Does it really matter if you believe in the creation story? Does it really change anything if you dismiss the account of the flood? What if you dismiss the words about wives submitting to their husbands? Or judge all of the statements about sexuality being something only to be enjoyed in marriage as old fashioned? Does it change anything if you decide not to wrestle with the biblical calls to take the message of the gospel to the end of the earth? Or ignore the calls to accept the last and the least into our midst?
I suppose you can argue on face value that each of these things doesn’t seems like a deal breaker. Surely one can dismiss one of these things and still hold onto the faith. Or at least that is the argument.
But the problem is that the only way you embrace one of these ideas is by latching on to one false hermeneutic (approach to interpreting the bible) or another. And once you do that, other biblical ideas will quickly fall like dominoes. If you decide that the bible does not intend to be literal in its account of creation, soon that hermeneutic has removed faith in the flood and the miracles of Jesus. If you decide that the bible is trapped in cultural presuppositions to justify casting out the bible instruction on the order of marriage, soon its teachings on sexuality in general are placed aside as well.
Because once you take up a false means of interpreting the bible into your hand, you will start chiseling away the parts of the bible your flesh does not like. And when you do that, you will be left with a bible that you could have written yourself with your own ideas. And once you have done that, you must know that you have simply chiseled yourself an idol to worship. And you should not be surprised that that idol looks eerily like the image you behold in a mirror.
