Why I am no longer a Christian | By Paul Williams
Summary
TLDRThe speaker explains their journey from being a born-again Evangelical Christian to losing faith in key Christian doctrines. They describe how intense Bible study and exposure to biblical scholarship led to doubts about the inerrancy of Scripture and the divinity of Jesus. Despite still holding many Christian beliefs, they can no longer accept doctrines like the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement due to historical and theological issues. The video reflects on how critical examination of religious texts can challenge deeply held beliefs.
Takeaways
- 📅 Became a born-again Evangelical Christian on a specific date, month, and year.
- 🙏 Developed a powerful relationship with God and saw the Bible come alive.
- 📖 Noticed various problems and inconsistencies in the Bible, initially attributing them to the Devil.
- 🔍 Sought solutions in biblical commentaries, but some problems persisted and deepened.
- 📚 Realized many of these issues are well-known in biblical scholarship, not just spiritual attacks.
- 📅 Identified the belief in the imminent end of the world as a significant issue.
- 📜 Discovered that the Gospel of John is less historical and more theological, casting doubt on its reliability.
- 🏛 Learned from scholars that early church doctrines like the Trinity and Incarnation developed over time and were influenced by external philosophies.
- 🧠 Recognized modern understanding of biblical texts is more nuanced than early church interpretations.
- ✝️ While rejecting key doctrines like the Incarnation and Atonement, still retains many Christian beliefs, but no longer identifies as a traditional Christian.
Q & A
Why did the speaker originally become a Christian?
-The speaker became a Christian after a born-again experience in a local Baptist church, believing in the inerrancy of scripture and the divinity of Jesus.
What positive experiences did the speaker have as a Christian?
-The speaker had many extraordinary spiritual and even supernatural experiences, developed a powerful relationship with God, and found the scriptures to be very relevant and alive.
What caused the speaker to start doubting their faith?
-The speaker began to notice various problems and contradictions in the Bible, which led them to seek solutions through biblical commentaries and further reading. However, this often resulted in discovering more issues.
What were some specific problems the speaker encountered in the Bible?
-The speaker identified two major issues: the eschatological expectations of Jesus, Paul, and others in the New Testament, which didn't materialize, and the historical reliability of the Gospel of John, particularly its portrayal of Jesus' divinity.
How did biblical scholarship affect the speaker's faith?
-The speaker found that many well-known issues among biblical scholars, which contradicted their previous understanding of the Bible, led them to question the inerrancy and historical reliability of the scriptures.
What is the 'imminent parousia' and how did it impact the speaker's beliefs?
-The 'imminent parousia' refers to the New Testament expectation of the end of the world happening soon. The speaker found that this expectation, which did not come to pass, indicated a mistake by key New Testament figures, contributing to their doubt.
What did the speaker learn about the Gospel of John from biblical scholars?
-The speaker learned that the Gospel of John is considered less historical than the other gospels and that its high Christological statements are not believed to be actual sayings of the historical Jesus by most scholars.
How did the understanding of genre and historical context change the speaker's view of the Bible?
-The speaker realized that modern readers understand much more about the types of literature in the Bible, metaphors, and the historical development of beliefs, which made them question the naive historical reading of the early church.
What parts of Christianity does the speaker still believe in?
-The speaker still believes in one God, God's creation of the universe, Jesus as the Messiah, the day of judgment, angels and demons, and the resurrection of the dead, among other aspects.
What does the speaker reject about Christianity now?
-The speaker rejects the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Atonement, viewing them as historically, theologically, and philosophically untenable.
What impact did studying Christianity at university have on the speaker's faith?
-Studying Christianity at university exposed the speaker to critical biblical scholarship, which further undermined their faith and led many of their peers to lose their evangelical or traditional beliefs.
What is the main reason the speaker is no longer a Christian?
-The speaker is no longer a Christian primarily due to historical, theological, and philosophical issues they discovered in the Bible, particularly concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Incarnation, and the Atonement.
Outlines
🌟 Leaving Christianity: My Journey Begins
The speaker recounts their initial experience as a born-again Evangelical Christian, emphasizing their profound spiritual experiences and the development of a strong relationship with God. They describe their dedication to studying the Bible and their struggle with the arising doubts and contradictions, which they initially attributed to the Devil's influence. As they sought solutions through biblical commentaries, they found some answers but also uncovered more troubling questions. This led to a parallel existence of firm belief in Christian doctrines and growing awareness of significant issues in the scriptures.
🧩 Reconciling Faith and Reality
The speaker delves into the specific issues that caused them to question their faith, focusing on the concept of eschatology and the 'imminent parousia.' They explain their realization that early Christians, including Jesus and his disciples, expected the end of the world within their lifetime. The speaker discusses their struggle to reconcile this belief with the reality of the world continuing 2,000 years later. They also highlight the Gospel of John as problematic due to its less historical nature and how this discovery shook their reliance on the Bible as an accurate source of Jesus' teachings.
📚 Scholarly Insights on Jesus and Early Christianity
The speaker shares insights from the book 'Jesus Now and Then' by Dr. Richard A. Burridge and Dr. Graham Gould. The book explores how early church theologians interpreted vague Old Testament references as evidence for Jesus' divinity, using prophetic proof and miracles to build the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The speaker emphasizes the significant influence of Middle Platonist philosophy on these doctrines and how modern readers' understanding of biblical literature differs from that of early theologians, impacting the perception of Jesus' divinity.
🔍 Challenging Historical and Theological Beliefs
The speaker concludes by discussing the broader implications of their findings on their Christian faith. They highlight how modern biblical scholarship challenges traditional beliefs about the historical accuracy and divine nature of the gospels. The speaker notes that many events in Jesus' life were likely created based on the belief that he was the Messiah, rather than historical facts. They reflect on their personal journey, recognizing that while they still hold many Christian beliefs, they reject crucial doctrines like the divinity of Jesus, the Incarnation, and the Atonement. This shift in belief aligns with the experiences of many who have studied Christianity at an academic level.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Christian
💡Born-again
💡Evangelical
💡Scripture
💡Eschatology
💡Incarnation
💡Trinity
💡Atonement
💡Biblical Scholarship
💡Liberal Theology
💡Fundamentalist
Highlights
Explanation of why the speaker is no longer a Christian.
Description of becoming a born-again Evangelical Christian.
Mention of many extraordinary spiritual and even supernatural experiences.
Awareness of the universe as a divine creation and the significance of the Holy Bible.
Parallel process of noticing problems in the Bible and seeking solutions through biblical commentaries.
Realization of deeper issues and additional problems in the Bible through scholarly references.
Conflict between committed Christian beliefs and awareness of biblical issues.
Mention of well-known issues in biblical studies discussed by scholars for the last 150-200 years.
Examples of eschatology and the 'imminent parousia' problem in the New Testament.
Discovery of the less historical nature of the Gospel of John compared to other gospels.
Loss of reliance on the Gospel of John for authentic teachings of Jesus.
Impact of scholarly findings on the edifice of Christian faith leading to its crumbling.
Discovery of errors and historical inaccuracies in the Bible.
Study at university further contributing to the faith crisis.
Introduction to 'Jesus Now and Then' by Dr. Richard A. Burridge and Dr. Graham Gould.
Early church theologians' naive reading of Scripture as evidence of Jesus' divinity.
Modern understanding of the Bible and the historical basis for Christian beliefs.
Issues with using the New Testament as purely objective historical evidence.
Creation of gospel statements about Jesus fulfilling prophecy influenced by belief in his Messiahship.
Comparison of early and modern interpretations of Scripture and the historical basis of Jesus' divinity.
Liberal project of not being too dogmatic about Jesus' divinity justified by historical understanding.
Danger to fundamentalist Christians of critical understanding of gospel texts.
Speaker's continued belief in many aspects of Christianity despite rejecting core doctrines like Incarnation and Trinity.
Rejection of atonement as necessary for God to forgive and reconcile humanity.
Personal story of faith crisis shared by many, influenced by academic study of Christianity.
Transcripts
In this video I just want to briefly explain why I am no longer a Christian.
When I became a Christian some years ago in my local Baptist church not far from here I became
a born-again Evangelical Christian and I had a born-again experience and I can tell you the exact
day, the month, the year that I said the Jesus prayer and I became a born-again Christian.
And many wonderful things happened: I had many extraordinary experiences of a kind of spiritual
even supernatural kind and but that wasn't the end of the story of course, and what happened? Well
you know I developed a powerful relationship with God. I became aware of the universe as a
creation of God, a divine creation, the scriptures the Holy Bible, the Old and New Testament, became
very important to me and they came alive to me in that way that they do for Christians.
But also a parallel process started to happen and this was the Achilles heel of my faith, and it happened
almost from the beginning. Because I took a great interest in the Bible of course, and read it avidly
and with an expectation that God would speak to me, and I felt that God did on occasions and
that it would be relevant to my life and I applied the Bible to many problems and it was great. But
at the same time I couldn't help but notice various things, various problems
which I assumed at the time was the Devil trying to undermine my trust in God's Word.
And so I looked for solutions to these problems. And the way I did it was to think about them
and to turn to biblical commentaries written by Christians to help explain to me you know
what the solution was and thus overcome the problems and move forward. But it wasn't as
simple as that. Yes, some of the problems did have solutions and I happily moved on, but others of
them I kind of dug myself into a deeper and deeper hole and I discovered other problems because
scholars would reference other issues and I would think 'oh my goodness me I didn't know that was a problem'
and that became an issue for me. And as I said I developed this parallel existence: on the one hand
I was a committed Christian, I believed Jesus was God, I believed in the Trinity, the Incarnation,
the Atonement, I believed in the inerrancy of scripture. I was a Evangelical of course, Protestant and
conservative. And on the other hand I was becoming aware through my own innocent reading
of the New Testament of particularly big problems which as I said I thought were
spiritual in origin caused by the Devil trying to undermine my faith. I don't believe
that anymore of course because these problems I was stumbling across are well known to biblical
scholars and have been discussed by them for the last 150 to 200 years. I just stumbled across issues
which were well known in the world of biblical studies and of course unless there's some kind of
massive satanic conspiracy you know in all the universities and seminaries
in the world you know then these are real issues, and I think of course they are real issues.
What are they? Well, there's a number of them i'll just give you a couple of examples and then
I'm going to read from a book by a leading Church of England priest, a biblical scholar and
Dean of King's College here in London, a professor of biblical interpretation, and a very respected scholar.
And he discusses some of these issues in a very concise and helpful way,
just to share with you what happened to me when I also wrestled with these issues, and it led
me ultimately to part company with many - not all - many of the fundamental teachings of Christianity
because I still believe a lot of Christianity is true: obviously a belief in one God, belief in
God's creation of the created order, that Jesus was the Messiah sent by God, the prophets, I believe the
day of judgment, I believe in angels and demons and the Resurrection of the dead, and so on.
The list is very long. Actually it's like a huge iceberg under the water there's so much I still
just accept is there it's just a little bit on top principally to do with things like Incarnation,
Trinity and Atonement which I can no longer accept for historical and philosophical and theological
reasons. So what were some of the issues? Well I stumbled across (much to my horror in a way)
through my reading of the New Testament the clear impression that many people, including Jesus,
including Paul, James, John, and others expected the End of the world soon, VERY soon, imminently,
within the lifetime of people then living (see Mark 13 etc). And I looked into this and tried to find a way to
reconcile this with rather obvious fact that we are living 2,000 years later and the End hasn't
come any time soon and there's a prospect of endless millennia ahead. How can this be
the case? There seems to be a mistake here made by Jesus and Paul and James and John
etc. And the more I looked into this problem - it's called technically it's called 'eschatology'
or the 'imminent parousia' - the more I realized that in fact there was a mistake,
at least according to the scriptures of the New Testament, in them
Jesus is made to have made a mistake, and Paul clearly makes a mistake. Now these are not
moral errors, they're not bad people because they made a mistake. Paul expected the end of the world
you know he was wrong, he was fallible a human being. He was wrong about many things in fact.
So that was one serious issue. The other serious issue which is kind of connected is
the gospels, I discovered and this is something that I didn't stumble across in my reading of
the New Testament but I learned and discovered through reading scholarship, biblical scholars.
I discovered that the the Gospel of John is seen as much less historical than the other three
gospels and that's a real shame because the gospel of John has some of the juiciest, most robust, most
clear statements of Jesus' divinity anywhere in the New Testament, where Jesus says according to John: "I
am the light of the world" or "Before Abraham was I am" or "I am the resurrection and the life" etc.
Now all these wonderful statements are only found in one gospel the very last to be written they're
not found anywhere else and scholars are pretty unanimous with one or two exceptions across the
whole world the leading scholars including Christians (most scholars are Christians) that
Jesus - the actual historical Jesus 2,000 years ago - didn't say these things, and the reasons why
are historical and textual and theological. I'm not going to go into them here, but the fact is
that is the case and I was shocked to discover that was the case. Now what did that mean to me?
It meant that I felt that I could no longer rely on John, the gospel of John, to give me
the teaching of Jesus, the true historical person, as it as it really happened, teaching of Jesus.
I felt that the experts, the historians. as I say vast majority of whom are Christians,
had taken the gospel away from me and I can no longer rely on it as reliable, as authentic.
So that was that was unfortunate. Now there are other issues I'm not going to go into them but
what they did was - the edifice of my Christian faith began to crack and the
foundation, you know basically started to crumble and my faith started to fall over. Now this
is at the same time of course as being a believing Christian and believing all these doctrines of
the inerrancy of scripture, the deity of Christ, the Atonement, the Incarnation, the Trinity: Father, Son,
Holy Spirit, and all that, the perfection of the Bible. And I was discovering the Bible was in fact very imperfect,
that it contained errors and in fact some of the things I took as history and as true were perhaps
not really history or true, at least in terms of something that could be traced back to Jesus.
So I became increasingly schizophrenic if that's the right word. On the one hand I
went to church, I believed, I prayed, on the other hand my faith was in crisis and it wasn't getting
any better, it was getting worse and worse and worse. And I did study this at university
as well and which didn't help in some ways my faith but that's another
story I'm not going to go into that. So just want to share with you some words from this book
'Jesus Now and Then' by Dr Richard A Burridge and Dr Graham Gould. Now Burridge is Dean of King's College one of the great colleges in Britain, professor of biblical interpretation and a Church of England
priest. He's a believing Christian and wrote this book with Dr Gould who is a lecturer in patristics (that is the early fathers) so they co-wrote this book. I do recommend it you can get it via Amazon.
And this is what they say and I have no reason to disagree with this but I want to share it with you
to give you a flavour of how serious Christian committed, top-notch biblical scholars
and experts understand the historical basis for their Christian faith and the problems they see.
These are not enemies of Christianity! So this is page 195, they write:
'To modern eyes, it is almost inevitable that the theologians of the early
church will appear to have read Scripture in a very naive way when they took it as evidence that
Jesus was a divine person become human. [In other words the incarnation] They took what to us seem
like very vague hints in the Old Testament about the figure of the Messiah, or the figure of Wisdom -
a personified quality of God in the Old Testament (notably the book of Proverbs) - and interpreted
these as evidence that the Old Testament authors actually foresaw, in considerable detail, the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus. [So what they're saying here is that these early theologians of
the church and the bishops you know whether it be Origen or Irenaeus or Tertullian or Justin Martyr,
quite a few of these very well-known names, they mined the Old Testament for
hints or evidence or proofs about the coming of Jesus, God on earth, the Messiah, the Incarnation].
Alongside this prophetic proof of Jesus status as God's Son or Messiah
which is expanded for example in the works of Justin and Origen, the Church Fathers set
a range of information about him - his miracles, his teaching, his authority over demons, and his power
to forgive sins - and erected it into what to them was very clear proof that he was a divine being.
Even then they were not finished, for they took the New Testament hints about Jesus' pre-existence
for example in Colossians, Paul's letter to Colossians chapter 1 verse 15 and the Gospel
of John 1:1, and developed them with the aid of the Logos-doctrine of of Middle Platonist philosophy,
into the fully-fledged doctrine of Jesus as God's creative Logos, which in the second century
became the basis of the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation. Now this is heavy
historical theology i'm not necessarily going to unpack it all here needless to say that the doctrine
the Trinity did not exist in the first century or the second century. What was what predominant,
I remember studying this at university, was this Logos theology in the second century. 'Logos' is the
Greek word meaning 'word' or 'reason' and it was identified as Jesus. This doctrine is heavily
influenced by pagan philosophy especially Plato's ideas, (Greek philosopher from the 5th century B.C.).
They continue: "Modern readers of the Bible know much more than the writers of the early church
could possibly have done about the type of literature that is contained in the bible
about the nature of metaphor about the way in which beliefs about the messiah accumulated
and the way in which Christian beliefs about Jesus developed over time including the period
of the New Testament itself. So they're saying here that today because of our awareness and
sensitivity of 'genre' -that's the sense of the different kinds of literature that exists:
so we have to ask what kind of literature is this. Is it poetry, is it a metaphor, is it history,
is it a letter, is it meant to be taken as unvarnished reporting, or is it highly interpreted,
and so on and so on we're now much more sensitive to these issues they say than
the Early Fathers were. And also the sense that the understanding of Jesus in the early church
developed and changed - it wasn't static from the beginning. So they continue: "We are aware
of how the New Testament presentation of Jesus was shaped by beliefs about him,
so that it cannot be used as a purely objective historical evidence for his life and status."
So they're saying here - a common place in scholarship - that the beliefs of the writers say
of the gospels the beliefs that they had shaped the way they spoke about Jesus tell
us as much really about the author's beliefs about Jesus as they do about Jesus out there as a person
who they are describing. So they're not objective in the modern sense of being disinterested
accounts of a life, they are motivated by faith. And that's not necessarily a bad thing
but we need to be aware of that when we read these texts and not just assume perhaps naively
that they are giving us objective truth. So they continue and give an example: "For example, we know
that some of the Gospel statements that Jesus fulfill prophecy - and the events in his life that
are alleged to have done so - were probably CREATED in the light of the belief that he was the Messiah,
and CANNOT be used as evidence to support the belief - for example the story
of Jesus' flight into Egypt in Matthew chapter 2 verse 13 to 15. Now without going into all of what
they're getting at here i'll just very briefly mention for Matthew it is commonly accepted
is presenting Jesus as a new Moses, as a second Moses and so the gospel portrays Jesus in that way.
So of course who was it that addressed Israel on Mount Sinai well
it was Moses - who was it that addressed the crowds on the Sermon on the Mount well it was the second
Moses, Jesus. Who was it that came out of Egypt? In the Exodus that was Moses.
Who also came out of Egypt? it was Jesus. and there are so many parallels between Moses and Jesus and Moses
and Jesus which are uniquely found in this gospel - but no other gospel Luke for example does not have
Jesus going off to Egypt. And these stories, well the story
of Jesus going into Egypt then out of Egypt again are probably created they say in the light
of the belief that he was the messiah and but they don't say it but a second Moses.
So they continue: "Unless modern Christians are going to to pretend that they live in the second
or fourth century and to take scripture exactly as it was taken by the tradition prior to the
Enlightenment it is difficult to accept that there is as much historical basis in scripture
for believing that Jesus was divine as the early church commonly thought. For this reason alone,
the liberal project of refusing to be too dogmatic about claiming that Jesus was
divine seems amply justified." Now this extract is part of a chapter which is talking about modern
understandings of Jesus and he's talking about how the liberal understanding of Jesus actually
can help us to sort out fact from fiction in the gospels. So I'll leave that there but
you see how how dangerous this is if you are a fundamentalist Christian because it really brings
you up against the question of the historical or unhistorical nature of the gospels in the
light of an intelligent critical understanding of the texts and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
So just to end it really here because I could go on and on for hours like this
A lot of what I believed as a Christian I still believe. As i said the iceberg is there:
vast areas of belief I still hold in fact most of what I believed I still believe but on certain
crucial doctrines crucial beliefs I don't I don't believe Jesus was Yahweh, I don't believe that he
was the incarnate Son of God, I don't believe he was the Second Person of Trinity, and the idea
of atonement, this idea of a human sacrifice or of any kind is necessary for God to forgive us
and reconcile us I think is totally unacceptable on historical and moral and theological grounds.
So I reject that now and I have obviously for some time. So that's why I'm no longer a Christian.
But I suppose you could say I'm still half a Christian and what I mean by that is the
good things in Christianity I accept. The things I no longer believe in I don't accept, obviously.
So that's for what it's worth is my story and I must say that there are many many people who
can give a similar story. I know that the people who were with me in the first year class at
university when I started to study Christianity (Bachelor of Divinity degree at the University of London)
I think most of us were conservative Christians, evangelicals probably,
more Catholics as well and I believe I'm told that by the end of the course
only one person was still evangelical or traditional at all and even they were quite
liberal because we had all been forced to face the facts the historical facts: the literary facts,
the archaeology, the facts of of biblical scholarship what they have uncovered and shown us
about the scriptures and about historical theology about the historical Jesus about
well you name it it's a very long list and that's why many of us some of us lost our faith.
Some of us clung to bits of it. Anyway but so there we go, that's why I'm no longer a Christian.
I hope you found that interesting. Till next time.
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