outbox

Sometime after finishing Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted, it hit me. Two realizations arrived together and never left me.

First: my theology was doing violence to what the biblical texts actually said. The original languages and contexts told a different story than what I'd been taught.

Second: Christian traditions today ignore the Bible's historical context when it's inconvenient. They renegotiate meaning to support doctrines the texts never claimed.

That became a turning point. I started examining everything I'd accepted as inerrant biblical truth. Doctrines from childhood. Beliefs I carried into adulthood. Hell was one of them. What I found was fascinating if not disorienting.

You walk a trail and map what you see. Steep hill at mile two. Creek at mile four. What you charted is real. It happened. You were there.

But when a hundred hikers walk that same trail and compare notes, the maps won’t match. Some people missed the creek entirely because they took a different fork earlier. Others went around the hill instead of over it. A few swear there was a waterfall that nobody else saw.

The trail exists. The features are real. But nobody experienced the whole thing the same way.

So the group stitches together a composite. They argue about which fork is the main path. They vote on whether the waterfall counts. Eventually they settle on an authoritative map. It gets printed. Posted at trailheads. Handed to new hikers.

The composite map becomes the definitive version of what’s real. Hikers trust it. They rarely question it. If their experience doesn’t match the map, they assume they took a wrong turn or weren’t paying attention.

The map stops being descriptive. It becomes prescriptive. This is what you should see. This is the correct way to walk the trail.