If one rejects the inspiration of scripture, but still wants to claim to be a Christian, now you’re left with an epistemological dilemma. How can you possibly know what parts of the Bible are inspired and to be believed and obeyed, and which parts can be dismissed? Every solution will be to place yourself or other people over and in the place of God. 

Imagine a young man meets a woman on a dating website. He sees her picture and is infatuated, but upon meeting her things don’t go well. She says she doesn’t like baseball, but the man does, so he insists that she does too. She says she prefers nights in, but the man is convinced that she actually wants to go bowling, his favorite hobby. In short, the man won’t listen to her, but is emphatic that he loves her. What’s wrong with this scenario? There are a couple problems here and one is that the man isn’t in love with who the woman really is. He’s in love with a figment of his imagination. He’s picturing her, but with all of his own tastes projected onto her. He doesn’t want her; he wants a woman made in his own image which means that he’s actually just in love with himself.

In a relationship, this is not only unloving (as the man refuses to listen to the woman and rejects who she really is), but delusional. In the Bible when someone does this with God it’s called idolatry, but idolatry is not something that happened only in a bygone era. You can easily do this today by rejecting the parts of the Bible that you don’t like, or believing God is one way simply because you want him to be so. If God does things, speaks, and commands what you don’t like, then this can be negated by claiming those parts of the Bible aren’t inspired or ignoring them altogether. How many people today claim to be Christians, yet reject what the Bible says about sexuality, marriage, and headship with the assertion, “That was just Paul.” Or how many refuse to acknowledge that God actually commanded Israel to destroy all the people living in Canaan, and was just in his command, instead believing that Israel chose to commit genocide and later put words into God’s mouth in scripture to justify their actions?

If you do this with these, or any other parts of scripture that don’t sit well with modern readers, what you end up with is a god who only acts in the ways you want him to act, who speaks in the ways you want him to speak, and whose ethical commands match your own ethics. Hard parts of scripture never have to be wrestled with in a way that makes you study more or challenge your preconceived notions. Instead, chunks of scripture can easily be dismissed as uninspired. Your “faith” never calls you to believe differently, or even to seriously repent of lifestyle choices, because you already have a god who now approves of everything you believe and do.

Yet what you’ve done is to re-make God in your own image. You aren’t in love with God as he has declared himself to be, but like the delusional and unloving man, you love only a figment of your imagination, one that looks just like you. This is why what you believe cannot seriously be called faith. Faith requires you to look to and trust in someone other than yourself. In short, you’re an idolator. Church father Augustine stated it well when he said, “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you don’t, it’s not the gospel you believe in but yourself.”

It should be noted that this is not a modern phenomenon. This was and remains the heart of idolatry, which is as old as sin. People didn’t want God for who he really is. They may have wanted some of his benefits (material blessings, eternal salvation), but they didn’t want a God who would actually challenge them or expect them to live one way and not another. They wanted to be their own gods who decided for themselves how to live. We can read examples in the Old Testament people of God, such as in the book of Jeremiah. In Jeremiah’s day the people liked to cry “The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.” They thought that because they alone, out of all the nations on the Earth, had the LORD’s temple that judgment would never befall them. They were right in one respect. God hadn’t covenanted with other nations. They alone knew God and the right way of worship. They alone had God’s word and promises. They had the covenant signs. They were uniquely blessed in ways that no other nation was.

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