Conservatives think I’m unfaithful to Jesus and the Bible. But what does walking by faith regarding Jesus and the Bible look like to me? It looks like loving my neighbor as myself.

Therefore, I will study the best scholarship we have today from a variety of sources in order to gain as much insight as I can into the world of the biblical authors, who are my neighbors across space and time.

When I learn about how they interpreted the world, I will respect them enough not to excuse or explain their perspectives away. Instead, I will experience the complex emotions I feel as a result of learning about them and realizing how disconnected my modern assumptions have been about how they viewed the world.

When I learn about how they interpreted their present reality by telling ancient stories in ancient genres, I will open my hands of their grip on inerrancy and perspicuity (the ironically named word for ‘biblical clarity’) and will accept that many of those stories never literally happened as they were written.

When I start to notice the political and patriarchal nature of their stories, I’ll have even deeper questions that cause me concern because they lead me to question the motives of the writers. And I will embrace those questions because that’s where loving my neighbor has led me to.

When I learn about how those stories were mapped onto the gospels, I will admit how this causes me to have unanswerable questions about what Jesus literally said and did as well. I will not shy away from this inevitable crisis of faith.

But I will move toward Jesus and the prophets, at the very least, as my neighbors across space and time and will begin to learn from them about being on the underside of power and about longing for liberation. I will see them, at the very least, as humans. And in their humanity, I will recognize my own.

In this communion, I will resonate with their teaching to love my neighbor as myself amidst a world of empire.

Then I will walk forward on that narrow path of love, despite the celebrations of power and retribution all around me, not as a way of earning my way to a particular afterlife for my own glory, but because loving your neighbor as yourself is true and good.

Walking by faith means walking toward your neighbor and self in love. It’s a very different walk than the walk of conservative evangelicalism because it’s one that embraces and processes reality until love brings wholeness rather than one that denies reality due to fear of exile.