Thanks for sharing this, David. It's an honest and shared view of the ex-evangelical experience.
You might appreciate Mark Vernon's (a former anglican priest) Secret History of Christianity, which places the Bible as a development in human consciousness, not a fixed infallible text. But rather giving birth to the individual and the possibility of human freedom. I just read this, already familiar with Owen Barfield's work, but it opens up vistas that might be particularly of interest to you.
The failure of evangelicalism is largely its utter lack of imagination. The Bible, for all its curious flaws, isn't a book. It's an entire library of little books. Some are mythology, some are magical realism, some are quasi-historical, but we can't read each section of any library without knowing what section we're in. The hermeneutic lens depends on what section of a library we're reading.
Fundamentalism fails to appreciate poetry except as pleasantries, refusing to feel out ontologolical rhymes in the language of the cosmos. If someone were to read a love poem and take it literally, it would read like nonsense — and yet that's precisely what literalists do with the Bible.
Thanks for sharing this, David. It's an honest and shared view of the ex-evangelical experience.
You might appreciate Mark Vernon's (a former anglican priest) Secret History of Christianity, which places the Bible as a development in human consciousness, not a fixed infallible text. But rather giving birth to the individual and the possibility of human freedom. I just read this, already familiar with Owen Barfield's work, but it opens up vistas that might be particularly of interest to you.
The failure of evangelicalism is largely its utter lack of imagination. The Bible, for all its curious flaws, isn't a book. It's an entire library of little books. Some are mythology, some are magical realism, some are quasi-historical, but we can't read each section of any library without knowing what section we're in. The hermeneutic lens depends on what section of a library we're reading.
Fundamentalism fails to appreciate poetry except as pleasantries, refusing to feel out ontologolical rhymes in the language of the cosmos. If someone were to read a love poem and take it literally, it would read like nonsense — and yet that's precisely what literalists do with the Bible.