The title is a reference to a sketch from the Seattle sketch comedy show Almost Live. The particular sketch featured Bill Nye (long before he was nationally popular as “the science guy”), and it was unsurprisingly humoroud. It was Bill Nye, after all. The whole show was hilarious, and your life is poorer for not having seen it.
Anyway, that’s only tangentally related to this post. The thing is, I’m skeptical about Jesus.
I’m not an atheist. I can’t be. I know there is some kind of divine reality out there, something transcendent, some source of spirit beyond our day-to-day perception. There has to be. But I just have a hard time buying that this spiritual reality is in fact Jesus Christ, who in fact died for my sins, and in fact can save me from hell or sin or death or whatever. I mean, I like it- I like Christianity and Christian theology. I think it’s the kind of thing that maybe could be real. But for Christianity as presented to us now to work at all, it has to be literally true. And there’s just this part of me that’s too skeptical to belive that it is.
Plus, then ancient Judaism also has to be literally true, and I’m not always sure that I buy the clean connection between Old and New Testaments. An without that, I certanly don’t believe that Judaism is literally true (in which God gives a bunch of arbitrary comandments to one particular chosen people).
Maybe my problem is just a basic lack of faith, but it’s not as simple as just saying “well, I’ll believe anyway, and see what happens.” For starters, I’m shy about jumping in the deep end as far as religion goes. Second, don’t forget my little friend, Mister Mental Block. Third, I’m afraid that in jumping in and simply living Christianity and telling myself that I believe in Jesus, that I will believe in Jesus but not because Jesus is really real. Instead, I will believe because I have convinced myself to believe and then allowed myself to get swept up in a spiritual current. That’s basically what I did with Mormonism. Furthermore, I’m afraid that I will have a lingering nagging doubt about Jesus (much like I always had a lingering nagging doubt about Mormonism) which will eventiually come back and bite me- ultimately leaving me writhing in agnostic agony the way I am right now.
It’s very possible that I am overthinking it, but if I am, I can’t do otherwise. I can’t just tell myself to stop thinking, nor would I ever, ever want to.
So I don’t know what to do. I’m paralyzed spiritually because on the one hand I feel to skeptical about Jesus to really be a Christian, but I’m too afraid to not believe in Jesus (and at the same time, not being a Christian would make me kind of sad, since like I said, I find Christianity very appealing). I don’t know what to do. for now, I’m mostly just thining about it. Arguably I should do more studying and praying. You could even make an argument to me that I do need ot just dive in despite my doubts, that being what faith is all about. But it’s not as easy as that for me.
Sailing to Byzantium 
“I know there is some kind of divine reality out there, something transcendent, some source of spirit beyond our day-to-day perception. There has to be.”
You do? There does? Why?
This isn’t really a matter of overthinking or underthinking or thinking at all. It’s a matter of considering evidence for or against the existence of a God and the purpose of religion at all. You’re paralyzed because you feel like religion is the right thing to do. But what if you’re wasting your energy?
I do. There does. Because.
I don;t feel at all that it is a matter of considering evidence for or against the existence of a God and the purpose of religion at all. That’s aplying a decidedly scientific approach to a decidedly non-scientific subject.
Religion is neither provable nor disprovable by the scientific method. The SM is simply not an appropriate tool for evaluating maters of faith and religion.
I am perfectly willing to accept a divine of some kind. I feel that it is there, and I feel a sense of unqualified right about it. That’s good enough for me.
For a long time, I have had this nagging feeling that perhaps somewhere out there, there is a God. But on the other hand, I often mocked believers (quietly in my heart) for believing in all this hocus-pocus.
One day, I went for a walk in the park and was suddenly struck by the beauty I was surrounded with. I was instantly humbled and like you, started searching to find out who The Creator could be.
As I searched more and more, I started building a relationship with the Holy and Divine God and now have absolutely no doubt that He exists, Jesus exists, Jesus came, died, and rose again to save me from sins, and am so very very glad to have found Him.
It has not been a waste of time, but rather, it has been very fulfilling every single day, in an very difficult to describe way.
May you be as blessed as I have been recently.
I don’t know that you’ll ever find absolute proof that Jesus is real. In fact, I don’t think you’ll find absolute proof about anything (including your own existence). I think the question is, is there reasonable evidence? Perhaps you should look at what the best Christian apologist have to say and see if their arguments seem reasonable. Don’t just stop at C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel. Go to the next level and read, listen or watch WIlliam Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Alvin Plantiga, and Gary Habermas.
I think you should also continue to study neo-paganism, or anything else that you might have interest in.
I’m sure you know, but there’s nothing wrong with trying Christianity while you have doubts. You’re at a good church for that. No one is going to do a “testimony check” to let you be fully involved. Mister Mental Block is allowed to sit in the pews too. In fact from what I know of McLaren, Mister Mental Block is sometimes preaching the sermon.
By the way, I concur that the Old Testament is sometimes really hard to swallow. If Jesus hadn’t affirmed it, it would be easy to chuck some large portions.
Dando,
I actually have an easier time accepting the Tanach than the NT. The story of the Israelites’ gradual shift from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism, while I don’t go along with it, seems more reasonable to me than the Christian version.
“I actually have an easier time accepting the Tanach than the NT. The story of the Israelites’ gradual shift from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism, while I don’t go along with it, seems more reasonable to me than the Christian version.”
Which Christian version, though? There are quite a few (probably at least one per Christian!). 😉 For example, the Anglican theologian (and he’s fairly orthodox Anglican too; I doubt that he’d give Bishop Spong the time of day) pretty much accepts the view you outline (right up to comments in the vein of ‘you can see the bits where they edited the polytheism out’ with respect to Exodus); it’s fairly standard amoungst OT scholars, Christian or otherwise.
The version where everything up to that point was just preparation for Jesus.
I also have a hard time seeing the Old Testament as nothing but preparation for Jesus. I mean, yes, there is plenty of substance in the OT that can be seen as prophecies about Jesus, but part of that is because Matthew already told you which parts they were. I’s kind of self-fulfilling, and seems like, I don;t know, like it’s much easier to see Jesus all over the Old Testament when you look at it with your mind already made up about Jesus, and thus having decided beforehand what you’re going to find.
I realize that there’s a heavy messianic thread running through the OT, but sometimes I wonder if the Messiah wouldn;t need to be, well, more Jewish. My Orthodox Jewish friends certainly dont think Jesus was the Messiah, and they know the Old Testament backwards and forwards.
At the very least, I have a hard time easily swallowing the idea that such a non-Jewish religion, Christianity, would really be what Judaism was looking forward to the whole time.
Judaism looks to me often like just another tribal religion with the usual our-god-is-better-than-your-god thing going on. In fact, although I like Christianity a lot and I am very attracted to its philosophy and theology, I sometimes sit back and think that Christianity looks like it is to Judaism what Mormonism is to Christianity, just a lot more popular.
Kullervo
Did you ever read the Chronicles of Narnia as a kid? I’m pretty sure you did, so you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you remember, in the last book, “The Last Battle,” there’s a group of Dwarves who get fooled by a false religion, and decide to make sure that they never get fooled again, so they just reject everything. Later in the story, when Aslan actually comes to them, they reject him as their leader because he’s just like all of the other pretenders. He even tries to miraculously provide food for them, but when they taste it they say it’s just straw and mud, despite the fact that it clearly isn’t. Anyway, I know you feel like you got burned with Mormonism, but the fact is that you’re unlikely to be happy in any religion if you can’t bring yourself to have faith. And of course, the main question is which religion to have faith in, and I just failed to help you with that, but I think the Dwarf analogy is a good one for you to bear in mind. Skepticism is good for discovering what isn’t true, but if you let it, it will keep you from believing anything (and that applies to anything in life, not just religion).
I haven;t read all the Narnia books, but I have read someo of them.
But the analogy is probably appropriate. On the other hand, like I said, it’s not as easy as just saying “okay; I’ll have faith then!”
Erik: ‘The version where everything up to that point was just preparation for Jesus.’
Fair enough; there’s an extent to which that’s a part and parcel of most Christian theology, but it seems to me that some form of it isn’t incompatible with Keith Ward’s view. Having said which, I do think the circularity charges stand; I really wouldn’t like to try and argue that Jesus was the Messiah on OT grounds alone, especially given the ease with which one can read anything into prophecy. At the time the Gospels were written, though, this was a perfectly acceptable thing to do, and I have a horrible feeling that even the more far out components of their exegeses are pretty tame by the standards of the time.
On the Jewishness of Jesus: It’s worth noting though, that strands of early Christianity were *extremely* Jewish, as was Jesus. Most of the book of Acts covers the dispute over how much of the Law should be kept, but from the somewhat biased pov of the winners, at least in that part of the world. IIRC, there may have been Christian groups that observed Jewish law well into the second century; the Marchonian (sp?) heresy may have been a response to this.
And even the dominant nonobservant strand were more Jewish than, say, the Gnostics.
Kullervo,
If you can read this, I left a post for you at my blog; I’ve been trying to post in this thread for two days and WordPress is saying “none shall pass”…
Wow, that worked… let’s try the original reply again.
http://tinyurl.com/267sq3
That link leads to a very interesting lecture by Amy-Jill Levine, a Conservative Jewish professor of NT at Vanderbilt. Free to watch. In the context of this discussion, I am particularly thinking of her comments regarding how Jews and Christians can talk together about the Tanakh/OT, and why she thinks the two groups are actually not reading the same book.
Man, Akismet kept thinking that was Spam. Sorry about that, Erik. I went through the filter and saw that you’ve been having a tough time.
‘s all good. You may want to remove most of the iterations of that post, though 🙂