Tools to Deconstruct and Construct a Religious Faith (Part I)
Throughout the preceding five essays of Prehistory of the Bible: A Prelude to Relational Faith, we have undertaken a journey through humanity's immense evolutionary, cultural, and religious history to understand the world from which Jewish and Christian biblical traditions eventually emerged. We began with questions concerning reality and its interpretation (Essay 1), moved through humanity's evolutionary development and its possible relational significance (Essays 2A-2B), examined prehistoric social life, symbolic imagination, and the possible emergence of religious understanding (Essays 3A-3B-3C), and followed the development of ancient civilizations, mythology, sacred narratives, and biblical origins (Essays 4A-4B-4C). Finally, we explored how inherited religious traditions became living systems of belief, institutional authority, and communal identity (Essays 5A-5B-5C).
Our purpose has not been to disprove God, diminish Scripture, or persuade Christian readers to abandon their faith. Nor has it been to defend inherited religious explanations against the findings of contemporary scholarship. Rather, we have sought to understand how human beings came to interpret their world religiously, how those interpretations developed historically, and how particular religious traditions eventually acquired the authority of sacred truth.
Essay One established the philosophical and methodological foundations of our inquiry. We distinguished reality from our descriptions of reality, philosophical investigation from theological interpretation, and historical explanation from religious confession. We introduced relational reality as a developing philosophical understanding of existence without presuming that its conclusions must establish Christian theology. This distinction would become essential throughout the essays that followed: reality must remain free to challenge our interpretations of it, including those we regard as religiously authoritative.
Essays 2A and 2B situated humanity within the long evolutionary history of life on Earth. Human beings did not appear independently of the natural world but emerged through biological processes extending across immense periods of time. Our bodily existence, capacities for responsiveness, social relationships, and developing consciousness belong within that evolutionary history. We also began considering how a relational understanding of reality might interpret humanity's emergence without requiring evolution to have been directed toward the eventual appearance of human beings, religious consciousness, or Christianity.
Essays 3A, 3B, and 3C carried this investigation into humanity's prehistoric worlds. We examined the development of social relationships, cultural practices, memory, language, imagination, symbolic thought, ritual behavior, and the possible emergence of religious interpretation. Long before written Scripture, human beings were already responding to their environments, confronting mortality, developing communal identities, remembering their ancestors, interpreting unusual experiences, and constructing meaningful understandings of the worlds they inhabited. Religious imagination did not emerge outside human history but developed within it, through processes whose beginnings remain only partially accessible to contemporary investigation.
Essays 4A, 4B, and 4C followed these developments into increasingly settled communities, ancient civilizations, institutional religion, mythology, writing, and the religious environments from which biblical traditions arose. We encountered the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, and the wider ancient Near East, recognizing that the biblical world entered a religious conversation already thousands of years old. Israel's traditions emerged within this interconnected historical environment, preserving, contesting, adapting, and reinterpreting inherited understandings of divine reality. Scripture itself possessed a history before becoming Scripture.
Essays 5A, 5B, and 5C examined how religious inheritances became living systems of belief. We considered how narratives, memories, rituals, institutions, sacred writings, and claims of divine authority accumulated across generations, how interpretations became increasingly authoritative, and how historically developed religious understandings eventually came to appear self-evident to those who inherited them. We also distinguished the historical explanation of religious development from the philosophical and theological question of whether divine reality exists. The fact that human religious traditions can be investigated through natural historical processes neither establishes nor automatically disproves the existence of God. Nevertheless, historical evidence may challenge, revise, or undermine particular claims made in God's name.
Taken together, these investigations have brought us to a consequential recognition. Christianity, like the religious traditions from which it developed, possesses a human and historical ancestry. Its sacred texts, theological interpretations, doctrinal formulations, and institutional authorities emerged through generations of human experience, reflection, disagreement, transmission, and reinterpretation. The Christianity inherited by contemporary believers is not identical in every respect to the religious understandings of ancient Israel, Second Temple Judaism, the earliest followers of Jesus, or subsequent generations of Christian communities.
Recognizing this history does not tell us everything we need to know about Christianity's truth claims. It does, however, challenge the assumption that inherited religious understandings should be accepted as historically certain merely because they have been taught as sacred, traditional, or divinely authorized.
And here our investigation begins to change direction.
Until now, we have principally asked how humanity's religious worlds developed. We must now ask what these discoveries mean for those who inhabit those worlds as believers.
For many Christians, these are not merely academic questions. Biblical narratives have provided explanations of human origins, sin, suffering, divine judgment, salvation, and the meaning of Jesus Christ. Scripture has served as a source of spiritual confidence and religious authority. Churches, families, and communities have transmitted these understandings as essential features of Christian identity. To reconsider them may therefore involve more than revising historical opinions. It may disturb the foundations upon which one's understanding of God, faith, belonging, and hope has been built.
Yet the possibility that inherited explanations may require revision does not necessarily mean that Christian faith itself must disappear. It raises a different and more demanding question: Can Christian faith remain intellectually responsible when the historical certainties upon which some of its familiar expressions have depended can no longer be sustained?
The final three essays of our Prelude will investigate this question through three successive movements.
Essay Six, Can Faith Survive What We Have Learned?, begins with the believer's encounter with historical criticism. We will consider what happens when religious authority, biblical interpretation, inherited doctrines, and previously unquestioned explanations become subject to critical examination and inquiry. We will ask what must be reconsidered, what may need to be relinquished, and what might remain open to Christian commitment. Our purpose will not be to guarantee the survival of every inherited conviction, but to consider whether faith can develop beyond the demand for historical certainty without surrendering intellectual honesty or religious seriousness.
Essay Seven, Toward a Relational Christian Theology, will move from critical reconsideration toward constructive theological interpretation. Having examined the evolutionary, historical, and cultural development of humanity and religion, we will ask how Christian faith might understand God, creation, revelation, Jesus Christ, resurrection, salvation, and divine participation within an open and developing world. We will explore panentheism and the possibility of understanding God as relationally present within creation rather than primarily as a supernatural agent intervening from outside its natural processes. Yet we must also ask what warrants such theological interpretations, how divine reality might be distinguished from nature itself, and whether relational theology contributes something meaningful beyond redescribing reality in religious language. These proposals must remain open to philosophical examination rather than being treated as conclusions established by science, history, or relational ontology.
Essay Eight, Relational Theology and the Christian Worldview, will bring these investigations together by examining whether independent philosophical inquiry, historical scholarship, Christian theological interpretation, ethics, and practical participation can form a coherent and livable understanding of reality. We will consider how theology often functions as an implicit philosophy for believers and why a responsible Christian worldview must recognize the philosophical assumptions underlying its religious convictions. We will also return to several enduring questions encountered in the ancient world: Why does the world exist? What sustains life? Why do human beings suffer and die? How should communities live together? And what powers govern the circumstances upon which human survival depends? These questions will allow us to consider what contemporary science, relational philosophy, and Christian theology may each contribute without requiring their explanations to become identical.
Throughout these final essays, one methodological commitment must remain intact. We must not begin with Christian conclusions we wish to preserve and then organize scientific knowledge, historical evidence, and philosophical reasoning to validate them. Neither should we assume that historical criticism necessarily requires the abandonment of every Christian conviction. Reality, interpretation, philosophy, and theology must remain distinguishable, even as they challenge and inform one another.
Our governing progression remains:
Reality → Ontology → Metaphysics → Interpretation → Theology → Ethics → Participation
This sequence does not establish a hierarchy in which one discipline possesses every answer. Rather, it reminds us that our interpretations of reality must remain accountable to the reality they seek to understand, and that our theological commitments must eventually be examined in relation to the ethical and practical consequences they produce.
12 "No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him." (1 John 4.12ff)
In other words, if we affirm that God exists, we must be prepared to explain what we mean by that affirmation, what grounds we have for believing it, and how such faith becomes evident in the ways we live and relate to one another. For the Christian, the Johannine witness adds a further theological conviction: faith in God is inseparable from the practice of love, through which believers understand themselves as participating in the life and Spirit of God.
For Christian readers, this investigation offers neither the comfort of unquestioned certainty nor the demand that faith be abandoned before inquiry begins. It offers something more difficult, but potentially more constructive: permission to examine inherited beliefs without fear that honest questions are themselves acts of unfaithfulness.
We may discover that some understandings of Scripture, revelation, divine action, and Christian doctrine cannot remain unchanged. Others may acquire new meaning through historical reconsideration. Still others may require forms of theological reconstruction we have not yet anticipated. None should be preserved merely because it is familiar, nor rejected merely because it belongs to religious tradition.
Perhaps the most important question, then, is not whether we can recover the biblical certainty we once possessed before the development of modern historical and critical scholarship. It is whether a critically informed Christian faith might become more faithful to reality by relinquishing the demand that reality conform to its inherited explanations.
That is where Essay Six begins. Not with the assumption that every traditional belief must survive, but with the freedom to ask how contemporary Christian faith might grow more attentive to the world we inhabit in light of what we have learned through modern science, archaeology, history, and critical scholarship.
Consequently, we are not attempting to defend inherited biblical accounts of Israel's origins against modern archaeological investigation. Rather, we are allowing archaeology, history, and contemporary knowledge to inform our understanding of how Israel's religious identity and traditions developed. This can be especially difficult for Christians whose understanding of biblical/Scriptural authority requires inherited historical interpretations to remain unquestioned, even when contemporary evidence calls them into question.
Most of us do not begin our religious lives by independently examining the historical foundations of our beliefs. We are born into families, communities, and cultures that have already interpreted the world for us. Long before we develop the intellectual tools necessary to evaluate those interpretations, we encounter religious stories, expectations, practices, and explanations through the people upon whom we depend.
For many Christians, particularly within conservative evangelical traditions, this inheritance includes a familiar account of reality. God created the world and humanity. Human disobedience introduced sin and death. God established a covenant with Israel, communicated through prophets, inspired the Scriptures, and ultimately revealed himself through Jesus Christ. Salvation became available through Christ's death and resurrection, and human history moves toward the fulfillment of God's purposes.
Different Christian traditions interpret this account differently. Nevertheless, its central elements have frequently been presented as belonging together within a single coherent explanation of creation, humanity, history, and redemption.
Such an inheritance can provide a powerful sense of belonging and purpose. It can also establish intellectual boundaries that believers may not initially recognize. Certain questions are welcomed, while others appear dangerous. Some uncertainties are regarded as opportunities for learning, while others seem to threaten the foundations of faith itself.
The difficulty becomes especially acute when particular interpretations of Scripture are presented not simply as persuasive religious understandings, but as the necessary conditions of Christian belief.
In such circumstances, believers may come to understand fidelity to God as requiring fidelity to a particular historical or theological system.
When Knowledge Disturbs the Inherited World
The challenge often begins quietly.
A Christian encounters evolutionary biology and learns that humanity emerged through a long history of biological development rather than appearing independently of other living organisms. Archaeology reveals ancient civilizations whose histories complicate familiar biblical chronologies. Comparative religious studies identify literary and cultural relationships between biblical narratives and older traditions of the ancient Near East. Biblical scholarship examines the authorship, composition, transmission, and interpretation of writings once assumed to have originated in simpler ways.
These discoveries do not necessarily challenge every Christian doctrine. They do, however, challenge particular historical claims upon which some theological systems have depended.
Consider the traditional relationship between Adam, the Fall, and salvation. If human beings emerged through evolutionary processes and biological death existed long before humanity, inherited explanations that locate the biological origin of death in a single human act (Genesis 3.6) become difficult to maintain. That difficulty does not automatically establish that the biblical narratives lack theological meaning. It does require reconsideration of how their meaning relates to historical reality.
Similar questions arise concerning the Flood, the development of Israelite religion, the formation of Scripture, and the historical diversity of early Christianity.
The difficulty is not simply that modern scholarship offers unfamiliar information. It is that new knowledge may expose the distinction between the religious world believers inherited and the historical world in which their traditions actually developed.
When these worlds appear inconsistent, the consequences may become deeply personal.
The Personal Cost of Reconsideration
Religious convictions rarely exist in isolation. They are embedded within family relationships, friendships, worshiping communities, moral commitments, personal memories, and experiences interpreted as encounters with God.
To reconsider inherited Christianity may therefore mean more than changing one's understanding of an ancient text. It may involve uncertainty concerning one's religious identity, fear of disappointing loved ones, anxiety about spiritual consequences, or the loss of a community in which one has found belonging.
For some believers, historical criticism may initially appear to threaten everything at once. If one explanation proves mistaken, perhaps the larger system is mistaken. If Scripture contains historical difficulties, perhaps revelation is impossible. If religious beliefs possess human ancestry, perhaps God is only a human invention.
Yet none of these conclusions follows automatically from the preceding observation.
The inadequacy of one interpretation does not establish the inadequacy of every alternative interpretation. Nor does the historical development of religious understanding, by itself, determine whether the divine reality believers seek to understand is genuine or not.
At the same time, such distinctions should not become convenient reassurances that permit believers to disregard difficult evidence. Historical investigation can genuinely undermine particular beliefs, and some theological commitments may not survive its findings unchanged.
The question is whether we can acknowledge those consequences without treating intellectual reconsideration as a failure of religious loyalty.
Religious certainty may be comforting, but comfort is not itself a reliable measure of truth. An inherited worldview deserves examination not because it is necessarily mistaken, but because it makes its own claims about reality.
And if those claims concern reality, they must remain answerable to what we discover about it.
Every tradition possesses convictions through which it understands its identity. Religious communities also preserve practices and teachings considered worthy of unusual reverence. Such commitments can sustain communal continuity, moral responsibility, and meaningful forms of belonging.
Problems arise, however, when reverence becomes a prohibition against examination.
A religious interpretation may become so closely associated with divine authority that questioning the interpretation appears equivalent to questioning God. A doctrine may be regarded as beyond criticism because generations of believers have accepted it. A particular understanding of Scripture may be defended as sacred even when the interpretation itself possesses an identifiable and comparatively recent history.
At that point, the distinction between divine reality and human religious understanding has become obscured. And the consequences can be substantial.
Questions that might otherwise invite investigation become occasions for guilt or fear. Evidence that challenges inherited claims may be regarded as spiritually dangerous before it has been carefully examined. Intellectual disagreement may become a test of religious loyalty.
These responses are not universal features of Christianity. Christian traditions have also sustained extensive philosophical inquiry, textual criticism, theological debate, and intellectual reform. Nevertheless, the tendency to protect established religious interpretations through appeals to sacred authority has appeared repeatedly within Christian history.
Its presence deserves examination wherever it occurs.
The Difference Between Reverence and Certainty
Reverence does not require the conviction that human understanding is complete.
Indeed, if God is genuinely greater than our religious descriptions, then the limitation of those descriptions should not be surprising. Human language, memory, interpretation, and theological reasoning operate within historical circumstances. They remain capable of insight, but they also remain vulnerable to misunderstanding.
Recognizing these limitations does not require dismissing religious experience or the possibility of revelation. It requires distinguishing the reality to which religious language refers from the language through which that reality is interpreted.
A Christian may regard Scripture with deep seriousness while acknowledging the historical circumstances in which it took shape. A believer may retain theological commitments while examining the arguments supporting them. Religious devotion may coexist with uncertainty regarding particular doctrines, interpretations, and historical claims.
What cannot responsibly be assumed is that designating a belief as sacred automatically establishes its factual accuracy. Religious experiences and inherited teachings may carry deep significance within their traditions, but this does not guarantee the accuracy of every explanation subsequently attached to them. Rather, they invite careful inquiry instead of exemption from it.
The Responsibility to Question
Historical inquiry gives us an opportunity to reconsider what earlier generations designated as sacred or divine without beginning from the assumption that criticism constitutes irreverence. This freedom is not a demand that every belief be abandoned. It is the recognition that inherited beliefs should remain open to examination according to the kinds of claims they make.
Historical propositions should be examined through historical evidence. Scientific assertions should be examined through scientific investigation. Philosophical arguments should be evaluated through reasoning and criticism. Theological interpretations require consideration of their coherence, historical grounding, religious significance, and explanatory responsibilities.
These forms of inquiry are not interchangeable, but neither are they intellectually isolated.
Theological claims frequently include philosophical and historical assumptions. Yet, as philosophical proposals may be challenged by scientific findings, so too may religious experiences receive competing psychological, cultural, or theological examination.
Responsible inquiry therefore asks not merely whether a belief belongs to a revered tradition, but what reasons justify accepting it.
The freedom to question is not the absence of commitment. It is the possibility of allowing commitment to become more discerning. For Christian believers, this freedom may be understood not as a departure from faith but as one possible expression of its intellectual responsibility.
Yet that possibility brings us to a more fundamental distinction. What, precisely, are we questioning when we question an inherited understanding of God?
Throughout this Prelude, we have distinguished reality from the human interpretations through which reality becomes understood.
That distinction now assumes particular importance not only for Christian faith but for religious faith more broadly. The natural world existed long before human beings developed scientific theories about it. Human relationships preceded the philosophical systems through which later generations interpreted social existence. Likewise, religious traditions developed through human attempts to understand experiences, events, circumstances, and possibilities that appeared meaningful or significant.
Christian theology belongs within this larger human activity of interpretation. It arose from particular historical communities attempting to understand their experiences of life, the sacred, and what they believed to be encounters with God. Through their stories, memories, religious practices, and developing theological language, these communities came to express convictions concerning God, creation, humanity, revelation, salvation, and ultimate purpose. Those convictions may contain genuine insight, remain open to reconsideration, or prove mistaken. But the theological descriptions themselves should not be confused with the reality they seek to describe, including the possibility of a divine reality present and active within the natural world.
If God exists, divine reality cannot simply be equated with the doctrines through which religious communities have come to understand their inherited faith. Ancient experiences interpreted as encounters with the divine were remembered, narrated, transmitted, and repeatedly reinterpreted across generations. As religious traditions developed, these interpretations became increasingly formalized through sacred writings, theological arguments, doctrines, and confessions. Over time, such formulations sometimes came to function as substitutes for the earlier experiences and interpretations from which they arose. What began as an attempt to remember and understand an encounter with the sacred would eventually become an authoritative explanation of what God must be - rightly or wrongly.
Yet a theological formulation is not the original experience, just as the original experience is not necessarily an unmediated disclosure of divine reality. Each belongs to a developing history of human interpretation - both personally as well as communally. Recognizing these distinctions does not disprove God, nor does it establish that any particular doctrine adequately describes God. It reminds us that inherited explanations of the divine are not identical with the divine reality they seek to understand.
Consequently, the larger questions remain as important today as they were for the ancients. Does divine reality exist? And if so, what is God? Is God adequately understood through the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity? What might we learn from the different understandings preserved within other religious traditions? Or is God, like reality itself, more mysterious and expansive than our inherited descriptions have allowed us to recognize?
For Christians who affirm that God is real, these questions need not represent a departure from faith. They may instead express a desire to understand more faithfully the God in whom they already believe. Ancient peoples interpreted their experiences of the divine within the worlds they inhabited. Successive generations continued that work through changing cultures, philosophies, and theological traditions. Why should we presume that the search for a more adequate understanding of God has ended?
Our contemporary world has been profoundly reshaped by evolutionary biology, cosmology, archaeology, neuroscience, historical criticism, and the expanding study of human consciousness, culture, and religion. These developments invite us to reconsider not only what earlier generations believed about God, but also how they arrived at those beliefs and whether their explanations remain adequate to what we now understand about reality - whether divine or natural or one-and-the-same.
Perhaps, then, our task is not to recover a supposedly final description of God from the ancient past, nor to abandon Christian faith because inherited explanations require revision. Rather, it is to continue the human and religious search for God within the world we actually inhabit, bringing our contemporary knowledge, experiences, questions, and judgments into conversation with the long history of faith that precedes us.
If God is real, our understanding of God need not be finished.
The Historical Development of God-Language
Ancient communities interpreted the powers upon which their lives depended through divine figures, mythological narratives, ritual practices, and communal traditions. Israelite religion developed within the wider religious worlds of the ancient Near East. Jewish and Christian interpretations continued to change through own historically situated experiences re political disruption, cultural exchange, textual interpretation, philosophical engagement, and institutional development.
Consequently, later Christian understandings of God cannot be assumed to have existed in their fully developed forms throughout biblical history. The language of divine sovereignty, holiness, judgment, providence, transcendence, incarnation, and salvation possesses complicated historical and theological backgrounds.
These histories do not necessarily invalidate inherited theological claims. They do, however, remind us that such doctrines are historically developed interpretations of divine reality rather than complete or final descriptions of God. Too often, Christians have mistaken the discussion of inherited beliefs within Bible studies and church fellowships for genuine critical examination, while the underlying doctrinal assumptions remain unquestioned. Yet this is precisely the problem we must address: faithfulness to God does not necessarily require agreement with established church authorities. It may instead require disagreement, critical reconsideration, and a willingness to revise what we have inherited.
Recognizing the historical development of God-language invites a further question: To what extent do our inherited theological categories adequately describe the reality they seek to interpret?
Can We Distinguish God from Human Conceptions of God?
The distinction between God and our understandings of God is necessary, but it introduces a significant philosophical difficulty.
We do not possess an uninterpreted description of God against which every theological claim can be directly compared. Nor can we recover the original religious experiences from which many inherited descriptions arose. That is because our understanding is critically mediated through language, memory, experience, religious traditions, and philosophical reasoning.
Consequently, affirming God's reality does not establish that our inherited descriptions of God are adequate. We must continue examining how those descriptions arose and whether they remain faithful to the reality they seek to understand and teach.
We must ask what warrants theological affirmation in the first place.
How should we understand experiences interpreted as encounters with God?
What might other religious traditions contribute to our understanding of divine reality?
And might the natural, relational world we inhabit also be understood as suffused with divine presence, without requiring supernatural intervention from beyond it?
These questions cannot be resolved by acknowledging the limitations of human language alone.
They require the constructive investigation reserved for Essay Seven.
For now, our immediate concern is more modest.
Christians may discover that certain inherited descriptions of God are inadequate without concluding that God is therefore unreal. Others may find that these discoveries raise deeper questions about divine reality itself. Both responses deserve serious consideration. Which is precisely these discourses are being separately written with the Prehistory of the Bible and Reality & Metaphysics series.
A responsible Christian faith must remain willing to reconsider not only its inherited descriptions of God but also the assumptions through which it understands divine presence within the natural world.
Both possibilities must remain open.
A responsible faith cannot guarantee in advance that its examination will leave every fundamental conviction intact.
Scripture Within Human History
For many Christians, the question of religious certainty eventually becomes a question concerning Scripture. If the Bible is regarded as divine revelation, what follows when its writings are understood as historically composed, edited, transmitted, translated, collected, and interpreted?
Our earlier essays have already examined the human ancestry of biblical traditions. We need not reconstruct that history again.
What requires attention here is its significance for Christian belief.
The Bible is not a single composition produced at one historical moment. It is a diverse collection of literary works emerging through different communities, languages, historical circumstances, and theological concerns.
Its writings preserve narrative, poetry, legal traditions, prophecy, wisdom, correspondence, apocalyptic literature, theological argument, and other literary forms. They reflect historical experiences, inherited cultural assumptions, and changing religious understandings.
Recognizing these features does not necessarily diminish Scripture's religious importance. It does, however, complicate explanations that regard the biblical text as information delivered independently of human historical processes.
Revelation Is Not Identical with Text
Several distinctions become necessary.
An experience understood as divine communication is not identical with its subsequent interpretation, nor is that interpretation identical with the account eventually preserved in oral or written tradition. The original experience itself is irrecoverable; what survives is its remembered and repeatedly interpreted testimony.
A written account may later acquire sacred authority within a religious community and its evolving teachings. Teachings that will later be gathered into a recognized scriptural corpus called "the Bible".
These developments are related, but they should not be treated as interchangeable.
The historical study of revelation claims can investigate the circumstances in which people claimed to encounter God, the language through which they communicated those experiences, and the traditions that developed afterward. Yet it cannot simply establish that divine communication occurred because a community believed it had occurred.
Neither does the recognition of historical mediation automatically establish that divine communication was impossible.
The theological question remains how Christians might understand revelation within the human experiences, traditions, and writings through which their faith has developed, and whether divine presence might be encountered through these natural and historical processes rather than through an imposed "supernatural" intervention.
Inspiration and the Limits of Inerrancy
Christian understandings of biblical inspiration have varied throughout history.
Some approaches emphasize God's direct supervision of the biblical writings. Others understand inspiration through the interaction of divine purpose and human authorship. Still others regard Scripture primarily as the historically developing testimony of religious communities through which believers may encounter divine meaning.
The relatively newer doctrine of biblical inerrancy adds a further complication concerning the reliability of Scripture. Yet inerrancy's precise meaning depends upon how error, genre, intention, interpretation, and historical assertion are relatively defined within traditional Christian fellowships.
Biblical inerrancy should not be confused with strict literalism. Some defenders of inerrancy remove literal readings in favor of recognizing literary genres, metaphor, symbolic narration, and the importance of interpreting biblical writings according to their historical and literary intentions.
The more consequential question is whether particular claims of biblical historical or scientific accuracy remain defensible when examined against available evidence. Recognizing literary genre may resolve certain interpretive difficulties by relaxing prior inerrant criteria such as literalism, but it cannot automatically establish the historical accuracy of every biblical assertion or remove genuine conflicts between inherited interpretations and contemporary scholarship.
An approach requiring every biblical narrative to function as an accurate modern historical or scientific report encounters substantial difficulties when confronted with contemporary scholarship. Alternative understandings may recognize Scripture's literary diversity and theological purposes without requiring its authors to possess knowledge unavailable within their historical circumstances.
Thus, abandoning comprehensive inerrancy does not automatically solve every problem of biblical authority. A historically conditioned text may preserve morally troubling assumptions, conflicting theological interpretations, or claims whose significance contemporary readers must reconsider.
Christians must therefore ask how Scripture should guide religious life when the Bible's human limitations are acknowledged within its corpus.
Authority as Responsible Discernment
Biblical authority may be understood not as an exemption from criticism, but as Scripture's continuing structured significance for Christian communities seeking to understand God, Christ, and faithful living. Its authority need not require unquestioning agreement with inherited interpretations, but may instead invite their continuing examination and revision.
Under such an approach, a non-inerrant approach to Scripture can still remain indispensable to Christian identity because it preserves the literary, historical, and theological witnesses through which Christianity has developed. Nevertheless, its authority would not require that every claim be treated as equally reliable, timeless, or directly applicable.
Biblical interpretation would consequently, and necessarily, involve historical understanding, theological judgment, ethical consideration, and communal discernment. But with this approach will also come substantial questions requiring theological maturity and a willingness to live in a tension of uncertainty and doubt. For example,
What standards guide will biblical text vs. theological discernment?
Can Christians distinguish constructive reinterpretation from deconstructive research?
How might disagreements concerning Scripture be evaluated?
What role should Jesus and the Christian understanding of divine love play in assessing inherited biblical interpretations of divine wrath and judgment? Sin and evil? Heaven and Hell? Hope and divinely determined apocalypse?
These questions may then lead beyond historical criticism into renewing forms of constructive theology. But it will also challenge the traditionalized faith and faithful practice of a lived divine reality.
For this present Essay Six, our immediate conclusion is that Scripture's historical development will require Christians to reconsider inherited explanations of revelation and authority. What historical scholarship has uncovered cannot simply be set aside through appeals to inspiration. The authority of Scripture must be understood in conversation with the actual character and history of Scripture.
Once inherited religious understandings become open to examination, an important distinction must be maintained. Namely, not every Christian claim is challenged by historical scholarship in the same way.
Some claims concern events or circumstances for which substantial empirical evidence is available. Others concern philosophical interpretations, theological meaning, religious experience, or possibilities that cannot be established through historical investigation alone. Such claims require their own forms of investigation, using the methods and evidence appropriate to their respective fields.
These differences matter.
For example, the evolutionary ancestry of human beings is supported by extensive scientific evidence. A theological explanation requiring humanity to have originated through a separate biological creation must therefore confront serious conflict with established scientific understanding.
Likewise, geological and archaeological evidence does not support treating the Genesis Flood as a recent global inundation that explains the present geological record.
Such difficulties cannot responsibly be dismissed merely because a particular interpretation has been regarded as religiously authoritative.
Other claims require different forms of consideration.
The affirmation that creation possesses divine significance is not identical with a scientific claim about the processes through which biological species emerged.
Likewise, understanding the natural world as suffused with divine presence involves philosophical and theological interpretation, even while remaining fully attentive to scientific explanations of that same world.
Distinguishing these kinds of assertions allows us to recognize genuine conflicts without manufacturing unnecessary ones.
Historical Claims and Theological Dependencies
The challenge becomes particularly demanding when theological interpretations depend upon historical claims that appear increasingly difficult to defend.
Consider for instance interpretations of sin and salvation requiring a single original human couple whose disobedience introduced biological mortality into a previously deathless creation.
If the relevant historical assumptions cannot be maintained, the resulting theological system requires reconsideration in some manner. That reconsideration may involve reinterpreting the biblical narrative, revising the doctrine of original sin, developing a different account of human moral alienation, or questioning whether the inherited soteriological framework remains adequate.
Such work is not accomplished merely by declaring the biblical narrative symbolic.
The theological consequences must also be examined. This has been my own experience over the years when developing the website, Relevancy22. It has become a very long journey of reconsideration and re-examination, doctrine by doctrine, view by view, insight by insight. All the while holding discrepancies in tension without drawing immediate consolidation or conclusion, and allowing doubt and uncertainty a useful place for the necessary work of deconstructing and reconstructing my once, very conservative, very evangelical, Christian faith.
A similar responsibility applies to inherited explanations of divine intervention, biblical authorship, religious exclusivity, providence, judgment, and scriptural authority, particularly when theological claims depend upon historical assumptions that contemporary scholarship has called into question.
Some of these beliefs may remain defensible after careful qualification. Yet others may require substantial reconstruction. Still others may need to be relinquished altogether. In my own experience I have been as heightened by examination as grieved with other findings. It is not an easy process for anyone sincerely committed to the beliefs they have been taught in the springtime of their youth.
The outcome depends then upon the merits of the inquiry rather than a prior commitment to preserving every inherited doctrine in the form in which it was originally received. This includes any resulting temptations to abandon faith and walk away from family and fellowship. Thus this site's commitment to educate, direct, analyze, and provide a variety of outlooks as helps in updating a Christian faith too long held back by church and society.
For some, this reconsideration may result in leaving inherited religious communities or Christianity itself. For others, it may open the possibility of a renewed faith. This has been one of Relevancy22's continuing purposes: to provide historical understanding, theological reflection, and alternative perspectives for Christians seeking to reconsider their faith without surrendering either spirituality or intellectual honesty.
The Difference Between Revision and Preservation
Nor should religious revision become an automatic preference for whatever is new. Historical traditions may preserve genuine insight, profound moral understanding, meaningful religious experience, and important communal wisdom. Their age does not establish their truth, but neither does it establish their falsehood.
Responsible reconsideration therefore requires examining both inherited beliefs and proposed alternatives. A new interpretation should not be accepted merely because it avoids conflict with contemporary scholarship. It must also possess philosophical coherence, historical responsibility, explanatory adequacy, and meaningful theological content.
For our developing relational theology, this requirement will be especially important. We must not simply replace supernatural language with relational concepts and terminology but also not assume that the underlying problems being examined have naively disappeared.
If traditional understandings of divine action require revision, we must also examine what divine agency might mean within the natural processes of an evolving relational world. This is what is meant by deconstructing an older tenent or belief while also reconstructing that same belief - rather than leave it dangling without support. In Whitehead's terms, it will require a bit of creativity and imagination. And because we live in an age of technology where information can be gathered, read, and interpreted, there is help from every direction when measured in discernment and discussion with trusted others.
If revelation is understood through human historical experience, we must ask whether divine presence might be encountered within those experiences without presuming supernatural intervention, while recognizing the difficulty of distinguishing such interpretations from human religious construction.
If salvation is reconsidered through healing and reconciliation, we must examine what becomes of Christian claims concerning sin, the cross, resurrection, and the significance of Jesus. For the apostolic tradition, Jesus stands at the center of the Christian faith and the salvation presented in his life, death, and resurrection. Reconsidering these convictions therefore requires not only intellectual responsibility but also theological sensitivity toward the beliefs and communities for whom they remain foundational.
The Courage to Relinquish
Some inherited beliefs may ultimately prove impossible to defend in the ways we were originally taught to understand them. I think particularly of traditional historical interpretations of the Bible's creation stories, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and other ancient narratives. Reconsidering these interpretations is one of the consequences of bringing Christian faith into conversation with contemporary knowledge. Moreover, these questions have been central to my own inquiries and have been addressed repeatedly over the years at Relevancy22, often requiring further examination as my understanding developed.
Too, this work has also arisen from a concern for those who describe themselves as "Nones and Dones," particularly those whose disillusionment with inherited Christianity has led them away from religious belief or church participation. My hope has been to demonstrate that reconsidering inherited explanations need not require abandoning Christian faith, but may instead open a path toward recovering and renewing the more generous, thoughtful, and life-giving possibilities within its best traditions. For this reason, Relevancy22 remains freely available as a resource for readers wishing to investigate these questions for themselves, explore alternative theological perspectives, and pursue their own reconsideration of Christian faith without financial obligation or institutional membership.
Therefore, the possibility of one's faith being challenged and re-orientated should not be concealed from Christian readers struggling with today's contemporary knowledge. Religious commitment does not guarantee that every inherited doctrine will withstand historical, scientific, philosophical, or ethical examination. Nevertheless, relinquishing a belief need not amount to abandoning every source of meaning previously associated with it.
One may reject a particular biblical explanation while continuing to recognize the literary, moral, or theological questions the explanation sought to address. That continuity is not automatic. It must be carefully argued. But it remains possible. The fundamental responsibility is to avoid confusing faithfulness to God with the preservation of every inherited interpretation through which Christian identity has traditionally been expressed.
If God is God, then God is no stranger to humanity's long history, its developing religious understandings, or the changing circumstances through which people seek divine meaning. Faith must therefore remain capable of reconsideration in the face of personal experience, communal life, suffering, discovery, and historical change. A sheltered faith may be poorly prepared for life's difficulties. An examined faith may help us recognize and avoid unnecessary harm and error.
Consequently, do not walk this road alone. Find a trusted friend to share your thoughts, fears, and concerns. Together two are strong, and where possible, find a third source of strength and honesty, to make an unbreakable, resilient fellowship lasting and worthy of pursuit (Eccl 4.9-12).
Beyond the Fear of Losing Everything
When inherited religious explanations begin to change, believers may fear that nothing substantial can remain.
If Scripture possesses human ancestry, can it still be sacred? If religious beliefs developed historically, can they still communicate truth? If divine activity cannot be understood primarily through supernatural intervention, can Christians still affirm God, prayer, providence, or revelation?
These questions deserve answers, but they should not be answered through reassurance alone.
Continuing in Christian faith does not require preserving every inherited conviction. Rather, it invites us to reconsider what we may responsibly affirm in light of contemporary knowledge, historical understanding, and our own developing experiences of faith.
God and the Possibility of Divine Reality
The historical development of religious belief is compatible with different philosophical interpretations.
A nonbelieving interpretation may regard religious traditions as human constructions shaped by cognitive, cultural, social, and historical processes.
A believing interpretation may acknowledge those same processes while proposing that human religious experience sometimes involves a genuine relationship with divine reality, understood as continuously present to creation and responsive to humanity within its developing history.
The historical evidence does not require these interpretations to be treated as equally persuasive in every respect. Each must be examined according to the claims it makes.
A contemporary Christian theology must therefore reconsider how God might be understood within the natural world whose evolutionary, historical, and relational development we increasingly understand.
For Christians who affirm divine reality, the question is not necessarily whether God exists apart from nature, but whether the natural world itself may be understood as suffused with divine presence. What such an understanding means for Christian faith will become central to Essay Seven.
Jesus Christ and Christian Identity
Christian faith possesses a distinctive historical relationship to Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians confess as the Son of the Living God and the Messiah not only of Israel but of the world itself.
Whatever conclusions one reaches concerning later Christian theology, Jesus originally belongs within the historical world of first-century Judaism under Roman rule. The earliest Christian communities developed their religious identities through interpretations of his life, teaching, death, and the conviction that God had raised him from the dead.
Historical scholarship can examine the evidence concerning Jesus, the emergence of early Christian communities, and the development of Christological beliefs.
It also reveals that Christian understandings of Jesus developed through different textual traditions as reflection of differing theological interpretations and geographic-historical circumstances.
The confessional claims that Jesus reveals God, embodies divine love, or participates uniquely in divine reality require theological examination. This is the sphere of faith. Whereas recognizing the historical development of Christian confessions cannot independently establish their truth or falsehood. A confession is ultimately a confession of the heart and spirit.
For Christians who continue to follow Jesus, the task is not simply to preserve inherited Christological formulations, but to reconsider how his life, teachings, death, and resurrection have been understood and what they may continue to mean for Christian faith and practice today.
Scripture, Prayer, Worship, and Community
Christian practice also raises questions that cannot be reduced to disputes about biblical historicity.
Scripture may continue to shape religious understanding through its narratives, poetry, ethical teachings, theological arguments, and witness to the development of Christian faith.
Prayer may remain meaningful as an expression of attention, gratitude, lament, trust, self-examination, and relational openness. Within a relational understanding of Christian faith, prayer may also be experienced as participation in a divine presence suffusing the natural world rather than as an appeal for supernatural intervention from beyond it.
Worship may continue to gather communities around shared commitments, remembered traditions, and expressions of reverence.
Christian fellowship may sustain practices of generosity, forgiveness, hospitality, mutual care, and service.
None of these possibilities demonstrates the truth of Christian theology. They do, however, remind us that Christianity is more than a collection of historical propositions. That it is also a lived religious tradition involving relationships, commitments, practices, interpretations, and hopes. The challenge is to determine whether those practices can be connected to defensible theological understandings rather than sustained solely through inherited habit.
Resurrection, Salvation, and Hope
Some Christian convictions remain especially difficult because they concern events or realities that ordinary historical inquiry cannot straightforwardly establish.
The resurrection of Jesus is a central example. Historians can investigate early Christian resurrection testimony, the development of resurrection belief, and the contexts in which such claims emerged. The Christian confession that God raised Jesus from the dead belongs to the theological interpretation of these testimonies and the experiences remembered by the earliest Christian communities. Historical investigation can examine those accounts and their development, but it cannot independently establish the divine action they proclaim.
Consequently, neither scientific method nor historical criticism should be made to affirm that conclusion merely because Christian theology states it. Equally, the historical examination of the resurrection belief should not be confused with a philosophical demonstration that resurrection is impossible. A responsible Christian account must consider the available evidence, alternative explanations, conceptual difficulties, and theological implications of this remarkable event.
Similarly, questions concerning salvation, reconciliation, life beyond death, and ultimate hope require similar care. These are more questions of faith than they are provable experiences.
Thus, for those who continue to identify with Christian faith, its enduring significance may also be found in the life and teachings of Jesus, the call to love one's neighbor, the pursuit of mercy and justice, the practice of forgiveness, and the responsibilities of belonging to a community of care. These commitments do not establish the truth of Christianity's supernatural or metaphysical claims. Yet neither do they become meaningless simply because inherited historical explanations require reconsideration. They remain part of what Christians must evaluate when asking whether their faith can continue responsibly within the world they now understand.
A Faith Worth Reconsidering
How might the God of creation communicate with humanity and the world itself?How are experiences of divine presence recognized, interpreted, remembered, and transmitted?And how might we distinguish God's possible participation in human existence from the religious meanings human beings themselves have constructed around their experiences?
What remains available, therefore, is the opportunity to reconsider Christian faith without assuming that the failure of an inherited theological system requires the abandonment of every Christian commitment.
- Psalm 51:10 – "Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me."
- Ezekiel 36:26 – "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you he heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."
- Matthew 5:8 – "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."
- Hebrews 4:12 – "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart."
- Deuteronomy 6:5 – "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."
- Jeremiah 29:13 – "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."
Faith and the Demand for Certainty
Christian faith is sometimes presented as requiring confidence that a complete and internally consistent system of religious answers has already been provided. Within such a system, one would expect Scriptures to be a source of definitive explanations concerning creation, human nature, divine action, moral authority, history, and ultimate destiny.
In such a system, doubt becomes troublesome because it appears to threaten the system's coherence. Likewise, historical criticism is regarded as dangerous because it may expose disagreement between inherited explanation and available evidence.
But Christian faith need not be identified with a closed explanatory system. Faith in God is not the same as unfailing certainty regarding every explanation Christians have come to expect about God through their inherited faith.
Human knowledge has been shown to be historically developing and inherently limited. Not only in the past before the modern era but even now. Scientific understanding advances through investigation, criticism, and revision. Historical reconstruction remains dependent upon incomplete evidence. Philosophical proposals require continuing examination.
No less then theological reasoning that itself has developed through fallible, finite, human beings within an array of historical and cultural circumstances. Even its teachings of God cannot reasonably claim exemption from these limitations.
This recognition does not mean that all beliefs are equally uncertain or that firm convictions are impossible. Rather, it requires that confidence be proportionate to the reasons supporting a claim.
We should therefore distinguish confidence from infallibility. A conviction may be firmly held because its supporting reasons are persuasive, even while its holder acknowledges the possibility of error. What becomes problematic is not confidence itself, but the refusal to reconsider a belief when substantial reasons for doing so emerge. Intellectual humility does not require perpetual indecision; it requires the willingness to distinguish what we know, what we reasonably infer, and what we continue to hold as a matter of interpretive or religious commitment.
The Possibility of Trust Without Exhaustive Knowledge
Faith and certainty are related, but they are not identical.
A person may place trust in another without claiming complete knowledge of that person. A community may commit itself to principles whose application requires continuing interpretation. Human beings routinely act responsibly within circumstances whose outcomes remain uncertain.
Religious faith may likewise involve commitment without exhaustive explanation. Christians often speak of a faith that is mysterious, a God that is unknowable, and love that exceeds all else.
- Hebrews 11:1 - "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
- 2 Corinthians 5:7 - "For we walk by faith, not by sight."
- Romans 11:33 - "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!"
- Isaiah 55:8-9 - "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
- Proverbs 25:2 - "It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out."
- 1 Timothy 3:9 - "They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience."
- Job 42:2-3 - "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted... Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know."
So then, within Christian faith, trust in God does not mean exhaustive knowledge of God's nature or purposes. What the ancients beheld of God's work then has been lost and is irrecoverable except through the purported gathering of canonized texts, community memory, religious rituals, practices, symbols, and transmission of oral belief.
Such trust should therefore remain open to examination, particularly when inherited descriptions of God conflict with what we have learned through historical research, science, modern judgment and experience, and thoughtful reflection.
A responsible Christian faith considers not only what it means to trust God, but also to measure those beliefs in reality through which that trust has been expressed that it remains worthy of one's confidence. Yesteryear's traditional responses presented in historically developed beliefs, dogmas, practices, and convictions, were not challenged then as they are now. Today's Christian witness has some work to do if it is to continue testifying of God's saving work in Christ. But not by way of apologetics. But by allowing itself to accept and work with critical scholarship and the sciences.
As such, as we take from the bible its lessons we must also remember to update those lessons so that the Christian faith isn't continually exasperated by theological claims of denial, dismissal, ill-reasoning, or even fantastical re-constructions in order to keep its faith viable. It is better to be honest with today's modern insights and to seek the God beheld behind the expressions of the ancients that later became inadvertently encapsulated, then actively insulated, and finally baked into churchy stories leaving faith more in its mysticisms than in its elements.
We have entered into an age long in the making which now requires believers to cease from the manufacturing of theological constructions protecting its faith when, in fact, we must now utilize doubt and uncertainty, spiritual tension and tethered hope, to accept, adopt, adapt, and reasonably rebuild a Christian theology that can reasonably dialogue with contemporary knowledge. If not, the Christian faith will become a mystical faith without natural grounding rather than a continuing story of God speaking into human hearts.
Doubt as a Responsibility of Understanding
Doubt may arise from unfamiliar evidence, internal contradiction, moral concern, personal suffering, or the recognition that inherited explanations no longer adequately describe reality. Yet not all doubts are equally well founded.
Some may reflect misunderstanding. Others may reveal genuine weaknesses in established arguments. Their intellectual significance must be evaluated rather than predetermined so that within a critically responsible faith, doubt can become an occasion for investigation. It may lead to renewed conviction, revised interpretation, suspension of judgment, or the abandonment of a claim.
What matters is not that doubt always strengthens faith, but that its presence need not be condemned before its reasons have been examined. The same principle applies to belief. Religious confidence should not be regarded as a virtue merely because it is strong. The strength of a conviction is different from the strength of its justification.
Humility Without Relativism
Recognizing the limitations of human understanding does not require denying the possibility of truth. Reality may possess features that our descriptions identify accurately even though those descriptions remain incomplete.
Similarly, theological interpretations may contain genuine insights without exhausting the nature of what they seek to understand. The challenge is to distinguish responsible intellectual humility from the claim that every interpretation is equally acceptable.
An open worldview must still evaluate evidence, arguments, explanatory consequences, and ethical implications. Openness does not mean refusing to reach conclusions. It means allowing conclusions to remain answerable to further understanding.
This distinction is fundamental to our larger philosophical project.
Embodied Relational Reality and Generative Relational Realism are themselves philosophical proposals subject to criticism and reconsideration. Their commitments to relational existence, responsiveness, becoming, and emergence do not exempt them from the responsibility to examine, explain, and critically evaluate their claims.
Christian relational theology must remain equally open to criticism and reconsideration. Its developing interpretation of relational reality as suffused with divine presence represents a Christian understanding of the world, rather than a conclusion that relational philosophy must establish or affirm.
Relational philosophy therefore provides an independent, philosophical foundation, from which Christian relational theology may develop, but Christian theology is not the foundation upon which relational philosophy depends. Our investigation of reality must first remain open to discovery without requiring its conclusions to conform to inherited religious assumptions.
Consequently, only then may that reality be interpreted theologically, while remaining equally available to nonreligious or alternative religious interpretations. Christian relational theology consequently draws upon our developing philosophical understanding of reality without determining its conclusions in advance. Philosophy must remain free to investigate reality on its own terms, while theology must remain responsible to the reality it seeks to interpret.
This distinction then is essential to our larger project because it preserves the freedom of inquiry while allowing Christian faith to develop through responsible interpretation. We are not constructing a philosophy to validate our theology, nor a theology that dictates what reality must be. Rather, we are seeking to understand reality as faithfully as possible, then asking how Christian faith might interpret and participate within that reality without compromising either intellectual integrity or religious conviction.
Living Within an Unfinished Understanding
A comprehensive worldview need not be a closed explanatory system. It may instead offer a coherent and critically revisable way of understanding and participating in a reality that continually exceeds our descriptions of it.
Such a worldview can sustain meaningful convictions while acknowledging their limitations.
For Christians, this possibility may open a different understanding of faithfulness. Faith need not be measured exclusively by the refusal to reconsider inherited beliefs. It may also involve the willingness to examine whether those beliefs adequately represent the reality they claim to interpret.
Such willingness does not guarantee that every inherited conviction will survive reconsideration. It does, however, make theological reconstruction possible without requiring Christians to abandon their faith in God.
And it prepares us to move beyond what historical criticism has unsettled toward the question of how Christian theology might more faithfully understand God and participate within the world we inhabit.
Criticism Is Necessary but Not Sufficient
Historical criticism can expose the human development of religious traditions. Scientific investigation can challenge inherited explanations of creation, humanity, and natural events. Philosophical analysis can identify conceptual difficulties within established theological systems.
These are important contemporary achievements. Yet identifying problems in an inherited worldview does not, by itself, establish an alternative understanding of reality.
- A believer may relinquish biblical literalism without knowing how to understand Scripture theologically.
- One may reject supernatural intervention as a primary explanation of natural events without possessing a coherent account of divine activity.
- One may acknowledge the historical development of Christological doctrine while remaining uncertain about the meaning of incarnation and resurrection.
Consequently, criticism eventually brings us to a constructive responsibility.
The question before us then is the following -
If Christian faith is to remain intellectually responsible and meaningful within the contemporary world, how might we reconsider and reconstruct our understandings of God, creation, humanity, revelation, Christ, and religious life in light of what we have learned?
The Possibility of a Relational Interpretation
Our earlier philosophical work expressed in the Reality & Cosmology and Reality & Metaphysics series has explored the possibility that reality is fundamentally relational rather than composed of independently self-sufficient substances.
Within this developing interpretation, relations and responsiveness are treated as foundational to reality, while complex structures, living systems, consciousness, and experience emerge through developing forms of relational organization.
Existence is understood through processes of interaction, constraint, coherence, differentiation, persistence, and generative becoming.
Such a philosophical account remains independent of theological interpretation. Nevertheless, Christians may understand this same relational reality as suffused with divine presence and may wish to explore how such an understanding might reshape their inherited theological commitments.
- What would it mean to understand creation as an open and developing reality rather than a completed arrangement of predetermined outcomes?
- Could divine presence be interpreted as continuously relational rather than principally interventionist as the teaching of supernaturalism presents?
- Might revelation be understood through relationally historically situated human experience without assuming that religious language is exempt from cultural development?
- Could the Christian understanding of a relational God as love offer a coherent account of divine participation that respects creaturely freedom and the open future?
These questions provide possible directions for theological exploration but they do not yet establish that the resulting theology is true.
The Challenge of Divine Reality
The most demanding question concerns how we understand God within the natural world we inhabit.
Scientific investigation continues to illuminate biological evolution, cosmic development, forms of consciousness, and the historical formation of religion. Rather than regard these discoveries as threats to Christian faith, relational theology welcomes them as opportunities to reconsider inherited understandings of creation and divine presence.
God need not be inserted into gaps left by incomplete scientific explanations. Nor should relational existence, responsiveness, emergence, or generative becoming automatically be identified as evidence of divine activity. Rather, Christians may ask whether the reality described by contemporary knowledge may also be experienced and understood as suffused with relational divine presence.
What does it mean to affirm that God is relationally present throughout creation?
Does God possess agency distinguishable from the causal activities of the natural world?
How might we understand experiences of divine presence while recognizing that our religious language and interpretations remain historically and culturally situated?
And why should Christians identify this proposed divine reality with the God understood through Israel, Jesus, and Christian tradition?
These questions cannot be answered adequately through compatibility alone.
Our forthcoming constructive investigation in Essay 7 must therefore consider coherence, explanatory significance, historical responsibility, competing interpretations, religious experience, and the ethical consequences of its claims.
Christianity Without Philosophical Privilege
The independence of relational philosophy must remain intact throughout its development. We cannot begin by requiring our relational ontology or relational metaphysics to vindicate Christian confession.
Nor can Christianity be granted privileged exemption from philosophical criticism because its interpretations are religiously significant.
At the same time, Christian traditions provide questions, experiences, historical claims, and conceptual resources that may contribute meaningfully to philosophical reflection.
The relationship between philosophy and theology need not be one of mutual isolation or contention. It can be one of critical conversation without predetermined agreement.
For Christian readers, this approach also preserves an important freedom. One need not first accept every proposition of Generative Relational Realism in order to consider the possibility of relational Christian theology. The philosophical framework provides a developing interpretation of reality. The theological proposal must establish its own meaning and defensibility. Both remain open to further examination.
Toward a Faith Centered Upon Love
Within our developing Christian relational theology, one conviction will receive particular attention: God is love.
Rather than treating love as merely one divine attribute among others, we will reconsider divine holiness, power, judgment, providence, and salvation through the foundational Christian affirmation that God is love, and that divine love orders all else within its orb. Not holiness. Not power. But LOVE.
This proposal arises from a reconsideration of Christian faith through the life and teachings of Jesus, particularly the centrality of love of God and neighbor, mercy, reconciliation, and care for those who suffer. It asks whether these commitments might provide a more adequate organizing principle for Christian theology than inherited understandings centered primarily upon divine sovereignty, control, or punishment. The proposal is therefore not simply a philosophical preference for relational language. It represents a Christian theological judgment that also must be critically examined and defended.
Such a proposal raises substantial questions.
What distinguishes divine love from human moral ideals?
Can a theology centered upon love provide an adequate account of suffering, evil, justice, and judgment?
How would noncoercive divine activity operate within a world marked by contingency, conflict, violence, and vulnerability?
What becomes of traditional understandings of incarnation, resurrection, and salvation?
And can love provide the organizing principle for a genuinely Christian theology without requiring philosophical inquiry to presuppose its truth?
These matters belong to Essay Seven.
For the present, their importance lies in demonstrating that the movement beyond historical certainty need not terminate in intellectual negation. It may also open the possibility of constructive theological development. Yet that possibility must remain a question to be investigated rather than an outcome guaranteed in advance.
We began this essay by considering what happens when the religious world Christians inherit no longer corresponds adequately to what scientific and historical investigation has uncovered.
For some believers, that recognition may be unsettling. Explanations once regarded as certain become subject to criticism. Biblical narratives acquire historical contexts different from those previously assumed. Religious doctrines reveal long histories of interpretation and development. Claims of divine authority become distinguishable from the human communities through which those claims emerged.
These discoveries may require substantial changes in Christian understanding.
They may also produce genuine losses.
Certain historical interpretations can no longer be responsibly maintained. Some theological formulations may prove dependent upon assumptions that contemporary knowledge has made untenable. Other convictions may remain possible but require forms of justification different from those inherited through religious education and communal tradition.
There is no intellectual responsibility in pretending otherwise.
Yet the failure of an inherited explanatory system need not require the abandonment of Christian faith. Historical investigation reveals how religious traditions developed, how Scripture acquired its authority, and how theological doctrines emerged through generations of interpretation. These discoveries challenge inherited understandings without necessarily exhausting the religious significance of the experiences, convictions, and traditions from which Christianity developed.
For contemporary Christians, the responsibility is not to protect inherited explanations from criticism, but to reconsider what those explanations may still teach us about God, humanity, and the world we inhabit.
What must change is the assumption that religious conviction becomes more faithful by protecting itself from examination. A Christian faith that seeks to understand reality cannot require reality to conform to inherited explanations simply because those explanations have acquired religious authority. Nor should the willingness to reconsider inherited belief be mistaken for the abandonment of religious seriousness.
For Christians who affirm that God is real, the reality of God cannot be confined to the limitations of inherited theological descriptions. Christian faith must therefore remain willing to engage scientific discoveries, historical scholarship, philosophical criticism, and contemporary experience without requiring their conclusions to conform to established doctrine.
Nor does such openness diminish faith. It allows faith to continue learning, questioning, and reconsidering how God might be understood within the natural and relational world we inhabit.
Perhaps the most important freedom recovered through our study of humanity's religious ancestry is the freedom to distinguish what we have been taught about God from what we may responsibly come to understand. That freedom may lead people in different directions. Some may renew their Christian commitments through reconsideration. Others may suspend judgment or find themselves moving beyond Christian belief. These possibilities deserve recognition and respect.
For those who continue within Christian faith the work need not end with dismantling inherited certainty. It may become an opportunity to rediscover Christianity through a more historically informed, intellectually responsible, and relational understanding of God and creation.
Our investigation may now continue through constructive theological inquiry, taking evolutionary science, historical scholarship, philosophical reflection, and humanity's religious history seriously while reconsidering how God, Christ, revelation, hope, and Christian participation might be understood within our contemporary world.
This brings us to Essay Seven, Toward a Relational Christian Theology.
There we will move beyond examining what historical knowledge requires us to reconsider and begin exploring how Christian faith might be reconstructed within an open, evolving, and relational reality. We will ask how God may be understood as present throughout creation, how divine love might reshape inherited theological convictions, and how Christian faith might be lived responsibly within the world we increasingly understand.
Christian faith need not end where inherited certainty fails. It may instead find renewed possibilities through examination, reconsideration, and reconstruction. And perhaps that is a more responsible beginning than certainty ever allowed.
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For Essay Six, the central question remains whether Christian faith can survive the relinquishment of historical certainty without simply replacing one unquestionable system with another. This essay has therefore undertaken the deconstruction of inherited religious understandings.
In Essay Seven, Toward a Relational Christian Theology, we will take up the constructive responsibility of exploring how a relational understanding of God, creation, revelation, and Christian faith might contribute to a responsible contemporary theological interpretation of reality without compromising the independence of philosophical and historical inquiry.
In sum, Essay Six is about the courage to reconsider inherited faith. Essay Seven will be about the possibilities of a Christian faith reconstructed through relational understanding.
Collins, John J. What Are Biblical Values? What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Dunn, James D. G. The Living Word. London: SCM Press, 1987.
Enns, Peter. Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005.
Sparks, Kenton L. God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008.
Faith, Reason, and the Conditions of Belief
Kitcher, Philip. Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
McGrath, Alister E. The Territories of Human Reason: Science and Theology in an Age of Multiple Rationalities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
Swinburne, Richard. Faith and Reason. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Science, Philosophy, and Constructive Theology
Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.
Polkinghorne, John. Science and Theology: An Introduction. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
Smith, James K. A. How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014.
The bibliography therefore brings biblical scholarship into conversation with philosophical reflection, religious epistemology, constructive theology, and nonreligious interpretations of human meaning. These authors do not represent a single theological school or a unified understanding of Christianity. Their differing approaches help establish the intellectual conditions under which inherited religious convictions may be examined without predetermining whether those convictions must be preserved, revised, or relinquished.
Biblical Criticism and the Responsibilities of Scriptural Interpretation
Peter Enns and Kenton L. Sparks were chosen because their works engage historical biblical criticism from within conversations about evangelical Christian understandings of Scripture. Both confront difficulties arising when the Bible's literary forms, cultural environments, historical composition, and human limitations are examined through contemporary scholarship.
Their contributions are particularly relevant to Christians who have inherited strong doctrines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy. They demonstrate that acknowledging the Bible's human and historical character raises substantial theological questions, but need not automatically terminate Christian reflection upon revelation or scriptural authority.
James D. G. Dunn contributes a historically informed approach to Scripture, interpretation, and theological authority. His work helps distinguish the continuing religious significance of biblical writings from the assumption that their authority requires a single, unchanging mode of interpretation.
John J. Collins addresses the ethical and interpretive difficulties involved in appealing to Scripture as an authoritative source of religious values. His scholarship reminds us that biblical literature emerged within historically situated communities whose moral assumptions and social arrangements cannot simply be transferred unchanged into contemporary life.
Together, these authors support the essay's examination of biblical authority after historical criticism, especially the distinction between taking Scripture seriously and protecting every inherited interpretation from reconsideration.
Religious Belief, Reason, and Intellectual Responsibility
Richard Swinburne was selected for his philosophical examination of faith, religious commitment, and rational justification. His work provides resources for distinguishing religious trust and commitment from the assumption that belief is independent of reasoning or evidence.
Although our developing relational theology differs from important elements of Swinburne's philosophical theism, his insistence that religious convictions can be evaluated rationally provides a valuable conversation partner.
Alister E. McGrath examines the relationship between scientific and theological reasoning, emphasizing the different forms of rational inquiry involved in understanding reality. His work is useful for considering why historical, scientific, philosophical, and theological questions should be distinguished without treating them as necessarily unrelated.
Paul Ricoeur contributes a philosophical understanding of narrative, symbol, interpretation, and religious language. His work helps illuminate how religious texts and traditions may communicate meaning without being reducible to literal descriptions of historical events. At the same time, interpretive richness should not be mistaken for automatic confirmation of theological truth.
These authors provide resources for one of Essay Six's central commitments: religious faith may be intellectually serious without claiming exhaustive knowledge or exemption from criticism.
Faith and Unbelief Within Contemporary Society
Charles Taylor was chosen for his extensive examination of the historical and cultural conditions under which religious belief and unbelief have become competing possibilities within modern societies. His work is especially valuable for understanding how religious convictions are embedded within broader social imaginaries and inherited assumptions concerning reality.
James K. A. Smith provides an accessible interpretation of Taylor's work, emphasizing the lived and existential dimensions of belief within a society where Christian faith can no longer be regarded as the only available understanding of human existence.
Philip Kitcher offers an important nonreligious perspective. His defense of secular humanism challenges the assumption that moral seriousness, human flourishing, intellectual responsibility, and meaningful participation depend upon theological belief.
Including Kitcher is methodologically important. Essay Six must not evaluate Christianity solely against alternative Christian theologies. It must also recognize that nonbelieving interpretations of reality may provide coherent and humane accounts of human existence.
These contrasting perspectives help preserve the openness of our investigation. The possibility of continuing Christian faith deserves examination, but it cannot be established merely by showing that religious commitment remains personally meaningful.
From Critical Faith Toward Constructive Theology
John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin were included because their introductory account of process theology provides an important historical example of Christian theological reconstruction through philosophical engagement. Their work demonstrates how inherited doctrines concerning God, creation, divine action, suffering, and freedom may be reconsidered within a developing metaphysical framework.
Their contribution is particularly relevant to the transition from Essay Six to Essay Seven. Nevertheless, our developing Generative Relational Realism is not identical with Whiteheadian process metaphysics, nor does it begin by treating experience or feeling as ontologically primitive. Process theology therefore serves as a significant conversation partner rather than the predetermined philosophical foundation of our own theological proposal.
John Polkinghorne also contributes to this transition through his examination of science and Christian theology. His work illustrates both the possibilities and difficulties involved in developing theological interpretations that remain accountable to contemporary scientific understanding.
These contributions help prepare the constructive investigation of Essay Seven without requiring Essay Six to establish a completed relational theology.
The Governing Scholarly Responsibility
The bibliography reflects a distinction that has guided the entire Prelude: explaining the human history of religion is not the same as determining the existence or nonexistence of God. Nevertheless, historical, scientific, philosophical, and ethical findings can have significant consequences for particular religious claims.
No single author or theological tradition represented here possesses authority over the conclusions of this investigation.
The purpose of consulting these works is not to assemble scholarly endorsements for beliefs we have already decided to preserve. It is to examine the strongest relevant arguments, recognize alternative interpretations, identify the limitations of inherited explanations, and consider whether continuing Christian commitment can remain intellectually responsible.
For Essay Six, the central question remains whether faith can survive the relinquishment of historical certainty without simply replacing one unquestionable system with another.
The following Essay 7, Toward a Relational Christian Theology, will take up the more demanding constructive responsibility: whether a relational understanding of God, creation, revelation, and Christian faith can offer a defensible theological interpretation of reality without compromising the independence of philosophical and historical inquiry.
How might believers reconsider inherited convictions without assuming beforehand that those convictions must either be preserved unchanged or abandoned altogether?
The following framework offers a method for distinguishing religious claims, examining their foundations, and identifying what further consideration may be required.
Its purpose is not to determine what Christians must believe, but to encourage a disciplined approach to deciding what they may responsibly affirm.
A. Six Questions for Responsible Reconsideration
Question | What responsible inquiry asks |
|---|---|
What have I inherited? | Identify the belief and its historical and theological origins |
What kind of claim is it? | Historical, scientific, philosophical, theological, ethical, or some combination |
What evidence supports it? | Examine the relevant evidence and competing explanations |
What might need reconsideration? | Distinguish the inherited interpretation from its underlying claim |
What conclusions are justified? | Retain, revise, relinquish, or suspend judgment |
What remains open? | Identify questions requiring further historical, philosophical, or theological investigation |
These questions are not necessarily successive steps. A single religious conviction may contain several kinds of claims requiring different methods of investigation. Historical evidence may challenge a theological interpretation, while philosophical criticism may expose assumptions that neither historical nor scientific investigation can independently resolve.
The goal is to make these relationships visible rather than allowing inherited religious authority to determine the outcome in advance.
B. Three Illustrations of Responsible Reconsideration
1. Adam, Eve, and the Fall
A Christian may inherit the belief that all humanity descended from a single original couple whose disobedience introduced biological death and moral corruption into creation.
This interpretation contains historical, biological, and theological claims.
Evolutionary biology establishes humanity's emergence through populations with long biological ancestries, while death existed throughout the history of life long before human beings appeared. These findings challenge interpretations requiring a separately created original couple whose actions introduced biological mortality into an otherwise deathless world.
Yet the biblical narratives also raise questions concerning human moral responsibility, estrangement, temptation, suffering, and the human condition. Recognizing their historical and literary contexts does not automatically resolve those theological questions. Nor does identifying their symbolic significance establish the truth of every theological interpretation subsequently derived from them.
Responsible reconsideration may therefore require relinquishing particular historical explanations while separately examining the theological concepts that depended upon them.
2. Biblical Inspiration and Religious Authority
A Christian may inherit the conviction that Scripture is divinely inspired and therefore wholly without error.
This raises several distinguishable questions. How did the biblical writings originate? What literary forms do they employ? What historical claims do they make? What does divine inspiration mean, and what relationship does it bear to textual reliability and religious authority?
Historical and textual scholarship can investigate composition, editing, transmission, literary intention, and the circumstances surrounding biblical writings. Such investigation may challenge particular assumptions about authorship, historical accuracy, or the independence of Scripture from its cultural environments.
Whether Scripture should nevertheless be understood as divinely inspired requires additional theological consideration. Consequently, revising a doctrine of biblical inerrancy does not automatically settle the question of inspiration. Neither can an appeal to inspiration exempt historical claims from appropriate examination.
The task is to distinguish what scholarship can establish from what Christian theology must independently explain and defend.
For instance, the traditional teaching of divine inspiration requires supernatural act(s). But what if divine inspiration moved through natural courses? The first kind of teaching is classic theism; the second is pan-en-theism (not pan-theism). How then has religious interpretation of the natural world interjected acts of supernatural experience rather than through the natural world itself? Can a theology of natural consequences be responsibly taught within a doctrinal or religious setting?
3. The Resurrection of Jesus
A Christian may inherit the conviction that God raised Jesus from the dead. Says the Apostle Paul,
If Christ be raised not from the dead then our faith is in vain (1 Cor 15.14; ref vv. 12-34).
Unlike claims concerning evolutionary ancestry or the geological history of Earth, resurrection involves historical testimony together with philosophical and theological claims about divine reality and action.
Historical scholarship can examine the earliest resurrection proclamations, surviving textual witnesses, the circumstances of early Christian communities, and competing reconstructions of the origins of resurrection belief. These investigations can provide reasons for accepting or questioning particular historical interpretations. Yet they do not independently establish the theological conclusion that God raised Jesus.
Neither does identifying the historical development of resurrection belief, by itself, demonstrate that resurrection is impossible. Responsible reconsideration therefore requires distinguishing the historical evidence, its alternative explanations, the philosophical possibility of divine action, and the particular Christian confession being affirmed.
The resulting judgment may involve continuing belief, reinterpretation, uncertainty, or rejection. Each requires reasons appropriate to the claim.
C. Reconsideration Without Predetermined Outcomes
These examples illustrate why religious convictions cannot all be evaluated through one undifferentiated method.
Some inherited explanations confront strong empirical objections. Others depend upon philosophical assumptions, theological interpretations, or historical judgments for which evidence remains disputed or incomplete.
Responsible inquiry does not require equal confidence in every possibility. It requires allowing the strength and character of the evidence to influence the conclusions we reach.
Nor should revising one conviction automatically require abandoning every belief associated with it. The historical explanation, theological interpretation, moral significance, and practical consequences of a religious tradition may require separate consideration.
This approach offers no guarantee that Christian faith will emerge unchanged. It does, however, permit believers to reconsider their commitments without making preservation or rejection the predetermined purpose of their investigation.
Critical faith does not mean believing less or doubting everything. It means allowing what we believe to remain accountable to what we have good reason to understand.
Throughout this essay, we have distinguished religious faith from the demand for unquestionable certainty. Yet the language of belief, confidence, doubt, and faith is frequently used without clarifying what these terms mean or how they relate to one another. Such distinctions become especially important when inherited religious convictions are examined through historical, scientific, and philosophical inquiry.
The following definitions provide a brief conceptual vocabulary for responsible reconsideration. They are working distinctions rather than exhaustive philosophical definitions, intended to clarify how Christians may retain meaningful commitments while recognizing the limitations of human knowledge.
A. Eight Distinctions for Responsible Faith
Belief: Acceptance of a proposition as true. Beliefs may be based upon evidence, reasoning, experience, testimony, or inherited understanding. Their justification depends upon the character and reliability of those grounds.
Confidence: The degree of assurance with which a belief is held. Confidence may be well founded or poorly supported and should not be confused with the strength of the evidence itself.
Certainty: A particularly strong claim to assurance, whose meaning varies according to context. Practical certainty may be sufficient for responsible action, while claims of absolute or infallible certainty require much stronger justification.
Faith: Religious trust, commitment, and conviction concerning God, ultimate meaning, or sacred reality. Faith may include beliefs, practices, experiences, and relationships, but its religious significance does not exempt its claims from critical examination.
Doubt: Uncertainty, hesitation, or questioning concerning a belief or interpretation. Doubt may arise from insufficient evidence, conflicting information, personal experience, or philosophical criticism. It may lead to further understanding, revised conviction, suspension of judgment, or rejection.
Critical Inquiry: The disciplined examination of claims through appropriate evidence, reasoning, interpretation, and consideration of alternative explanations. Its purpose is neither automatic acceptance nor predetermined rejection, but responsible understanding.
Intellectual Humility: Recognition that one's knowledge and interpretations may be incomplete or mistaken. Intellectual humility does not require abandoning conviction, but it does require openness to correction when sufficient reasons emerge.
Responsible Commitment: The willingness to affirm and practice convictions while remaining accountable to relevant evidence, criticism, and reconsideration. Such commitment distinguishes meaningful faithfulness from unquestioning adherence to inherited formulations.
B. Faith Without Infallibility
These distinctions help clarify an important misunderstanding: relinquishing absolute certainty does not necessarily require relinquishing confidence, conviction, or religious commitment.
Human beings routinely make responsible judgments without possessing exhaustive knowledge. Scientific explanations, historical reconstructions, philosophical arguments, and moral decisions differ in their methods and degrees of justification, yet none requires the assumption that human understanding is incapable of error.
Religious faith may likewise involve meaningful commitment under conditions of incomplete knowledge. Nevertheless, faith cannot become a substitute for justification when it makes claims about historical events, natural processes, or the character of reality.
The appropriate question is not simply how strongly a belief is held, but what reasons support it and whether those reasons remain adequate when examined critically.
C. The Responsibility of an Open Faith
Intellectual openness should not be confused with indecision or relativism. Some beliefs are much better supported than others, and responsible inquiry should acknowledge those differences.
Similarly, doubt is not inherently virtuous, just as confidence is not inherently mistaken. Their significance depends upon the reasons from which they arise and the ways in which they influence our understanding.
A critically responsible Christian faith may therefore retain meaningful convictions while recognizing their historical development, interpretive limitations, and continuing exposure to new understanding. The central distinction is between commitment that remains open to correction and certainty that refuses examination.
Faith need not require infallibility, and uncertainty need not dissolve conviction. What matters is whether our beliefs remain accountable to the reality they seek to understand.
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