Skeptical Christianity (And Why Thomas is my Favorite Disciple)

My Meyers-Briggs personality type is the ISTJ - also known as "The Investigator." I would rather use information, not intuition, to make decisions, and I look deeply into issues to make up my mind instead of going with the crowd or just looking at the surface. (Which is why I got in trouble as a child for taking everything apart to see how it worked. I grew up and became a technical consultant, though.) The ISTJ personality is marked by these rigorous investigations, and that is an important part of my faith.

This is how I see myself.

While researching the ISTJ mindset I noticed that it was associated with the Apostle Thomas. Of course, we don't know enough about his personality to make a claim like that, but I have to admit that I've always had a soft spot for Doubting Thomas. I'll tell you why:

After His resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples while they were gathered in a room - everyone but Thomas. After Jesus left they found Thomas and told him what had happened, but he was skeptical. Jesus had come back and was walking around talking to people? Thomas famously said that he would not believe it until he saw this miracle for himself.

Poor Thomas has been harshly criticized for this, but I'm not sure why. The other disciples were no better. They didn't believe until Jesus appeared to them, even though they already knew the grave was empty. The first person to see the risen Lord was Mary, a friend of the apostles, and she ran to them immediately to say the Jesus was alive. They went to the tomb and saw it was vacant, but none of them seemed to believe He was walking around in the flesh until they saw it with their own eyes. They were just as skeptical as Thomas. (And why not? If you told me Jesus was having coffee next door I'd probably want to see it for myself.)

This skepticism is healthy for a Christian. How can we know what to believe if we don't question things? Cult leaders gather followers by claiming to be divine even though they have no proof, and those who follow them would be better off if they were more doubtful. The Bible even asks us to be skeptical when people make religious claims so we can use our brains to discern the truth. Being skeptical is how we can be people of faith without being fools who will just believe anything. (If you are in a healthy church, like mine, the leaders are more than happy to hear your questions and concerns, rather than trying to force any beliefs on you.) These questions will take us on journeys, and our faith is strengthened by these journeys.

Back to Thomas. He's unfortunately remembered as a guy who doubted Jesus, but there's more to him than that. When Lazarus died, Jesus told His followers he was going to Judea where Lazarus' sisters were waiting for Him. The disciples reminded Jesus that He had enemies in that town who might try to murder Him, but they couldn't change His mind. It was Thomas who said,  "Let us go, too, that we may die with Him." Thomas' convictions were not paper-thin; he was a noble man who intended to follow through with his beliefs. This is probably why he was so highly revered by the early church.

In our rush to try and feel superior to our predecessors, let's go easy on Thomas and remember to ask questions as we explore issues of faith.

Five Reasons that Being a Pastor is a Really Annoying Job

In order to appreciate another person we have to learn what their life is like and understand their struggles. A local pastor has a rough job, and since it's pastor appreciation month (apparently) we should start by knowing what it's like to lead a church. Here's just a few of the things that can make the job annoying.

1 - The Whining

Being a pastor is sometimes like working in a complaint box. It seems like everyone just knows exactly how the church should be run and is eager to tell the pastor about it. A constant barrage of whining about how it was done in the good ol' days ("Why aren't there more ferns on stage, like in Branson?"), or how the church should adopt more modern methods ("We should sell our church and meet under a bridge, because that would be so real."), is the reality of running a church. The pastor will have no choice but to disappoint most of these people and continue hearing their complaints. Yay.

I'll bet these soldiers don't gripe about how their church is decorated or which hymns they sing.

Furthermore, if immature people in the church don't get along they'll go to the pastor and try to get them on their side. It's like dealing with children.

2 - The Gravity of Failure

When a pastor isn't listening to complaints, he's dealing with our society's most difficult problems. They're counseling people who want to kill themselves, or advising a homeless person who just wandered in and might be dangerous. What happens if the person they help doesn't get better and hurts themselves, or someone else? What if the pastor can't figure out how to help the senior citizen who can't pay their rent? Ministers deal with high stakes issues, and they're expected to always know all the answers. That's a lot of pressure.

3 -The Job is Actually Really Hard

A pastor is expected to be a theological genius, a profound speaker, a comedian, a counselor, and an administrator.  (And a saint.) This is a lot of work in many different disciplines. The amount of hours put into each of these responsibilities taxes a pastor, leaving little time for friends and family. And, for some reason, everyone acts like being a pastor should be easy.

Pastors are expected to drop everything (even their kid's soccer game) to help someone who is upset about losing their job, or to fix a plumbing problem that happened when a child at the church building tried to flush a toy down the toilet. They have responsibilities every day of the week and their own family life is always sacrificed to help everyone else. It's not a one-day-a-week type of job - it's all day, every day.

4 - The Expectations

Pastors aren't perfect, but they're expected to be. I've seen ministers get fired because they were caught looking at pornography, even though nearly every person in their congregation had done the same thing at some point. They can't get upset and lose their temper, even once, or they'll never live it down. It's a constant battle to appear perfect which can make a pastor feel lonely. We have to allow our leaders to be human and not expect them to be flawless public figures.

5 - The Money Problems

People like to think that ministers are highly paid public speakers who live in luxury, raking in money from their poor congregation, but that's not how it works. Most pastors work at small churches and barely manage to get by. They often work a second job and sometimes even depend on welfare to make ends meet. I've even known ministers who couldn't afford to buy themselves food and would have to ignore their own hunger while dealing with their congregation's problems. A pastor can be among the lowest wage earners in a small town, but that won't keep the locals from expecting them to meet all of their needs.

Larger churches can afford to pay their ministers more, of course, but comparing their salaries to similar jobs in the corporate world shows that being a pastor doesn't pay as well as being a CEO. (Unless you're a crook who pretends to be able to heal the sick if they send money to your mansion.) I earn a pretty average salary from my job (for which I'm incredibly thankful - I love my work), and it's higher than the pay of a lot of ministers I've known who, unlike me, were usually providing for a family.

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There are good things about leading a congregation - it's not all bad - but you can see that your local pastor is under a lot of pressure. Think of a way to let your church leader know they are appreciated, and go easy on them because they have a really tough job.

St. Francis Never Said That

"Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words." -Unknown

That quote has been attributed to St. Francis of Assisi for as long as I can remember, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I only recently found out that he didn't actually say it!

The gospel coalition has the whole story in a well-researched article, here. I'm shocked. I found out this morning because the Catholic Memes website posted this on their Facebook page:

This is just as devastating as the time I realized that Sean Connery's line in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade about Charlemagne was completely made up. Talk about feeling let down.

The Myth of the Word-For-Word Bible Translation. (Languages Don't Work That Way.)

When I was young, people (who should have known better) told me that I should only read Bibles that were translated with a "word for word" method so as to preserve the original meaning of the text. Anything else was unacceptable.

This made sense to me, at the time. Why read a translation that isn't literally the same words as the original? It was a simple concept. Or, so I thought. Later I noticed that in the front of every Bible I owned (I owned a lot of them - and still do) was a section describing the method of translation used by the scholars and none of them claimed to be literal, word-for-word translations. None of them.

Did you know that the old Hebrew and Greek texts didn't contain punctuation? It's all added in by translators. A misplaced comma can change the meaning of an entire paragraph, and in this case they aren't even in the manuscripts. However, punctuation is how languages work, today, so it wouldn't be a proper translation without commas, quotation marks, and the rest.

But anyone who's studied languages, at all, can see a more fundamental problem: languages cannot be
translated with word-for-word methods.

For example, take a simple sentence that we all learn in Spanish class - "Como se llamas." It means, "What's your name" to us, but a word-for-word translation would be "How you are called?" It's not even readable that way, and that's just a simple example. When you apply this method to a very ancient language the problems are much more complicated.

To put it simply: it is impossible to translate anything in a word-for-word manner - especially something written in ancient languages. (To make matters worse, Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but his words were recorded in Greek, so our manuscripts don't even have His original words - they had to be translated into something else to be preserved.) To bring an ancient text to a modern audience the translator must understand the meaning of each sentence and then translate that sentence into contemporary rhetoric. Since language changes with each generation these translations must be updated regularly or they'll stop making sense.

What bugs me the most is that the people who told me to seek out word-for-word translations were ministers who had graduated from conservative, Christian seminaries. How could they make this mistake?