Gregory A. Boyd - Inspired Imperfection: How the Bibles Problems Enhance Its Divine Authority

To the remarkable pastors and staff of
Woodland Hills Church.
Thank you for your willingness to think,
for your courage to act,
and for your refusal to ever let anything
compromise our call
to do everything in love.

As has held true of everything I have ever written, I am keenly aware of how much Inspired Imperfection is indebted to others. For starters, I am blessed beyond measure to pastor an unusual, passionate, Christ-centered, Bible-based, evangelical-Anabaptist churchWoodland Hills Church in Maplewood, Minnesota that supports their senior pastor writing a potentially controversial book like this! Thank you, Woodland Hills, for always being willing to join in my exploration of new ways of looking at old problems. I am honored to have been your pastor over the last twenty-seven exciting years.

I want to offer a more particular word of gratitude to the remarkable ten students who belonged to the first-year class of the School of Missional Apprenticeship (SOMA) that is now part of Woodland Hills. Thank you for the engaging conversations we had around biblical authority and the cross, as well as around so many other matters. I hope our time together will prove as profitable for the kingdom in your life as it has been for mine.

I must also express my profound appreciation for the remarkable pastors and staff of Woodland Hills Church, to whom this book is dedicated. I doubt there are many pastoral teams on the planet that spend as much time and energy discussing contested theological issues as we do. I love that we are odd like this, and I, for one, am the better for it.

A special word of appreciation must be given to Janice Rohling, the executive pastor at Woodland Hills for the last twenty-two years. God has used this extraordinary (and extraordinarily strange) woman to not only create the unique other-oriented staff culture we have at Woodland Hills but also prophetically guide our church at crucial junctures in our history. Janice, the longer I have the opportunity to minister alongside of you, the more appreciative Ive become of the precious gift that you are to Woodland Hills Church and to the body of Christ as a whole.

As is true of almost everything Ive ever written, this book is heavily indebted to my beloved covenant bro, Paul Eddy. I love the way our polar-opposite personalities and gift mixes complement each other. Among other things, were it not for the editorial work of my much-more-cautious covenant brother, I am quite sure my tendency to state things in bold but insufficiently nuanced ways would have made this work less compelling, especially to some conservative readers. Thank you, Paul, for always watching my back!

Finally, I am not exaggerating when I profess that nothing in my life would work without my truly remarkable wife of forty years, Shelley (a.k.a. Beso). Beso is super smart in all the ways Im exceptionally stupid, including in just about everything practical. I am acutely aware of the fact that I could not begin to do what I do, including writing books, were it not for Besos willingness to serve as a buffer of sorts between me and the practical world. Beso, the selfless and always-behind-the-scenes way in which you pour yourself out for me, for our children, and for our grandchildren, as well as for our friends, neighbors, and strangers, makes you a kingdom rock star in my book!

Words cannot express how blessed I feel to have such a kingdom rock star as my life-long partner and friend!

I became a Christian in 1974, several weeks after my seventeenth birthday. I surrendered my life to Jesus in a small Pentecostal revival service where I had a powerful, even life-transforming, encounter with God.

This particular Pentecostal church placed a lot of importance on people experiencing God in dramatic, emotionally charged ways. It was, for them, the main proof that their particular doctrinessome of which, I would later learn, were quite unorthodoxwere true. Consequently, I ended up having a number of emotionally charged experiences with God in the year following my conversion, which is why I initially embraced everything this church taught, including the teaching that the Bible is the divinely inspired, completely inerrant, word of God, as my pastor regularly preached.

I was also taught that true Christiansas opposed to those liberal Christiansaccept that everything in the Bible is literally true. If the earth wasnt created in six literal days, I remember my pastor preaching, then the whole Bible may as well be a book of lies.

I had been an atheist for four years leading up to my conversion, and I had increasingly struggled with the apparent meaninglessness of life. Now, however, I felt like my life had an eternal purpose, and I loved it. I wasnt certain of anything prior to my conversion but afterwards, my dramatic experiences of God made me feel certain I had found the truth, as we used to say in my Pentecostal Church. I enjoyed that blissful certainty and sense of purpose throughout my senior year in high school.

Then I attended the University of Minnesota (U of M), and that bliss went straight out the window.

* * *

As has happened to countless other young Christians who have been taught that the Bible must be inerrant if it is to be considered divinely inspired, my year-old-faith came crashing down once I discovered that the Bible is plagued with all sorts of errors. Two classes did the trick.

The first was a class entitled Introduction to Evolutionary Biology. I intentionally chose this class to pick a fight. I had prepared myself by reading three books that claimed to refute evolution and to prove Young Earth Creationism. Because I hadnt been much of a reader up to this point in my life, I naively assumed that reading three whole books on a topic qualified me as something of an expert. I felt entirely too confident. My plan for this class was to use my expert knowledge of the truth to expose the lie of evolution and to thereby save the faith of fellow Christians in this class. Perhaps, I fantasized, I might even convert some nonbelievers. My fantasy failed spectacularly.

Today, I am astonished, and frankly a bit embarrassed, by the nave arrogance of my ridiculous eighteen-year-old self. Every day for the first several weeks of this course, I would come to class with a stack of three-by-five cards, each of which contained a summary of an anti-evolution or a pro-Creationism argument that I had transcribed from one of the three books Id read. Whenever our professor would make a point that I had an argument against, I would raise my hand, find the relevant three-by-five card, and voice my objection. Each and every time, my professor would calmly and effortlessly expose the weakness or factual incorrectness of my objection, and then move on.