In August 2006 I enrolled in the Master of Divinity program at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University. For the three year course of study there were several required classes, beyond that the student has the choice of a few electives. Since I passed the Greek proficiency exam with the third highest score that year, I opted to take the New Testament Honors track which freed up even more electives. I decided to take a mix of classes that just interested me and and ones that dealt specifically with some of the doubts that I was still struggling with.

For my “Revelation and Inspiration” class there was quite a bit that seemed relevant. I had to read the book Steps to Christ by Ellen G. White, while I had hoped that it would strengthen my faith, instead I highlighted everything that jumped out at me, which turned out to be everything that didn’t sit right for me. By the end, most of the book was highlighted.

I did my term paper on trying to find a way to argue for the authority of scripture starting from a typical Northwest skeptical view. The paper was largely based on the arguments from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and no matter how I tried, I could not pull it off. Since there are no good arguments for the authority of scripture aside from the Bible itself, it was simply just trying to present a bunch of logical if-then arguments with the hope that by the time you get to the end your audience has bought into the hope that the initial presuppositions are true.

A big part of why I took on this challenge was because I needed it. I couldn’t handle saying that something is true just because it says its true. While I was unable to do what I had hoped, I had done enough to get a standing ovation from my class when I presented it. Sadly, it left me feeling cold and cheep. The techniques seemed a bit too much like those of snake oil salesmen and homeopaths.

Another class was called “Issues in Origins.” This class was designed to make it so that ministers wouldn’t be caught off guard by the evidence presented by science for evolution and long ages while giving the students just enough material to make potshots and straw man arguments. Overall, the class was quite disappointing since it made it clear that there is a lot of evidence for evolution with almost nothing to argue against it. Since there is no credible body of scientific evidence to support creationism, the professor had an argument to keep us from adopting the view of theistic evolution. Allow me outline it:

1. The Bible presents salvation as a restoration.
2. If God used natural selection as part of creation, then he used a violent painful process to create humans and death would have been nothing new by the time of man’s fall.
3. If humanity evolved from lower forms then there was no fall from perfection.
4. With out a fall there can be no restoration.
5. With out a restoration then there is no salvation.
6. If evolution is true then scripture is not and there is no salvation.

I also took a field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago for my “Archeology of Egypt” class, one of the exhibits was called “Our Evolving World” and for the first time I actually tried to understand what science had to say about our origins. To my surprise, it wasn’t a bunch of logical fallacies and unsubstantiated guesses as I had been told. Instead, it was a very reasonable progression with lots of evidence and an honest admission that the mechanism has not been proven, but that natural selection is the best explanation to date.

I almost called it quits at the end of that semester, but I already had the plane ticket to fly home for Christmas and it was not a good time of year to make a drive across the Rocky mountains. So I decided to stick it out. I was also trying to ignore what I had seen, because if Jesus is the savior then nothing else matters. At this point I had not given up on salvation.

Of course I got to “The Doctrine of Salvation” in my second semester. A full three credit class on Salvation. I had to read R. C. Sproul’s Faith Alone and write a report on it. He presented that there are three faiths, the first of which is called the “faith of assent” that, he argues, is given by God (he’s a Calvinist) and cannot be chosen by human free will. This assent is that point where your subconscious allows you to make a conscious choice of whether or not to accept something as true. I was less concerned with where the assent came from than the fact that I didn’t have it. I would hear things that I choose to believe to be true, but something inside me would always scream “NO!”

Another part of the class was looking at the models of salvation. Before I said that there was one that seemed to fit, unfortunately it was pretty clear that it was far from biblical. The only one that followed scripture was the Sacrificial Atonement model. This model was also the one I had the greatest issues with. Allow me to present a simplified version of my objection:

The way salvation is presented in the Bible, namely in the writings of Paul is very clearly that of a debt payment. If Jesus’ death was sufficient to pay for humanity’s sin and yet still allow for his resurrection and eternal life, then a sinner’s death should be sufficient to pay for those sins and allow for resurrection and eternal life. Otherwise the wages of sin is not merely death, but eternal death (or eternal torment for the duelists out there), something which Jesus did not endure. A death on the cross is horrifically brutal, but seeing as how it was only temporary, it would amount to little more than torture and nowhere in the Bible does it say that the wages of sin is torture. Any judge who would accept a lesser punishment from a token individual to let his friends off the hook while expecting the full punishment from everybody else would not in anyway be just.

This time I almost quit during the middle of the term. I talked to a few professors about it, but all they could come up with was to keep trying and slow down my study to look at epistemology (the study of how we know things) more closely. My roommate and I had a long discussion about it, and he reminded me of the sense of calling that I had. So again, I was stuck, I didn’t believe but my ego wouldn’t allow me to let go of that sense of calling. I decided to finish out the semester and tried to not think about it.

This compartmentalizing of my doubt from the belief it was questioning worked, to an extent. After a while I got caught up with the busyness of life and the abstract theological debates that were all around me. I thought that it might be good to get a little distance from the halls of the seminary so I could clear my head and hopefully restore my faith, so I signed up for two trips that summer. The first was to Jordan for an archaeological dig, the second was to Mexico to preach an evangelistic series.

Stay tuned for part three: The Softer Side of Things