Yesterday I wrote about my two hours of violent vomiting after eating two pancakes that were supposed to be gluten free but weren’t. I don’t know if the problem was a spacey restaurant server or a negligent chef. After the two hours of misery, I spent the rest of the day in a recliner without enough energy to get up for a sip of water, which was all I dared to consume.
I don’t believe the restaurant staff intentionally harmed me. But their SINCERE belief that they were treating a customer well didn’t prevent my misery. It’s a very good thing that my disease (Celiac) doesn’t produce a life-or-death consequence as it might with two of our EpiPen carrying grandkids who have more serious allegies. I can tell you that as I scarfed down those luscious pancakes, I was totally SINCERE in my belief that they were safe – free of gluten.
The fact is that in many situations, SINCERITY doesn’t prevent significant negative consequences. The sincerity of the server, chef, and me, the consumer of those yummy but “poisoned” flapjacks, didn’t prevent them from working havoc on my digestive system.
I’m not saying this to generate sympathy (Honest!) and it’s important to know that by morning I was totally fine. I’m recounting my story to illustrate that being SINCERE doesn’t necessarily mitigate the damage that can occur from being sincerely WRONG.
As a pastor for 50 years, it was always my sincere commitment to teach the Bible accurately. Sometimes in those 8000+ sermons I was sometimes sincerely wrong on relatively minor points a bit like an inadvertent nudge on the basketball court that doesn’t interfere with the play. The referee may conclude “no harm, no foul.” I regret those but lose no sleep because they really didn’t injure anyone and were easily corrected.
But there was one major area of Bible teaching concerning which I was very sincere in my belief that I was faithfully representing the Scriptures, but now, after a five-year intensive study, realize that I was WRONG – sincerely wrong – but the possible damage from that error is huge. The lost opportunities that followed cannot be restored.
My sincerity in believing that a handful of Bible passages on this topic were indisputably clear prevented me from having sufficient curiosity or courage to dig deeper to see if they had been translated and interpreted accurately.
That’s why I wrote a book – to describe my momentous journey and to present a very detailed study of every relevant Bible passage. My book is titled “Should Women Be Pastors and Leaders in Church? My Journey to Discover What the Bible Says About Gender Roles.” It’s available in all formats from Amazon and other outlets (or from me). I’m convinced that there are a host of others who are sincere in their belief but like I was, are sincerely wrong. I hope and pray they will investigate my journey. Pastorbillrudd.com.
Bill
February 5, 2019 at 11:02 pmThanks for your honesty in this journey. Congratulations on going to a deeper place. I would suggest that part of that going deeper in the Bible is to move beyond the literalism that has plagued American Christianity for about 120 years. The kind of hard work that you did to reach the conclusion you reached wouldn’t be necessary if you/we understood the Bible in its historical context and saw it not so much as God’s book, but the faith community’s book. To say such is not to denigrate the Bible but to see it in a more powerfully real way.
Dr. Bill Rudd
February 6, 2019 at 1:08 amThanks so much for your comment, friend. Would I be correct that most of those who approach the Scriptures as you suggest have already adopted an egalitarian position and likely don’t need my book to support it? My primary target audience are those who, to change their position as I did, need to be convinced based on their view of Scripture and hermeneutic. I sincerely thought that a correct understanding of the Scriptures required a complementarian position. I discovered that I was wrong! My goal was to show that for those who hold to a traditional evangelical view of the Scriptures, the egalitarian position results from a correct interpretation of all of the relevant Scripture passages. As you well know, how one understands the nature of the Scriptures is a very important debate but was beyond the scope of this book. Thanks again.