(Second question for John Hobbins) What one historical or interpretative question related to the Bible or Christianity most troubles you? How do you deal with it?
ANSWER: I hate it when people take something like feminism or patriarchy and pass it off, in the name of God, as the gospel. I hate it when people make the Bible into a collection of proof-texts for their favorite cause, or turn it into a weapon to cow people into submission with. I’m passionate about letting the Bible “be itself,” if that makes any sense. I hope it does.
However, I’m probably misreading your question. Perhaps you want me to say something about my deepest-held doubts related to questions of faith and human experience. I want to say they run right across the board, and are all deeply-held. I would frighten myself terribly if I could not embrace both doubt and belief in the very depths of my being.
When I went to seminary for a year in Germany, among the many friends I made, most of whom are now excellent pastors throughout Deutschland, I almost had a cult following based on my joy in trashing everyone’s favorite statement, “God is love.” Such an absurd, ridiculous statement, I’d say. I would then point out a litany of things in demonstration of the proposition’s extreme counter-factuality. Yet I would do this without ceasing for a moment to believe that God is, nonetheless, love. How anyone can read 1 Corinthians 13, written by that hard-bitten man named Paul, and not know that it is true, every word of it, is beyond me. But if it’s true, we are untrue.
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