I grew up in a Protestant Christian missionary environment, where I went to church eight days a week and twice on Sundays. Every single person I had any truck with claimed to be a Christian, and every last man-jack of ‘em held all sorts of things to be self-evident. They just were not always sure about why.
Now, me, I like, appreciate and believe in the Bible (I will not be bothering to tell you why). Here’s the kicker, though. I don’t believe that everything the Bible says is true. I think everything the Bible says is true is true, but there’s a difference. For instance, there is a verse in the Bible that says “there is no God”. You have to look at context, though (“the fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’”) to really get what that verse is communicating. Since the Bible is a set of contexts too large to ever completely grasp, I don’t figure I will ever get it all straight. Here, though, is my shot for today. If you read the whole thing, you are a hero.
I would like to be a hero. In the life of every young man of my sort of temperament there comes a time when he feels he oughta go ahead and nail something to the door of a church. Usually wisdom or laziness prevails and nothing ever comes of it. Sometimes, however, the foolish vigor of youth prompts him to post a perhaps heretical statement on his website.
Before I give you my shpiel, I should hit you with my idea about herasy. I think that most heresies (which I define as incorrect/untrue propositions about God’s nature and the way that plays itself out in the world) derive from the prideful human desire to control the incomprehensible by re-shaping it into a sort of dumbed-down (and therefore less intimidating) shape. Most everybody does this in some way or another, because fear is one of the most prevalent human emotions and people are notoriously subject to emotional broo-hah-hah. That does not, however, negate the need and responsibility to do your best to figure out a way to live in the context of some reasonable beliefs. Ideas control actions and actions are crazy important, so we should do our best to have the best ideas we can.
The place to start, for me, is Substitutionary Atonement, which has been taught to me as the idea that Jesus had to die for our salvation because God demands innocent blood in return for sin. Since Jesus was the most innocent of persons, his blood was therefore worth more and released people forever from the difficult, expensive and painful task of killing an animal (the best they could afford) every time they screwd up (as God had instructed the Jews to do prior to Jesus’ arrival).
The first stone that sticks in my craw here is that this God of Love would demand violent retribution for acts of rebellion against himself. Since God doesn’t change (“he’s the same yesterday, today and forever”) then it follows that God’s in perpetual holy rage of the sort that can only be satiated by the infliction of bloody violence against innocence. Better a sheep that a person, as it were. This is not how it started, I’m told. Rather, God set up the Old Covenant of blood sacrifice of animals to remind his people Israel of the seriousness of their wrong actions and of how the proud choice of their great great great grandpappy and mammy in the garden to quit on naked bliss introduced imperfection into the human condition and by implication created a rift between us-guys and God, which resulted in death. Jesus was foretold in the original Jewish scriptures as the Messiah who would come to bring people (that is, everyone) back to the potential for direct communication with God, sans priestly intermediaries and (most importantly) to shed his innocent blood so that God’s justice would be once and for all fulfilled and death would no longer trouble us.
What I don’t like is that most “Christians”, between their understanding of the “Old” and “New” Testaments of the Bible seem to undergo a fundamental shift from an understanding of blood sacrifice as a necessary reminder of the seriousness of sin (which is a deterrent of right relationship with God) to an understanding of that same sacrifice as a necessary requirement for the satiation of God’s blood-lust which must be cognitively, emotionally and spiritually recognized for salvation to occur. I’d probably be shot for putting it so crassly from a pulpit but the idea is there: for sin to be properly taken care of so that a perfect, holy God can stand to be around his stinking, vomitous creations, they have got to be drenched in blood. First the blood of animals, now the blood of Jesus.
I find that hard to believe – that God at the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden initiated some sort of sacramental blood equation, by which so many pints of innocent platelets and plasma would negate so many sins and make everything hunky-dory, with the equation being solved once-and-for-all by Jesus and his sacrificial death.
My understanding, rather, is that Jesus came because of the Love that is God’s most primary characteristic. Witness the most memorized sentence in the whole wide world: “for God so LOVED the world that he sent his only son that whoever believed in him would not die but would have everlasting life” [emphasis mine]. Yes, I admit that Justice and Holiness require that retribution be visited on evil. Any honest person would have to admit to that. But it is not the sort of retribution that can be achieved by killing. Killing is a one-time thing easily forgotten in the humdrum of everyday life, while the horrible effects of evil (such as the Holocaust) reverberate throughout time. I guess that’s what makes Jesus’ death more significant – that God seems to be saying by it in the Bible that he’s willing to let things go with a lot less punishment than is deserved. That is Grace, which as Bono once said is the real point of Jesus’ life and the main difference between Christianity and the rest of the world’s religions.
What about folks who do not get a chance to hear about the lofty concept of Grace and substitutionary atonement? What if they are too busy toiling away on a farm to travel to America and go to a Southern Baptist Bible School? Are they necessarily damned, damned and double-damned? I think not. I believe, rather, that God has always and at all times and in all ways and to all people been in the business of re-creating a tainted world and drawing it back into right relation and communication with himself. I think he’s maintained a steadfast hand on the world through Common Grace or whatever you want to call it, sustaining and causing every tree and rock and stream to cry out in an effort to get us to freely recognize that there is a God and we are not him. By prompting us by any and all means to a humble admission of our true relation to the universe (that is, as petty creatures inescapably subject to laws of Being beyond our control) he intends to re-forge the lines of communication frayed or broken when the first folks decided to pretend this wasn’t true.
I am not trying to suggest that his vengeance is not real – just that it is a necessary result of broken communication and not a foundational part of God’s character. The necessary, essential part of God’s character is his Love and it is this that has impelled him to reach out to people in all ways possible – from the delicate construction of an orchid to the passionate reminder woven into his relationship with the Jews to the arrival, teaching and symbolic significance of Jesus through his death and resurrection.
I think Jesus came in Roman times because the Jews were thinking too much about blood sacrifice and rituals and thereby missing the harder, more character-forming (sanctifying) reality towards which those sacrifices were intended to point. That is, the realignment of the tainted character of people into the patterns of Love that is God, in whose image they were designed to exist.
Wow! Am I ever getting obscure. Let me bring it back a notch. God has always wanted to have a real, choice-based relationship with people and since he has got the power to make this a reality, it stands to reason that he has always been doing so. I don’t think God had to wait to send Jesus to re-establish contact with people after the oodles of years of prophetic silence described in the Bible as I was taught in some class somewhere or another.
Rather, I think that one of God’s most obvious communicative works in history – his relationship with the Jews – was hindered for a time by Jewish pride. First the Jews ignored what God told them about the way they were designed to operate. Then they took what God told them and changed it into a whole bunch of impossible rules that they thought would give them power to control right and wrong. God was forced for a while by his commitment to freedom of human choice to permit the Jews to exclude him from a big chunk of their lives. God’s voice was as constant as ever during this time, but in Israel it fell mostly on deaf ears. Perhaps it was more readily received during that time by the Greeks, who said a lot of True things and said them well.
That, however, is beyond the point of the moment. The point I am trying to get to here is that Jesus came to Roman times as the corporeal manifestation of God’s voice to people. The Bible describes Jesus as the Word. The book of the Bible that John wrote begins by saying that the Word [that is, Jesus] was with God and was God at the Beginning [that is, the creation of the world].
Why would the Bible call Jesus the Word? Because Jesus is the aspect of God’s Self that involves and embodies the act of God-people communication. Jesus is, of course, more than that (for instance, he is also a chap who likes fish, wine and a well-built chair), but he is definitely not less. And while the incarnation is the most clear example of God as man/communicant in the Bible, the entire Old Testament is written as a description of the relationship of God with a group of people, the Israelites, and of his intention to use that to HELP him reestablish a relationship with the rest of the world.
Jesus did not pop into existence in the womb of an unwed Israelite teenager, however, just as he does not cease to exist in times and places on the globe where Billy Graham has never held a crusade. The Bible says that Jesus was around since God made the world and it seems likely to me that that was when he first started to BE – since the existence of people would have provided a necessary impetus for the development of that aspect of God that involves communicating with willful creatures. When the Bible mentions God walking and talking (corporeal functions, to be sure) with Adam and Eve in the garden, it seems likely that it was Jesus with whom they were chumming it up. Yet another aspect of the incomprehensible Being that is God had become actuated.
I could, of course, be dead wrong. In fact, it is inconceivable that I’ve gotten it all right. Mine is a puny brain attempting to grasp a gargantuan reality. No one, I think, ought to expect to comprehend in its entirety the nature of God. This provides me with yet another reason to doubt that when Jesus said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father [that is God] but by me”, that he meant that no one could get close to God without first knowing and understanding and accepting every bit of the reality surrounding the cross and substitutionary atonement. If that was the case, then he might as well have said, “What up? My name’s Jesus. The only way you could get to God is if I were to override your free will and control you to God as an automaton – which I don’t want to do.” That’s bullpoop! John Calvin (or at least, his followers) might have thought that, but it is absolutely out of whack with the message of the rest of the Bible.
I believe, instead, that Jesus was saying that as the manifestation of God’s true Voice (all that is True, is he), he was the only conduit through which one might engage God in right relationship. This is because unless you accept the truth about the way things ARE, you’ll be in no shape to relate with God in the way he intended. So Elijah, for instance (or Job or Abraham or David or any other of a number of prominent Old Testament dead guys), need not be considered God-damned merely because they were unaware of the Four Spiritual Laws and did not subscribe to Theological Treatises One-through-Seven as written by the Eighteenth Ecumenical Counsel of the Southern Baptist Synod at the Diet of Worms in 1492.
Let me put it another way: people do not really need to truly and completely understand Jesus’ substitutionary atonement on the cross to be “saved”. Even a machiguenga hunter, living on the Urubamba river in 1850 before the appearance of a single white man, could still have a real encounter with Jesus and, having heard the voice of God, accept it as Truth and find freedom from sin. Even Paul (ahhh, Paul), wrote in one of his many letters to one of many churches that creation cries out so forcefully that nobody (NOBODY) has an excuse for rejecting God.
Is that so hard to believe? When millions or billions or more have heard of Christ yet continue to wallow in the consumer, conformist lie that is North American culture – even as they claim to know God – how is it possible to sit back and give primacy to our own flawed and flubbed understanding of who Christ was and what he is and what it means? The North American church sits back and reviles those who drink alchohol (which scripture clearly allows and even advocates) while at the same time accepting and condoning gossip in the name of God (“Oh, here’s another juicy one you can pray about”) when gossip – not drinking – is on the Bible’s list of seven things God really, really hates! Does God really need that kind of church to get his message out?
When some guys asked Jesus what the most important thing was his response was simple: “Love. First, love God. Then, show that you do by loving other people.” THAT was Jesus’ criteria for drawing close to God and becoming realigned with one’s true nature – not by toeing the denominational party line and accepting a particular systematic theology which has been so thoroughly worked out that all tough problems are boxed neatly and stacked one on another into an impenetrable wall so that people’s brains can contain the vastness of God and control it into submission. God is neither solely a God of the intellectual elite nor of mindless sheep. He is the God of everything and everyone.
It could be, in fact, that a man who lived his entire life in the 12th century A.D. in a Muslim country and, through no fault of his own, had zero contact with anyone from an evangelical Christian church in Waxhaw, North Carolina might still have looked at a dog on a dune and at the petty darkness of his and other people’s souls and have had a much more real and vibrant encounter with the living God than I, fidgeting in the back row of my first grade Sunday School class.
I am not trying to suggest through all this that “anything goes” or that “truth is relative”. Rather, I am beseeching you and me to accept that the Truth is the same yesterday, today and forever – independent of the mental gymnastics we attempt in our efforts to control and overpower it. Therefore, if a person is willing to humbly accept that Truth, God will be there (wherever that is) in the form of Jesus Christ to communicate with them. God does not speak Christianeze, he talks openly and aggressively in Spirit and in Truth.
Neither am I advocating the abandonment of the Christian message, which my reason and emotion and experience all tell me is the clearest expression of God’s voice to the world if only the Christians will shut up and let him talk. I believe that people who reject the message that Jesus came to give – that of God’s Love and Grace being available to everyone – are rejecting the Truth and cutting themselves off from God.
However, I AM arguing for an explosion of humility, an earthquake of openness which will crack wide all the petty foolish concrete and curbs we have laid over God’s verdant Truth because we fear (though we do not admit it) that that Truth might not be enough. I’m hoping that we will stop serving the tattered façade of a fallen culture and start giving our allegiance to the Truth. Read the Bible and a book or two. Look at a mountain. Listen to your neighbor, die to yourself and EXPERIENCE what God through Jesus is saying to you and to the world in which you live. God is talking. Shut up and listen!
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Garsh! That’s been festering in my brain for probably four years. Hopefully I wasn't too heretical. It can't hurt to say the truth about what's going on insid your head. I cannot believe you made it this far. Good for you. Now that it’s off my chest, I suppose I will just have to go watch a movie.
