A Pasta Sea: Post-Apostasy Correspondence Saga: My Exchanges with Church Leaders

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Post-Apostasy Correspondence Saga: My Exchanges with Church Leaders

Warning: this post is long. Specifically it's about 26,000 words long or about 44 printed pages. I thought about breaking it up into a few different posts, but that wouldn't really fit my purpose. I'm mainly just looking for a place to dump this on my blog, so here it is. I apologize that after almost a year without posting I'm marking my return with something like this, but I had a recent, unexpected, and encouraging phone call from someone from my past that brought all these events to mind and prompted me to do it.

A few times on this blog I've alluded to the response my wife and I received from the PCA church we were active members of at the time of our deconversion. Outside of work and home, it was pretty much our world. I've also mentioned that not a single person from that church remained friends with us in any meaningful sense. At least one former good friend stated he would never set foot in my house or even meet with me in person until we repented. Others unfriended us on Facebook. A couple of my wife's friends seemed to be willing to at least correspond, but they said they needed some time first. That was three years ago.

I saved nearly all of the correspondence we received during that period. I've been hesitant to share much of it on this blog, but I recently had a conversation with someone who was privy to some of the things that were communicated to the congregation of the church by the session of elders in the aftermath of our departure. Based on that person's recollections, it would seem the elders told the congregation not to interact with us lest we poison them. In light of that unsurprising revelation, I've decided to publish the exchanges I had with the elders, the details of which they no doubt withheld from the congregants. I've redacted names and places. Mainly I'm excluding them so people performing Internet searches on those specific names won't end up getting linked here.

In retrospect, now three years removed from these exchanges, I think it was a mistake to allow the elders and the senior pastor in particular to control the narrative fully in the way we did. If I had to do it all over again, I might be tempted to avoid phone conversations, stick strictly to email interactions, and then cc everyone in the church directory on the entire exchange so they could see for themselves how it all went down. Something like that had briefly crossed my mind, but I never seriously considered it. At the time I didn't want to risk burning bridges, nor did I want to fit into the narrative of being out to deliberately hurt people. In the end, the elders were going to burn plenty of bridges for us so it didn't really matter.

For those who may not be aware, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) practices church discipline in the Reformed Protestant tradition. For many Christians this is probably a foreign concept and when I describe it to people, they often find it alarming. Even most of the evangelicals I've discussed it with seemed to find it cult-like and bizarre. Of course, one Christian's "cult-like and bizarre" is another's "Biblically faithful." In the case of church discipline, it certainly looks like the New Testament is on the PCA's side here. I'm not going to flesh out a biblical case for church discipline or denounce fluffy denominations that take a much more "hands off" approach to their members. It's just important to know that the PCA treats church discipline almost like a sacrament and considers practicing it to be one of the marks of a True Church™.

My wife and I knew what we were getting into when we joined this church. Even though we were leaving our Southern Baptist church in good standing, we still had to take an introductory class, meet with members of the session of elders, and stand before the church and take solemn vows. Even so, as is the case many religious organizations, getting out still proved to be much more of a hassle than getting in.

We didn't know at the time that we could have made it easier on ourselves. Instead we naively assumed that because we had taken these vows that we had to go through the whole church discipline process. We did not realize that all we had to do was submit a letter stating "we are withdrawing our membership" and then simply let them know we wanted no further communication with them on the matter. For them to take disciplinary action after that would've opened them up to a potential tort, as they would have been taking such actions against people who were no longer members of their organization. The courts in this country have repeatedly said that's a big no-no, despite their reluctance to involve themselves in ecclesiastical matters.

In 1992, for example, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in Hadnot v Shaw that, "At the point when the church‐member relationship is severed through an affirmative act of either a parishioner's withdrawal or excommunication by the ecclesiastical body, a different situation arises. In the event of withdrawal or of post‐excommunication activity . . . the absolute privilege from tort liability no longer attaches."

Basically, a church has First Amendment protections to practice church discipline free from being sued up to the point a member withdraws their membership. Action taken after that time in the name of church discipline runs the risk of landing them in court. As church liability insurer Brotherhood Mutual tells its policyholders: "Church discipline should never apply to anyone who is not clearly and voluntarily affiliated with the church." Note to future apostates: it might be helpful to remind a church of that fact if you think they might be tempted to pursue action after you withdraw your membership.

That said, as you will see, the only real punishment the church leaders could dish out was refusing to give us any of their cheap wine and thin bread wafers and telling the congregation to shun us and avoid us. Aside from that, all the other punishments they administered existed solely in their imaginations.

On some level, my wife and I also chose the difficult path because we did not want to give the appearance that we were running scared. Simply withdrawing our membership and cutting everyone off would've permitted all kinds of speculation. Additionally, we were friends with most of these folks and naively thought that some of those friendships might survive. Even after it all went down we still held out hope and waited over a year before we finally grew tired of being shunned and simply moved to another community in the same metropolitan area so we could get a fresh start and forge new relationships.

We did not want to give the impression that we were trying to pick off weaker members of the church by going behind the elders' backs. While we were waiting for a good opportunity to drop the bomb, I was still teaching a Wednesday night youth boys Bible study and was in the regular rotation for teaching adult Sunday School. I could've used those platforms to plant seeds of doubt, but instead I took great pains to insure I kept all of my teaching in conformity to the church's confessional standards. I even took the step of calling on others to pray in those situations rather than doing it myself and I avoided framing anything as my own opinion or belief on a subject. We even waited until the senior pastor returned from sabbatical so the newly-ordained associate pastor would not be thrust into this. We chose instead to confront the organization head-on at the top. Even before we told our families, we would go directly to the session first.

My wife and I chose as the first people to whom we would reveal our unbelief a couple that we had been friends with very early on at the church. They were close in age to us and had a couple of kids that were close in age to our own, adding another later. Both seemed pretty level-headed and were not as hardcore into Reformed culture as some of the other folks in the church. Of all the members of the session, he was the most grounded in reality and always seemed to strike a good balance between pragmatism and doctrinal fidelity. On the list of people we hoped to remain friends with, this couple was certainly towards the top. Since he was an elder, giving our letter to him along with speaking with them on our own terms would allow us a means to inform the session and try to lay the groundwork for forging our friendship with them on different terms.

So on the fateful evening of Tuesday, November 6th, 2012, the night of the general election, we had this couple over for dinner. I was very late because the person who was driving the car pool that week had car trouble. This left my anxious wife there stalling until I got home around the time they were finishing up dessert. When I arrived, we sat down and told them we were leaving the church and why. They assured us that no matter what happened they saw no reason why we could no longer be friends and we would always be invited in their home. As it turned out, other than my wife reaching out to her via email and her replying that she needed some more time, neither has communicated with us since. That was a pretty heavy blow for us.

They left with the following letter from us in hand to be delivered to the rest of the session:

The Session of Elders

[the church]

[address]

Gentlemen,

This letter is to serve as notification that we no longer believe what you would consider the basic tenets of the Christian faith including the inspiration and authority of the Bible, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and salvation by faith in him. As a result we are no longer willing or able to fulfill our church vows and membership obligations at either [the church] or in any other branch of what you would likely recognize as part of the visible church. We understand that from your perspective we previously entered into a solemn covenant with God and his church and that our inability to fulfill our church vows warrants removal from the church roll.

We realize that you will see our apostasy as a grievous occasion and that you may wish to further communicate in person or in writing the serious peril that you perceive our souls to be in. We know you view such things as very real and that you will see this as a loving way to warn us and attempt to return us to fellowship. Although we will view such actions as well-intentioned scare tactics and are likely to remain unconvinced such danger is real, we understand that you may feel duty-bound to address this matter beyond merely sending us a formal letter of excommunication. We also realize that you may be curious about how this happens to church members that, by all appearances, seemed genuinely committed to the faith. We are open to further communication of some degree about this matter, but ask that we be given at least a week from the date of this letter before any follow-up is pursued so that we may have time to inform our families about this.

We know that our actions are likely to be shocking and perceived as a form of betrayal by some. We know that some will find being in our presence awkward and that some may even see us as a kind of threat to the peace of the congregation that should be avoided. If some form of either formal or informal shunning does follow we will understand. However, it is our hope that at least some will be able to maintain social relationships with us and continue in friendship as they would with any other unbelieving friends or family members, once the initial shock wears off.

We are aware that our level of participation in teaching both children and adults will likely raise some concerns in hindsight. For whatever it’s worth, we do affirm that in no time did we knowingly teach doctrines contrary to the confessional standards of the church or intentionally seek to subvert them in any way while either in a classroom setting, small group or while engaged in informal conversation with members of the church prior to the submission of this letter.

This may not have been the best way to handle this matter, but short of taking the rather impractical step of moving away, there really wasn’t going to be a “clean” way to go about leaving the church given our level of participation and the friendships our family has with many of its members. It is unfortunate that there was no way to do this without causing some pain for others, but in some ways we are glad this process is not easy as it has forced us to seriously contemplate our decision and its potential ramifications. We sincerely apologize for any of our own missteps that served to increase your pain and hope that you will forgive us for that much.

While we do in many respects regret having devoted a great deal of time, money and effort in the service of a cause we no longer support and beliefs we no longer hold to, we are glad to have known the people of [the church].

Sincerely,

[The Apostate]

[Mrs. Apostate]

In spite of the fact that we had asked for a week before contacting us to discuss things and receiving assurances from the elder we originally spoke with that he would do his best to keep things a bay for awhile, at 9:03 AM on Wednesday 11/7, a mere 12 hours after giving him the letter, we received the following email from the senior pastor with our "shepherding elder" cc'd:

Dear [Apostates],

I received the surprising and heart-wrenching news last night that you have both disowned Jesus Christ and renounced the Christian Faith. [the pastor's wife] and I have shed tears and prayed for you. It is very hard for me to believe, however, that the both of you, simultaneously, have completely turned away from all that you've held dear for most of your lives. I wish you would have shared your struggle and doubts with your pastors and elders, as I suspect this is something you've been wrestling with for some time. [Apostates], we love you, and we love [The Apostates' kids]. We will not simply file this away and move on. Your family is too precious to us. Your shepherding elders and your church love you dearly.

I would like to visit with you as soon as possible. If the weekend is best you [sic], I can come over anytime Saturday or anytime Sunday afternoon. Please let me know. And please forgive this mode of communication (email)– I wanted to get in touch right away without having to call you ([The Apostate]) at work with such a weighty matter.

Again, we love you and desire to enter the struggle with you.

Sincerely,

[the senior pastor]

Note how he opened with an attack by accusing us of the personal betrayal of Jesus Christ. Of course, he was projecting his own feelings of betrayal, but by making it about Jesus, he doubtless felt this added weight to it. He moved from there to pointing out that not only had this upset him, but it had also upset his wife. His wife is a wonderful, kind, caring, loving person (seriously, she really is) and we were hurting her and he wanted us to know it. He'll pull this out again later.

He followed that with a thinly-veiled accusation that it was not really both of us that had pulled out. Despite the fact that my wife had done most of the talking when we spoke with the other elder, the pastor would remain unconvinced that we are united on this. That is, until Mrs. Apostate chimed in on the correspondence later.

The insinuations and attacks didn't end there. He moved to trying to guilt us for not coming to him or one of the other elders earlier. You'll see he brought this up repeatedly, though it changed from implying that it was a misstep on our part to insinuating it was a deliberate act of avoidance and even sneaky subversion. He concluded by saying what he was going to do is all about love and for good measure, he threw our kids in there.

It was Wednesday morning. He said he wanted to meet with us on Saturday or Sunday. We specifically asked for a week before being contacted and he had not only contacted us, but he wanted to meet with us within the very time frame we had set aside to drop this on our families. So much for holding him a bay. It's important to understand that our families moved in close circles with many of the folks we went to church with. Word was going to get out quickly and we did not want our devout parents hearing about this second-hand. In retrospect, we probably should've done that first. Take note, future apostates.

About 15 minutes later the pastor followed his email with:

Dear [Apostates],

Would you be willing to hold off on sharing your thoughts with your family until we have all had a chance to spend some time together?

Your Pastor, Servant and Friend,

[the senior pastor]

Why? Did he think he was so awesome that he was going to talk us out of this so there was no need to involve our parents? By the way, kids, if a religious leader ever tells you to withhold something like this from your own family, politely decline the request. I suggest employing an expletive phrase in which you invite him to go have sex with himself. Run away quickly. That is a sign you are dealing with a cult. Period.

I'm left to conclude that he either thought he could persuade us to return to the fold so there was no need to trouble our parents, or he was trying to limit our interactions with anyone else as much as possible to contain the outbreak. I wanted very badly to think it was the former, but as the interactions unfolded, it became increasingly more apparent that it was the latter. Just to clarify, I still think much of this stuff was reactionary and not calculated and deliberate, but I do think religious organizations are structured in such a way so that these self-preserving reactions become automatic. The meme has survived for thousands of years for a reason.

Around lunchtime that day, we received a "me too" email from our shepherding elder:

[Apostates],

As your elder, I would plead with you to say yes to [senior pastor] and let us meet first to discuss this monumental matter.

With phileo and great concern,

[shepherding elder]

Oh, snap. He went Greek on us. It's not just love, y'all. It's phileo.

These guys were trying their best. Really, they were. Even now, it's hard for me to impute sinister motives. They were my friends, which probably made this even more problematic. Note to churches: you should really think about outsourcing dealing with apostates to other people. Maybe partner up with sister churches and agree to handle each other's apostates or something. The session would have at least been better served to deliberate first and appoint two other guys, any two other guys, to be on point than these two. Any other two members of the session would've been better. In fairness, though, this was new territory for all of them.

My wife and I discussed it and decided that in spite of their unwillingness to respect our request for a week's worth of staying the hell away from us, we could agree to a weekend meeting. At this point we were still under the mistaken notion that the session could keep this under wraps until we could meet with our parents. We were beginning to wonder if that timetable might be shrinking, though.

I emailed the two of them with the following reply Wednesday afternoon:

[senior pastor],

Thank you for your discretion and courtesy with respect to your chosen mode of communication. I agree that this was not an appropriate matter for a phone conversation while I’m at work.

We are agreeable to meeting with you sometime this weekend. Saturday will most likely be best for us, but we will have a better idea on a specific time later in the week. We will take your request to postpone telling our families into consideration, but due to the timing and other circumstances, in all likelihood we will proceed as we originally planned. It is not clear to us what end postponement would serve anyway.

I’m certain that this was difficult news for you and the other members of the session, as it will be difficult news for a lot of folks. We realize it is an emotion-filled situation and we are willing to give the benefit of the doubt. However, it was a bit disconcerting to us that you would open a dialogue by expressing doubt in our rather clear statement that we have reached these conclusions together. Perhaps you can see how we might take this as an accusation that you don’t think we’re being forthcoming. Furthermore, in expressing your wish that we would have shared our doubts with you earlier, it sounds like you are casting blame on us for the way in which we have dealt with this. We will chalk it up to either emotion or the limitations inherent in the medium of email communication.

We want to be clear on something. When we meet to discuss things, we are not meeting as shepherds and sheep, elders and parishioners. We are meeting as equal persons and our meeting with you is out of courtesy. While you may not recognize this yet, from our perspective the relationship has changed and we no longer consider ourselves under your authority in any way. I’m not trying to sound unnecessarily adversarial, but I feel it is important to express this change in the dynamic from our point of view before we meet so that you are not caught off guard.

We appreciate the love you have expressed toward our family. We love the people of [the church] as well. It is regrettable that we now find ourselves unavoidably divided over this.

We will follow up later in the week to settle on a definite time of meeting.

Sincerely,

[The Apostates]

Now, I want to point out that while our first letter to the session may have been vague, this one was pretty unambiguous in its expression that we no longer considered ourselves a part of the organization. While I didn't use the specific words, "we have withdrawn our membership," I did state fairly unequivocally, "we no longer consider ourselves under your authority in any way." At the very least at that point we were no longer "clearly and voluntarily affiliated with the church," to borrow Brotherhood Mutual's legalese. From a legal perspective, they were treading on dangerous ground from there on out. Of course, none of us likely knew that at the time. The session had a practicing attorney and a law professor sitting on it, but we were dealing with the professional theologian and the home improvement contractor.

As you will see, this change in dynamic would never be recognized. It's kind of ironic because one of the principal components of the same Greek concept of philia that one of them referred to earlier is equality. It should become evident that we were never treated as equals in this interaction, though, as we were condescended to as subordinates throughout.

That night, as we tried to figure out schedules of when we could sit down with our family members and discuss our apostasy before word got out, we received a phone call from a random church member asking if we could swap one of our assigned duties. Apparently she was prompted because the church secretary had been calling around all day to find people to fill in for a duty that was six weeks away. This was completely unnecessary at this point. It hadn't even been 24 hours and already more people than just the members of the session and their wives were in the loop. This placed even more pressure on us to arrange meetings with our families as soon as possible. I ended up calling my stepfather while he was out of town on a hunting trip so he could return to be at my mother's side when I broke the news because I didn't feel it could wait any longer.

That Friday afternoon I sent the following letter to the senior pastor and cc'd phileo elder guy:

[senior pastor],

Tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM looks like it will work out for us as a good time to meet. We are fine meeting at our house. Let us know if that works for you.

Thank you,

[The Apostates]

We heard nothing after that and had no idea if they would even show up until Saturday morning at 8:30 when we received the following:

Dear [Apostates],

[phileo elder] and I will be at your house at 10:00 a.m.

In Christ,

[the senior pastor]

They arrived at our house separately, the first to arrive waiting in his truck. They walked up the walkway, and as we waited in our living room we could see them through the front windows kneeling at our doorstep to pray before knocking. It was strange to us and we couldn't help but be amused. What they saw as petitioning the God of the universe to dispel the demonic forces and turn our hearts back to the truth, we saw as attempting to cast magic spells from the threshold of our house. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that we shared a good chuckle at their expense. OK, I'm not ashamed. It was funny.

Content that they had sufficiently prepared for this battle with unseen powers, they knocked and we let them in. The senior pastor did most of the talking, of course. He relayed that he was just there to hear from us. We told the two of them of the events that led up to our no longer believing. We laid out several of the many reasons, but he later seemed to focus only on one of the items I had mentioned that sparked my questioning, mistakenly thinking somehow that this was merely the linchpin that had fallen out, rather than the goad that set me off on my journey.

They asked if we had found another religion. I believe the metaphor was that we had jumped out of the ship, but had we climbed into another one? We said we had not. We had no god-belief. He asked if we would consider ourselves agnostic and I replied that was a fair description. We were not operating with the same definition of "agnostic" at the time, as will later become evident. Why is it that so many believers are so quick to assume that "I'm agnostic" means, "I just haven't heard the right pitch of your brand of bullshit yet; but if I did, I might be persuaded to believe in the existence of your particular version of a god"? In retrospect, we should've clarified that when it came to his specific god, we were most decidedly atheists.

It's been over three years since this conversation took place, but one of my vivid recollections is the pastor telling me that from his perspective the devil had his claws in my mind. I didn't get the impression that he meant it in some sort of broad, metaphorical sense either. I remember thinking how honored I felt that the supreme embodiment of evil on earth, the Prince of the Power of the Air himself, thought little ol' me worthy of taking time out of his busy schedule of conducting operations in the Obama administration and running the National Football League just so that he could sink his invisible claws into my mind. Truly, I'm not worthy.

The pastor said he had answers to all of my objections, of course, but since he was only there to listen he wasn't going to offer any rebuttals. He was supremely confident in his theological prowess, though he wasn't going to whip it out for us to behold in all its magnificent glory just yet. Once again, he brought up the subject of why we didn't come to him first when we started having questions about the veracity of Christianity and insinuated some kind of sinister motives on our part. I explained to him that my critical investigation of truth claims had made me suspect of partisan motives and my own confirmation bias.

Aside from that, behind him on my bookshelf was literally thousands of pages of exposition, commentary, apologetics, systematic theologies, etc.; all from a Christian perspective. Was he going to tell me that he was better-equipped to handle my inquiry than the collective works of two-thousand years worth of writing from theological giants? I wasn't reading Dick and Jane. Did he think he was dealing with average Joe pew-dweller here? Did he not recall that he had personally guided me through weighty theological works during my elder-training and that I had been administered the presbytery's written theological examination for elder candidates and had passed with flying colors? In fact, I had been told that the only reason I wasn't on the session was because I lacked the glad-handing social skills the job required.

I asked him rhetorically if he would advise someone who had been a member of the LDS Church all his life who was having doubts about that particular brand of Christianity to seek out and consult with his Mormon elders before leaving the LDS Church in favor of the PCA. Of course he wouldn't do that. He'd tell that guy he was in a cult and that all his elders will do is say whatever they need to in order to keep him in the fold and advise him to run far, far away. The analogy didn't land and special pleading ensued.

I told him I didn't trust him to have the capacity to be self-critical when it came to the Christian faith. He of all people had vested interests. His entire life, family relationships, social circles, esteem, power, and especially his paycheck were all tied to his adherence to those doctrines. Every fiber of his being was going to resist anything that threatened those things out of a sense of self-preservation, whether he was consciously aware of that or not. In response to this, a man who firmly held to the doctrine of Total Depravity accused me of being cynical.

Despite all this, we remained civil in our discourse and agreed to continue to communicate with them through email and then get together again at a later date. In the mean time, they gave us assurances that they would keep the news under wraps for a while so we could let others know. This was not a promise they were able to keep.

Two days later we received this email from the senior pastor with phileo elder cc'd:

Dear [Apostates],

The session of elders met yesterday afternoon and discussed your decision to turn away from the Christian Faith. A pastoral letter will be mailed out later this week to our congregation explaining the situation, and asking them to pray earnestly for your family. Also, [one of the elders] and I spoke to [one of my best friends from the church] after the evening service. We know that you all have been good friends. I know you were interested to know when the congregation would be informed about these matters. And I trust you received my email regarding my conversation with [the lady who called us about switching duties].

I have been thinking about what might be helpful and stimulating reading on the topics of epistemology, canon formation, inspiration, and other subjects that were raised (slavery, treatment of women, historical method, etc.). Obviously, this is a wide array of topics (enough reading for a semester at [Reformed Theological Seminary]!), and cannot be dealt with all at the same time. For now, I am thinking that it might be best to begin working through a couple of works on cannon formation and inspiration. I have already ordered a recent publication on canon formation. I will mail it to you as soon as it comes. Also, I am going to recommend that you read through BB Warfield's classic work on the inspiration and authority of Scripture. I will send this to you as well. I think that it would be extremely worthwhile to honestly consider the arguments found in these works. Perhaps as you get into these books we could begin a dialogue through email–– and then schedule a face to face meeting thereafter.

[Apostates], we love you very much. As I mentioned on Saturday, our hearts are breaking over your apostasy. Please be assured that everything that happens from our perspective in relation to the disciplinary process at [the church] is founded upon the Scriptures and flows from a heart of love to your family. Our hope and prayer is that you will come back Christ, to us, and to all that you once held dear.

Sincerely,

[the senior pastor]

By now we had told our families, so the fact that they were sending out this letter wasn't really a problem. Keep in mind that the week we had originally asked for still wouldn't be up for another day. The fact that he incorporated in this email the story of their telling one of my best friends about our apostasy kind of pissed me off, though. At the time it seemed he was twisting the knife and reminding me who had control over the narrative when it came to all of our friends. I was further regretting my decision to come to the elders first.

I later had an exchange with that friend via email in which he sounded nothing like himself. The correspondence had all the marks of pastoral meddling. Much of it read as though the pastor was standing over his shoulder and some of it sounded as though it was coming directly from the pastor's voice. That could've been merely a mark of influence, but I'll be damned if some of it wasn't nearly a verbatim representation of things the pastor had said.

The bigger issue was his second paragraph. By all appearances he was tipping his hand about the kinds of tactics he was going to employ. He may have suspected from our conversation that weekend that he had no real shot a bringing us back around. From my perspective, his strategy looked like it was going to be to bury me in so much abstract theological bullshit that I would either succumb, get distracted, or simply say "screw this; I'm out." He could then accuse me of shutting up my ears in purposeful rejection of the truth, which would satisfy the narrative he was constructing. Well turnabout is fair play, as the saying goes.

Again he mentioned the breaking hearts and anguish, as though all of this pain was our fault. I'm sure he saw it that way, but I didn't see how that was even relevant to our discussion and I wasn't going to let that go unchecked much longer. First I wanted to call him out on his threat to bury me up to my eyeballs in sophistry and let him know where I saw that the problems truly arose. If he really wanted to address my concerns, I thought he should let me pick the topics for discussion and direct the areas of inquiry. I felt it was time to fire a shot across the bow because he clearly wasn't understanding that the dynamics in the relationship had changed and he damned sure wasn't listening.

I replied that day with this:

[senior pastor],

I appreciate that you are looking for a way to get conversations started over some of the issues we raised. As I stated, the Bible has died the death of a thousand cuts in my eyes and with it all the superstition that flowed from it. I’m not interested in beginning a course load that’s the equivalent of a semester at seminary. You are the one who is the seminary trained pastor. You should be able to condense these arguments without us having to go through hundreds of pages of old Princetonians just to get to the point. My problem is not with Warfield. It’s with the specific group of ancient documents he claims to have been inspired by a tribal, Iron Age deity who supposedly has authority over the universe.

The suggestion that it takes “enough reading for a semester at RTS” to overcome the difficulties in the Bible is, quite frankly, a tacit admission that this god has great difficulty in explaining himself to people in a way that is succinct and clear. I will exercise a certain degree of patience in this matter, but asking me to sift through a mountain of even more reading than I have already done in an attempt to get me to yield out of exhaustion only to have you turn around and claim that I’m just not willing to hear opposing arguments would be insulting, cheap and beneath you. I’m certain you won’t do that.

So before you send over any books for starting points of discussion, whet my appetite with what you think are their best arguments in addition to which specific question we’ve raised they address. With respect to Warfield, I’m not sure we share enough of the same basic assumptions anymore for that work to be helpful, but I’ll try to keep an open mind. I’ve seen inductive approaches to supporting the doctrines of Biblical inspiration and inerrancy before and have not been impressed. Perhaps those derivatives did not do their progenitor’s arguments justice.

The problem I foresee in the issues of inspiration and canonicity, is that regardless of the arguments these works put forward, they will simply not be able to overcome the internal inconsistencies contained within the Bible itself. I would suggest that it would be better to begin there.

We could start with the Exodus, the stories of the Patriarchs, the resurrection, the contradictions in the Synoptics, the historical problems of Daniel, failed prophecy, the virtually irreconcilable accounts of Paul in Galatians with the writer of Acts, or the myriad of empirical claims that the Bible makes that are falsifiable. To put it bluntly, if you can’t come up with something other than obvious ad hoc explanations for issues as simple as why, for example, the genealogies in Matthew and Luke are so screwed up when compared with each other, I don’t see any reason why we would need to go any further.

Heck, I’d even be interested in hearing a solid explanation of how Lot was able to maintain an erection on consecutive nights and impregnate his virgin daughters after only one act of intercourse with each, in spite of the fact that he was so drunk he didn’t even realize what was going on. Silly stories like that which bear all the marks of jingoistic propaganda against surrounding cultures make it real difficult for me to take stories found in the Bible with anything other than a view to them being part of an ancient civilization's mythology and folklore.

Again, we’re open to discussion, but we have a threshold to how much we’re willing to invest in this dialogue so we’d really like to get to the point on these issues as quickly as is practical. Please understand that we expect to have to fight this battle on several fronts, not just the Reformed one.

Many thanks,

[The Apostate]

Even re-reading it now makes me smile a bit to myself. Rarely do I read something I wrote years later and still find it satisfying. Don't get me wrong. From a relational perspective this probably wasn't the best move, as you'll soon see. Any tiny chance I had at breaking through his wall of doxastic closure was shot all to hell at this point, but boy did that feel good.

About three hours later I received this reply:

Dear [Apostate],

With all due respect, I am grieved by the tone of your email. [Apostate], I humbly ask that you please keep in mind that what you used to hold dear, but now scoffingly refer to as "superstitious," "screwed up," "silly stories," and "jingoistic propaganda," we, a church that very much still loves you and your family, still considers the living and abiding Word of God. My passing (light-hearted) remark about a semester at RTS was not meant to communicate that I want you and [Mrs. Apostate] to read thousands of pages of assigned literature. Not at all. I certainly wouldn't expect that. It was only in response to the amount of issues that you presented to us on Saturday morning. It was only to say that we must start somewhere. I thought that a good place to start would be with two well-written, well-reasearched books on canon formation and inspiration. These two issues seem to be the soil of your unbelief.

[Apostate], as you know, the Bible is both simple and complex, much like the universe itself. A children's Bible song will express deep theological truths in a simple way. "Jesus loves me this I know," for instance, is constituted of grand theological and philosophical ideas (e.g. Christology, soteriology, anthropology, epistemology, etc.). "Jesus wept," is the shortest verse in the Bible and may be simply understood as Jesus being sad at the death of Lazarus. However, as you know, there is much meaning to unpack there. You communicated to [phileo elder] and me on Saturday morning that you spent many months researching and studying, looking for answers to your honest and deep theological, philosophical, historical, and epistemological questions. From your comments, I thought that you were looking for something that went a bit deeper than the "succinct" answers you say that you now desire. The questions that you are asking, specifically as it pertains to canon formation and inspiration, are good questions. But they require serious and well-researched answers–– especially as they relate to your deep questions. And these two issues, canon formation and inspiration, seem to be the lion's share of your "thousand cuts" to the Christian Faith. That is simply why I thought two insightful works, written with many of your criticisms in mind, might be helpful in presenting another perspective.

Rather than firing paragraphs out like the one below, a paragraph that I'm not even sure what to do with since the subjects that you mention are so broad in scope (eg Exodus, stories of Patriarchs, the resurrection, inconsistencies and contradictions in Gospels, etc.–– what about them?), it might be better to deal with things on a more macro-level as it concerns the doctrine of Scripture. Again, that seems to be the main problem here.

[Apostates], we love you and your children very much. I know that this is hard and emotional for everyone. I get that. [my good friend from church] wept in my study last night. Therefore, in light of all this, perhaps we can work harder to keep our exchanges more cordial and respectful.

Thanks so much.

With Love in Christ,

[the senior pastor]

Ah, the offended victim card. I want the reader to note that pastor dude will never once throughout this entire exchange ever whip out his giant theological...um...knowledge on me. After all that bragging about how he had all the answers to all of my questions and objections, all he will present will be these odd power plays, guilt trips, emotional appeals, and admonishments. I will eventually get a book to read in the mail, so there's that, which is nice.

It seems he'd somehow forgotten who I was. I had sat around with him on many occasions with the other presby bros, smoking pipes and drinking foreign beer and scotch while exchanging off-color remarks amid pseudo-intellectual discourse. We'd bunked together on a mission trip to South America, for crissakes. As a former athlete, I'm certain he's heard everything offensive under the sun in countless locker rooms. I know that his sensibilities are not so fragile. On top of that, he'd been involving himself in nasty scraps over theology for years, so that couldn't be it either. This was so transparently a tactic, and yet I fell for it.

He backpedaled his remarks, which I expected. But then instead of trying to address my concerns, he took a condescending didactic tone and pastorsplained to me about how simple and complex the Bible is. This was not only stuff I had already heard; this was stuff I had actually said. He knew this. He knew I knew this and yet he still felt the need to state all of it. He did all that to try to continue to steer the topics into the direction that he wanted to go and make excuses for his god's lack of ability to explain himself.

He demonstrated, once again, that he was not listening and that he didn't really care to discuss what I want to discuss. He even had the gall to tell me where the "loin's share" of my "thousand cuts" came from. It's almost like instead of constructing a straw man, he wanted me to dress as a straw man for him. I'd never seen this before. Truly. Someone telling me what my objection really is rather than letting me tell them what it is? Who does that?

Upon reflection it occurs to me that perhaps he wasn't really writing this with me in mind as his audience. He was likely trying to reach my wife, who at this point he still thought was under my spell or something (because God knows a woman can't possibly think for herself). Additionally, he's still cc'ing phileo dude on all this stuff as well.

For those who may not know, his "macro-level" comment and perpetual insistence that we focus on those issues is a result of his presuppositional approach to apologetics. This approach is very effective at keeping its adherents from ever actually examining the text outside of their own belief structure. His reluctance to examine the internal inconsistencies of the Bible itself is telling. He really doesn't want to go there and you'll see how badly he doesn't want to go there in a bit when I take him there.

As a parting shot he brings up my good friend again. Kudos to him because that heart string tugging probably got me to soften up and give him the benefit of the doubt on his sensibilities being genuinely offended. I began to think that perhaps he just found this shocking because it was coming from me. I can be a real sap sometimes.

That night I started to feel bad. Perhaps I was being too adversarial and sensing ulterior motives and intentional gamesmanship where none existed. I figured it would be best if he could hear my tone over the phone. I sent the following:

[the pastor],

Please accept this as an expression of my sincere apologies for my caustic tone before you and [phileo guy]. Please call me tonight if you get a chance so that I may offer one audibly.

With regrets,

[The Apostate]

Like I said. I can be real sap. In my defense I didn't want to give him an excuse to cut me off just yet and I was worried he might use this pearl-clutching tactic as a way to break away and make things easier on himself.

He called shortly after I sent the message and I apologized further for offending him. I told him that I still cared for him and still considered him a friend. He then told me that his goal in our conversations was to convince me to return to the faith because I was putting my family on a destructive path and embracing a worldview with devastating consequences for both myself and society as a whole. His stated aim was to rescue us from this.

This is an area where Christians just don't have any self-awareness at all. He had no idea how condescending that sounded to me. Nor did he have any notion of just how sinister that sounds to anyone outside of his belief system. On top of that, he expressed no concern whatsoever about figuring out what's actually true. It was all about convincing me that he was right. He needed to hear himself and I figured I could help him do that.

I told him that since I too still cared for him and his family that I had similar hopes that our conversations would lead to him rethinking his beliefs. I told him how it was my view that many of the things his religion espoused were dangerous to his and his family's well-being and to society at large. I didn't want him to get the mistaken notion that this was going to be a one-way street and I wanted him to see how it felt to know that the person you were speaking with is trying actively to change your mind.

He went silent. I didn't realize at the time just how badly he would react to this and just how insecure he was. We found out later that following this phone conversation he began telling people that I was out to destroy him and his ministry.

Apparently it was OK for him to want to try to change my mind, but it was not OK for me to try to change his. In fact, it was a dark, sinister, demonic plot against him and his family. I have no idea how much mileage he got out of portraying himself as some kind of warrior for the faith under attack from a devious betrayer. In their minds, instead of just being two people with a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality, we were locked in a battle between ultimate good and evil.

I had no idea what kinds of things were being spread about me at this point subsequent to that conversation. I agreed to read the book he was going to send me. I ended up with the mistaken impression that we had agreed we would discuss the issues he wanted to discuss as well as the ones I did, so I decided to open up the substantive portion of our exchange.

He was sending me a book to read that fit with his "macro" view, so I figured in the mean time we could maybe discuss things at the level I wanted to examine. I sent the below the following day. I know it's long, but keep in mind dude was sending me a book. And not a light and fluffy book written for popular audiences either. You'll note that I also included some caveats that this was just a starting point for discussion and to give some concrete examples. I did not expect him to respond to all of it, but I did hope he would respond to something at least. Apparently it was OK for him to load me up with a mountain of theological sophistry to sift through, but providing him with some brief commentary on the first part of a single book of in the actual Bible was just too much.

[the pastor],

While we are waiting for Warfield I thought I would try to give some concrete examples of what I’m talking about with respect to things that I find internally inconsistent in the Bible. I know I unfairly listed several broad examples in my last screed, but I’ll try this time just to focus on one narrative section. I’ve selected it based on the fact that it doesn’t include anything that I feel you would potentially find offensive. Although I still would like to discuss Lot some time because I really do see the origin story of Moab and Ammon as an example of a folkloric tradition and I really don’t think I was mischaracterizing it by calling it jingoistic propaganda. It was not my intention to suggest that all of the Bible can be classified that way, just that story in particular.

Anyway, I have selected portions of the early narratives of Exodus. I don’t necessarily see this is as some kind of linchpin, but practically speaking, if my points on these things cannot be adequately addressed, I don’t see much hope for some of the other problems we’ve yet to discuss. I’m just throwing some stuff out as a starting point so you can see why I don’t view the Bible as inspired, inerrant and infallible anymore.

I’m not always the best at communicating in writing and often assume too much about my audience sometimes, so please let me know if you’re not following something or can’t see my point somewhere and I’ll try to clarify. I’ll begin each section with the chapter and verses and then follow with a comment.

1:8

It strikes me as odd that in spite of having been raised by a pharaoh’s daughter and presumably taught at least recent Egyptian history, Moses never names the rulers of Egypt during the time of the Patriarchs, the oppression, or the Exodus. It’s almost as if the writer of these accounts didn’t have a source with that information. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to match up the chronology of the Exodus with comparatively well-documented Egyptian historical records. It’s almost as if the story could be set “Once upon a time in the land of Egypt.” With all the names of various figures given elsewhere why do we only have the title “pharaoh”?

1:11

According to Egyptian records and modern archeology, the storage city of Pithom wasn’t built until the 7^th century BC and the earliest possible date for a city associated with anyone named Ramesses would’ve been in the 13^th century BC. Both of these are far too late for them to have been built by the Hebrew slaves of Exodus. Again, not a huge deal if you dismiss archeology every time it clashes with Bible, but it is one of those cuts I was talking about.

1:15

Listed here are 2 midwives with Hebrew names. There’s only 2 of them for a population that was able to muster 600,000 fighting men from among them in another 80 years? That doesn’t seem likely. Maybe we can just write it off as meaning they were the heads of the vast army of midwives that would’ve been necessary to deliver babies at an alarming rate.

1:16-2:9

The account of Pharaoh’s attempt at population control posing an early existential threat to the life of the hero of the story contains several elements that betray it as a work of legendary folklore. First of all, it is counterintuitive for Pharaoh to order the slaughter of the male children. It seems that a much more practical way to control a growing slave population would be to order the killing of the female infants, especially in a society that allowed polygamy. A lone male could impregnate multiple females at a time and maintain potency for almost his entire life, whereas women are limited to a single pregnancy at a time and have a window of fertility during their lifespans. We’re even told in the narrative that Pharaoh is working under the assumption that “the Hebrew women are vigorous.” Ergo, wipeout the women, problem solved.

Additionally, the stated point of the slave labor was to build cities. A higher ratio of females to males results in an additional strain on resources and a net loss of manual labor. It’s a pretty bone-headed idea from a practical standpoint for population control and is the kind of thing that only makes sense if we see it as plot device needed to threaten the hero and set up a later story parallel with the killing of the firstborn of Egypt in the tenth plague. If not, this pharaoh is almost as incompetent of a ruler as his successor.

The whole situation allows for the setup of an infant exposure story. The infant exposure motif was very common in ancient mythology and often involved water of some kind, probably symbolizing afterbirth. As you know, in the ancient world, birth was a rather perilous event in and of itself and this motif would highlight that struggle. The hero would certainly face great obstacles later, but in overcoming the obstacles at birth, his favor with the gods and track record of victory is established at the outset of his story.

Sargon of Akkad (2270-2215 BC) was one such infant exposure story and his tale predates Moses. His infant exposure story involves his mother hiding his birth, making a basket of rushes, sealing it with bitumen, and placing him in the Euphrates River. Like Moses, he’s born to the priestly class, but unlike him, he’s raised as a peasant and later wins the favor of the goddess Ishtar as a gardener and becomes a great ruler. Other examples include Karna, a 9^th century BC Indian warrior placed in a basket on the Ganges River; Oedipus, Paris, and Telephus who were all Greeks abandoned on mountains; Perseus who was put in a box and cast into the sea; Romulus and Remus who were placed in a basket along the Tiber River; and Sigurd, a Norse hero placed in a crystal vessel and kicked into a river.

I suppose one could argue that the Moses story is different because it really happened and all those others were just coincidences, copycat stories or types that point the reality of the Moses story. However, since this is hardly the only story element that points to the legendary and fictive nature of this Biblical narrative, making an exception for Moses here looks a lot like special pleading. Of course, there’s another similar, well-known infant exposure story in the New Testament as well that contains obvious fictive elements, but we’ll save that discussion for some other time.

2:10

The account of the naming of Moses is odd for several reasons if we take it as an historical account rather than a work of literary fiction. First of all, we can assume that the princess would’ve spoken Egyptian, not Hebrew and would’ve given the child an Egyptian name. Yet the reason for the naming only makes sense in Hebrew. The closest Egyptian cognate would be the word “mose”. In Egyptian it’s often used as a naming suffix meaning “child of”, as in Thutmose (child of Thoth, the god of wisdom) or Ahmose (child of the moon).

Additionally, the Hebrew name in this particular spelling takes the form of the active participle and means “the one who draws out” pointing more to what Moses would later do, rather than what was done to him by the princess. It’s almost as if the writer is trying to force an origin story for Moses’ name that could explain how he acquired it at birth without having to acknowledge that the character really got his name from his legendary actions later in life in drawing the people out of Egypt.

Birth narratives almost always develop after a legendary figure has already taken shape within folklore. The same can be observed later with Jesus Christ, as the earliest writings about him including the Pauline epistles, general epistles and the Gospel of Mark mention nothing about any of the miraculous circumstances surrounding his birth.

2:18

Here he’s Reul; in 4:18, he’s Jethro. Why does Moses so often insist on using two or more different names for people and places throughout these books? Doesn’t he know that gets confusing? It’s almost as if there were multiple traditions of these stories being edited together.

2:24-25

God is said to have heard, remembered, saw and understood. Literary devices? Anthropomorphisms? That’s the usual answer. But what if the writer really does have a low enough view of Yahweh to attribute these characteristics to him simply because he really does envision gods this way?

3:7-8

More anthropomorphisms? Or is our author’s view of god not so transcendent?

4:24-26

After Yahweh commissions his servant Moses to go to Egypt and tell pharaoh to let his people go under threat of killing pharaoh’s first born son, Moses, Zipporah and their two sons (see v. 20) travel to Egypt from Midian and they stop for the night. While there, Yahweh meets Moses and seeks to kill him. It’s left to Zipporah to figure out why, circumcise one of their sons and touch Moses’ “feet” with the foreskin. Yahweh then decides to leave Moses alone and Zipporah calls Moses a “bridegroom of blood.”

This really weird passage lacks any explanation in the text itself and gets any number of interpretations. It’s odd for several reasons. It interrupts the flow of the text. It lacks clear antecedents for the pronouns and objects for the verbs, making it unclear just who exactly Yahweh intends to kill and whether Zipporah touches the foreskin to Moses’ feet, her sons’ feet or even Yahweh’s feet (several translations insert “Moses” but my understanding is that it’s not provided in the Hebrew).

Additionally, it raises some obvious and ultimately unanswerable questions. Why was Yahweh so angry with Moses that he felt the need to take such a rash action and try to kill him (or his son)? Why does Yahweh need to “seek to kill” anyone? Why couldn’t this misunderstanding have been worked out earlier? Why no prior warning? How did Zipporah know what to do and why does Moses seem helpless and unaware? Why only one son and not both? How did she know to touch it to something? What does her saying mean? Who was it addressed to? What in the world is the point to all of this? None of those questions can be clearly answered by the text itself and all of them are anyone’s guess. To me it’s just another example of the lack of clarity found throughout the Bible.

6:3

“By my name ‘Yahweh’ I was not known to them”; it takes lots of explanation and speculation about what this means to make this work. There are several examples in Genesis of people knowing and using Yahweh’s name. Moses supposedly wrote about that. Why does he not remember?

6:20

For problems related to this passage see Gen. 15:13-16, Ex. 12:40, Gal. 3:17.

Additionally, Moses and Aaron are four generations from Levi, but in 1 Chronicles 7:20-27 we find that Joshua is 12 generations from Joseph. Something’s not adding up.

8:7

The Egyptian sorcerers’ bringing up frogs with their own secret arts is odd. Why would they even do that? To prove that their gods can do what Yahweh can do? How would anyone even know that it was their frogs and not Yahweh’s fogs? How did they know it was water they had changed to blood and not water that Yahweh had change? Why would pharaoh even want them to this? This would be like the president blowing up the Empire State Building in response to the 9/11 attacks.

8:10

“Tomorrow”? Really, pharaoh? Why not now? The population’s entire water supply was contaminated, followed by an invasion of pests and the head of state not only has his own men duplicate Yahweh’s terrorist acts [That is what you call it when you threaten a civilian populace to try to change a political leader’s mind, is it not?], but when given the opportunity to end them, he postpones things for a day? Perhaps we can accept that his heart was so hard that there was no concern for his own people. However, the potential for violent civil unrest had to have at least occurred to him.

In any normal situation, when a country is faced with such a crisis as a real and present threat to their entire water supply, there would surely be riots in the streets and other such demonstrations of desperation. Large groups of people in any civilization simply don’t take threats to basic necessities like water with calm and collected resignation. So many of these descriptions of the ways people act in the Pentateuch simply contradict everything we know about normal human behavior. This is but one example.

Yahweh is just getting warmed up, though. There are still 8 more plagues to go, all of them catastrophic in scope and most of them directly threatening things that are basic necessities for the sustaining of a civilization. Somehow Ancient Egypt manages to survive and even thrive for hundreds of years following the contamination of their entire water supply, the widespread deaths of their livestock on at least 3 separate occasions, the destruction of their cultivated and uncultivated food supplies on at least 2 separate occasions and a dramatic reduction in population.

The reduction in population would have been not only from the death of every first born, but also from the massive starvation, disease and civil unrest which would surely have followed these plagues. What about mass migration? One would think the idea of emigration would have occurred to these folks. Surely it dawned on some of the Egyptians that maybe now would be a good time to sell themselves into slavery to some neighboring people in Philistia or Cush just to get the heck out of Egypt, right? Are we to believe that after say the 4^th or 5^th plagues everybody was still intent on riding this thing out?

Additionally, their civilization managed to survive other minor things like the death of their monarch and his successor, the total annihilation of their chariot forces, and the departure of a slave labor force numbering in the millions that supposedly took much of the remaining material wealth with them along with a “mixed multitude” of Egyptians who decided to go with them. Any one of these devastating events could have precipitated the collapse of this entire civilization, and yet they seem to bounce back rather quickly from them all. That’s quite curious.

Not only did the resilient Egyptians manage to recover from these events, they managed to wipe them clean from their otherwise well-kept records of the period. Even if they had managed to purposely remove all written records of these events including any alternate accounts, surely there would have been a profound psychological and cultural impact on them and the generations that followed for hundreds of years as they searched for meaning and explanation for these hardships. And yet, nary a scrap of cultural or archeological evidence pointing to such an utterly devastating encounter with a foreign deity remains.

The Hyksos and Akhenaten’s henotheistic shift are sometimes pointed to as possible examples of how the exodus may have impacted Egyptian culture and history, but those events are relatively minor by comparison and have much simpler explanations accompanied by actual archeological evidence. Never mind the fact that they wouldn’t fit the chronology anyway. At best the story of the exodus is an incredibly over-exaggerated retelling of some rather minor historical events involving the departure of some foreign slaves. At worst the whole thing was completely made up.

8:18

The magicians try and fail to bring forth gnats/mosquitos/lice/ticks/fleas/whatever they were with their secret arts and since they can’t replicate it, they conclude that Elohim actually did it. Note that we are to understand that these magicians really were replicating these plagues prior to this point and only now when they can’t they conclude that Elohim did it. It’s odd because it’s as though they were unimpressed by the plagues up until now. Why would that be? Was their power real?

8:24

Here the text says the whole land was ruined by the swarms but this is only the fourth plague. Surely there must have been something left to be ruined later, right? What is the hail going to smash? What will the locusts eat?

9:5-7

The fifth plague involves some kind of disease that kills livestock. One must note the comparison in verse 6 that “all the livestock of the Egyptians” died, but “not one of the livestock of Israel died.” The contrast suggests totality. The natural understanding of this text is that only the Israelites would’ve had living livestock at this point. This is odd because Egyptian livestock will be mentioned again...and again…and again.

9:10

Animals break out with boils along with the people. What animals? Certainly not all the livestock that were killed in the preceding plague, right?

9:18-21

Yahweh says he’s going to bring hail and warns the people to bring their slaves and livestock in from the field or else they’ll die from it. Again, what livestock? How much livestock could they possibly have left at this point? Verse 21 says that some of Pharaoh’s servants did not take Yahweh’s word seriously and left their slaves and cattle in the field. Really? After six previous plagues, two of them involving livestock, they’re actually just going to take chances and not do something relatively simple to preserve what little remains of their property? Maybe they just figured they had really tough livestock. I mean, after all, these animals had already survived contaminated water, biting insects, widespread disease and boils, why not deadly hail?

9:25 & 35

Here we learn how vast the devastation of plant life was from the hail. Note that it struck “all the cultivated grain” and “all the trees of the field” were broken. However, in verse 35 there is an oddly-placed parenthetical remark that clarifies that it was just the ripened flax and barley and not the wheat and spelt that were struck because those didn’t ripen until later. The verse is odd because it contains the Hebrew word kussemet which is only found in 2 other biblical texts that were supposedly written nearly 800 years later (Isaiah 28:25 & Ezekiel 4:9). It’s quite the linguistic feat. It’s also odd because it tries to “solve” an obvious problem that occurs in the next plague, i.e. what was left for the locusts to eat.