Throwing out the baby with the bathwater

As a one-time high school teacher who knew many students raised in Christian homes, possessed of the normal adolescent hyper-awareness of adult inconsistency, and in the process of deciding whether the faith of their parents should become their own, this seems right:

"...when it is discovered, as it frequently is when those imposed upon "come of age," that God does not require what his representatives said he did, it casts heavy doubt upon the evangelical verities they have also taught. If the faithful have in fact been lied to about one thing, how can they be confident that the whole mass of Christian teaching received from their teachers wasn't a fabrication of clericalism and prudential mendacity? If - to extract some blunt examples - it is discovered that God does not actually require (that is, the Bible does not in fact teach) teetotalism, or forbid dancing, or may not regard you with diminished satisfaction if you eat meat on Friday, then why should we think he is as firmly interested in modesty or temperance or the necessity of believing in Christ's resurrection? Or that he exists? When we kick over the traces that deserve the kicking, we find that others attached to them also tremble.

The book I was reading tells of a pastor who, upon being forced by his conscience to confront and admit to himself a number of the errors of his sect, thought himself not only obliged to leave its pastorate - which would have been honest and perhaps inevitable - but had his faith shaken to the core by the discovery.

Source: Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Also read: Paul Manuel: Assessing the strength of your convictions