I am a theologian

Hi,

My name is Adam Jorden Clark.

I run a no-religion, no-dogma, no-personal belief Bible blog. www.adamjordenclark.com

By no-religion, no-dogma, no-personal belief I literally mean just that. I am not interested in expressing my own beliefs on religion, dogma, or personal belief nor am I interested in pushing my beliefs on someone else. I am concerned with information. More importantly, I am concerned with giving people other alternatives instead of the Christian and Atheistic alternatives they have been given by mainstream media.

I give people reliable information about the Bible because the information is not filtered through religion, dogma, or personal belief like it would be if it were coming from an Atheist, Agnostic, or Evangelical Christian.

Why do this? Because if you went to church and listen to a pastor speak on any Bible passage what you would get is his opinion, his belief, or the belief of the church. You would not actually get the real information. Sometimes you can, but most of the time you can't, and even if you did… you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

And I know, every pastor always says, "This is what the Bible says" or they say, "This is what the Bible means." Trust me, I have been in Christianity long enough to know that when a pastor says one of those phrases he or she has no idea what they are talking about!

The Bible is Not Simple

The Bible is a highly complex book that requires severe studying in order to understand its meaning. The average Joe cannot just pick up the Bible and understand what it means. We know this from the Pentecostals and Charismatics. From their inception, they have read the Bible without any theological or historical training and it has taken them down some very dark paths. They completely misinterpret Acts chapter 2 (And every other passage in the Bible) because of a lack of theological and historical training in this ancient writing we call the Bible.

For example, most people are unaware of the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of changes in New Testament manuscripts. Christians have propagated a lie that everything in the Bible is true, but they somehow forget to mention that there were major portions of texts that were added to the New Testament after it was originally written.

Bible additions (not editions) have affected, (And in many cases infected), all of Christianity. It is not just about the hundreds of thousands of changes in New Testament manuscripts. It is about all the doctrines and theologies that were created over the centuries of Christianity.

With these types of problems comes suspect texts and biblical concepts. The Virgin Birth, the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the Resurrection of Christ, and many other biblical doctrines are suspect. Many historians, even Christian historians, have a hard time accepting the Virgin Birth as historical fact due to the lack of evidence of eye witness account. Certainty, any minor research conducted on the doctrine of the Trinity during the first three centuries will show how theologians use the word "development" to describe how early Christians strived to keep the Jewish tradition of monotheism in the new growing religion of Christianity.

In fact, this is a good place to comment on the manipulative tactics Evangelical Christians will use to re-write history to fit their doctrines. Evangelical Christians seem to promote this idea that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same Gods. The problem with this idea is that there is very little biblical evidence to support this belief. Early Christians ran into the same problem and they sought of a way to solve it, which is how the doctrine of the Trinity was developed. In other words, the same tactics used by early Christians of distorting Bible passages to support their idea is the very foundation of Christianity.

The question lingers, if the major core doctrines of Christianity are suspect, then what is there left to study? Why even research these kinds of issues?

Well, while it may seem easy to write this off quickly the understanding of this topic comes with maturity. I do not mean maturity in terms of ill-mind or unable to understand. I mean this term in the sense that the word "suspect" must be understood in its proper theological and historical context. Much like a suspect accused of a crime, there still needs to be evidence, a good case based on logical argumentation, and a trial that eventually reaches a dependable verdict. Unfortunately, these kinds of problems are extremely complex and even the most brilliant of minds have a hard time reaching a good sustainable conclusion.

What Do Theologians Do?

Basically, theologians study the Bible and try to interpret it in the best possible way. Since the Bible is so massive, theologians will pick a particular area and work there for many years until they feel comfortable writing about their findings. Theology is a science, but it is not a natural science. This means that theologians think about the Bible much like a scientist would think about the natural world.

We are rational, critical, argumentative, thoughtful, enjoyable, and most of all patient. After all, us theologians have been trying to solve problems that have existed for thousands of years and we do not seem to have very good answers to some of these problems.

Theologians are not just limited to Christianity. In fact, every Religion has theology and they have their theologians. However, Christianity is most known for theologians because of the amount of history supporting the profession. Of course, theologians are practically unknown because they are not mainstream media material. When Bart D. Ehrman appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report hosted by Stephen Colbert after his first New York Times Bestseller Misquoting Jesus, it shocked the world of scholarship and theology because someone finally made it on TV! After all, Ehrman is a Textual Critic who wrote an introductory book to Greek New Testament Manuscripts, which was designed for lay people. Literally, a book on Greek manuscripts ended up on the New York Times Bestsellers List.

Needless to say, theologians are not popular, not even in Christianity. We are perceived as boring dull people, which is not true. After all, where else are you going to learn that everything you thought you knew about the Bible is wrong if it's not coming from us theologians?

And of course, we take great pride and joy in telling everyone that their interpretation of the Bible is incorrect (I don't know why though).

But for me, I'll write about anything that is not in mainstream Christian or Atheistic conversations.

I'm not religious, preachy, or dogmatic.

I'm just a theologian who cares about theology and history.

Think of me as someone who will tell you the truth regardless of what's popular, what's trendy, or what's approved by fundamentalist. Some have said I "Go against the grain." Maybe... But I see a side of theology that most people never get to see. Most importantly, I know a lot about the Bible that most people do not know. And if people do know, they are not interested in telling anyone.

My Educational Background

I began my academic education journey way back in 2010 when I started my first degree in psychology. When I first began college, I wanted to be a professor. The reason I wanted to be a professor is simply because I love studying, reading, writing, and most of all, teaching. However, as I continued on in my college courses I began to see the true side of academia, which is that professors were failing to properly teach their students the education that they were paying for. I looked deeply into this issue because I believed it may have only been a few professors. However, as I looked further, I realized that it was all of academia, not just a few professors.

Professors only care about their subject, not the success of the student. Just like everyone else' education, I was neglected by my professors and shoved into the diploma line just like the rest of the herd. However, when I continued on into my bachelor's degree, which is when I changed my major from psychology to religion, I became fully aware of the problems in academia.

What did I study in school?

However, my problem did not stop there. I was also studying a lot of Bible at the time. And I was not just reading assigned material by the school that wanted to indoctrinate me. No, I was reading all kinds of stuff outside course curriculum. This is where a lot of my knowledge of the Bible actually came from. It was not from school (where you'd think it would be). No, it was from my own study.

Because I was able to read whatever I wanted I was exposed to things about the Bible that I probably was not supposed to know at the time. The good news for me is that by the time I had got to my master’s degree I was already well prepared and armed with good working arguments, most of which I never presented to my professors out of fear of being kicked out of seminary, which was highly likely; since I had already begun to tell my friends and family that I was no longer Evangelical!

When I was in school I did a lot of reading and writing. But to the surprise of many, I did not spend a lot of time reading my assigned textbooks or other school related reading material. I was interested in reading about other advanced theological perspectives that my school was not teaching. This is not to say that the school was neglecting education or anything. It is to say that I took my study seriously and went beyond what they were teaching ordinary students. Besides, I already had a strong foundation in the basic curriculum so it was not that big of a deal to spend extra time studying other things.

Is the Bible Inspired by God?

While I was doing my extra study, I became very interested in how the Bible came to be. I was taught that it was a divine document that God had personally inspired and preserved from one generation to the next. This all sounded good until I realized that there were a lot of problems with the New Testament.

I realized that the argument to support inspiration was a bogus nonsensical argument. Evangelicals like to point to the number of New Testament manuscripts (copies of the New Testament, which is nearly 6,000) and claim that because we have so many copies that it must mean they are inspired. The argument goes well beyond this and it is designed to make the Bible sound more credible than it actually is (not that the Bible is unreliable; just that it is not extremely reliable).

I realized that the number of manuscripts had nothing to do with whether or not God wrote the Bible. This led me to investigate the theories behind inspiration. Of course, it was not much of a surprise to find that there really is no theory because even if it were inspired no one knows how it occurred. All Evangelicals have done is ruled out possibilities by picking the best explanation with the least number of objections. It just so happens that the best explanation with the least number of objections is this theory that God’s Holy Spirit came upon the human authors and guided them along while using their own thoughts and feelings (personality) to write the Bible. Of course, there is no proof of this other than a handful of Bible passages that may allude to some type of inspiration.

It is a clever explanation because it is almost impossible to argue against this position, unless of course, you figure out a way to go beyond the instances of God interacting with the human authors. In fact, it is highly possible that I have figured out a way to do this, in affect proving the Bible is not inspired, but I am not ready to publish any of my findings or arguments in favor of this view because I am still working hard on improvements.

Stories added to the Bible?

I found out later that there were stories added to the Bible centuries after they were originally written. I found out that a lot of doctrines and theologies (that evangelicals believe today) were actually made up centuries after the New Testament was completed.

There are all kinds of things that were added into the Bible many centuries after the it was originally written. This is partly because the Bible, while in circulation, was being copied by hand from one person to the next. These people were not highly educated people and most of them could hardly spell. Naturally, they made mistakes like misspelling words, missing periods and commas, and skipped sentences. However, these kinds of changes do not matter.

But there were changes that did matter and these changes are the most concerning to me and virtually everyone else who knows about these kinds of things. Sure, there is the story of the woman caught in adultery that was added by a scribe way after the Gospel of John was originally written. Yes, the latter half of the Gospel of Mark was added on by a scribe because the original went missing. But these are really not the biggest issues.

One of the biggest issues in the New Testament, just to mention one, is that majority of the Gospel of John is not historically accurate. The book was written to tell a theological point, not to convey actual history. Well, if the early Christians did not care about writing real history, then how much of the story of Jesus is actually real?

Evangelicals Lied?

These kinds of problems sort of caused my mind to think deeper about these problems. Of course, the Evangelicals will admit that these problems are there (at least the smart ones), but they will quickly brush them aside and say that they have no meaning at all.

As mentioned early, Evangelicals only care about the best explanation with the least number of objections. They do not actually care about the truth or even care about the facts. If you don’t believe me, just open up the four Gospels, find some contradictions, take them to a self-proclaiming evangelical, and ask them to make sense of it. When faced with evidence of the many Gospel contradictions, they will only lean of their explanations and those explanations are going to be based on the least amount of objections you raise to them.

Trinity Made Up?

Well, this all seems good and dandy until you do some research on the Trinity during the first three centuries of Christianity and realize that the entire thing was made up by Christians. Literally, the Trinity is not even in the Bible!

Not only is there an entire book that is practically made up, but the doctrine of the Trinity was also made up. There are no explicit passages in the Old Testament or in the New Testament that even speak to a Trinity. The King James Only crowd likes to point to 1 John 5:7-8 because the King James uses the phrase, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

However, a little dive into the history books will show that the King James translators used bad manuscripts to copy the Bible. The father, son, and holy spirit never occurred in the original Greek and still do not to this day.

So, the passage that some ignorant King James Bible thumpers like to point to is not even credible evidence. Instead, it is the perfect example of lazy study and poor approach to the Bible.

Even though there are no passages that explicitly state a Trinity, Evangelicals still affirm this view of God, but why?

Graduated Seminary

I graduated seminary in 2016 and decided that I was not going back to school because my beliefs changed. I knew I could never be a professor and that it meant I could no longer pursue a Ph. D. It also meant that continuing the next step in my education, obtaining a Master of Divinity, was meaningless. That degree is only for people who want to be pastors or for people who want to do postgraduate work. I could do neither because I no longer believed the same things they did.

Additionally, my beliefs no longer fit in with Evangelicalism. It was safe to say that I could never call myself an Evangelical either. This meant that any job, (other than working for myself) literally went out the winder. Basically, you cannot work in Christianity unless you believe the exact same thing the exact same way they do.

So, I wasted thousands of dollars on education and years of my time. I will never be accepted into that world even though my brain is more than well qualified to be there. That is why I started my website. I saw holes in the Christian and Atheist community (because they study the Bible too) and I wanted to fill in the gap.

What do I believe?

Atheist…? Agnostic…? Christian…?

It would be hard to classify me in any of these categories. So, it is probably best to say that “I don’t know.”

But, my “I don’t know” is not an Agnostic position. Agnostics say they don’t know because they do not have enough facts yet (or this is one way to explain the belief system).

Well, that’s not me.

I say that “I don’t know” because I don’t know where to put my beliefs. Literally, I do not know how to even formulate a belief about God or Christianity because I believe (from my recent 6 years of study) it is impossible to formulate a working belief about God and Christianity.

In other words, if God is real, I do not know how to believe because I do not know where to put my beliefs. Therefore, God’s existence is not really my concern. As a theologian, I have to assume that God does exist. However, what I believe about God and how I believe I should live are two entirely different things and should not be confused with one another. I could believe that God is a mass murderer, but that does not make him so. Likewise, I could believe that I can live my life without any moral standard, but that does not prove or disprove God’s existence, his character, or nature.

To make the point simple, I do not reject the Bible. I reject Evangelical Christian interpretation of the Bible. However, most people have no idea that “other” views of the Bible exist because of the predominate views of Atheism and Evangelicalism. So, my attempt to make this simple is in fact a failed attempt because this is not simple at all.

Why Steemit?

Steemit is sort of an experiment. Christians and Atheist are not ready to hear the truth about the Bible. All they want to hear is more information about what they already believe. An Atheist only wants to hear about how wrong the Bible is and a Christian only wants to hear about how right the Bible is. Truthfully, these are such primitive approaches to Scripture that I have no way of even communicating on such an infantile level. It is not about hearing more information that supports your beliefs. It is about learning the truth for the sake of learning the truth. You can deal with your beliefs however you want from that point after, but if you have no working knowledge of the Bible, then you should probably get one before discussing such an important issue as this.

My experiment involves a risk. I want to be an open transparent theologian, but in a world surrounded by dogmatic people, it is nearly impossible. So, I am hoping that there is a community of people in Steemit who are open to learning new things about the Bible.

My Website

If you find my story appealing or think I may have something worth reading in the future, then follow my Steemit account

You can also visit my website: www.adamjordenclark.com
And you can subscribe to my blog: www.adamjordenclark.com/subscribe