FERGUSON: Looking for God at the library

I don't think this editorial page has ever hosted a more controversial columnist than Dr. Bill Cummings. He is a former Catholic priest who has developed a decidedly liberal and humanistic view of Christianity over the years, and he has not been shy about sharing his non-literalist point of view of the Christian Bible. Needless to say, his columns have provoked strong and often negative feedback from readers, some of whom have shared that feedback here on the opinion page and others (I'm sure) have shared their displeasure in person.

Christians who hold fundamentalist beliefs about the Bible and the Christian faith see individuals like Cummings as dangerous. They believe that his take on Christianity, dangerously watered-down with secular humanism, can lead people down a path straight to hell.

I enjoy a good debate, and I've enjoyed reading the exchanges between Cummings and his adversaries. I am grateful that I live in a country where people can express opposing views on the subject of religion without anyone being killed, physically assaulted, or arrested for speaking their mind. Many people around the world do not enjoy that privilege, and it is a right we should cherish and protect.

I certainly don't have the theological training and experience that Cummings does, but my spiritual journey has included a fair amount of questioning and challenging positions held by those in authority, especially when I was younger. I specifically remember sitting in a pew in the Southern Baptist church I attended when I was 17 or 18 and becoming alarmed at some of the things that were coming out of the minister's mouth that Sunday.

He was relating his views on what happens to people who live and die without hearing the Gospels. He did so by telling a story of a missionary to some far-flung land who was having a conversation with a young woman had recently been "saved" through his preaching who was worried about the fate of her deceased Mother. Her Mother had passed away before the missionary arrived and had never had a chance to hear the "Good News."

With great sadness the missionary informed the woman, and the preacher informed us attending the service that day, that anyone who dies without accepting Christ as their savior is bound for hell, even if they'd never heard the name Jesus and therefore had never had a chance to make that decision.

At that point in my life I had already read the Bible cover to cover, and I did not believe that the fate of unsaved people who had never heard the gospel was clearly spelled out in its pages. So it seemed to me that the preacher was presenting his opinion on this difficult and emotionally-charged issue as incontrovertible fact. It's fair to say that I found the experience to be more than a little troubling.

That experience started me down a road to questioning a lot of things that I had absorbed as innate truths from the Southern Baptist culture I'd been immersed in from a young age. I started talking to people of other faiths and reading books on theology, the history of the Christian faith and comparative religion. I think at the time I believed that I could know all there was to know about God if I studied hard enough.

To make a long story short, I can't say that I succeeded in finding all the answers. Instead I found that asking tough theological questions only leads you to even tougher questions, and much smarter people than me have wrestled with these questions and often failed to come up with definitive answers.

The only thing I really concluded was that when it comes to God and what is true or not true about him, you sort of have to trust your gut. And clearly our guts don't tell us all the same things in this matter, so we have to respect each other's right to believe as we see fit.

Luckily that doesn't mean we can't all proclaim the truth according to our own perceptions. That's what makes this page so interesting.

Bill Ferguson is a resident of Warner Robins. Readers can write him at fergcolumn@hotmail.com.

This story was originally published February 11, 2016 at 9:37 PM with the headline "FERGUSON: Looking for God at the library ."