A Giant Leap of Doubt

The next step in my mind-changing journey was crucial and difficult. It was so significant that I could not express it in my familiar form of a considered essay; for such a profound change of heart I could only express the questions in rhetorical and poetic form.

I do not write many poems and this was not great poetry; but it was a great leap of understanding. At last I acknowledged that the Bible could be wrong. Previously I had skirted round the idea with euphemisms, but now the point had really struck the target. I admitted that the scripture writers could simply have got things wrong. In my heart, I had probably understood that for a long time, which, I suppose, was why I had found the Bible so inaccessible during the period when I was denying my thoughts. Once I had acknowledged it to myself I was able to search the scriptures with a new enthusiasm and to re-visit studies I had rejected many years previously. I began researching the origins of the bible texts… Who wrote the books and what were their sources? What were their circumstances and influences? What were they aiming to put across with their stories? How much can we learn from them about mankind, as well as about God? The books mean so much more when we can see the writers as real people rather than granite saints.

The poem's title "Growing Up" could be referring to me, in that I had come of age in my thinking about the Bible. Or it could refer to God in that, if the Bible were taken literally, he would be seen to have evolved from a brutal, jealous, vindictive national deity into a wise and merciful universal God. It could also refer to the community of faith (the church), which adapts, but oh-so-slowly, to accept the decay of its once-immutable doctrines.

The poem leaves these questions open....

©Derrick Phillips
August 2001