Stage Two - Boston and First Master's (1995-2003)
From certainty to questions and the beginning of my biblical deconstruction.
Greetings everyone,
This is the beginning of Stage Two of what is a series entitled My Deconstruction of the Bible in Six Stages.
If you didn’t get a chance, you can read Stage One where I talk about my conversion to Christianity, and the spiritual backpack I received upon my declaration of faith.
Boston Calling
In March 1995, I received a call from a gentleman from Boston about a promising software. At the time, I was living the corporate life, with a corner office on the 26th floor of a bank in Los Angeles. Despite the daily suit and tie routine, the views from my desk were spectacular.
I agreed to see the sales rep who promptly dazzled me with his software. It was going to replace my manual reporting process and dramatically improve my productivity. My boss would be thrilled.
The sales rep left me a demo and promised to follow-up soon.
After popping the floppy disk into my machine (which I later learned had been programmed by my future wife), my machine made a few gurgles, and then promptly crashed!
Well this wasn’t a good sign.
I had a top of the line 486 Compaq computer with 16 MBs of RAM. That was greased lighting, right there. As I write, it is a remarkable to consider the technological revolution of the past thirty years.
Do you remember a world without iPhones, the Internet, or social media?
Mmmm. Sounds dreamy, right? Hold on, someone is sending me a reel! :)
She Had Me at Hello
I called the software company in Boston, and a woman answered the phone
Hello.
She had a slight southern accent. And she didn’t just have me at hello. She arrested me at hello.
It was love at first sound. Had to be.
The woman on the other end was prompt, polite, and efficient. As for me, something was happening in my heart, or it could have been my loins! I don’t know. She had such a great voice.
That evening I shared the news with my roomie, also a Pepperdine grad, “I met this amazing girl, she’s in tech support.” And he replied, “Dude, that's like falling in love with the MCI operator. They're supposed to be nice!”
“Well, I think there is something different about her,” I replied.
And I was right.
Because nine months later, I packed my few belongings, found a home for my cat, and moved to Boston—all for Rochelle, my tech support savior. This also meant that I would endure my first Boston winter which had a historic snowfall in 1995.
Of course!
Boston and Park Street Church
Los Angeles was glamorous, but Boston was unique among U.S. cities: 400 years of history, the American Revolution, Paul Revere, home to 44 universities including Harvard and MIT, and a rabid and historic sports fan base.
By the way, I arrived in Boston six years before one of the greatest runs of titles by a city: thirteen over twenty five years. It is one of the highlights of my life as I am a huge sports fan.
Rochelle was attending historic Park Street Church, established in 1809 as a trinitarian congregation in response to the Unitarian movement (also started in Boston).
Park Street was part of the Neo-evangelical movement which aimed to engage constructively with science, academia, and society after the perceived cultural isolationism of fundamentalist Christianity going back to the 1920s.
But this also meant that there was a broad spectrum of people in the congregation, both politically and religiously. Indeed, when I came to Boston, I didn't know one could be both a Christian and a Democrat. I know it’s wild to say that, but I was fairly strict in my beliefs. I had learned that the other side was evil because they believed in abortion.
In addition, my charismatic beliefs clashed with the staid New England style of worship. No one raised their hands. “Where was the Spirit,” I kept insisting naively? Finally, a dear sister (who was probably tired of my rantings) gave me Chuck Colson’s The Body which opened my eyes to the variety of Christian worship and expression.
In these two incidences, it is unsettling to see how quickly I judged entire groups of people based on my beliefs. I was trying to live out the ideas and theology that I had learned in my previous church, but I kept running into conflicts with my particular views on faith and the Bible.
From Corporate Life to Ministry
Rochelle and I married ten months after I arrived in Boston. It took five months to the engagement, and four months to plan a destination wedding in San Diego.
Who needs more time than that?
Three years in—having finally adjusted to Boston culture, which was harder than adjusting to a foreign culture—I began contemplating a change in vocation. I considered graduate programs in education or psychology, but then Rochelle suggested I try ministry instead.
"You always light up when you are doing ministry," she continued. I used to say that God speaks to some people through dreams or a still small voice, but he speaks to me through Rochelle because she has a brain!
Duh. She was absolutely right, knowing me better than I knew myself.
Even back in Los Angeles, when I was leading worship at retreats or sharing my testimony in youth prisons, I always thought, “It would be really cool to do this full-time.” So I applied and was accepted into Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Master of Divinity program.
The First Domino: Textual Criticism
My first crisis of faith (and with the Bible) came with an Introduction to the New Testament class. Here is where I learned about textual criticism which shattered my naive assumption that the Bible had somehow "fallen from the sky" perfect and complete.
"What do you mean there are thousands of manuscripts for the New Testament?" I asked incredulously. In that class I discovered that the New Testament (and the whole Bible for that matter) had been recreated, reconfigured, and pieced together by an army of scholars who had painstakingly poured over thousands of manuscripts over hundreds of years.
This revelation fundamentally changed my understanding: the Bible was clearly a human document. Without a massive human effort, we do not have it in its present form.
Still, I did not lose faith in the Bible at this point because my profs taught me that it was both a human AND divine document. But, I stopped thinking of the Bible as the inerrant, and perfect word of God. No way. The process to put it together was too messy (though some in seminary insisted that God even orchestrated that).
Nevertheless, textual criticism became the first domino to fall in my journey of deconstruction—a journey that would eventually lead me to question the very nature of the Bible itself.
Til the next stage.
Gustavo
P.S. Would love to know what you think. Was there one idea that stuck out?
