Category Archives: Church Culture

July 26, 2010 · 3:29 pm

The Wrong Definition of Having Faith

I’ve been wanting to comment on a certain strain of American evangelical culture for a while now and haven’t been sure how to get into it, but Mike Cope broached the topic, so I’ll take this as my opportunity to jump in.  He’s commenting on Jason Boyett’s new book O Me of Little Faith: True Confessions of a Spiritual Weakling, and I’ll re-quote part of the book Mike quoted:

“When you live and work within the American Christian subculture — especially the less liturgical, more conservative, evangelical, megachurch sub-subculture — you hear a lot of people talking casually about the intimacy of their relationship with God. The way they tell it, they get frequent, distinct impressions from the Holy Spirit. They get personal promptings from Jesus. They get very specific answers to prayer and detailed directions about even the most trivial aspects of their lives.

“I’ve heard someone tell a friend, ‘I woke up in the middle of the night and thought of you, and it was definitely the Holy Spirit wanting me to pray for you right then and there.’ I’ve overheard a middle-aged woman say, ‘It was totally a God thing that my flight got cancelled, because I got to share my faith with the lady next to me. Talk about a divine appointment!’

“I’ve heard musicians credit God with having written their song lyrics. I’ve heard businessmen give God credit for finally coming through with the promotions for which they’d been praying. I know a few people who don’t hesitate to reveal that God told them to quit their jobs and go into full-time ministry.

“One Sunday I overheard someone give this breathless recap of a worship service: ‘The Lord totally showed up in church this morning. When we got to that key change in “Breathe,” you just knew God was moving.’

“You’ve heard this kind of talk too, maybe coming out of your own mouth. Please understand me: I’m not telling you — or them — to stop. I’m pretty sure most of those kinds of statements express a sincere and real faith in a personal God who is intimately involved in our lives. That people talk this way is not what bothers me.

Unlike Boyett, I am asking them to stop, and I’m not at all sure those statements reflect a sincere and real faith in a personal God who is intimately involved in our lives.  I think it reflects a sincere and artificial faith that mistakes predictable responses to certain stimuli as the work of God.  Far from being more spiritual, I think that people who are always going on about the latest thing that God has said to them are less spiritual.  One of the keys to authentic life with Yahweh is not taking the Lord’s name in vain, which I take to mean, in part, not acting as though your own thoughts and purposes necessarily have divine approval.  If it’s wrong to falsely proclaim that God has damned something, surely it’s also wrong to falsely proclaim that he has blessed something.  I’m not going to be as generous about this stuff as Boyett is.  We seriously need to knock this stuff off, and we definitely need to stop sending the signal that that real Christians hear from God on a regular basis.

Why does it bother me so much?

1)  It’s unbiblical.

Search the scriptures are closely as you can.  You aren’t going to find any instances of God leading someone through a coincidence, or a gut feeling or an intuition. That never happens. No one ever tries to discern God’s will for their lives. His general will is communicated through the scriptures, and if he has a specific mission for someone, he sends a message that can’t be missed–an audible voice, an angelic visit, something like that. As soon as someone says “God laid a message on my heart” they have departed from all Biblical precedent. You can, of course, argue that not every Christian practice needs to have Biblical precedent, and for some matters, I would agree. But on the central question of “how does God communicate with people?” I’d sure like to see a verse or two that supports our practices.

2) It “defines divinity down.”

Another problem with hearing from God every afternoon is that when your way of hearing from the Lord is completely indistinguishable from the routine products of your own imagination, the experience of God has became so meager and small that the glory of God is inevitably diminished. Frankly, I’d much rather worship a God who communicates clearly through overwhelming personal encounters, but rarely, than a God who works in my life exactly the same way coincidence and personal insights work for atheists.

We’ve gotten used to speaking about the presence of God and the voice of God in casual ways that don’t knock us down to our knees (and that certainly doesn’t line up with the biblical testimony). I’ve often thought about that when I’m in a worship service where they sing “Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord”

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord
Open the eyes of my heart
I want to see You
I want to see You

To see You high and lifted up
Shinin’ in the light of Your glory
Pour out Your power and love
As we sing holy, holy, holy

The sounds great to sing, but do we realize what we are asking for? When someone sees God high and lifted up, it isn’t a fun or casual experience, and you don’t leave feeling good about yourself. Just ask Isaiah.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”

One of my big pet peeves is when some human person cleverly designs a worship experience for maximum emotional impact through dramatic lighting and moving song selections, and then, when it is over says something like “God really showed up and showed off tonight!” This bothers me because a) nothing happened here that doesn’t happen in secular concerts or movies every day and b) if God had decided to show up and show off, you wouldn’t be telling me about it over dessert at Chili’s. You’d still be in the sanctuary shaking with fright, and we’d be on our way there to bring you a clean pair of pants.

3) It’s a pagan worldview in Christian language.

In Deuteronomy 30, when Moses has finished passing on to Israel the commandments that God gave him (with an audible voice and written tablets, not a warm feeling in his heart), Moses says:

The LORD will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your fathers, if you obey the LORD your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

In other words–I’ve just laid out God’s will for you. It’s really clear, and now you all know it, and there’s no need to worry about how you are going to know what he wants. He’s told you up front.

This is really, really great news, because it means they don’t have to do what the pagans do, which is read tea leaves and animal entrails to try to figure out what the gods want, or search for signs in the heavens, or–worst of all–go to some witch or necromancer to see if the souls of the departed have any insights. One of the incredible plusses of the biblical tradition is that everything we need is set down in print.

Have you ever noticed that when Jesus encounters someone who isn’t hip to God’s agenda, he never says “you need to spend more time seeking God’s will for your life”? Instead he points them to the Bible. “Have you not read….?” This is one area where the Judeo-Christian tradition is in sharp contrast to the surrounding culture of the ancient world. Having written scriptures is better than having to search for signs of the divine will, and it’s a move backward (and one that mystifies me) to leave the assurance of a scriptural grounding for the uncertainties of analyzing your gut feelings.

I once heard someone say “Faith isn’t believing that God will do whatever you want him to do. Faith is believing that God will do what he has already promised to do.” He never promised to pick out your college, or your spouse, or your job, and whisper the answer to you. He didn’t promise “divine appointments” or messages laid on your heart. No matter how much we might want those things or how great we think they are, it doesn’t seem to be the way that God prefers to operate. And it causes all manner of practical problems. But more on that later, maybe.

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July 3, 2010 · 2:50 pm

On Conscientiously Refusing to Praise Humans

It’s been a busy, busy month–thus, the lack of blogging.  My wife and I are still in our contest to see who can get a job first, with no winner yet.  She’s had a few interviews, the most recent of which may still result in an offer.  I have an interview next week for a community college adjunct faculty position, which wouldn’t pay much–but it doesn’t take much money to improve on zero.  I am so looking forward to telling my grandkids stories from the great recession.

Our daughter turns four today.  Due to our moves and transitions, she is currently without friends, so when we noticed that one of the Methodist churches in town was about to start a VBS, we signed her up, and then worshiped there the Sunday before VBS began to get a feel for the congregation.

I’m inclined to have warm thoughts toward Methodism in general, because of my affection for the work of Stanley Hauerwas, William Willimon and Richard Hays, who have significantly impacted my own thinking.  (I understand that Hauerwas is attending an Episcopal Church now, but his roots are Methodist.)  I explored the idea of becoming a Methodist pastor once, but I can’t get enthusiastic about infant baptism, although I see the argument for it.  I wouldn’t say that I’m against it, or that I think it’s invalid, but I was raised in a tradition that immersed professing believers, and that symbolic act still resonates powerfully with me in a way that pedobaptism just can’t match.  I suppose if I had been raised Methodist, my feelings would be just the opposite, but I wasn’t, and you have to go to war with the memories you have, not the ones you wish you had.   I’m also not keen on being told which church to go to and when–although I haven’t always done a dandy job of sussing out by myself which congregations would be a good match, so I might be able to get over that one.

At any rate, we attended this Methodist church and found it, overall, delightful.  Very welcoming, very enthusiastic.  It was an unusual Sunday for them, because they were wrapping up a mission trip (to the heathens of neighboring Oklahoma) and kicking off their VBS, so the whole service was given over to testimonies, appreciations and explanations.  As a visitor, I rather appreciated the chance to get some insights into the life of the congregation that I wouldn’t get on most Sundays.

One thing that stood out to me was the two or three times that a specific instance of laudable work was mentioned, and the speaker would always offer the caveat that, “Of course, I’m not saying this to give glory to Jim (or Carol, or Brandon)–we’re giving all the glory to God.”

I’ve heard that sort of thing in churches of various stripes.  I’m sure it’s not limited to Methodism–although it was so pronounced that I wondered if the refusal to honor humans is particularly strong in Methodist culture.  I admit  that always strikes me the wrong way.  I get it that we’re shunning pridefulness and encouraging thanking God in all things, but surely there is some room to acknowledge Jim, Carol and Brandon made some exemplary choices through their own free will that can be praised and emulated.  Scripture doesn’t seem to shy away from doing that.  Just look through Romans 16, for example, and watch Paul praise one person after another, without ever stopping to snatch the plaudits away from them and redirect them toward God alone.

Humans need exemplars, and we need to be told when we’ve done something well.  Unabashed praise of outstanding work is a blessing both to the worker and to the witnesses.  It gives us something to aim for.  A friend of mine says “You get what you praise.”  As church leaders recognize and honor certain kinds of activity, the congregation moves further in that direction.  I’m a little concerned that perpetually saying, “Of course, it’s not Jim that we’re honoring, it’s God” will leave Jim feeling a bit deflated, wishing that his community could at least notice that he did some really hard work that he didn’t have to do, and that he chose it.  Others are concerned not to diminish the agency of God, but Jim is also a moral agent, and I don’t see the value in pretending otherwise.  If Jim gets no credit for his work, and it was God alone that made him work hard, then it was God alone that made Skyler lazy, and God alone that decided that Suzy would feign an illness and run off to the liquor store during the Thursday evening devotional.  If there’s really only one moral agent in the universe, then human awards and punishments are an exercise in futility–unless the only point is to try to discern the mind of God by noticing which particular meat puppet he used for good deeds this week and which he used for criminal ones.  That doesn’t seem like a fun game to me.

Yeah, the person who stood and praised God for the things that Jim did probably didn’t mean it that way.  But words are powerful, and words of praise especially so.  Let’s go ahead and clap for Jim.  If he becomes prideful, then let’s pull him aside and rebuke him.  Either way, at least we are appreciating that he, too, makes choices.

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June 4, 2010 · 1:58 am

Shifting Over Time

There’s been a lot going on the past few weeks.  We packed up our house and then I drove from North Carolina to Texas in a 26 foot U-Haul moving van–just me with my almost-four-year-old daughter and 14-month old son, traveling over 1300 miles in 2 1/2 days.  Packing up everything you own is a good spiritual exercise.  It makes you realize just how much stuff you’ve accumulated.  For me, it’s somewhat depressing, as I like to think of myself as freer from materialism than the average American–and I probably am, but “less materialistic than the average American” is kind of like being “less murderous than Ted Bundy.”  You can meet that standard and still leave a trail of bodies in your wake.

So, blogging has been set aside while we moved into our temporary headquarters, AKA job search central.  I know I want to settle back in Texas, nearer old friends and family, but exactly where depends on where my wife or I find a job and perhaps what jobs are close to a school where I can train for a post-ministry life.

While I’m doing all this soul-searching and stock-taking, I’ve been thinking about the major ways that my thinking has shifted over the years.  I probably want to think and write a little more about each of them over time, and it’s already late tonight, so think of this as kind of a place-holder for content that may or may not follow later.  Even this is subject to revision.  But I think my major shifts have been:

1. From a static Bible-based faith that sought to preserve and maintain the first-century church to a stance that sees the Bible as one part of a living, breathing tradition that grows and changes as it engages God freshly in each era.  Part of this shift has been my acknowledgment that the Bible itself is far from monolithic, and itself models wrestling with existing traditions and adapting practices to new situations.

2. From an emphasis on orthodoxy (believing the right things) to orthopraxy (doing the right things.) Both are necessary, but I feel like I grew up in a church culture where doctrinal correctness and “chapter and verse” Bible knowledge were expected, but whether anyone ever actually fed the hungry or clothed the naked was completely off the radar.  Frankly, a lot of the minutiae we studied was either pointless or actively harmful, and kept us from going out into the world and being Jesus for the dying.

3.  From looking for the work of God in the congregation alone to seeking Him at work in the world.  I think that 12 or 15 years ago I pretty much thought that anything I should do for God would happen within the context of the congregation, with the possible  exception of personal evangelism, but even then, the point was to get some, ahem, “unchurched” person to join my church.  But I don’t want to “church” people–I could stand a little less “churching” myself.  I think the hardest part, for me, about trying to be a deeply devoted Jesus-follower and a minister in your standard American religious congregation is that Jesus has this tendency of calling religious leaders on the carpet for burdening people with the legalism, for caring more for like-minded insiders than struggling outsiders, and for missing the radical love and grace of God even though they had memorized so many verses.  I kept seeing myself and my tradition in the people that Christ excoriated.  I spent a lot of time asking myself where Jesus would be if he were incarnated in the 21st century, and no matter how I ran the numbers “in ordained congregational ministry” was never the answer.  I’m not saying there isn’t a place for it, or that some churches aren’t doing a wonderful job of forming people into ambassadors for Jesus.  There is and they do.  But I do think it’s harder than most folks think to be a preacher and to be like Jesus.  He won’t be bound in church life.  But this is more biography than theology, perhaps.  What I mostly mean is it’s a lot harder for me to radically follow Jesus from the context of a staid ministry position than I realized until recent years.  He keeps pushing me out among the pagans, and I keep finding Him already at work there.

I feel like there’s something more kicking around in my brain.  Maybe it’ll crystallize in a day or two.  Time for bed.

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Filed under Church Culture, Ministry, Reflections

May 12, 2010 · 11:19 am

And Then There’s That Other Thing

So I left my ministry position at a Church of Christ at the end of January. That wound up being two big changes at once since (1) I left the only career I’ve ever had and (2) I left the only denomination I’ve ever known. Since then I’ve been trying to discern which of my frustrations are unique to Churches of Christ and would be ameliorated in another denominational context and which of them are common to ministry everywhere. There’s a lot riding on that, since soon I’ll either apply for standing as a licensed minister in a new denomination, train for a new professional career all together, or acquaint myself with the safety procedures for the aforementioned Burger King Frialator.*

So, if you’ve been tracking this blog the last couple of days, you’ve got a pretty good idea about why I think I’m done with Churches of Christ. But suppose I find some church that’s all about justice and equality, where I fit right in theologically and they have a strong respect for the ordained clergy. Then I’m happy and all is good and I can just continue on in my ministry career, right?

Maybe.

But the other aspect of all of this stuff is that I’m increasingly drawn to a missional paradigm in which the church is sent out into the world to bless it, and I am drawn to go out into the world as God’s ambassador, with this message of reconcilation. (2 Cor 5.) And by that I do not mean street preaching or established inner city mission work–I mean finding some kind of meaningful labor that makes a positive contribution to society** and that allows me to form relationships with people outside the Kingdom so that I can demonstrate the love of Jesus by loving them. In contrast, I have lost interest in the kind of ministry that measures success in terms of the Three B’s of Church Life: buildings, budgets and butts in the pews. A church that thinks they are succeeding in God’s mission solely on the evidence of increased membership is no longer enough to drive me. Although increased membership is well and good, my own criterion for success is the increased involvement of the saints in God’s work of justice and reconciliation. I can’t be at a church that raises money to give their own kids a playground and then puts up a fence to keep neighborhood kids out. That just seems backward to me.*** I don’t want to be the person designated to drop in on folks who have been Christians for 40 years to see how they are doing and if there is some way I can “meet their felt needs” or make them happy. I expect that mature Christians have learned how to minister to one another, and desire to follow Christ into society to minister to others. I certainly want to be available to church members in need of special care, but I also think that my job should be to encourage a culture of mutual ministry–and that mutual ministry should reach outward to embrace the stranger.

Now it might very well be that the truth is I just don’t want to be a pastor anymore, because the things that I am draw to are such a small part of the job, and the things that drain me such a big part of it. I’m trying to figure that out. But maybe there are churches out there who want someone to help them learn to be ministers to the world, not someone who is hired just to minister to them. I don’t know.

I have to say though, when you read through the gospels, it seems like Jesus is always bumping up against an entrenched, inward-looking, closed-off religious tradition with such a small vision of who God is and such a limited desire to be a source of blessing that the people who invoke the name of the Lord the most turn out to be the same people who are consistently hindering his will. If your desire is to be a radical Jesus-follower, going where he went and doing what he did, I almost wonder if you wind up having to give up the institutional church to do that–or at least give up positions of leadership.

I really bet there is some good ministry that can be done while manning the Frialator.

One big disclaimer–I’m really talking here about my journey with God and my Spirit-given gifts and desires. Most of my close friends are ministers, and if they are able to do meaningful work and follow Jesus in that setting, I wouldn’t begin to second-guess that. I’m just going through a major discernment process of my own path right now.

* That is, by the way, what that thing is actually called. I only know that because I was in a fast food joint one day and made some reference to the dude working the Frialator, which is a term I thought I was making up, but then I glanced at the machine, and burst out laughing when I saw the label. I only hope that helps me out on Jeopardy someday.

** Like crafting the most delicious French Fries ever!

*** Yes, I understand concerns about injuries and legal liability. So don’t build the playground–send your kids to the public park where they can be salt and light in the world.

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May 11, 2010 · 2:30 pm

Moving Past the Primitivist Paradigm

Those who were raised in the Churches of Christ and paid any attention at all knew that we were part of the Restoration Movement. That label alone tells you a lot–something had been lost, and we had set about trying to bring it back. In our case, what had been lost was The One True Church, shattered into a thousand apostate fellowships operating in various degrees of error. Or, if understood more graciously, what had been lost was God’s Original Design for the Church, which had been obscured by well-intentioned people who had cluttered up the simple New Testament plan with misguided creeds and practices that detracted from the purity of the early church. Or maybe that should be written The Early Church, a supposed monolithic organization so close to the time of Jesus and so submissive to the inspired teaching of the apostles that their practice constituted a (near?) perfect pattern that could be copied in any time and place. Any group of Jesus-followers who managed to recreate the primitive pattern of The Early Church will have, ipso facto, Restored the Church.

Over time, the Churches of Christ developed a hermeneutic that was understood to enable Bible readers to suss out the pattern from the evidence left in the scripture. That hermeneutic has been commonly called “command, example and necessary inference.” In short, the church can only take a certain action if it has been commanded in the New Testament, if there is an “inspired example” of the church doing it, or if it is necessarily inferred that it must be done in order to obey the commands and examples. That simple formula works in theory, but in reality a whole cluster of traditional interpretation arose to explain why Jesus’ command to sell all our possessions and give to the poor was not incumbent on all Christians, but the example of weekly celebration of communion was. It get even trickier when dealing with matters that are “unauthorized” due to lack of a positive scriptural command or example–like instrumental music. Why are instruments, which God positively commanded in the Old Testament and never mentions one way or the other in the New, now verboten, while something like congregational ownership of property (which I contend caused a much bigger change in the tenor of church life) is accepted without anyone even seeing a need to try to defend it? How do we justify four-part harmony, which was unknown in the early church (and surely as much of a departure from a cappella antiphonal chant as the pipe organ)? Other restorationist groups felt that it was essential to bring back such things as miraculous healings and speaking in tongues–and there are surely approved examples of both of those. Why does Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 14 that women are to be silent overrule Peter’s proclamation in Acts 2 (following Joel) that “your sons and daughters will prophesy?” If it’s possible to be a consistent primitivist, I haven’t seen it in action yet–which is a large part of why the Restoration Movement has divided so many times, over questions of instruments, Sunday School, paid ministers, multiple cups in communion, wine or grape juice in communion, missionary societies, and on and on. The Roman Catholic critique that Protestants got no closer to the truth of God by rejecting the papacy and relying on each person’s own interpretive skill has some bite to it. In the extreme Church of Christ position (which did and still does exist) being part of a congregation that takes the wrong position on any one of those issues could condemn a person to perdition, which means, necessarily, that the vast bulk of not just the world but even of confessing Christians are damned because they made a mistake in somewhere in their chain of logical inferences, and took something to be approved which was, in fact, forbidden, or vice versa.

It’s hard to write all that out now without being overwhelmed by how harsh, how misguided, and how unfeasible the whole system is, but such is the power of group conditioning. If you are raised in a setting where everyone tells you “well, of course instrumental music is not authorized by God” you tend to buy into it and thank Jesus that you were fortunate enough to be born into the company of such right-thinking and righteous folk. Which is, of course, what your teachers had thought when they were younger, and their teachers before them, back to the first revolutionaries who started down this path.

For thoughtful Christians, usually a change in one’s theological outlook comes about gradually, the result of long wrestling with the scriptures, and with valued books, and the stimulating conversation of friends. But occasionally some grand epiphany comes along, or something is said that, in a flash, gives substance to a mass of inchoate thoughts that were cluttering around in your head, waiting to take form.

One day when I was 20, I was performing some errand with the preacher at the church where I was interning, when he said to me “Where in the Bible does it say that we can only do what the Bible specifically says we can do?” I could have fallen over right then. BAM! Our hermeneutic was not commanded. Nor was there an inspired example of Jesus or the apostles interpreting the scripture like we were. And it certainly wasn’t necessarily inferred from anything. It was something humans thought up that was handed down through tradition–the very kind of fallible doctrinal accretion that we were so vigorously fighting to do away with. The foundation of our movement was self-refuting.

There’s a line in Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, where someone explains, “It’s the sort of thing that, once you see it, you can never not see it again.” Halfway across the parking lot, on a walk from the auditorium to the church gymnasium, my life changed.  While the reverence I had been taught for the Bible was a good thing, the way I had been taught to read it was a kind of idol that needed to fall and make room for something better.

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May 20, 2009 · 3:04 pm

Scot McKnight on “Kingdom Gospel”

This is excellent.  I want to track Scot down and make him my best friend.

A snippet:

Many readers of the Bible read the whole Bible through the lens of the gospel they believe and this is what that gospel looks like:

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
But you have a sin problem that separates you from God.
The good news is that Jesus came to die for your sins.
If you accept Jesus’ death, you can be reconnected to God.
Those who are reconnected to God will live in heaven with God.

Every line of that statement is more or less true. It is the sequencing of those lines, the “story” of that gospel if you will, that concerns me and that turns Jesus’ message of the kingdom into a blue parakeet. And it is not only the sequencing, it is the omitting of major themes in the Bible that concerns me. What most shocks the one who reads the Bible as Story, where the focus is overwhelmingly on God forming a covenant community, is that this outline of the gospel above does two things: it eliminates community and it turns the entire gospel into a “me and God” or “God and me” gospel. Who needs a church if this is the gospel? (Answer: no one.) What becomes of the church for this gospel? (Answer: an organization for those who want to do that sort of thing.) While every line in this gospel is more or less true, what concerns many of us today is that this gospel makes the church unimportant.

I believe this gospel can deconstruct, is deconstructing, and will deconstruct the church if we don’t change it now. Our churches are filled with Christians who don’t give a rip about church life and we have a young generation who, in some cases, care so much about the Church they can’t attend a local church because too many local churches are shaped too much by the gospel I outlined above. To be truthful, the gospel above is a distortion of Romans. More and more of us, because we are reading the Bible as Story, are seeing the centrality of the church in God’s plan and the gospel being preached too often is out of touch with the Bible’s Story.

I dealt with some related concerns here.

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Filed under Church Culture, Good Theology, Noted In Passing, This Is Good

May 20, 2009 · 2:40 pm

How Could We Have Kept JohnK Among Us?

Here’s part of a deconversion story by “JohnK” from ex-Christian.net.

So recently, when I was still a christian, I decided to do a morning devotional bible study. I started as I usually did, with a short prayer asking god for guidance and wisdom through his word. That day I came across the story of jesus’ anointing at Bethany in john 12. This is the story of how Mary (sister of Martha) poured oil into jesus’ head during a meal, which was met by indignation by the disciples and a subsequent rebuke from jesus. But that’s strange, I thought. I had remembered it was some unknown, unnamed woman who poured the oil and got rebuked. I decided to do some research on the internet. This was the beginning of the end of my faith.

I found out that the anointing at Bethany is detailed three different times in the gospels: john 12, Matthew 26, and mark 14 (there is a similar account of anointing in luke 7 but it is different enough to be considered a separate incident). In Mark and Matthew, the name of the woman is not given. However, the stories in all three accounts are almost identical: the woman, supposedly Mary, approaches jesus and his disciples at a dinner table and pours an alabaster vial of expensive perfume of nard on him. The disciples, seeing this, say something to the effect of: “Why are you wasting this expensive perfume? It could have been sold for 300 denarii and the money given to the poor.” And jesus rebukes the disciples, telling them to leave her alone, that she is preparing him for burial, that the poor would always be with them, but he wouldn’t, etc.

But this is the problem: the episode in John happens BEFORE jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, while in Matthew and Mark the anointing happens AFTER the triumphal entry. So there is no way it could have been the same event… yet the stories are so identical, that I found it IMPOSSIBLE to believe it happened twice, within the space of a few days!

My research led me to skeptical sites listing bible contradictions and absurdities, and I discovered the bible contained many other contradictions, some I had noticed before (and tried to ignore) and others that I had not. The death of Judas Iscariot is another example. Matthew 27 states that after Judas had betrayed jesus, he became remorseful, flung the 30 pieces of silver into the temple and hanged himself. Acts 1 says he bought a field with the silver, then somehow fell headfirst into it, and died when his guts spilled out after his stomach burst open. So the “Field of Blood” was purchased by the chief priests according to Matthew, and by Judas according to Acts. The cherry on top of this whole confusing contradictory episode is Matthew’s reference in 27:9 that Jeremiah is the prophet foretelling the whole 30 pieces of silver incident; the problem is, there is nothing about 30 pieces of silver anywhere in the book of Jeremiah!

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other contradictions in the bible, such as the conflicting genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, the conflicting accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb, the conflicting accounts of how the disciples were first gathered, etc. (and I haven’t even gotten to the old testament). So basically, my deep investigation of the anointing story opened the floodgates to my skepticism and doubt of the bible, and my faith in the book began to crumble and did not stop. For quite a few days I was in distress, trying to find a way to reconcile all the errors. The entire worldview I had developed and lived for the last few years was breaking down! Eventually, I remember flinging the bible on my table, looking at it, and saying something like “You are full of errors. You are not reliable”. The next day I prayed my last real prayer, where I asked god, that if he was really there, to give me or show me an explanation of why his supposed book had so many contradictions and confusions, otherwise I could not keep on believing. I think the reader knows by now whether there was an answer to that prayer.

I understand now why fundamentalists always insist that the bible is inerrant. It is because once you concede that the bible has errors, it is a slippery slope. Who decides then what is an error, what is sound doctrine, and what is not? Biblical interpretation becomes very subjective, and christianity becomes a salad bar for each individual, who chooses what to take literally and what to take as metaphor depending on their own reasoning and sensibilities. Salad bar christianity is much of what I see today among christians, and partly why there are so many different christian denominations and schools of thought. John 16 says the holy spirit guides believers into all truth, and 1 Corinthians 14 says god is not the author of confusion, but these exhortations are false and ridiculous considering all the divisions and differing interpretations of scripture among christians both now and throughout church history. No book has created more confusion and conflict than the bible, because there is no holy spirit guiding anyone who reads it.

Now when I look back, I wonder how in the world I ever convinced myself that a serpent/devil deceived Eve and cursed the world, or that Noah took all the animals into his ark to save them from a flood that covered the entire earth, or that languages were uniform before the tower of Babel, etc. etc. I was so taken by Jesus and what I perceived to be his wise and other-worldly teachings, that I chose to ignore the other parts of the bible that probably deserve as much belief as Santa Claus. As a christian, when I would encounter unbelievable stories in the old testament or statements that seemed to contradict each other, I would often push it out of my mind, reassuring myself there must be an explanation, or that things were different in those days, etc. But now my faith no longer exists and I see the bible for what it really is. I still think that the bible is a remarkable piece of literature that has had an enormous impact in western history and thought, both for good and ill. But it is also no longer a book I can base my life on.

Suppose JohnK had been able to talk with a really good inerrancy apologist about the contradictions he was seeing in the Bible–could an excellent apologist have kept him in the inerrancy (and Christian) fold?

What if instead of insisting on inerrancy, someone had told John that the Bible doesn’t work quite like that?

What if he had been instructed that the Bible never intended to be 21st century style historiography?

What if he was told that the scriptures themselves were not his model, but that they, like the Holy Spirit, were designed to point the way to Jesus?

What if someone said that our faith isn’t in a book, it’s in the Christ, and the Bible is just one of our resources for knowing the Christ, along with orthodox church tradition, worship practices, and the faithful lives of the community of believers?

Would John’s experience have been different if he had been told from the start that we wouldn’t be able to make an historical timeline of Jesus’ ministry out of the gospel accounts?

Here’s a bright person, articulate and thoughtful, who lost his faith because he read the Bible.  There are thousands more out there like him.  Can the evangelical churches in America undergo the paradigm shift it will take to cultivate faith in people who currently leaving our churches because they’ve read the Bible carefully and it didn’t turn out to be what they had been told it was?

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May 18, 2009 · 1:48 am

Faith in Flux

The new report from the Pew Forum is worth a look.

Among the findings:

The biggest gains due to change in religious affiliation have been among those who say they are not affiliated with any particular faith. Overall, the 2007 “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” found that 16% of the adult population is unaffiliated, with the vast majority of this group (79%) reporting that they were raised in a religion as children.

Among the currently unaffiliated, large majorities of both former Catholics and former Protestants report attending worship services at least once a week as children (74% and 64%, respectively). However, regular church attendance drops dramatically by adolescence for both groups, and very few unaffiliated people report regularly attending worship services now, as adults. Unaffiliated former Catholics and former Protestants are equally unlikely to say they regularly attend worship services as adults.

Three-in-four former Catholics (75%) and former Protestants (76%) who have become unaffiliated say that many religions are partly true but no religion is completely true. Most of those who agree with this statement say this is an important reason they became unaffiliated, including 48% of former Catholics and 43% of former Protestants. About seven-in-ten (73% of former Catholics and 71% of former Protestants) say that religious organizations focus too much on rules and not enough on spirituality, with nearly half saying this is an important reason they became unaffiliated. A slightly smaller fraction of those who have become unaffiliated say that religious leaders are more concerned with money and power than they are with truth and spirituality, and about four-in-ten say this is an important reason they decided to become unaffiliated.

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May 15, 2009 · 10:30 pm

Jesus versus the National Day of Prayer

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”  –Matthew 6:5-6

Sometimes I really am just confused.  How do we go from this to prayer tents at city hall?

(No, I’m not commenting on this too late.  I’m really early for next year’s event.)

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May 15, 2009 · 9:58 pm

Why Does This Matter?

I’ll get back to a specific discussion of Genesis and Jonah before long, but let me zoom out for a minute and look at the big picture.  What’s the point of discussing the minutiae of details about historicity in Biblical texts?  Here’s why I think it’s important:

1)      Biblical inerrancy/literalism is an unnecessary barrier to faith. I started down this line of thought by noting that Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, an atheist polemic, wants to limit his readers’ option to atheism or fundamentalism.  At that point, all he has to do to lead them out of faith is create sufficient doubt about Biblical inerrancy—which, in my opinion, is devastatingly easy to do.  I don’t think it’s either gracious or smart to tell people who have noticed tensions in the Biblical text that they can’t be real Christians unless they cling to the doctrine of inerrancy.  That strategy is creating more new atheists than new evangelicals.  Same thing goes for literalism (a closely related proposition).  Tell a young person who is gifted at science that he or she must be a creationist (or worse, a young-Earth-creationist) in order to be a Christian, and chances are that person is walking away from faith forever.  Because we made something other than submission to the Lordship of Jesus a requirement for entrance.

2)      These texts are read better when assigned to the correct genre. Take the creation accounts for example.  A lot of ink is spilled trying to defend the proposition that Genesis is an accurate telling of the origins of the world, and I still see people claiming that what Genesis teaches is in harmony with modern scientific understandings.  That doesn’t hold up, to put it mildly.  I don’t think you are going to find a reputable astronomer who seriously believes that the very first thing to appear in the entire universe was the planet Earth.  But that’s the picture in Genesis.  No stars until day four, just Earth, floating alone in the void of space.  Scratch that—the Biblical picture is that Earth is immovably built atop the foundations that God laid (Job 38:4, Psalm 18:15, 82:5, 103:25, 105:5, and other texts).  I have yet to have a young-earth creationist give me a satisfying answer as to why Genesis 1 is literal history, but the many references to God laying the foundations of the immovable earth are not.

So, back to the point: one thing I hope we all can agree on, regardless of our view of the scriptures, is that there was no such thing as a secular evolutionist when Genesis 1 was written.  And yet a lot of the same people who teach the basic interpretive principle that “the text means what it meant to the original readers” completely throw that out the window when it comes to Genesis, and turn it into an anti-evolutionist polemic—one of the things it couldn’t possibly have intended to be.  Some very devout Christians have been reading this text for decades without ever asking the basic questions, “but what did this mean way back then?  What did the first audience think was important about Genesis 1?  How did it challenge existing ideologies?”  We have a hard time getting to those questions because the theory of Biblical inerrancy overwhelms our study with the agenda to defend the literality of these texts, which, ironically, makes it less likely that we’ll ever get to real theology at work in Genesis.  This unnecessary agenda diverts us to questions like “Did humans and dinosaurs co-exist?” “Has the speed of light changed?”  “Did the Flood change the global climate?” and all manner of diversions from letting the text spiritually form us.  But that’s where you inevitably wind up if you take a mythic poem and insist on defending it as a scientifically accurate text.  It stops being scripture and becomes the starting point for endless argument.

It’s really incredible the change that happens in Christian formation when you say, “Let’s set aside our modern scientific questions and try to hear what the text said to readers in the ancient world.”

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May 6, 2009 · 1:11 pm

Atheists Think the Only Real Christians Are Fundamentalists

Author Sam Harris. This picture, like his worldview, is black and white.

Author Sam Harris. This picture, like his worldview, is black and white.

I wrote before that “there’s a pretty thin line between Fundamentalism and Atheism,” and “It is the Fundamentalist position that there are only two coherent worldviews: Fundamentalism or Atheism.”  What I should have mentioned is that most atheists I interact with think that the only legitimate form of Christianity is Fundamentalism, and they continually read the Bible just like fundamentalists, do, only without faith.  Granted, that’s a big difference, but it’s important to note that the reading strategies are identical.  Atheists and fundies agree that the presence of contradictions or historical inaccuracies in the text would disqualify the Bible from functioning as divine scripture, which is why one side tirelessly compiles lists of Biblical errors and the other side tirelessly seeks to reconcile them all.  The reason that game goes on and on, unendingly, is that they are working from the same Enlightenment rules.  And it’s a pretty dumb game for Christians to play, since the rules stipulate that the other side only has to score one point to win the game.   If we don’t plausibly explain away every single alleged contradiction, we lose.  And you already know that I don’t think we can do that.

Or take the opening paragraph of Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation:

You believe that the Bible is the word of God, and that Jesus is the Son of God, and that only those who place their faith in Jesus will find salvation after death. As a Christian, you believe these propositions not because they make you feel good, but because you think they are true. Before I point out some of the problems with these beliefs, I would like to acknowledge that there are many points on which you and I agree. We agree, for instance, that if one of us is right, the other is wrong.  The Bible is either the word of God, or it isn’t.  Either Jesus offers humanity the one, true path to salvation (John 14:6), or he does not.  We agree that to be a true Christian is to believe that all other faiths are mistaken, and profoundly so….

As a work of propaganda this is marvelous, and surely effective.  All Harris is doing is pointing out that he and the fundamentalists he is addressing share an identical black and white worldview.  He doesn’t have to persuade them to play by his rules–they are already on board.  All he has to do is play the game better than they do.  Actually, he doesn’t even have to do that, since they’ve implicitly agreed to the “if I score one point against you, you automatically lose” rule.

The really clever thing he does comes soon after, on page 5.

Here, we need only observe that the issue is both simpler and more urgent than liberals and moderates generally admit.  Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn’t.  Either Christ was divine, or he was not….At least half the American population understands this.

This follows up on something he writes on page ix, in the introductory “Note to the Reader”:

In Letter to a Christian Nation, I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms. Consequently, liberal and moderate Christians will not always recognize themselves in the “Christian” I address. (emphasis mine)

Brilliant!  He not-very-subtly flatters his intended audience by declaring that fundamentalist/conservative evangelical Christianity is the most committed form of the faith.  He knows that if he can convince his readers that all the really serious Christians are inerrantists, his work is almost done.  He’s narrowed the field down to two options, one of which he’s pretty sure he can obliterate, even while he’s smiling and speaking softly the whole time.

Needless to say, Pope Benedict XVI might not be so quick to agree that the most committed Christians are fundies.  Or the Metropolitan Christodoulos of the Greek Orthodox Church.  Or the Episcopal priests I know who are doing poverty assistance in struggling urban neighborhoods.  Or the pastor at the Disciples of Christ church down the road who is active in homeless assistance.  Harris wants to measure commitment not by “perseverance in following the example of Jesus” (which seems like a reasonable definition to me), but by “adherence to a literalist reading of the scriptures.”  There’s no necessary link between the two, and if you were to tell most of the early church fathers that the only really dedicated Christians were strict literalists you’d have to wait for them to stop laughing before they could give you a cogent response.  In fact, the whole historical-grammatical interpretive paradigm only develops in the most recent four or five hundred years of Christian history, and really became prominent in the last three hundred.  That might seem like a long time, but for most of Christian history, the brand of Christian identity that Harris considers “the most committed form” didn’t even exist.

Lunch break is over…I’ll continue this line of thinking later.

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May 4, 2009 · 11:36 pm

Believing in the Bible

Just ran across this column from Bart Ehrman at the Washington Post site.  Excerpts:

The idea that to be a Christian you have to “believe in the Bible” (meaning, believe that it is in some sense infallible) is a modern invention. Church historians have traced the view, rather precisely, to the Niagara Conference on the Bible, in the 1870s, held over a number of years to foster belief in the Bible in opposition to liberal theologians who were accepting the results of historical scholarship. In 1878 the conference summarized the true faith in a series of fourteen statements. The very first one — to be believed above all else — was not belief in God, or in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It was belief in the Bible….

To make faith in the Bible the most important tenet of Christianity was a radical shift in thinking — away, for example, from traditional statements of faith such as the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed, which say not a word about belief in the Bible….

Here are the historical realities. Christianity existed before the Bible came into being: no one decided that our twenty-seven books of the New Testament should be “the” Christian Scripture until three hundred years after the death of the apostles. Since that time Christianity has existed in places where there were no Bibles to be found, where no one could read the Bible, where no one correctly understood the Bible. Yet it has existed. Christianity does not stand or fall with the Bible.

And so, biblical scholarship will not destroy Christianity. It might de-convert people away from a modern form of fundamentalist belief. But that might be a very good thing indeed.

I think Ehrman is being a little coy.  If you read the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, you get a brief version of Ehrman’s faith journey, which basically boils down to “I was a conservative, Bible-believing Christian for a while, and because of that I got deep into Biblical scholarship, and what I learned about the Bible turned me agnostic.”  I don’t think he’s lying here–he certainly knows that there are a lot of Christians who take a liberal or post-liberal stance toward the scriptures but are still guided by a deep faith in Jesus.  I’m one of them.  But I think if Ehrman were really pressed on this point, he would admit that while there are people who accept Biblical criticism while retaining Christian faith, he himself doesn’t find that position tenable.

I don’t want to pick on Ehrman too much.  I’m pretty appreciative of his books, which essentially take the basic Biblical information you’ll learn in a mainline seminary and make it accessible to a mass audience.  We ought to be discussing the difficulties with the Bible in church more, and it really isn’t Ehrman’s fault that some people learn this information and drift away from faith.  (As per this post, I think it’s the fault of the kinds of churches who essentially make their congregants choose between believing in inerrancy or becoming an atheist.)  But he ought to be a more honest about the reality that his books certainly will provoke a faith crisis in a fair number of his readers, if not an outright rejection of Christianity.

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May 3, 2009 · 10:29 pm

Denomination Switching

Altogether, Americans are switching in and out of churches at unprecedented rates, with about half of Americans today saying that they have changed their religious affiliation at some point during their lives, according to a study released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention at all.  I’m really not quite sure how I feel about it.  On one hand, even though I am the ultimate insider–a Church of Christ preacher trained at a Church of Christ university who has never been a member of anything other than a Church of Christ–my own self-assessment is that my denominational loyalty is approximately zero.  A lot of what keeps me in Churches of Christ has more to do with relationships and pragmatism than theology.  Theologically, as a general rule I would fit better in a denomination quite a bit further to the left, and closer to the Catholic tradition.  I really am a closet Episcopalian.  My current congregation is a nice enough fit, but the denomination as a whole doesn’t really feel like home to me.  When I moved to this church, I had decided that it was probably my last ministry in a Church of Christ.  If I stay here 30 years and retire, that’s wonderful.  But if not, I’m probably going to explore my options in the broader world.

On the other hand, I really don’t know that this much denomination switching is a good thing.  It’s really helpful to be deeply grounded in a specific tradition, and I fear that it doesn’t do us a lot of good to be completely generic Christians.  I’m glad that the acrimony of the denomination wars has been toned down, but there are some benefits to having distinctive traditions with their own peculiar strengths working alongside each other.  Lowest common denominator Christianity doesn’t make for good formation.

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