Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions

by Rachel Held Evans

Christians have struggled to define and apply the fundamental elements of his teachings. We haven’t spent the last two thousand years simply defending the fundamentals; we’ve spent the last two thousand years deciding on many of them.

wondered if the God of my childhood was really the kind of God I wanted to worship, and at times I wondered if he even exists at all. But rather than killing off my faith, these doubts led to a surprising rebirth. To survive in a new, volatile environment, I had to shed old convictions and grow new ones in their place. I

the vulnerability of standing, my head and heart exposed, in the truth of my own spiritual experience. I evolved, not into a better creature than those around me but into a better, more adapted me—a me who wasn’t afraid of her own ideas and doubts and intuitions, a me whose faith could survive change.

Evolution means letting go of our false fundamentals so that God can get into those shadowy places we’re not sure we want him to be. It means being okay with being wrong, okay with not having all the answers, okay with never being finished.

Most worrisome, however, was how we criticized relativists for picking and choosing truth, while our own biblical approach required some selectivity of its own. For example, I was taught that the Bible served as a guidebook for Christian dating and marriage, but no one ever suggested that my father had the right to sell me to the highest bidder or to take multiple wives, like Abraham. Homosexuality was preached against incessantly, but little was said of gluttony or greed. We decried the death of each aborted baby as a violation of the sanctity of human life but shrugged off the deaths of Iraqi children as expected collateral damage in a war against evil. We celebrated archeological finds that supported the historical claims of the Bible yet discounted massive amounts of scientific evidence in support of an old earth.

But something about sitting in a circle with those ladies doing something for somebody else makes me feel closer to God. It’s like my church.”

I thought about the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the gassing of Iraqi Kurds, and those terrible, haunting images of warehouses full of eyeglasses and shoes and prayer shawls left behind by victims of the Holocaust. Was I supposed to believe that all of these people went to hell because they weren’t Christians?

In Sunday school, they always make hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims. But if my Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, then hell will be populated not only by people like Hitler and Stalin, Hussein and Milosevic but by the people that they persecuted. If only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony at the hands of an angry God.

salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it is terrible news.

What makes a faith crisis so scary is that once you allow yourself to ask one or two questions, more inevitably follow.

If God is really good and merciful, then why did he command Joshua to kill every man, woman, and child in Jericho? Wouldn’t we call that genocide today? How can God be fair and just if he preordains our eternal destiny, if most people have no choice but to face eternal damnation? When we say that God is sovereign, that no good or evil is done outside of his will, does that mean that he presides over every rape of a child? If we are born depraved and we have no control over our sin nature, why does God punish us for it? If all truth is God’s truth, then why are we so afraid to confront the mountain of scientific evidence in support of evolution? Isn’t it a little suspicious that the only true religion is the one with which we happened to grow up?

First I doubted that he is good; then I doubted that he is real. It seemed the teleological argument in support of his existence was a lot less effective when I was unsure of his benevolence. I never realized how important hope is to belief.

I was a Christian because I was born in the United States of America in the year 1981 to Peter and Robin Held. Arminians call it free will; Calvinists call it predestination. I call it “the cosmic lottery.”

We don’t choose our worldviews; they are chosen for us.

So this is the point in the story where I turn to Jesus. Don’t worry. There’s no altar call or soft light or repetitious droning of “Just as I Am,” no sudden realization that all of my questions are answered in a single verse, every doubt cast away by a moment of illumination, just me in my sweats with a glass of wine and the familiar stories of Jesus spread before me on the kitchen table like an old family photo album that suddenly carries new meaning after a death or a divorce or a long overdue reconciliation.

“We’re going to stop by the New Testament to see what Jesus has to say about this,” he would announce before citing chapter and verse, “because Jesus embodied all of God’s desires and passions and hopes and dreams, because Jesus was God in sandals.”

If Jesus was really the most complete and comprehensive revelation of the divine, if he was indeed God in sandals, then that means he cared about what God cared about, hated what God hated, and loved what God loved. The incarnation gave God a face. It gave him literal tears, literal laughter, literal hands, literal feet, a literal heart, and a literal mind.

You can’t get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist. I’m convinced he would have flunked out of any halfway decent Christian liberal arts institution.

Jesus responded more with questions than with answers. He preferred story to exposition. Despite boasting infinite wisdom and limitless knowledge, Jesus chose not to overtly address religious pluralism, the problem of evil, hermeneutics, science, or homosexuality. He didn’t provide bullet-point answers for detractors or lengthy explanations to doubters. He didn’t make following him logical or easy. And yet I wasn’t disappointed.

Something about Jesus gave me just enough hope to decide not to give up…at least not yet.

The teachings of Jesus fly in the face of all we are told by our culture and even by the church about setting boundaries, getting even, achieving financial success, and “calling sin a sin.”

I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in my late teens or early twenties, it was as if Jesus packed his bags and moved from my heart into my head. He became an idea, a sort of theological mechanism by which salvation was attained. I described him in terms of atonement, logos, the object of my faith, and absolute truth. He was something I agreed to, not someone I followed.

But Jesus rarely framed discipleship in terms of intellectual assent to a set of propositional statements. He didn’t walk new converts down the Romans Road or ask Peter to draft a doctrinal statement before giving him the keys to the kingdom. His method of evangelism varied from person to person and generally involved a dramatic change of lifestyle rather than a simple change of mind. To Jesus, “by faith alone” did not mean “by belief alone.” To Jesus, faith was invariably linked to obedience.

And yet, in the words of Jesus, all those apologetics courses and theology books and debating techniques are just castles in the sand without a commitment to love my neighbor as myself.

a Jesus who requires more from me than intellectual assent and emotional allegiance; a Jesus who associated with sinners and infuriated the religious; a Jesus who broke the rules and refused to cast the first stone; a Jesus who gravitated toward sick people and crazy people, homeless people and hopeless people; a Jesus who preferred story to exposition and metaphor to syllogism; a Jesus who answered questions with more questions, and demands for proof with demands for faith; a Jesus who taught his followers to give without expecting anything in return, to love their enemies to the point of death, to live simply and without a lot of stuff, and to say what they mean and mean what they say; a Jesus who healed each person differently and saved each person differently; a Jesus who had no list of beliefs to check off, no doctrinal statement to sign, no surefire way to tell who was “in” and who was “out”; a Jesus who loved after being betrayed, healed after being hurt, and forgave while being nailed to a tree; a Jesus who asked his disciples to do the same. We

This radical Jesus wanted to live not only in my heart and in my head but also in my hands,

Being a Christian, it seemed, isn’t about agreeing to a certain way; it is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God. It is about being Jesus…in tennis shoes.

Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell.

Privately, I felt frightened and lost. I cried out to God night after night, begging him to “help me in my unbelief.” I pressed my face into my pillow, trying to will myself out of doubt and back to faith, only to wake up the next morning with puffy red eyes and a spiritual numbness that left me absent and discon-nected from the world. I hated going to church because silly little things like communion cups or kids’ choirs or fundraising announcements triggered paranoia about brainwashing and pyramid schemes. I couldn’t seem to read the Bible without bumping into something I didn’t like or didn’t understand. Praying grew harder and harder, and I felt myself starting to give up.

I’m really struggling with this idea that our eternal destiny is determined by luck of the draw, that most people go to hell simply for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any way you look at it, that’s unfair.”

Pond-scum theology effectively shifts the question from How could a loving God send anyone to hell? to How could an angry God allow anyone into heaven?

In the end, it was doubt that saved my faith.

Sometimes I think that John the Revelator might have been a crazy old man whose creative writing assignment for the Patmos Learning Annex accidentally made it into the Bible.

don’t know anyone, believer or skeptic, who doesn’t long for a day when God wipes every tear from every eye, when “there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain” (Rev. 21:4 NASB). Even the faintest inkling that this might be true can keep you going for one more day.

“We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ,” he wrote in Mere Christianity. “We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.”11

In fact, the more I studied, the more hopeful I became that John the Revelator wasn’t as off his rocker as he seemed. Maybe his prophecy included people from every tribe, tongue, and nation because God really loves people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, and because the rest of Scripture supports such a claim.

While the Bible teaches that people are justified by faith, it does not stipulate how much a person needs to know about God to be saved. It simply qualifies that the fruit of saving faith is good works.

We are not saved by information. We are saved by restored relationship with God, which might look a little different from person to person, culture to culture, time to time.

When we require that all people must say the same words or subscribe to the same creeds in order to experience God, we underestimate the scope and power of God’s activity in the world.

don’t know if I’ll ever find the answers to all of my questions, no matter how much time I spend in the library. All I know is that if the God of the Bible is true, he loves his creation and will do whatever it takes to restore it.

But the assurance that I can still be a Christian without believing that God hates the world and damns most of it to hell gave me just enough hope to jump to the next lily pad on my way across the swamp of doubt.

Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God’s justice, because it suggests that we have it backward—the mystery lies not in God’s unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God’s ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. Despite all that we do to alienate ourselves from God, all that we do to insult and disobey, God abundantly pardons again and again.

know that, deep down, my problem isn’t really with Christians who celebrate their blessings but with a God who seems to bless arbitrarily. What bothers me about God things is that they remind me of the cosmic lottery—that sobering dichotomy between the world’s rich and the world’s poor, between the lucky and the unlucky—which has always been a sticking point in my own fitful walk with God.

I began to suspect that perhaps the problem lies not in God’s goodness but in how we measure it.

The longer our lists of rules and regulations, the more likely it is that God himself will break one.

It is natural for most Christians to assume that had we lived in Galilee two thousand years ago, we would have dropped everything we owned and followed Jesus. But I’m not so sure that those of us with expensive Christian educations and deeply religious backgrounds would have fallen in line. I’m beginning to suspect that most of us would have joined the Pharisees and enrolled in the I Hate Jesus Club. Jesus drank wine with sexual deviants. He committed major social taboos. He spent a lot of time among contagious people, crazy people, uneducated people, and smelly people. His famous cousin wore camel hair and ate locusts and honey. Those most familiar with Scripture called his views heretical, and his own family questioned his sanity. Jesus introduced new teachings not found in the Scriptures and claimed his authority came directly from God. He asked his disciples to sell all their “blessings” and follow him, when doing so could get them excommunicated from the faith or even killed. He was too liberal, too radical, and too demanding. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that I would have followed the guy, and that really scares me sometimes.

When you grow up in church, however, these events tend to lose their impact over time, as the thrill of making your reservations for eternity wears off and you start to wonder what being a Christian means for the day-to-day. Even those of us who tried to “walk the walk” by going to discipleship groups, starting Bibles studies, and evangelizing got bored with our Christianity every now and then. Sometimes it just seemed like all we were doing was killing time.

suppose this was the moment of my conversion, although it didn’t seem to me that much had changed. I didn’t love Jesus any more than I already had loved him, and I suspected that he had always loved me too. But I felt better now that I’d crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s when it came to something as important as eternity.

Sometimes I try to imagine what my life would be like if I had grown up assuming that I could experience God only within the parameters of this present world. I wonder if I would look more closely for him in the simple, everyday things, if I would ask more questions and search harder for the answers, if I would be seized by a sense of wonder and carpe diem, if I would live more deliberately and love more recklessly.

In Surprised by Hope, he writes, “God’s kingdom in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’…Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life—God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.”12