Introduction: Questioning the Foundations
What if you suddenly had to re-learn everything you thought you knew about Jesus, the Bible, Church, Christianity, Theological terms, all of it? I think you could summarize this book and my journey with a simple set of questions:
- Am I committed to the traditions of my faith of origin, or am I committed to understanding what the biblical authors actually intended to communicate to their original audience?
- If those conflict, which will I choose?
- How will changing my attitudes, ideas, theological positions, doctrines, orthodoxy, and/or orthopraxy affect my daily living?
- What, if anything, does the secular idea of “mental health” have to do with these things?
- What if pulling just one thread leads to unraveling all of them? What if deciding there is no rapture leads me to changes in my mental health, community, and day-to-day living that were completely unexpected? Hint: I did, they did.
Personal Journey and Identity
However, this book is about more than an intellectual exercise in theology, this is my story.
It is my life, my journey; every step earned painfully.
This book is about re-discovering spirituality, the Bible, Jesus, all while working through my journey with Autism and ADHD, sexual dysfunction, mental health, grief, recovery, restoration, deconstruction, reconstruction, and coming to terms with a life that is Pro-Jesus, Pro-Bible, and maybe just a little more than a little Post-Churchianity.
It’s about finding The Way of Jesus outside the walls of the Sunday morning experience, the concert followed by a public speaker, where we go to learn “what to think”, aka the “Church”. Then coming to terms with how (if at all) I can continue to have “Church” (at least its modern western American expressions) as part of my life. Or do I need a Fresh Expression (cite them here)?
Where do I start to unravel a lifetime of journey with Jesus, one that will continue to the day I die or he returns?
There's no conclusion to provide you, because I learn something new, and unlearn something old almost daily. But I think I can share my experiences, what I think I’ve learned, and some changes to my approach that I intend to carry forward.
It less about a change of thoughts, and more about a change in my way of thinking (See Bob Hamp for more on that).
ADHD, Autism, Sexual Dysfunction, Mental Health, Grief
I grew up as a Pastor’s Kid and spent most of my adult life deeply involved in various expressions of modern western American Churchianity.
As a result, almost all of my struggles have been filtered through my Biblical and/or Christian experience. That is why so much of this text will revolve around a changing worldview and better understanding the Bible. Ironically, it was after rejecting Churchianity that I found the Bible (as a Jewish text) held many of the answers I needed about the nature of the human condition. The biblical author’s worldview looks almost nothing like modern western American Churchianity.
That being said, this book will be just as much about my personal life experiences, and the attitudes, mindsets, worldview shifts, and personal growth I experienced along the way.
I will discuss ADHD, Autism, Sexual Dysfunction, Relationship Addiction, Mental Health, Loss, Grief, Codependency, Boundaries, and finding a new balance in my own mental health journey. These stories will be weaved into the larger questions about the Bible, God, and religion. However, many of my most profound changes came from understanding the Bible as a completely different book than the one I thought it was. So these stories will be mixed throughout the book as I touch on various Bible related topics.
Commitment to Original Biblical Intent
I can start by telling you that I am more loyal to Yeshua HaMashiach (Iesus Christos, Jesus the Messiah (Christ)), than I ever was before.
I can also say I have more reverence, awe, and respect for the texts we've come to call 'The Bible' than ever before...
I am still “Spirit-Filled”, though my understanding of that experience and the gifts have changed dramatically since becoming an ex-Pentecostal/Charismatic.
However, I have lost many of the doctrines, ideas, mental frameworks, and theological positions from the two thousand years of traditions that I have come to call Churchianity.
There are almost no theological terms or “doctrines” that I haven't had to redefine and re-contextualize as I've come to understand the biblical authors better.
I still believe that Jesus was with God and was God (John 1), that Ha’Ruach Ha’Kodesh (The Holy Spirit) is also God; that Jesus lived as a man on earth, died, rose again, and reigns as king of the universe at his Father’s right hand as I write this text, and that he will return to this earth (bodily) to reign here at a future point in time.
Beyond that, the biblical authors worldview provides layers of context and meaning we’ve lost in western Churchianity.
Contrary to one pastor who said, “We must unhook from the Old Testament”, we must dive much deeper into the Hebrew Bible if we have any hope of understanding the “New Testament” authors, who were mostly (or my opinion, entirely) Jewish authors, speaking in Greek to a Greek world, but from a Jewish worldview.
Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, and if you don’t understand, deeply, the story the biblical authors are telling in the Hebrew scriptures, including the Divine Council Worldview, you will not properly understand the mission of Jesus, the “good news” of Jesus, the mission of Paul, or what kind of community we are called to join today in the modern era.
I’ve come to redefine almost every term I was taught growing up in Church, while I’ve outright rejected some terms entirely. We’ll get into all that later in this text.
Historical and Cultural Context
At various points throughout this text, I will use terms that you may or may not be familiar with, for example: Ha’Ruach Ha’Kodesh (The Holy Spirit). That is because I found that I was at a disadvantage from understanding the biblical authors correctly until I began understanding the Jewish cultural origins and Hebrew language origins of the Messianic Jewish Jesus Movement called The Way, which eventually expanded to include Gentiles, before it unfortunately rejected its eldest brothers of Jewish heritage becoming an entirely different beast called 'Christianity' in the 100-300s AD.
We’ll get into details later, but it comes to this: studying the biblical authors in light of all other available contemporary evidence (texts that existed at the same time the biblical authors were writing) will have more fruit in our sincerely understanding what they wanted to say, than anything said by anyone after-the-fact, even if it was just 50-100 years after. The further afterward, the less weight those writers and thinkers have on the discussion.
Therefore, studying 1 Enoch or Maccabees or texts from the Qumran caves, or the Ugaritic textual discoveries, will carry more weight than something said by Augustine, Luther, or Calvin, who wrote well after-the-fact.
Deconstruction and Reconstruction
I have come to accept that each generation of Yahweh's people have had to 'wrestle with God' in their own time and their own contexts. I am able to honor and respect that wrestling, without accepting their perspectives or conclusions.
One rabbi said that Jacob’s name means “to wrestle with God” and we Jews have been wrestling with Adonai ever since (correct this quote and cite it?? Xxxxx).
While I still mostly own the term “Christian” as it was used historically, I have lost much respect for many of the teachings by those using that title throughout most of its history.
To clarify, I respect their journey, their struggles, their attempts to “wrestle with God”; but I do not accept many of their teachings, theological positions, or doctrines. I feel no loyalty to any “creed”, tradition, or the claim of any theologian, regardless of how long that position has been held by the establishment(s), unless I can verify for myself, through the use of scholarship and primary textual evidence, that position aligns with the worldview of the biblical authors.
One man on social media responded to me by saying, “You just reject two thousand years of church history because all of a sudden you know better now?”
Plainly, Yes.
I firmly believe we have better tools, more research, more textual documents, better scholarship, and a better ability to understand the original biblical authors than even the early patristics did just 50-100 years after the fact. I respect each generations attempts to wrestle with the texts, but I choose to accept only those conclusions that I find agreement with as I study the historical contexts.
If a text of any kind was available to the biblical authors to read and reflect upon, that text will have more meaning for me in understanding the message the biblical authors is trying to communicate to their own original audience, than anything said after the fact, no matter how sincerely or piously it was said.
In the last 50-100 years, the scholarly debates between a traditional understanding of Paul, the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), and the Paul within Judaism perspective (sometimes called the Radical Perspective on Paul), are just one example of how we must re-align our understanding of everything based on the best textual evidence available from all contemporary resources.
While a text of this nature, which includes my personal story and journey, cannot be comprehensive; and this is in no way an academic treatise or Thesis paper, I do want to cover enough of the most important terms that came from my own journey to provide some idea about what I mean by redefining and recontextualizing.
Some of the terms we’ll discuss, briefly:
- The Gospel
- The Cross/Importance of the Cross
- Law
- Sin
- Justification
- Rapture / 7-Year Tribulation (which are not biblical concepts at all)
- The Second Coming (which is a biblical concept)
- TBD… I’ll finish this list when I finish writing.
Warning: Modern Interpretations and Biases
If you are committed to the traditional views and do not want them challenged, this book isn't for you.
If you are committed to either an American Right or American Left view, either extreme, this book isn't for you. Example: You are fully against or fully for the statement “Marriage is between one man and one woman” and incapable of discussing any nuance in the biblical texts around this topic, this text isn’t for you.
I will be challenging views from every side, agnostics, atheists, Jews, Christians, Left, and Right equally. I also admit my own biases. There are no possibilities that I will ever stop loving and serving Jesus as Yahweh come among men, died, risen, and coming again bodily in the future. That is central to what I understand of the biblical witnesses.
However, there are almost no positions that I once held deeply that I haven’t at least reconsidered, if not fully changed my position. I expect many more will come in the future. My future self may even contradict myself in this text, which is why it will be focused on my journey toward a way of approaching life and Bible, and not on specific conclusions.
So this is less about getting the “right answers” and more about learning how to ask the right questions, and being willing to allow the messy middle to be unclear or nuanced. God has to be right, but I don’t.
Engagement with Diverse Perspectives
Augustine wrestled with God, and wrote many things as he wrestled, and for reasons beyond me, Churchianity has placed him on a pedestal in Church history. Augustine was also a brutal antisemite, who would be in jail today for some of his rhetoric, and rightfully so. I am completely free to reject up to and including 100% of his ideas while I can still respect that he had his own journey and I have mine, and we are each responsible for our own journey. I’m also free to admit where he may have gotten something right, while holding evil and despicable views about the Jewish people (our eldest brothers in Yahweh’s kingdom).
I do reject much from the patristics and I think we've gradually got it more and more wrong throughout the centuries after they wrote. We’re beginning to correct many of our errors, and it is our duty, with access to modern scholarship and loads of ancient texts (that were not available to those theologians in centuries past), to ask what the biblical authors intended to communicate to their original audience, even if we end up deciding that we have to reject the interpretation we collectively held or had imposed onto the text in some prior century.
Conclusion: A Living Faith
I am not asking you to change your theology or doctrinal positions, although I think you may if you take this journey with me.
I am asking you to be open to the possibility that we could understand the biblical authors better than we have.
I am asking that you be open to changing the way you approach the Bible, and consider how that might impact every other area of your life.
I’m asking you to rethink how you engage life, community, mental health, politics, religion and religious establishments, all as part of adopting The Way of Jesus.
Note: If you’re familiar with Donald Miller, this is my journey inspired by Blue Like Jazz (read that book if you haven’t yet).
A Call to the Reader
If you're brave enough to keep reading, let's begin.
Darrell Wolfe, Storyteller at NoHiding.Faith, DarrellWolfe.com, and Topos Creative LLC
