Stage Four: PhD, Colombia, and the Second Deconstruction Domino Falls (2009-2019)

The steady drip of uncertainty and another major doubt appears

Welcome to Tuesdays with Doctor G., where I share my journey of teaching and deconstructing the Bible over two decades of ministerial work and the radical spiritual reawakening that I experienced in the aftermath.

This is Stage Four of a series entitled "My Deconstruction of the Bible in Six Stages." It incorporates our first mission to Colombia and my doctoral work.

Setting the Scenery

After four formative years teaching in Paraguay and a second master’s, my academic journey led me to London School of Theology in 2009, where I pursued a PhD in New Testament studies. While immersed in doctoral work, Park Street Church commissioned our family to serve at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia in Medellín. By 2011, we arrived on campus where I would spend thirteen fulfilling years teaching New Testament courses until my retirement as a seminary professor in June 2024.

Colombia indelibly marked my soul. Looking over Medellín's dynamic and majestic cityscape, teaching and doing life with colleagues and students on that hillside campus, and traveling to colonial towns evoke a bittersweet blend of joy, gratitude, and longing.

Colombia transcends its narco-trafficker mythology. Beyond Pablo Escobar's shadow lies a geographical paradise of breathtaking canyons and lush plateaus. Here thrives a rich culture and a warm, embracing, and resilient people tempered, but not broken, by decades of armed conflict.

This conflict has raged for six decades, as government forces, militias, and cartels have turned Colombia’s countryside into a battleground. Ordinary citizens have been caught in the crossfire. Many villages were uprooted overnight, and families were sent fleeing into the mountains with only the shirts on their backs. Meanwhile, violent militias left a trail of rape, murder and torture in their wake. A staggering 6.8 million people—second only to Syria's displaced population—carry the scars of this national tragedy.

Despite this difficult backdrop, I arrived in Colombia with renewed purpose. I had processed the painful lessons from Paraguay but had not fully attributed these difficulties to scripture itself. My academic studies had yielded a theological compromise—viewing the Bible as both human and divine—that temporarily resolved my intellectual concerns. Finally, I still believed that properly training pastors in biblical interpretation would solve the church's persistent problems.

I was literally on top of the world. My home was at the highest point on the campus, and every morning I would bound out the door exclaiming, “Good Morning Medellín!” I was teaching at one of the top Bible colleges on the continent, serving eager undergraduate students, and living in a vibrant city amongst a passionate community.

It was a vocational dream.

But you can probably guess what happened next.

The Steady Drip of Uncertainty

There wasn't one singular moment in Colombia that continued my declining faith in the Bible—rather, it was a steady drip of unsettling realities I had trouble ignoring.

The doctrinal fragmentation I witnessed in my work highlighted a troubling aspect of biblical authority. Unlike Paraguay, where I worked with a single denomination, our seminary hosted students from thirty-three different denominations—each with their own interpretations of the same text.

These divisions were stark and consequential: Baptists barred women from pastoring churches, while Pentecostals welcomed them. Wesleyans and Calvinists waged endless debates over salvation, free will, and predestination. In my classes, I would tell students, “You must embrace both positions because the Bible embraces both.” Believing the Bible had a single divine author, I assumed it conveyed a unified theology. So, when faced with doctrines that simply didn’t align, I often reached for words like “mystery” or “paradox” to hold them together.

The academic rigor of seminary only intensified this focus. Students devoted four years of their lives to learning how to study, interpret, and preach the Bible. We also equipped them with research tools and hermeneutical frameworks. Most of our students were preparing to pastor churches, so this work was needed so that they could “preach sound doctrine.”

Over time, I realized that the Bible had become the cornerstone of institutional Christianity. Seminaries trained students in exegesis, hermeneutics, and homiletics to ensure they could “rightly handle the word of God.” Preaching a sermon became the centerpiece of a Protestant worship service, while the Bible study industry reinforced the cycle, urging believers to cultivate their relationship with God through daily devotions and quiet time.

Yet many questions lurked beneath the surface which kept gnawing at me: Why was there any disagreement at all in a book penned by God himself? Why did we have 6,000 Protestant denominations splitting over doctrine or arguing about every topic? The irony wasn't lost on me—we were teaching precision in interpretation while the broader Christian landscape demonstrated a complete lack of interpretive clarity.

Bracketing the Violence of God

Another aspect which caused much spiritual anxiety was the violence attributed to God in scripture. While Joshua's narratives had always troubled me, "Put every man and woman, young and old, and every beast under the sword," I had compartmentalized these passages, separating them from their human implications: the slaughter of infants, pregnant women, and entire communities.

What ultimately shattered my defenses were the songs. In both ancient text and modern worship, I heard celebrations of divine violence (God drowning his enemies, defeating nations, wiping out populations). These weren't just difficult accounts that needed to be contextualized; they were being celebrated as demonstrations of God's power and faithfulness.

I had become the Great Apologist. For years, I offered the standard explanations: their sins had reached "full measure," they were sacrificing children, this was "holy war" with specific rules, it was necessary to establish God's people in the Promised Land. In this way, I was echoing John Piper's disconcerting theology: "It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.” And if you doubt he said that, just Google it.

Even Sunday schools were alarming. We were teaching children to “walk around the walls of Jericho til they came tumbling down.” We had sanitized violence for children, turning a massacre into felt-board stories with a moral lesson.

Most revealing was how we discussed the Exile—treating it as a period in Israel’s history rather than what it truly was: brutally violent armies overrunning villages, slaughtering people, raping women, and carrying captives into foreign lands. The biblical framing presented this horror as divine judgment, God's righteous response to Israel's disobedience.

Really? God did this to his people?

Looking back now, I was too immersed in my beliefs to see the parallels with Colombia’s armed conflict. What was the difference between a militia group terrorizing Colombian villages and the Babylonian army that God supposedly "sent" against Jerusalem? Both left trails of destruction, created refugees, and inflicted generational trauma. We just called it The Exile, and moved on.

My seminary students included victims of Colombia's armed conflict—people who had lost family members, homes, and security to violence. I don’t know why they never saw the irony. All of us were justifying this violence saying that it was right when sanctioned by God. Midway through my time in Colombia, the cognitive dissonance became so unbearable that I bracketed that part of the Bible. I was a New Testament scholar, after all—where Jesus preached love for enemies and turning the other cheek.

The Second Domino - Comparative Religions

The second major domino in my deconstruction of the Bible fell when my PhD research brought me face-to-face with the ancient civilizations that preceded Israel, Mesopotamia and Egypt.

These cultures, separated by vast distances and centuries, had developed religious systems with striking similarities to Israel's. They had priests and ritual sacrifices. They established intricate purity laws and ethical codes. They documented creation stories and flood narratives—including the account of a dove that is released and comes back because the waters had not receded. And the most striking similarity to Israel’s stories, all featured gods and kings who bore the title "shepherd" of their people.

In Mesopotamian texts, Marduk was described as a "faithful shepherd" who provided grazing lands, drinking places, rainfall, and vegetation. He was portrayed as just and wise, frustrating the plans of enemies and blotting out evildoers—yet possessing a sympathetic heart that turned want into plenty. The Egyptian hymns to Amun-Re declared him creator of all things, including animals, men, and fields. He was husband to widows and father to orphans, a deliverer of prisoners and healer of the sick, because he was "a shepherd, who loves his flock."

These ancient cultures had maintained elaborate theological systems for over two millennia. They built temples, performed rituals, and lived as if their gods were real. They interpreted prosperity as divine blessing and catastrophe as divine judgment. They believed their kings were established by gods for just rule.

The question lodged in my brain like a splinter: If these cultures could maintain a theological facade, inventing gods and attributing natural events to divine intervention for thousands of years, was Israel any different?

This was the series of questions that sent the boulder rolling downhill. The driving force behind my faith, studies, and ministry had always been the nature of the Bible. But this discovery opened a loop in my mind that I could not close. The evidence suggested that Israel, like its neighbors, had developed its religious system through natural cultural processes rather than divine revelation.

Conclusion

In 2015, my family and I returned to Boston so our kids could attend a traditional high school. I continued teaching at the seminary but had transitioned to virtual instruction. After nearly twenty years of studying and teaching the Bible, my faith in the "good book" had taken many serious hits.

It’s a testament to the power of belief that even with all of these doubts, I searched for a way to preserve the Bible’s inspiration. At this stage, I still saw it as both human and divine—but increasingly, the weight tilted toward the human.

When I returned to Colombia four years later, they would prove to be the most spiritually challenging, culminating in a breaking point when I taught the Jewish cultural context of the New Testament.

Til the next stage.

Gustavo