This year, our pastor has been periodically asking members of the congregation to talk about what is saving their faith. We are full of church refugees. They have been abused. They have been lied to. They’ve been raised on much the same theology as I was. We thought we were on God’s side, that we were good people, and we’ve learned that it was all based on a thoroughly screwed up understanding of who God is and what God wants. I’m not even saying Christianity is a bad thing, but some versions of it are. I’m not saying that everyone who believes that version is a bad person, but some of them are. This is the (brief) story of my last straw and why, having given up on Evangelicalism, I still haven’t given up on God.

I thought I had published this almost a year ago, but . . . brain cell evaporation. Here it is, the talk I gave at church December 31, 2023. What a way to wrap up a year.

What’s Saving my Faith?

History

Growing up, I was Church Boy.

We lived three blocks from Rochester Christian Reformed Church, and I could cover the distance at a dead run. I knew this because I’d done it so often—I was also Procrastinating Boy. On Sundays we were at church for two services (10:00 AM and 5:00 PM) plus Sunday school, and on Wednesdays for choir practice or Cadets, aka Calvinist Cadet Corps. My sisters went to, no joke, Calvinettes. Even my spellcheck thinks that’s a weird name.

I went to Christian elementary school, attended Campus Life meetings in high school, and went to a Christian college. After college, I attended the church I’d grown up in, then a smaller Christian Reformed congregation, then, when that got too Republican, Crossbridge Community Church. When Crossbridge closed, I went to Capax Dei, which merged with Quest to become Artisan Church.

Along the way, I also became guitar and bass and cello playing Christian Music Leader, Recovering Reformed (reformed Reformed?) Theology Nerd, Spiritual Formation Promoting, Poor Folk Loving, Racially Aware, LGBTQ Affirming, all-around Church Man. American, Evangelical adjacent Christianity, permeated my life. I was one of those people who Took Faith Seriously.

Evangelical adjacent because in my Reformed upbringing, thinking was boffo, and I was never down with the anti-intellectualism I saw in Evangelicalism. We learned about Reformed Distinctives™, aka how we were better than the hoi polloi, like Evangelicals and fundamentalists, and especially Methodists.

I gradually learned moderation, nuance, and just how weird Calvinism was. I also met nice Methodists. I remained a theology nerd and continued to think carefully about my faith and refine it over decades. I became a Progressive Evangelical™.

Why am I standing in front of you talking?

So, why am I standing in front of you talking about what’s saving my faith?

Evangelicals pissed me off

Let’s start here: Evangelicals pissed me off.

Most of the people in this room have left mainstream Evangelical churches or been pronounced persona non grata. We’re saddened, disgusted, or traumatized by our Evangelical history—sometimes all three.

All my life, Evangelicals told me to do the right thing, even when it was hard. I’m a late boomer, and our parents fought World War II. They defeated the freaking Nazis. I grew up around thick Dutch accents in church, and some of those folks had been honored by the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for risking their lives to protect Jews from the Nazis—they just did it because protecting the persecuted and outcasts was the right thing to do. A lot of others died in the process.

But then Evangelicalism grew and became powerful and assimilated small churches with independent streaks. Thinking carefully was replaced by thinking right thoughts, and a community became a tribe. Risking your life for outcasts was replaced by attacks on outsiders. Gracious welcome of strangers and the poor was replaced by righteous indignation at foreigners taking our jobs and not following our customs. Sure, good folks gave to Compassion and Samaritan’s purse to help poor folks far away, but heaven forbid they should move into our neighborhoods. They could have their own churches if they wanted, but if they came to ours, they’d better fit in.

It became painfully clear that most Evangelicals not only weren’t willing to risk their lives to protect strangers, they weren’t even willing to risk their own comfort or 401Ks. They want to be protected by the persecutors. They were willing to tolerate and even support a disgusting bully so long as he was their bully.

Theological Implications

Evangelicals love to talk about having a Good Witness, and I finally realized they had shot their witness to hell. Apparently, their theology made very little difference in their behavior. They weren’t living according to a Biblical worldview—they were being good, upright folks, which, remarkably enough, looked a lot like being middle class, white Republicans. This shot my trust in them to hell. My belief in God had been based on scripture, and my belief in Scripture had been based on what I’d been taught—that it was the very words of God and without error. If I could no longer trust the people who had taught me, I could no longer trust their version of scripture, and if I could no longer trust scripture, I could no longer trust their version of God.

So I went back and looked at their theology (i.e. study of God) and found that it didn’t hold up, at least not in the way I’d been taught. For instance, the belief that God is all powerful forces us to ask, if God is omnipotent, then why does God allow evil? There is an entire branch of theology devoted to answering this question, not very well. It’s only possible to believe scripture is without error with so many caveats that inerrancy no longer means much, and I find it much simpler to admit that scripture is a very human document, which is somehow inspired by God, whatever that means. The idea that Jesus died to take God’s punishment for our sins, which is central to Evangelical theology, owes more to feudal society and the fact that Calvin was a lawyer than to scripture. It turns out that there are multiple atonement theories that don’t rely on divine child abuse, but Evangelicals only teach the one that does.

Fundamentalist cranks like to portray deconstruction as an indulgence of overprivileged hipsters and heretics. But I didn’t deconstruct anything, and this was no indulgence. Instead, once I understood that the foundational doctrines of Evangelicalism were unsupportable, the bottom fell out. I felt like I had a theological structure that was floating in air with nothing to hold it up. Beliefs that made sense within the Evangelical bubble suddenly made no sense outside of it, and my inherited theology collapsed under its own weight.

What do I believe? Do I believe?

To be frank, I was no longer entirely sure God existed. I was mostly sure, but it seemed wise to avoid certainty about a divine being who, by definition, transcended our understanding. I simply couldn’t conceive of a world without a first cause, and I chose to call that first cause, God. I saw both good and evil in the world, and my intuition told me that evil could exist if God was good, but good could not exist if God was evil, so I figured that God was probably good. It seemed to me that the rest was conjecture, and the best we could do was muddle toward God as well as we could.

That was painfully disorienting for a former Church Boy. My carefully constructed faith had been so central to how I saw myself and found meaning that losing it left me feeling unanchored and rudderless. I didn’t know what to hang onto or where I was going, and panic started to set in.

Take a deep breath. Exhale slowly. I can get through this.

Evangelicalism was dead to me, but not God. Christianity was the language I knew, and I’d invested too much in learning it to suddenly convert to, say, Buddhism. However, I could learn from other traditions. I could rebuild the foundations of my faith, this time without inerrant scripture as their bedrock. First, however, I needed to ask some basic questions:

• Could I know anything about God with certainty?
• And if I couldn’t, what and how could I know?

Sola Scriptura

Growing up, I was taught that we could only know about God from scripture—it was the one true revelation from God. This was so central to Reformed theology that Calvinists have a Latin phrase for it: sola scriptura or scripture alone. But given that my trust in scripture was shot to hell, how should I read it? Could it be true without being entirely accurate? How could I treat scripture with respect while not taking it as the actual words of God?

Gradually, I came to see scripture as valuable mostly because it had passed the test of time. Millions of people from hundreds of traditions had read and wrestled and argued with it for millennia. Call it commentary or tradition or reason—all of it it is people working out practically how to live well in light of sacred texts.

Even within scripture Abraham and Moses bargained with God, Mary asked, “how can this be?”, and Jacob wrestled with God through the night to demand a blessing. They weren’t meekly submitting to God’s word or finding simple and obvious answers in scripture. They were creation questioning the Creator and insisting that they be listened to and taken seriously. If one could argue with scripture, then there must be other sources of truth to argue from.

To wit:

• Clearly one could reason about scripture.
• What about other religious traditions?
• Was there evidence of God in nature?
• How could I experience God myself?

Reason

Reason shouldn’t be a hard sell here, but in the more fundamentalist corners of American protestantism, human reason is suspect. Certainty is easy—we simply need to obey the plain truth of scripture without question. The problem is, the truth of scripture is anything but simple or plain. Scripture is a collection of ancient texts, birthed in equally ancient cultures foreign to our own, and written in ancient languages and words that have changed their meanings over time. Understanding these texts requires studying their cultural contexts and literary forms and discerning what the original authors were trying to say. Inerrancy tries to bypass all that work by promising easy truth, but only doing the work produces real wisdom.

Other Traditions

Even though I was angry with Evangelicals, I still saw a lot of value in communities of faith. Some of it had to do with the community and some with the faith. I didn’t want to abandon Christianity, much less community—just to leave the toxicity of Evangelicalism. Other traditions, even other religions, offered different ways to understand God. It wasn’t as if I’d never ventured outside the Evangelical bubble—to the contrary, I’d always felt like a bit of an outsider—so this was more of an evolution than a leap.

History redux

For example, I went to Houghton College and met nice Methodists. Then, early in our marriage, Chris and I hung out with United Methodists on a spiritual formation retreat called Walk to Emmaus, which grew out of the Catholic Cursillo, and I discovered that there were both United Methodists and Catholics I really liked.

I was introduced to the writings of Richard Rohr and Henri Nouwen, which are gateway drugs for Evangelicals learning about Catholicism, and I strayed a bit further from the neatly fenced confines of my Reformed upbringing.

I began to read real Jewish writers, not Evangelicals in Jewish drag. I enjoyed the fresh perspective of a people who have argued with God and scripture and the lamppost for millennia.

The ways other traditions approached faith were so different from those I’d been raised with that questions Evangelicals obsessed on didn’t even apply. My people were so ignorant of the cultures that had birthed our faith, and afraid of anything learned in the 20th century that their fiercely held beliefs were unmoored from history and walled off from reality. They cast those with questions as weak minded or bad influences, but I came to believe that certainty about the transcendent was the real sin, and a modest agnosticism was a sign of spiritual health.

Diving uncritically into a new tradition would simply have been looking for certainty in a new place, so I approached them with a certain reserve, yet healthy and deep relationships are built on vulnerability. Perhaps I could be both gracious and skeptical. After all, I see so much grace and wisdom in a Dalai Lama and so little in a John Piper or Franklin Graham that I can no longer dismiss the one and look up to the other based on a shared religious label alone. I can’t leave Christianity entirely, and it will always be my mother tongue, but I will be open to wisdom wherever I find it.

Natural Theology

Since I’d become skeptical of the special revelation of scripture, what could I learn about God from, say, the natural world? If God had made all that was, then it followed that the creation should bear the marks of the creator. And if we were part of creation, then shouldn’t our nature somehow reflect the nature of God? Doesn’t scripture itself say that the skies display God’s handiwork and that we are made in the very image of God?

Frustratingly, natural theology has faced significant challenges from inherited understandings of the natural world—it has been overwhelmed by the assumption that the natural and divine are distinct realms. Equally, it is distrusted by those who would make Jesus so divine that he never could have had a zit. More than two millennia after Jesus walked the dusty roads of Palestine, we still struggle to accept the idea that he could have been both fully God and fully human.

Still, it seems to be a path worth following. The rocks may well cry out, even if I can’t expect them to recite the attributes of God.

Experience of God

My last, great, hope for rebuilding my faith was having an incontestable, personal experience of God.

I’m a pretty intellectual guy, and engaging my heart over my head has always been a struggle, but rational approaches to finding God had failed me. Could I have an experience of God? If I could bypass rationality and meet God directly, then I could be sure that God existed, that God cared about me, and that I wasn’t praying to air. Right?

Sadly, no.

The temptation is to make this yet another attempt to find certainty, and I’ve learned certainty is a mirage. Clinging to one transformative personal experience would be no better than clinging to inerrant scripture or infallible dogma.

Contemplative practice is not a shortcut to find oneness with God. It is a tool to build a relationship with God. It is a practice, meaning that it requires repeated and sustained effort. In short, it’s work.

I am still a novice. I try centering prayer, and all I experience is chaos as I wearily repeat the Jesus prayer again and again and again. I’ve tried prayer beads (aka the Anglican rosary) to keep myself on track, but it still feels like vain repetition. The good news is, this is normal. I have to keep doing the work. There is no guarantee that I’ll find perfect inner peace, but there is a good chance that I will get better over time and learn, with practice, to quiet my soul. Once it is quiet, I hope to hear the still small voice of the Spirit speaking to me, and learn, finally, simply to be with God.

The conclusion of the matter?

There is a thread that runs through all these paths, and that is uncertainty. None of them will prove that God is real or present or that God loves me. None will open my eyes to see that God was there all the time. None will make me feel like I am being held in God’s arms. All of them are ways to pursue God; none of them are ways to arrive. I am gradually coming to peace with that.

When Evangelicals failed me and my faith collapsed, uncertainty enabled me to keep believing something, anything about God. It continues to give me that freedom because it is far better to wrestle with honest questions than to cling to brittle dogma. If certainty was my only option, then I would have to walk away from belief. Uncertainty is saving my faith.

Postscript

If Christianity is worth anything, then the incarnation must be its beating heart. Traditionally, Easter has been the more important religious holiday for Christians because it celebrates our salvation from sin and hell, but I no longer believe in the Evangelical notion of hell. It too is the fruit of a poisoned tree. Salvation from sin, all the things we do to hurt others and harm our relationship with God, that’s worth talking about—but first there has to be a relationship with God, and Christmas celebrates God coming to be one of us! There is a way to have a loving relationship with God, and it is a gift!

There are questions, so many questions, about the historical Jesus, yet . . . if God did become part of our world, what does that imply? The transcendent creator of the universe became one of us. I don’t see how we could possibly establish this factually—what does factual even mean when considering the transcendent?—but I can say this: if God really has become one of us, that changes everything. God is no longer an abstract concept or absent deity but a living, breathing person who walked with us and was thirsty and hungry and tired just like us. And if scripture is to believed, God is still one of us—it boggles the mind to try to grasp what that means. So, I will continue to reach out to God in the humble hope that Emmanuel, God With Us, will honor the dearest desire of my heart, and answer.

Prune my priorities

This is a phrase has been part of the week’s prayer of approach from Lectio365:

Lord, as I meditate on your word and learn from your Church, teach me what it means to “pray without ceasing” (@1 Thess. 5:17). Holy Spirit, wake me up to your constant presence and prune my priorities so I can go further in prayer-fuelled mission.

Prune is a wonderful, positive word to express trimming back our commitments and activities to strengthen that which is most likely to flower and bear fruit. The pruned activities aren’t necessarily bad, and they have grown naturally. However, pruning them gives our highest priorities more life sustaining food and light to grow even stronger. Pruning takes wisdom and experience, and sometimes, when a plant has become diseased from lack of proper care, it requires cutting back a plant almost to the ground, so that new growth can spring up from the roots and grow a new, healthy plant. It appears that the gardener has destroyed the plant, when they have actually given it a new life.

Caste

I’m reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson because she is coming to speak at the University this fall, and I just finished the chapter, The Container We Have Built for You. Lordy, but that was a tough slog. Not because the material was too academic or hard to understand—to the contrary, Wilkerson is an experienced journalist and writes beautiful and accessible prose. No, the issue was that what she wrote was all too plain and, to me, familiar because of the study I have done. It was reminiscent of Edward Baptiste’s The Half Has Never Been Told—the stories of African Americans being treated as cattle—less than cattle, really, and how that shapes their lives still today. It’s painful, because it was done in the name of my country and religion, and for the benefit of my “race”, and it is still being done by people who look like me and are even my neighbors and coworkers. I have done similar things myself in past, even though I know better now and try mightily not to. When reading work like this, I can be swamped by guilt and grief over what my people have done and despair of ever making it right. There is rich and bitter irony in that the shining light of democracy was built on the cruelly coerced labor of humans we treated as things.

Digging In Again

Good lord, do I want to do this?

I imported my State of Faith and Saving My Faith documents from Ulysses into Obsidian, along with most of my State of Faith notes, with the idea that I’d like to develop that more and possibly even finish it. It’ll be different than it would have been if I’d finished it a year ago, and even some of what I’d polished will change. I’m not quite sure I want to immerse myself in that again—I’m in a different place than I was, and some of my anger has subsided. I’ve settled into being mostly agnostic while carrying on with Christian worship and piety, sort of. I don’t know what I am, and I don’t know that it matters. I’ve actually got a contemplative practice of sorts (listening to Lectio365 daily), even though I’d hardly call myself a contemplative—my brain is too overactive for that. Intellectual, yes—I can overthink with the best of them. Perhaps what I can do it to cultivate a practice of study—regular time set aside to read and think and write. I’ve been doing the reading bit fairly well but not so much of the writing, and writing is what forces me to examine and articulate what I’ve been thinking. It’s hard (for me) to be sloppy when I’m explaining an idea to someone, even if that someone is myself—my OCD won’t let me. How would I explain a concept to someone without any theological training?

It’s going to take some emotional energy to get myself into that head space again and find the concentration to write. On the other hand, I fall into that fairly easily if I just have a block of uninterrupted time and something challenging to read. Give me a good book, and it’s highlight-palooza. It’d be easier if I didn’t have to work around copy protection on most of the books I’m reading, but figuring out ways to work around problems is what I do. Right now, it’s time to go to bed so I can be perky for our road trip tomorrow—study time will have to wait.

A random thought about the prayer of St. Francis occurred to me a few days ago that I wanted to share. He probably didn’t actually write the prayer, but lots of good stuff is pseudepigraphic, including large parts of scripture. This is what struck me:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

Apparently, St. Francis or his ghostwriter had a counseling degree, because that bolded line is exactly what my therapist has been telling me for months. If we honestly try to understand another person, they are far more likely to try to understand us. We’ll also understand them better in the process, which is probably burying the lede—we may want them to understand how they are hurting us, but that felt need will likely fade once we understand why they are actually trying to say. Anyway, if it’s good enough for St. Francis, I’ll give it a try. Probably not random too.

What do I want?

Seriously. What do I want from God?

Let me take a step back. The question of what I want arises from losing any certainty about God and faith. I know what I was taught, but my assurance that what I was taught was true was vaporized in the implosion of American Evangelicalism and its nearly unanimous support for a troop of horribly behaved goons led by Donald Trump. I still believe there is a God, and I believe that God does not endorse coarse, philandering bullies as leadership material. I also know the language of Christianity and can use it to describe God, but I am no longer certain of specifics or the theological claims that I was raised with.

And if I ask, what do I want, it seems fair to ask, what do I need? That complicates the question. What is reasonable? What is likely? Would what I want be helpful in the long run? Or would granting my wish come with all sorts of unanticipated drawbacks? Humans, especially conservative humans, long for certainty in the worst way, and they often create it where it is not warranted, which, in a nutshell, describes the development of fundamentalisms of all sorts. Intellectual humility pushes back gently but is largely ignored by the masses. I don’t mean to be elitist, just to say that living with uncertainty is hard.

So . . . I believe God exists, but I can’t be sure of more than that. I hope and gravitate toward the idea that God is good—while there is much that is evil in the world, I don’t see how the good and kind could exist without an eternal paradigm—but many days I have my doubts.

I often feel a deep, existential loneliness. Human relationships are good and a gift, but they are temporary and often fickle. It seems that a relationship with an eternal, self existent God would be dependable beyond the limits of humanity, except that I too am temporal and often fickle. Is an eternally dependable relationship possible, or am I too looking for certainty that doesn’t exist?

Would I be happy, even temporarily, with an experience of God, something I could feel and touch. We like to picture ourselves as rational beings, but that isn’t what sustains us—we need to feel loved. I can have all kinds of good ideas about God, but what I really want is a hug.

Christmas used to fill me with warm fuzzy feelings—it was a special time that we celebrated together; it brought the promise of time together as family, of gifts and good food, of time away from the workaday, when we could enjoy each other and relax. We celebrated the presence of God With Us in a naive assurance that it was all true and all would be well. Now I feel a nostalgic ache for those times I remember but cannot reclaim. I don’t want to be cynical, but I’ve seen too much of life to believe that all can ever be well. A lot can be well, and all can be well for a short time, but sadness, hurt, and loneliness always return. It really does seem to be existential, and we need to learn to embrace the good knowing it will all will eventually end.

Am I looking for a temporal connection to an eternal and good God? Or an eternal relationship in some kind of post-death existence? I don’t know. Either sounds good; each has its drawbacks. Temporal relationships end, and eternal ones I can’t wrap my head around. Projecting my current existence eternally is, frankly, exhausting and frightening—a wearying existence with no hope of escape. It makes one feel for Sisyphus—why does he continue to push that rock unless there is no alternative? I’m left hoping for an eternal existence that I can’t currently understand and having to trust the goodness of God to make it good. Or that my existence will end peacefully and that I will be able to enjoy what I have while it lasts.

Do I want certainty again? Probably. Perhaps what I want is certainty and what I need is to accept uncertainty. Can I trust God enough to eventually make all things well that I can live in an unwell world with hope? I long for love and friendship and even more so for love and friendship with an eternal God. I want a sign that God exists. Jesus often spoke of signs and of the people’s blindness to them—am I asking for a sign that will not come? Am I being stubborn and not believing the signs I’ve been given? It seems to come down to what I can make myself trust, if I can make myself trust anything.

My initial, glib, answer was for God to become known. For me to have some kind of relationship with God that felt familiar. Or that felt like anything. I can barely feel close to people I can touch and see, much less a transcendent God. For God to become known would be for the transcendent to become present in the material word, perhaps immanent, maybe even incarnate. I think that’s why Christmas and the incarnation hold such fascination for me—I am longing for God to be present in my life.

It seems like an undeniable encounter with God would be really nice, but could I coast through the rest of my life on that? Am I being realistic or cynical? Or hopeless? I honestly don’t know. Would I need to coast through the rest of my life, or could I just enjoy the experience while it lasted? Anything that could carry me through the rest of my life would seem very likely to involve certainty, so maybe I need to keep renewing my experience to charge my batteries for another bit. Maybe that’s the essence. Maybe that’s why we have weekly services and annual holidays—we can’t go forever on just one charge. We need to keep breathing, to keep eating, to keep encountering God, even if it doesn’t feel we’re encountering anything. Maybe just going through the motions is all we can do some days, even most days. There will always be a post-holiday letdown, we’ll always have to return to ordinary time, but we can always look forward to next week and next year, when we do it all over again.

Life feels spectacularly ordinary right now, and yet I still long for Christmas. That old hope won’t go away—hope that God will be with us. Is that enough? Maybe it has to be, at least for now.

This post isn’t ready for prime time. It’s not even half baked. It’s still fluid.

• I want to write about Advent because it’s coming.
• I want to write about Advent because it implies the incarnation, which is my all-time favorite doctrine.
• Incarnation is important because it is God the creator entering creation in order to be in community with us.
• Incarnation is the transcendent becoming immanent.

How can a transcendent, eternal God enter a temporal world that they created? What is incarnation? If we reject dualism, what does it mean that the divine spirit inhabits a material body? It’s not even a logical notion in light of contemporary science and theology. If incarnation makes no sense factually, at least as it was understood in the first centry, then what is scripture telling us? I’d say metaphor is a good first approximation.

I’m thinking of 1st century notions of life force, soul, and spirit vs. flesh or material. Greek notions weren’t as simple as a dualistic body and soul. Even then, the incarnation was described as the perfect melding of God & humanity—the hypostatic union, to be exact. There were two natures that were one nature, distinct and yet inseparable. Finding words to describe it is an exercise in oxymoron. It’s a bundle of paradoxes tied up in red Christmas ribbons.

I have no answers. I have lots of questions. It is a lifelong fascination. There will be more to come.

Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. (Rachel Held Evans: Searching for Sunday (2015), p. 38)

I find the cosmological argument for the existence of God convincing—I can’t conceive of a universe without a first cause. I can believe in the Trinity. I can believe in creation, so long as you give me longer than six days. I struggle with divine intervention in the world, not because I don’t believe God is capable but because of the problem of evil it raises. But resurrection . . . our resurrection. If you can swallow that, you can swallow all of it. I think I want it to be true—I mean, an eternity in heaven could be pretty nice—but it also scares the crap out of me. We’re finite beings, and we can only ever understand infinity as an abstract concept. An existence that transcends time is, well, transcendent. Beyond our understand and the nature of our being. Guaranteed to blow your mind.

A woman driving a minivan nearly hit my daughter on her bicycle today at an intersection where the entrance to a gated community crosses the Virginia Capital Trail. Then she had the gall to honk at her. I pulled in front of her car and let her know very firmly (without profanity) that cars are legally required to yield to cyclists in a crosswalk, even if there is an (unofficial) stop sign on the trail. What I should have said was, “You nearly hit my daughter with your car! You could have killer her!”

It amazes me how motorists are so obstinately ignorant are of how dangerous they are in a vehicle. Wrapped in their protective automotive shell, they are oblivious that there are live human bodies out there that they can maim and kill with their carelessness, and when they threat another person’s life, all they can do is insist that it is the victim’s fault. I don’t f-ing care if there is a stop sign on the trail—you are responsible to ensure the multi-thousand-pound machine you are piloting doesn’t kill someone.

My father-in-law said most people in that community are mindful of cyclists on the trail but that there were a few Karens. I think that is unfair to Karens. I’m sure this particular woman was shaken by the incident, especially after encountering an enraged papa bear, and that could partially account for her cowering in her car and angrily pointing at the stop sign. However, there is a simple fix for all of that—don’t be a criminally negligent narcissist asshole when you drive. Your actions affect other people—people whose lives matter.

John 3:16

For God so loved the world. Not all the white American Christians. Not all the people who loved him. Not even all the people. The World. The Cosmos. All of it. God loves creation, because it is good.

And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

For God so loved the world [κόσμος/cosmos] that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.

John 3:14-17 NRSVue

I’ll grant that there is some talk about condemnation after that, but I still maintain we take a statement about the cosmos and squeeze it until it fits in a tiny corner of our particular world. The God of the universe is waaaaay bigger than that.

David James Duncan speaks of “unsaying God”, that is, apophasis—theology defined by what God is not. God has been badly defined by so many people and so many traditions that we need to strip the baggage away from the name and treat it as we would any other—someone we are getting to know.

I had much the same thought yesterday, then lost it, so I was happy to read it again in God Laughs & Plays. My thought was that I need to return to a childlike curiosity about God, but I need to nuance that. I don’t seek to nor can I approach God as a tabula rasa—I have a lifetime of experience and learning crowding my brain but also informing my intuition. I often say the Christianity is the language I know, so that is the language I use about God. I can, however, discipline myself to approach God with a mindful approach, consciously muting all my preconceptions. How would I think about God if I hadn’t heard all this stuff? I’ll still have unconscious biases and preconceptions, hence the challenge, but I can seek them out and question them. How else can I think about this? What are my options?

It would be both arrogant and foolish to try to discover God without leaning on any existing traditions or thinking—there are a lot of good books (and essays and blogs and sermons and a long list of others) out there waiting to be consulted and critiqued and absorbed. The difference is that now I won’t accept them uncritically but will instead examine them for biases I don’t agree with and perspectives that I do. Hopefully I’ll find ideas I can’t classify one way or the other and have to cogitate and ruminate on until I’ve absorbed or excreted them as well.

I’ve been thinking about my approach to faith and how I am unsure of anything anymore, and I’m wondering how to describe it. Am I confused? I don’t think so. Confusion implies some level of discomfort, and I’m remarkably mellow about this. Perhaps my attempts to learn mindfulness have taken hold enough that I’m simply noticing and wondering—exploring the possibilities. I can be obsessively curious, but this doesn’t even feel like that. It’s more of a happy, childlike curiosity that leads to exploration than an obsessive search. I’m motivated but not driven, now that I no longer believe in eternal damnation if I don’t get it exactly right.

We create God from our insecurities—John Calvin certainly did. If we believe a perfect God must require perfect adherence to a minutely defined code, that sounds more like anxiety talking than a honest assessment of reality. If God is at all like a loving human parent, then God appreciates and loves our sloppy attempts to please him and give him refrigerator-art-worthy scrawls. God has lots of magnets and a universe-sized refrigerator to put them on.

This ridiculously cute little guy was at the Rochester Pride Parade in June. I sent this pic to his person because I’m a geek and I like to share. :-)

Taken on my Canon RP with 24-105mm lens. Transferred wirelessly to Canon app on my phone and sent to doggo’s person’s phone via AirDrop. See, being a geek is a good thing.

I take lots of photos on my commute. Of course, my commute is along the Erie Canal.

This shot was a little tricky because I was trying to get a sharp, well composed image while the wind was blowing this little flower all over the frame—this is a surprisingly common problem when shooting outside in breeezy meadows and along canal paths. I think I mostly succeeded.

I have tons of photos, and I don’t post enough of them. Here’s one more:

I’m not sure if this is a dragonfly or a damselfly. At any rate, it landed on my ring while I was riding down Scottsville Road, and I tried to take a quick picture with my phone camera. I figured it would fly away if I tried to pull out my little Canon, and I was right—it took off in the process of taking this, probably because I was careening all over the shoulder.

August 4, 2023

This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind. I loved Mom. She had her own struggles, but her love and encouragement gave me the ability to have any deep relationships, even if they were few and far between. Losing her was awful.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that seeing God as Father (or Mother) hasn’t been easy or wholly positive for me. I’ve struggled all my life to feel anything about God other than fear, and that has changed only in the last several years. I wanted a dad more than anything, and I’m still looking.

Experiential

For all my rants about the intellectual difficulties I have with Evangelicalism, those mostly just piss me off. My struggles with the experiential side of my faith are what really hurt. I understand, no, I know in my bones why my dad pursued Pentecostalism when I was a kid—the deep longing for a tangible experience of God. When we are hurting, all theology and rhetoric become meaningless, and all we want is an assurance that there is Someone who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us with a white hot passion. Someone who holds us firmly in their arms and guards us from any fool who would do us harm. We want a mother and a father and a faithful friend whose tenderness dries all our tears and whose power shakes the foundations of the earth. We are the motherless child crying out in our loneliness and pain for someone to comfort us.

And all I hear is utter silence.

Where is the loving God we learned about in Sunday school? The one who is with us everywhere and in every trial? Why is it that we can see our breath more easily than the omnipotent and immanent God of the universe? How can I know that God is there? I want to trust my own experience, but I haven’t had any encounters with the divine, or what I thought were, in decades, and the ones I have had all have materialistic explanations. All the ecstatic experiences people describe can be accounted for by hormones and neurotransmitters. Sure, the same can be said for any human emotion—so how can I know these are genuine experiences and not just biology? Since I no longer believe in the inerrancy of scripture or trust the authority of the church that raised me, how can I know anything about God, much less know God?

Even so, I’m not coming to the question primarily as a skeptic but simply as one who has a hard time with feeling close to anyone or anything. I’ve never been much of a joiner and have always struggled with feeling a part of a group. I was bullied and isolated as a kid and a nerd in a small class of jocks and jock wannabes. Dad tried, but he had a pretty stunted emotional vocabulary—I learned to love and accept him as an adult, but our discussions stayed, for the most part, at a surface level. I was closer to Mom, and she is probably why I have managed to form any healthy relationships. My few romances were brief, intense, disorienting, and mostly nonexistent—I miserably pined for lost romances far longer than I was in any. My best relationships were with a few close friends, but then life would happen, they would move away, and even those would fade. I spent a lot of time as a lonely young man.

I’m left with a philosophical conviction of the existence of God but no real idea how to have a relationship with that God. If I’m going to spend eternity with this dude, I’d like to have a clue. Talking to God is mostly a rational, verbal affair for me. Talking with God is a dim hope. I’ve tried various forms of contemplative practice but found only the noise of my own brain—centering prayer with mostly chaos and not so much centering. The one bright spot is that I’ve learned I’m not alone—contemplative practice takes work and it takes time to learn to quiet the inner voices that rage back and forth. Heck, it takes time to learn to quiet the inner voices wondering what’s for dinner so I can focus on writing. I have a long way to go before I can feel I’m communing with God.

I am anticipating seeing the Barbie movie with a mixture of excitement and dread. It’s a Greta Gerwig film, which means it will be a sharp and funny satire of Barbie, Mattel, and our ridiculously consumerist culture. On the other hand, my name is Ken, and this is a movie about . . . Barbie. My nemesis. The name which, unwisely wielded, can move me to violence. My cross to bear.

My mother was Barbara or Barb, and I’ve had good friends named Barb, one of whom sometimes went by Barbie and would deck anyone who mentioned “Ken.” I was one of the lucky few who survived.

I’ve never been comfortable with the whole world of Barbie—her misshapen body and sex toy breasts, her maniacally upbeat attitude, and the relentless marketing to impressionable and vulnerable young girls looking for role models and wanting to fit in. My own daughters played some with Barbies alongside their far more realistic Fischer Price Little People, American Girls, and stuffed animals, and they put away their Barbies with the rest of their childhood toys. They didn’t grow up to be overdone fashion hounds or to chase boys—in fact, they’re both refreshingly practical and grounded, even if one collects too many tchotchkes for her own good.

Still, the material culture surrounding Barbie—attempting to numb the pain of meaninglessness—bothers me. No matter how many idealized role models Mattel and its ilk churn out, it’s all in the service of profit—even the attitude of Mattel executives tolerating a sharply critical movie because they also knew it will make them a shit-ton of money. This is consumerism feeding capitalism, manipulation masquerading as nurture. I’ve spent my life trying to become less attached to things, and Barbie is the ultimate material girl. I suppose it’s good to give young girls positive role models—I just wish they didn’t have permanently pointed toes to fit in those fabulous pumps.

And Ken, that glassy eyed bimbo whose only function is to establish Barbie’s heterosexuality while leaving his own in doubt. Ken, face it. You’d be happier if you just admitted that you were as gay as a maypole. At least your feet look human.

Is there a conclusion to all this? Well, I’ll probably end up plunking down my six bucks to see Barbie (I’ll watch it in an inexpensive neighborhood theater) and wash it down with a chaser of Oppenheimer, so I can feel good about watching serious cinema. And we’ll go on amusing ourselves to death. And Mattel will only get richer and richer until they rule the world. Where’s the hand basket, honey? We’re headed for hell.

Ken Redux

Watched the film—ended up paying eleven bucks, not six, but it was a cool nonprofit theater with all the kinds of people who got the satire. Boy, is Ken a bimbo. All six hundred thirty-seven of him. And poor Alan. America Ferrara (previously Ugly Betty, who wears glasses and isn’t ugly) is a mom who draws flawed Barbies, and Ryan Gosling (previously Lars with the Real Girl) is in love with a doll who becomes a real girl, but he’s still a doll. And plain girls become beautiful when they take off their glasses.

Barbie has an existential crisis and rallies all her incarnations to shake off their brainwashing and fight for their agency. Ken has an existential crisis and . . . he’s still a bimbo. A bimbo with hope for growth but still a bimbo. Without too many spoilers, Ken finds his masculinity. And patriarchy. And horses. Then he learns patriarchy is hard. And it’s not about horses.

The film really does celebrate Barbies in all their campy excess, and it really does savage consumerism and patriarchy, frequently with tongue in cheek, and is even compassionate to bland, accessory Ken and his attempts to find himself and be someone in his own right—all largely what I expected. It goes in so many directions and tackles so many issues in a film about a plastic plaything that I often found myself unsure of what it was trying to say. Perhaps that’s intentional, and it’s really trying to ask questions rather than answer them. It’s definitely more than a piece of fluff to be dismissed in one viewing, and I may watch it again once it comes to streaming, if only for the laughs (there were several genuine lol moments in the theater).

Oppenheimer still calls, and we need to watch that on IMAX for the full, boneshaking, earth-shattering effect. It’s interesting that a film that tackles ostensibly far heavier topics relies so much on visual impact to make its point—maybe calling Barbie just a plastic plaything is akin to calling an atomic bomb just a bunch of metal, wires, and enriched uranium. Should be an experience.

This is about my State of Faith project but not actually part of it—kind of a meta-post. I’m not entirely done with the deconstruction part, but I’ve documented the snot out of why I’m no longer even Evangelical adjacent and maybe not even Christian. I want to start writing about something positive—what I’m constructing now. I hesitate to call it reconstruction because I don’t want to simply replace one rickety system with another. I do want to talk about my evolving concepts of God and the transcendent, and the hope I’m finding there.

I don’t yet have a lot to write about, or I would have put it in the main blog feed, but I feel a need to be positive and hopeful. One reason I write is that it forces me to think clearly and helps me focus and process. I supposed that’s actually two or three reasons, but we’ll just call that a collective.

Some stuff I’ve been doing to help me process:

• I’ve read some good books by Rachel Held Evans, and I’m working on some more. Damn, she left us too soon.
• Learning about Process Theology, sometimes called ORT or Open and Relational Theology. In a related vein, I’ve done some reading on Philosophy of Religion.
• Reading and listening to more Catholic and Jewish thought. Richard Rohr is the gateway drug for a lot of Evangelicals, and I’ve both read his books and am moving on to works on contemplative practice and writers like Thomas Merton.
• Going to spiritual direction with a Roman Catholic sister. We’re both learning a lot about each other's respective worlds.

Longer term, I think ORT holds a lot of promise. I want to read God Can’t by Thomas Jay Ord, which is written as an introductory text. I’ve read and heard enough of his work to make me look forward to reading the book. God’s perfection and immutability are central to Reformed thought, and I’ve come to see their understanding of those as seriously flawed, because they lead to a god who cannot need or even respond in any way to humans, a god who cannot feel or share our pain. Calvinists have treated Jesus’ incarnation as fire insurance against divine wrath eternal conscious torment and lost reverence and thankfulness for God’s immanence and desire to be with us, and it becomes clear that Reformed notions of perfection and grace are at loggerheads and that their solution of holding those two in tension seems naive or even deliberately ignorant. Those concepts need to be redefined away from their Platonic origins to something that fits better with reality as we know it now. I don’t believe that’s cultural relativism—it’s intellectual honesty.

I’m slowly processing how this all works out in practice, but simply acknowledging that Calvinism’s Maximum Entity isn’t a God worthy of our worship is a huge first step in the right direction.

July 13, 2023

I’ve been working on this for ages, and I need to publish something, so here it is. I’ll likely come back to this post and refine it—it certainly isn’t in a final form, but it is a good start.

Atonement

I could be accused of burying the lede here, because changing my view of atonement, actually, just learning there were alternative views of atonement, was the first domino that fell and knocked down a whole series of beliefs.

Atonement is simply how we become at one with God (at-one-ment). More specifically, it is how the life and work of Jesus achieved oneness between God and humanity. It’s not terribly hard to define, but it’s a bear to explain. There are multiple atonement theories, some of which are compatible, some of which vary in the details, and some of which flat out contradict each other. Explaining atonement requires an understanding of the concepts of sin and punishment (especially hell), both of which are complex and nuanced, having evolved over literally thousands of years. Even within the confines of scripture they are referred to by multiple terms and in multiple languages. What began as the words of a nomadic middle eastern herdsman, speaking ancient Aramaic has passed through Hebrew and Greek to English over multiple millennia. Concepts which can be expressed in a single word in one language and culture may require paragraphs to explain in another, especially when they encompass/address issues of ultimate meaning, eternity, the beginning and end of time, and the divine. Easy peasey, eh?

The theory I was taught as a child was Penal Substitutionary Atonement (sometimes abbreviated as PSA). It was taught most famously by John Calvin, who was trained as a lawyer, and holds that we are separated from God fundamentally by a legal debt—we have broken God’s law and must pay for those infractions (aka sins). It is accepted unquestioningly by the majority of Evangelicals, most of whom are completely unaware that it came from Calvin and his infant sprinkling ilk or that it is only about 500 years old, out of a Christian history of roughly two millennia. There is close to zero chance that they know it is only one of many atonement theories and even less chance that they know what any of those alternatives are. I know this because, even though I was a theologically sophisticated layperson, I didn’t know that there were alternatives myself until my mid-fifties.

In order to understand what Calvin was claiming, it would be helpful first to unpack a couple of concepts:

• Hell—More generally, this is the concept of punishment, with hell being the state or place of punishment for sin after death, possibly eternal. The earliest notions of our post-life condition were simple nonexistence or perhaps existence as shadows of our livings selves in an equally shadowy underworld. Even in the New Testament, Gehenna was a vague metaphor referencing a constantly burning garbage dump in the valley of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem. In Reformed thought (aka Calvinism), this developed into eternal conscious torment—a place of agonizing, never-ending torture, perhaps in literal flames, inflicted by God himself. Some, seeing hell as the natural consequence of our decisions rather than of God’s divine anger, define it simply as eternal separation from God, devoid of any love or even contact with another being, a la C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Not a happy place in any definition, but also not the hierarchical kingdom of pain ruled over demons with pitchforks envisioned in Dante’s Inferno. Dante was imaginative but not at all literal. And the fact is, scripture isn’t clear as to the nature of heaven or hell, other than that one is good and one is bad. It’s not even clear if hell is a place or state, whether it is temporal or eternal, or who is condemned to go there—it could be people who have rejected God, or it could be the accuser and his fallen angels, if those are actual beings and not metaphors themselves. It seems all we can do is imagine what our eternal existence, might be like and leave it to God to know the specifics. All else is simply speculation.
• Sin—I learned growing up that sin was simply an infraction of God’s law, a definition that fit nicely with PSA. Sin is often translated in the Septuagint as hamartía, that is, missing the mark, as in archery. This is also the most common word used in the NT. Similar to hell, the concept of sin developed though the OT. Several words are used for sin, which denote violating a norm, incurring a debt. At this point, suffice it to say that a definition of sin requires a whole lot more detail and nuance than we got in Sunday school or even Sunday sermons, and salvation is far more than a cross bridging a chasm.

I grew up being told again and again that Jesus died to save me from my sins. As I grew older, I learned this was a very particular kind of saving—Jesus took the punishment for me (and all the elect) breaking the law of God. Any infraction of this law resulted in eternal separation from God and torment in hell. Only Jesus, the Son of God, could live a sinless life and substitute his righteousness and suffering in death for my totally depraved life and those of all who believed in him and accepted his free gift of salvation. Note that the salvation in question had moved from saving me from my sins to saving me from hell—not at all the same thing. Since all Christians continued to sin after being saved by the blood of the Lamb, the Bible must have gotten that bit wrong.

Well, what if it didn’t? What if we didn’t need Jesus to intercede for us before the harshest of judges but instead for him to save us from our sins? What if living as a follower of Christ was less about avoiding sin and more about loving God with all our being and loving our neighbors as ourselves? Could Jesus’ work have somehow changed how we lived our lives rather than rejiggered the legal calculus of the universe? Frankly, that seems to be the much tougher problem and vastly more helpful to our existence in the here and now rather than in the by and by.

Scripture says that Jesus conquered sin and death, and I suppose that could be interpreted to mean he was God’s whipping boy¹ if you turn your head and squint just right. Seems to me more likely that he did what scripture says—he broke the power of sin (that which harms our relationship with God) and death (eternal separation from God or maybe nonexistence) over us and replaced them with joy, purpose, and shalom, that is, deep peace and flourishing, and possibly eternal life with God. I can only guess what that actually means.

August 4, 2023

Experiential Problems with Faith

This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind. I loved Mom. She had her own struggles, but her love and encouragement gave me the ability to have any deep relationships, even if they were few and far between. Losing her was awful.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that seeing God as Father (or Mother) hasn’t been easy or wholly positive for me. I’ve struggled all my life to feel anything about God other than fear, and that has changed only in the last several years. I wanted a dad more than anything, and I’m still looking.

Introduction

I’ve been in a near constant state of gradual spiritual evolution over the last 40 years (since college), a process which reached a turning point around 2016. Even though I was more comfortable calling myself “Evangelical adjacent” than Evangelical, Evangelicals were still my people. I went to an Evangelical college, listened to Evangelical music, and grew up in a church that anyone from the outside would have called Evangelical. My discomfort was with the anti-intellectualism and vestigial fundamentalism I saw in too many Evangelical churches, and I was Reformed, definitely not Fundamentalist. Those folks were nuts or at least the unwashed masses.

I thought carefully about my beliefs and nuanced them when I learned they didn’t comport with reality. I was distressed by the growing overlap between my people and the Republican Party—a lot of them even thought the Republicans were wishy-washy and needed an infusion of real conservatism. I, on the other hand, voted almost exclusively for Democrats, although I remained officially unaffiliated with any political party. I wanted to be a bridge or at least a moderating influence. I believed in compassion and read Tony Campolo and Ron Sider and Shane Claiborne and thought the Emergent church movement was the bees knees—I was a Progressive Evangelical™.

After the 2016 election, I was one of those hoping vainly that 81% of my people really hadn’t voted for Donald Trump or at least that they had done so with their noses firmly plugged. Sadly, I was wrong. While Evangelicalism may have started as an attempt to soften the rough edges of fundamentalism, the fundamentalists had won. Even more, this could no longer be called a movement where faith drove actions—it was clearly a movement where the safety and comfort of the tribe were paramount. What would Jesus do? Carry an AK47 and blow away bad guys. Loving your enemies was for liberals and wimps. I saw the fruit of their faith, and the fruit was rotten.

In the midst of processing the 2016 election, I was learning new paradigms for viewing faith and scripture—a few examples will suffice:

• Penal substitutionary atonement was only one of many views and a late one at that. It also led to a really toxic view of God as The Great Punisher rather than as a loving father or mother, depending on where you looked in scripture. Mother hen works too.
• A view of scripture as inerrant¹ simply couldn’t hold up. In the first place, what did inspiration even mean? I could buy that the holy breath of God’s spirit infused the many writers with wisdom, but dictating the actual words, all the actual words, was implausible. An omniscient God would have done better proofreading.
• Would the God of truth mess with natural law to perform miracles? Yes, it might be loving, but it would also mislead us as to the reality of the world, wouldn’t it? Would God give wisdom to a chosen few and let the confused masses go to hell? Or did we need to filter our data to exclude miracles—“well, that’s about a miraculous number of standard deviations from the mean”?
• Discoveries in psychology have led to materialistic explanations for much that we’ve thought of as spiritual experience. These could simply be the physical mechanisms by which a spiritual experience occurs, or could we have been over-spiritualizing—indulging our hyperactive agency detectors?²
• What is God’s nature? What is the meaning of perfection? Are we stuck on ideas of perfection from Plato, 2,300 years old? Any belief that leads to the conclusion that our ideal bodies would be spheres (yup, both Plato and Origen) is suspect to me, and I’m thinking we need to tweak that one a bit.

This is a work in progress, and there is (already) more to come. At the very least, it will help me to clarify my somewhat jumbled mass of thoughts, although don’t anyone take that as license to label me as confused—I’ma fight you on that one. This is about seeing how my thoughts fit together in a unified whole or as unified as I can manage, not flailing to find the lifeboat of Approved Knowledge. Too many people are sure they know The Truth. If there is anything I’ve learned, it’s that we should be careful of saying anything is certain and even more careful of any person who says they are certain of All The Important Truths. I’ve never seen that work out well.

The Sin of Certainty

It has been suggested that selfishness is humanity’s original sin—viewing our own desires as more worthy than the needs of others. I’d like to suggest (along with Pete Enns) that the original sin of theology is certainty—believing that we can know anything beyond doubt regarding God, that we can somehow make God manageable by precisely defining the attributes of the divine. That is not to claim we can say nothing about God but that it is an act of hubris to suppose that we can somehow constrain the transcendent.

I come from a people who love to think carefully and in great detail about God. Actually, they like to think in great detail about almost anything. They believe logic is boffo, and nuance is the bees knees. And they love to use words, lots of words, to communicate their very logical thoughts.

I honestly appreciate the care that Reformed folks take with theology and their devotion to getting it right, but many fall into the trap of worshipping their theology rather than the living God and Creator of the universe. They turn a loving relationship with a divine person with into intellectual assent to the supremacy of the maximum entity.³ If they use the right words, all the right words, they can somehow make God comprehensible and overcome their terror at confronting the infinite. Maybe we need God to be terrible and awesome and loving and forgiving. In the words of C. S. Lewis, Aslan isn’t safe, but he is good.

I often say I grew up Evangelical adjacent. Well, ever since the fundamentalists ran roughshod over the more thoughtful pockets of Evangelicalism, they have taken certainty even further by rigidly defining a caricature of God and removing all nuance. Their theology has become a bludgeon with which to smite their enemies and keep the doubters in line. It’s a stick with a carrot of eternal bliss. Oh, and the stick is eternal conscious torment in hell for anyone with unapproved beliefs. And if you were once one of the Chosen (well, faking it, because God protects the salvation of those who are Real Christians) and have chosen to abandon God’s Eternal Truth, you have committed the Unforgivable Sin, and not even the Holy Spirit can return you to the Narrow Way by the Work of the Blood of the Lamb. It’s a scary place to be, and some poor souls fleeing the carnage believe that is where they are headed.

If I’m done with Evangelicalism, why write about this at all? Why not just chuck it and be done? There are several reasons:

• I haven’t said I don’t believe in Christianity but that I don’t know how to believe in it—I am agnostic, not antagonistic. Scripture may well be inspired and authoritative, if not inerrant—I just need to find a new basis for believing that.
• I believe, at minimum, that there is a God because I can’t conceive of a universe without a first cause or creation without a Creator.
• From what I see in the world, I believe God is most likely good—could altruism exist in a world created by an evil deity? Possible, but not probable.
• I want to be like Jesus.
• Christianity is still the language I know—it’s the only coherent way I know to talk about transcendence—and I’m not giving that up, even as my understanding changes drastically.
• My deconstruction has proceeded over such a long period of time that I need to define exactly what it is that I have rejected, if for no other reason, so I understand it myself. Explaining in writing forces me to think clearly.
• While I’ve seen Christians behave horribly, I’ve also seen Christians do enormous good. It’s not that I believe Christians are all bad, just that the Christian exceptionalism that believes the Church is somehow immune to human failings is full of shit.

Let’s look at the ancient words of a mentor to a young pastor:

2 Timothy 2:15 (New Testament: A Translation):
Hasten to present yourself proven to God, a worker unashamed, cutting the word of truth straight.

I don’t take this as Paul’s exhortation to Timothy to be really good at apologetics. I think Paul is encouraging Timothy to do good work and to be intellectually honest—no shortcuts or laziness, no manipulation of his flock. If I’m going to believe anything about the transcendent and eternal, I’m going to endeavor to do my best work. I don’t wish to mislead myself or anyone else with sloppy thinking or halfhearted actions.

Or this, where Paul sends his guidance to a community he cares for and loves:

Philippians 2:12-13 (New Testament: A Translation):
Thus, my beloved ones, just as you have always been obedient (not as if only in my presence, but a great deal more so in my absence), work out your own salvation in reverence and trembling, for it is God who is making active within you both the willing and the working of that which is dearly desirable.

One’s approach to the divine shouldn’t be flippant or slapdash—it needs to be done carefully and with reverence for the person and subject you are approaching. We can hope that God will honor that by giving us the will and the ability to become more holy ourselves each day.

Sooooo . . . where am I going?

• First, I want to document and discuss my deconstruction from both intellectual and experiential perspectives. This has been a long process, really more of a spiritual journey than deconstruction, per se, with roots all the way back to my teens and 20s.
• I don’t expect this to be a process where I arrive at some destination and sit there, fat and happy. I hope to continue to evolve and grow as I learn and experience more, in a process of reconstruction. Or maybe this is all one long pilgrimage, and the last few years have just been a particularly active period of change.
• Lastly, I want to discuss the idea of faith as hope, as it is described in Hebrews 11:1. This is one of many paradigms or perspectives I’ve been exploring as new ways to understand belief and faith, and I’m finding hope and peace as I move from the relative security of the beliefs I was raised with.

This is a work in progress, and I’m posting as I flesh out my basic outline, and not necessarily in order. I’m creating an archive where posts are arranged in a logical progression, so stay tuned. I don’t know where this will lead, but I have enough structure, material, and commitment to follow this arc through to its logical conclusion. After that, we’ll see what comes next. Maybe more cat pictures.

Deconstruction

“Deconstruction” has become overused and weighed down with cultural baggage, but I still find it a useful concept. I am disassembling pieces of my spiritual heritage and the framework I’ve built to determine what can support belief and what needs to be discarded or renovated (made new again). This isn’t hipster indulgence (as if—I’m 61 years old), as it is sometimes labelled by religious curmudgeons and the overly certain, but an in-depth analysis of beliefs I’ve inherited and a thorough exploration of alternatives.

There is a sense in which I didn’t deconstruct my faith at all, but because of a weak foundation, it collapsed under its own weight. Once I came to understand key doctrines, like the inerrancy of scripture and penal substitutionary atonement, were untenable, secondary doctrines that relied on them began to crumble like a dynamited building until all that remained was a pile of rubble. Rachel Held Evans called this the unravelling of her faith⁴—tugging on one troublesome thread unknotted the whole garment into a jumble of loose yarn. More technically, this can be described as a collapse of plausibility structures⁵—having left the Evangelical bubble, Evangelical theology became unsupportable of its own without me consciously deconstructing anything.

Whatever the metaphor, there are elements of my received tradition and personal faith that need to be replaced. For some, a patch and some TLC will do. Others I’ll need to discard, no matter how I’ve grown into their familiar shape. An old shoe may feel comfortable but give out when I need it most. Better to break in a new pair than to turn an ankle or slip and fall.

Intellectual & Rational Issues

I intuitively organize my issues with Evangelicalism and my inherited faith into intellectual and experiential pots. I’m a pretty intellectual guy, and the majority of my issues fall into that category, which I’ve further divided into the nature of revelation, the authority of scripture, and philosophical problems.

Revelation

What can we know about God? As the first cause and creator of the material universe, God is, by definition, transcendent, and as such, not observable as an object in our experience. Transcendence means the idea of God is necessarily an abstract concept and hard to get our heads around—if we could understand God as something in our experience, God wouldn’t be transcendent. There are parts of God that are necessarily outside our experience and any experience we ever could have and can only be understood, partially, by metaphors, using objects within our experience. We describe God as father, mother, son, savior, almighty, creator, spirit, wind, shepherd, king, and a thousand other familiar ideas, which can only hint at the full and true nature of God.

What it comes down to is this: at best, we can understand only bits and pieces of God, that are limited to partial manifestations of God within the material universe or what someone with knowledge of God tells us. God must be revealed to us.

Some attributes of God can be gleaned from observing and thinking about the world around us (general revelation or natural theology)—I believe God exists as a creator because I cannot conceive of a universe without a first cause—but that is limited to generalities. I believe God is probably good based on the good I see in the world, but the doctrine of the Trinity would never occur to me, as it were, out of the blue.

Specifics must come from special revelation—God communicating directly to people. (That is, unless dogs can know the Lord. Cats clearly are demon spawn.) I have not had experiences that I can point to as direct communication from God or empirical observations of God’s presence. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to or haven’t tried, and I’ve had plenty of experiences that are consistent with a loving, good, and creative God. However, none of my experiences has compelled me to believe—I would have loved it if they had.

Many others claim to have had direct experiences of God in prayer, religious ritual, and miracles, and I’m not questioning that they have had these experiences. To accept those for myself as indirect evidence of the divine, however, I must first trust their witnesses as objectively true or sufficiently persuasive for me to believe. Christians have an entire library of testimony to the existence and nature of God in scripture, and to take that received tradition as evidence I must also trust those I received it from and its writers as reliable witnesses.

Authority of Scripture

In Reformed Christianity, Scripture is the single most important revelation of the nature and work of God, and if one takes sola scriptura seriously, it is the only true revelation of God.

All Evangelicals hold a high view of scripture, and I come from the Reformed tradition, which holds to Sola Scriptura—scripture trumps all other sources of revelation and truth. Most Reformed folks also hold to some form of inerrancy—the idea that scripture is without error, although that has been nuanced some:

• Scripture is without error in the autographs (original written form).
• Scripture is without error in all it affirms: this can exclude simple factual disagreements in different accounts and accounts of events which are descriptive rather than prescriptive.

However, I learned that an inerrant view of scripture was not the only way to view inspiration and one that didn’t hold up well. Scripture simply had too many contradictions on its face and was clearly told from too many perspectives. While I’ve had to reject inerrancy, I still believe scripture has a lot to teach us. I’m left, however, with more questions than answers.

• As discussed above, what is the nature of revelation, especially general revelation (natural theology) vs. special revelation (scripture)?
• I believe God exists, but how do we trust divine revelation—how do we know it really is from God? What does it mean for scripture to be inspired?
• If scripture is both inspired and a thoroughly human document⁶, how do we read it? Certainly not as Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
• How do we read from the perspective of the Biblical writers and their intended audiences? How do we avoid flattening scripture into a 21st century message to 21st century, white, middle-class Americans?
• How can we minimize confirmation bias and reading long held interpretations and cultural assumptions back into scripture? In other words, how do we read scripture again for the first time?
• What is objectivity? We are finite beings with finite perspectives—how do we take on the perspectives of others? Does a truly objective interpretation exist? Would it be helpful even if it did?

My faith rested on scripture and what I read there. We read scripture, recited scripture, interpreted scripture, studied the minutiae of scripture. Our carefully considered worldview was based on the truth of scripture. Every action we took was held up to the mirror of scripture.

There were hard passages, but we responded with nuance and respect for the primacy of the word of God. I was schooled, catechized, and steeped in scripture. When I hung out with the Baptists, I memorized scripture. Certainly, there were questions, but we had well constructed answers, which revealed the depth and beauty of divine revelation in its pages.

For most of my life, my answers to those questions came from received tradition. I grew up believing in God—Christianity was the air I breathed, and belief effortlessly infused my mind. Scripture was the inspired word of God, which taught us all we needed to know for eternal life. It was something I did without conscious thought, even as I learned, and my beliefs became more mature and nuanced. All of that, however, rested on a foundation of trust in my teachers, regardless of whether that was their stated role.

I was taught that scripture—sola scriptura—was the highest form of revelation. We could use our reason to understand scripture, but its truth trumped all church tradition and presumed encounters with the divine. Popes could speak ex cathedra, and their word was infallible, but we were Reformed, and we would have none of that. The Bible was the inspired, infallible, inerrant word of God, and that was what we believed, the strong foundation on which we built our faith. All else was distraction, the wisdom of man, vainglorious striving.

What happened, then, when the witnesses I trusted behaved badly? Could my trust in scripture stand?

As I grew older and saw more clearly the social and political biases of the church in which I was raised, my beliefs grew more and more distant from those of my childhood. I believe that was a worthy maturation, and it enabled me to hold on to a form of those beliefs well into my 50s. I came to see pillars of my faith tradition, especially a penal substitutionary view of atonement, were not the only way to believe—there were historical options I had never been taught. I had never been exposed to whole strains of Christianity, like Orthodox, Catholic, and mainline Protestant positively and even taught they were heretical. As I read and met Christians from other traditions, I was impressed with their commitment and even piety. These were people I’d been taught were liberals and not true Christians, because they twisted scripture, or they didn’t believe Jesus was God. That, or they were legalists, they worshipped Mary, or they were even John’s whore of Babylon. The people I met didn’t fit these distorted stereotypes, and I had to question the wisdom of the people who had taught them to me.

As the poor behavior of my people became more and more pronounced, I had to question the foundations of their profession—was this actual faith, or was it tribal affinity? Were they trying to be like Jesus, or were they just being American conservatives? If character really didn’t matter, as it appeared, what did? Was their conservatism an outgrowth of their faith in God and a reflection of the character of Christ, or was their religious practice an outgrowth of their accustomed way of life and loyalty to the Republican Party?

I have to believe it’s a mix. My people sincerely wanted to be good, but they were blind to how much of their idea of good simply supported their way of life. Liberal ideas like redistributive justice disrupted their comfortable suburban lifestyles and challenged their enlightened sense of noblesse oblige. Are we really good when we give a tiny portion of our wealth to aid the poor or when we blame our problems on the moral decay of immigrants? How is that being like Jesus, who taught us to love the stranger and exalted hated half-breed foreigners as exemplars in his parables?

If I couldn’t trust those who had taught me that scripture was the literal word of God, how could I hold a belief so counterintuitive, so apparently fantastical—that a transcendent, omnipotent being had created all that exists?

Not only was my trust in scripture weakened by the abysmal witness of Evangelicals; reading outside my Evangelical bubble showed me much of what they had taught me was simplistic or just wrong. I learned that much of the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures was likely ahistorical—the children of Abraham weren’t a persecuted minority in Egypt who were bred as slaves but a neighboring Canaanite tribe which became large and difficult and were kicked out by the Egyptians, because they didn’t play well with others. While the gnostic gospels were obvious (albeit ancient) fabrications, core doctrines like the trinity still were unsettled (see eastern church), and none of the gospels were written by apostles. The documentary hypothesis was not liberal hooey but a good faith attempt to understand how the Books of Moses had come to be—oral traditions which had solidified over time into written texts, likely compiled during the Babylonian captivity. The Old Testament had excellent textual integrity from the time it was first written down but was composed in a long process of compilation, borrowing, and revision to support the message each evangelist wanted to deliver. Peter, Paul, and James had real theological differences and argued like cats on a hot summer night. Some canonical epistles were pseudepigraphical, and Paul wasn’t the author of Hebrews. It might have been Apollos—no one knows.

Slavery in Egypt, God’s miraculous salvation, the exodus, and the conquest of Canaan have been the core of Jewish identity and theology for millennia, but now they are revealed as a tribal oral tradition which told history from the perspective of a badly behaved playground bully? And the doctrine of the trinity was a compromise report by a committee? And the Eastern and Western churches still didn’t agree on the nature of the Holy Spirit?⁷

Scripture was sounding less like a holy book dictated by God and more like an unholy mess banged together in a long, difficult, painful process by very fallible, and sometimes distasteful, men, mostly. It was, in short, very human.

For Jews, Catholics, and even Wesleyans, this is hardly news. They have long argued with scripture, and scriptural commentary in the various Targums and Mishnah have nearly the same weight as the inspired word itself. And what does inspiration mean anyway? Not settled. Not simple. Not inerrancy. Even inerrancy has been nuanced and stretched until it means very little, by people trying desperately to hold on to the word in the face of mountains of contrary evidence. This is what happens when evangelicals attempt to be intellectually honest.

Philosophical Problems

Philosophy, in particular, is difficult for me, because I have very little formal training in the subject. I’m trying to be as accurate and fair as possible, but don’t be surprised if I get some details wrong. Oh, I’m also bringing in some Greek words, and I’m bound to screw that up.

I am not a philosopher, and sometimes philosophy’s intricate parsing of words and ideas really can feel like obsessing on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—it may be an interesting question, but it has little or no bearing on our lived experience. However, philosophy also tackles questions with concrete implications for how we live our lives, which was its original goal—this wasn’t simply the love of knowledge or disputation (annoying ancient Greeks aside) but of wisdom, the practical application of knowledge and experience. Both philosophy and theology seek to address questions of transcendence and meaning (Who are we? Who is God? Why are we here?) along with more tangible / concrete concerns (How do I love God? How do I love my neighbor? Paper or plastic? Is this storm bad luck or divine judgement?).

The study of anything simultaneously so broad and so tangible and intimately connected to living our daily lives is bound to lead to hard questions. While the questions alone haven’t caused me to reject the tradition I was raised in, many of the answers I’ve heard from current Evangelicals fail miserably, presenting a contradictory and bleak view of life and a misanthropic God. I confess to adopting some of philosophy’s stance of radical skepticism, at least as regards the divine. I don’t mean that belief is impossible but that I need to reexamine mine from the roots (Greek: radix, radices) up. What can we really know about God? Does God exist? What is revelation? Can it be trusted? Which beliefs are tradition? Which are conjecture? Which are just plain ludicrous?

I’ve struggled to be accurate and intellectually honest in writing about those failings, partly because I have no formal training in philosophy and partly because these are difficult concepts to communicate, even more so to communicate why they matter to me.

The Nature of God

Evangelicals (especially Calvinists) like to define the attributes of God, most of which can also be called perfections:

• Omnipotence—God is all powerful. God can do anything except that which is logically inconsistent (e.g., making a rock so heavy that they⁸ cannot lift it⁹) or inconsistent with God’s perfect nature (e.g., lying).
• Omniscience—God knows all that occurs in creation, including all of our thoughts. God knows all truth.
• Eternality—God has always existed. In fact, God existed before time, if before time is even a thing.¹⁰
• Transcendence—God (or parts of God) exists outside our reality and is unconstrained by it or its physical laws. God is not contained by any kind of reality but rather contains¹¹ or surpasses reality.¹²
• Immanence—kinda the opposite of transcendence. God is intimately part of our existence (while simultaneously transcending it). Like I said, difficult concepts.
• Non-contingency—God is the source of all creation and relies on nothing else for existence. God was not made and cannot be destroyed.
• Perfection—This can refer either to God’s general perfection (i.e., the perfection of each of God’s attributes) or to God’s inviolable goodness. God is good, all of God’s actions are good, and God enacts good for all of creation.

As interpreted in much of Evangelical thought, these attributes can lead to viewing God as a maximum entity rather than a loving, personal being, and a major theme of (good) theology is to nuance God’s attributes to avoid conflicts or inconsistencies. A key point is the meaning of perfection—does it simply mean infinite or maximal, or is more about wholeness? For instance, classical theology takes God’s non-contingency to mean that God is absolutely immutable¹³ or unchanging, but this robs God of any ability to interact with creation or, heaven forbid, change their mind.¹⁴ An immutable God cannot feel our pain or desire a relationship with us. How can this square with a belief in God’s mercy or love? A God who can’t feel or respond to our pain is hollow and barren, hardly worthy of our worship.

The Problem of Evil

Any discussion of the existence and nature of God must take seriously the problem of evil. If God is the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenvolent being of classical theology, then how does this perfectly good deity cause or, at minimum, tolerate the presence of evil in creation?

Theodicies comprise an entire branch of theology devoted to answering how a good God and evil can coexist. The subject is far too complex and deep for me to cover here, and it may be the single knottiest problem in all of theology; however, I can’t simply ignore it. Briefly, evil can be classified as moral (caused by human actions) and natural (due to events in the natural world). Some events may be atrocious or painful but bring about a greater good (e.g. the pain of childbirth)—these are called instrumental evil. In other cases, on balance, the world would have been better off had the events never occurred—these are called true or gratuitous evils. Even if one only looks at true, moral evils, why would a loving, omnipotent God allow these to happen? Why allow pain and suffering at all, much less without any redeeming purpose? While the formal argument concludes that God cannot exist, I questioned more whether God was good.

I believe God exists because I can’t conceive of a world without a first cause, and the problem of evil doesn’t particularly weaken that belief. It does make me believe that we need to think very differently about God’s attributes and perfections. Does omnipotence require absolute sovereignty over all events, or do we have free will? Does omniscience require complete knowledge of future events? If God is sovereign and omniscient, how are we responsible for our actions? Is our agency a higher good to God than sovereignty?

In order to maintain the ideal of a perfectly good deity, Evangelicals, especially Calvinists, have imagined a bizarre parody of a loving god, who is also so holy as to be unable to tolerate the presence of even the smallest flaw in his creation. In counterpoint, they have constructed a view of humanity as so totally depraved that they are entirely responsible for the evil they suffer and deserve eternal conscious torment inflicted by the same god. And it is only by the grace of this graceless god that they will be spared.

Frankly, this god scared the shit out of me, so much so that, well into my forties, I was periodically reduced to screaming “please god, no no no” into my pillow at the thought of eternity. My choice seemed to be spending a never ending existence with a god who, at the least provocation, would have tormented me eternally or, if I was lucky, annihilated my soul. Actually, less than the least provocation because, if I was unlucky, this god would have determined before creating me or anything else that he would torment me eternally. Why create in sixfold goodness¹⁵ knowing that you would later declare your creation fallen, then zap that sucker to hell? That seems a bit pointless or even megalomaniacal and not at all like a loving and patient mother or father.

I eventually came to a belief that God was loving and good, but I first had to abandon Evangelical and Reformed ideas about the nature of God and what was accomplished in Christ’s work of atonement (at-one-ment). Their version of God only made sense if I stuck strictly to their postulates and abandoned all my intuitions about what a loving God should be.

This Evangelical view of God and evil either leads to or enables some awful beliefs, weaponized by demagogues in times of tragedy. They see the literal hand of God in tornados and tsunamis and earthquakes and say, “This tragedy was God’s punishment for <insert scapegoat here>’s sinful ways”, or “God is calling you to repent of <sin de jour or fundraising rant>”. But what of the collateral damage? Do innocent children deserve to die because God was ticked off about the “gay agenda”? Would God wipe out the homes of the poor to teach a lesson to the rich? That isn’t the God that Jesus showed us.

There are better ways to understand the problem. Open and relational theology (ORT), also known as Process Theology (developed by Alfred North Whitehead), posits that God can be affected by external events and that, while God may be more powerful than any other being, God may not be infinitely powerful. In answer to the question of evil, ORT answers, because God can’t. Maybe exercising absolute sovereignty over every event would destroy the purpose of creation. Maybe God’s power over humanity is persuasive rather than coercive. Boy, does that get Evangelicals hot under the collar, but it may be the best answer I’ve heard so far.

Materialism or Physicalism vs. Dualism

This gets a bit technical, so first, a few Greek words (from a non-theologian):

• Sṓma (also sárx): the physical body, flesh. Sárx can be used of a corpse.
• Psyché: soul, life. The life force which leaves the body at death, that which transcends the physical. Note: this does not refer to the mind.
• Pneúma: spirit, literally breath. This is very similar to soul but also implies that which can commune with the divine.

The usages of these terms has changed over time, but these, more or less, were their meanings in the first century, when Platonists ruled the earth¹⁶.

There is a growing consensus that consciousness is an emergent¹⁷ property of the human nervous system rather than a distinct, metaphysical entity—it is different from the physical nervous system but still arises from it. This implies that mind/body dualism, which asserts that the soul and body are distinct and separable, represents a misunderstanding of our nature(s). If consciousness is, at its root, a material or physical property, then what of the soul, to say nothing of the spirit? Is a human endowed with a soul at conception? At birth? Or does it develop as a child matures? If consciousness is an emergent property of the physical body, then can our soul go to eternal bliss apart from it? How would a new, heavenly body be essentially (of the same essence) the same person I am now?

Our theology was birthed in an era dominated by philosophical ideas inherited from the ancient Greeks. How must it be revised in light of what we’ve learned in the past hundred years? Even if scripture isn’t consistently dualistic (it’s not), the idea of a temporal body and eternal soul has so infused our thinking that we assume it without pause.

Miracles

This is a tough one because we all want a God who can intervene on our behalf. I mean, what good is a God who is all powerful but can’t or won’t use that power to give us a hand? What are miracles? Are they God benevolently helping people out of a tough spot? Altering natural laws? What if favoring one person harms another? Be careful of what you wish for, the folks tales tell us—unintended consequences lurk behind our wishes, and they can be far worse than our original plight.

If we define miracles as events which occur or appear to occur outside normal physical laws, laws created by God, then what does that imply for our ability to know those laws? An important concept in Christian theology is that God is entirely truthful and reliable, and scripture tells us we can know God by observing creation. Altering natural laws in special cases feels like fudging the data. Lying. Can miracles confuse or mislead people as to what those laws are? Some people see this simply as wisdom being given to the faithful and the wicked going astray, which implies God lies to the damned. I believe the God of truth would find that abhorrent. And if one of our purposes on earth is to glorify God by learning and discovering the nature of creation (which I believe scripture teaches), would miracles inhibit our ability to understand creation correctly? If creation speaks of the glory of God, wouldn’t God want it to speak truthfully and accurately?

If God won’t miraculously mess with the physical world, and our soul is an emergent property of our physical body, does that preclude God communicating to humanity through what we call our soul or spirit? Is the metaphysical or supernatural truly outside the natural world or simply outside our current knowledge? Are there mechanisms within the bounds of natural law that we do not yet understand and that God uses to communicate with us directly?

Perhaps God can interact with the physical universe in ways that are miraculous but not supernatural. As one small example, quantum indeterminacy has been proposed as an alternative that would allow for divine intervention that didn’t contravene natural laws. We already know that matter doesn’t behave in entirely deterministic ways at the quantum level—is it a stretch to believe that God could shape that indeterminacy to cause events which appear miraculous but operate within natural laws? Or to speak to us in even the most mundane ways?

What if the miraculous is not necessarily supernatural? Perhaps God is both more subtly and more actively and intimately involved in our lives than popular conceptions would suggest.

Atonement

I could be accused of burying the lede here, because changing my view of atonement, actually, just learning there were alternative views of atonement, was the first domino that fell and knocked down a whole series of beliefs.

Atonement is simply how we become at one with God (at-one-ment). More specifically, it is how the life and work of Jesus achieved oneness between God and humanity. It’s not terribly hard to define, but it’s a bear to explain. There are multiple atonement theories, some of which are compatible, some of which vary in the details, and some of which flat out contradict each other. Explaining atonement requires an understanding of the concepts of sin and punishment (especially hell), both of which are complex and nuanced, having evolved over literally thousands of years. Even within the confines of scripture they are referred to by multiple terms and in multiple languages. What began as the words of a nomadic middle eastern herdsman, speaking ancient Aramaic has passed through Hebrew and Greek to English over multiple millennia. Concepts which can be expressed in a single word in one language and culture may require paragraphs to explain in another, especially when they encompass/address issues of ultimate meaning, eternity, the beginning and end of time, and the divine. Easy peasey, eh?

The theory I was taught as a child was Penal Substitutionary Atonement (sometimes abbreviated as PSA). It was taught most famously by John Calvin, who was trained as a lawyer, and holds that we are separated from God fundamentally by a legal debt—we have broken God’s law and must pay for those infractions (aka sins). It is accepted unquestioningly by the majority of Evangelicals, most of whom are completely unaware that it came from Calvin and his infant sprinkling ilk or that it is only about 500 years old, out of a Christian history of roughly two millennia. There is close to zero chance that they know it is only one of many atonement theories and even less chance that they know what any of those alternatives are. I know this because, even though I was a theologically sophisticated layperson, I didn’t know that there were alternatives myself until my mid-fifties.

In order to understand what Calvin was claiming, it would be helpful first to unpack a couple of concepts:

• Hell—More generally, this is the concept of punishment, with hell being the state or place of punishment for sin after death, possibly eternal. The earliest notions of our post-life condition were simple nonexistence or perhaps existence as shadows of our livings selves in an equally shadowy underworld. Even in the New Testament, Gehenna was a vague metaphor referencing a constantly burning garbage dump in the valley of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem. In Reformed thought (aka Calvinism), this developed into eternal conscious torment—a place of agonizing, never-ending torture, perhaps in literal flames, inflicted by God himself. Some, seeing hell as the natural consequence of our decisions rather than of God’s divine anger, define it simply as eternal separation from God, devoid of any love or even contact with another being, a la C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Not a happy place in any definition, but also not the hierarchical kingdom of pain ruled over demons with pitchforks envisioned in Dante’s Inferno. Dante was imaginative but not at all literal. And the fact is, scripture isn’t clear as to the nature of heaven or hell, other than that one is good and one is bad. It’s not even clear if hell is a place or state, whether it is temporal or eternal, or who is condemned to go there—it could be people who have rejected God, or it could be the accuser and his fallen angels, if those are actual beings and not metaphors themselves. It seems all we can do is imagine what our eternal existence, might be like and leave it to God to know the specifics. All else is simply speculation.
• Sin—I learned growing up that sin was simply an infraction of God’s law, a definition that fit nicely with PSA. Sin is often translated in the Septuagint as hamartía, that is, missing the mark, as in archery. This is also the most common word used in the NT. Similar to hell, the concept of sin developed though the OT. Several words are used for sin, which denote violating a norm, incurring a debt. At this point, suffice it to say that a definition of sin requires a whole lot more detail and nuance than we got in Sunday school or even Sunday sermons, and salvation is far more than a cross bridging a chasm.

I grew up being told again and again that Jesus died to save me from my sins. As I grew older, I learned this was a very particular kind of saving—Jesus took the punishment for me (and all the elect) breaking the law of God. Any infraction of this law resulted in eternal separation from God and torment in hell. Only Jesus, the Son of God, could live a sinless life and substitute his righteousness and suffering in death for my totally depraved life and those of all who believed in him and accepted his free gift of salvation. Note that the salvation in question had moved from saving me from my sins to saving me from hell—not at all the same thing. Since all Christians continued to sin after being saved by the blood of the Lamb, the Bible must have gotten that bit wrong.

Well, what if it didn’t? What if we didn’t need Jesus to intercede for us before the harshest of judges but instead for him to save us from our sins? What if living as a follower of Christ was less about avoiding sin and more about loving God with all our being and loving our neighbors as ourselves? Could Jesus’ work have somehow changed how we lived our lives rather than rejiggered the legal calculus of the universe? Frankly, that seems to be the much tougher problem and vastly more helpful to our existence in the here and now rather than in the by and by.

Scripture says that Jesus conquered sin and death, and I suppose that could be interpreted to mean he was God’s whipping boy¹⁸ if you turn your head and squint just right. Seems to me more likely that he did what scripture says—he broke the power of sin (that which harms our relationship with God) and death (eternal separation from God or maybe nonexistence) over us and replaced them with joy, purpose, and shalom, that is, deep peace and flourishing, and possibly eternal life with God. I can only guess what that actually means.

Experiential

For all my rants about the intellectual difficulties I have with Evangelicalism, those mostly just piss me off. My struggles with the experiential side of my faith are what really hurt. I understand, no, I know in my bones why my dad pursued Pentecostalism when I was a kid—the deep longing for a tangible experience of God. When we are hurting, all theology and rhetoric become meaningless, and all we want is an assurance that there is Someone who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us with a white hot passion. Someone who holds us firmly in their arms and guards us from any fool who would do us harm. We want a mother and a father and a faithful friend whose tenderness dries all our tears and whose power shakes the foundations of the earth. We are the motherless child crying out in our loneliness and pain for someone to comfort us.

And all I hear is utter silence.

Where is the loving God we learned about in Sunday school? The one who is with us everywhere and in every trial? Why is it that we can see our breath more easily than the omnipotent and immanent God of the universe? How can I know that God is there? I want to trust my own experience, but I haven’t had any encounters with the divine, or what I thought were, in decades, and the ones I have had all have materialistic explanations. All the ecstatic experiences people describe can be accounted for by hormones and neurotransmitters. Sure, the same can be said for any human emotion—so how can I know these are genuine experiences and not just biology? Since I no longer believe in the inerrancy of scripture or trust the authority of the church that raised me, how can I know anything about God, much less know God?

Even so, I’m not coming to the question primarily as a skeptic but simply as one who has a hard time with feeling close to anyone or anything. I’ve never been much of a joiner and have always struggled with feeling a part of a group. I was bullied and isolated as a kid and a nerd in a small class of jocks and jock wannabes. Dad tried, but he had a pretty stunted emotional vocabulary—I learned to love and accept him as an adult, but our discussions stayed, for the most part, at a surface level. I was closer to Mom, and she is probably why I have managed to form any healthy relationships. My few romances were brief, intense, disorienting, and mostly nonexistent—I miserably pined for lost romances far longer than I was in any. My best relationships were with a few close friends, but then life would happen, they would move away, and even those would fade. I spent a lot of time as a lonely young man.

I’m left with a philosophical conviction of the existence of God but no real idea how to have a relationship with that God. If I’m going to spend eternity with this dude, I’d like to have a clue. Talking to God is mostly a rational, verbal affair for me. Talking with God is a dim hope. I’ve tried various forms of contemplative practice but found only the noise of my own brain—centering prayer with mostly chaos and not so much centering. The one bright spot is that I’ve learned I’m not alone—contemplative practice takes work and it takes time to learn to quiet the inner voices that rage back and forth. Heck, it takes time to learn to quiet the inner voices wondering what’s for dinner so I can focus on writing. I have a long way to go before I can feel I’m communing with God.

Reconstruction

Having deconstructed my faith or experienced its collapse of its own accord, what will fill the void? As it is often said, nature abhors a vacuum, and having abandoned one faulty system, it wouldn’t do to carelessly replace it with another, which may be as bad or worse.¹⁹ I have no desire to go from an Evangelical fundamentalism to a progressive fundamentalism, and trust me, fundamentalist progressives are real. Do I need something more flexible? Perhaps a set of general principles to guide my exploration²⁰? But that sounds so liberal—I might as well become a Unitarian. Seriously, how do I avoid wishy-washiness and rigidity? The perspicacity of scripture, if it’s a doctrine worth anything, doesn’t mean that all I need is me and my Bible—that kind of thinking has led to some seriously wackadoodle theology, untouched by reality or rational thought. Crackpots reading scripture “literally” without reference to historical, linguistic, or theological expertise have created nonsensical systems of belief that should appear as ludicrous in the light day. Sadly, they often convince others with their sincerity and passion and form communities who live in either bubbles or walled fortresses of self-reinforcing fears, cut off from and immune to any logic or grace that would contradict the beliefs they hold to with white knuckled fear and rage. These are the Jim Joneses and David Koreshes who lead their followers into mass suicides for the cause, and the minor crackpots who simply make life miserable for those around them and leave wiser people shaking their heads.

One possible metaphor is that of a pilgrimage. What do I take for the journey? As the terrain changes, I require different kit to complement my strengths and counter my weaknesses. I’m no longer a young man in need of certainty but a seasoned traveller exploring ancient paths new to me. I may cross untracked wilds, following only the contours of the land. I may find refreshing springs and sunlit glades. I may even fall into a pit and have an adventure.²¹ What is crucial to a pilgrimage is that I have a goal and that I keep traveling toward it.

A pilgrimage need not be in a straight line—actually, meanders make it more interesting. The sin of certainty would insist that I plow ahead on the straight and narrow way, regardless of

The Power of Myth

I’ve been reading Inspired by Rachel Held Evans, partly because it was available on my Bible study app and partly because I no longer know how to read scripture or what “inspired” even means. I enjoy her humor and frank honesty about her own struggles and misbehavior—it feels like she has invited me into her secret society of misfits and screwballs. That’s a crowd that makes me feel right at home, even if I, like Rachel, look pretty normal at first glance.

In the aftermath of the Bible’s collapse, at least the the Bible I was raised with, I’m having a hard time putting any stock in it as an unbiased, factual account of history. I was raised in the buckle of the inerrancy belt, which is kinda like the Bible Belt, only more northern, Dutch, and Reformed. We were all in on the efficacy and perspicacity of scripture, except that we didn’t gamble or play cards.²² Actually that was the Wesleyans,²³ who were so holy that they didn’t do much of anything. Calvinists were just opposed to fun.²⁴ So, naturally, when the fall came, I fell hard. It’s not so much that I reject scripture; it’s just that after believing that every word had to be divinely inspired and true, now I couldn’t trust that any of it was. How could I? I’d been taught for so long that inerrancy was an all or nothing proposition that when I could no longer believe it all, nothing was my only other option.

If I can’t take scripture as literal truth, then how do I take it? One perspective is as myth—I don’t mean myth as in an old fib or fairytale, but myth as in an origin story—how we organize the otherwise random events of our lives into coherent narratives that give us meaning and purpose and explain us.

We’ve so denigrated stories that the word has become an insult—just a story—but stories held in common are what hold a culture together. People are willing to fight and die for their stories—that George Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, and God blesses America. If our stories are good and true, they lead us to do things that are good and true. If our stories are self aggrandizing and full of holes, they can wreck our lives.

I no longer believe scripture is an unbiased, factual account of history. I do think it’s a bang-up collection of stories about life. Even though the world around us has changed immensely in the last few thousand years, people are pretty much the same, and we have the same kinds of problems. If we read scripture in the right way and in the right context, we can learn a lot from it, whether or not we believe it came from the mouth of God. Or maybe if we would like to believe that but just can’t right now—maybe our community will have to believe for us. Others pray for us, not meaning that they intercede with God for our benefit, but that they pray our prayers for us because the words of our prayers, any prayer, cannot currently escape our lips. Our community believes the stories of scripture for us in the same way.

The Power of Metaphor

If myth is one end of the narrative spectrum, then metaphor is the other. Myths are grand, transcendent stories which help to explain why the world is as it is. Metaphors are nuggets of meaning, comparisons which carry associations and contextual significance rather than storylines. Metaphors are true without being isolated ideas or propositions. They imply stories without being limited by them.

The transcendent is, by definition, beyond our experience and, being beyond our experience, beyond our words. We can’t describe the transcendent directly, so we use metaphor—imperfect parallels that are within our experience. Everything we say about is God is necessarily metaphor and approximation. We no more know that God is a man than that God is a bird—God is described as both a father and a mother hen, so both images are legitimate. It’s as Paul says—we see as through a glass (mirror), darkly. Not an optically perfect glass, but a first century steel mirror that revealed the basic shape and hinted at the color but distorted the view. We are all searching for metaphors that reveal God in the way that our experience and intuition tell us is true because, absent some revelation appearing as a bolt out the the clear blue sky, that is all we can know. I’ve already said I can’t trust scripture as an inerrant documentation of the voice of God because it’s far too human for that; however, I can trust it as a story, a library of stories, really, collected and refined by millennia of tradition and the wisdom of those who passed it on to us. It carries all their speculation, meditation, and wonder at God, as well as their love and devotion and desire to serve God and God’s creation. Did God breathe into all of this, strangely warming their hearts? Why, yes, I can believe that. And what does that mean? It’s yet another metaphor for a reality beyond my comprehension.

May 28, 2023

This is a tough one because we all want a God who can intervene on our behalf. I mean, what good is a God who is all powerful but can’t or won’t use that power to give us a hand? What are miracles? Are they God benevolently helping people out of a tough spot? Altering natural laws? What if favoring one person harms another? Be careful of what you wish for, the folks tales tell us—unintended consequences lurk behind our wishes, and they can be far worse than our original plight.

If we define miracles as events which occur or appear to occur outside normal physical laws, laws created by God, then what does that imply for our ability to know those laws? An important concept in Christian theology is that God is entirely truthful and reliable, and scripture tells us we can know God by observing creation. Altering natural laws in special cases feels like fudging the data. Lying. Can miracles confuse or mislead people as to what those laws are? Some people see this simply as wisdom being given to the faithful and the wicked going astray, which implies God lies to the damned. I believe the God of truth would find that abhorrent. And if one of our purposes on earth is to glorify God by learning and discovering the nature of creation (which I believe scripture teaches), would miracles inhibit our ability to understand creation correctly? If creation speaks of the glory of God, wouldn’t God want it to speak truthfully and accurately?

If miracles mess with the physical world, and our soul is an emergent property of our physical body, does that preclude God communicating to humanity through what we call our soul or spirit? Is the metaphysical or supernatural truly outside the natural world or simply outside our current knowledge? Are there mechanisms within the bounds of natural law that we do not yet understand and that God uses to communicate with us directly?

Perhaps God can interact with the physical universe in ways that are miraculous but not supernatural. As one small example, quantum indeterminacy has been proposed as an alternative that would allow for divine intervention that didn’t contravene natural laws. We already know that matter doesn’t behave in entirely deterministic ways at the quantum level—is it a stretch to believe that God could shape that indeterminacy to cause events which appear miraculous but operate within natural laws? Or to speak to us in even the most mundane ways?

What if the miraculous is not necessarily supernatural? Perhaps God is both more subtly and more actively and intimately involved in our lives than popular conceptions would suggest.

May 24, 2023

This gets a bit technical, so first, a few Greek words (from a non-theologian):

• ** Sṓma** (also sárx): the physical body, flesh. Sárx can be used of a corpse.

• ** Psyché**: soul, life. The life force which leaves the body at death and goes to the underworld.

• ** Pneúma**: spirit, literally breath. This is very similar to soul but also implies that which can commune with the divine.

The usages of these terms has changed over time, but these, more or less, were their meanings in the first century, when Platonists ruled the earth¹.

There is a growing consensus that consciousness is an emergent² property of the human nervous system rather than a distinct, metaphysical entity—it is different from the physical nervous system but still arises from it. This implies that mind/body dualism, which asserts that the soul and body are distinct and separable, represents a misunderstanding of our nature(s). If consciousness is, at its root, a material or physical property, then what of the soul, to say nothing of the spirit? Is a human endowed with a soul at conception? At birth? Or does it develop as a child matures? If consciousness is an emergent property of the physical body, then can our soul go to eternal bliss apart from it? How would a new, heavenly body be essentially (of the same essence) the same person I am now?

Our theology was birthed in an era dominated by philosophical ideas inherited from the ancient Greeks. How must it be revised in light of what we’ve learned in the past hundred years? Even if scripture isn’t consistently dualistic (it’s not), the idea of a temporal body and eternal soul has so infused our thinking that we assume it without pause.

Updated June 3, 2023

Any discussion of the existence and nature of God must take seriously the problem of evil. If God is the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenvolent being of classical theology, then how does this perfectly good deity cause or, at minimum, tolerate the presence of evil in creation?

Theodicies comprise an entire branch of theology devoted to answering how a good God and evil can coexist. The subject is far too complex and deep for me to cover here, and it may be the single knottiest problem in all of theology; however, I can’t simply ignore it. Briefly, evil can be classified as moral (caused by human actions) and natural (due to events in the natural world). Some events may be atrocious or painful but bring about a greater good (e.g. the pain of childbirth)—these are called instrumental evil. In other cases, on balance, the world would have been better off had the events never occurred—these are called true or gratuitous evils. Even if one only looks at true, moral evils, why would a loving, omnipotent God allow these to happen? Why allow pain and suffering at all, much less without any redeeming purpose? While the formal argument concludes that God cannot exist, I questioned more whether God was good.

I believe God exists because I can’t conceive of a world without a first cause, and the problem of evil doesn’t particularly weaken that belief. It does make me believe that we need to think very differently about God’s attributes and perfections. Does omnipotence require absolute sovereignty over all events, or do we have free will? Does omniscience require complete knowledge of future events? If God is sovereign and omniscient, how are we responsible for our actions? Is our agency a higher good to God than sovereignty?

In order to maintain the ideal of a perfectly good deity, Evangelicals, especially Calvinists, have imagined a bizarre parody of a loving god, who is also so holy as to be unable to tolerate the presence of even the smallest flaw in his creation. In counterpoint, they have constructed a view of humanity as so totally depraved that they are entirely responsible for the evil they suffer and deserve eternal conscious torment inflicted by the same god. And it is only by the grace of this graceless god that they will be spared.

Frankly, this god scared the shit out of me, so much so that, well into my forties, I was periodically reduced to screaming “please god, no no no” into my pillow at the thought of eternity. My choice seemed to be spending a never ending existence with a god who, at the least provocation, would have tormented me eternally or, if I was lucky, annihilated my soul. Actually, less than the least provocation because, if I was unlucky, this god would have determined before creating me or anything else that he would torment me eternally. Why create in sixfold goodness¹ knowing that you would later declare your creation fallen, then zap that sucker to hell? That seems a bit pointless or even megalomaniacal and not at all like a loving and patient mother or father.

I eventually came to a belief that God was loving and good, but I first had to abandon Evangelical and Reformed ideas about the nature of God and what was accomplished in Christ’s work of atonement (at-one-ment). Their version of God only made sense if I stuck strictly to their postulates and abandoned all my intuitions about what a loving God should be.

This Evangelical view of God and evil either leads to or enables some awful beliefs, weaponized by demagogues in times of tragedy. They see the literal hand of God in tornados and tsunamis and earthquakes and say, “This tragedy was God’s punishment for <insert scapegoat here>’s sinful ways”, or “God is calling you to repent of <sin de jour or fundraising rant>”. But what of the collateral damage? Do innocent children deserve to die because God was ticked off about the “gay agenda”? Would God wipe out the homes of the poor to teach a lesson to the rich? That isn’t the God that Jesus showed us.

There are better ways to understand the problem. Open and relational theology (ORT), also known as Process Theology (developed by Alfred North Whitehead), posits that God can be affected by external events and that, while God may be more powerful than any other being, God may not be infinitely powerful. In answer to the question of evil, ORT answers, because God can’t. Maybe exercising absolute sovereignty over every event would destroy the purpose of creation. Maybe God’s power over humanity is persuasive rather than coercive. Boy, does that get Evangelicals hot under the collar, but it may be the best answer I’ve heard so far.

May 23, 2023

Evangelicals (especially Calvinists) like to define the attributes of God, most of which can also be called perfections:

• Omnipotence—God is all powerful. God can do anything except that which is logically inconsistent (e.g., making a rock so heavy that they¹ cannot lift it²) or inconsistent with God’s perfect nature (e.g., lying).
• Omniscience—God knows all that occurs in creation, including all of our thoughts. God knows all truth.
• Eternality—God has always existed. In fact, God existed before time, if before time is even a thing.³
• Transcendence—God (or parts of God) exists outside our reality and is unconstrained by it or its physical laws. God is not contained by any kind of reality but rather contains⁴ or surpasses reality.⁵
• Immanence—kinda the opposite of transcendence. God is intimately part of our existence (while simultaneously transcending it). Like I said, difficult concepts.
• Non-contingency—God is the source of all creation and relies on nothing else for existence. God was not made and cannot be destroyed.
• Perfection—This can refer either to God’s general perfection (i.e., the perfection of each of God’s attributes) or to God’s inviolable goodness. God is good, all of God’s actions are good, and God enacts good for all of creation.

As interpreted in much of Evangelical thought, these attributes can lead to viewing God as a maximum entity rather than a loving, personal being, and a major theme of (good) theology is to nuance God’s attributes to avoid conflicts or inconsistencies. A key point is the meaning of perfection—does it simply mean infinite or maximal, or is more about wholeness? For instance, classical theology takes God’s non-contingency to mean that God is absolutely immutable⁶ or unchanging, but this robs God of any ability to feel. An immutable God cannot feel our pain or desire a relationship with us. How can this square with a belief in God’s mercy or love? A God who can’t feel or respond to our pain is hollow and barren, hardly worthy of our worship.