The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser

Tag: Bible Interpretation

  • My Use of Internal Critique and Why I Befuddle So Many Evangelicals

    Typically, I use internal critiques when engaging Evangelicals on this site. If you are unfamiliar with the term “internal critique,” Google defines it like this:

    An internal critique evaluates an idea, theory, or system using its own rules, assumptions, and standards rather than applying outside values. It temporarily accepts a position to see if it is logical, self-consistent, and works by its own definitions.

    Simply put, I assume the Evangelical (or Independent Fundamentalist Baptist) position when critiquing Evangelicalism. This means that I accept their Bible-based theological beliefs at face value. My goal is to determine whether Evangelical beliefs and practices are logical and consistent. Are the beliefs of my interlocutors consistent with the stated theological beliefs of Evangelical Christianity? Are their beliefs consistent with their professed doctrine and interpretations of the Bible; a collection of religious texts Evangelicals believe are inspired, inerrant, and infallible?

    Thus, when Evangelicals say “God is Good,” an internal critique looks at whether this claim is logical and consistent with what Evangelicals say they believe and practice. This, of course, requires engaging what the Biblical text says. The Bible is the foundational text of Evangelical Christianity. My internal critiques always focus on the Bible, since it is, allegedly, the standard by which Evangelicals judge their beliefs and live their lives.

    While some — not many — Evangelicals might appeal to philosophy or external critiques, discussions are best served by focusing on the Biblical text itself, or, to a lesser degree, church history. The Christian church has a 2,000-year history, so there’s much to glean about Christianity itself. That said, most Evangelicals are not well-informed about church history, and even if they might know a bit of church history, their final court of appeal will be the Bible and the history contained therein.

    An internal critique of Evangelicalism requires a basic understanding of Christian/Evangelical beliefs and practices (orthodoxy and orthopraxy). Knowing how to use Hebrew and Greek language tools (dictionaries, interlinears) tools is helpful too. No need to purchase these things. They are readily available on the Internet.

    My use of internal critiques often confuses both Evangelicals and atheists alike, but for different reasons. This leads to them not understanding what it is I do on this site. More than a few atheist critics have told me that I’m still a Christian; a secret believer. They totally misunderstand what I am trying to accomplish with my writing. My primary goal is to help those who have deconverted or are thinking about leaving Christianity. Engaging critics helps with that goal.

    Many Evangelicals also think I’m still a Christian. They read my writing and find it “Biblical” and compelling. Sometimes, they will send me an email thanking me for my faith in Jesus and my stand on the Word of God. Ten minutes later, another email from them will arrive, stating that they are appalled by the fact that I’m an ex-Evangelical pastor, an atheist, and humanist. How could I possibly write such “powerful”words and be an atheist. I love it when Evangelicals send me a donation, only to find they are supporting a tool of Satan. Sorry, all donations are final.

    An internal critique will not work with some Evangelicals. Once they appeal to faith, claim Holy Spirit-given knowledge, or say that the ‘natural man” (all non-Christians) cannot understand the Bible, meaningful discussions end. An internal critique requires both parties in the discussion to play by the same rules. I generally try to focus discussions on the Biblical text itself. Faith claims and personal testimonies have no value when giving an internal critique. All that matters is the Biblical text and how Evangelical Christians interpret it.

    I try to keep doors open and bridges unburned when engaging Evangelicals, hoping we will have thoughtful discussions in the future. Sadly, this will not be the case when dealing some believers. When they find their beliefs twisted into a pretzel, they become filled with anger instead of grace. Instead of considering what has been presented, they display what they hilariously call “righteous anger”; which often is no different from impudently losing their temper. When this happens, I try not to return the same, choosing to remember that I was once a devout, Spirit-filled, passionate Evangelical Christian. I understand their anger, which often is actually fear. Fear that they can’t answer my questions and challenges. Often, such people will say, “We will just have to agree to disagree.” No, we don’t. There can’t be two correct answers. Both of us may be wrong, but both of us can’t be right. And I would think, for all of us, truth matters.

    Do you use internal critiques when engaging Evangelicals in discussions? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comment section. Disagree with what I’ve written? Fire away!

  • Bruce, You Are Interpreting Those Verses Wrong

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    I recently received the following question from a Christian man named Joel. My response follows.

    It’s not true that you can’t be saved.

    Is this a general statement or a specific one? Is Joel claiming universal salvation? How does Joel KNOW that it is NOT true that I can’t be saved?” It is clear from the Bible that apostates and reprobates cannot be saved. They have crossed a line of no return.

    Further the book of Hebrews says:

    For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the Holy Spirit and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come and then have fallen away, since they are crucifying again the Son of God to their own harm and are holding him up to contempt. (Hebrews 6:4-6)

    Let’s take a careful look at these verses.

    The text says “For it is impossible.” What is “impossible?” To restore a Christian who has fallen away.

    Have I been enlightened, tasted the Heavenly gift, shared in the Holy Spirit, tasted the good word of God, and power of the age to come? Yes.

    It is clear from Scripture and personal testimony that I was a follower or Jesus. Yet, I am an atheist today. Why is that? The above text answers this question by saying that I have fallen away and crucified Jesus afresh, making a mockery of him.

    Hebrews 10:26-30 says:

    For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins but a fearful prospect of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy “on the testimony of two or three witnesses.” How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know the one who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:26-30)

    Have I spurned Jesus, profaned the blood of the covenant, and outraged the Spirit? Have I received the knowledge of the truth? Yes, and this means there no longer remains a sacrifice for my sins. No blood atonement, no salvation.

    It is clear from Hebrews 6 and 10, that I am unsaved and can never be saved again.

    That verse that says about how it’s impossible for a person who was once enlightened, etc. and who has seen the powers of the come…

    You haven’t seen the powers of the age to come, but a somewhat watered-down version of Christianity, where it was taught in IFB seminary that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are not for today. That wasn’t your fault that you were taught that.

    Sigh. Joel wrongly believes that I haven’t seen “the powers of the age of come.” Based on this faulty conclusion, Joel believes I was taught a watered-down version of Christianity. He provides no evidence for his claim. Joel just asserts his claim and expects everyone to just trust him.

    I suspect Joel is either a pentecostal or charismatic Christian. What Joel does not know is that I was a non-cessationist; someone who believes the gifts of the Holy Spirit are in force and operational today. A cessationist is someone who believes the gifts of the spirit are not for today. That said, much of what goes on in Pentecostal/Charismatic churches is downright heretical. No “miracle” is out of bounds, so healing evangelists report crazy claims.

    I attended Midwestern Baptist College in the mid-70s to train for the ministry. According to Joel, Midwestern taught me a watered-down version of Christianity. Maybe, but Joel is unaware of the fact that I left the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement in the 80s — 20 years before I deconverted. There goes another straw man up in smoke. I just love setting fire to straw men. 🙂

    I think you just got discouraged and went AWOL for awhile.

    I left Christianity almost 20 years ago. So much for going “AWOL for awhile.” In other words. my atheism is temporary, and to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I’ll be back.” This is patently untrue. My atheism is not a temporary viewpoint. I will, however, get saved for $5,000,000. 🙂

    Joel thinks the reason I left Christianity is because I “got discouraged.” I am sure discouragement played a part, but the primary reason I left Christianity is this: the central claims of Christianity are false. They no longer make any sense to me.

    You were seeing  a very lukewarm version of “church”.

    How could Joel possibly know this? Did he attend any of the churches I pastored? No. Did he know I left the IFB church movement 20 years before I deconverted? No. Had Joel gone to any of the churches I pastored, he would have learned “lukewarm” was not in my vocabulary. I was a committed Christian who took seriously the teachings of the Bible and tried to put my faith into practice every day of the week,

    Joel, you might want to peruse the posts on the WHY? page.

    Saved by Reason,

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  • What Does the Bible Say?

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    “What does the Bible say?” is a common refrain from Evangelicals when called on to defend their beliefs, social pronouncements, or other claims they make, purportedly in the name of God and according to what this deity said within the pages of the Protestant Christian Bible. However, the Bible by itself says nothing, and I mean nothing. The Bible is no different from any other book. Of course, Evangelicals think the Bible is different from all the books that have ever been written. Evangelicals claim the Bible is a supernatural book, written by a supernatural God, and endowed with supernatural powers. When asked for evidence for their claims, Evangelicals reply, “The Bible says.”

    But what, actually, does the Bible say? Nothing. The Bible doesn’t say anything until we interpret it through the grid of our personal experiences and beliefs. That’s why no two Christians believe the same things. So, when an Evangelical declares “The Bible says,” what he really means is this is what I say, what my denomination says, what my church says, and what my pastor says.

    Dr. Dan McClellan does a good job explaining this in the video below:

    Video Link

    Remember this the next time a confident, arrogant Evangelical says, “The Bible says.”

    Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.

    Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

    You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

  • What My Evangelical Professors Taught Me About the Bible

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    I attended Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan from 1976-1979. Midwestern is a diehard Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) institution. Established in 1954, Midwestern requires its professors to rigidly hold to IFB/Evangelical beliefs. Not doing so leads to firing for professors and expulsion for students. No one was permitted to deviate from the “faith once delivered to the saints” — as interpreted by Chancellor Tom Malone and the college’s administration.

    These presuppositions guided every professor’s teaching:

    • The Bible is the very words of God.
    • The Bible is inspired — breathed out by God.
    • The Bible is inerrant — without error.
    • The Bible is infallible — true in all that it says,
    • The Bible is meant, with few exceptions, to be read and interpreted literally.
    • The Holy Spirit teaches us what particular verses of the Bible mean.
    • The Bible has no errors, mistakes, or contractions.
    • The Bible is internally consistent (univocality).

    Further, Midwestern had particular beliefs about soteriology, eschatology, ecclesiology, and pneumatology. Only the King James Bible was used in the classroom, and only Erasmus’ text was used in Greek class. Hebrew was not taught at Midwestern. Opposing viewpoints were rarely brought up, other than to tell students, “We don’t believe that here.” Not one class was spent addressing Calvinism or any other eschatological system except dispensationalism, premillennialism, and pretribulationalism. Indoctrination, not knowledge, was always the goal.

    My college education was rudimentary, at best. My real education came in my study, as I spent 20,000 hours reading and studying the Bible. I quickly learned that my professors had misled me. I suspect many of them didn’t know any better, having been raised in similar IFB surroundings as I.

    Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.

    Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

    You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

  • How Evangelicals Read and Interpret the Bible

    want truth read bible-001

    How do Evangelicals read and interpret the Bible? By Bible, I mean the sixty-six books of the Protestant Christian Bible. Before Evangelicals read one syllable of the Bible, they agree to the following presuppositions:

    • The Bible is the very words of God.
    • The Bible is inspired — breathed out by God.
    • The Bible is inerrant — without error.
    • The Bible is infallible — true in all that it says,
    • The Bible is meant, with few exceptions, to be read and interpreted literally.
    • The Holy Spirit teaches us what particular verses of the Bible mean.
    • The Bible has no errors, mistakes, or contractions.
    • The Bible is internally consistent (univocality).

    All of the presuppositions above are faith claims. Either you believe them, or you don’t. Of course, these claims are little more than special pleading. Evangelicals don’t read any other text or book this way except the Bible. Imagine taking this same approach with an auto repair manual or a biology textbook.

    Books are meant to provide us with knowledge. We read because we want to know. When Evangelicals read the Bible, they want knowledge too, but that knowledge is conditioned by the claims made above. As a result, this leads to wild, rationally indefensible interpretations of the Bible and demands for conformity of belief.

    I have no doubt some of my Evangelical critics will object to this post, saying that the “natural man understands not the things of God” or unbelievers, lacking the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, cannot rightly read, interpret, or understand the Bible. In their minds, the moment I deconverted, God did a Men in Black-like mind wipe on me, and all the knowledge I had about the Biblical text was gone. This, of course, is absurd.

    Anyone can understand the Bible if they are willing to read it and use widely available tools to interpret the text properly. Contrary to what Evangelicals say, the Bible is NOT so simple that a child can understand it. The Bible is a complex text written in several languages by numerous authors over many centuries. An inability to read the underlying Hebrew and Greek manuscripts hinders the ability to determine what the Bible actually says. There are tools that can be used to ameliorate this problem, but even here, Evangelical-produced tools can and do operate from the presuppositions above. Instead of letting the chips fall where they may, these tools dishonestly present the Bible as a unified text, consistent in all that it says. This is patently untrue, as any non-Evangelical Biblical scholar will tell you.

    Every reading of the Bible should start with the data. Instead of letting the two creation accounts in Genesis 1-3 speak for themselves, Evangelicals try to make the conflicting accounts “fit.” This is called harmonization. There are lots of such contradictions in the Bible, yet Evangelicals will deny this, coming up with all sorts of novel explanations to turn away claims that the Bible is not infallible and inerrant. The Bible, in Evangelical minds, can’t be errant and fallible. If it is, that means their God, who wrote the Bible, is errant and fallible too.

    Faith prevents Evangelicals from seeing the Bible for what it is: a fallible, errant text written by fallible, errant men. Does the Bible have value? Sure. Can the Bible provide wisdom and direction? Yes. Can the Bible lead people to God? Absolutely. These things can be true without the Bible being a supernatural text written by a supernatural God.

    Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.

    Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

    You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

  • Does Reading the Bible Require Personal Interpretation?

    private interpretation of bible

    It is common to hear Evangelicals say that they are “Bible believers” — that they read the Bible and believe and accept what it says without personal interpretation. Appealing to 2 Peter 1:20,21:

    Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

    Evangelicals believe the Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. Written by God himself, the Bible doesn’t need interpretation, just obedience on the part of the Christian. Years ago, an Evangelical man and his family visited the church I was pastoring in West Unity. After the service, the man engaged me in a theological discussion. I suggested the titles of several books I thought would be helpful. He quickly replied, “All I need is the Bible.” He was a man of one book — ironically, an English translation that required translators to interpret the meanings of Hebrew and Greek texts. This man wrongly thought that the Bible was the very words of God; and that reading the Bible was the same as God directly speaking to him.

    All written words require interpretation. It is absurd to suggest otherwise. The moment we read a written text, we are interpreting what it says and means — be it the Bible or texts written by Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, or Bruce Gerencser — to name a few. I am certainly not in the class of these authors, but I know understanding my writing requires interpretation on the part of readers. Whether these interpretations align with what I meant to say is a whole other story. People can and do interpret my words in a variety of ways, often leading to conclusions that bear no resemblance to my intent.

    The moment you read the first word, sentence, and paragraph of this post, you began the process of interpreting my writing. How could it be otherwise? Should we treat the Bible differently? It is, fundamentally, a collection of written texts, each requiring interpretation on our part hopefully to understand what it means. I say hopefully for this reason: Christianity is 2,000 years old. Every sect, preacher, and parishioner interprets the Bible for themselves. So much for no “private interpretation.” Put a hundred Christians in a room, ask them what a particular Bible verse or passage of Scripture means, and you will end up with a plethora of answers. There is no such singular thing as Christianity or the Bible only having one meaning. Christians can’t even agree on what the Bible says about salvation, baptism, communion, church government, the law of God, or end times. Hopelessly fractured and divided, Christians fight internecine wars over the teachings of the Bible. What are the criteria for determining who is right? Drum roll, please . . . personal (private) interpretation.

    The moment any of us read a written text, we are interpreting said text. It is impossible to read a text without interpreting it. Behind every text are the personal experiences and beliefs of its author. People who best understand my writing are those who know and appreciate my backstory. They understand the lenses through which I view life.

    Evangelicals argue that the Bible is different from all other books; and that it is of supernatural origin. Thus we can just believe what it says — no interpretation needed. However, the people reading the Bible are quite human — fallible, frail, and ignorant. We require interpretation to understand anything in life. Polly and I have been married for forty-five years. Both of us speak and write words to each other. Understanding these words requires us to process them through our interpretive grid. Otherwise, we might misunderstand what each of us actually means.

    These things seem obvious to me, yet millions of Evangelicals disagree. In their minds, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it for me.” However, unknown men wrote the Bible. The original texts no longer exist. All we have are copies of copies of copies and translations of translations of translations. Scribes, and later translators, determined what the Bible said, and not the Evangelical God. These historical facts are without dispute. Yet, Evangelicals ignore these facts, choosing instead to ignorantly (and naively) believe that the Bible is somehow, someway, different from the 160,000,000 books written since the invention of the printing press. Every year, over 2,000,000 books at added to humanity’s library. (How Many Books Exist in the World?)

    I will leave it to readers to “interpret” this article. While I am Bruce Almighty, I make no claim of supernatural origin. This blog is the writing of “one man with a story to share.” How you understand my words is up to you.

    Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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.

    Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

    You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.