III. Christian Hypocrisy

I used to find myself turning a number of experiences in churches over and over in my mind when I couldn’t sleep at night. Usually, all this was done in an effort to assess blame, trying in vain to formulate a final evaluation, trying to imagine how much braver and wiser I should have been; confessing to myself all the times I acted hypocritically and praying I might live more honestly in the future.

Such is the plight of the unfaithful, I suppose.

The sharpest of the impulses I felt is that I should have stood up more aggressively for my partner, for myself and, ironically, even for God. I allowed people to do and say things in the name of God, things that hurt people, because I wanted to fit in the community, I wanted to be seen as a man of God, a minister of the gospel. Because I needed this acceptance, and craved this respect; because I was too afraid to question authorities and beliefs, I promoted spiritual and emotional harm to those I was supposed to be serving. I’m dreadfully sorry. 

I’ve since vowed to take responsibility for my beliefs, my values; to forge my own ways of being in the world. I’ve given up the half-beliefs and blind faith.

I want to formulate or find something I can believe in. I want to say really ‘yes’ to the life I’ve been given. I don’t want to pretend I’ve found the meaning but to really find a meaning that is my own.

I was cursed with sleepless nights after leaving Christianity for a while — not that there was a shortage while I was still a believer. At first, I worried about whether or not I was wrong. If I’m honest, there were nights I was terrified of going to Hell. I hadn’t even believed in Hell for years while I was a Christian. At first, I found little cause for celebrating the loss of what had always given my life meaning. I mourned the death of my religiosity and wept bitterly at God’s departure. Although I’ve come to the conclusion that the Christian God isn’t real, the loss was very real.

Celebrity Christians, Church Fathers and even Jesus himself communicate the notion that Christianity is for the broken, that the Church is supposed to be some sort of hospital for sinners. Well, I think the Church is something more like a psych ward, full of sick people who aren’t well enough acquainted with their sickness. Tragically, Christians have traversed the entire earth dispensing what they think is a cure, all while spreading terrible illness.

Of course, the loaded alternative is always looming in the background. Have Christians shown generosity and kindness? Yes. Are they capable of profound honesty and even great humanitarian work? Obviously. I’m a critic of Christianity precisely because I seek to be truthful about it, I don’t have to ignore any of its goods or invent new evils in its name in order to criticize it. It is, as a postmodernist might say, autodeconstructive. It takes itself apart (indeed am I not an example of the Church taking itself apart?) It offers the tools for a proper analysis and the seeds of revolution within its own makeup. So I might make two points here regarding Christianity’s backward ethics:

First, good acts do not exist for their own sake in the Church. The New Testament is clear enough about this. The real purpose of acting with sacrificial benevolence toward other humans according to Jesus and his namesake is tied up with a vision of the afterlife; one I find to be grimly authoritarian and often simply predatory. A Christian does not love the world, rather it is like a child who is forced by a parent to behave kindly toward a disliked schoolmate. It is for the reputation of the Father and the promise of future rewards that Christians do good. Any exception is probably guilty of syncretism.

Second, how often do we see the ‘good’ deeds of powerful people justify their more dubitable choices? This is paradoxical but it is simply built into the logic of our society that a grand gesture — whether religious, romantic, idealist, humanitarian, sincere or even ostentatious — covers a multitude of sins. I think Trump’s persisting popularity with white evangelicals may be an excellent test case for this. Redemption is usually cheap if you are willing and clever. This is a hallmark of modern Evangelical Christianity: salvation is easy as A, B, C. So Christians sometimes act in especially humane ways — just like many seculars, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists seem to be able to do — but this does not wash away the grandiose sins committed in Jesus’ name. Nor does it serve as a good apologetic argument for the validity of Christianity’s truth-claims.

Bringing a charge of hypocrisy against Christians is beating a dead horse, it has basically always topped the charts for reasons Christians suck. For this to be such a common sentiment — found on the lips of such a diverse crowd as St. Augustine, Gandhi, DC Talk, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr.— it seems to be a uniquely Christian problem. Not that hypocrisy is exclusive to Christians, an obviously absurd claim, rather it’s a problem that has uniquely plagued the Church through its whole lifetime. 

So what is this particularly Christian hypocrisy? How is it so thoroughly ubiquitous that we find it in every age of the Church? Do not basically all major theologians in Christian history react to it in some form?

Hypocrisy is essential to the deep structure of Christian life.

For most of us, this hypocrisy lives below our awareness. We don’t know what we’re doing when we’re being hypocritical in a Christian way; Christian hypocrisy hides itself from the subject. Once this hypocrisy becomes detectable to the Christian, four actions present themselves. The Christian might choose to acknowledge the duplicity basic to Christian belief, which opens doors leading to knavish leadership, moral reform, or apostasy. For the average Christian however, all three of those options might be terrible. The easier path is to choose a type of blindness, a type of faith in denial.

The Church, then, is made up of four people:

1. cynics who know better but still pretend to believe for power, convenience or comfort
2. reformers who, digging their heels in, passionately insist on (their ideal form of) Christianity as the universal truth over and above all other truth claims
3. The negligent, those who choose not to inspect themselves, their history
4. The blissfully ignorant who lack even the impulse and/or tools to think critically of the faith passed down to them

The notion of the Church itself is a discourse in hypocrisy. Notice how quickly Jesus’ revolution betrayed itself. Jesus was executed as a Jewish political radical by the Roman Empire. Not three hundred years later, the Roman empire married itself to Christ’s legacy and began conducting its bloody campaigns under the symbol of the Cross, several of them massacring large numbers of Jews.

Ironically, Jesus’ executioners became the executors of his estate.

Christian hypocrisy goes all the way up and all the way down. It is hardwired into the experience of every believer and essentialized in the metaphysics of the Church. There is nowhere we might look and not find it.

As an abstract idea, the Church functions sort of like an ideological see-saw in the minds of Christians. On one side, we might put down the Church as a failure, an unfaithful spouse, even corrupted. This serves to elevate our particular form of Christianity and legitimate it as somehow original or authentic. Conversely, when our local experience of Christianity horrifies us, or is simply just uninteresting and dry, we might lift up the Church universal as some lofty, traditional key to our skepticism. Talk about the Church is usually ambiguous in this way, invoking a type of double-speak to cloak its embarrassing parts.

The Church promises what it cannot give. It writes enormous checks without the funds to back them up. This has always been the case, for it could hardly continue to function any other way. Sixteenth century catholics may have hated the Reformation but it mostly happened because the Church was brazen enough to officially sell afterlife insurance to peasants for actual money. 

I’ve often heard Christians referred to as the salt of the earth in reference to secular morality. A lot of believers, even brilliant ones, seem to think that if the Church ceased to exist, the world’s ethical conduct would crumble to either totalitarian slavery or anarchic chaos. As you might expect, I disagree wholeheartedly. Need I mention the Crusades, the Inquisition, Christian treatment of Jews, women, LGBT+ and minorities, or the heinous outcomes of mixing religion with military machines? Good historians cannot but draw a direct line between the holy war justifications of Christians and the type of fundamentalist religious terrorism close to the heart of life in our 21st century. Christians certainly don’t seem to fair better in the sphere of moral history than anyone else — prison statistics regarding religious preference show that, proportionally, Christians break the law in considerably larger numbers than do atheists.

If a politician claims to be a Christian, it does not indicate a high moral accountability but rather acts as a redeeming quality, excusing a great many indiscretions. 

If the Christian God exists, the history of the Church makes little sense. Jesus was supposed to return and didn’t, what a hypocrite. In lieu of his Second Coming, the Church has behaved no better than non-Christian institutions. However, if you think about the Church as simply an agent of world power in humanity’s story things seem to clear up.

Belief in something does not make you virtuous. Virtues take hard work, practice, sacrifice and a life-long commitment to human flourishing.

Christianity offers a machinery that allows morally mediocre people to believe they are virtuous, that they’ve found the answer to life’s mysteries, that they’ve been made clean. The Church provides us with a double-edged lie in order to pull this off. First, that we are, ontologically, sinners who owe God an impossible debt and second, belief in Jesus (which usually includes church participation) absolves that debt, leaving the believer in good standing with God, i.e. righteous.  In reality, churches are human institutions like any other, playing power games, relying on the generosity and capital of those who believe, speaking its own language and complete with its own set of rules and brands.

I’ve tried to make clear in earlier posts that I don’t believe in a monolithic Christianity, there is a myriad of Christianities. However, I would argue that hypocrisy is something they all have in common — albeit often a more sophisticated, subtle type of hypocrisy than the blatant bigotry and quackery associated with the term. 

I don’t believe that many Christians actually believe in what they profess to believe. And even less believe according to orthodox Christianity.

I stopped going to church because I don’t think Christians know anything about God. I also don’t think they know much about humanity or redemption; nor do I believe Christian love is lovely enough. I think I only have one life and I desperately wish to live it with honesty, ambition, humility, courage and love. To continue life as a Christian would be to live against those values.

 

Flowers

I think the most powerful critiques of Christianity are often subtle in their approach and nuanced by a robust bibliography’s worth of arguments. GLMIS is not a work of that type. Remember, I’m telling my story for all to hear because so far I’d only ever told it to myself. I don’t know if they’re closer to Usher’s or Augustine’s, but these are my confessions.

I am not able to write about my experience in church life with the same abstract distance with which I critique theology and biblical studies. This is not to say I left the community that reared me for a different set of reasons than those I’ve introduced already. It’s all bound together and irreducibly manifold. 

My problems with Christianity began as problems with the Church, it was only in seminary that I began to see the Church as a faithful image of Her God.

My wife and I have worked in a number of churches over the last decade or so. In their own special way, each one of them attributed to a heap of cynicism and bitterness in our hearts. To the best of our ability we tried to heal with the tools the churches gave us. We heeded their counsel, read our Bibles, and begged God to restore us. For all that, the Church still lost us and it happened while I was in seminary. I’ve seen my wife be mistreated and downright disrespected—simply because of her sex—in every single church we’ve invested in. At some point we had to ask, “Our we taking care of ourselves? Is it wise to thoughtlessly put ourselves in a position to be abused again?”

If we must learn from experience, my experience of church has taught me to flee from all forms of organized religion.

I’ve had pastors withhold promised pay as an “incentive” for getting more people to attend. I’ve also had multiple worship leaders fail to pay out for thousands of dollars worth of contract gigs. I’ve worked under pastors who have doctorates, pastors without even a bachelors, some with huge expense accounts, some who pastored pro bono. All of them, every single one, have proved to be a small man with an enormous ego. Some of them say unimaginably hateful things about queer people, some believe that Trump is right to ban muslims, some think Jesus is coming back to destroy everyone except the real Christians… One or two of them hid their bigotry and narcissism better than the others — but what they all have in common is a following of people who trust in their words every single week. This is not an institution I wish to associate myself with.

I’ve spent the last decade in close quarters with hundreds of Christian leaders, in academic and worship settings. I have been made sharply aware of the general anti-intellectual attitude of most ministry students, and those are the few who are actually educated. My final post in this project is dedicated to the joke that calls itself theological education, so for now suffice it to say, many if not most, local ministers are essentially uneducated except for within the bounds and biases of their given denomination. They are not worthy of a following, in my opinion.

I’m not trying to be mean, just honest. I’ve learned from teachers much wiser than any of my pastors to shew off resentment. It is a poison many mistake for maturity, perhaps especially among those of us who have left Christianity. I am leaving all the vitriol and vinegar that stewed in my heart at the door of the Church, like flowers on the grave of God. I expected more from those who call themselves people of God, the self-proclaimed salt of the earth. The only way I’ve learned to overcome bitterness is honesty.

My Last Pastor

The last man I’ll ever call my pastor was among the most pathetic representatives of the species I’ve encountered. He’d never had any job outside of Christian ministry and his education came from one of the most laughable institutions modern Christianity has birthed (the same that brought us that gem of Christian fetish literature: The Left Behind Series). He has no business having an authoritative opinion, yet people listen as he spews ignorant buffoonery from a stage every Sunday.

Less than a week after I accepted his offer to work for him, we had to have a come to Jesus meeting. I had written a blog on my personal WordPress site that he found offensive and if I weren’t willing to submit to his authority, he indicated that I should find other employment. I wish I would have walked away with middle fingers high in the sky right then. But I didn’t.

My blog was a polemic against subordinating women to men in the Church, among other things. I was genuinely baffled when it got me into trouble. The problem was that I had assumed my new church and its pastor actually valued the experiences and voices of women… you know, because they said they did. It turns out, the church had decided decades ago that women are not allowed to have any positions of power and hardly any meaningful leadership in the congregation. This pastor produced a statement he had written in 1998 and handed it to me at some point during our tense exchange at a North Dallas Starbucks in 2015. According to him—and virtually all christians through history— God has ontologically placed women under the authority of men.

Why have we given these people authority over us? Are we really better than our tribal ancestors and their shamans?

I’m exceedingly grateful for Christian feminists as they have played a huge role in my development, but their very existence still seems to me an oxymoron. I want to shout to them, “GET OUT!” There are so many communities that will value your power, intelligence, strength and even your faith… but I don’t believe that the Church will ever truly be one.    

Grievances

I’ve experienced more trepidation, more fear and trembling over the content of this post than I have over any of the others so far. I wasn’t surprised to receive a hefty amount of criticism and disappointment since I began posting GLMIS. It mostly doesn’t bother me, I’m happy that anyone bothers to engage with it at all. However, the most annoying feedback I regularly receive is that I’m just angry and choosing to see only the negative parts of Christianity.

Now, I spent a very long time being angry with Christians, both specific people and in general. I was mad at them for all sorts of obvious reasons. Mostly it came down to the feeling that so many Christians were poorly representing Christ, at least the Christ I had in my head. It is only since officially leaving Christianity that I’ve been able to let go of that anger. Since I’m not one anymore, I don’t have to constantly be disappointed in people that deem themselves believers. I can just let them be. I no longer have a dog in the fight.

I would’ve never left Christianity on the grounds of poor Christian behavior alone, though it certainly didn’t inspire me to want to stick around. As I’ve attempted to indicate in previous posts, I have deep grievances with Christianity that extend to its very foundations. I honestly believe I would’ve found my way out of the Church regardless.

Finally, I wish to be painfully honest, if not exhaustively verbose, about Christianity. Selectively writing about only the negative parts or allowing personal experience entirely dictate my opinions get in the way of that, so I’ve really tried to curb that impulse. I understand that you might get annoyed with the accusations I’ve made — but I promised I’d be honest, and this is the voice I have to share. Even though it scares the hell out of me, I wouldn’t let myself remove these words from the page.

It is Christ’s body that has sinned against us. 

I. God’s Den of Thieves

God’s house has been no special harbor from the suffering and evil humans bring to each other.

Well, that’s actually not true. The Church has often provided shelter to powerful and guilty men from a wide spectrum of moral character — as long as their willing to confess certain truths. But I fear that Jesus’ own “least of these” have never authentically been a priority for Christianity, except nominally of course.  While the sexual crimes of Catholic priests have served as a disturbing cultural meme for decades now, the era of #meToo exposes us to what should have been obvious: the ways Christians torture themselves sexually were always doomed to bring about great pain and heinous violence, whether in Roman Catholic or Southern Baptist communities.

Christ’s body has failed to provide safety —much less salvation— for millions of Christ’s own. Worse, it turns out we have quite frequently abetted and cloaked such destructive abuses of power.

The shocking crimes of racism that have consistently plagued civilization for the last four or five centuries have all taken place on the Church’s watch. Puritans brought African slaves to America, German Christians helped Hitler (there’s even a direct line of antisemitism from Luther to 20th c. Germany), Baptists in the United States invented Southern Baptist as a denomination because they were slave owners. It seems that we can still agree with MLK that Sunday is the most divided day of the week.

All the sins of the Church don’t need to be recounted here. Most Christians are willing to admit that the Church has had its indiscretions. The handy emergence of denominations —which themselves splinter off into multiple types of “non-denominations”— allows Christians to feel distanced from what they see as inferior types of Christianity. To them, I cannot do better than to quote Samuel Coleridge: “He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”

There is no pure form of Christianity, it has been dividing itself since the beginning, always trying to renew or reinvent what is so obviously broken. Whatever revolution was began in Jesus’ name quickly betrayed itself, reinvented itself. 

Christians, you sustain an institution that has failed to live up to its name from damn near its very beginning. Jesus’ movement has been made to limp through ages depending on civil power and blind faith. You are complicit in the sins of your leaders. Your tithes compensate thieves, your faith gives perverts power over your weak. Celebrities like Louie C.K., R. Kelly and Bill Cosby are secular mirrors of this same problem. The clout we bestow upon people we feel represent the best of our communities always comes with sexual dimensions. For the majority of us, these feelings and attractions can be exercised in a healthy manner, but not all of us. While I don’t think the actions of Ryan Adams and others have been defensible, we also have to deal with the reality that the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are our creation.

If you are not investigating those to whom you give such great power, you are most assuredly covering up and solidifying that power.

It is Christ’s body that has committed rape, torture and destruction of the bodies of countless children. Not to forget the full-grown bodies of adult women, which have been religiously patrolled and dominated openly since the second century. Few are spared sexual self-alienation, shame and guilt. Indeed, Christian delusions about human sexuality is forging new fractions even now, as LGBTQ friendly Christians don’t want to be confused with “straights only” Christians and vice versa. This is not a symptom of bad Christians or broken churches: this is Christianity, this is the Church.

How many bodies will it violate, through how many centuries will it be allowed to protect the devils it employs?

So, again, God’s house has been no special harbor from evil. 

The Church is a place where evil hides and calls itself by other names.

 

To Christ’s beloved Bride

My eyes have opened wide

At the sight of her Faith I cower

All along it has been in Her own power

To Christ’s perfect and beloved Bride

I seek now to give you my eyes

How else might you find your insides?

Foregrounding the smell of formaldehyde

To what does your Faith give sight?

the Image I want burned into mind

is of a child who decides never to die

Mistaking a millimeter for a mile

Preaching to us of our obligation to the sky

Your Hope is not mute, far from taciturn

The crooked rule until the (dead) king returns

But Your Love I may have missed

Unless, wait, does she merely love avarice?

More honestly, I’d say it’s a surprising mix.

Your love really is something I miss, 

something like a smoker’s cigarette kiss,

Accused by the eyes of the Other

How do you continue in this?

Are you not afraid, do you not shudder?

You’ll never again find me within your gates

I’ve repented of my dishonest faith

Now for your destruction, I sit and wait.

4. Hallowed …or Hollowed?

Is it not obvious that theology has hollowed out humanity’s holiest words? Through constant qualifications and loopy interpretive moves, we lose all clarity as to what someone from anywhere might mean by utterances such as God, faith, spirit, and even—or perhaps especially—Jesus or Christ. I can never quite tell what people are signifying with these terms. Even after reading several monographs, in which these words are employed hundreds of times by the same author, we will usually find surprises, contradictions, or unhelpful appeals to mystery. It’s usually the case with even the greatest of theologians who have offered the most convincing of definitions through decades of writing that there is great variance between their earlier and later work. This has been much of the history of theology.  (Especially since Luther, or should I blame the printing press and modern medicine?)

Unfortunately, the price we pay for an excess of meanings is basic meaninglessness. People have justified all sorts of horrendous acts with the Bible. Why? How? Because the Christian canon has no clear meaning, especially after two millennia of people trying to fit their beliefs into Jesus’ mouth. People perceive in it often only what they wish to see. 

Though it may sound like I’ve set myself against all theologians, I often consider that maybe John Calvin was right about some things. One of those things is that the human heart is an idol factory. This is no small point of agreement between us. Although I might add that this is particularly true of Christian hearts. Much of Christian theology is inherently idolatrous. It presents ideas, mingling stories and traditions with geography, politics, and a whole host of time-bound assumptions as eternal propositional truths.

It is guilty of a very basic dishonesty, that God might be known.

One symptom of this is that God always seems to look a lot like whoever is speaking about God. As an old Greek poet once observed, Ethiopian gods are black while European gods are pale, and if cattle could create, they’d make idols of gods in their own image too. 

Theologians fumble Christianity’s most profound symbol: the icon. Where Christianity might’ve avoided idolatry, theology has said: “Christ is not just a symbol through which we imagine God. Our Christ is God.” 

5. Job’s Friends

So, lest my training as a theologian betray my aspiration to clarity, I will be direct as possible. There are four distinct observations about theology that bring me to my allegations of idolatry. Where theology escapes these traps, it may also genuinely evade idolatry.

First, it relies on multiple levels of ambiguity. This would not be so bad if theologians were honest about it—with themselves as much as their readers. Instead, they have developed all kinds of whacky ways to keep connecting their project directly to the almighty. These leaps of reason desperate for a foundation multiply the difficulties of getting a handle on Christianity’s most basic vocabulary. The effect of this vague web of curious terms is universally that theologians unwittingly project their own accidental intuitions into them without much of a problem. 

If Christian historians have peered down the long well of history to see their own reflection in the historical Jesus, theologians have fared no better with God.

That brings me to my second point. For so many god-talkers, God seems to be something like an idealized version of themselves. Whether it is the invincibility and power of an omnipotent Sovereign or the boundless compassion of an all-loving Creator, people seem to believe in the gods that look most like who they wish they were. This means that theology has quite a great deal to tell us about ourselves but probably nothing to teach us about God.

Third, where theology is authoritarian, there is sure to be idols nearby. Dogma — or that which a given authority or tradition requires one to believe to participate in the rituals and rewards of religion — isn’t a word thrown around too much in evangelical circles. However, it is still an active part of the formula. Believers are made to conform their thoughts and experiences to boundaries set by authority figures. Is God afraid that if people are allowed to make up their own minds, they’d believe in a different God, or maybe no God at all? Sounds like an idol to me.

Lastly, theology is by and large a defense mechanism. Though it is almost impossible to see as an insider, “faith seeking understanding” is the logic of someone walling themselves in from the inside. Theology is almost nothing if it is not defensive rationalization of prior commitments. It is hardly done outside of direct denominational affiliations and objectives. It takes the form of explanation of (or meditation on) what we are already supposed to believe.

In the poem that begins my section on theology, I picture the theologian as a construction worker building what at first might be imagined to be a castle — after Teresa of Avila, another heretic who loved her God—but the analogy might work better as a beloved prison. Castles are supposed to keep out intruders; if this is theology’s task, Christian theology has failed miserably, it has included the failures of many other religions. But if it is considered as a prison, theology has done remarkably well. The places that need the most fortifying show the greatest weaknesses, these are not the entrances but the exits. Theology doesn’t usually kill people (anymore), but it still damns them for eternity…and the worst punishments are usually reserved for apostates.

Thank god no theologian has ever been a match for Job.

Theologians and preachers are Job’s friends,

They’d have the innocent admit he sinned.

“For no individual does our System bend

God does not kill the righteous man’s kin.”

So still they bless and condemn,

Yet  they do not know God from Satan.

In spirit with my words on the Bible, I’m convinced that by including the prophets in the Christian canon, theologians have effectively invited a dangerous Trojan horse into the Church. Unwittingly, theology reveals itself as a house built on sand, a questionable set of structures resting on shaky foundations, though theologians have not slowed construction at all. If Christian theologians insist on the privileges of life on a beach, we should not be surprised when nature itself threatens their castles….

Theology is where ideology goes to get baptized, where the gods are born; it is the idol factory. Theology itself is Christianity’s original sin.

2. Perhaps heretics are just people who are too honest

Christianity’s three virtues are faith, hope and love. I suggest a fourth, one that should be implicit in the other three but has been forgotten: honesty. It is the honesty of heretics and whistleblowers that I aspire to; a fidelity to convictions no matter the cost, a commitment to what I have seen and heard. Though my voice may be small and full of quivers, I still bring my charge: Christian theology is, and has always been, full of idols. 

If one is to make an idol, like the summoning of an ancient god, it requires a sacrifice. Honesty must burn on the altar of loyalty. 

Yet abstaining from idolatry is much more difficult than indulging. By Christian reckoning, it is a necessary condition of the fallen human state. It is my conviction that theology is itself an exercise in fallenness, a way of building a defensive structure around one’s particular idol. 

It is only by waging war on the beliefs we’ve inherited, by attacking the gods that we see if they bleed. After all, No LORD of history need fear a lone human armed with questions and poems. Only idols die.

If you judge me as disrespectful, insubordinate or misguided, my first response must be that I’ve only ever believed in the God whose people were named for their god-fighting, the same one in whom Jesus himself is supposed to have believed. Secondly, if Christians were as aggressive in judging their own religion as they are at judging others’, perhaps my thoughts here wouldn’t seem so odious or obscure. The double-standard at work is difficult to detect from the inside but much harder to ignore once it is seen. 

Christianity is a singularly theological religion. Armed with talk of norms and quadrilaterals, Christian theologians generally make a big stink about subordinating their exercises in reason to a secure biblical foundation. This is not to say that theologians are even thought to be great interpreters of the Bible in their own circles. In fact, it’s a running joke in seminaries all over the world that theologians are terrible Bible scholars, and likewise, Bible scholars make terrible theologians. Why is this? In a sense, we can say it is because while one of them wishes to find out all they can about a set of ancient bricks, the other wishes to construct a shiny new castle with them.

It has been the task of theologians through history to construct systems of faith for their generation. After a decade of living and breathing theology in universities and in churches, I think I’ve gotten peeks here and there of what seem to be the blueprints. Baptism is much easier than circumcision, and a simple saving faith in another risen God-man of antiquity was much more attractive to potential converts than a life conformed to Torah. 

Though Christianity was initially loaded with female leadership, theologians were quick to quiet this embarrassing reality and invent their own brand of patriarchal religious oppression. It is only now in the wake of feminist criticism we can realize that this is not an isolated incident, this is theology. It is literally the job of theologians to formulate the old resources to new audiences–not long ago this was lauded as missional. So for almost two thousand years this has meant –among other things– that theology has all but been a men’s only club for the sake of cultural respectability. And what does the God of so many misogynistic men look like? A misogynistic man, go figure.

Theology has kept Christianity in power in the same way any group stays in power for 2000 years:

Demanding unconditional loyalty from all men and threatening terrible consequences for rejecting it,

Asserting dominance over the lives and bodies of those weaker in the hierarchy,

Hushing the stories of all inconvenient or non-conforming lips- whether dissenters be women, slaves, anyone outside of cisgender heteronormativity, children or heretics.

Our honesty is far too dangerous.

3. Salvation Sells

It should hardly be surprising that preachers and theologians might sound like salesmen for their particular version of their religion. The model Christian theologian was a salesman, competing with other artisans for the business of the enormously wealthy—only the upper class could afford his tents. Not to disparage salespeople in general, but we’ve all encountered the old techniques. We’re offered grand promises to get us in the door, made to feel that we cannot live without the goods being sold; we feel the rush of novelty and all the zeal of brand identity. They make the transaction smooth and quick. By the time we might feel some sort of buyers remorse, the charges incurred for returning our new faith are much too costly.

St. Paul is no doubt worthy of his great fame. He built the theological foundation, as well as fundraising and traveling to build the physical infrastructure of Christ’s kingdom on Earth. Without Paul, the nascent movement would have snuffed itself out within a generation and Jesus would have been just another dead messiah with a failed revolution.

Paul’s own Jewish people had long been tutored by foreign oppression and exile against syncretism and conversion to other religions; but he cursed this as stubbornness when they rightfully mistrusted his new project. Paul had to make sense of his experience on the Damascus road. It’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that a  person so spiritually sensitive —as Paul shows himself to be in his letters —could have a powerful psychosomatic response to persecuting and murdering his fellow Jews. Don’t people have these types of breakdowns all the time?

The point is that Paul redeemed his awful crimes to early Christ followers. Perhaps as a rising elite of his day, he knew he could never get his Jewish people to see Jesus of Nazareth as God. However, he might be able to sell the idea to another demographic. By becoming all things to all people, by reducing Judaism to the Law, by using the old pagan image of a human God, Paul became apostle to the gentiles. This is not to say he betrayed the real Jesus. Paul never met Jesus. Rather, he created the Jesus he wanted to believe in–as we all do– – and used the theologies and myths latent in his world to fill the gaps. 

Paul was a contextual theologian, a missionary. He used the images and trends of his day to construct and advertise what would become Christianity. And it sold well. (Even compared to the rival Christianities of people who actually knew Jesus).

 

The whole of theology deals not in honesty,

but what might convince.

Use the Bible, other religions or philosophy,

use whatever fits.

The job of theologians is to pour secretly,

new wine, old skins.

 

They point to a salvation that is wide and easy;

masses all find it.

But the exit is well-hid, forgotten and unseemly

guarded with prejudice.

 Jesus preaches people-fishing; Did we not feel

the hook as we bit?

How might we define theology?

God-talk? A divine science? Reflection on revelation? Religious studies?

Surely, no one has given the definitive answer for all time and I find the impossibility of doing justice to this question significant. Like its subject matter—God, that is— no single definition is able to accurately and thoroughly capture its referent. A pesky excess always seems to go un-communicated, always leaving some wiggle room between words for modification. In this sense, the theologian is quite able to avoid direct hits from their critics by qualifying themselves out of this or that. It is remarkably difficult to define anything with such a complex history.

Christian pluralism is not some postmodern whimsy, it’s a fact. It’s Christian unity that seems to be the anti-empirical myth. This is particularly evident as a Baptist, whose tradition is one of constantly reforming the reformation, splintering splinters. But what renders the notion of a complete definition of theology all but impossible, however, is that it is still a living organism; it insists on going by the same name while continuing to adapt to its many environments.

But what is it that theologians actually do? What defines a theologian?

Surely it is not simply a god-talker, nor is it merely a scholar of religion but both are possible candidates. It is the theologians’ commitment that distinguishes them as much as it is their academic credentials. We might also refer to this commitment as faith; theologians are those, ideally, who speak of God from a position of faith and authority. It’s worth noticing that there is a type of binary at work here: while there might not be a hard and fast distinction between free and slave, Jew or Greek, male or female, there is certainly always—even eternally— a divide between the believer and the unbeliever. This is a distinction that does not fall away for Jesus, nor for almost any of his followers. One is either committed to faith (and may be a theologian) or not, I suppose.

This brings us another term made ambiguous through millennia of redefinitions in God knows how many languages and contexts. What do we mean by the word ‘faith’?

For many Christians, I think Nietzsche might unfortunately be right, faith is not wanting to know the truth. They may know Christ and him crucified, and that is enough; curiosity for any more may snatch from them their precious security. You might see people put the same type of faith in their national identity—which leads to nationalism — or in an unfaithful spouse or even a football team, which might lead to all sorts of delusions or denials of foul play. It is at the heart of my reasons for writing GLMIS that I think most of theology has been about building a structure in which faith like this can exist. I’ve even found it impossible to live in the Christianity of my time without it.

Much of theology relies on the type of faith that does not want to know if it is wrong, that might get along better if truth were relativized completely. This type of faith is idolatrous from the starting line. It turns ideas into ideologies and icons into idols.

It’s important to me I note that my critique of theology is not a criticism of faith. I think faith is necessary, it is much older and more deeply human than even religion. This is true on a basic level that even Thomas Aquinas would agree with. Faith is simply necessary for the level of certainty we need to live our lives. If we didn’t place faith in the cars we drive every morning, the chairs we sit in on a daily basis and the fact that we really DID LOCK OUR DOOR THIS MORNING, we would be institutionalized for insanity—another type of commitment.

In this sense, we all have faith and plenty of it. A very basic day in the life of any human being requires thousands of exercises in faith. Faith is something we might have too much of, or too little, and either would cause problems. If we simply mean that faith is believing without obsessively checking the reliability of something, it’s a necessary element of human life. Outside mathematics, certainty is an incredibly elusive position— but through the employment of faith we are able to act on our intuitions and trust our best guesses without thorough knowledge of what we are doing. Faith allows us to feel certain when we need to.

But this isn’t the only faith in the Bible. We also find that faith might mean something like a radical fidelity. An illustration might be seen in a proud parent’s reaction to the news that their child has committed a horrific crime—yet another type of commitment! Would the parent be exhibiting greater faith in their child by refusing the information and blindly insisting against evidence? Or is greater faith shown by a parent who at once accepts their child’s heinous faults, seeing them for what they are, and walking with them through their punishment and rehabilitation? Both are faithful in terms of commitment, but one makes the truth a servant of loyalty while the other sees that loyalty is only meaningful when it is founded in honesty. One type of faith seems to be afraid of inconvenient truths while the other seems to know nothing other than inconvenient truths. 

Faith is not synonymous with your particular confirmation bias,  in my opinion it is just the opposite. It involves having the courage to attack your own assumptions, convictions and traditions. True faith –like true love– must never be blind, lest it sacrifice its honesty for loyalty. Though it may lead us to lurch forth into darkness, faith never shuts our eyes to reality.

Blind, uncritical, unquestionable faith is irresponsible, it allows us to avoid taking responsibility for conducting our own investigations and places an authority over us that is outside our own experience. It solidifies the power of misinformation and the knaves who might use it to manipulate us. Faith that runs from criticism exposes our idolatrous hearts.

Once again, I find the most profound models among heretics and whistleblowers, whose faith and convictions often cost them such a great deal. The logic of our faith should not be the same as that of soldiers, who remain loyal to their king no matter his ethics.

Although it is a title that once meant so much to me, I no longer care whether I can be considered a theologian. Now, standing on the outside of Christianity’s walls, theology seems little more than a defense mechanism constructed with millennia’s worth of inductive reasoning. I still speak of God and I believe I do it faithfully.

Is it a castle we‘re building?
I remember reading about her interior
Walls lined with priceless pieces unyielding
To nothing and no-one is she inferior

Fit for a god, she’s full of profundities, wonders  and charms
More images, rituals and beauty than time allows us to know
Still we stop, floors meet knees, chests meet arms
Beyond her walls, few builders remember to go

The freshly faithful rush in to Truths unguarded,
For the old, only blocking the exits is rewarded

Once her towers are built high,
we might see all Creation from inside,

Words, winds and wars, with our lens Christened
Is it a castle we’re building, or a prison?

3. Moses’ Atheism

The charisma and wisdom of the characters of the Hebrew imagination buck violently against their forced baptism by theologians. Moses and his line of prophets are about as radically anti-theological as any religious writers in history. Moses led his people away from the highly polytheistic and afterlife-obsessed religious expression of the Egyptians, led by the conviction that all of its gods were dead objects.

Yet Christians largely miss out on the rich joys of Hebrew literature because of a reading problem. This is the fault of the institution of Christianity, which has consistently prized loyalty over honesty, rather than laypeople who seek truth in their religion. Christians disrupt the truths of the Hebrew scriptures with the assumption that they point to Jesus.

One major problem is the assumption that the Bible is the direct Word of God. This would effectively serve to objectify God in the form of a human book–and many Baptists I grew up with are guilty of this idolatry. But in biblical Christianity, Jesus is supposed to be the Word of God, not the Bible. It is only in Islam that God’s Word is statically associated with a book. Nonetheless, many Christians have strange ideas about where the Bible came from.

Genesis, for example, is actually full of stories taken from other Near Eastern religious traditions. This can be a troubling revelation for naive young Bible students. What happens to the beliefs of an evangelical when they are exposed to the fact that stories like the creation accounts in Genesis, Noah’s Flood and even Moses’ enormous set of laws are actually reinterpretations of much older myths? That the stories of Israel’s conquests in Joshua are geographically impossible? That the historians who chronicled David’s kingdom were writing nationalistic propaganda? What do we do when we realize that the images of the New Testament are sewn together with many pagan fabrics?

These concerns are not what buckled my commitment to Christianity. As I hope to show, it was the hypocrisy of the New Testament itself, wrapped up in the impossible promises of the Church.

What many Bible readers miss —because theologians and translators try to hide its embarrassing heterogeneity—is that these stories become much more meaningful as reinterpretations, as new spins on older myths. Moses told the old stories but he told them without all the gods, their requirements, and their drama. Instead Moses’ God was as non-mythical as possible and entirely without objectification, without an inner subjective life of his own. God was simply a challenge that swept over God’s people, that bid them all to become free, every individual was to go up, to transcend, to create, to defy any who would conquer or rule over the individual. No gods or demons can stand in our way, indeed they don’t even exist. This was radical and its effect on the development of civilization is inestimable.

The centrally significant theological passage in the Torah is the Exodus. It begins with a call from an unknown and unknowable beyond. The caller cannot be named but allows itself to be consistently represented in ways those it is addressing will understand—namely a voice, though it seemingly has no vocal structure—and an undying flame amidst unharmed foliage. The absurd character of this revelation clues us into the fact that the truth it offers is not like normal everyday facts.

God speaks to Moses, challenges him to liberation and even offers an answer to Moses’ request for a name. For all that however, we are left with very little we can actually say about God: which, I think, is the point. For the people leaving a land full of objectified deity, God is that of which we cannot speak, cannot picture but don’t dare ignore. Thinking of God like an object in the world became the ultimate sin to the Hebrew psyche.

Moses’ great Ten Commandments begin:

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall make no idols.
   
3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Moses, like many of his progeny, was excellent at destroying gods (and keeping them dead). Moses’ faith has lived through thick and ridiculously thin, dispersed throughout the whole earth. It has consistently defied all gods old and new, no matter the cost. Perhaps to Jews, then, it is no great irony that atheists are much better at keeping the Ten Commandments than Christians.

Christians have failed dismally at all three of the theological laws, whereas my atheism passes with flying colors.

Christians have made an idol of a dead Jew and used him as the definition of God. Through constant qualifications and redefinitions, theologians have hollowed rather than hallowed the name of God. They’ve hidden the sharp edges of the scriptures and tamed their Spirit. The name of God, even Godself, has been sculpted into a horror of vanity.

Unfortunately, the bible condemns the objectification of God and then just like the antsy Israelites, immediately proceeds to associate God with patriarchal and political images.  The Hebrew Bible seems to evade idolatry, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, but the Christian Bible–and much less its interpreters–is not. Although the Christian scholar quickly objects that the images of the New Testament are merely metaphors and are to be treated as such, they are rarely done so in churches and local expressions of religion.

4. Moses’ God

Moses’ uniquely personal experiences of God cohere with that of his ancestors, the basis of which founds a narrative that has partially shaped the construction of billions of people’s respective realities over the course of history.

What’s more, he is the only major religious personality in the world who has entirely avoided being deified by later fanatics. Moses did this with great intention and integrity. His own book records his failure and later denial into the Promised Land, even after leading his people so faithfully for so long. The end of Deuteronomy records that he traveled away from his beloved people, going off to die alone, an action that ensured his grave would never be worshipped. He avoided the fate both Jesus and Buddha could not.

For Moses, nothing in the world is worthy of worship. Including images. Including humans. Including Jesus.

However it is not for Moses’ or Jeremiah’s sake that I am forced from Christian doctrine, but rather it is because of the God to which they point. A God beyond knowing, beyond all conditions, and beyond existence—even existing— itself.

It is the God of Jonah and Ecclesiastes and Esther I have loved,

The God who praises Job as righteous for questioning God.

Not a god of the gaps or a pathetic explanation of suffering, but the God who forgives entire wretched civilizations because they commit to treating one another with more dignity. Without baptism, without circumcision or even conversion. The God who might go unmentioned, the God we have no ability whatsoever to speak or know about—but who we cannot but speak about and long for. This speaking and longing without knowing sometimes means resorting to myths and older human images of divinity.

My conviction is that Christ has replaced, rather than revealed this God.

Ultimately then, my question is, does the Bible itself condemn Christianity? Christian theology? The Church? What of the afterlife? And, dare I ask, what of its God?

Can Jesus stand his own against Moses? 

Is the entire Christian project undermined by its own foundation?

1. Cross-Eyed

In my experience, Christian leaders usually laud that the simple solution to weak faith is to read the Bible and pray more. Ironically, it was precisely these two things that have led me to abandon all organized religion. I have almost universally found Christians to be poor readers of scripture and many of them don’t even seem to enjoy reading their precious leather-bound book. This is not the fault of these individuals, this is Christianity.

In case it isn’t obvious, I have not left the faith because I refused to take the Bible seriously. I have faced the scriptures with as much seriousness and courage as I could muster. I’ve allowed them to address me, I’ve listened patiently to their demands and how they’d have me live. I love the Bible and I’ve found it to be much more interesting, challenging and mysterious when read honestly, without putting it in God’s mouth or tying it into knots to make Jesus look good.

 

 

cross-eyed

Was it the death of God,

we saw when Jesus died?

Is he YHWH or a fraud?

How could he be One prophesied?

The price God pays for creation,

Did Isaiah, did David envision him crucified?

Does he really bring us salvation?

Was it him that Zechariah had in mind?

To see it like this, one must be cross-eyed.

 

When early Christians began developing a canon, they chose to organize the Old Testament differently than the Jews had organized their Hebrew Bible. Christians wanted to demonstrate continuity with with the Hebrew scriptures, something that was not by any means readily apparent to the Jews. So, they reconfigured it in the way that seemed to make best sense of Jesus–effectively inventing the Old Testament– and included it as the preface for their new canon.

In doing so, they were acting in the same spirit as the New Testament writers, who felt the creative freedom to write Jesus into specific Hebrew images –most notably, the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 and the abandoned pathos of Psalm 22, but we also get images like the donkey-rider of Zechariah 9, and various allusions to passover. I don’t doubt that they genuinely saw Jesus as the messianic fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel but it definitely took some interpretive revisioning to make a Savior out of Jesus.

2. Endings

I think a quick look at the basic interpretive differences between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible will illuminate the thesis of this post well. The primary move I want to highlight is the eventually unanimous Christian decision to defy chronology and move the prophets to the end of the Old Testament. The major effect this achieves can be clarified through a quick juxtaposition of endings:

The Hebrew Bible ends with a remarkable finale. The Persians defeat the Babylonians and free the Jews from the dark night of their exile. Cyrus, the King of Persia, issues what seems to be the thematic element throughout: “…whoever is among you of all [God’s] people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.”

Let him go up.

The thrust of the Jewish scriptures is not theological or even religious. Rather, we might think of it as an existential challenge. God charges that all God’s people are called to dignity, to liberation, to reject all forms of slavery. Moses’ call is not to a religious conformity but a call to becoming, to make something of ourselves. No other religion seems to so radically affirm the potential of the individual human being, even across boundaries of ethnicity and religion.

The Christian formulation of the Bible does not have the same effect. The international, suprareligious humanistic streak of the Hebrews is hushed against the development of a new religious technology, Hell. By relegating the prophets to the end, they are stripped of their centrality and power for the Jewish experience. Instead, Christians set them up as a sort of transition from the Old to the New, a type of wind up to the New Testament. Often, a picture is painted of an “intertestamental silence,” when really the Jewish literature from this period is exceptional–the sheer number of messiahs, sects and revolutions reveal it to have been a uniquely fertile spiritual era.

The Hebrew Bible ends with a blessing, the Christian Old Testament ends with a curse.

We usually only tell the meaning of any story from how it ends. An end means a new lens, it means we see everything that happens from the beginning as colored by the ending. Christians knew that Jesus was the answer but they still had to formulate the question. In other words, Christians reworked their literary inheritance to present a problem to which Jesus would be the solution. While the motif of Jewish scriptures might be labeled something like liberation, that of Christian scriptures would have to be something like personal security. Jesus and Paul are by far the most concerned about people knowing the importance of rewards in the afterlife. Things like justice, adventure, romance, parenthood are relativized to otherwordly rewards; it is the damned state of our soul and our likelihood of an eternity spent in Hell that matters. Our actual lives are mere quibbles, a chance to shrewdly stock up trophies in Heaven.

A Christian reading of the Old Testament is necessarily determined by the New Testament, which by its very nature suggests that it supersedes what is old. Contemporary theologians play all sorts of word games in attempt to vindicate Christianity from the charge of supersession, a charge of which the great theologians of history have been far less afraid. The New Testament changes everything. It supposes itself to be the fulfillment of the old Hebrew religion.

And it’s not just the OT that Christianity makes us subordinate to this process of making Jesus look good. Rather, if we are good Christians, we are supposed to see everything through the perspective of Christ’s death and resurrection. In doing so, we become “cross-eyed”, the blood of Christ pervades our field of vision. As if we had wrapped our heads Christ’s blood-soaked garment, expecting that it should offer clarity rather than obscured vision.

This was how I read the Bible. That is, until a blessed (or cursed) little seminary professor challenged me to read the Hebrew Bible on its own, that I might better understand the scriptures Jesus inherited in his time. Little did either of us know that this would be the bomb that blew me out of belief.

I found in the Hebrew Bible a tiny cosmos of wild and explosive literature. There is nothing in the New Testament that holds a candle to its literary brilliance, and indeed almost nothing in all of Christian literature that rivals its boldness and originality. The New Testament is effectively a hermeneutical cage for the savage prophets of its Old Testament. Christians are taught to read them only in light of a prior commitment to  Jesus, which leads us to miss the prophets at their most profound and radical.