Deconversion stories from Biblical Errancy
DM
Letter #707 from DM of Supply, North Carolina
Dear Dennis.
I spoke with you about the passage in Matt. 12:40 ("For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth") and you suggested I write to you about it and here goes.The difficulty caused by Matthew 12:40 when compared to other passages in the Bible was the first one that initially caused me to lose confidence in the inerrancy of the Bible. I was a born-again Christian, totally sold on the infallibility and inerrancy of the "Word of God". I spent ten years ([74-84:] attending services with the Worldwide Church of God, voraciously reading the "Plain Truth", and the "Good News" magazines, studying the Ambassador College Home Bible Study Course and hundreds of other "booklets" and "reprint articles" that claimed to impart the plain truth to the spiritually hungry. I really believed that I was being "called" by God to understand his truths. From 1974 to 1988 I did not consider myself "born again". The WCG taught at that time that no one is "born again" until the return of Christ. However, I left the WCG in 1984 (for personal reasons) and four years later I did the unthinkable. I joined a Sunday keeping church in Atlanta! It was the First Baptist Church, pastored by Charles Stanley. Such a move was not made lightly, and despite being four years removed from WCG indoctrination, I still had difficulty making the change. I never totally embraced all the doctrines that the rest of the members of FBA held, but rather I held a combination of some of the beliefs I had held in the WCG and some of the beliefs held by the majority of members at FBA. I even refused to call myself a baptist but rather called myself a "Christian who worships in a baptist church." I was already a freethinker in the making because I determined that a church would never again dictate for me what was true and what was false without my full informed consent. It is true that my "full informed consent" was insufficient at the time because my idea of full and informed consent was reading apologetic works from different denominations that believed in the inerrancy of the Bible. In other words, I wanted to know what different denominations taught so I could be better qualified to select what was true and what wasn't, but I limited myself to those who believed in the inerrancy of the scriptures. To me, inerrancy couldn't even be debated, so I never thought about reviewing my beliefs on inerrancy, just the different doctrines that denominations disagreed upon.
This criteria didn't last long. When you have spent 10 years of your life in a church believing with all your heart and soul you have the truth and no one else has it, and you are so convinced you have the truth you would even die for it, but later find some of your doctrinal beliefs were in error, it makes it difficult to totally sell out the second time. Yes, I was in a baptist church, but I never sold my soul to them. I began an investigation on Christian doctrines and determined that the FBA would be my home church until I found something better. I knew then I had been wrong before, terribly wrong, and I didn't want to be wrong again. I could testify how fervently one could believe something, and be absolutely sure of it and later discover it to be false. I would sometimes lie in bed at night and talk to God, imploring him to help me to KNOW the truth. I could see that intelligent people at FBA believed the doctrines they held, so how could they be wrong? But then I remembered that the WCG had their intelligent people too, and they held just as fervently to their beliefs. I didn't imagine myself as intelligent as some of them, so I wondered how could I ever be certain again. I was sure that the intelligent ones prayed just as fervently as I for the truth and yet they arrived at different conclusions from each other. It was becoming obvious to me that intelligence wasn't enough. A person had to totally empty himself of any prior beliefs and start over, even if he had to begin with the basic question of: Is the Christian Bible the word of God? Of course no matter how hard I tried to be impartial, I still was aware that I was prejudiced in my belief that the Bible was the word of God. I had to MAKE AN EFFORT TO BE FAIR.
It was during the summer of 1988 that things really began to change. I first noticed a discrepancy between Matt. 12:40 and the other passages describing the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. I also noticed the conflicting genealogies in Matthew and Luke. I read the apologetic works for answers and they all failed to provide satisfying answers. My Christian friends told me to just "trust God", but that didn't help resolve the issue. Once one begins to entertain the very real possibility of mistakes in the Bible, then all kinds of thoughts begin to occur. The implications for a fundy like myself are huge. My whole world view was threatened. But I'm getting off the subject. My change from fundy to liberal Christian to outright infidel took a little over 12 months, from the summer of 1988 to early fall 1989. Once a crack in the dam occurs, it is only a matter of time before the whole thing collapses. Two difficult passages that couldn't be reconciled became outright contradictions, but the implications of Matt. 12:40 being a contradiction did more to damage the trustworthiness of the Bible than the genealogies did. Too much was riding on Matthew 12:40 for it to prove to be a contradiction. Once my internal bias for the Bible had been damaged, I began to notice more "difficulties" and "discrepancies" that in time I had to admit were contradictions or absurdities. The trickle became a stream, the stream became a flood. You can figure the rest. I left FBA in the fall of 1989 and ceased being a "member" at that time. I called myself a deist when I left and used deist interchangeably with atheist from fall 1989 to fall 1991, at which time I began to have contacts with the writings of freethinkers like myself, and was able to accept the label "atheist" without worry.
In December 1992 I came into contact with the Truth Seeker magazine and through them I was able to contact you, Farrell Till, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and others. It is always a joy to read of others who have had similar experiences like myself. Thanks for your publication.
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