I almost gave up on Christianity. Growing up in a conservative Protestant church, I was taught a lot of ideas about God, the Bible, salvation, and what was called faith. I never questioned most of this until I got older and began to really study the Bible. I slowly discovered that much of what I had been taught did not make sense in that it was internally incon-sistent and sometimes contradictory. My childhood theology could not answer even the simplest questions about prayer or how to know what was authoritative.