The conversation with my skeptic friend continues with my response:
It sounds like you should keep wrestling with your relationship with Catholicism, considering your quandary with children. Say you do have your child baptized to appease your family, what then? Will you be there for first communion? What about confirmation? What will you tell your child when he or she asks why you are not involved in the Church? I don’t mean to suggest a level of guilt, but more to consider the implications of your actions. Infant baptism, as I understand it (because we Baptists do not practice it), is a time when the parent(s) are speaking on behalf of the child as to matters of faith. If you find it important to maintain relationships with your family, and if you do not want to be disingenuous with your children and yourself, then you should continue to struggle with these questions. I’m suggesting that you should find a way to justify a continued relationship with the Church, but that you find a place where you can be authentic on as many levels as possible. It is good to work on this now before the issue is real. I know to may parents who ignore the issue until the child is born and the choice is forced. That is just my two cents, you can do what you want with them.
Now, onto the fun questions. First, as to the nature of the church as a place where one defines oneself as who they are not. I think this is the nature of most (if not all groups). My brother used to describe High School pep rallies as moments when a group of kids would gather together and hate a different group of kids. Democrats and Republicans spend a lot of time saying why they are not like each other. When I lived in Dayton one of the ways they described themselves was by saying that at least they weren’t Springfield Ohio. I think it is a matter of perception. I could describe the Baptists by saying how we are not like others (no bishop, no Pope, no infant baptism, etc.), or I could describe the movement with positive attributes (we have local church autonomy, priesthood of believers, adult/believers baptism, etc.). Neither is wrong. I think you are picking up on what is very often the norm, describing ourselves via the negative. This is not something to be proud of, and I think a symptom of human nature. I’m sure there are a number of sociologists who have looked at this group identity theory in greater detail.
As to the Bible, you are asking a great, great question. First, I don’t think you can read anything literally (except maybe phone books, dictionaries, and legal documents). Can you imagine reading O’Neil, Joyce, Hemmingway, or Dante literally? We take it for granted that there are layers of meaning embedded in the text.
Second, we need to remember that the Bible is a collection of different genres of literature. We would not read creation stories in the same way as we would read a listing of law, or a letter from one person to a community, or stories of people struggling to be in a relationship with God, or songs. A literal reading, at best, is closed-minded, and extremely problematic. I would recommend Kathleen Boone’s book The Bible Tells Them So for a great literary criticism of literal reading (she uses Stanley Fish – whee!).
Yet there is the problem of reading the cannon as a whole. Here is my take. The Bible is a collection of stories, experiences, rules, songs, and reactions of a people trying to understand their relationship with God. These are told through different genres, by different people, and at different times. Yet, I would contend, that they are focus on the same God. Chew on that for a while.
Finally, a great book on a literary/narrative criticism of the Old Testament is Robert Alters’ The Art of Biblical Narrative. Secondly, the scriptures you referenced don’t hold much water and is a forced reading of staying within the text via a literal interpretation.
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