A Long Day's Journey Into Light (Religious Biography of J. Farrell Till)
Re-posted
from The
Skeptical Review with
permission.
I
can't remember the first time I heard that the Bible is a
perfectly harmonious book from cover to cover. I was
reared in Southeast Missouri in a family with deep roots in the
Church of Christ, a sect that is probably as rigid as any in its
belief that the Bible is the inspired "word of God."
When I went to church I heard both preachers and Bible teachers
proclaim the inerrancy of the scriptures. A favorite spiel of
Church-of-Christ preachers is the one about forty men, writing
over a period of 1600 years, in different languages and
countries, producing a collection of 66 different books so
unified and harmonious in theme that only the verbal inspiration
of an infinite God could account for it. It isn't true, of
course, but in my case, it worked. I bought the idea and
spent almost twelve years of my life preaching it.
While yet in high school, I was baptized and made the
personal commitment to become a "gospel preacher."
To prepare myself for this calling, I attended two Bible
colleges supported by the Church of Christ. I first
attended Freed-Hardeman, a junior Bible college in Henderson,
Tennessee, and then transferred to Harding College in
Searcy, Arkansas, where I received both my bachelor's and
master's degrees. At these colleges, I had the experience
of hearing foreign missionaries report on their activities
abroad, and this kindled within me the desire to become a
missionary. After all, I reasoned, Jesus did say, "Go into
all the world and preach the gospel to every creature"
(Mark 16:15), so how could I consider myself obedient to God
unless I fulfilled this commission? So anxious was I to
get involved in worldwide evangelism that I quit college a
semester before graduation to work in missionary projects of the
Church of Christ in France.
Altogether, I spent twelve years preaching for the Churches of
Christ, and five of those years involved missionary work in
France. My skepticism began while I was there. My wife
tells me jestingly, but probably with serious intent, that I
have a personality flaw: I can never be content to do anything
halfheartedly; I must devote myself totally and completely to
it. So, she sometimes reminds me, I wasn't content to be
just a Christian; I had to be a preacher. Then I wasn't
content to be just a preacher; I had to be a missionary.
When deep-seated doubts finally led me to abandon the ministry,
I wasn't content to be just a skeptic; I had to become an
evangelical atheist.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back when I was still a
preacher, I knew that if I was going to be a good one, I would
need to be familiar with the Bible, so I was determined to learn
as much about it as I could. I didn't want to
"know" the Bible; I wanted to know it inside out.
This determination led me to put many hours into biblical
studies. One method of study that I used was to sit at a
desk with several different versions of the Bible opened to what
I was going to study during that session. I would read a passage
in one version and then the same passage in another version and
so on through several versions in both English and French.
If on that day I was studying something from the life of Jesus,
I would go through this process in Matthew's account and then
repeat it for Mark's, Luke's, and John's versions of the same
story. Sometimes I would apply the same method to parallel
accounts in the Old Testament. I would read from several
versions a part of, say, David's life as told in the books of
Samuel and then read the same account, if there was one, in 1
Chronicles.
When I was doing these parallel studies, I couldn't help
noticing inconsistencies and even outright contradictions in the
way the same stories were related. This made me wonder about the
marvelous unity and harmony of the scriptures that I had heard
so much about in sermons and Bible classes both when I was
growing up and attending college. However, one doesn't grow up
in a fundamentalist environment and then throw his belief in
Bible inerrancy away the very first time he encounters problems
that don't quite agree with what he has been taught all of his
life. I sincerely believed that there were explanations and
solutions to be found. All I had to do was look for them.
When I looked and couldn't find them, I experienced deep
feelings of guilt and shame. The problem had to be with
me. It just couldn't be that the Bible was not what I had
been taught to believe.
Once the seeds of doubt had been planted in my mind, I began to
see that the Bible wasn't a book with just a few problems; it
was riddled with inconsistencies, discrepancies, contradictions,
and absurdities. As long as I believed that the Bible was
inerrant, for example, I was able to rationalize the
barbaric nature of God as presented in the Old Testament. I
accepted the premise that God was not immoral in ordering the
massacre of children and babies (Num. 31:17; 1 Sam. 15:3), for
if he could create life, he had the right to take life; if he
killed children and babies in the heathen nations around Israel,
he was actually doing them a favor, because they would go to
heaven rather than grow up to be like their wicked parents.
To my embarrassment and discredit, I have to admit that I
actually preached this kind of stuff when I was a fundamentalist
minister. Once my faith in inerrancy was shaken, however,
I was able to see the folly of stupid attempts like these to
justify the despicable conduct of the Hebrew god. When I
crossed that line, I had gone too far ever to turn back again.
When I returned from France in 1961, I knew that I could not
continue to preach things that I no longer believed, but the
tenacity of a fundamentalist is an almost marvelous thing.
I couldn't walk away from what I had believed all of my life, so
I decided to become just an ordinary churchgoer. I would
no longer preach, but I would continue to go to church. This
meant, of course, that I would have to train for another
profession. To do this, I returned to college to complete
the degree that I had left unfinished in order to become a
missionary. Since I was so close to having my bachelor's
degree completed, I simultaneously began work on a master's.
These were extremely difficult times for my family, both
economically and emotionally. We were a family of five, so,
needless to say, it wasn't easy to provide our needs and pay
tuition too while I was an unemployed student, to say nothing
about the psychological stress from the religious upheaval in my
life that I was trying to cope with. Guilt and shame
had forced me to be secretive about my plans for the future with
everyone but my wife. When people asked why I was back in
college studying English, I told them that raising funds for
foreign missionary work was difficult to do, so I was qualifying
myself for teaching credentials so that I could support myself
in a mission area within the United States. Yes, I lied,
but at the time that seemed a better alternative to me than
openly confessing my skepticism.
As a missionary "home from the field," I had the
opportunity to fill vacant pulpits on the weekend in churches
within driving distance of the Bible college I was attending.
This would provide a source of income that I desperately needed,
so, to my discredit again, I took advantage of it. By this
time, I had become a skilled rationalizer. Although I no
longer accepted the biblical inerrancy doctrine, I believed--and
still do believe--that some excellent moral principles are
taught in the New Testament, so I rationalized that it would be
all right to accept these weekend preaching assignments if I
related all of my sermons to biblical principles that I could
personally accept. During this period, I preached a lot of
"doing-good" sermons, i.e., loving one's neighbor,
going the second mile, visiting the fatherless and widows in
their affliction, and such like. This worked well for a time,
but I was preaching these sermons in the Church of Christ, a
fundamentalist sect that expects to hear from its preachers a
lot of hellfire and brimstone and condemnation of false
"denominationalist" doctrines. Eventually, I
began to hear complaints and suggestions that I preach more on
doctrinal matters. I couldn't conscientiously do this, so
I continued to preach "Christian-duty" themes.
Finally, the matter was resolved when the elders of the
congregation I had been preaching for announced a business
meeting after the Sunday evening services. In the meeting, I was
asked to lead the perfunctory prayer with which such meetings
always open, and then I was informed that I was fired. The
entire process had taken perhaps five minutes.
Actually, I considered this a release from a tremendous burden I
had been trying to carry, because it forced upon me what I had
not been able to do on my own. I was now freed from the
responsibility of preparing sermons. Although I may have
technically agreed with the principles I was preaching about, I
was never able to rid myself of a horrible feeling of hypocrisy
that I had wrestled with every time I stepped into a pulpit.
For one thing, a preacher in the Church of Christ must end every
sermon with an appeal for the unconverted in the audience to
"obey the gospel," and for some time this had been a
very difficult part of the church services for me. I knew
that I was making a plea for people to become a part of
something I did not believe in myself.
When this congregation "terminated" my services, I
still had a summer session to complete before my graduate degree
would be finished. How was I going to manage that
financially? In addition to doing the weekend preaching
appointments, I had been working at whatever temporary jobs were
available through the student employment office, but the income
from this was minimal. By securing a student loan, I was
able to complete the summer session and receive my degree.
My family then left for Gallup, New Mexico, where both my wife
and I had contracted to teach. We made the trip in a Peugeot 403
station wagon that we had brought back from France, which for
lack of money I had not changed the oil in during the eighteen
months we had been students at the Bible college. Fortunately,
it held up through the 1200-mile trip.
In New Mexico, we dutifully went to church when Sunday came, but
my wife and I had agreed that neither of us would mention my
past involvement in preaching and missionary work. We
would just be ordinary church members. The only problem
was that I had been very active in writing religious articles
while I was a preacher, and I had served as the European
correspondent for a journal that specialized in reporting
missionary activities. A few days after we had attended our
first church service as just ordinary members, I met the local
preacher at a food market. The first thing that he said to
me was, "Farrell Till! I knew I had heard that name
before." He then went on to tell me that he was looking
through some back issues of a brotherhood paper and had seen one
of my articles. "Well, you will have to preach for us next
Sunday," he said.
What could I do? Somehow, I couldn't say no, so the next
Sunday found me on the front pew waiting for the hymn to end
that would be my cue to go to the pulpit and begin preaching.
I did that with no outward difficulty. I preached one of
my "doing-good" sermons, and when the time came to
"extend the invitation," I knew what to say, because I
had been trained in Church-of-Christ doctrine. But I
didn't like it. I don't know whether I was angry or
guilt-ridden or both. I just knew that I could not go back
to that church again, because I knew I would be expected to fill
the pulpit whenever the minister was ill or out of town or just
not in the mood to preach himself. I couldn't bear the
thought of doing that.
The next Sunday we went to a small church that we had heard
about on the Navaho Indian Reservation. After we arrived, a man
introduced himself and told us that he had been present at the
services in Gallup the Sunday before and had heard me preach.
So guess what? Since this congregation didn't have a
minister, I was pressed into preaching. With no
"doing-good" sermon outlines with me, the only thing I
could do was reach back into the repertoire of my mind and
preach on a doctrinal subject. Doing that was no problem.
I knew what I was expected to say, and so I said it, but as time
wore on in the delivery of the sermon, I think I actually hated
myself. I knew that I didn't believe what I was saying,
and it seemed to me that when I looked at my wife in the
audience, she was unable to look at me. I cut the sermon
short, politely waited for the services to conclude, and left.
I told my wife as we were driving away that that was it; I
wasn't going back until I had resolved the doubts that I was
struggling with.
That all happened on the first Sunday in September 1963, and I
have not been back to church since. Over the years, I have
spent many hours studying the Bible. My first efforts were
directed at looking for solutions to the problem of textual
inconsistencies and contradictions. I suppose my intention was
to discover that there were no grounds for my skepticism, but
the more I studied the Bible, the more I realized I would never
resolve the problem of biblical discrepancies, because the truth
is that the Bible is a collection of books written by
uninspired, fallible men, and like all fallible men they made
mistakes. They probably were sincere in their belief that
they were writing as representatives of God, but their sincerity
didn't make it so. The truth was a long time in coming,
but finally I realized that God had had exactly nothing to do
with the authorship of the Bible.
My first instinct was to keep this discovery to myself, because
religion is a sensitive subject. If I said anything
publicly, I might offend somebody, and I didn't want to do that.
At times, I wasn't able to remain silent because of religious
activities in the community that I considered infringements on
the rights of others, but for the most part, I kept my views of
the Bible to myself. Gradually, my thinking about this
changed, because I eventually realized that people with
religious beliefs had no qualms about offending those who
didn't. Christian fundamentalists didn't mind intruding on the
privacy of others by going door to door to try to impose their
religious beliefs on others. They weren't a bit bashful
about polluting the airwaves with their doctrinal nonsense, and
they certainly didn't mind forcing their hackneyed prayers on
the unreligious at public meetings that had nothing to do with
religion. Then, finally, during the Reagan administration,
I became deeply concerned with the way that the Republican Party
openly courted the support of Christian fundamentalists and even
at times catered to their whims. I saw a danger in what was
happening and decided that the outrageous claims of biblical
authority and inerrancy that fundamentalists were making needed
to be publicly opposed by an informed opposition. I
decided to be that opposition.
By then, I was living at my current residence in Illinois.
After teaching two years in New Mexico, my family moved back to
the Midwest, and for the past twenty-eight years, I have taught
English at Spoon River College in Canton, Illinois. During
those years, I maintained my interest in the Bible and spent
many hours researching the subject of Bible discrepancies. Since
becoming public in the 1980's with my opposition to Christian
fundamentalism, I have participated in eight oral and six
written debates. Negotiations for several oral debates are now
in progress. In January 1990, I began publishing *The Skeptical
Review,* a sixteen-page quarterly journal that is devoted
entirely to discussion of the Bible inerrancy doctrine.
The success of this publication has far exceeded my
expectations. It began with no subscribers and in less
than five years has grown to over 1200. A recent flurry of
subscription requests has resulted from local and Associated
Press news stories published about me following my appearance on
the CBS farce, *Ancient Secrets of the Bible II.* I
consider this at least one benefit to come from the experience.
Earlier, I described myself as an "evangelical
atheist," a condition of mind that I suppose was
inevitable, given my disposition to commit myself fully to
causes I believe in. A question I am often asked about my
evangelical activities on behalf of skepticism is, "Why are
you doing this?" The question itself implies that I
am doing something disgraceful and shameful or at least
something I am not entitled to do. I don't remember ever
being asked when I was a preacher why I was so evangelical about
my beliefs. When I made known my plans to go abroad as a
missionary, the announcement was greeted with praise and
admiration. Nobody asked, "Well, why do you want to
do that?" In other words, we live in a society where
people believe that it is proper for those who have religious
convictions to be evangelical. They can build churches, publish
papers and journals, go door to door distributing tracts, preach
on the airwaves, organize to support political causes favorable
to their beliefs, impose public prayers on everyone in
attendance at nonreligious meetings, and do just about anything
they want to in promotion of their beliefs--all the while
enjoying tax exempt status--but atheists and skeptics should not
have the same right. They should sit idly by and allow blatantly
absurd religious doctrines to be propagated without opposition.
The widespread acceptance of the belief that religion should
enjoy privileged status has wreaked inestimable havoc on our
society. It has cost the lives of defenseless children
whose parents sought cures for their illnesses in prayer rather
than medical science; it has brought child abuse into families
indoctrinated in the biblical belief that beating the child with
the rod will deliver his soul from hell (Prov. 23:13-14); it has
degraded women and relegated them to subservient status in our
society through nonsensical beliefs that evil was introduced
into the world by a woman (1 Tim. 2:13-15) and that the divine
intention is for the man to be the head of the woman (1 Cor.
11:3; Eph. 5:23); it has siphoned our energy and resources and
poured them into the maintenance of church buildings and
pastorates rather than enterprises that would truly benefit
mankind; it has retarded educational progress by its resistance
to the teaching of sex education and scientific principles in
conflict with fundamentalist beliefs; it has left psychological
scars in the lives of people and in more extreme cases produced
religious fanatics like Jim Jones and David Koresh. In a
word, it has been a blight on our society.
It took me a long time to recognize the harm that religion does
to a society. Even after I was convinced that the Bible
was nothing but another book, I was reluctant to oppose
biblically based religious beliefs. One of Nobel playwright
Eugene O'Neill's greatest dramas was his Pulitzer Prize winning
*Long Day's Journey into Night,* a posthumous autobiographical
play about a day in the life of a family coping with the ravages
of drug addiction and alcoholism. I know that evangelical
Christians will resent the simile, but fundamentalist religion
is like a drug. Once a person is under its influence, it works
like a drug in his life. To become free of it is as
difficult as any habitual user's struggle with the drug of his
addiction. I consider the first two decades of my adult
life as a long day's journey into light. Again, Bible
fundamentalists will resent the metaphor, but I believe it is
valid. Religion is a form of darkness in the individual's
life; escape from it is like a journey from darkness to light.
My escape was by no means easy.
In my evangelical activities now, I encounter many people who
are just beginning their journey into light, and I have been
able to help some of them with advice drawn from the benefits of
my own experiences. I have found this far more personally
gratifying than any conversions to Bible fundamentalism that I
was responsible for when I was a preacher. I plan to continue my
evangelical activities on behalf of skepticism and common sense
as long as I possibly can. Anyone reading this who wants
my help in throwing off the shackles of religious superstition
can get it by writing to me at P. O. Box 717, Canton, IL 61520
or e-mailing jftill@midwest.net. I have announced my
retirement from teaching, effective June 30, 1995, and after
that date I will have more flexibility in scheduling debates and
lectures. If any readers are having problems with Bible
fundamentalists, I will gladly engage them in public debate if
by chance you can find any who are willing to defend their
outrageous beliefs before an informed opposition. My experience
has been that not too many are willing to take that risk.
They prefer the security of preaching to partisan audiences.
*******************
FOOTNOTE: Since this was written, I have retired from my
teaching position and now devote myself to full time activities
intended to educate people in facts about the Bible that they
are unlikely to hear in their church services. I have conducted
several public debates with such Church-of-Christ preachers as
Mac Deaver, Buster Dobbs, Jerry Moffitt, and others less known.
I have also debated Norman Geisler, one of the leading spokesmen
for biblical inerrancy. These debates have been conducted
at colleges, universities, and churches that were willing to
permit their facilities to be used for this purpose.
posted
by Brian
Worley January 20,
2010 Ex-Minister.org
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