The New Testament and the U.S. Constitution

Before I get into the details of my latest de-conversion, I want to give some more details about my views as a liberal Christian.

When I came back to Christianity a few years ago, I studied it a lot. I decided that the evidence wasn't contradictory for about 60 to 80% of the Gnostic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke). I put more credence in many of the quotes that are given to Jesus, rather than the stuff about him fulfilling prophecies. Because of the hundreds of inconsistencies in John, I rejected that Gospel pretty much in its entirety (as well as Revelation).

The rest of the New Testament I view as literary criticism. Much of it has interesting philosophical points, and contain useful information about how one can positively influence society. Some of it is the product of its time and it has, I believe, human errors (the stuff about slavery, etc). And some of it is not worth following or appears contradictory.

I became convinced of the idea that Jesus was talking about the Kingdom of God as a philosophical place we can experience on Earth, by doing good for the sake of doing good. (As Jesus was a rabbi, he probably subscribed to the concept of Sheol as an afterlife instead of Heaven or Hell--at least if one doesn't read John.)

One thing is for certain -- many of the words attributed to Jesus in the first 3 Gospels have a lot of value to me in how to live my life. The parable about The Good Samaritan, the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule, etc. This way of thinking has led me on a path where I'm looking at the New Testament more like the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (um, if you couldn't tell, I live in the U.S.). They are both great but flawed documents about how we should treat each other. The U.S. founding documents have pro-slavery stuff in it too, just like the N.T. But it also has the "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Even though many of those documents' authors owned slaves, I believe their words to be morally correct (especially if by 'men' one uses the definition meaning 'humankind').

I'm sure many Christians (even the legalistic and evangelicals) would agree with me that the Gospels have a lot of value. However, that's pretty much where I part ways with most Christians. The most imporatant thing about the Bible for most Christians is salvation. The idea that there really isn't a heaven means rejecting a lot of NT text. Rejecting the concept of salvation requires rejecting more NT text. Reading the letters as mere literary criticism (as if they were the writings of Thomas Aquinas or Marcus Borg) requires a sea-change in one's thinking, and certainly the rejection of the notion that the letter-writers were inspired by God.

But the more I studied the NT text, the more several points became clear to me.
1) The Gospels present four vastly different pictures of Jesus; even without direct textual contradictions, it is strongly indicated that at least 3 of the 4 are somewhat (if not mostly) unreliable.
2) The letter-writers think differently than each other about many aspects of the church and of Jesus. These points might have value, but should not be taken as divine inspiration.

And here was the biggie: I could follow the examples of Christ presented in the NT (at least the portions of the NT that I believed to be true) without needing to be "saved" in the John 3:16 sense. I called myself a Christian--one who follows Christ--without believing in the Resurrection, the Second Coming, or Biblical inerrancy.

That's where I was for a few years. And then, as I said in my last post, I moved.