Rachel Held Evans (June 8, 1981 – May 4, 2019) was an American Christian columnist, blogger and author. She grew up in the middle of the American Bible Belt.
Her book, “Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions." describes her journey through doubting her evangelical roots and coming to terms with the inconsistencies in the Bible. Below are excerpts from a chapter in her book.
Please bear in mind that it's well nigh an impossible task to summarize a chapter, it breaks up the flow of reading, but "fair use" allows max one page to be re-published.
So this is the point in the story where I turn to Jesus... I was as angry with God as ever... because of the deep, entrenched sadness of this world, a world in which thirty thousand children die of hunger every day, a world in which tsunami waves wash away entire villages, a world in which the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow wider...
I remembered something my youth pastor used to say in his sermons. “We’re going to stop by the New Testament to see what Jesus has to say about this,” he would announce before citing chapter and verse, “because Jesus embodied all of God’s desires and passions and hopes and dreams, because Jesus was God in sandals.” I always loved that image: God in sandals. Nothing is quite so absurd or profound as the notion of the Great I AM walking around with dirt between his toes...
So in spite of my doubts, or perhaps because of them, I decided to see if Jesus had the answer. Well, he didn’t. You can’t get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist. I’m convinced he would have flunked out of any halfway decent Christian liberal arts institution. Jesus responded more with questions than with answers. He preferred story to exposition. Despite boasting infinite wisdom and limitless knowledge, Jesus chose not to overtly address religious pluralism, the problem of evil, hermeneutics, science, or homosexuality. He didn’t provide bullet-point answers for detractors or lengthy explanations to doubters. He didn’t make following him logical or easy. And yet I wasn’t disappointed.
The first thing I noticed while reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was that Christians who claim to take the Bible literally or who say they obey all of his teachings without “picking and choosing” are either liars or homeless. (Luke 14:33)
The teachings of Jesus fly in the face of all we are told by our culture and even by the church about setting boundaries, getting even, achieving financial success, and “calling sin a sin.” For the first time, I asked myself if my reservations about Christianity were purely ideological. I wondered if perhaps counting the cost played a subtle role. You’d have to be crazy not to have second thoughts about following Jesus.
The second theme that emerged while reading the Gospels is that, if Jesus is God, then God has not forgotten the downtrodden and oppressed of this world...
The final and most startling thing I noticed as I grew more acquainted with the Gospels was that Jesus had a very different view of faith than the one to which I was accustomed. I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in my late teens or early twenties, it was as if Jesus packed his bags and moved from my heart into my head. He became an idea, a sort of theological mechanism by which salvation was attained.
Through the years, I heard about... the importance of building my house on the solid rock of a biblical worldview, about how the best way to protect my faith against the winds and rain of doubt is to build it with the concrete of absolute truth, the joists of inerrant Scripture, and the bearing walls of sound Christian doctrine. And yet, in the words of Jesus, all those apologetics courses and theology books and debating techniques are just castles in the sand without a commitment to love my neighbor as myself. I began to wonder if obedience — with or without answers — was the only thing that could save me from this storm.
Being a Christian, it seemed, isn’t about agreeing to a certain way; it is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God. It is about being Jesus . . . in tennis shoes.
By Anderson Reign, “A Poet for Our Time” Oct 2022
By Brian Zahnd Nov 2018