So, to continue yesterday's rant...

I've tried on a lot of different versions of Christianity since my initial "conversion" at the age of nine in a Southern Baptist Church. I'm now in my mid-thirties, and I've tried to make myself a Presbyterian (of, alternately, the liberal or orthodox stripe), a Lutheran, a "non-denominational Christian" (whatever that means), a unitarian, a universalist, a Catholic, and an Episcopalian. Those are in no particular order and are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. The unity across all of these flirtations is that, in every one of them, with respect to my most important human relationship, I've been alone.

This sucks, not to put too fine a point on it, and I'm so tired of it.

As I said yesterday, I need some buy-in from my spousal unit here. Some serious Holy Spirit action on the home front. I can't find a tradition (or "doctrine" if "tradition" gives you the willies) that I really trust-- trust, that is, to the point that I would seek spiritual and marital advice from their representative clergy. Or maybe it's less a problem for me to trust someone than for me to keep my wife's trust. If I turn to a solidly Reformed pastor, or a Roman Catholic priest, I know roughly what I will get: instruction to come to church and obey the church (or Scripture) and contend for the teachings of the church (or Scripture) at home and let the chips fall where they may; and if I follow that advice, indeed if I seek it from those quarters, I'm a traitor to my marriage, or at least perceived as such.

Of course, it's not new to me to wonder whether Scripture actually teaches what orthodox Reformed pastors would tell me it teaches. Yes, I've read the Bible myself. And I find that it is interpreted by somebody, living or historical, in even the most Protestant of Protestant traditions. Moreover, there is a school of interpretation out there that doesn't, well, side against my wife in the "culture war".

The trouble with that current of thought is that it drifts toward a naturalized vision of Jesus and God. People in the denominations I'm thinking of start to allow a separation between "the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith". And maybe it's small-minded of me, but if these aren't the same Person, I'm not sure what all the fuss has been about this whole time. Anyone can make up stories or metaphors. Only one Person in all of history, so far as I know, has actually been a metaphor, straight from the pen of God, if you will. I'm probably not expressing this well, or in an acceptably orthodox way, but there it is: Jesus is the hero of fantasy, living in history; too good to be allowed to live, too righteous to remain dead. Anything less than this is not worth wasting a bright Sunday morning on.

I moan and groan about my wife, but it's not just her doubts that trip me up. The "inerrancy" of Scripture seems to me to be poorly defended, even by Scripture itself. "Useful", "God-breathed", "cannot be broken", etc.-- I don't see that any of these imply "inerrancy" in the sense that strict Protestants mean it. Can't God breathe a piece of edifying historical fiction? A myth that expresses something important about human nature?