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?