My recent journey started here. I had grown up with the Bible, had read it, sung it, taught it and believed it my whole life. I’d had a one-year seminary course in it. I never seriously thought I could ever read it any differently.

In 2008, I began to question the commonly-held evangelical premise that the Bible was the inerrant, authoritative, inspired Word of God. I think there were several triggers to this process. For one, I began to teach classes in the Bible and to study hermeneutics (the interpretation of texts) in more depth, and this forced me up against some authors with profoundly different approaches to Scripture. Secondly, a deep sense of God’s love (fuelled in part by the discoveries discussed in some of my earlier blog posts) meant that some of the Bible passages jarred with me in a visceral sense, in a way they hadn’t before. Thirdly, our church community had just wrestled with the thorny issue of women in leadership over several months and several of us had experienced a 180-degree change in our doctrine and practice as we concluded that, maybe, we’d read Paul wrong.

The more I thought about it, the more my inherited viewpoint of the inerrancy and authority of the Bible was being eroded by my studies, my spiritual experience and my community’s reassessment of doctrine. Things just didn’t make sense like they used to.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to my view of the Bible was that I just didn’t like the God I read in it anymore. Here’s a quick example. In 2 Kings 2 there is a brief and disturbing episode concerning the prophet Elisha:

As [Elisha] was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. (vv23-24 NIV)

Now I have read several commentaries on these verses. Some stress how offensive or politically-loaded the term rendered ‘baldy’ is. Others surmise that the youths were trying to stop Elisha from fulfilling his mission. Many expound vaguely that sin is serious, that Satan sometimes uses people to oppose God’s servants, that this was a very different era and we have to make allowances (‘God’s not into that cursing stuff anymore‘). But it is still hard to avoid the conclusion that the story’s moral is: it’s OK for Elisha to call a curse down on them (and, more pertinently, it’s absolutely fine for God to back him up and maul 42 boys). That’s who God is. He’s scary, and hot-tempered, and liable to swift and disproportionate vengeance. So watch out! Get on the right side. Or you’re in danger. And since this is the Word of God, it’s authoritative and utterly correct.

The thing is, it’s not like I had just stumbled on this story. I knew it well. And it had never bothered me. I’d thought it was odd, to be sure – but now it provoked an intense, almost physical disgust. I concluded that I couldn’t serve a God like this, if that’s the only way to read 2 Kings 2. Alternatively, I needed to find a better way to read the Bible.

In later posts, I’ll try to outline what happened next.