When I was a young boy, I asked my parents about the biblical teaching not to judge others. I think that I was puzzled because I regularly observed plenty of judgment from people in the church. They had firm beliefs that particular actions were wrong, and they weren’t at all reluctant to pronounce the people who did these things guilty.
For many years I have been in churches that reject the idea of female subordination. In these churches there are two general approaches to dealing with biblical texts that might suggest otherwise.
There are passages of scripture that will mess up your thinking if you take them at face value. Take, for example, Mark 11:24. The verse says, “So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” If you take this verse to be stating a simple fact, then making a prayer request sounds like writing an already-signed blank check where you simply fill in the amount.
There is a better way than adopting the literalist readings of either Dawkins or conservative defenders of everything ascribed to God in biblical stories. Just as we might acknowledge that a biblical writer can have an overly anthropomorphic view of God, we can say that a biblical writer can have a view of God that is morally deficient, which comes from common ways of thinking about deity at the time.
In recent years I have met quite a few young people who say that they have deconstructed their faith.
When I was young, I was taught to read the Bible as a message directly from God. It was recognized, of course, that the message came through human writers.
Robert Brownson was a professor of New Testament who had taken what he calls a “moderate traditional position” on biblical teaching about same-sex sexuality. But his thinking on the topic was challenged when his eighteen-year-old son revealed that he thought he was gay.
