I was raised a conservative Southern Baptist, and not just a "we go here on Sunday" Baptist, a "This is our life" Baptist. The entirety of my worldview, how I interpreted my experienced and all facts that came my way, was shaped by my understanding of theology and the Bible. As a child I was in Sunday School, as a youth I started reading works about apologetics, and finally in my early-20s I started an undergraduate degree in Christian Philosophy at a Southern Baptist seminary. Up until the age of 28, the Southern Baptist brand served as my brand of Christianity.
My time at the seminary was fascinating and disappointing. On the one hand I was introduced to all these different thinkers − Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, all the famous "enemies of the faith" − on their own terms. On the other hand, I saw firsthand the effects of "Christian love" on people, I realized the logical conclusions of some of my beliefs, and I ultimately realized I had to decide between orthodoxy and love. I learned a lot academically, but I learned just as much through my experiences with the Baptists there to know I wanted nothing to do with it.
I eventually fell in with the Orthodox Church and was even catechized. In the Orthodox Church − my parish − I found love and acceptance, openness, and a willingness to discuss things and question the faith. There was no rejection of science and there were quite a few Orthodox biologists, chemists, and so on. However, by this point the years of abuse within my Baptist upbringing and seeing it exist across multiple denominations on my journey, had left me cynical of any Christian church. While I loved my parish in North Carolina and the people there were genuine to me and loved me, I looked at other parishes and the overall views of the Orthodox Church and realized I no longer fit in.
My views of homosexuality, transpeople, and many other social issues − with exception to abortion − had been shifting more toward a "how could God view this as a sin" mentality. If something didn't harm anyone then how was it violating "God's Economy." While Dominionism teaches that Christians are to control the earth in all its glory (including the politics), it's just an extreme view of the common Christian belief in the “cultural mandate,” the belief that we're to be light and salt to a dark and rotten world. Thus, God has a natural order that we Christians are called to uphold and maintain, and part of that natural order involves human sexuality. But why would two men or two women loving each other violate God's economy? What about this is harmful? Things didn't make sense to me.
Raised to believe that the Bible was the absolute authority over everything, once I began to remove it from the center of my worldview as the only source of authority, I began to open myself up to new ideas. This transition was essential in my transition to Orthodoxy − after all, you can't believe in Sola Scriptura and be a good Orthodox. I had to open the door to Tradition and, by extension, reason.
Yet, even within the Orthodox faith I saw the ugliness that I grew accustomed to in the SBC. The view of homosexuals, of those not of the faith, was shifting due to political grounds. I had studied philosophy and apologetics so intellectually I was very much a Christian, but existentially I was moving away from the faith entirely as I began to doubt it more and more.
Throughout the years, thanks to Francis Schaeffer's thought guiding my own, I believed that certain aspects of the Bible had to be true in a very historical literal sense. The creation and fall of Adam and Eve was one example, otherwise how do we explain the existence of evil in this world and the need for God to save us? The death and resurrection of Christ, otherwise what hope was there for us in a literal physical resurrection? Thus, as I began to question my faith and shift toward Orthodoxy and even away from Orthodoxy, I already had a strong pretty bright line around what was a challenge to my faith and what wasn't. Finding out that the Bible was just wrong about certain things wasn't a challenge to my faith. Being unable to escape the evolution of humans as a species was a challenge to my faith due to how my faith had been constructed in such an absolute and rigid way.
I am convinced that had I grown up under a less-rigid version of Christianity that I'd probably still be a Christian or a theist of some type. I know quite a few Christians and theists who are great people and who's faith is foreign and alien to anything I would have recognized as a legitimate Christian faith when I was a Christian, but now I see as a completely reasonable way of shoring up their beliefs with what is known about reality. But I didn't grow up in that version of Christianity. I grew up in an extremely orthodox (within the American evangelical tradition) denomination with an extremely orthodox upbringing. My faith became all or nothing, to the point that it became nothing.
Early in my Christian education I was introduced to the book Escape From Reason by Francis Schaeffer. The book lates the foundation for a conservative evangelical view of the world. In fact, it's difficult to be a respected conservative evangelical and not have been familiar with Schaeffer. If Schaeffer was escaping from “reason,” the word he used to describe the system of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy that had taken over the world, then I'm escaping from Eden, the system of conservativism and orthodoxy that has taken over Christianity.
To escape from Eden is to escape the Biblical narrative of the creation, fall, and redemption of humanity and instead take the Bible and the world as it is. This blog is the aftermath of that escape. A lot of posts will deal with Christianity and faith, but some will just be about politics, economics, philosophy, culture, or any number of other issues. It's my attempt to rebuild my worldview and work through these issues once more, this time with a new perspective.