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Why Do Evangelicals Bother With Quoting Bible Verses to Atheists?

neuralyzer

But the natural [unsaved, unregenerate] man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can [lacks ability] he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (2 Corinthians 2:14)

According to 2 Corinthians 2:14, the natural man — anyone who is not a Christian — cannot receive the things of God, neither can he know them. Why? Such things are spiritually discerned; since the Holy Spirit does not indwell the unbelievers, they cannot know them.

If this is so, and Evangelicals say it is, then why, oh why do they quote Bible verses to atheists, agnostics, pagans, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, Catholics, and other unbelievers? We lack the God-given ability to understand the Bible, so why bomb us with verses from the allegedly inerrant and infallible Word of God?

Of course, this is nonsense. All of us can read, understand, and comprehend the Bible if we choose to do so. Many of us don’t do so because we don’t find the Bible text interesting or valuable. I have spent most of my life with my nose in the Bible. While I no longer find spiritual value in the Bible, I still find it to be a fascinating text. Or better put, I am fascinated by how individual people interpret the text. One God, one allegedly supernatural text, countless interpretations.

Evangelical apologists often use 2 Corinthians 2:14 to discredit my writing, saying that I am a “natural man,” unable to truly understand and comprehend the Bible. Apologists should realize how absurd this is, but, hey, THE BIBLE SAYS, right? Here’s the thing, I was an Evangelical Christian for fifty years. I was a Bible college-trained pastor; a man who spent over 20,000 hours reading and studying the Bible. Yet, the moment I deconverted, fifty years of Bible knowledge disappeared from my mind. God sent Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) to my house, and with their Men in Black neuralyzer, they wiped from my mind EVERYTHING I knew and understood about the Biblical text. Amazing, right?

Or, 2 Corinthians 2:14 is wrong. Reason and common sense tell us that all that is needed to understand the Bible is the ability to read; and that knowledge gained is never lost unless age or dementia affects our memories and understanding. For Evangelicals intent on saying unsaved, unregenerate people cannot understand the Bible, I ask that you stop quoting the Bible to me and other atheists. God himself says I CANNOT understand the Word of God. This, of course, leads to another dilemma for Evangelicals. The Bible says in Romans 10:17, So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. If I can’t “hear” the word of God due to me being a “natural man,” this means “faith” is beyond me. Go ahead, Evangelicals. I look forward to you explaining away the clear teachings of the Bible.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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14 Comments

  1. przxqgl

    the first time i read the bible, i realised that what it said was so far removed from what the “christians” said — and did — that i thought it incredible that they could use the bible so wrongly, and so consistently wrongly… but, eventually, i realised that, in order to discuss the bible with these people, i would have to know A LOT more about the entire bible than they did… which is when i entered the seminary. 😉

  2. Avatar
    Jimmy

    In the case of KJV onlyist IFBers, my guess would be that they think speaking like Shakespeare gives the impression of intelligence. Basically baffle people with BS and hope it works.

  3. Avatar
    Matilda

    Hubby and I supported bible translation missions for decades, deeply entrenched in the fundy belief that every language group needed to have the bible in their mother tongue, their heart language. But I was a teacher whose special interest was helping pupils who, at the ages of 5-8yo, were having difficulty hacking the skill of reading. Experts said that the average reading age in the UK was 11yo, but other research suggested the reading age of the KJV was much higher than that. I never squared that fact with my fundy belief that even newer translations needed reading levels higher than average. I just thought god interpreted his word to poorer readers. Now I think that those language groups whom we helped to receive a bible for the first time, well what a mish-mash that is. I mean simply trying to translate ‘snow’ or ‘sheep’ or a thousand other cultural references to a group living near the Equator, for example, who’d never experienced any of them, made a mockery of my former belief in the one unchanging ‘Word of God’.

  4. velovixen

    Jimmy—H.L. Mencken said essentially the same thing about KJV: The seeming orotundity of its rhetoric makes people feel “in the know” when they quote it and hearers are either cowed by that or lulled by its sonorous ness.

    By the way: The language of KJV and Shakespeare are actually very different, although they sound the same to people who don’t know the Bard’s work beyond “To be or not to be.” (My algebra teacher quoted it all the time.)

    As to believers who Bible-bomb non-believers: They now remind me of the worst teachers I had—and, possibly, the kind I was when I started. (Yes, I’ve taught Shakespeare plays and sonnets.) Such teachers think that whatever they are teaching is self-evident and if students aren’t getting it, they must be stubborn or lazy. Likewise, Evangelicals and other Christian zealots believe the authority of the Bible is self-evident and that anyone who doesn’t agree is either willfully sinning or being tricked by Satan. Said Evangelicals think that a barrage of scriptural snippets will open something in the hearer’s mind and the light of Jesus will come streaming in.

  5. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    Magical thinking is encouraged in Christianity (in my ipinion), and evangelicals treat the Bible like it’s a powerfully magical object. I think they think the Holy Spirit travels thru the words, so if evangelicals spout verses at nonbelievers, they’re creating a portal for the Holy Spirit to travel through to touch the nonbeliever and open their “heart”. That’s my read on it…..

    • Avatar
      ... Zoe ~

      This is similar to what I was thinking. Magic. An incantation. Unseen power (Holy Spirit). Though I think there is a sort of personal spiritual power that the person thinks they possess and therefore can’t help themselves. Sort of like being under a spell and delivering a spell at the same time.

  6. Avatar
    Jeff Bishop

    Hello Bruce,
    If I may comment, a bit off topic. Of course your question is why Evangelicals quote or throw bible versus at you when: “But the natural [unsaved, unregenerate] man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can [lacks ability] he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (2 Corinthians 2:14)”

    This of course implies the ignorance of the speaker (Evangelical) not know the scriptures of which they speak.

    The point that I find interesting and related to the thread, is my cursory understanding of the practices of “The Church” when it comes to “The Flock”.

    Specifically – The introduction of the “Printing Press” Johannes Gutenburg / 1448. Prior to this books (and reading) were the results of scribes. Books being exceedingly rare, and tremendously expensive, (outside of China but thats a story for another thread).

    Accordingly books were the preview of the extremely wealthy or the Catholic Church.

    The % of people that could read, (again books were exceedingly rare) was very low and the Catholic Church in it’s wisdom, attempted to destroy every Classical period scroll they could get there hands on, so the people that could read were essentially reading CULT propaganda.

    Prior to Gutenburgs magnificent invention, the % of Europeans that could “read” was very low, and in rural or isolated villages the % was literally non-existant. (reference: The Constitutional Rights Foundation)

    Getting to the key point:
    For most people, following the collapse of the Roman Empire and in the centuries leading up to and including the Middle Ages, the only source of information was the village Catholic Priest.

    CONSIDER the IMPLICATIONS: From about AD 400 to 1448, / basicly 1,000 years, Europeans were directed, influenced and manipulated by the cult of the Catholic Church.

    BRUCE: 1,000 YEARS of Christian mind control over 99% of the population! 1,000 YEARS!!!

    The Western Mind has never fully recovered from this 1,000 year cult assault. Perhaps this is a key reason that the Christian miasma is so hard to shake.

    If too far off topic please delete.

  7. Avatar
    Elliot

    Russia is a better place to be Christian than the US. The US is highjacked by crazies who are okay with a man calling himself a woman and entering a woman’s sauna.

  8. Avatar
    John S.

    Elliot, I am a practicing Catholic who lives in the US. I plan on staying here regardless of who becomes President, etc. The price of living in a free society is that you must afford those who differ from you the same respect and dignity as you want for yourself. That’s the bottom line for me.
    From reading my US history, the worst oppression here for those of my faith did not come from far-left totalitarians, (although Catholics were oppressed in other parts of the world by the far left, where the Catholic Church itself had previously been aligned with repressive regimes) but rather from good old fashioned White Anglo-Saxon Protestant bigots who passed laws that were meant to suppress Catholicism. Usually these folks, referred to as “Nativists” were in bed with other groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
    From the few recent posts I have read of yours, you appear to be friendly to Russia and other faux “Peoples’ Republics” like North Korea that are in fact repressive dictatorships. I would just respond that Jesus himself in the Gospels advocated for the exact opposite of these systems of government, especially when they want to co-opt Christian religious organizations to bolster their legitimacy. I recognize my own hypocrisy in this regard, as the Catholic Church itself has been guilty of this in history. But at times the Church has also suffered for not enabling a dictator, Ortega in Nicaragua coming to mind as a recent example. Other dictators, such as Xi in Communist China seek to use the veneer of the “Patriotic Catholic Church of China” as an instrument of state propaganda. Putin, who for most of his career was a KGB agent working for an anti-theistic state (the Soviet Union) sudden embrace of Russian Orthodoxy to me is no different than Josef Stalin’s 180 degree turn in the dark days of the German invasion, where he suddenly released Metropolitan Sergius from the gulag and allowed the churches in Moscow to be opened for Christmas. The ROC made a Devil’s deal with Stalin- it became the only “church” allowed in the Eastern Block countries ( with maybe Poland being an exception), many of which were predominantly Catholic. Priests and other religious who did not convert to orthodoxy were imprisoned and martyred. Putin is cut from this cloth, as evidenced by his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
    This is the person you are idolizing.

  9. Avatar
    Elliot

    Russia didn’t invade Ukraine. The people of the eastern provinces of Ukraine democratically and overwhelmingly voted to secede from an American-installed, rabidly Russophobe, puppet regime staffed with Neo-Nazis who overthrew the democratically elected president (Yanukovych) and committed heinous terrorist attacks on civilians separatist provinces. They assaulted and destroyed property and tried to stamp out the Russian language.

    The entity known as Ukraine changed borders frequently. The eastern regions such as Crimea and Donbass do not consider themselves Ukrainian. They speak Russian and many are part of the Orthodox Christian Church unlike the West which is Catholic.

    The Kiev gangster regime sold out the country’s industries to the West and impoverished the country, causing people to immigrate back to Russia where the high paying jobs were.

    After 8 years of negotiation, Russia intervened militarily to protect the Russian-speaking regions who wanted to be reunited with the motherland. Russian Armed Forces limited the operation to protecting just those regions and had no designs on taking the entire country. It is Kiev, with its Western backers, who are continuing to push the confrontation to a deadly extreme by launching long range missile strikes deep into Russia.

    Russian defense industry is top class and self-sufficient. Ukraine has no industry and relies entirely on the West. Without American support, it would collapse in an instant. Same goes for most of these NATO countries like Estonia and Latvia. Russia knows this and isn’t going to waste time attacking militarily irrelevant countries unless America provokes it by stationing missiles in those countries. Countries like Romania and Poland shouldn’t even be in NATO. All they do is make an accidental clash with Russia more likely.

    As for Taiwan? The US repeatedly acknowledged the island as being part of the mainland PRC. Taiwan is a self-governing province at best. It is not a sovereign state. It will never field a military capable of defending itself from the mainland People’s Liberation Army. The PLA will encircle and blockade the island and sink any American ship that comes near it. Worse yet, a fight with the PLA Navy over Taiwan has an extremely high risk of turning into a 2 front war with DPRK at the same time.

    The answer is easy. Disband NATO. Stop defending Europe, Israel, Taiwan, Japan, and yes, even the ROK. ROK and Japan have the technology to build nuclear weapons. Their cities and industries are better than those of America.

  10. Avatar
    Elliot

    The United States Military is incapable of protecting the country from a hypothetical Russian or Chinese hypersonic missile strike. A handful of North Korean ICBMs can overwhelm the air defense system. Russia has over 6000 nuclear weapons, some of them over 100 times stronger than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and capable of producing radioactive tsunamis. These are the kind of weapons you use to end a war. Not to win one.

    The US should get rid of its nuclear weapons, drastically downsize its military, close all overseas bases, and return its soldiers home.

    If Europe, Japan, ROK, Israel, and everyone else can’t defend themselves after decades of American support? That is going to be on them.

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