At What Price Inerrancy?

Two years ago when I wrote my first blog, despite the confusion and questions my church situation stirred up, I was sure of an awful lot of things.  Between then and now I've lost my grasp of many of the principles I thought I knew and in which I once (seemingly at least) unequivocally believed. 

I was raised up in a very conservative faith--biblical inerrancy, complementarianism, creationism...you get the idea.  And I was pretty much a hardcore proponent of all of these principles at one time or another (with the exception of unilateral female submission to male authority because I came out of the womb a feminist).  Yet, as I got older and learned myself some education, one by one the bastions of fundamentalism have come under scrutiny and failed to assert themselves as capital T Truth.

Biblical inerrancy has probably been the toughest struggle.  Growing up I was taught to believe in the deity of Christ/seven day creation/salvation by grace through faith, etc. because the Bible told me so.  As long as I believed that the Bible was God's inerrant Word, faith was relatively simple.  The hard part was trusting Scripture, the rest was gravy.  Nevertheless, eventually even trusting Scripture became too great a leap for me.  Doubts began to niggle (and I hate when things niggle--it's terribly uncomfortable), and I started to question the existence of Satan as anymore than a literary construct (realistically, how could God ever haven an opponent?  It would be a farce.  And why would an angel who had been in the Presence of the Most High be that stupid?) and from there I went on to question Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel--the stories that sound as mythical as any pagan account of origins I've ever read.  Until finally, I realized that if I were asked to stake my life on my belief in these things, I wouldn't be able to do it.  I didn't literally believe that magical trees and a talking snake converged to help damn humanity.  I just didn't.  And this was a problem.

Now I realize that there is nothing logically impossible about Eve being deceived by a Satan-infused serpent and thereby getting barred from the Tree of Life by flame-wielding Cherubim who have since disappeared from the planet or been interdimensionally transported elsewhere.  That this all actually took place is within the very large realm of possibility, I know.  It's just that on a personal level I find it tough to swallow.  But my issues with Genesis, even if my suspicions are accurate, do not render the Bible meaningless or even error-filled.  I certainly can, as C. S. Lewis did, believe that God used myth in the Old Testament to teach true principles even if the stories themselves did not literally play out.  It just makes it harder to trust what I read or to trust that it's possible to interpret Scripture accurately with any degree of confidence.  Perhaps that kind of discernment takes more wisdom than I have.

So my faith has undergone a pretty radical transformation.  I won't call it a regression because I'm not sure it is one.  It could be that in all my doubt I am closer to the truth than I ever was when I had an answer for everything.  But the loss of my spiritual touchstones has been a painful journey and a lonely one.  I haven't been able to find a guide book for the fundamental revision of my view of Scripture, which, let's face it, is the lynchpin of Christian theology.  The Christians I know read the Bible literally.  The atheists I know of read it ironically.  Neither one of those options really works for me at the moment.  I guess I could try to read the Bible symbolically, incarnationally or haphazardly, but I don't know how to do any of that.  I'm sort of on my own, and that's a scary state to be in.  I'd be pretty darn hopeless but for God.  With God, though?  Anything is possible (yes, even talking snakes and magic fruit).  With God maybe even an overthinking, underperforming wretch like me could find the ubiquitous happy ending told of in legend and song.  And believe me, ubiquity has never sounded so good.