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[Questions]

Recent college graduate here going through either a deconstruction or reconstruction; raised as a Christian and didn’t have a lot of time for independent thinking prior to COVID-19.

One of the bumps I’ve come across with my faith is confidence that it is truth, and not another religion that is just prevalent within this cultural moment in the Western part of the world in the US.

Here are some questions I’d love to hear opinions on, that have been roadblocks of sorts for me to navigate; they may seem goofy but my intent is just to keep things transparent.

• Zoroastrianism was all the craze at one point in history and some point to Christianity deriving some things from that religion. With that religion + many others in the ancient worlds (ranging from the Greeks to the Native Americans), how do you maintain confidence Christianity isn’t something that isn’t just a current iteration of the same thing that will one day be looked back on?
• How do you think God worked to communicate + build a relationship with those outside of the regions mentioned in the Bible? With one of the primary purposes of our existence being the ability to build an eternal relationship with Christ, how do you think this was made available or known to Native Americans + other tribal nations, many of them who worshipped other deities, based on the knowledge they had at the time?
• The Bible was written in dessert culture at a time where they knew a lot less about the world than we know now. Listening to the Bible Project guy, Tim Mackey, he explains they thought the world was covered by a dome (keeping us shielded from the blue waters above), and was flat, sitting on two pillars, etc. With so much of the ancient world being written in such context + so many different ways the gospels were translated over time, how much of the Bible do you take as literal/verbatim?

I’ve looked into some of these topics more this year than I ever have and wanted to hear some opinions. Thank you all for the time!!

[jimwalton]

> Zoroastrianism was all the craze at one point in history and some point to Christianity deriving some things from that religion.

While there are some similarities between Zoroastrianism and Christianity (and it's pretty impossible to not have some kind of overlap between any two religious systems), there is no proof that Christianity derived some things from Zoroastrianism. Similarity doesn't indicate derivation.

> With that religion + many others in the ancient worlds (ranging from the Greeks to the Native Americans), how do you maintain confidence Christianity isn’t something that isn’t just a current iteration of the same thing that will one day be looked back on?

There are several points that come to mind. (1) Christianity is a historical religion, and so it's on a different footing of reality than the philosophical religions. (2) What sets Christianity apart from something like Zoroastrianism, but also the others, is prophecy and the historical (not mythological) resurrection of Jesus. (3) Another effect that sets Christianity apart from other religions is the genuine life change (and sometimes even personality change) that happens in its adherents. It's not just coming to a new religion, it's new life, and there's nothing like it in any other religion. These three factors make me confident to say that Christianity is not just a current iteration of religious thought that will one day fall by the wayside.

> How do you think God worked to communicate + build a relationship with those outside of the regions mentioned in the Bible?

It's only through the interaction of Israelites with other cultures that the knowledge of God could be communicated, and it's through the two-millennium-old missionary movement of the Church that spreads the knowledge of God. For those cultures that haven't had opportunity to hear of Christ, I assume Romans 5.13 is applicable: "To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law."

> The Bible was written in dessert culture at a time where they knew a lot less about the world than we know now.

This has nothing to do with spiritual truth. Their scientific and historical contexts provide a context for the locution that we read in the Bible, but the authority of the Word is not in the locution, but rather in the illocution. God accommodates their primitive scientific understanding (as I'm sure He accommodates our faulty science as well) to communicate spiritual truth. It doesn't matter what they did or did not know of the world; what matters is that God revealed Himself to them, and God is the same now as He was then, so the illocution is reliable.

> so many different ways the gospels were translated over time

The translation efforts aim to make the Bible understandable to the culture to which those translations are addressed. But since we're all working off the same manuscripts and codices, we're all still working with the same authoritative source.

> how much of the Bible do you take as literal/verbatim?

The Bible is a rich literary collection containing music, poetry, metaphor, allegory, archetypes, parable, hyperbole, metonymy, irony, simile, and many other literary forms, as well as genres such as prayer, prophecy, blessing, covenant language, legal language, etc. "Literally" quickly becomes a word with very little meaning or helpfulness. If a poet says the trees of the field will clap their hands and the mountains will jump for joy, is that literal? Of course not, it's poetry. If a man prays, "God, kill all those people", we may all understand that his prayer is inappropriate, and is not blessed by God, but is it literal? Well, how does that word even apply? And how does it apply to archetype, allegory, parable, and all the others? It's a word that should be dropped from the discussion because it doesn't take us anywhere except to the Land of Misunderstanding.

It's better to think that the Bible should be taken the way the author intended it to be taken. If he was using hyperbole, we're to take it that way. So also allegorically, historically, parabolic, poetic, etc. Our quest is to understand the intent of the author. In that case we'll take the Bible seriously, but "literally" doesn't take us anywhere.