Dr Bart D Erhman blog post

Here is the kind of anecdote that I’m thinking about including in my book on How Jesus Became God; if I use it – or others like it – it would begin a chapter, before I move to the scholarly issues.

When I attended Moody Bible Institute in the mid 1970s, every student was required, every semester, to do some kind of Christian ministry work.   Like all of my fellow students I was completely untrained and unqualified to do the things I did, but I think Moody believed in on-the-job training.   And so every student had to have one semester where, for maybe 2-3 hours one afternoon a week, they would engage in “door-to-door evangelism.”  That involved being transported to some neighborhood in Chicago, knocking on doors, trying to strike up a conversation, get into the homes, and convert people.  A fundamentalist version of the Mormon missionary thing, also carried out two-by-two.

One semester I was a late-night counselor on the Moody Christian radio station.  People would call up with questions about the Bible or with problems in their lives, and I would, well, give them all the answers.  I was all of 18.  One semester I was a chaplain one afternoon a week at Cook County Hospital.  Completely out of my depth with that one.

When I was a senior (it was a three year degree program), my roommate and I decided that we wanted to do our ministry in a church as youth pastors.   We were hooked up, through Moody, with a terrific church (I still have extremely fond memories of those days) in Oak Lawn, a southern suburb.   The church was Trinity Evangelical Covenant Church – part of a small denomination that originated as some kind of Swedish pietist movement that split from the Lutherans.  Their seminary, and college, is North Park.

My roommate Bill and I would go to the church on Wednesday evenings, Saturday evenings, and all day Sundays, and do the youth pastor sorts of things – lead Bible studies, prayer meetings, youth group meetings, social events all the time, retreats, and so on.   Bill, did it for a year; I stayed on through my final two years of college at Wheaton, and so did it for three years altogether.  It was a great group of kids (high school and college).

The pastor of the church was a pious and charismatic (personality, not theology) person, an energetic and dynamic preacher and a real care-er for souls.   His name was Evan Goranson, and for three years he was my mentor, teaching me the ropes of ministry.  My only problem with Pastor Goranson was that I thought he was a shade too liberal.  Now this was in my hard-core evangelical phase, and Billy Graham was too liberal for me too!   The problem with Pastor Goranson was that he was not a strict Calvinist, and I didn’t trust anyone who didn’t subscribe to predestination.  Ah, those were the days.

Pastor Goranson was one of the most loving persons on the planet, and he was far more focused on ministering to people in need (there are always lots of them in any church of any size) than in fretting and arguing about theology.  But in fact, he had a very traditional conservative theology.  For the entire time I was there at the church I was evangelical, although I think I started to loosen up at the edges my final year at Wheaton, where I was studying English and taking classes in history and sundry other things that made me realize that the world was a bigger place than I had imagined.   But I stayed true to my convictions, and spending all that time in prayer meetings and leading Bible studies certainly didn’t encourage me to change a single thing.  (What would people think?!?)

When I graduated from Wheaton I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary to pursue graduate studies, and it was there that I began seriously to change my views about, well, most everything: life, ethics, social responsibility, and, especially, theology.   The more I studied the Bible, the more I realized that it was full of problems that I had been aggressively denying or blithely overlooking.  There in fact were discrepancies and contradictions and mistakes in it, and I might as well admit it.  It was indeed hard for me to admit – it took me a couple of years.  But once I did, I came to see just how human the Bible was as a book.

But if my theology was rooted in the Bible and the Bible was not divinely inspired, what was that supposed to do to my theology?

The first really major issue for me was the divinity of Christ.  I had believed that Christ was God since I had known that there was such a thing as Christ and such a thing as God.   When I was very young I was raised in the Episcopal church where Jesus was considered God.  When I became born again in high school, the divinity of Christ was at the center of my theological views, and my theological views were at the center of my life.  As I went through my early education at Moody I learned all sorts of “proofs” that Jesus was God.   The divinity of Christ was rooted in the fabric of my existence.

But I began to doubt it.  I began to see that Jesus is hardly ever, if at all, explicitly called God in the New Testament.  I began to see that some of the authors of the New Testament do not equate Jesus with God.   I began to see that the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were found only in the Gospel of John, the last and most theologically loaded of the four Gospels.  If Jesus really went around calling himself God, wouldn’t the other Gospels at least mention the fact?   Did they just decide to skip that part?

In the throes of my theological doubt, I made a visit for other reasons back to Chicago to visit Trinity Evangelical Church and Pastor Goranson.  I remember the moment vividly.  We were in his car, driving somewhere, and I began to tell him the doubts I was having about the Bible and about what I had formerly held to be completely sacrosanct.  He was sympathetic with me, since he had always been a bit more liberal and a whole lot less doctrinaire.  But his view was that all that mattered was that we hold on to the basics.  And he told me to remember that Jesus had said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).  That was all that mattered.

Then I asked him, “But what if Jesus never said that?”  He was taken aback and stunned, and, good pastor that he was, tears started to well up in his eyes.  It hurt me to see it, but what could I do?  You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to…..