SOS Introduction

(continued)

the more I realise how little I know; the more, in fact, I appreciate how unknowable are the mysteries of God. I enjoy meditating on the teachings contained in the mediaeval book "The Cloud of Unknowing" and its title fits what I am saying here. I can live with mystery and no longer care that I am unable to explain everything. Part of the problem with fundamentalism is its arrogant assumption that it knows all the answers when it hasn't fully listened to the questions. I have given up fundamentalism.

The problem that spoiled my appreciation of the Bible was that I had become so familiar with it that I could not help noticing discrepancies; but I was denying what I was seeing. For instance, I knew the gospel stories so well that I could sense when they diverged from one another. And I knew the oddities of the Bible, like Matthew's clumsy story of Jesus riding two donkeys at the same time! (See Note 2) But I also know the stock fundamentalist explanations for those differences and peculiarities and tried to convince myself that those excuses were satisfactory. They were not, and I eventually realised that I was deceiving myself so, for the sake of sanity and truthfulness, I thought again.

In the more widely accessible medium of the Internet, these pages may be read by people who will find it hard to understand the problem. If you never believed the Bible you may wonder why I ever became a fundamentalist and why it was so hard to break free. Please don't take my past problems as justification for rejecting the Bible altogether and treating it with total disbelief. My problem was not belief, but slavish belief. The Bible would not have survived the onslaughts that it has suffered over the centuries unless it had something valuable that made it worth fighting for - even to the death. My fault was to take belief to an extreme. Not to believe the scriptures at all is the opposite extreme and is at least as dangerous.

The essays that follow are mostly selected from those I circulated to friends and are dated to show how my thinking developed over several years. The wording is unchanged, apart from some revisions to the footnotes, and neither have I changed them in this new edition of SOS. The linking chapters explain the context in which each article was written and fit them into a steady process of growth and re-learning. The articles were written for myself, to help re-establish my thinking and understanding and to explore the depths of my faith. By bringing the essays together in this way I was able to take stock of what I learned over those years and how the Bible was rescued from my misplaced worship. By re-issuing them in this revised edition I offer my example of freedom to a wider audience, praying that many more Christians will rediscover the scriptures as aids to faith, hope and love, rather than laws to imprison, punish and frighten.

© Derrick Phillips
June 2001