Conversions and De-converions - Slash and Burn

Penchansky’s Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible was the first book in my new journey.  It was exhilarating.  I was reading things about my Bible that I never could have imagined.  Polytheism?  The Bible has more than one god?  Absolutely – Penchansky just had to show me where to look, and I definitely found that polytheism is in there.  Inconceivable!  I was not convinced by everything Penchansky or anybody else said for the sake of it being counter to anything I had known before.  But I came to understand that there was a possibility that everything I had understood about God, about Jesus, the Bible, everything had another side to the story.  I was discovering that there was so much more that I had never learned from a single pastor or Bible teacher, and that I would never learn unless I ignored all the warnings of ‘worldly wisdom’ from Pastor Skip, went to the library myself and did my own digging.

I was 42 years old, and I was as enthused as any youngster who was on the verge of an exciting intellectual discovery.  I remember the thrill of first reading about and understanding Chaos Theory or Quantum Mechanics some fifteen years before.  There was once a time when I had stayed up late into the night reading and pondering on this newly discovered knowledge that few other people could claim to understand.  It was more than any of my family, friends or anybody I had grown up with had ever known before, and that had made anything that challenged what I thought I knew about the world to be a thrilling intellectual adventure.  It was the thrill of having my mind expanded, my vistas broadened, and learning something that only a privileged few who put forth the effort could know.  I felt that thrill again in early 2006, when everything I thought I knew about my religious beliefs was rattled from the foundation.  I felt the pull of my own ignorance.  The more I learned, the more insignificant I felt.  There was more out there in the world than I could ever hope to absorb.  I simply could not get enough.

I was not a young, angry rebel who was looking for a way to shake off the confines of my religion.  I had no desire to start ‘living a life of sin’, as so many offended Christians would imagine of me.  None of these supposed motivations were anywhere on my radar.  ‘Sinning’ was not my motivation.  I had just turned 42 years old.  It was my first year of marriage to a woman I desperately loved.  I was attending two different churches, keeping close to my Fundamentalist faith, and learning to appreciate Rosemary’s Catholic traditions.  We were hosting weekly Bible studies in our home, and I loved all the people we met from the two churches we attended.  I had no reason to rebel against anything in my life.  But I had to face the fact that Christianity, as I knew it, was not working in my life anymore.   As much as I had tried to deny it, it had not worked in years.   I could no longer naively accept what I was being told from the pulpit, as I once had.  But to cut my skepticism even deeper, I now could no longer naively accept what was even in the Bible itself!  The very Fountainhead of my Faith, the Holy Scriptures, also had to come under my intense scrutiny. 

Penchansky challenged me to try reading the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, not as a historical or theological description of mankind’s Fall into a state of Original Sin, but as mythology no different from any other mythology of antiquity.  Instead of accepting my religion’s official interpretation of this sacred story as the origin of mankind’s eternal and defiant separation from God Almighty and the corruption of the natural order, I tried reading the story only as it stood in the text.  Try imagining Yahweh as only one in a pantheon of deities who created humans for the tending of His garden.  Inside His garden is a magical tree, the fruit of which gives the innocent couple a sense of self-aware morality.  The curses that Yahweh inflicts on his creatures are myths to explain why men must work and toil in life, why women must labor in childbirth and be subservient to men, and why snakes crawl around with no legs.  I had fought for years to somehow interpret the Adam and Eve story in a way that would not violate either my imposed religious dogma of Original Sin, or my scientific understanding of evolution and the origins of Homo Sapiens.  Each attempt at reconciliation was so unsuccessful, that over time I simply resorted to the ‘somehow – someway’ interpretation that they both must be simultaneously true.  Penchansky challenged me to look at the same story as ancient, polytheistic myth, no different from the fantastic myths of the Greeks and Romans.  I had long thought that the story fell in some genre of inspired myth, but one that ultimately pointed to Christian doctrine.  But if I tried, even just for the sake of argument, not to impose later Christian dogma onto the ancient story of Adam and Eve, and just let the story speak for itself, the interpretation of the text became simple and obvious.  Suddenly, the story made sense.  It worked.  It fit perfectly within a pre-scientific world that routinely generated myths to explain natural phenomena.  So much the worse for that part of Christian dogma.  Christian dogma was what I was scrutinizing.  If it was not working, I figured – tough luck.  It had to go.  If I could find a simpler model, a less contrived explanation to what had been impossible to put together, I figured that one was more likely to be true. 

So, one chip at a time, inspiration and inerrancy was removed from the Bible.  From here, it seemed that everything about my Christian religion collapsed all at once.  The doctrine of the Biblical Inerrancy was very fast to go.  I had seen ‘alleged’ contradictions in the Bible, but I had been trained with plenty of apologetic talking points that would save my Bible from embarrassment.  It was not until I started reading library books, then buying them for myself, that I discovered just how many problems there really were with the Biblical text, and just how ludicrous most of my canned responses to them were.  Biblical inerrancy went fast.  I was still a Christian, at least I still felt like one, but I knew my Faith was going to go through a rapid transformation.  I was vaguely aware by this time that I might even have to discard my Faith completely.  For some reason, I do not remember being particularly afraid.  I knew that my intentions were honest and sincere.  I knew that I was not looking for an excuse to sin.  I knew that I did not hate God.  I was just fed up with being confused, miserable, and forcing myself to settle with unsatisfactory answers.  I just wanted to get to the bottom of what my religion was really all about and to cut through the lies that I knew I was being fed from the pulpit.

I was more afraid of my friends and family than I was of God.  Rosemary was certainly concerned.  Since she was a Catholic, I don’t think she ever understood my bizarre obsession with understanding the Bible.  It seemed that every day, my reading and research led me to some new unsolvable problem with Biblical inerrancy.  After enumerating everything I had just discovered about the contradictions, for instance, between the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ trail and crucifixion, my suffering wife would just seek to make peace rather than argue. 

Rosemary could tell me, “Yes, yes, they wrote their gospel stories differently, didn’t they?  Maybe they just wrote from their own perspectives, and could never get all the tiny details exactly the same.  I am sure those were busy times with lots of confusion and intrigues.  Nobody could have gotten it exactly right!”  I had by then learned that there were plenty of reasons why the differences between the four Gospels should be concerning to a person trying to preserve inerrancy, but I never argued with her.  I just did my best to listen to her point of view, and take from it what I could.  But she really did not know what to say to me.  She did not know what it would take to ease my doubts.  She had been raised in a religious environment that emphasized Faith as the ultimate virtue, and unlike my tradition, never looked to the Bible for evidence of her Faith.  Looking for evidence would make her a doubter.  If she was to be a Catholic, she was to believe, Bible or no Bible, evidence or no evidence, and that was all there was to it.  She did not understand why I would begin doubting after finding Biblical discrepancies or contradictions.  To her, such things were unimportant and irrelevant.  I did my best to explain to her that I was on my own religious and spiritual quest.  I needed to find out what was best for me, and what I could understand as truth to my best satisfaction.  I believed that to be the best husband that I could be, I needed to be honest with my convictions and with her.  Although she was concerned for me, I tried to reassure her that my beliefs were mine alone, and I would never force her to believe exactly as I did.  Rosemary was incredibly patient with me during this time.  I am sure it was a stressful situation for her.  We had married with different religious traditions from the start.  Now less than a year into our marriage, she could tell I was headed for some kind of drastic change.

We continued hosting weekly Bible studies in our home, but I think everybody in the room was feeling the tensions of my changing beliefs.  I never kept any thought or doubt secret from Rosemary.  I was not ashamed to show her the books that I was then reading.  But I kept everything secret from my Bible study group and anybody else at La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church.  Instead of venting my doubts to my Bible study group, I presented them with some challenges that I had suddenly been made aware of to see how any one of them would react.  Many Fundamentalists are particularly sensitive to the charge that their Scriptures contain contradictions, so every now and again I thought I would challenge the members of my Bible study group with a bit of a problem.  Inevitably, the only person who responded to my challenges was our group leader, Dave.  Everybody else sat in tense silence.  A typical challenge would go something like:

Me: I know that there are no real contradictions in the Bible, only ‘seeming’ contradictions, so what is your opinion of salvation by grace versus salvation by works.  I grew up believing in Grace Alone, but Rosemary grew up as a Catholic, and that God’s grace allows us to do good works, but ultimately we have to work out our own salvation.  So who is right?

John: The Bible says that we are saved by grace alone.

Me: What about the problem between Paul in Romans and James.  I read both, and it really like they are saying two different things.

John:  No.  Paul is saying that we are saved by God’s grace.  James is saying that our works are the evidence that we are saved through God’s grace.

Of course I had heard this apologetic countless times before, but I did not want to needlessly press the issue with my study group.  I was not trying to cause problems with them, or cause any of them to doubt with me.  I was just interested to see if they had anything new or more compelling to offer than the usual apologetics that I was finding increasingly unconvincing.  I never told my group that I had noticed the common strategy of ironing over contradictions by inserting things into the Biblical text that were not there.  I figured that the doubts swimming in my head were far beyond anything my poor group was equipped to deal with.  Both Paul and James reference Abraham as a model of salvation, but Paul uses that model to say, explicitly, that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).  James uses that same model to say, explicitly, that we “see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” (James 2:24).   My study group responded to this nasty theological problem with the common apologetic tactic of making James say things that I did not see in the text of his epistle. 

I felt that if there was this much controversy, with my Fundamentalist traditions interpreting these texts one way, and Rosemary’s Catholic traditions interpreting them differently, then what good reason did I have to choose one interpretation over the other?  What good reason did anybody have to choose a favored interpretation of ambiguous texts, except by appealing to a favored religious tradition?  But even if my friends were right, and James said that works were only an evidence that we were in fact saved by Faith alone, how do we Christians know how many good works are enough to count as evidence of our own salvation?  I knew plenty of non-Christians, especially in my university years, who were definitely not Christians, but whose outward actions made them indistinguishable from Christians.  So if works are the evidence of salvation in a Christian, and the Christian finds himself not performing enough works that he feels would be a manifest result of his Faith, he will be forced to perform more good works, just to prove he is in fact saved!  I had struggled with this problem many times over the years.  I had to believe that I was saved only through my Faith in Jesus, and not to rely on my good works for salvation.  But if I did not do enough good works, I did not have solid evidence that I was in fact being sanctified into the image of Christ.  So I would have to perform more good works to demonstrate my sanctification.  As a result chasing my tail like this, I could not tell the difference between works and faith.  It was all just ridiculous semantics that I was basing my salvation on.  I feared that my home Bible study group would suspect my doubts had increased to an unacceptable level.

But what about my Christian friends?  If they wanted to say they were saved, and that their good works were evidence of salvation, I should have expected to see that evidence manifest in how they lived their lives.  But from what I saw, their morality was nothing markedly different from anything saw in the typical, non-believing heathen.  If anybody stood out as moral paragons, it was some of my Catholic friends who had devoted enormous amounts of effort and sacrifice into border justice, all done in the name of Christ.  These were the same Christians who criticized my strong focus on the Bible.  Yet, my Fundamentalist friends constantly spoke of grace, faith, and our works manifesting the sanctifying work of the Spirit, yet they evidenced nothing that demonstrated some supernatural Force compelling them to divine service.  Outside of church and Bible study, they acted pretty much the same as anybody else.  Where was this ‘works as evidence’ of divine grace?  If Christians were in fact indistinguishable from non-Christians, how could their works be any evidence of their supposed salvation? 

Our home Bible study had stagnated into a half hour or so of exploring a theme in the Bible, asking everybody to volunteer their opinions on a few selected scriptures, then gather group prayer.  How many decades had I spent repeating this same material over and over again?  How many different ways can we repeat the constant refrain – we are sinners, Jesus is the Savior, He died to bare our sins, and we now need to accept His salvation?  How many times must we dredge up Scriptures that convict us to love our neighbor, to seek His higher glory, to pray without ceasing, etc, etc?  I felt that there were only so many ways to express the same things over and over again, and I was afraid that some of the more, shall we say, emotionally needy believers in our small study group were leaning far too heavily on the wisdom of our group leader, John.  With a limited number of scriptures that could be referred to in a finite book like the Bible, I felt that stagnation was inevitable, and these people had become complacent in constantly hearing the same thing.  They asked questions of our group leader, but I suspect they knew what the answers were before they asked, and would have been disappointed if they received an answer that they did not expect.  Complacency in my Faith was the one thing that I was trying to escape from.  Fed up and frustrated with this seeming over-reliance on Faith at the expense of Works, I decided to test my home study group with another kind of challenge.  

Martin Luther King Day had just passed, so I decided to read a small excerpt from Dr. King’s classic of activist literature, his powerful Letter from Birmingham Jail.  I had just recently finished reading a biography of his life, and I was gripped by how much he had sacrificed for the cause of racial justice, and by how powerfully he was empowered by his religious beliefs.  In 1963, King was arrested for protesting segregation laws in Birmingham, Alabama.  While he was in jail, eight white pastors from around the state wrote the local Birmingham newspaper, and editorialized against King’s activism.  They figured he should be a good preacher, stay behind the pulpit, and keep his nose out of racial justice and activism.  In response, King wrote from solitary confinement what came to be known as Letter from Birmingham Jail on scraps of paper, and smuggled out by his lawyer bit by bit.  King’s letter detailed his commitment to using the Church as an empowered vehicle that I thought made our comfortable Christian apathy pathetic in comparison.   Would my fellow Christians be as affected by Dr. King’s letter as I was?  I gave my study group a short background of the history behind Dr. King’s letter, then read to them this excerpt:

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

I told them that this letter had a powerful effect on me, and I waited for their response.  I was not expecting an instant moral commitment to social justice.  I was just expecting a comment for discussion.  Perhaps somebody in my group could tell me what Dr. King’s letter and message had to say about our modern church, specifically ours, who had the same concerns of falling into apathy and irrelevance.  What I did not expect was the room full of blank stares and tepid nods of accent and agreement.  I could not even get an honest opinion from these people who believed that their morality and works were manifest evidence of their personal salvation.  These people had no desire or intention to have their convictions challenged, even by a fellow Christian like Martin Luther King!  They clearly were not interested in Spiritual growth or any kind of moral challenge.  My spiritually empowered and sanctified Christian brethren only wanted to coddle themselves up to the same familiar, warm and simmering pot of stewed ingredients that they had been born and raised with.  I loved them all, but I had to be honest with what I was seeing.  The evidence of works that the Spirit had made manifest in these fellow Christians was nothing more than a pathetic dependence on comfort food.  These people had nothing to offer me, and I did not want to be content with their spiritual complacency.  I was searching because I was no longer satisfied with living a spiritual life of doubts, concerns and questions.  The familiar Fundamentalism of my home Bible study group and La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church had nothing more to offer me.

Simultaneous with these events was my discovery of the Internet.  I have never been especially enamored of electronic gadgets in my house.  I did have a boom-box to listen to music, but that is about where the technology ended.  In 2006, I still had my rotary telephone and no television.  I certainly did not have a home computer!  Rosemary would have none of my aversion to technology, and had the Internet installed in our house around the time we started hosting the weekly Bible studies.  I had used the Internet quite a bit as a research tool at work and when I was attending university.  I had no intention or desire of ever using it for personal use, until I saw a need to do some personally important research.  I discovered that there was an endless supply of the apologetics that I had come to despise.  I discovered that Chuck Missler was still around, and still selling the ‘briefing packages’ that I had practically memorized back in the early ‘90s.  I already knew that stuff.  I needed to be challenged with something different.  I remember naively typing ‘Bible Contradictions’ into the search engine.  What a mammoth mistake that was!  I discovered that there were a lot of irrational and unwarranted criticisms of Christianity that seemed to come from very angry people.  I did my best to avoid emotional ranting that contained obvious lies.  But I eventually found two sites that were instrumental in my ultimate departure from Christianity.

Infidels.org introduced me to the works of Robert Ingersoll.  I had never heard of Ingersoll, and had no idea who he was when I started browsing the lectures stored at infidels.org.  Robert Ingersoll, polemicist and orator, toured the United States during the turn of the century, back during the time when public lectures were a form of entertainment.  I opened something from Ingersoll called Heretics and Hericies, only one of dozens of his public lectures in print, and started reading:

Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. This word was born of the hatred, arrogance and cruelty of those who love their enemies, and who, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. This word was born of intellectual slavery in the feudal ages of thought. It was an epithet used in the place of argument. From the commencement of the Christian era, every art has been exhausted and every conceivable punishment inflicted to force all people to hold the same religious opinions. This effort was born of the idea that a certain belief was necessary to the salvation of the soul. Christ taught, and the church still teaches that unbelief is the blackest of crimes. God is supposed to hate with an infinite and implacable hatred, every heretic upon the earth, and the heretics who have died are supposed at this moment to be suffering the agonies of the damned. The church persecutes the living and her God burns, for all eternity, the dead…

I had a visceral gut reaction to what I was reading.  It felt like an emotional gag reflex.  It was one of the very few times that I was offended by the blasphemy of what I was reading.  I felt the strong urge to choke on what I was reading, to look away from the horrors of heresy.  No!  I had to force myself to override the instinct to look away from what was on the page before me, and rather ask myself if there was anything in Ingersoll’s shocking words that were not accurate.  Was my revulsion due to reading lies and distortions, or was I reading ugly truth?  Is it not true that, for instance, “Christ taught, and the church still teaches that unbelief is the blackest of crimes”?  Was Ingersoll correct when he said, “Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak”?  I knew very well about purges and inquisitions of the past.  But even if heretics are not now persecuted to the extent that they were in the past, Ingersoll was still correct about the Church’s hatred of heresies.  After all, why was I hiding my own heretical thoughts and opinions from my small Bible study group?  Was I not afraid of their hatred of my unorthodox thoughts?  I had to accept that Ingersoll was not stretching the truth.  He was expressing Christianity’s hatred of heresies and originality and freethought in highly charged and polemical prose.  This is what public speakers do.  It did not make it any less true.  I was fascinated with what critical evaluation of Christian texts and traditions had to offer, and how it expanded my mind to new ideas about my Faith.  But the bluntness of Ingersoll’s polemics forced me not to sugar-coat what the outcomes of my changing Faith really were, and where I was headed.  I was becoming the subject of countless condemning sermons from the pulpit.  I was becoming a heretic.  I may have been intimidated by my fellow Christians, but I was no longer afraid of God.  Was I becoming hard of heart, like Pharaoh’s defiance against God?  Was I in the process of being handed over to a reprobate mind?  Perhaps, but I had lost all my guilt and fear of Divine judges.  I was not afraid of Him because I knew I was being honest.  If anything, I knew that my integrity was intact.

One other website that I must mention, pummeled my senses with a blunt question - Why won't God heal amputees?  Reading in particular a long article which addressed this question, brought me back nearly twenty years before to a Calvary Chapel service in which believers were sharing their stories of miraculous healing.  As I have written about in a previous article of this series, one man shared how he had prayed for the healing of a friend’s severed hand.  When he shared with us that he had seen that hand grow back with his very eyes, Pastor Skip quickly intervened to quiet his obviously deluded testimony and end the sharing of miraculous stories.  It seemed strange to me at the time why everybody would believe stories of healed colds, bad backs, even cancer remission, or anything else that had one thing in common - that any testimony could conceivably occur with no miraculous intervention.  But nobody, not me, not even Pastor Skip, believed a sincere, faithful and enthusiastic story that involved something truly miraculous.  I was finally ready to confront the question of why Christians never pray for the healing of amputees, the mentally retarded, the Alzheimer patient, or any other person in which there was no chance of natural remission.  When the question was raised in Calvary Chapel, I ignored the obvious implications, and brushed them under a rug.  But fifteen years later, I was finally ready to examine those questions again.  I pulled them back out from the rug and the answers were immediately obvious to me.  Christians, at least every Christian I had ever personally encountered, only prayed for things that would take no faith to believe would be answered.  Nobody prayed for the healing of our Bible study leader’s autistic son.  Nobody ever prays for the regeneration of severed limbs.  Nobody ever prays for new skin on a 3^rd degree burn patient.  We all know that those prayers will never be answered.  But why shouldn’t they be answered?  The entire Universe will be just as insignificant as a speck of lint to a Being of infinite scope.   Healing a head cold and healing a congenital birth defect should be pretty much the same thing to a Creature of unlimited power.  So why, why did we never pray for those miraculous things that would unquestionably demonstrate His existence and majesty?  Why shouldn’t a prayer for the resurrection of a still-born fetus be just as common as a prayer for the relief of an aching back?  

I knew the answer why.  I think that deep down, we all knew the answer why, and we always knew it.  But it took me decades to accept that grim fact of my Faith in the Almighty.  We never prayed those prayers because we knew they would never be answered.  We only prayed for those things which would not make a mockery of our magical genie in the bottle.  We only prayed for those things that take no faith at all.  We even append each prayer with ‘…but Your will be done’ just in case, because we also know that even pathetic, faithless prayers are only answered with no greater certainty than random chance.

Looking back at the year 2006, I am shocked at how fast my Christian Faith collapsed.  I never intended to stop believing.  I was not out to look for an excuse to stop believing.  I did not know this intense ‘spiritual quest’ of skepticism and scrutiny of my religious beliefs would lead to my eventual abandonment of those beliefs.  I caught myself by surprise when I realized that I no longer believed.  I knew that my beliefs were changing, and I knew that I would not come out of this skeptical period with the same Fundamentalist beliefs I had held before.  I initially welcomed that change and I was not afraid of where it would eventually end up.  I had no idea it would end in non-belief!  I was expecting to wind up, perhaps, as an enlightened Catholic Christian, which was just fine by me.  All I wanted was to believe in something that I could be honest with, and not have to lie about or tie my brain into logical knots to justify.  Finally, I wanted to believe in something that would be attractive to my wife and hopefully be compatible with her beliefs.  I wanted a happy and successful marriage, and I needed some religious framework that would make our relationship stronger in the coming years.  So I merrily went along, reading everything I could get my hands on that looked intelligent and skeptical, yet fair to my Christian Faith.  I did not know until it was too late how quickly my Faith had completely eroded away.

The shock of what I was doing to myself finally came early one morning sometime in summer 2006.  Rosemary was asleep next to me in bed.  I was up early, reading a book that gripped me like a best-selling suspense novel.  I remember reading in that book about the various forms of early Christian beliefs that existed in the first centuries after Jesus walked the earth.  Bart Ehrman’s book Lost Christianities demonstrated to me that the ancient Mediterranean was a cornucopia of religions, mythologies, saviors, miracles, god-men and pagan beliefs.  Ehrman demonstrated from the numerous writings that are preserved from the ancient Mediteranean world, including the New Testament itself, that the Christian milieu was awash in various types of Gnostics, Marcionites, Encratites, Docetics, Ebionites, and other extinct forms of Christian heresies.  Ehrman showed that what later became Orthodox Christianity most likely sprung out of this syncretistic stew like the first strands of primitive DNA had once steamed out of chemical reactions in thermal vents and magma flows.

I lay next to my sleeping wife.  I put the book down momentarily, dumbstruck at what I had just then realized.  “Oh no,” I whispered to myself.  “Joe, what are you going to believe?  What are you going to believe?”  It was a stunning moment.  I knew then where I was.  Rather, I knew where I was not. 

One evening in 1988, I had walked behind the Calvary Chapel stage in Albuquerque, New Mexico to make a firm commitment to Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  I had cried and slobbered my way through the Sinner’s Prayer, convicted and repentant of my sins, and ready to live a new life for Jesus.  F there is any such thing as an ‘Apostate’s Prayer’, I said it to myself that morning in 2006, with Ehrman’s Lost Christianities open in front of me. 

“Joe, what are you going to believe?” 

I did not know quite what to believe.  But I knew, right then and there, that I did not believe a single thing I had once thought was true of God, Jesus, The Bible.  Heaven or Hell.  The sanctification of the saints and the inherent virtues of holding to the Christian Faith.  In that moment, it was gone.  All gone.  Slash and burn and start all over again.  All those years – all that time and effort and expense of holding up a belief system to mold everything in my life into – all of that was gone.  I realized it all at in just that moment.

I momentarily panicked.  But it did not last long.  I guess that was how it felt to be abandoned by God and “given up unto vile affections” (Romans 1:26).  I felt the breathing of my sleeping wife lying next to me, and I turned the page to expose myself to more damnable heresies.

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter

Conversions and De-Conversions – All the Messianic Prophecies

I felt lost and directionless.  I wanted to feel the Divine numinous power that I had felt years before, back when I was attending Calvary Chapel and on fire for Jesus.  But in that interval of time my Faith stopped making much sense.  I wanted to retreat back to the Christianity that I was familiar with, yet the closer I got to that, the less sense it actually made.  My devotions seemed to be trite and empty, my prayers unanswered and meaningless.  All through my life of Faith, there were signs and stumbling blocks that challenged my Faith.  My education in science, my exposure to different cultures, my increasing distaste of proselytizing, and my growing realization that fundamental tenets of the Christian creed did not always correlate  with real life around me, all presented challenges to the religious framework that I tried my mold my life into.  But finally, at the age of 42, the foundation that supported my Christian paradigm started to crack.  I found myself retreating into the type of Fundamentalism that I hated.  The old, comfortable, Fundamentalist faith that I understood so well, was making me frustrated and intolerant, my wife confused and angry, and was seriously endangering our young marriage.  It was all driving me crazy, but I did not know how to live without it. 

The bottom line was that I desperately wanted to be a good husband, which drove me closer to Jesus, which then frustrated me to no end.  Trusting everything to Jesus, as I knew how to do it, was not working.  Reading the Bible was not working.  Fervent prayer was not working.  40 Days of Community, or Service, or Purpose, or whatever it was that Rick Warren was wanting me to do for 40 days, was definitely not working.  I tried to speak to Rosemary about my concerns, but her Catholic background left her unequipped to deal with my Fundamentalist anxieties.  I wanted to talk about these things in my home Bible Study group, but fear kept me from knowing how to approach them with the topic.  There was no easy way to tell my fellow Believers that I was losing my own Beliefs, and worse, I had no real idea why I was losing my beliefs.  I did not doubt because I was angry with Church hypocrites, or because I suddenly came to disbelieve the Bible, or because my devotional time with Jesus was lacking.  Not at all.  In fact, I missed that kind of Faith in my life, and the personal intimacy that I had once felt with my Savior.  I still thought that I had Faith of some kind.  But the promises made to me by God, the promises that I relied on as a Believer, no longer had any efficacious power.  The Christian Faith was all I had, and all I understood, but it was no longer something that gave me any peace in understanding, hope for the future, or the joy of a happy marriage.  I needed something different but I was terrified of changing the religious beliefs that I had held my entire life.  I had no idea what it was that I was looking for, but I had been warned many times over the years that looking for something outside of Christ, when I should have been content with the grace that Christ provided, could only lead to trouble.  Truth be told, I was terrified of losing my Faith.

After one Sunday morning service at  , I found myself wandering into the old, empty church library.  Stacks and stacks of devotional books were lined up on the shelves.  I did not see any books newer than perhaps ten years.  It was as if the church had stopped collecting books, and the empty and unused library had turned into a giant closet.  I browsed the shelves while my some friends chatted with Rosemary in the main foyer.  I saw a book that I was sure would add some conviction to my floundering faith.  I pulled a thick book off the shelf, a book stuffed full of apologetics that I had once found convincing and powerful.  I was determined to read all 600 pages of Herbert Lockyer’s All the Messianic Prophecies of the Bible, and through that book allow the power of the Holy Spirit to renew my Faith.  Only twelve years previous,  I had found apologetic arguments for the divine nature and authority of the Bible to be powerful encouragement to my Christian Faith.  I figured that all I needed was to remind myself of God’s amazing prophetic power, and my Faith would flower back to life.  I needed the neglected assurance that I knew apologetics could provide.

I still had loads of old Chuck Missler sermon cassettes, or Briefing Packages as Missler called them, stored in shoeboxes.  I had practically memorized every one after repeated plays over the years.  He and many other ‘Bible teachers’ would astound their Calvary Chapel congregations with one Messianic Prophecy after another, and cite the overwhelming odds against them occurring by chance.  God had accurately predicted everything about the coming Messiah hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years before He was born in a manger.  Hundreds of prophecies were given concerning Jesus, I was told, and given the incredible odds, it was impossible not to believe in the divine origin of the Scriptures.  But those sermons were given in the late 1980s and early 90s.  I had not studied Christian apologetics in over twelve years.  I had wandered away in the intervening time.  I had stopped attending church to focus on my physics education.  I had gotten married, gotten distracted with other worldly concerns, and I just needed an avenue to find my way back to God.  Reminding myself of God’s power, through apologetics, was the answer.  There was once a time when studying Messianic Prophecies filled me with awe and wonder at God’s handiwork.  I viewed Messianic Prophecy as indisputable proof of the reliability of the Bible and the trustworthiness of Jesus.  A 600 page book detailing every known reliable Messianic Prophecy was just what I needed to again feel the magic and power of the Scriptures.  I had once believed that every page, every word of the Bible centered on the person of Jesus Christ, and that even the most obscure passage of the Old Testament had hidden meaning that pointed to the Messiah.  My job was to search through all the Scriptures, all of it, from beginning to end, and discover for myself how it all centered on the Person of Jesus Christ.  Scripture, through Messianic Prophecy, demonstrated itself to be true.  It was absolute certainty and divine verity!    If any bit of old apologetics was going to save my Faith, this was going to be it.  As Lockyer stated in his introduction, “Human oracles are fallible, but the inspired Word, containing divine oracles is different.  Instead of ambiguous and untrustworthy utterances, we find teachings distinct and definite, inspired and infallible, authoritative and authentic.” (p 17)

But I had changed in the intervening years since the time I had fervently believed everything I heard from the Calvary Chapel pulpit.  An education in the proper application of critical thought sharpened my discernment, and what I had one accepted at face value, I now had to look at some level of scrutiny.  The problems with the book started in the opening pages, in which Lockyer described the overwhelming odds against Messianic Prophecies occuring by chance.  Lockyer attempted to demonstrate the fantastic odds of any man fulfilling any number of the stated prophecies in the Old Testament.  I remembered Pastor Skip citing the same absurd odds, and I found them convincing years before I ever knew how probabilities were actually calculated.  Now, after receiving college instruction in the theories of probability and statistics, I actually had some competence to analyze some of Lockyer’s astounding claims – such as:

“The literal fulfillment of a prophecy is the seal of its divine origin.  Prophecies of centuries concerning the final sufferings of Christ were fulfilled during the twenty-four hours leading up to His crucifixion.  According to the law of compound probabilities, the chance that they all happened together by accident is 1 in 537,000,000.” (p 17)

I immediately knew there were going to be problems with this book.  According to Lockyer, who cites Arthur Pierson’s God’s Living Oracles, there are:

“over 300 predictions about the Messiah to be found in the Old Testament.  According to the law of compound probability, the chance of their coming true is represented by a fraction whose numerator is one, and the denominator eighty-four followed by nearly one hundred ciphers.  One might almost as well expect by accident to dip up any one particular drop out of the ocean as to expect so many prophetic rays to converge by change upon one man, in one place, at one time.” (p 17)

And just like Skip Heitzig, Lockyer never demonstrated how these fantastic odds were calculated.  I was very early into reading this book, and I was already disappointed with the approach that was being taken.  Reading Lockyer’s citation of precise odds of supposedly historical events, without even a hint of derivation, left me unconvinced.  How was Lockyer calculating the number of all possible events occurring, which is a fundamental necessity in any probabilistic calculation?  And how was Lockyer figuring that all the possible variables that would go into any calculation of these historical events occurring were actually random?  Are all possible outcomes of any of these prophecies equally likely?  Is making predictions of the coming Messiah the same as predicting which card I randomly draw from a shuffled deck?  Or is it possible for certain people and events to willfully interfere, and make calculations of non-random events nearly impossible?  Lockyer, like every other Christian apologist I had ever heard claiming proof from prophecy, never mentioned this or any other methodology to their claimed probabilities.  He just threw fantastic odds out at me, and expected me to accept them at face value.

I used to tell my freshman physics students that when I graded their homework, the answer to a given problem was one of the least things I was interested in.  Many students had a habit of presenting sloppy calculations but printing their answer as neatly as possible in a giant read circle.  The answer was not important to me, I told them.  Physics and math instruction taught me that the answer was not nearly as important as the process or methodology that produced that answer.  If a student demonstrated clever derivation, clear thinking and proper use of their problem solving skills, but somewhere in the long chain of reasoning slipped in a silly arithmetic error that resulted in a wrong answer, I was more likely than not going to give them full credit.  If a student gave a correct answer in a bright red circle with no demonstration of how they got that answer, they got no credit.  The answer is not interesting to me, but the process is interesting.  Herbert Lockyer committed the worst mistake he could have made had he been a student in one of my classes.  He just blurted out answers without showing his work, and expected full credit.

I could see immediately how my mind had changed in the last twelve years.  I had once accepted almost everything my beloved pastors said, with full acceptance and with no though to question their word.  I never thought to ask Skip Heitzig, after one of his sermons full of fantastic claims, how he knew those things were true.  There was once a time when I would have greeted Herbert Lockyer or any other author of apologetic works with no critical scrutiny whatsoever.  Now, after receiving a full university education, I understood better what critical thinking was, and how to scrutinize fantastic claims, to the best of my ability, if I cared at all how truthful those claims were.

The book from first page to last was loaded with logical absurdities.  There was not a single prophecy that was stated as a clear and precisely stated prediction of something that would occur in the future.  Most alleged Messianic Prophecies were not even stated as predictions.  They were not even in the same genre.  They were Old Testament phrases ripped out of all context or connection with the poetry that surrounded it.  Worse, Lockyer never gave any indication that there was a context to even worry about.  For instance in one of the best known Messianic Prophecies, he claimed that there are specific predictions regarding the Messiah’s birthplace and childhood home.  He cited them as,

 “I…called my son out of Egypt” (Hos 11:1).  “But thou Bethlehem … out of thee shall he come forth” (Mic 5:2) (p 64)

Lockyer never bothered to explain any of the context that these were taken from.  It is as if Lockyer were not even using the Bible, just a scraps of paper from fortune cookies with snippets of verses without any contextual framework.  “I called my son out of Egypt,” stated as is, reminds the devout Christian of the Father lovingly calling the babe Jesus from Egypt back to the safety of Nazareth.  But a quick reading of the actual King James text from which Lockyer (sort of) quotes:

Hosea Chapter 11

¹When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.

² As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images.

³ I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms; but they knew not that I healed them.

First, Lockyer intentionally quoted only a portion of Hosea 11:1 in his book.  The carefully placed ellipses that Lockyer inserted in place of actual scriptural text, changed the entire meaning of the text to make it sound better than it really was.  In fact, his whole book was covered with only half quotes of verses.  There were sneaky ellipses in place of text everywhere!  This had to have been an intentional move by Lockyer to make obviously mundane verses sound more like actual predictions.  It was willful deception!  Second, it became clear that even if verses were quoted in full context, there was no prediction anyway.  None at all!  But for some reason that I could not then figure out, it was taken by the Evangelist Matthew as some kind of prediction.  Why?  I had no idea.  But I could see that it was not.  There was no way.

Lockyer went down the laundry list of what I call the usual suspects: those Messianic Prophecies that are well known amongst Fundamentalists and usually the only referenced to non-believers as evidence for the Faith. 

Jesus will crush Satan’s head.  Prophecy: Genesis 3:15 - Fulfillment: Galatians 4:4, Luke 2:7.

Jesus’s hands and feet will be pierced.  Prophecy: Psalm 22:16 - Fulfillment:  John 20:27

etc, etc, etc, with no discussion of context, genre, or any other critical analysis that would have made some sense of the texts.  It was just taken for granted that the reader would understand that the Old Testament said one thing, then the New Testament somehow mirrored it.  No, at the time I could not give any alternative explanation for how these supposedly prophetic scriptures came to be written or what their original intent was.  But to suppose that two similar passages of Scripture needed miraculous intervention to explain their existence was shooting a mouse with an elephant gun.  It just did not seem to be necessary.

The worst of the usual suspects came from Lockyer’s treatment of Matthew 2:23.  Lockyer went down his laundry list of fulfilled predictions, and without quoting Scripture, simply states:

He shall be called a Nazarene.  Prophecy: Isaiah 11:1 – Fulfillment: Matt. 2:23

OK, Matthew 2:23 is the fulfilled prediction:

And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.

But the actual prediction claimed, but never quoted, by Lockyer is:

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: (Isaiah 11:1)

What?  This made absolutely no sense to me.  How in the world could anybody, using any rules of grammar or logic, possibly conclude that Isaiah 11:1 was a prediction that the Messiah would be called a Nazarene?  Yet this was the best that Lockyer could come up with.  If Matthew 2:23 claimed it was a fulfilled prophecy, Lockyer was going to find any prophecy by hook or by crook, and not even quote the verse for his readers’ scrutiny!  He gave no argument or justification for his implicit claim that ‘a stem of Jesse’ or ‘a Branch shall grow out of his roots’ could be equated with being called a Nazarene.  Nothing!  Lockyer just placed the citation down without actually quoting the text, and having tricked the unsuspecting reader, moved right along.  This book was not made for any reader with an ounce of critical acumen.

It even got worse.  Not only were most of the alleged predictions not even stated as predictions, most would not be open to analysis even if they were genuine predictions.   Lockyer padded his book and the total number of Messianic Prophecies with types of prophecies that could never possibly be verified.  Lockyer had written an entire chapter, for instance, on prophecies concerning Jesus’spreexistence.  “The Old Testament abounds in references to our Lord’s pre-existence”, gloated Lockyer (p 34).  So something like “In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1) was verified by Lockyer with something like “all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16).  How could I, a struggling Christian, desperate for any apologetic assurance to salvage what Faith I could, use this as evidence for anything?  Forget about me, how could anybody use this as evidence for anything?  There was no historical fulfillment of prophecy in something like this.  It was just one theological statement confirming another theological statement, and I was astute enough at this point to know that this could be done with any sacred writing.  Lockyer cited dozens more prophecies of Jesus’sdual nature that were unverifiable theological statements, and so vague in meaning that they could be interpreted to mean whatever Lockyer wanted.  There is not a single, unambiguous, clear, and certain prediction in the Old Testament like, “The Messiah will have a dual nature, fully human and fully divine”.  Instead I got cloudy statements like, “out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2).  I had a hard time imagining a person reading this for the first time, a person completely ignorant of Christianity, who could possibly interpret Micah 5:2 as a prediction of a coming Messiah who would later be identified as Jesus, as He had come to be understood.  The Christian who is fully indoctrinated in Christian teachings will read passages like this and immediately see the Christian doctrine in it.  It is much like seeing the Face on Mars on a Viking Orbiter photograph, when it is actually a big pile of rocks on a heavily eroded Martian hillside.  But even if it was a clear prediction, it was a prediction of purely theological nature that could never be evaluated.  Lockyer gave page after page, entire chapter of nothing more than self-affirming statements of Faith!  It might as well have been one creed agreeing with another.   Self-affirming theological statements could be found in something as absurd as The Celestine Prophecy.  In fact, I knew plenty of people who were able to do just that. 

Another chapter was devoted to prophecies of the character of Jesus.  Like prophecies of purely theological character, there was no way to confirm or even evaluate prophecies of the person’s internal character.  Jesus was predicted to be Holy.  Prophecy: “Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion” (Psalm 2:6).  Fulfillment: “Thy holy child Jesus…” (Acts 4:27).  If some evangelical statistician wished to evaluate the fantastic odds of Psalm 2:6 coming true, how would he proceed?  What possible methodology could be used to evaluate this supposed ‘prediction’?  How could it even be called a prediction of anything – Psalm 2:6 is not even phrased as a prediction.  It is a statement in a different category from prediction.  It does not fit the definition.  It is just a line from ancient poetry, seemingly pulled at random from all contexts!  The quatrains of Nostrodamus were clearer than the puzzle ciphers that Lockyer was somehow able to decode.  Every prophecy concerning Jesus’scharacter was just as unconvincing as the prophecies of Jesus’sholiness or preexistence.  Lockyer detailed for my edification predictions and fulfillments of Jesus’srighteousness, goodness, justice, guilelessness, spotlessness, patience, and plenty more ambiguous, arbitrary, and unclear statements of Faith, read as prediction.

Lockyer set the standard for what he considered Divine prophetic fulfillment so low, I am not sure if he even had a standard.  He even counted personal affirmations of Jesus as evidence that He fulfilled something from the Old Testament.  When Jesus said of Himself, “I am the light of the world”, it echoed the words of God atop Mount Sinai.  When Moses asked God through the burning bush what His name was, God replied “I AM THAT I AM … Say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you (Exodus 3:13,14).  Sure, when Jesus said “I AM the resurrection and the life”, it seemed reasonable to me that Jesus was claiming to be the I AM behind the burning bush a thousand years before.  But was this recording of His words supposed to be taken as fulfillment of prophecy?  I mean, anybody could say or claim something.  To me, that is hardly miraculous, and certainly could not be considered a random variable for establishing a probability.  Yet Lockyer spent whole chapters on prophecies like these that could be fulfilled by a mere acceptance of a verbal claim.  There was no possible means of analysis or verification. 

This was bad.  In fact, this was devastating for somebody looking for justification to continue holding on to a life-long held Faith.  The holes in the logic were finally becoming obvious.  But as bad as it was, I was not even halfway finished with Lockyer’s collection of Messianic Prophecies.  I had only read the Messianic Prophecies that were solid enough to be classed in a section of the book called, ‘Specific Messianic Prophecies’.  Lockyer devoted the entire second half of his book, over 300 pages, to what he called ‘Symbolic Messianic Prophecies’.  At this point, any scrap of reason that Lockyer may have employed up to this point was spit on, trampled over and tossed in the compost bin.  Lockyer was finished with the firm ground of specificity, and was about to begin using types, allusions, models and metaphors as evidence of the Supernatural.  I was sunk.

“Throughout our study,” explained Lockyer, “we are endeavoring to prove that Jesus is prefigured not only in events and in things but also in persons.  As to the true significance of a type, it can be defined as an illustration from a lower sphere of a truth belonging to a higher” (page 265)  But Lockyer also cautioned, “…in no other phase of Bible study is there so much need of ‘sanctified common sense’ as in the handling of types.  Fancy, absurd, exaggerated interpretations must be shunned.” (page 265)  The problem was that Lockyer never defined what sort of type was within the realm of sanctified common sense, and what was absurd fancy.  There was no method of following “sanctified common sense” when categories were named but never defined.  Lockyer justified his use of symbols by claiming that the search for symbolism made the Old Testament vibrant in understanding.  “The Eastern mind has ever been pictorial, and as the Bible is an Eastern book, it is but natural that it should abound in figurative language.  To read all the Old Testament books without seeing Jesus, not only in direct predictions and promises, but also in veiled pictures and parables, leaves our reading somewhat flat and insipid.  When, however, we keep looking for Him, even in most unexpected places, our meditation becomes most satisfying and profitable.” (page 211).

How do I go about finding veiled predictions of Jesus?  According to Herbert Lockyer, I could find them in the lives of ‘conspicuous persons’.  In this way, desired aspects of the lives of various Old Testament characters could be gleaned as prophetic of Jesus, that is, if a desired match could first be made.  “The blood of Abel cried out for vengeance; the blood of Jesus ever cries out for forgiveness and mercy … Murder did not silence Abel, just as Calvary did not silence Jesus.  Faith is endowed with immortality and cannot therefore die.” (page 214)  Good enough, Abel is, by virtue of his murder, miraculously prophetic of the sacrifice of Jesus.  Similarly with Moses, Joseph, Aaron, Abraham, Job, and many others.  If Jesus’s death allows us to take possession of what God has already given us, then for Lockyer that is close enough to, let us say, Joshua!  If God provided help for Moses when he could not handle the sole burden of leadership, this must be prophetic of Jesus since He can handle the terrible burden of our sin.

According to Herbert Lockyer, prophetic types could also be gleaned from prescribed offices.  If Jesus could reveal God to man, then Jesus must be a prophet.  If His sacrifice bridged man to God with an everlasting covenant, then Jesus must be a priest.  If some day He is to rule over His redeemed subjects, then He must be a king.  With these common offices proclaimed of Jesus, it is then easy to find their prophetic counterparts in the Old Testament.  No, Lockyer rarely named a prophet, and by virtue of his office, designate that prophet as a foretelling counterpart.  The prophet Samuel, for instance, was not a symbolic type of Jesus just because he was a prophet.  No, what Lockyer did was far worse than this.  Persons were not the prophetic type, but descriptions were.  For instance, “Priests were consecrated to office by an anointing with oil.  The term Messiah, meaning ‘the anointed One,’ is applied to the high priest (Lev. 4:3, 5, 16; 6:22; 8:12), and is prophetic of Him who is our high priest” (page 269).  “The Psalms appear to be fuller than any other section of the truth of the glory of His kingdom when He shall take to Himself His right and power to reign in millennial bliss over all the earth … All through the psalter we find the constant blending of sovereignty and sacrifice.  We see Him as king and priest; prophet and priest, with His offices being interdependent, and inherent in the one person.  While in some of the king-passages there may be a reference to Israel’s great kings, David and Solomon, the language used is infinitely more glorious and mighty than their respective reigns, and must be thought of as predictions of Christ as king, and His kingdom (Ps. 2:21; 24; 45; 72; 100) are evidence of One who is coming as

A priest greater than Aaron and Melchizedek

A prophet greater than Jonah

A king greater than Solomon” (page 271) 

So there you have it – prophecy by tautology.  If Jesus merely fits the described job office, then it must be miraculous!  If the job office is somehow more elevated than it should normally be, it must be miraculous!  In my mind, this was like claiming that the United States Constitution was somehow a supernatural prediction of the existence of President Barack Obama. 

But Lockyer was saving the worst for last.  For his next proof from prophecy, Lockyer moved straight into Chuck Missler territory.  Missler, once my favorite Bible teacher, often claimed that every word of the Old Testament somehow pointed to Jesus Christ, and it was our privilege as believers to hunt for that spiritual treasure in the pages of Scripture.  I was very familiar with how Missler dredged prophetic types and symbols of Christ out of Old Testament historical events, religious rituals and, most importantly, from the architecture of the Tabernacle and the rituals of Levitical feasts and festivals.  In this way, for instance, Noah’s Ark was a prophetic foretelling of Jesus, since both the Ark and Jesus were the salvation of the Faithful.  The Passover Lamb of Moses was slaughtered and applied to the doorposts of the chosen people.  The bones of the lamb were not broken, and it was to be memorialized as a justification for God’s chosen people.  After all, Jesus himself was called The Lamb of God, wasn’t He?  The pillar of smoke by day and fire by night led the Children of Israel through the wilderness; it went before them, it served as their shelter and defense, and remained with them until the end of their journey – all claimed as miraculous foretelling of the character of Jesus.  The parting of the Red Sea served as a pathway to salvation – need I elaborate?  Even the manna from Heaven was prophetic of Jesus.  The manna was provided miraculously to the people as a gift from Heaven.  Lockyer, despite his cautions to keep within the bounds of ‘sanctified common sense’, often presented evidence that would appear ridiculous to anybody not already obligated to believe.  Manna was small like a wafer, just like the town that Jesus was born in was “little among the thousands of Judah” (Micah 5:2).  The manna was round and easy to handle, which can be easily seen to “typify Jesus in the circle of His eternal being” (page 301).  Manna was the color of coriander seed, so it was easily discovered, just like You Know Who.  It was made with honey and had the taste of fresh oil, just like You Guessed It.  This is literally on the level of claiming that the banana must be a miraculous creation of God since it so easily fits in the human hand.  Oh good grief, apologists are not this dense, are they? 

I discovered that with Herbert Lockyer, Messianic Prophecy was boundless in ludicrous and one-sided logic. The Burning Bush of Moses is somehow prophetic of the whole history of the Jewish People.  Just like the Burning Bush, the Jewish people were continually tortured, tormented, scattered and destroyed; and just like the Burning Bush, the Jewish people could not be extinguished.  Aaron’s dead rod was resurrected by the act of budding, just as … well you get the idea.

Just like Chuck Missler, Herbert Lockyer took great zeal in dissecting the description of the Tabernacle, primarily from the book of Exodus, and giving mystical and prophetic application to its contents, construction, architecture and its associated rituals.  Which, Lockyer reasoned, made sense considering God spent only six days creating the entire universe, but a whole forty days explaining to Moses the details of the Tabernacle.  Lockyer thus set out to demonstrate that the symbolic meaning of the Tabernacle was an endless labyrinth of cipher codes and riddles.  Lockyer spent 140 pages of his 600 page book on the Tabernacle alone, and the illogical reasoning just got more absurd with each turned page.

Every detail of the Tabernacle, no matter how trivial, was used as some prediction of Jesus.  Lockyer never showed how the Bible itself specified that it was to be taken as prophetic.  He never demonstrated or described any methodology that the Bible specified, or that he was to use, beyond ‘sanctified common sense’.  Lockyer could claim that the very architecture of the Tabernacle, with its various courts and chambers, could all somehow typify Jesus, and since there were no rules to his procedure he had no rules to break.  He could easily say that everywhere the Bible mentioned silver, it actually meant blood – therefore if the ugly badger skins of the tabernacle were supported by silver pegs, then this must mean that Jesus, who had no beauty that we should desire Him (Isa. 53:2), and yet rested on a foundation of His blood, was foretold in this obscure description of the Tabernacle.  There was no reason to think that silver meant blood, brass meant judgment, or iron meant strength.  There was no reason to think I could sneak secret meanings into symbols.  Why is Jesus resting on blood?  Because it fits the typology.  If we wish silver to mean love or faith or justice or sacrifice or anything else we perceive as a virtue, it would fit just as well.  Lockyer was shaving the edges of the puzzle pieces to make them fit.

The sheer absurdity of Lockyer’s prophetic reasoning can be demonstrated with how he tortures a single aspect of the Tabernacle, and how he extrapolates and distorts it beyond all logic.  The gate of the outer court of the tabernacle is described in a total of three Biblical verses:

Exodus 27:16

¹⁶ And for the gate of the court shall be an hanging of twenty cubits, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, wrought with needlework: and their pillars shall be four, and their sockets four. 

Exodus 38:18-19
¹⁸ And the hanging for the gate of the court was needlework, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen: and twenty cubits was the length, and the height in the breadth was five cubits, answerable to the hangings of the court.

¹⁹ And their pillars were four, and their sockets of brass four; their hooks of silver, and the overlaying of their chapiters and their fillets of silver. 

This is all Scripture describes of the gate of the outer court.  But Herbert Lockyer expounded on the typology of its prophetic elements for five full pages!  Lockyer saw the face of Jesus in gate to the outer court as much as a deluded believer will see the face of Jesus in a toasted tortilla.

First, explained Lockyer, the very fact that a gate to the outer court actually exists speaks of God’s gracious generosity in providing the sinful Israelite with a way to enter into the Tabernacle for cleansing.  Lockyer uses this bare fact as an excuse for a little preaching.  “What a world of misery and woe our would have been had the Lord Jesus not have come!  Think of the world with no church, no Bible, no Gospel, no holy men and women!  Why such a world would be but a reflection of hell!  But let us ever be grateful to God that there is a gate divinely provided whereby mankind can enter in and be reconciled to God.” (page 365)  Not only this, but Lockyer explains that the gate to the outer court was the only gate, and follows this simple observation with another full page of preaching on Christ as the only gate to salvation.  The gate to the outer court was 20 cubits wide which, Lockyer observes, is wide enough to admit any sinful Isrealite who wishes cleansing, which Lockyer followed with another half page of preaching.  Lockyer locks onto the width of the gate, leans over the pulpit at his faithful audience and preaches, “Think of the Width of God’s love – Think of the Width of Man’s need – Think of the Width of Christ’s Redemption”! (page 367)

Lockyer was far from finished with dissecting the symbolic meaning of the gate to the outer court.  The gate to the outer court was a strong gate, composed of four pillars and kept secure by sockets, pins and cords.  Needless to say, Lockyer tied this to the salvation of Jesus which is also strong, but that was just the beginning for this bit of typology.  The gate was strong because the way into the outer court was composed of four pillars, just like the work of Jesus is supported with the four infallible pillars called the Gospels.  Not content with being predictive of the four Gospels, Lockyer then claimed that the number four was the number that connected the threefold Trinity of God with the oneness of the world.  There are four pillars supporting the outer gate, just like there are four … fill in the blank.  Lockyer claims the four pillars represent the four great elements of the earth, the four principle divisions of the day, the four seasons of the year and the four cardinal points of the compass.  The methodology of this kind of reasoning was apparent to me.  Find a number in the architecture of the Tabernacle, any number that we run across, and find something in the life of Jesus make it predict.  If we can not find anything in the life of Jesus, try something else even tangentially relevant, in this case, even mistaken attributes of the natural world!  Lockyer makes the number of Gospels fit in his description of the gate to the outer court - maybe the number of disciples, the number of years in Jesus’s ministry or the number of people Jesus took with Him to witness His transfiguration would fit in other places.    Lockyer not only pulled this trick with the number of pillars supporting the gate to the outer court, he did this with the number of spaces between the pillars!  With four pillars, we get three spaces between the pillars, which “clearly illustrates the Saviour who Himself declared that He was the Way, Truth,  Life (John 14:6).  Across these three openings we can also write His threefold title, so fragrant to sinners saved by His grace – LORD JESUS CHRIST.” (page 368) Of course, with this golden opportunity of the number three presented to him in this most contrived manner, he cannot pass up an opportunity to use this as predictive of the Trinity.  Three spaces between the four pillars?  This is a clear and unmistakable reference to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Sure, why not?  How could anybody miss this?

 

Lockyer continued for page after page, wrenching every drop of meaning he could out of the gate to the tabernacle’s outer court.  The gate was illuminated since it was pitched toward the East – therefore Jesus.  After entering the outer court through the gate the first thing one sees is the brazen alter, brass symbolizing judgment and water symbolizing washing – therefore Jesus.  The sheer beauty of the gate, the warming rays of the sun shining upon the four pillars with a curtain of fine needlework, colored in blue, purple and scarlet – therefore Jesus.  The colors of the linen somehow represented divine attributes.  Lockyer explained that the blue in the linen curtain represents Heaven, the scarlet of course is a symbol of blood.  The purple, which intertwined the linen with the blue and scarlet, is naturally and mixture of those two colors.  The heavenly mingled with fleshly blood must be prophetic of the dual nature of Jesus; He who came to earth from Heaven, fully God, yet paradoxically fully Man.

Lockyer continued his exposition of the gate to the outer court by considering the brass sockets, which for some reason represent the judgement of Jesus, and the silver hooks, which somehow represent His blood – therefore Jesus.  “What a beautiful gate we have in Jesus!  How miserable would have been our lot had he not come and combined all that the colors of the gate suggest in that wondrous life of His?” (page 372)

In the previous few paragraphs, I described Lockyer’s absurd prophetic extrapolation from a single piece of tabernacle architecture.  Lockyer continued in this vein, dissecting and mysticizing every dimension of the tabernacle, every piece of furniture, every feast, every offering, every ceremony, even pulling prophetic meaning from the tassles dangling off priestly garments.  No minutia was too small for Herbert Lockyer.   I could not believe that into this book was packed all this irrationality, especially considering that Lockyer lead off each chapter with warnings not to get carried away with the imagination when studying Messianic Prophecy.  What was the boundary between ‘sanctified common sense’ and fanciful imagination?  Whether Lockyer used his ‘sanctified common sense” or not, Messianic Prophecy simply had no rules to follow.  It’s logic was as bogus and fraudulent as using the architecture of Stonehenge or The Great Pyramid to predict the future.  Come to think of it, Chuck Missler did that too.

My old Calvary pastors constantly told their faithful congregations that apologetics was useful for defending and justifying the Gospel of Jesus to unbelievers and skeptics.  They told me that Messianic prophecy could be a great witnessing tool!  Non-Christians were willfully repressing their innate knowledge of the True God, but they showed their true reprobate nature by denying the obvious signs that were given to us by God.  Christianity, I was constantly told, was a reasonable and rational Belief, not a blind leap of Faith, and apologetics evidences like Messianic Prophecy was clear evidence of the truthfulness of the Gospel.  I still remember that tearful evening when I converted to Christianity and devoted my entire life to His purpose.  I converted because at the time I was miserable and desperate for answers that I thought Jesus could provide me.  I did not convert to Christianity because of apologetic arguments and evidence.  But if an unbelieving skeptic were to ever ask me why I was a Christian, I could confidently claim that it was due to rational evidence.  But Lockyer let the cat out of the bag.  According to him, instead of using Messianic Prophecy as a witnessing tool for unbelievers, it was to be used as cement for a Faith that was already there.  After demonstrating a prophecy of the Virgin Birth of Jesus that was, like all others, a statement ripped out of all context, Lockyer confessed:

In the presence of such a holy miracle, ‘there can be no fitting attitude of the human intellect save that of acceptance of truth, without any attempt to explain the absolute mystery.’  With this ‘mystery of godliness’ in mind, we should give heed to this dictum:
I will seek to believe rather than to reason;to adore rather than to explain;to give thanks rather than to penetrate;to love rather than to know;to humble myself rather than to speak - page 61

I was dumbstruck at this confession of something that I think I already knew deep down but was afraid to accept.  The Christian apologists that I had placed so much trust in had no real interest in reason, rationality or evidence.  The Christian apologist was not spending vast amounts of their time and energy into cooking up these evidences for the Faith to convince anybody.  It was a front.  The Christian, Lockyer confessed, was to believe first, and fit reason to that belief later.  In over 600 pages of Lockyer’s text, I could not find a single ‘Messianic Prophecy’ that I could imagine any non-Christian would find convincing or even merely plausible.  Not a single one.  And I, a Christian struggling desperately to hold on to any kind of Faith that would keep me within the Christian fold, was finding each and every one of these astounding prophecies to be strained contrivances at best.  There was no nice way of saying it.  I discovered that I was being lied to.  These claims of Messianic Prophecies were not misstatements.  I was not missing some slippery nuance of interpretation in the Scriptures.  I was being told the Bible contained things that were simply, blatantly not there.  Effort was being made by this Christian apologist to deceive me into believing.  It did not take me long to correlate the lies of Herbert Lockyer with lies of every other Christian apologist I had ever heard.  I recognized the same tactics and strategies used by Christians like Skip Heitzig, Chuck Missler, and other apologists that I had trusted and respected in the past.

I do not remember praying after reading this book.  I was too furious.  I thought of my Josh McDowell books, the countless apologetic cassettes that I had practically memorized, and the endless assurances from my pastors that Christianity was a Faith of evidence and reason.  All I could think of was that I was lied to.  Herbert Lockyer’s book All the Messianic Prophecies of the Bible single handedly did more damage to my Christian Faith than any book I had ever read before or since. 

-----------------------------------------------

At some point, I decided to bring my doubts up to the Christians that I felt closest with at the time – my home Bible Study group.  I did not tell them that I was having doubts about my Christian Faith; I was afraid to expose too much.  I simply told them about the disappointment that I felt reading Lockyer and his giant book of Messianic Prophecies.  “They felt so contrived to me.  I mean some of them made sense, but most of them just seemed so far flung.  It was like reading stuff into a Nostradamus prophecy to make it look true.”

They had just the reading material for me!  New paperbacks were making the rounds in popular Evangelical circles and they suggested that I read them to rejuvenate my Faith.  “I know how you feel”, the group leader’s wife told me.  “We all sometimes feel tired from the burdens of the world.  It is spiritual burnout.  Nothing to be ashamed of, but it can really affect your Faith.  Have you ever heard of this new book called, Blue Like Jazz?  You should read that!  It is really good.  Another good one is Velvet Elvis.  They are written for Christians who are exhausted by their own Faith.  They sort of give a new and fresh way to look at Faith.”

So on that recommendation, I read the new and popular paperback by college student Donald Miller called Blue Like Jazz.  I could tell that my Bible Study home group had no idea why my Faith was dying.  I read Blue Like Jazz in a single evening and found it to be condescending tripe. 

Another girl in my recommended a new, in-depth Bible Study course being offered by La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church.  This wasn’t just the same thing I had always heard before about the Bible, she assured me.  The elderly couple who taught the class were engineers, and were surely able to relate to my scientific reasoning.  So on her recommendation, I joined her for the inaugural first session in the new in-depth Bible Study course.  I sat in the outdoor patio on a cool Monday evening with about a dozen other thirsty students of the Bible.  The elderly engineer said that the Bible could withstand the scrutiny of honest doubters.  We knew it could handle scrutiny because we knew it was the inspired Word of God.  The entire Bible, this engineer told us ala Herbert Lockyer, pointed to Jesus Christ.  After all, it could be demonstrated that the center of the Bible was THE LORD.  Literally – the center of the Bible!  Psalm 118:8, the very center of the Bible, tells us, “It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man.”  The very center of the Bible warns us to trust God over man.  And what is at the very center of Psalm 118:8?  THE LORD, with six words before and six words after!  The entire Bible surrounds THE LORD!

I felt like Herbert Lockyer himself was teaching this in-depth class.  The session of the class was not even 10 minutes old and I had heard more illogical nonsense than I cared to hear.  I turned around and saw the dozen or so other students furiously taking notes as they absorbed every absurdity the instructor told them.  My mind shut down and I daydreamed until the class was over.  I never went returned.

I did not know what to do.  I was angry, frustrated and disgusted.  I felt like I was being made a fool of, and I did not know where to turn.  I had never in my life read anything related to my Christian Faith that was not first approved in some way by my Church.  Any book I read was from the Church library or bookstore.  Teaching pamphlets and cassettes were not read until first recommended by church friends.  I never encountered anything that deviated from the Orthodox.  I never knew of anything that was not first filtered by the Party Line of Orthodoxy.  Of course I knew that such things existed.  One of my favorite science writers, Isaac Asimov, had his Guide to the Bible in the old university library, but I always felt unsure about checking books like that out.  I had always loved his science writing, but I knew that he, along with other favorite writers like Carl Sagan, were definitely not Christians.  What could non-Christians possibly know about the Bible or my Faith?  I almost felt queasy at the thought of reading books by ‘pseudo-intellectuals’, as Pastor Skip Heitzig had called them.  They may have known the Bible, but they did not know the Author of the Bible, and thinking themselves wise, they would make themselves out to be fools.  But if I was not going to tell my Christian friends about the true dire condition of my Faith and Doubts, then I had to remove all fear and forge ahead.  I went to the public library and started browsing the section few Christians venture into – Religion. 

I no longer cared about only reading safe, orthodox opinions that I knew I would agree with before I even read it.  I had done that for years.  But the Master Physician’s diagnosis was not working and I needed a second opinion.  I grabbed the first thing that looked challenging, hence, heretical to my Faith.  The thin book by David Penchansky had a title that I would keep hidden from my fellow believers like a secret issue of Penthouse.  I opened Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible, and immediately read the opening, shocking words, “Many texts in the Hebrew Bible assume a polytheistic universe...”  It was scholarship.  It was damnable heresy.  And I could not put it down.  I read it like a parched animal laps water in the oasis.

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter