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Theology

teaching virginity is anti-Christian

I’ve been mulling this idea over for a while now, ever since I read Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank when I was preparing for my “What is Virginity?” video (and yes: I plan to get back to the YouTube channel soon. Editing video of yourself while depressed is …. heh). When I emerged from under the mountains of research with the realization that virginity is a myth, I startled wrestling with the theological position it’s inhabited in Christianity for centuries.

While Christianity certainly did not invent the concept, we in Western culture think of virginity in very Christian terms. It has religious, moral, and mystic significance for us. The Holy Mother is enshrined in our tradition as a virgin– and not just of the “young girl” variety. Her sexual purity was encoded as catholic doctrine  in the Nicene Creed of 381. We even have fables and legends about unicorns and how only the purest women could capture them.

Today there’s a whole culture in evangelicalism– purity culture— built around the concept. Not only is virginity considered physically real in conservative Christianity, it’s “the most precious gift a woman can give her husband.” We wear rings, we sign contracts and pledge cards, and we dive into the endless wave of books like Lady in Waiting and Why True Love Waits. All the sermons, the books, the podcasts, the blogs, the Sunday school lessons tell us all one very important thing: we must save our virginity for marriage, or unspeakable horrors will descend on us. Divorce. Betrayal. Adultery. Addiction. Disease. Death.

Aside from the fact that virginity doesn’t actually exist and all the different ways that insisting on it harms women, there’s also a theological problem with teaching our young men and women that they need to remain virgins.

As far as I’m aware, most (if not all) Christian traditions, from Protestant to Catholic to Orthodox, have some articulation of sanctification. I’m not sure if we all call it the same thing, so here’s a basic definition that hopefully works across traditions:

Sanctification is God’s work in us.

I’m a universalist, so I think of Martin Luther King Jr. saying “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I believe that God is working through each of us to bring about a more loving planet where “all oppressions shall cease.” If you’re a more traditional Protestant, sanctification begins at the moment you become a Christian and ends when we receive our glorified bodies in heaven.

Virginity doesn’t fit into that anywhere. Teaching about virginity amounts to teaching against sanctification. This is because virginity is a state of existence. One is, or is not, a virgin. End of story. There is no becoming a virgin. There’s no progression from sinfulness to righteousness in virginity. You start out “clean,” and either you make it to marriage or you’re sullied. Lose your virginity, and you’re a ripped-open present, a half-eaten chocolate bar. Virginity is consumable. Disposable. A one-off.

That idea shouldn’t have a place in Christianity. Living as a Christian is a journey toward becoming more Christ-like. We struggle, like Paul, to “die daily.” There will be no moment on earth when we’ve attained moral perfection. We will fail. We will succeed. We will strive. We go to bed and tell ourselves tomorrow by the grace of God I will do better. We do our best to love more, to love generously. We try to be kind, to forgive, to be gracious.

Telling teenagers to “hold on” to their virginity flies in the face of everything else we try to teach them about honoring ourselves and honoring Christ. Nothing else about being a Christian works this way. There is no room in the fruits of the spirit for this notion that one either is or isn’t. We do. We try. We act.

Because virginity– at least, our cultural notion of it– isn’t an action but a state of existence, it shouldn’t hold a moral value for Christians.

Photo by Francesca Dioni
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

God on the sidelines

I’ve been wrestling with a few significant theological issues over the past few months, and while I’m getting closer to making up my mind on some, a lot of these ideas are the biggies– sin, Atonement, the problem of evil, the role of prayer, of Scripture … but the question I’ve been struggling the most with has been what does God do?

I’m honestly not even sure how to fully articulate this question it’s so big. I’m trying to figure out what God’s role in history has been, and what actions has he taken, does he take, will he take? Am I actually a deist? Do I believe that God has a strict non-interference policy/Prime Directive? Or is he much more active than that– determining who gets into accidents, who is cured of cancer, who finds their missing socks? Is it something more moderated than either of those? Has he stepped into linear history at specific important moments, but most of the time leaves well enough alone?

There’s so much that goes into this question, like Sovereignty vs. free will, the problem of evil, and the question that open theism poses; as I’ve been searching for an answer I’ve gone to so many different sources trying to piecemeal something together that makes consistent sense with logic, with history, with empathy, with other theological concepts.

As I’ve been looking, I’ve sort of stumbled into a metaphor that is working for me. I don’t know how well it will hold up, but for the moment I’m liking it.

God is a football coach.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with it, but I’ve never heard someone make this comparison so I’m going with it. I think it works at least somewhat well because it fits into other patterns I’ve noticed, both in the Bible and in my personal life.

A little while ago I wrote about Moses and liberation theology, and that’s actually what started this whole train of thought:

It seems that people like Moses, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and Rosa Parks, are necessary, that it takes regular, every day, run-of-the-mill humans to stand up and say “No More.” I’m not sure what it says about God, but I like what it says about people, about you and me.

Then, a few weeks ago, during small group we talked about C.S. Lewis’ concept in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, that when Jesus taught his disciples to pray he was encouraging them to take action, that they weren’t supposed to just say the words “let thy will be done,” but to be the ones responsible for doing it. That was the night I came up with this metaphor– I sort of stumbled into it, actually, the words falling out of my mouth without me fully realizing everything I meant.

I firmly believe that the very foundation of being a Christian is love one another, and I believe that it is completely and totally impossible to love while passively existing in (or actively reenforcing) a white-supremacist bigoted patriarchal society that is almost totally ruled by greed for money and power. My partner is reading Exclusion and Embrace (I’m reading it next), and every once in a while he reads something out loud that he finds particularly insightful:

Even more than just encouraging inaction, neutrality is positively harmful. For one, it gives tacit support to the stronger party, independently of whether that party is right or wrong. Second, neutrality shields the perpetrators and frees their hands precisely by the failure to name them as perpetrators. (219)

As a Christian, it is my sacred duty to be a part of what Jesus came here to do: to liberate the oppressed, to set the captive free. If I do not combat the way I’ve internalized oppressive narratives, then I am failing to do that. When I look at not just Jesus but the whole Bible, what I consistently see is a deity who sides with the oppressed, the victim, the outcast. She cares for the powerless, for those who have been abused.

I feel that the God who interacted with Israel, the deity who became flesh in Jesus, the Spirit who guides all of us (and since I’m a universalist, I do mean all) has shown us how important it is not to just swing our arms wide open to everyone but to critically be aware of our culture and how it actively destroys people. I feel that was Jesus’ primary goal while he was with us– that’s why he spent so much time saying things like “You have heard it said (referencing The Bible, for those conservative Christians who seemed to have missed that), but I say to you ____.” And whatever follows that opener usually has something to do with non-violence, or love, or subverting power structures.

In a way, Jesus and God and the Spirit have been our coach, and now we’re the running backs and the tight ends and the centers. They have taught us how to love, shown us that our primary concern should be the widow and the orphan and the victim, and now they sent us out onto the field to be the ones to do it.

One of the better-known arguments surrounding the problem of evil is that God can’t override our free will, that to take our free will away from us would be more monstrous than any of the world’s darkness– and I still agree with that, at least partly. This “football coach” metaphor makes that argument work for me, though, because it takes the idea God gave us free will and puts boots on it.

God is encouraging us from the sidelines, reminding us of who we are, what our responsibilities are, and what our capabilities are. But they can’t come out onto the field and do it for us.

I haven’t fully worked all of this out– surprisingly, this has some pretty significant ramifications for what I could believe about eschatology (do I believe in any “Second Coming”? Do I believe in a physical and massive redemption/re-creation of the universe at some point in the future?) and it definitely leans toward the Moral Influence theory of Atonement, but, for now, this is an idea that’s brought me some comfort.

Photo by Chris Brooks
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.

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?

 

 

 

Feminism, Theology

marriage as a blood covenant

blood covenant

Last week I heard something I didn’t expect to hear outside of a fundamentalist church, and it shook me up a little. Someone was talking about the importance of marriage, and they launched into an explanation of how marriage is a blood covenant. I’d heard passing references to this idea in the last year, but since I’d grown up in a church that never actually talked about sex, the whole “penis goes into vagina, vagina bleeds = blood covenant” idea was not one I was familiar with. I assumed that it was just something this one person had decided made sense and wasn’t that wide-spread.

But, last night when I was talking with my small group about the idea, it seemed like everyone in the room was way more familiar with it than I was– several had grown up hearing that “marriage is a blood covenant” and it didn’t stand out to some of them as unusual. How parents are supposed to keep the marriage-bed sheet as proof of their daughter’s virginity was cited as at least one example.

That disturbed me.

So, I’ve been doing some research today, and I’d like to talk about this somewhat common misconception that marriage is a blood covenant. When you google “blood covenant” all the results you’re going to get are many, many pages of Christians talking about it, which honestly wasn’t very helpful. It took me a little bit of digging until I finally grew a brain and consulted Judaic resources. That finally gave me a basic understanding of historical blood covenants:

The old, primitive way of concluding a covenant, (בְּרִית “to cut a covenant”) was for the covenanters to cut into each other’s arm and suck the blood; the mixing of the blood rendering them “brothers of the covenant” . . . A rite expressive of the same idea is the cutting of a sacrificial animal into two parts, between which the contracting parties pass, showing thereby that they are bound to each other.

There are only a few examples of blood covenants in the Bible that look like this– it seems that a lot of what modern-day Christians refer to as “blood covenants” are not really blood covenants at all. One of the few examples is interesting because of how it diverges from this: in Genesis 15, when God makes his first covenant, Abram sees it as a torch passing between the sacrificed animals, but Abram doesn’t follow. The significance of this covenant is that by passing through it alone, God declared that he will keep this covenant regardless of whether or not Abram did. The imagery of this is repeated, again, in the Crucifixion. Jesus did not require our blood to seal the covenant– just his.

There are, of course, other kinds of covenants, not just blood covenants, and I think one can argue that marriage is a type of covenant. It can be difficult to understand covenant as something different from a legal contract, especially since Christianity has been deeply influenced by a lawyer-like interpretation of the Bible for the last few centuries– but covenants are essentially about trust, while contracts are essentially about distrust.

The problem I have with talking about marriage as a blood covenant isn’t that I think it’s bad to think of marriage as a covenant– I think it’s horrible to think of marriage as a blood covenant for the very simple reason that it accepts violence against women.

I’ve written about this before, but the culturally accepted idea that female virgins bleed is just flat wrong. People with vaginas (who are not always women/female, to be clear) do not have to bleed the first time they have sex, and perpetuating this idea that bleeding is normal– in fact, it is necessary for a blood covenant— is wrong and harmful. It’s a teaching that has, at its core, the notion that female pain and suffering is completely normal, even unavoidable.  It keeps alive the incredibly damaging notion that men do not have to care about a woman’s pain, in fact, they must cause her pain, at least occasionally.

People with vaginas who have sex only bleed when their partner has done violence to them. If your partner is hurting, then you hurt them and you need to slow down, listen to them, and care about their body. Most likely this harm is done in complete innocence, in ignorance, but it is disgusting when our churches, our pastors, our Christian teachers, push pain as good, even holy, because it is a “blood covenant.”

Instead, when we talk about sex, what we should be encouraging is a mutual understanding of our bodies, of how to bring and give and share pleasure, and most of all, to never ever believe that it is acceptable for one of us to experience pain.

Theology

why I'm not observing Lent

Ash-Wednesday

I worked as a teller for a short while after I graduated from PCC, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I had moved away from the rural Southern town I’d grown up in and was living in an unfamiliar area where most of the people I met– if they were religious– usually identified as Catholic. It was strange for me, since I was used to everyone being Baptist even if they weren’t fundamentalists.

My first Ash Wednesday there was especially confusing. I was working the drive-through that day and after the twenty-fifth person came through with a gray smudge on their forehead, I finally asked someone what it was.

She stared at me, her mouth open. “I thought you said you were a Christian?”

I had no idea what that had to do with foreheads and gray smudges. I frowned. “I am.”

She laughed. “It’s Ash Wednesday, Sam.”

More blank staring, this time from my end. “What’s ‘Ash Wednesday’?”

She just shook her head and walked back to her office, laughing. When I got home from work that day and finally googled it, I realized that it was the first day of Lent. The interesting thing to me was that I’d been observing Lent for five years at that point and had somehow missed that Lent began on Ash Wednesday. I also found it amusing that Mardi Gras was also connected to Lent, which I had not known.

I started observing Lent my first year at PCC with a group of friends– together we made a pact to give up soda. I drank nothing but water those forty days, and when I noticed that I felt better without the stuff I gave it up almost totally– now I drink nothing but root beer and ginger ale on rare occasions. For the four and a half years I spent in college, I drank nothing but water.

The next year it was sugar– and that was much harder. No deserts, no sweeteners, no sugary cereals . . . after the first week, we agreed that we wouldn’t keep it through Sunday just so that we could have one gigantic slice of chocolate-chip-encrusted cake to get us through the week.

After that it was caffeine, then carbs, and that year I was working at the bank it was coffee. I had started thinking of Lent as my once-a-year diet, or purge, or I guess the popular term now would be “cleanse.” But that year, I finally looked into what Lent actually was and realized that what I had been doing was . . . just a little ridiculous. I didn’t understand the deep meaning, the tradition, the calling of Lent.

The only context I had to observe Lent was inside my fundamentalist box, and the way I was observing this ancient practice clicked right in alongside the self-flagellation of fundamentalism. I observed Lent because I believed that aestheticism was the point of Lent and Christianity. I didn’t yet love the Incarnation and the imago dei, I hadn’t yet learned to appreciate an embodied faith and the gift of life and beauty.

The next year for Lent, with my perspective starting the monumental shift that continues through today, and after several conversations with people from rich Protestant and Catholic traditions, I decided to give up facebook. I wanted to spend the scattered minutes throughout my day experiencing those moments instead of numbing or distracting  myself with a news feed. The next year I gave up the internet totally. Last year, it was reading the comment section.

But this year . . . this year I’m not observing Lent.

Lent has become an important part of my faith practice, especially as I have grown to appreciate its history and what its meant to me over the years. I’ve come to look forward to these forty days. I’ll probably be back to observing Lent next year, and my goal is to follow a more traditional path, especially since I’m living in a Catholic area again. I thought about it this year, but, ultimately I realized that I need to examine why. There are still too many fundamentalist strings tied to me, too many fundamentalist shadows in my life I need to shine a light on, too many times when crawling back inside a fundamentalist cage is my automatic response.

I need to not observe Lent this year, partly just to prove that I can. The guilt is still to close, the shame still too heavy. Fear has been pushed deep into my soul– fear of failing, fear of not being enough. Not holy enough. Not spiritual enough. Not righteous enough. Not godly enough.

Lent has become a way for me to affirm that I am “enough.” Lent has become a way for me to avoid guilt, and shame, and fear. Lent has become a litmus test– If I can just get to the end of these forty days and feel that I’ve “accomplished” being a Christian in some way, then maybe some of the fear in my soul will dissipate.

That is how the fundamentalist inside of me uses Lent, and I want to banish that part of me. I want to wake up on Easter morning and simply be enough for no other reason than I am. I don’t need to “give something up,” to push myself into making a commitment to self-sacrifice just to feel like I’m worthy of being a Christian. I don’t have to prove anything– not to myself, not to God.

Theology

creeds and redes

nicea

Interestingly, several people have asked me in the past couple of weeks whether or not I still agree with the Nicene Creed. If you’re not familiar with the history of the Nicene Creed, here’s a crash course:

In 325 AD, one of the major discussions at the Council of Nicea (council = gathering of all significant bishops) was whether or not Jesus was actually a human or if he only seemed to be human (an idea known as docetism, and a logical result of Christian gnosticism). The Nicene Creed, which is similar in substance to the Apostle’s Creed and seems to be the final articulation of the creed found in I Corinthians 15:1-11, goes a bit like this:

We believe in one God, the Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God the only begotten of the Father; that is, of the essence of the Father, Light of Light, very God of very God– begotten, not made, being of one substance of the Father
By whom all things were made
Who for us, and for our salvation, came down as incarnate and was made human
He suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven
From thence shall he come to judge the quick and the dead
And in the Holy Ghost.

The Nicene Creed is historically important because it establishes that one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is the Incarnation. You might have heard me rave about the Incarnation before– to me, it is probably one of the most beautiful and significant doctrines of my religion. Immanuel, “God with Us,” means that God became flesh and dwelt among us, and I think that’s extraordinary. It tells me that my humanity, my physicality, my existence, my life– it matters. Considering I grew up in a world where everything about my flesh is wholly corrupt and evil and must be literally beaten into submission, the idea that God became flesh never fails to comfort me.

So, short answer: yes. I agree with the Nicene Creed. It’s considered one of the most essential definitions of Christianity, and I like that it is incredibly unifying. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant– we all can come to the Nicene Creed and say here– here is where we are the same.

But . . . something sort of fell out of my mouth this morning while my partner and I were driving to church. Ever have those moments, where something you say seems like it’s been something germinating for a long time and all of sudden pops out as this fully-formed thought and it surprises you?

I was talking about how there are times when I desperately want to distance myself from the word Christian. I can’t get away, intellectually and emotionally, from my belief in a deity, and for a bunch of reasons I think that deity looks like Jesus. I want to follow Jesus– I believe that what he taught was beautiful and is worth trying to live out.

Sometimes, though, I look at religions like Buddhism and Wicca, and I think wow, there are some incredible ideas in these religions. For example, one of the most absolutely fundamental ideas of Wiccan practice is the Rede: An it harm none do what ye will, frequently shortened to “do no harm.” That’s the north star of Wicca, its central teaching: do no harm.

However, it seems to me that if you ask a Christian “what does it mean to be a Christian?” the answer you’re going to get is a list of varying beliefs, usually organized around something like the Nicene Creed.

Wouldn’t it be a spectacular if, instead, the answer to that question was they shall know you by how you love one another? Because, after all, what Jesus taught was love. Love each other. Love your enemy. Love your neighbor. Love the least of these.

What if the most absolute essential statement anyone could make about Christianity was that we love people? That how we loved was the only thing we really cared about or ever evaluated, and we stopped asking about how “theologically sound” someone is, or how “biblically based”? What if love were our North Star, instead of do you affirm the deity of Christ and his virgin birth?