nateeag.com >> christianity

I believe the Maker of the universe loves me so much that He died to save me from myself.

That belief is the heart of who I am.

I believe He has revealed Himself to man at various times and in various ways, most notably by inspiring the various authors of the Hebrew Tanakh, by becoming the man Jesus Christ, and by inspiring the early Christians to write the New Testament.

If pressed for the details of my theology, I refer to the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed as summarizing it better than I can.

I believe the Bible is the Word of God, written by humans who were inspired by the Holy Spirit. I believe it is true, beautiful, wise, trustworthy, and powerful.

I am not convinced it is completely error-free in every possible respect, and I know of no passage where it claims to be. Where it presents history I believe that history is true, but that does not mean every detail must be perfectly correct. Matthew and Luke disagree whether the centurion came to Jesus himself or sent a messenger, but the story's events are not massively changed by that discrepancy, nor is it the sort of difference that makes historians discard documents as untrustworthy. It is exactly the sort of divergence you might expect between an account written by an eyewitness and an account written by someone interviewing eyewitnesses.

As that implies, I am not a Biblical literalist. A lifetime of reading the Bible and many other texts has made it clear to me that the Bible contains many non-literal genres, ranging from parables to aphorisms to poems. Where it does contain historical accounts, they were not written as modern academic historical treatises, and reading them as if they were seems unwise and obtuse.

Fathering young children has taught me that trying to make my children understand something as thoroughly as I do usually harms their understanding rather than helping it.

I imagine God handles similar tradeoffs when communicating with us, and I believe that surfaces from time to time in Scripture. If you hold the entire universe in your mind, you likely know a lot of things that are hard (perhaps impossible) for a tiny mind to hold.