Agnostic Bible Study

I met again yesterday with a few friends to read and discuss Matthew. This time we were in chapter 3.

And once again, I was amazed how easy it is for people to read and discuss Scripture, even when they may not know anything about it, or even believe it’s true. It’s not a magical book that requires arcane knowledge to decipher and understand. Just give people a decent translation (I recommend NKJV), and have them read and discuss it like any other book.

Matthew 3 talks about things like “repentance” and “baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire” and some other ideas that throw the Christian world into heated debates. I tried to stay out of the discussion as much as possible to see what they thought about such things.

These guys, consisting of atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, and Rastafarians, read the text, looked at the surrounding paragraphs to see what John was talking about, and came up with what (in my opinion) is a correct understanding of the passage. They didn’t really know what “repentance” meant, but they looked at the context and decided it was related to confession and meant turning away from sin. When they read about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire, they didn’t think about speaking in tongues or getting slain the Spirit. They didn’t think “fire” referred to hell.

All on their own, they realized that John was talking about people’s lives being renewed as they turned away from their old way of life and turned toward a new way of life following the Spirit of God. The “fire,” they thought, was a picture of this purification process.

I tell you, sometimes I wonder why I spent all that time and money going to Bible college and Seminary. If agnostics and atheists can know and understand the Bible and what it says better than many Christians I know, and even better than myself at times, who are the true “agnostics” and “atheists”? Who is it really that “doesn’t know”?