At what point do one’s doubts or differing views become so great that one should stop identifying as a Christian, not because Jesus will turn you away but because his people will? At what point do numbers and volume redefine a thing so it becomes something else entirely?
This goes a lot deeper than wanting to distance myself from the fulminations of people whose fear of losing control is leading them into cruelty and a hunger for power. I’m feeling increasingly out of step with the church in America as I’ve understood it, not merely in a sociopolitical viewpoint but increasingly from a theological/doctrinal one.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to go down this rabbit hole, but it’s an indictment of the church in America that there are so few resources made available for those with an insatiable appetite to understand better. I ask questions in an evangelical setting and if I don’t get told I’m going to hell, I still see the uncomfortable twitch in their eyes. I ask simpler questions in a mainline church, and I find many if not most people have no idea what I’m talking about.
It’s been a 20-year-plus process, but I feel like things are fitting together properly. It’s making a lot more sense to me. You’re going to laugh, but in some ways I think I’ve found Jesus and for once he wasn’t hiding behind the sofa.
In a twist, I think I’ve converted to a first-century apocalyptic sect of Judaism, the one that believed an apocalyptic age was emerging amid the current age, begun in the person of Jesus.
And that’s the crux of the matter. Making an effort to understand the Bible not for its so-called “plain meaning” but as its original audience understood it is rewarding, but it’s also unnerving how different things look. Take hell. In the New Testament, hell just wasn’t a concept as we understand it. The “judgment to come” that John the Baptist warned about was the dramatic reordering of society as the Kingdom of God would manifest itself: the poor lifted up, the mighty laid low, the outsiders elevated.
God pursues and lives among the outcast and sinners are forgiven, but there is justice awaiting those who hurt, exploit or abuse others, and that justice isn’t eternal conscious torment but being left outside the city in gehinnon, literally the city garbage dump with the stray dogs. But even that’s implied to be temporary, as the gates to the city are always open and the Tree of Life grows there for the healing of the nations.
Hell’s not a major doctrine, not on the level of the Hypostatic Union, but it’s illustrative of how religions graft ideas from other belief systems as they go. In this case, Gentile converts to Christianity brought their pagan notions of hell (and even Gnostic views of the Fall) and found language and stories that, in their ignorance of Judaism, they interpreted around their familiar understanding and now claimed were biblical. I’ve seen this when pro-life Christians claim the Bible clearly teaches that life begins at conception, when conception is a 19th-century scientific discovery without mention in the Bible, whose authors understood life to begin when a child was born and took their first breath.
But the big stuff is a mess too. Read Scripture and you’ll find its depiction of God evolving over the years from “Our storm god can kick your storm god’s ass” and “Our god is head of a pantheon” to “Our god is the only god worth worshiping” and “Pantheon? Who said anything about a pantheon? I don’t see a pantheon” all the way to “There is only one God, and he has had dealings with the other nations as well, because he loves them.” It’s almost funny listening to some people get defensive about harmonizing the Genesis accounts of creation when Psalm 74 tells another creation story that has God fighting Leviathan the way Marduk fought Tiamat.
The Bible’s a great collection of ancient literature, but it’s not the book that I was taught it was, not just as an evangelical but even as a Presbyterian. It’s far from inerrant, doesn’t come closing to matching modern standards of consistency or historical accuracy, and parts of it seem to be written in response to other works, either within itself, or from ancient lit, the way the creation narrative in Genesis 1 follows the basic structure of the creation narrative of the Enuma Elish.
So rather than a clear stream of revelation, as evangelicalism asserts, we’re left with multiple streams that build on and argue with one another in such a way that they get pretty muddy; and the creeds, the catechisms and the familiar doctrines feel less like authoritative statements than they do like seeing animals in the clouds and arguing over them. (“Do you see yon cloud in the shape of a camel? Methinks it looks like a whale.”)
And of course added to this mess is that the Beatitudes Jesus presented as the in-or-out standards of his kingdom were about the behavioral expressions of one’s heart; by Nicea it was all about the doctrine you believed that determined whether your soul would ascend to God or you would perish; and nowadays it’s whether you’ve said the sinners prayer, and none of them is actually expressed in the Bible.
I’m still with Jesus, which in my understanding puts me on the side of those the church and society deems to be of little account. I’m just not sure where it puts me with his church.
I have no idea what questions I should be asking.
Some things are obvious. When El creates the world by speaking it into existence, the writer of the Genesis account wanted to emphasize the world is ordered by a transcendent creator and not the incidental byproduct of him tearing a sea monster to pieces. When eternal life is lost in Eden, it assumes a moral dimension not found in the Epic of Gilgamesh; similarly the Flood coming because of divine judgment and not because the gods couldn’t get a good night’s rest with all the noise people were making. The writers were establishing the Deity as a moral and ordered being, not an unprincipled and capricious god like the other nations worshiped. (And in the Eden myth, establishing a literary antecedent for the Babylonian Exile as part of a cycle of shalom-sin-exile-redemption.)
But what are the limits? Every generation rediscovers and redefines faith in response to the excesses and failures of its parents, and over the years the religion undergoes some amazing shifts. El begins as a storm god in the Council of Gods worshiped at high places. Amid shifting politics, worship becomes centered on the Temple and it becomes increasingly needful to distinguish him from other gods. Isaiah ends the association with Asherah by defining Israel as his love interest, and gradually henotheism gives way to monotheism. A later prophet writing under Isaiah’s name talks about Cyrus as the servant of God; later rabbis interpret that as statements about Israel, and then Jesus and the early church reinterpret those passages about him.
How seriously are we meant to take the Bible, and in what kind of seriousness? Someone pointed out once that a lot of the stories are infused with humor because we don’t translate names. For instance, Satan usually translates as adversary, but with different vowels it can mean wanderer. So in the divine council at the start of Job, it’s like God asks, “ANd what have you been doing, wanderer?” and Satan says, “Oh, you know how it is.” In the same way we miss that the book of Ruth tells us a story about a Judahite named God is KIng who takes his wife, Sweet, into Moab with their sons, Sick and Dying. God is King dies, and so do Sick and Dying, so Sweet comes home Bitter, except Friend makes everything better because she finds Strength and turns their fortunes around.
Turn to the Christian Scriptures, and we’re left with Jesus floating into the sky because that’s where people believed God was located; Luke gives us signs in the heavens because the Greek readers would expect that. while Matthew tells us a story referenced nowhere else that fits with accounts of Herod’s cruelty. How much stock can we put in the gospel accounts when it seems likely the evangelists took some fantastic liberties with the story to meet audience expectations.
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