Remember When You Loved Me? Digital Cartoon

I used to be a Bible-freak.

Seriously!

I still have my Bible from when I was a teen, all underlined in colored pencil and writing in the margins.

In my Bachelors, I took two years of Biblical Greek and a year of Biblical Hebrew.

Then in seminary, I took two more years of Greek, two more years of Hebrew, and a year of Aramaic.

I was a serious student of the Bible.

Which is why the event that launched my deconstruction... on the day of my graduation from seminary... was so cataclysmic! 

I spent the next 30 years in ministry as a pastor, trying to integrate my absolute devotion to the Bible with my doubts that it wasn't the three "e"s... inerrant, infallible, inspired.

When I finally saw that the Bible has its place, has value as transmission of truth, and it a part of the human search for meaning and understanding the mysterious universe we live in... then I finally had peace of mind.

Of course, my new relationship to the Bible, exciting to me, was suspicious to others.

This, among other things, led to my leaving the ministry and the church in 2010.

I still love the Bible. Yes.

But not like I used to.

I have grown.

And I appreciate that Bible for what it actually is rather than what I imagined it to be.

Isn't that a more mature love?

I think so.

Do you get this? Were you a Bible-freak and now you're not?