Sunday, March 2, 2014: Exodus 24:12-18; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

I grew up in Southern Baptist congregations. By the time I left high school I knew the four steps to salvation and the meaning of Jesus’ sacrificial death as a substitutionary atonement for my sins. I could articulate this understanding of salvation in clear and simple terms. Within the metanarrative of evangelical Christianity it made perfect sense and was logically coherent.

Then my fundamentalism began to unravel. As an undergraduate religious studies major I was introduced to the historical-critical study of scripture. My questions accelerated into a full-blown crisis of faith that challenged everything I’d been taught. Unlike those friends who had found Christian faith too problematic to maintain, I was able to pick up the pieces of my deconstructed fundamentalism and discover a more progressive form of Christianity.

During this time I was drawn to the Old Testament. As my fascination with the Hebrew Bible grew, I realized that references to the Old Testament had been largely absent from the evangelicalism of my youth. Yes, I learned the standard Old Testament Sunday school stories—Noah’s flood, Moses and the exodus, Jonah and the big fish, Elijah’s prophetic adventures, and David and Goliath. Otherwise, however, I’d read only selected quotations used in the New Testament or christological readings of portions of the prophet literature. Everything that I’d been told was important came from a rather narrow reading of the New Testament.