The audacity to question God: An interview with Greg Boyd

The audacity to question God: An interview with Greg Boyd
Jonathan Merritt, Sept 19, 2013
http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2013/09/19/audacity-question-god-interview-greg-boyd/

quoted excerpt:

Bestselling author Greg Boyd rejects the idea that faith is rooted in certainty and is the opposite of doubt.
Pastor Gregory Boyd (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) made a name for himself years ago when he penned the best-selling Gold Medallion Award-winner Letters from a Skeptic, a collection of letters with his agnostic father that address tough questions non-Christians people have about the faith. But Boyd quickly became a lightning rod of controversy when he became a proponent of “open theism”, a view claiming that the future is not pre-determined and therefore God knows the future as possibilities and not fact (for more, see his book God of the Possible).

In his newest book, Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty, Boyd has returned to his roots in a way by urging people to wrestle with the big questions of faith. He claims that modern Christians have come to accept a false belief that faith is rooted in certainty. He says that faith is instead being willing to commit to living a certain way despite not being certain. Here, we discuss the benefit of embracing doubt and why he believes we need even to question God.
quoted excerpt:

JM: Can you share a little bit of the story you share in Benefit of the Doubt that taught you the importance of being honest with God?

GB: I became a Christian at the age of 17 in a strict holiness Pentecostal Church. I was able to quit taking drugs and a host of other sinful behaviors, except for one – a f pornography addiction that I’d developed over the four years leading up to my conversion. Since this church taught that a person lost their salvation with every sin, I found I was getting “saved” and “unsaved” several times a week–if not each day–for the first two years of my Christian walk.
One night, I walked out of this holiness church in despair, believing I was never going to be able to kick my pornography habit. Believing at this point that I was destined to hell, I became “uncorked” in the church parking lot while sharing my despair with a friend. Like a volcano erupting, I unleashed anger and frustration toward God not just over my two years of unsuccessful struggling with porn, but going all the way back to abuse I had suffered for years as a child at the hands of an unloving, psychologically tormented, step-mother.
After I had spewed out my seething rage, I flopped my Bible on the hood of my friend’s truck and began reading it sarcastically. It “happened” to flop open to Romans 8:1, which read, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” This opened the door for me to begin to realize, for the first time in my life, that God loved me for free, despite my sin. It ultimately resulted in me finding a motivation of love I had never known before, and it was this motivation that eventually broke the stronghold of pornography in my life and completely revolutionized my life as a disciple.
One of the main lessons I glean from this night is that it is only when we are completely honest with God that we are able to receive a true revelation of what God is really like. Only when we are uncompromisingly “real” before God can we allow God to be uncompromisingly “real” with us.

quoted excerpt:
JM: In Benefit of the Doubt, you advise people to believe in the Bible because they believe in Jesus, not the other way around. What do you mean by this, and why do you feel it is important?

GB: The number one reason young people today are abandoning the Christian faith and why other people can’t take the Christian faith seriously has to do with problems they have with the Bible. For example, as most freshmen taking a course in “The Bible as Literature” at a secular college learn, the historical accuracy of some biblical stories are questioned by many scholars, and it’s hard to deny that the Bible contains some apparent contradictions and some material that seems to fly in the face of modern science. In Benefit of the Doubt, I argue that if we structured our faith the way the earliest Christians did, these problems with the Bible would pose no threat to our confidence in Jesus being Lord and even to our confidence that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.
The earliest disciples didn’t believe in Jesus because their scripture (Old Testament) proved to them that he was the Son of God. They were rather convinced by Jesus’ claims, his unique life of love, his distinctive authority, his unprecedented miracles, his self-sacrificial death, and especially his resurrection. Once they believed in Jesus, they looked for him and found him in their scripture. But they never would have been convinced that Jesus was Lord had they started with scripture alone.
Unfortunately, most evangelicals today are taught to do the opposite. They base their faith in Jesus’ Lordship (as well as everything else) on their belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. This is “unfortunate” because this way of structuring our faith leverages everything on the perfection of this book, forcing the Bible to carry more weight than it was ever meant to carry. Every single problem people find with scripture now threatens to undermine their faith.
As I flesh out in my book, I eventually came to the conclusion that the things about Jesus that convinced the earliest disciples that he was Lord continue to be compelling enough to convince open-minded people today that Jesus is Lord, and they do not presuppose the view that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Once I was persuaded on the basis of historical, philosophical and personal arguments that Jesus was Lord, I was motivated to also embrace the Bible as God’s Word, for (among other things) this was clearly Jesus’ own view and it’s very hard to confess Jesus to be one’s Lord while correcting his theology, especially on such a fundamental matter. But notice, my reasons for believing in Scripture are now based entirely on my faith in Jesus, which is why my faith need not be threatened any longer by any historical inaccuracies or contradictions or scientific inaccuracies I may find in it.
I’m convinced that if young people today would structure their faith this way, we’d see far fewer loosing their faith.

etc.