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Theology

thoughts prompted by the GCN conference

I wish there was a way to communicate how busy it has been for the past few months, and how wonderful and exhausting, all together at once. Between visiting family for Thanksgiving and Christmas, business travel, buying a house, packing, moving, unpacking, painting, and all the other little odds and ends that fall along with that … it’s been a whirlwind.

Handsome and I did buy a townhome, and I am sitting in my brand-spanking new office, with my brand-spanking new bookshelves (the past few months have seen a steady buildup of book piles around my old office), and I’m thrilled to pieces. There is sunlight in my home in winter. I have windows. I’m hoping this will help with the seasonal affective disorder, but February will be the true test of that. February is really the cruelest month.

We’re mostly unpacked—technically everything is out of boxes, there’s just a pile of things on my dining table left to be hung or sold or donated. So far it’s all the tiny little things that add up that make moving exhausting. Not the rent-the-truck-have-all-your-friends-carry-boxes day, but the week and a half after of trying to find 22x20x1 HEPA filters that don’t seem to exist for your brand-spanking-new furnace.

Update on something slightly more relevant to you readers: thanks to my Patrons and the many of you who helped on top of that, I was able to attend the Gay Christian Network Conference a few weeks ago, and present on Bi the Way: What’s Next for Bisexuality in the Church with Eliel Cruz-Lopez and Sarah Moon.

The panel was spectacular, and I even got to meet and hang out with a few of you, which was the highlight of the conference for me. It was mind-blowingly weird and fun to be live-tweeted, y’all. People were quoting the things I, Eliel, and Sarah were saying, and a few folks came up at the end and said we’d started them thinking or even changed their minds on a few things. That was amazing. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from the panel, but at the end when people were coming up and hugging me and we all laughed and cried together … I felt like I was standing on holy ground.

What happened for me at the conference happens so rarely that it both feeds my soul and enrages me all at the same time. Thursday night we sang a song about God’s love for us, and listening to all those people in the room I knew that they meant—really meant—that God loved all of us, that God loved me. It’s infuriating that feeling the love of God from my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ is so rare, but it was nice to experience regardless.

Every time I feel like maybe I should just say “screw it,” and give up on being a Christian, something like going to the GCN conference happens. I’m still on the fence about a lot of things, and my faith is just as mixed-up and confused as ever, but the few moments in my life like GCN’s conference tells me that remaining a Christian is still a worthy endeavor. Maybe it won’t be that way forever, but it’s true for at least today.

Other things of note at the conference: Broderick Greer preached Thursday night. We need more theology from survivors, from the margins, as Broderick put it, because “objective” theology from the Ivory Towers of White Supremacy and Misogyny is … well, to put it bluntly, faith without works is dead, and there’s nothing more dead to me than a bunch of old straight cisgender white men talking about God as if they have the sole right to Themself. They stay locked up there and refuse to come down to where people are dying because of their so-called “objective” theologies. It’s “faith” without boots on.

One of the workshops I attended was given by a former fundamentalist, and the description in the pamphlet said it would link fundamentalism and idolatry– y’know me, I exclaimed ooo! and went. I believe he was quoting someone when he gave this line: “fundamentalists don’t believe. They know,” which he followed up with “ever heard ‘I know that I know that I know that I’m saved!’?” and I think I gasped aloud, because he was right, and it helped clarify something for me that I’ve been struggling with a ton over the past few months.

The reality that I don’t know, that, in truth, it is impossible to know whether or not god/the supernatural/a supreme being/deity exists, and in fact, believing in him/they/her anyway is probably the essence of faith … well, it’s driving me nuts. I want to know. I want to look at my world and feel reasonably confident in “yes, a supernatural being has a redemptive plan for their creation and I am a participant in that plan” or “no, there is no divine spirit guiding anything, ever, we’re all a mathematical miracle and then we die the end.” However, what’s been hitting me in the gut every time I try to think about it is that there is no way to know, and that’s sort of the whole point behind faith.

I used to think that atheists claiming that Christians accepting the existence of God on “faith” meant we were believing in something without any evidence was a load of bunk … but now I think they’re right. I don’t have any “evidence” or “proof.”

I’m not ok with that yet, but I’m getting there. I’m becoming ok that choosing to believe in the Christian Trinity is no more or less ridiculous than believing in the Greek pantheon or the ancient Mesopotamian goddesses. It’s faith. I don’t know, I believe that a Triune God exists, and that they love me.

But, moving on. Perspectives embraced by organizations like GCN (who represents both Side A and Side B positions), that it’s important for all of us to live in the tension of disagreement over important ideas, are always challenging for me. Part of that is my ISTJ-ness—I want to be right, dammit—but another part of it is that I look at platforms like Side B and think “oh hell no.” If you’re LGBT and have chosen Side B for yourself, more power to you. You do you. But the fact that the most commonly held position among straight evangelical Christians is Side B makes me light on fire a little bit.

And Allyson Robinson’s address is still making me think. Some of what she said, things like “the culture war is over,” I flat-out disagree with especially as a bisexual person who isn’t even widely accepted in the LGBT community and we’ve got a freaking letter. But other things, like encouraging us not to use mockery and derision and snippiness and trolling when interacting with bigots … steps on my toes a mite. But, it reminds me of a truth I’ve been hearing echoed in several places, from Audre Lorde to bell hooks to Brian Zahnd in Beauty Will Save the World: you cannot use the tools of Empire to remove that Empire from power.

In many ways, that was the trouble with second-wave feminism: they decided to use patriarchy’s tools to try to tear down the patriarchy. They decided to adopt the same metrics that patriarchy’s Empire used to measure success: jobs, wealth, political power, capital.

The Christian LGBT community is, in many ways, a triumph of love over hate. But it’s hard, it’s hard not to hate, especially recently. A deep, miry, black, thick and oozing place inside of me roils when I heard Trump say things like “I could shoot someone in the middle of the street and I wouldn’t lose any votes.” When I hear Falwell, Jr. say “we need to end those Muslims,” it’s hard not to choke on my hatred. I want to scream and cry and break things.

Anger is appropriate, even rage. But hatred is not. When Jesus said that hatred is like murdering someone in your heart … he was right, and it’s not ok. I’m not entirely sure how to stop, but I know that I have to be able to. I cannot use the tools and weapons of Empire.

I’m not entirely sure what that all looks like, or what all I think about everything I’ve just spilled out here, but I’m working through it one day at a time. If you’d like to be as encouraged and challenged and confused as I was for three days, maybe you can go the GCN conference next year. It’s in Pittsburg.

I don’t quite have internet at the new house yet (it’ll be here on Thursday), but I am back to a regular blogging schedule again. Thanks for all of your patience and support through the past two months.

Theology

On “Different” Churches: You’re Actually Not

A little while ago I reached out to my followers on Twitter to ask if they’d stopped attending church and why. I was flooded with replies over the next few days, and many of the answers I received were heart-shattering. In the midst of that conversation, the Twitter account for Highlands Fellowship church jumped in, inviting me and another woman to their church because they were “different,” and linking both of us to a promotional video.

I decided to give this Highlands Fellowship PR person the benefit of the doubt and watch the thing, titled “What Three Words Would You Use to Describe Highlands Fellowship?” It made me chuckle because the church Handsome and I left last year asked us to be a part of a similar video, where they asked us the exact same question. We decided to bet on which words would appear– I chose “open” and “friendly,” he went with “loving” and “non-judgmental.” We laughed so hard because lordy did we nail it.

I also ended up e-mailing back a forth a couple times with Tim– the PR guy– which I won’t go into, but our private communication really didn’t go much further than what he’d said publicly: that Highlands Fellowship was supposedly different because “most churches are tradition and religion. We are relationship with Jesus and love.”

Which … that statement continually boggles me. It’s definitely far from the first time I’ve heard this sentiment– my mother’s license plate bracket reads “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord,” one of my favorite jokes as a middle-schooler was “want a taste of religion? Lick a witch,” and then there’s that “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus” spoken word poem that went viral way back in 2012. This whole “we’re about having a relationship with Jesus, not just following a religion” thing is the exact and total opposite of “different.”

I’ve talked about my problems with this bait-and-switch approach to the “it’s not a religion it’s a relationship” concept; it’s impossible to argue that all the bedrock elements of Christianity– things like the Eucharist, baptism, or conversion– are anything except religious, and trying to ignore that is ridiculous.

But I’ve seen these attempts by (usually) non-denominational, mainstream evangelical churches to distance themselves from “all those other churchesfor the bulk of my life, and it loses me every time because they’re not different at all.

If you look at the “what we believe” section of pretty much any non-denominational church, you’re going to find an overwhelming amount of homogeneity. They’ll probably pay some sort of lipservice to “in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity” and then go on to affirm all the ways evangelicalism looks exactly like fundamentalism (inerrancy of Scripture, penal substitutionary atonement theory, eternal conscious torment model of Hell…) and many will turn out to basically be “Secret Baptists” with emphasis placed on Baptism by Immersion as the First Act of Obedience.

I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last six years with the church staff of these Different Churches™, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that what they mean by “different” is that they’re still sexist, queerphobic, and racist, they’re just going to hide it. They’ll take their bigotry, slap a coat of Nice and Non-Threatening paint on top of it, and continue on with business as usual. There’s a big show going on about how “open” and “loving” they are, but absolutely nothing will have changed. Unfortunately, all these Different Churches™ have learned is that being honest about what they believe makes people justifiably call them bigots and that makes them feel like they may not be Nice Christians™.

But, Different Church™, I’m not going to leave you hanging; if you actually want to be different, here’s my thoughts.

Be Serious about “In Non-Essentials, Liberty”

What could this look like? I think it looks like having a diverse array of speakers (people of color, women, queer people) who routinely introduce topics like the different ways of understanding Atonement theory, from christus victor to moral exemplar, or who introduce your congregation to Open Theism, or who talk about the alternatives to Inherited Sin like Pelagianism, or the extremely varied ways people see the afterlife, from the Eternal Conscious Torment model to Annihilationism.

Stop Maintaining the Oppressive Status Quo

A pertinent quote here is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” The baseline of our American culture is racist, queerphobic, ableist, and misogynistic; systematic oppression is the lifeblood of our economy and our religion has trafficked in it for centuries. Most Different Churches™ ignore this reality, skirting around it, preferring to think of these things– if, indeed, they think of them at all– as something that happened Before, but isn’t a problem now.

The problem is that our unexamined bigotry means that we spend every day reinforcing it. If you’re not actively fighting against these systems, then you’re just flowing along with the rest of the river, one drop of silent oppression among millions of others. You need to confront sexism, queerphobia, ableism, and racism wherever and whenever it turns up in your church.

Actually Bother to Try Being like Jesus

If you look at the actions Jesus took during his earthly ministry, you’ll find a pretty amazing pattern: he did things. Lots of things. Physical things. He healed people. He fed people. Yes, he taught, but the bulk of what he did was form relationships with people who weren’t like him, who didn’t agree with him, who even actively opposed his work and did something to make an actual, real, physical change in people’s lives. Take the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats seriously and go out and do something. Worship services and preaching are great, but as a ministry they look barely anything like what Jesus did. Learn to actually take care of each other– if someone in your congregation doesn’t have all their needs met, who are having trouble buying groceries or paying rent, then you are absolutely not doing your job as a church, end of story.

I get why you want to be “different.” I get why you feel the need to try to put some distance between you and the people who’ve given evangelicalism such a hateful reputation, why you want to put so much importance on “relationship” and “love.” I applaud that, I do– but you’ll never be truly different unless you honestly examine what got American evangelicalism here in the first place.

Photo by Idibri
Theology

American Christianity is broken

[content note: discussions of child sexual abuse, rape apologia]

Growing up as a Christian fundamentalist meant that I was supremely good at judging people. I could tell, usually with the briefest glance, exactly who was in and who was out. I could winnow out the chaff of liberal and “lukewarm” Christians in an instant, but I could also spot a legalistic Christian– untrimmed hair, no makeup, no jewelry– five miles off.

That skill hasn’t gone away simply because I’m a liberal now. I have to fight off the urge to circle a completely different set of wagons and refuse admittance to the people who don’t agree with me. My theology has changed, but the desire to keep a mental checklist of doctrines to compare everyone to is still there. I’m on the opposite side of the question, but the problem is that I’m still asking it, and it’s difficult to stop. I’ve been reading through Searching for Sunday again with my small group, and one of Rachel’s challenges is to have room for all Christians in your faith– even the Christians you really don’t want anything to do with.

I was getting more comfortable with the idea, slowly, but this last weekend threw a whole monkey wrench into that process.

For the first time in a long time, I am truly astounded by the depths of depravity that American Evangelical Christianity is capable of sinking to.

For years I’ve heard preachers make jokes about beating infants and breaking the arms of toddlers. I’ve heard calls for genocide. I’ve seen Christians blame natural disasters on innocent children. I’ve watched as our leaders remain silent and complicit amidst horrible abuse. I thought I’d seen it all. I believed there was a line– surely there was a line. Surely we couldn’t be capable of defending a confessed child sexual abuser. We couldn’t.

I was wrong. Turns out, yes, we can. Easily.

I didn’t go to church on Sunday because of how exhausted I was and because I knew that if I heard a whisper of someone defending Josh Duggar I’d start screaming. I still can’t quite process the idea that I could encounter someone who thinks that child sexual abuse isn’t that bad, that people like me are merely “bloodthirsty,” that we’ll do anything to make conservative Christianity “look bad.”

I am repulsed. I am absolutely stunned by the amount of stomach-churning evil pouring out of keyboards and mouths. These people– supposedly good people, supposedly faithful Christians– are defending a young man who crept into bedrooms in the middle of the night and groped and fondled little girls. If they’re not saying it was a “mistake” or a “childish indiscretion,” they’re calling it normal.

Normal. To thousands and thousands of Christians, child sexual abuse is normal. We should be ignoring this and moving on because it isn’t that big of a deal. They shrug their shoulders at something that should be making every single one of us pull back in horror. They’re saying things that should make good people vomit. Anyone making the argument that child sexual abuse is dismissible should make us grieve, but we’re not. Instead I see thousands of Christians nodding their head in agreement.

That is sick.

All weekend, I couldn’t help but think of I Corinthians 5:

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

Only now it’s worse. Now it’s a teenager attacking a five-year-old little girl, and we are just so proud of the Duggars. Look at how wholesome they are, look at how they espouse family values, look at how radiant and spiritual they are!

I read an article on Saturday that argued how it would be “wrong” for someone to criticize conservative Christianity because of this, but oh, I am. If the reaction from all these self-proclaimed “true Christians” is so utterly despicable, how am I supposed to rectify this with the notion that being “saved” means we have a relationship with Jesus, that we have the Holy Spirit indwelling us, calling us to a more holy life? How is this possible?

There is something defective in American evangelical Christianity, something rotten in the core of it. We’ve created a culture conducive to almost nothing else besides defending predators and abusers. Right now, that seems like all we are: a way for predators and abusers to shout “do over!” and escape justice.

Photo by Rodrigo Parades
Theology

how in the world did I change my mind?

If you’ve been here for any length of time you should be pretty well aware of that fact that I grew up in Christian fundamentalism. It was everything, my entire world, for the bulk of the aware-of-Jesus-and-could-understand-sermons portion of my life. And then I grew up and decided that I didn’t agree with … well, pretty much all of it. Except for the God and Jesus part, which even believing in he/she/they was a struggle for a few years. A while after I’d decided well, I think I’m still a Christian but what does that even mean I started a blog to sort it all out and here we are.

Handsome and I have had a few conversations about this, because there’s a not-insignificant part of me that wonders how is anyone still a fundamentalist? It makes no sense, and is based on a lot of claims that are … well, in retrospect, I find it more than baffling that I ever accepted those claims as true, although I give myself a little wiggle room because I was a child and the second I was exposed to real information I started investigating and bam I wasn’t a fundamentalist anymore.

And that’s when I sort of stumbled into the answer to the question “how did I ever manage to change my mind?” After all, it’s not something that everyone easily does, especially when it comes to politics and religion. I was explaining my thought process to my partner and realized that I had some things going for me that a lot of grew-up-in-fundamentalist-Christianity people don’t have, and it wasn’t actually a “BAM! YOU’RE NO LONGER A FUNDAMENTALIST!” it was more “well, hello piece of information that seems to contradict something I’ve been taught, let’s look into thi– … whoah.” It has been, as the subtitle of this blog suggests, an ongoing journey.

Thing I had going for me #1: I was not a man.

I’ve casually mentioned this in a few things that I’ve written over the past few years, and talked about it in my BBC radio interview a few weeks ago– as a woman, I faced a lot of things that a man didn’t have to face. I was forbidden from doing things I deeply loved. I was shamed and mocked and belittled for being the sort of woman I am– feminine, but rambunctious. Introverted, but outgoing and occasionally loud. Ambitious in directions that no one approved of. I was told no an awful lot.

If I had been a boy and then a man, I wouldn’t have faced any of that. My rampant curiosity, my deep interest in theological discussions, my ability to stand up in front of people and shout about things– all of that would have been directed toward turning me into a “preacher boy.” I would have been one of the most amazingly privileged people in the fundamentalist community, and everything about who I am would have been nurtured and praised. Leaving behind a system that affords you a lot of power and opportunity is a lot harder to abandon than a system that is hell-bent on squashing you.

Thing I had going for me #2: I was not straight.

I was doggone terrified during high school because I thought I might be a lesbian. I thought the boys around me were repulsive (I was right: they were all, without exception, horrific misogynists and would have been controlling husbands) and combine that with the passing fanciful thoughts I had about kissing my best friend and I was in serious trouble. I rarely ever let myself think about it and when I inevitably did, I forced all those thoughts under the bannerhead of “I AM NOT A LESBIAN WOMEN ARE JUST PRETTY THAT’S IT.”

But that whole not-being-straight thing compounded with the not-a-man thing and by the time I got to college I was more likely than my straight male peers to think that this whole fundamentalist Christianity thing was total bunk.

Thing I had going for me #3: I was curious.

This isn’t to say that fundamentalists can’t be curious. Of course they can be. But their curiosity is … restrained. It has limits. The nature of fundamentalism means that there are some answers that they’re indoctrinated to reject out of hand, without investigation. But, because I was a bisexual woman and less averse to some answers than they were, I was predisposed to ask more meaningful questions and more willing to accept answers that disagreed with what I’d been taught.

I was also lucky.

During my sophomore year I had to take an Old Testament Survey class, and one of the assignments was to write a review of this book that was dedicated to how the King James Version is the Only True Bible blah blah blah. I’d grown up in this movement. Every church I attended or even visited until I was 23 was a strict King James Only church. One of the assigned textbooks I had to read every year since fourth grade was about the topic, and it was something that I was pretty interested in. It was a sticking point between me and some of my friends, and I even got into some late-night fights with roommates at summer camp about how it’s impossible to become a Christian if you read a different version of the Bible. Yeah, I know, I was that person.

Anyway, the book they assigned us was ridiculous– and that was coming from me, a staunch KJV-Only Supporter. At the time I was writing that paper, I stumbled across God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson and … well, nothing was ever quite the same. I’d picked it up at Barnes & Noble because the back copy made it sound extremely favorable toward my position (“It is the greatest work of English prose ever written”), and in fact, Nicolson is rather enamored with the Authorized Version and its history. But he approached it not as a theologian invested in defending the Textus Receptus, and was completely uninterested in proving that the KJV is superior to all other translations, or that the Sinaiticus was worthy of the trash heap and nothing more. That perspective allowed him to tell the story of how the Authorized Version was compiled and translated and it was … eye opening, especially since some of the verifiable facts he related blatantly contradicted several fundamentalist positions concerning Scripture and its interpretation.

That single book is what started this whole deconverting-from-fundamentalism process, because once you’ve opened your world to the idea that maybe some of the things you’ve been taught are wrong, Christian fundamentalism will inevitably collapse. It can’t stand up to rigorous questioning.

But, you have to get to the place where you’re willing to question it, and in a sense I’m rather fortunate. If the circumstances of my life had been different– if I hadn’t belonged to an abusive cult, if I’d had male privilege, if I’d been straight, if any one of a number of things had been different, I might have been happy in my ignorance and unwilling to rock my own boat.

 Photo by Jason Bötter
Theology

why am I still a Christian?

Last week, I wrote about some of the reasons why I still think that attending church is an important part of my faith practice, as many struggles as I have finding a church that will be a safe place for me and that I can, in good conscience, support. It sparked some interesting conversations here and on twitter, but I wanted to address Bri’s question in particular:

Personally, I don’t wonder so much why you want to go to church as why you still want to be a Christian. I hear a lot of progressive Christians talking about a struggle they deal with in trying to remain Christian but finding it difficult. I can’t relate to that at all, because for me, I can’t imagine why any part of me would want to still be Christian. What do you get out of it? What about it appeals to you?

This is a question I ask myself somewhat regularly, and there are days when I want to simply say “fuck it” and just be done with all of the questions, when everything about struggling with my faith seems so utterly pointless. Those are my extremely cynical, borderline-nihilistic days, though, and they don’t happen all that often. Most of the time I feel somewhat comfortable still choosing to be a Christian (whatever the hell that really means, anyway), and there’s a few reasons why.

The first being that the existence of a deity makes sense to me– and that I don’t find the arguments against the existence of gods or supernatural beings personally compelling. Over the last few years I’ve come to know and care for many agnostics and atheists, and as I’ve gotten to know them I’ve come to better understand why they don’t believe in the existence of any deity. It’s an interesting place for me to be–to fully inhabit a frame of mind that accepts another person’s conclusions without trying to change their mind, even though I disagree. I do not think they have faulty reasoning, or are drawing conclusions from inaccuracies. However, I also believe that my own reasoning is thorough, and I’m working with the same set of facts they are.

I never would have thought I’d end up in a place that would be happy to accept such a tension, but I am.

I think a big part of it is that for all intents and purposes I’m functionally a Deist. I believe in a deity on a rational level, but in some ways it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot when it comes down to the brass tacks of me living my life. My ethics are based on consent, not on what a deity tells me is right or wrong, and I believe that empathy and compassion should be the driving force of human action– and I think this is where I have more in common with atheists than I do with most evangelical American Christians.

So why bother with Christianity?

The answer is actually pretty straightforward: I like the theology. I’m still a Christian because I believe that God became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us, and we Beheld his Glory. The doctrine of The Incarnation is one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve ever encountered. My God became a flesh-and-blood person and lived with us, ate with us, drank with us, loved with his, had friends with us, enjoyed sunshine and rain and the sound of wind rushing over grass and trees whispering to each other and water laughing. He smiled when he could smell bread baking. He danced when he heard music playing. He laughed at good jokes and silly antics.

The thought of that … I can’t get over it.

My second favorite part of Christian theology is the Imago Dei. I’ve written some about this idea before, but I love how fully embodied Christianity can and should be. We were all created in the image of God, and that included our physical selves, which are not intended to be cast off like chaff. Christianity teaches that we won’t become disembodied souls– I’m not going to “Ascend” like Daniel in Stargate SG-1, or evolve to the point where I exist as energy on a higher plane of existence. I’m not searching for nirvana, but waiting for a physical eternity.

My body matters. My body is important. It is me, it is mine, and I love every part of it. I love that I have senses and live in a world that is overflowing with beauty and wonder and enjoyment as much as it is filled with destruction and evil. I love that when I look into the eyes of another person I am seeing God.

As I’ve become more progressive or liberal or whatever I am, I’ve started appreciating more and more that the teachings of Jesus aren’t about me sitting by myself at my dining room table every morning with a cup of coffee and my Bible and my prayer journal having my “quiet time.” Christianity is about looking around the physical world, seeing the suffering and oppression, and doing whatever you can to end it. That’s what I believe Jesus was talking about when he talked about bringing the kingdom of God to earth, for God’s will to be done in earth as it is in heaven.

I’m in the middle of reading C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, and in talking about the Lord’s Prayer he says this:

“Thy will be done.” But a great deal of it is to be done by God’s creatures; including me. The petition, then, is not merely that I may patiently suffer God’s will but also that I may vigorously do it. I must be an agent as well as a patient. I am asking that I may be enabled to do it. In the long run, I am asking to be given “the same mind which was also in Christ.” (25-26)

I hadn’t thought about that particular line that way before, but it works for me. Jesus taught us to love and sacrifice for each other. To look around and make sure that everyone is being taken care of physically, spiritually, emotionally. We are to feed the widow and orphan. We are to liberate the oppressed.

That’s what I feel it means to be a Christian. It is both my obligation and my joy to be a part of anything that is working to make this world a better place. Christianity at its best, I believe, is about making sure no one is ever enslaved or ever goes hungry. Jesus brought healing and comfort with him everywhere he went, and that’s what I feel that Christians should be doing, too.

Photo by Fusion of Horizons
Social Issues, Theology

the straight and narrow

straight and narrow

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

If I had to guess, I think I’ve heard that verse preached on more than any other verse from the entire Bible, and since this verse only had one possible interpretation for Christian fundamentalists, I’ve heard that particular sermon a lot. This verse, in the communities I grew up in, was meant for us, because we were the only ones who had it figured out. The “straight and narrow way” equaled the fundamentalist lifestyle, being “separated from the world,” the “salt of the earth”– in short, we were of bunch of judgmental legalistic assholes.

But, we were convinced that we weren’t legalists because we wanted to follow the rules– all of which we got from the Bible, anyway!– because they were our personal convictions. And we weren’t judgmental– we were just right, and how can we help it if people were convicted by our modesty and our “upright conversation” (conversation here in the archaic sense).

We thought this verse applied to Christian fundamentalism for a few reasons: first, we thought of ourselves as a persecuted minority, so the “few there be” part was literally true (I thought at the time. I now have serious doubts about how much of a “minority” fundamentalists actually are). Second, we were extremely proud of ourselves for being one of the precious few who were truly committed to living a holy, righteous life. Any supposed “Christian” who didn’t look, talk, and act like us was on the “broad way that leads to destruction,” the sorry bunch of liberals.

Now that I’m one of those liberals, I’ve had to re-think this verse, but I’ve had to be careful. A huge part of me wants to keep the same exact idea, but instead of applying it to fundamentalists I’d claim it for the liberals; I could so easily take the “straight and narrow way” and make it mean “be a Democratic anti-capitalist yuppie,” thereby rendering people like me the “few there be who found it.”

I’ve been thinking about what “the straight and narrow” could possibly be over the last week. I’ve been driving the same four-hour route a couple times this week, and I’ve passed a church with “Straightway” in its name each time. I also just finished reading 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker (the first thing I’ve read by her, and I really liked it. Enjoyable but challenging, too), and she raises the point that if Christians were truly following some of Christ’s simplest commands, so much of what is desperately wrong with the world would disappear (for example, there are 4o Southern Baptists for every child in the American foster system).

So, what in the world is Jesus talking about in Matthew 7?

Well, it’s part of the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount, for one– a passage I’ve wrestled with more now that my viewpoint has shifted so drastically over the last few years. Judging, fasting, giving generously and sacrificially, loving your enemies, trusting God, the Golden Rule, bearing good fruit . . . it’s all there: The Teachings of Jesus: Condensed Version.

Interestingly, my ESV groups this “straight and narrow” bit with the Golden Rule:

So whatever you wish that others would do to you,
do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
Enter by the narrow gate.
For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction,
and those who enter by it are many.
For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life,
and those who find it are few.

And as I’ve been mulling this over this week, something occurred to me– maybe I should be reading this passage just a little more literally, especially because of its context. Whose “destruction” is Jesus talking about? What does “life” mean here? And I’m wondering if Jesus might be talking about our world, our communities, as a whole. If we’re not making sure the needs of those around us are met, if we’re spending all of our time pursuing wealth, if we’re petty and vindictive to each other . . . are we not destroying our communities– literally?

Could it be that what Jesus meant by saying that “few there be” who find the “straight and narrow” was simply a statement of fact about the destitution of our world? That there is far more suffering and pain and death and sickness and poverty– destruction– than there is life? Isn’t part of the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount to instruct his followers in what it looks like to be a Christian in the day-to-day? That we must be the life-bringers, the merciful, the meek, the peacemakers?

The more time I spend reading about Jesus and hearing his words for what feels like the first time, the more I think I understand about what it means to be a Christian, and it is so far removed from the ridiculous pettiness of the Christianity I was raised in, where we were obsessed with “practicing our righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them.”

Theology

the New Testament: context and story

bible

Growing up, there were a few things I understood about the Old Testament, although the ideas were inconsistently applied and various preachers and sermons could throw all of these principles out of the window on any whim.

First, I knew that there was a difference between “Ceremonial Law” and the “Moral Law,” and that Jesus had re-established the “Moral Law” in places like the Sermon on the Mount, so that’s why we still think the Ten Commandments are valid, but we like eating shrimp and bacon. Because of teachings like this, I knew that a significant portion of the Old Testament did not apply to my life, and had to be understood as a part of Israel’s history. The “Law,” the word we used for everything that wasn’t the Ten Commandments or a story or a prophecy, applied only to Jewish people and only up until the moment Jesus died.

Second, we were taught that the reason we admitted the Jewish scriptures into our Christian cannon was that the Old Testament clearly pointed to the coming of Jesus, the Messiah. It would be impossible to truly understand the mission and purpose of Jesus’ life and earthly ministry without the context of the Old Testament. The writers of the New Testament were also almost entirely Jewish, and referenced the Old Testament frequently in their work. In order to understand what they were talking about, we’d have to be able to follow their allusions and references.

Third, the Old Testament is largely devoted to stories. There’s a few books scattered throughout that have very little narrative, but most of the books are interested in conveying history and parable. We believed that God had given us these stories to illuminate his character and to show us what we are are to do– and not to do. We were to draw larger lessons and morals out of these stories, and what the lesson could be was flexible and contextually based; a single story could have multiple meanings, and that was part of the beauty of Scripture (that this is inherently a post-modern understanding of literature and story . . . yeah, no one mentioned that).

Lastly, the most important thing we had to keep in mind about the Old Testament was that it was very old and you had to be careful with how you went about trying to interpret it. Knowledge about ancient history was important, because you had to be familiar with the cultures and religious practices that the stories talked about. I was given a lot of tools to help us read the Old Testament– maps and glossaries and reference manuals and concordances and chronological histories and lexicons– and told that we had to use them in order to be “rightly dividing the word of truth.”

But it occurred to me the other day that hardly any of those things were true when it came to the New Testament. I was halfway through college before I ever used a Greek lexicon in order to look up the meaning of a word (“touch” from I Corinthians 7:1. It’s ἅπτομαι, in case you were wondering, and its root meaning has something to do with “to set on fire.” That was a crucial part of a discussion I was having).

When we read the New Testament, we were reading for things like “the plain meaning of the text,” and doing our best to take the King James English translation at face-value. We didn’t really throw around statements like “the Bible says it, that settles it,” unless we were using a passage from the New Testament– and probably just the Pauline epistles, since the Gospels got left out of a lot of conversations. In retrospect, I think that Jesus was just a little to commie/free-love for my conservative community.

It’s taken me a long time to really wrap my brain around the fact that I am just as removed from the culture, tradition, and ideologies that the writers of the New Testament were operating with as I am from the writers of the Old Testament. Heavens, the New Testament is almost two thousand years old. If we were reading anything else from the Middle East and the Roman Empire written around the same time, there would be all the glossaries and maps and lexicons all of the time. Instead, we would sit down with our translated-from-a-language-we-don’t-speak-by-people-thousands-of-years-removed-from-its-history and it didn’t phase us.

I’m not entirely sure why this happened, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that the New Testament is largely propositional statements and arguments. We get some of the richest, most meaningful stories in the entire Bible in the shape of the Gospels, but we rarely ever study them the way we go through Galatians or Revelation. Instead, those stories and parables are ignored in favor of what appear to be “plain English” statements about women being silent and forsaking not the assembling of ourselves together.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to view the Bible principally as story, and not in the sense that I think it’s fiction. In graduate school, I was in a lot of discussions about the meaning and power and beauty of “story,” and how we use narratives to shape our lives and help us understand our world. I don’t think the Bible is any exception. And, just like I would study any piece of literature, I try to understand time and place and culture and the possible experiences of the author (if we know who that is, which, shockingly (at least to me), we don’t for most of the NT books).

And, just like I would approach any other ancient text, I have to approach the New Testament with the respect that something so old deserves. I have to admit my almost complete and total ignorance regarding the environment it was written in, and admit that just because something is a propositional statement it doesn’t mean I have any clue whatsoever what it means– because I don’t really understand the motives he or she might have had for writing it that way, and who they were writing to, and what questions they were answering and what their relationship might have been like for their audience. I don’t even understand the language.

I think it would be a huge shift in American evangelical culture if they collectively admitted to this– that our understanding of the New Testament is crippled by the fact that we are so utterly removed from it.

Social Issues

singleness in evangelicalism

happy woman

There was one day in graduate school when I got home from work, went on a very long walk, then I hid in my room, cried, and ate Sam’s Choice vanilla ice cream while I watched Sense and Sensibility. I’m not exactly sure why I felt the need to do that on that day, but the feeling of just being done with singlehood got a little overwhelming. I was lonely, and I just wanted it to be over with. I wanted to be in a relationship. I wanted to be happy.

I was only twenty-four years old.

Up until that point, I’d had marriage pushed on me pretty heavily– if you’ve been a Christian in America for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced that, too. GET MARRIED is most likely the dominating message any teenager and young adult hears in evangelicalism.

A few days ago, I read an article that included quotes from two prominent Southern Baptist leaders arguing that Christian adults need to be getting married sooner, and to hell with completing your college education or being financially stable. As always, the biggest concern was oh noes if they wait too long they might have The Sex!

Reading that came after several conversations I’ve had with my small group recently. We’ve got a good mix of single, married, dating, 20s-30s adults in my small group– something that I’m very thankful for. But those conversations have reminded me how very lucky I am. I’m married. When I walk into your typical American church, as a young married woman there’s a place for me. I’m welcome at the wives’ Bible studies, there’s activities and seminars and dinners and classes and picnics and breakfasts and retreats. I fit into the structure many churches are built on– I fit very neatly, very comfortably, into the churchy social life.

Granted, I’m a liberal progressive pro-choice pro-freedom-from-religion Pelagian liturgical universalist thinks-sin-mostly-includes-stuff-like-passive-participation-in-systemic-racism, but hey. I’m white and married. The people who greet visitors when I walk into a church know exactly where to put me.

The same isn’t true for a lot of my friends who are in their late 20s, 30s, 40s. They walk into a church, and the reaction they’re likely to get is umm, well, we have a college and career class! It’s as though you turn 26 in evangelicalism and you grow two heads. No one is quite sure what to do around you. And if you’re over 30 and you’re happy and you love your life and you don’t really care about whether or not you get married?

Yeah. No one knows what to do with that.

Anyway, I don’t really have any thoughts or solutions for this. I’m about to turn 27, and I’ve been married for a year and a half. I was only single for a couple of years before I met Handsome, and while it was not fun and dating was an in-general bore, I lucked out. I don’t have to deal with any of this, although I know it’s a problem.

But, I figured that I probably have plenty of readers who are in their late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s . . . and are single. It’s something that I think should be celebrated, and I really do think that articles like the one I read a few days ago are completely wrong– devastatingly wrong, in some aspects.

So, my adult single readers– if you’ve been in a church that has been a good fit for you as a single adult, what has that experience been like? What did you like about it? What are they doing well? Or, have you been to a church that felt like you were ignored unless you were married? What ideas do you have to help churches who struggle with their “singles ministry” (gag me with a spork)? What would you really like to hear from a pulpit? What would you want to know as a visitor? Etc, etc.

Hopefully you all know that this is a place for candor and gut-level honesty. 🙂

 

Theology

the Bible and my house of cards

house of cards

I was in seventh grade when I read the book Things that are Different are Not the Same as part of my school curriculum, and that was when I was formally introduced to the “King James Only” argument, although I’d known for years that was the only version my family and my church used. Over the years, through high school and college, as I was instructed in bibliology, I was given a lot of arguments about the Bible in general, and not just the King James version.

Christian fundamentalism and its sister evangelicalism have something in common that is largely absent from other faith traditions: they tend to see the Bible almost as the ThirdFourth member of the Trinity. For example, I was taught that I should never set any other book on top of the Bible and never place it on the ground. It is holy, sacred, the Word of God. It is special– fundamentally and drastically different from every other book that has been or will ever be in existence. It was the basis of our faith, the only guaranteed Truth.

One of the main arguments for seeing the Bible this way was what I’ll call the “Harmonious Library Argument.”

According the Harmonious Library Argument, the Bible’s very existence is a miracle. It was written and compiled over thousands of years. It was written by men from different times, different cultures, different socioecnomic backgrounds, different professions. And yet, somehow, all of the books in the Bible are really just One Book– The Book. It promotes a single message, a single vision. It’s literally a miracle that so many men over so long a time span were able to write books and letters that agreed with each other so perfectly. It just isn’t possible for men to have achieved such a Harmonious Library on their own without divine intervention. That’s how we know the Bible is the Inspired, God-Breathed Word.

The Old Testament writers were writing about Jesus and the Atonement without knowing anything about him or even Roman crucifixion. Everything in the Law and the Prophets pointed toward Christ; the Temple, the sacrifices, the Patriarchs . . . They were telling stories about Jesus, foreshadowing him in Joseph and David and Adam. And those who wrote the Gospels and the epistles tell the story of Christ and explain his teachings with no discrepancies, with no theological disagreements.

That could not have happened without God.

Over the past couple of years, my views on the Bible have slowly shifted. When you start out believing that the Bible is completely flawless, with no discrepancy, contradiction, or error of any kind, and you start asking questions . . . it is a rude awakening. Suddenly the difference between “Judas hung himself” and “Judas fell headlong and burst open” don’t seem quite as simple and easily resolved. And the differences start building until either you completely change your definition of inerrancy or you throw the whole thing out, baby and bathwater.

I’ve settled into a more comfortable understanding of the Bible, one that admits to . . . well, reality. It was a book written by humans, and this is a good, good thing. God, I suppose, could have done what he has supposedly done before– he wrote the Ten Commandments and gave them to Moses already completed. He took his finger and wrote on the wall of a king’s palace. According to the Bible, there’s nothing stopping God from giving us a book already finished.

But, for whatever reason, he didn’t. And so, we have a book written by people. Blessedly fallen, so very human people. This is good because of the differences that creates. We don’t have our written religious tradition delivered to us by only one man. We have a variety of perspectives and beliefs and arguments. We have people like Peter and Paul writing letters while disagreeing with each other, sometimes so intensely it resulted in shouting matches. We have both Romans and James, Amos and Hosea. No one person got to control the destiny of Christianity or Judaism.

That’s where I still am, although my perspective is undergoing another shift.

I picked up Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman at a library book sale. I hadn’t read anything written by Ehrman before this, and the only thing I knew about him were things I’d read or heard from fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. Those things mostly included things like “hates God” and “heretic.” Since I started moving in more progressive religious circles, though, I’d heard his name mentioned with respect, and I was curious.

It was . . . challenging to read. I have a lot of questions, and most of the margins have notes. I don’t think all of the arguments he makes are effective, and I got the feeling that he was occasionally leaving something out. However, he pointed some things out that made me do a double-take and think holy hell how did I never notice that wow that’s . . . so obvious.

The differences between various books in the New Testament are a little more significant than I’d previously thought, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it now. It isn’t quite the paradigm-altering revelation I’ve experienced before, but now I have to ask some serious questions about the Gospels, especially when it comes to questions like what were the authors trying to argue? What did they believe about Jesus that they wanted other people to believe? I started asking those questions months ago, but not quite as seriously as I am now. Before, I asked those sorts of questions out of a literary curiosity. Now, I’m looking for whether or not Jesus in fact claimed to be God Himself on Earth.

My Harmonious Library understanding of the Bible– really, only a house of cards– has completely collapsed. It couldn’t bear up to an honest examination, and initially I thought I had to replace it with something else right away right now.

It took me a little while to realize that the only reason why I felt that way was that I was still stuck in the fundamentalist understanding of the Bible– as my only source of faith and practice. I simply couldn’t imagine being a Christian without a divinely-ordered Bible. Believing in the Bible as “inspired” was what made me a Christian, and this was as recently as last month. I think I’m starting to figure out that being a Christian has a lot more to do with my life and actions than it has to do with a book and what I believe about it.

Theology

can I call myself a Christian?

cross

In the communities I grew up in, it was rare for someone to refer to themselves as a “Christian.” We were Bible-believers, Jesus-followers, disciples, believers, sisters and brothers, but not Christian. That word had far too loose a meaning– after all, Catholics could call themselves “Christians.” It was a term that, to us, was wrapped up in organized religion— which we were not, because we were Independent and didn’t belong to a church hierarchy like those dirty no-good Southern Baptists.

For me, I never really chose a label to describe myself, but when pressed about my beliefs would refer to myself as Baptist, all while joking that “you don’t go to the grocery store to buy the label on a can of green beans– you just want the beans, and the label helps you find them.”

When I started moving around in larger faith communities, I ran into the term evangelical, and for a long time it puzzled me. I had no idea what it meant, aside from the generic “typical American Christian” definition I could glean from context. As I’ve done more moving and reading, I’ve found that while evangelical encompasses a huge camp of people, denominations, and movements, people who identify as “evangelical” are those who believe in a certain list of things. That list changes depending on who you’re talking to, but there’s usually somewhere in the ballpark of 5-10 things on it. In my personal experience, that list includes the following:

  • Penal substitutionary Atonement
  • Salvation by faith that occurs at a specific moment
  • Inspiration and Inerrancy of the Protestant Canonical Bible (trending toward biblical literalism)
  • Original Sin that is Inherited by and Imputed to all people in a Fallen World
  • Belief in unending conscious torment (literal Hell) to which the unsaved are damned
  • God relates to us in the masculine– God is Father, not Mother
  • Emphasis on the spiritual over the physical, the Soul over the Flesh
  • Faith and practice are matters of the individual, not the communal

It didn’t take me too much longer after I’d compiled this list to realize that I didn’t agree with much on it, and I realized that I basically went straight from being a fundamentalist Baptist to being progressive/liberal, and I didn’t really stop in Evangelical Land on the way there (although there was a four-year detour to agnostic theism). Granted, not every single last person who identifies as evangelical is going to agree with this list– but I think this list is typical of evangelicalism in America, at least. However, last week, it became glaringly obvious that to a lot of people living in Evangelical Land, another item needs to be added to this list:

  • Bigotry and Homophobia

And that was the kicker that made a lot of us throw up our hands in defeat. I’d already decided months before that I couldn’t identify as evangelical, but now I’m facing another question: can I even identify as Christian any more?

I still affirm the Nicene Creed (of 325) . . . but that’s about it. As I was writing out the list above, I tried to focus on doctrines that seemed more particular to American evangelicalism, but I kept including items that are traditional orthodox beliefs– and not just Protestant ones, but Catholic and Eastern ones, too. I still believe in God, in Jesus, in his death and Resurrection . . . and that’s really about it.

I embrace beliefs and philosophies that have been condemned by the Church Universal as heresies for centuries. I’m exploring inclusivism, open theism, Pelagianism, liberation theology– and asking questions like Is God immutable? Is Jesus Divine? How much can I trust the Canon, if I can even trust it at all? Do I believe that salvation is a grace-filled, works-based process? Is there an afterlife? Can I explore other religions as revelations of the Divine?

I’m pretty sure a lot of those questions land me in the “New Age Pagan-Heretic” camp to a lot of people. To the fundamentalists I grew up with, I’m pretty sure they’d revoke my “Christian” card in a hurry. So the question I have to ask myself is . . . do I let them? I can’t fully affirm many of the basic tenets of Christianity since my questions about them are still so huge– and is that what makes a Christian, practically? If I don’t fit well under the “big tent” that is Protestantism, Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy, is it useful to still identify as a Christian, or should I adopt another moniker, like “spiritual”? Would that be more beneficial in communicating who I am and what I believe?

Or, do I decide for myself what “Christian” means? Am I a Christian because I believe, with all my heart, in the teachings of the Christ as found in the Gospels– no matter how historically reliable they may or may not be? Am I still a Christian because, like Peter, all I feel can be summed up in you have the words of life, where else can I go? Am I a Christian because my soul longs for the beauty and mystery of the Sacraments? Because I find rest and comfort and peace in a Mother-Father God who became Immanuel?

I’m not sure. There’s a line between words have meaning because they have culturally agreed-upon definitions and I can call myself whatever the hell I want because– well just, because. There’s also another way of asking the question: do I want to be associated with the culturally-agreed upon definition when that definition involves so much hate? Or, do I reclaim “Christian” in order to demonstrate what Jesus taught– that they shall know us by our love?