Old Dog, Older Tricks

On theological overtime, the cost of ideological certainty, and why the tricks worth learning were never new

Spend long enough inside a closed theological system and the confidence it produces starts to seem like real wisdom. It has the weight of repetition behind it, the texture of certainty, and for most of my adult life I mistook the whole package for wisdom I had actually earned. I walked around like it was something built through careful study and serious thought. I had done neither, as it turns out, at least not with the rigor I was crediting to myself.

I am fifty-three years old. I have been inside evangelical Christianity for essentially my entire conscious life, and for most of that time I was very sure about a great many things. Confidently sure, in the way people are sure when everyone around them is sure about the same things and the system itself is built to treat hard questions as spiritual faults rather than intellectual virtues. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that my certainty and the quality of my evidence were not actually proportional. I had the confidence of a man who had checked his work carefully yet, as it turns out, I had done no such thing.

Meet the Dog

A word about where I actually stand before any of this goes further, because the internet has a way of turning theological edginess into a performance. Someone leaves a tradition and immediately becomes an authority on everything that tradition got wrong, which is its own kind of overcorrection and its own kind of arrogance. I have no interest in trading one set of certainties for another, slightly hipper set. I have been that person and the view from inside is much less flattering than it seems.

What I am is someone who spent more than four decades inside a particular world, absorbed its assumptions at a cellular level, and then started asking questions that the system did not have good answers for. Not provocative questions, mostly. Just genuine, honest ones. The kind that start small, like why does this passage mean what we say it means, who decided that, when, and what were they trying to solve, and then, if you follow them honestly, have a tendency to get bigger and more interesting and considerably more disruptive to a comfortable faith.

The old dog metaphor is useful here because it is accurate in ways the person deploying it usually does not intend. The saying assumes the dog’s limitations are biological and permanent. What it actually describes, at least in my experience, is a learning problem that is more architectural. Long-term belief systems do not sit in the brain the way opinions do. They get embedded in the structure. They shape what feels true before conscious evaluation has a chance to weigh in. Neuroscientists studying the biology of belief have documented how deeply held religious frameworks become integrated into automatic neural processing, the kind that operates faster than conscious thought and carries a felt sense of truth independent of evidence. When I encounter an idea that challenges something I have held closely for nearly half a century, the resistance I feel is not primarily intellectual. It is neurological. The old wiring fires first, and it fires fast, and it carries the full emotional weight of every sermon and Bible study that reinforced the original circuit.

Knowing that, objectively, does not make it easier, but it does tend to make it less mysterious.

I am also not going to pretend I have arrived somewhere in terms of a spiritual or theological destination. The word most people reach for here is “reconstruction,” as in: I deconstructed my faith and now I am reconstructing it. I understand the appeal of that wording as a verbal shortcut, but it implies a cleaner process than anything I have experienced, and a destination I cannot honestly claim to see in full view. What I can say is that I left a particular version of evangelical Christianity. I am still working out what, if anything, I am moving toward, and the leaving has been equal parts liberating and genuinely hard, sometimes on the same afternoon.

What I can also say is that a lot of what I was taught to treat as ancient, essential, and non-negotiable turns out to have an address and a birthday, and in several cases a fairly specific set of authors with a fairly specific set of problems they were trying to solve at a very specific time in history. Worth knowing.

The Non-Negotiables That Were, In Fact, Negotiated

Every tradition has its foundational doctrines, the ones you are not supposed to examine too closely because the whole structure depends on them holding together. In the evangelical world, several of these were treated as so self-evidently biblical and so historically settled that questioning them was less an intellectual position than a blatant moral failure. I held most of them with great enthusiasm for most of my life. I am going to name only a few of them here, along with the point at which the wheels started coming off, because I think honesty about the specifics is more useful than vague gestures toward having “asked some hard questions.”

Biblical inerrancy and inspiration. The formal evangelical doctrine of inerrancy, that Scripture is without error in all that it affirms including matters of history and science, feels ancient until you look for it in the ancient church and discover it largely is not there. The doctrine as evangelicals now hold it was substantially shaped by B. B. Warfield and A. A. Hodge in an 1881 journal article, then codified in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978. Yes, it’s younger than me. That is a late-modern edifice built in direct response to the rise of historical criticism, constructed by people who were frightened, which is not a criticism of their character but certainly is relevant context for evaluating their conclusions. The Bible makes no claim to be what the Chicago Statement says it is. The Chicago Statement makes that claim on the Bible’s behalf, which is a different thing entirely, and once you see the difference, good luck pretending otherwise.

Literalist biblical interpretation. Closely related but important to separate out, because inerrancy is a claim about the text and literalism is a claim about how to read it. The assumption that the plain, face-value reading of a passage is the most faithful reading is itself a hermeneutical position with a history, and it is not the dominant position in most of that history. Jewish interpretive tradition has always been comfortable with multiple simultaneous meanings, with argument, with a text that resists closure. The early church fathers read Scripture allegorically as a matter of course. The literal sense was one layer, not the only one. The Protestant Reformation narrowed that considerably, and American fundamentalism narrowed it a whole lot further, until a large portion of the evangelical tradition ended up treating a 19th and 20th century interpretive strategy as the obvious and only way any serious Christian has ever approached the text.

Bibliocentrism. This one is harder to critique because it sounds like it cannot possibly be a problem. Of course the Bible is central. What else would be? The issue is not that Scripture matters, it does, but that the evangelical functional canon is considerably smaller than the actual canon. In practice, this means it runs heavily Pauline, leans hard on certain prophetic texts, filters everything through a doctrinal grid assembled well after the texts were written, and treats that grid as the natural and inevitable meaning of Scripture rather than as an interpretive tradition with its own history, limitations, and blind spots. The Bible does not interpret itself into Reformed soteriology. That required centuries of argument, several ecumenical crises, and a number of very smart men working very hard. Fine in itself. Theology is supposed to be hard work. The problem arises when the tradition starts presenting its conclusions as the transparent and obvious meaning of the text, foreclosing the kind of serious reading that produced those conclusions in the first place.

There is also a more specific problem, and it goes deeper than the canon question. When the Bible itself becomes the de facto object of reverence, treated as inviolable and almost sacred in its physical and textual form, something has quietly moved from theology into something closer to bibliodolatry. The Reformation tradition itself insisted that Scripture’s authority is derivative, a witness pointing toward Christ rather than existing as an end in itself. That is a different argument than the one about Scripture versus ecclesial tradition. The question here is not which authority ranks highest but what Scripture is actually for. John 1 does not call the Bible the Word of God. It calls Jesus the Word of God. When the text displaces the one it points toward, a Christocentric faith has been replaced by something else and calling it orthodoxy does not make it so.

Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide. Here is where I lose some of you, and I understand that. These are not minor doctrines. For traditions shaped by the Reformation, they are the foundation, the formal and material principles on which everything else rests. Scripture alone as the ultimate authority. Faith alone as the ground of justification. I spent years not just believing these doctrines but breathing them. They were my oxygen.

What I eventually had to reckon with is that they are 16th century solutions to 16th century problems. Luther was a brilliant and volatile Augustinian monk in a specific ecclesiastical and political crisis, responding to specific abuses in a specific institution at a specific moment in European history. Sola Scriptura was not handed down at Sinai. It was forged in a conflict with Rome over authority, and its meaning has been contested within Protestantism almost from the moment Luther articulated it, which is, not incidentally, one of the reasons there are now somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 Protestant denominations, every one of which believes it is reading Scripture alone correctly, and none of which is actually doing so, since every reading happens through some interpretive tradition whether acknowledged or not.

Sola Fide is more complex, and the arguments for it are more exegetically serious, but the particular shape it took in Reformed orthodoxy, with its architecture of imputation, double predestination, and limited atonement, involves philosophical and theological moves that go well beyond anything Paul lays out in the book of Romans, and which would have puzzled most Christians who lived before the 16th century. It also would have puzzled Paul’s actual first-century audience, you know the ones he was directly writing to, for whom the categories being constructed a millennium and a half later would have been largely unrecognizable.

Luther was right to pick that fight. The doctrine, though, bears the marks of that specific conflict in time and history in ways the tradition has not always been thoroughly honest about.

Eternal Conscious Torment. I have written about this at length elsewhere, so I will be brief here. The hell most evangelicals believe in is a synthesis, assembled over centuries from a handful of disparate biblical images, a great deal of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic literature that most evangelicals have never read and consider “concealed” for good reason, Dante’s considerable imagination, and the rhetorical needs of revival preaching. The Bible is serious about judgment. It is nowhere near as straightforward about the mechanics of that judgment as evangelical preaching suggests, and the version of hell that functioned as the emotional driver of most evangelistic appeals I ever heard owes more to Jonathan Edwards and the Apocalypse of Peter than to Jesus.

The Trinity. I want to be careful here because this is the one most likely to get me misread, and I am not interested in being misread. I am not saying the doctrine of the Trinity is entirely wrong. I am saying that the formulation hammered out at Nicaea in 325 and refined at Chalcedon in 451 is a Greek philosophical solution to a pastoral and political crisis, and that the language of substance, essence, and persons is not direct biblical language. It is the church’s best attempt, using the conceptual tools available to it in the 4th and 5th centuries, to say something coherent about the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. That may be a legitimate development, but it is not a transcript. And the fact that most evangelicals who would defend the doctrine vigorously cannot define homoousios or explain why it matters is itself a small piece of evidence that what is being defended is less a careful theological conclusion and more a well-rehearsed tribal marker.

These are not the only doctrines I have come to question, only some of the more obvious ones. The list is longer and continues to grow, which I have stopped treating as a crisis.

A quick callback to the old dog — something like: “Old dogs, it turns out, are capable of significant theological upheaval. This surprises no one more than the dog.

The Neurological Reality, or Why This Is Actually Hard

The intellectual work, it turns out, is actually the easier part. You read, you follow the evidence, you update your conclusions. Uncomfortable, at times, but manageable. What resists much more stubbornly is the emotional and neurological infrastructure the belief built on its way in over four plus decades. Daniel Kahneman’s research on automatic and deliberate cognition helps explain why. Deeply held beliefs engage what he calls System 1 processing, the fast, pre-conscious, emotionally loaded machinery that generates judgments before conscious thinking has a chance to engage. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg has documented something similar in studies of religious belief specifically, finding that long-held theological frameworks become neurologically integrated in ways that make revision feel less like updating a view and more like threatening the self. That is why questioning inerrancy, even when the historical evidence is quite clear, does not feel like simply updating a position. It feels more like betraying a lifelong friend.

What the books on cognitive science do not cover is the social dimension, the friendships that quietly cool, the family dinners that develop a careful avoidance of certain topics, the communities that were once home and now feel like a place you used to live. Certainty is not just a cognitive state. It is a felt sense of safety, and when it erodes, what replaces it, at least initially, is not the clean exhilaration of intellectual freedom but something that hits you considerably more like vertigo. I have had moments of genuine grief in this process, mourning a coherence that turned out to be partly borrowed and partly constructed, and moments of genuine anger, and at least one extended stretch of feeling like a very loyal employee who just read all the internal memos.

The anger passes. The grief passes. What I am left with, most days, is something more akin to insatiable curiosity, which I have also come to regard as a significant upgrade over my old ideological certainty.

The Older Tricks

Here is the thing the old dog metaphor gets exactly backwards. The ideas I was warned against, the ones labeled dangerous, liberal, progressive, or insufficiently biblical, are in most cases considerably older than the ones I was taught to believe were non-negotiable.

Origen of Alexandria was asking questions about eternal punishment, the nature of Scripture, and the final restoration of all things in the third century, and he was doing it with more exegetical sophistication than most contemporary evangelical commentary can muster. He argued, in fact, that certain passages of Scripture are deliberately impossible to read literally, that God designed the text with apparent absurdities and contradictions precisely to push the reader past the surface toward deeper meaning. That is a third-century hermeneutic, and it is considerably more interesting than being told that the plain reading is the only reading. The Cappadocian fathers (Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus) were more comfortable with theological mystery and apophatic humility than any Reformed study Bible I have ever owned. Gregory of Nyssa described the soul’s movement toward God as epektasis, a perpetual straining forward in which arriving is not the point because the divine is inexhaustible. The blessed life is not a destination reached but a direction sustained. That is a fourth-century theology of open-ended seeking, and it sounds considerably less threatening than the word “deconstruction” while being considerably more honest about what serious faith has always involved.

Jewish interpretive tradition, which the church spent centuries trying to leave behind, has always known that a text this ancient and this layered is not going to harmonize into a single clean meaning, and has treated argument with the text as honest engagement rather than rebellion. Dan McClellan has made the point, bluntly and accurately, that words do not inherently contain meaning. Meaning is constructed and contested across communities over time, which is precisely what the Jewish interpretive tradition has always understood and what much of Christian history, shaped largely by Greek assumptions about language and truth, has worked hard to deny.

The things I was taught to treat as the ancient and settled faith of the church, inerrancy as Warfield defined it, Sola Scriptura as American Protestantism practices it, ECT as Edwards preached it, the dispensational eschatology that convinced several generations of evangelicals that the rapture was imminent and current events were prophecy, are by the standards of Christian history the new arrivals. They were born in specific times, for specific reasons, by specific people. Some of them have copyright dates.

Who is novel now?

The older tradition is more comfortable with questions, more honest about the limits of theological language, more interested in what the text might mean than in foreclosing that question in advance. That is what serious engagement with Scripture has always actually looked like, when it was not being performed for an audience that needed certainty more than it needed truth.

Where That Leaves the Dog

To quote an eminent 20th century Canadian theologian, A. Morissette, I haven’t got it all figured out just yet. I want to say that plainly because the internet rewards people who are good at performing certainty, including certainty about the problems with certainty, and I am trying not to do that. I’m fairly certain I’m not.

What I have is more questions than I used to have, which I have come to regard as a sign that something is working correctly rather than failing. I have a genuine respect for Scripture that I think is actually deeper than the reverence I was performing when I was at my most confident, because it is no longer dependent on the text being something it never claimed to be. I have a faith of some kind that I am still working out the shape of, and I have stopped being in a hurry about that.

The old dog is still learning. The tricks worth learning, it turns out, were never new. They just require unlearning some things first, and that part, as advertised, is really hard. What nobody puts in the brochure is that the questions themselves, once you stop being afraid of them, turn out to be surprisingly good company.

Endnotes

1. For an accessible overview of how deeply held beliefs become integrated into automatic neural processing, see Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009). Newberg’s neuroimaging research examines how religious belief activates and is reinforced by specific neural circuits, making belief revision an experience of cognitive and emotional disruption rather than straightforward intellectual updating.

2. B. B. Warfield and A. A. Hodge, “Inspiration,” The Presbyterian Review 2, no. 6 (1881): 225-260. This article, often treated as the foundational modern articulation of inerrancy, was a direct response to the growing influence of historical-critical biblical scholarship in American theological education. For a readable evangelical critique of the inerrancy tradition that emerged from this moment, see Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).

3. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978. The statement’s nineteen articles and accompanying exposition represent the fullest formal elaboration of the doctrine in evangelical Protestantism. Its scope, precision, and defensive posture are themselves evidence of how contested the territory had become by the late 20th century.

4. On the fourfold sense of Scripture in the patristic and medieval tradition, see Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998; originally published in French, 1959). De Lubac documents how the literal sense of Scripture was consistently understood as one layer of meaning among several, not the privileged or primary sense it became in later Protestant interpretation. For Origen’s explicit account of spiritual over literal reading, and his argument that certain passages are deliberately designed to resist literal sense, see Origen, On First Principles (De Principiis), Book 4, ch. 2-3.

5. Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011). Smith, a sociologist of religion writing from within a broadly Christian perspective, argues that the evangelical approach to Scripture he calls “biblicism” — the combination of high-authority claims, plain-sense reading, and a functionally selective canon — is not only historically recent but internally incoherent, as evidenced by the persistent “pervasive interpretive pluralism” among biblicists reading the same texts.

6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §4, “The Word of God in its Threefold Form” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975). Barth’s distinction among the living Word (Jesus Christ), the written Word (Scripture), and the proclaimed Word (preaching) insists that Scripture’s authority is always instrumental and derivative, grounded in its witness to Christ rather than in any property of the text itself. For a more accessible engagement with this distinction, see also John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

7. For Luther’s ecclesial and political context and the historical emergence of Sola Scriptura as a polemical principle, see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). For the argument that Sola Scriptura’s internal logic inevitably produced doctrinal fragmentation rather than biblical clarity, see Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), esp. chapter 2. The estimate of 30,000-45,000 Protestant denominations varies by source and definition; figures derive from the World Christian Encyclopedia and related research.

8. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). Kahneman’s account of System 1 (fast, automatic, associative) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, analytical) cognition illuminates why long-held beliefs resist revision even when the deliberate, evidence-weighing mind has updated its conclusions. System 1 is where deeply embedded beliefs live, and it does not yield to argument the way conscious reasoning does.

9. Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009). See also Newberg’s earlier work with Eugene d’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), which documents the neurological correlates of religious experience and the role of repetitive religious practice in reinforcing belief structures at the neural level.

10. Origen’s most relevant works here are On First Principles (De Principiis), esp. Book 4, ch. 2-3 on the deliberate use of textual difficulty to drive spiritual interpretation, and Book 1, ch. 6 on the final restoration of all things (apokatastasis). For Gregory of Nyssa’s concept of epektasis (the soul’s endless movement toward God), see his Life of Moses and Homilies on the Song of Songs. For a scholarly treatment of Origen’s theological method, see John Anthony McGuckin, ed., The Westminster Handbook to Origen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004). Origen was condemned posthumously at the Second Council of Constantinople (553), which itself is evidence that his positions were taken seriously enough to require formal rejection rather than dismissal.