Culture War, Inerrancy, Tolstoy, & the Gospels: A Personal Journey Becoming Adam Podcast – Becoming Adam, Becoming Christ

Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Last week, I introduced the Becoming Christ aspect of the

website, which draws from my forthcoming e-book The Anointed. In this episode, the time seemed right to share a bit

of my personal journey. I hope it will shed some light on the book and the

direction I’m headed. Since this essay is mostly personal, I’ll forego the

usual footnotes and references.















My formative years were spent in ultra-conservative

Amarillo, Texas, during the 1970s. My family faithfully attended a Methodist

church down the street from our house, and this being the ’70s, we piled into

the car and drove to the end of the block to get there, rain or shine.







I had a children’s storybook Bible as a child, but my

interest was confined to the pictures. Even then, I couldn’t wrap my mind

around the story of Noah. I’d been to the San Diego Zoo and watched nature

shows on PBS. How did Noah get elephants, lions, rhinos, and giraffes onto the

Ark? It made no sense to me, so I mentally checked out whenever the subject of

the flood came up in Sunday School.







Around the age of 12, I was snooping in my parents’ bedroom

and discovered a book in my dad’s nightstand – Good News for Modern Man. This was one of the first “everyday

English” translations of the Bible, and at that time it was New Testament only.

I snuck the book out every morning and put it back every afternoon until I’d

read the entire thing on the sly. Afterward, to the shock of everyone in our small

congregation (including my parents), I grabbed my little sister’s hand at the

end of a service and said, “Let’s get baptized.”







My baptismal picture with my little sister, LeeAnn, in 1974. Wide white belt and big cuffs. ’70s rule, baby!







The next book I stole from my dad set the tone for my teens

and twenties. The Late, Great Planet

Earth was published in 1970 and went on to become “the No. 1 non-fiction

bestseller of the decade,” according to The

New York Times. I found it in ’74 or

so and was immediately “caught up” (forgive the pun) in its vision of rapture,

tribulation, Armageddon, and Christ’s return to a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.

It took years for me to outgrow this warped take on the “end times,” but one principle

from the book stuck with me: Interpret

literally unless you’re forced to interpret symbolically.







Armed with that litmus test, the now-disgraced duo of Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler launched their conservative takeover of Southern Baptist seminaries.







Soon, another book cemented that same thought in the

evangelical consciousness. In 1976 the editor of Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell, authored his infamous Battle for the Bible. Lindsell claimed

liberal theology was undermining the Scripture and would destroy the church.

While inerrancy had previously been a matter of opinion rather than a doctrine,

even among evangelicals, Lindsell argued that the Bible “does not contain error

of any kind,” even (or especially!) in its references to history, cosmology, and

science. Furthermore, any Christian who didn’t agree with this fundamentalist

definition of inerrancy was not a “true Christian.”







Lindsell named names and took no prisoners in his crusade to

expose “liberal theology” in evangelical seminaries and denominations. The next

year, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy was formed, and in 1978

it brought together 200 evangelical scholars, theologians, and pastors to draft