factual, but few people seriously argue that it has no historical value.

The Bible is also a collection of stories, poems, songs, and sayings (wisdom literature). As literature, it is full of imagery, compelling stories and words of wisdom. It has great literary value. 

The Bible is a collection of writings covering a span of about 1600 years by many authors focusing on particular people group in a particular geographical area of the Middle East during a particular time period in history. Some of the writings purport to be relatively contemporaneous accounts, and others seem more like historical accounts when they were written.

The writings that comprise the Bible have been collected and preserved as sacred text. Scribes were carefully trained to copy the manuscripts. Those scribes devoted their lives to the careful transcription of the text from generation to generation.

What is most likely meant when people say they “do not believe the Bible” is that they do not believe the Bible is the “Word of God”. People do not believe it is divinely inspired. People do not believe that the Bible is the revelation of God to people.

When people say the do not believe the Bible, they most likely mean they do not believe the Bible can be taken at face value. At face value, the writings of the Bible purport to a collection of God’s communications with a certain group of people, in a particular region of the world, over a particular time span in history.

Various people have various theories about the Bible. I have even recently heard people say that the Bible was put together by Roman dictators to “control the people” by giving them something to believe in. There is little to no scholarly support for that position by the way, but this theory and other theories abound.

Most scholars agree that the Bible has cultural, sociological, literary, and other value. Though people disagree over the degree to which the Bible has historical value, it does have some historical value as any ancient text does.

Significantly, the evidence suggests that the Old Testament writings pre-date the first Century. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which pre-date the First Century, include manuscripts from every book in the Old Testament except for Esther. Among the manuscripts found in the Qumran caves that we call the Dead Sea Scrolls, was a complete scroll of the Book of Isaiah dating to at least 200 BC that is virtually the same as the “book of Isaiah” we have preserved in modern Bibles.

It is fact that the Bible is by far the most well-preserved and well-attested ancient text in the history of humankind. We have more ancient manuscripts of the Bible, by a large volume, than any other ancient text. The volume of New Testament manuscripts is stunning compared to any other ancient text.

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A City Set on a Hill in a Foreign World

Our end goal is not ultimately to rehabilitate an earthly city or country, but to enter into a heavenly City of which the designer and builder is God.

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One Sunday I recall the pastor deviating from the planned sermon to observe that Christians today sometimes act as if God is not in control. We do this by complaining about politics, our country, the world, etc. Sometimes when the Spirit leads, we need to stop from our planned way and consider what God is saying. If we don’t, we might miss God.

There is a segment of the church that believes and acts like the USA is God’s country, a Christian nation. I think this is where many Christians allow politics into their theology at a grave danger to pure religion, which James reminds us “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world”. (James 1:27)

Yes, the founding fathers were “Christians”; and the country became a haven, a promised land, early on for people escaping religious persecution in England and other places. I love the fact that our country was founded on Biblical ideals, among other things, with honor for God. The freedom of religion and freedom of expression in the USA make this country great, the envy of much of the world, though not understood by much of the world as well.

Many hundreds of years before Jesus the Israelites were God’s chosen people. They were chosen out of all the people groups in the ancient Middle East on the basis of Abraham’s faith, and a promise was made to him that the whole world would be blessed by his progeny.

The promise of God to the people (Abraham and his descendants) to whom He chose to entrust that promise prepared the way for Jesus, the Messiah, except Jesus came with a plan and a message they did not expect. He came to his own, and his own knew him not. The Israelites were dug in, resting on the assumption that they alone were God’s chosen people. Many of them missed the boat. They rejected the Son of God because they had their own expectations and were not in tune with what God was doing.

We know the rest of the story, at least where the narrative continues today. God’s plan was to introduce the Christ for all people through the platform of the message entrusted to the Jewish people, who preserved that message and protected it. But many of them missed it. God does not always work as we expect Him to work.

We might say the Jews became nationalistic in their religion, and they missed the fact that God intended to bless the whole world. Yes, Jesus came to his own, but he also came to all who would believe on him. The new wine came, and the old wine skin could not contain it.

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Who Wrote the Gospels?

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Dr. Peter Williams 2
From a Lecture – Dr Peter Williams – New Evidences the Gospels were Based on Eyewitness Accounts

The Bible is ubiquitous in our society. More people have an opinion on the Bible than people who have read it, or at least much of it. The text was written over a period of 1500 years by about 40 some different people. As a literary text, I was struck when I first read it (for a class in college) by how complex, yet harmonious the Bible is. There was an internal authenticity that spoke to me.

While our society tends to view the Bible as just another book, a piece of our history and common culture, something that people tend to like (the most read book), but nothing to be taken terribly seriously, people of faith view it as the Word of God, sent from heaven, a revelation of God’s purpose and design for mankind. Few people really study the Bible in-depth and detail from an “objective” view. Maybe no one does. We come to it with our preconceived notions, and we look for support for what we already believe is true.

I have a great deal of doubt in the human ability to be objective. Scientists who live by the scientific method, in my opinion, can be as guilty of bias as the common man, and are all the more culpable for claiming it is science. But that is the subject of another discussion.

At the same time, there are stories of people who set out to disprove the Bible who come to believe it is true. Many of them in fact.

I did not approach the Bible initially like that; rather I approached it as I approached everything in my life during my search-for-truth-phase: I assumed there was truth in the Bible like there was truth in the Bhagavad gita, the Quran, Khalil Gibran, Aristotle, Plato and all of the philosophers, and Emerson, Shakespeare and all of the great writers. I still believe there is truth in that assumption. Truth is truth no matter where it is found. If truth is attainable and knowable, people from all over the world should have some grasp of it.

As a much older person, I have also come to believe firmly in the human capacity to ignore, overlook and dismiss the truth. There is so much at stake, chiefly our own pride and self-esteem. We commit to principles quickly sometimes, and we hold fast to them in the face of contrary evidence because we do not want to be wrong, especially once we have invested ourselves in developing those principles.

We have fears and insecurities that we try to cover, and we try to protect ourselves from being exposed. There are probably hundreds of reasons, big and small, that we miss the truth – big truths and little truths. It takes a lot of energy to be on the lookout for truth, and many of us do not have that energy or the time in our fast-paced, busy lives to be that vigilant.

Much has been made of the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible and a seeming lack of archaeological and historical evidence. The inconsistencies and contradictions that I have checked out are largely due to lack of knowledge, misunderstanding, or purposeful attempts to miscast the text. Archaeological and historical criticisms are based more on lack of evidence than contradictory evidence. Modern discoveries do more to substantiate the Biblical text than to disprove it. Still, we will likely never have absolute proof of the veracity of the Biblical text this side of heaven.

As intelligent beings, or  at least beings capable of intelligence, we can not rationally claim to be all-knowing or all-understanding. We are finite creatures with no legitimate claims on ultimate truth – at least none of us can claim it with a straight face or a sound mind.

With that said, I have found no reasons to discount the Bible as the authentic revelation of God in the 40+ years since I came to be a believer. In that time, I have found even more reasons to trust it.

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Intellectuals May Enter

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There is a common perception among “intellectuals” that religion is for simpletons and faith requires abandoning the intellect. Nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion. I graduated 2nd in my class in law school. I am smarter than the average bear. I do not mean to boast. There are far smarter people than I in the world. One of those people was a good friend in college. She graduated #1 in our class with a perfect 4.0 GPA. She was a triple major, including Physics, Math and Russian studies. She has a PhD in Astrophysics. She was also a leader in a campus ministry in college.

You do not have to leave your brain at the door of faith, and you should not feel like a second class intellectual citizen to be a Christian. Intellect is not the sole province of the irreligious. Do not buy into that lie.

And for those thinking that Atheists are smarter than people who believe in God, think again: