Upbringing

When I was young, my interest in religion was something people encouraged. In my adult life, it's become something people tolerate. It makes me feel like all the religious stuff that was pushed on me as a kid was just a way to stop me from having sex or doing drugs. I saw the church-world as fraudulent. Even though I knew lots of sincere, compassionate, honest people there (including some ministers), I couldn't help but feel that their goodness was being wasted in a den of dullness and spiritual sloth. And now that I am old enough to drink and fuck (apparently), it seems like people want me to drop the whole Jesus thing before it becomes dangerous. But it was always dangerous, they just tried to hide that from me, or didn't know about it.

I realize that that my faith is an affront to the values of the same people who first introduced me to the Christian tradition, but I believe that Christ is something that obliterates our assumptions and security and moral presumption. I believe that faith can be something that supersedes and cuts through nationalist allegiance, and despite the violence done in God's name, the faith that connects us over borders may be the only thing keeping nationalism in check. I refuse to allow my life to be ruled by the gods of Market, Nation and Ideology. And that refusal is dangerous. And it's lonely. And it's a lot to live up to. And it can make me a very self-righteous person sometimes. Other times, it makes me feel incredible guilt at how easily I fall right back into the patterns of consumption and exclusion and piety against which Christ hurled himself.

I know I seem arrogant, and I know I seem contrarian, but I can't get on board with the program.  I've never been able to.  I accept the civilising structures of power as a reality, but the cost is too high and I can not accept the world built in the image of these gods.  Out of love for humanity, I must return the ticket.

Ideas v. People

The energy of faith, hope, and love is the unheroic Passion of Christ crucified, the energy of his death and resurrection binding us to him. Passion is not willpower. Passion is the surrender of meaning and power, the emptying that is incorporation into Christ. Passion is the soul’s life.

Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning

I don’t believe there is a Hell in the afterlife, and this is probably why I am not evangelically-minded. If I did believe in something like that, I would be obligated to spend every waking moment saving (or trying to save) anyone I could from that fate. In light of infinite, endless suffering, nothing else could be worth doing.

I understand the impulse, however, to share profound experiences, and the impulse to defend and explore what we hold dear. The Christian experience compels us to invite (as fishermen, if you can excuse that imperfect metaphor) others to share in it.

When asked which commandment is greatest (see Mathew 22:36-40), Jesus answers “Love the Lord your God with all your heart. Love him with all your soul, and love him with all your mind."

I believe this means to strive toward a connection to Ultimacy, to accept our relative smallness, and to cease rebellion against the laws of the physical universe (our rebellion against our own mortality, for example, as seen in the Transhumanist movement.)

Jesus adds a second commandment, one that is like the first: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Everything in the books of Law, everything from the prophets is about these two things.

Perhaps, then, all or most Christians can agree on these priorities:

1) God

2) Humanity

We may understand the finer points (like, what “God” refers to) differently, but let's use this as a starting point. The two commands are alike. There is no clear distinction between loving others and loving God. What we do to anyone we do to Christ. Christ. God. Meaning. This is why our selfishness and our callousness to the needs of others does not expose the truth that we are very-naughty-indeed, it exposes the truth that we are mired in an existential failure.

Notice that there is nothing on the list between God and people. Doctrine and dogma are not included. In fact, Jesus appears to be saying that doctrine and dogma exist only to promote these two priorities. (If we intend to include our doctrine in the category of “God” we are making a grave mistake.) The conclusion is that people are more valuable than ideas.

Christian churches talk about fundamentals, the things on which they will not budge. At the same time, they evangelize, inviting people to share in the experience while, at the same time, alienating those people with “fundamental” ideas about the role of women, homosexuality, marriage, economics, violence, and a host of other contentious issues. It seems wrong to bend one’s principles to appease potential “buyers” but a question lurks: Is this idea worth more than the people you will lose?

This is why I have so little patience for talk about politics in the US. People appear more concerned with the triumph of their ideology than they are with the needs of others. I can rant about this at length, but why bother?

Any person is more precious than any idea. Christ calls us away from the idols of ideology, away from our loyalty to Truth-claims, and into a wilderness of love.

Recriminations on Every Side

If you'd like to know what the "emergent church" is trying to emerge from, point your ear at some of that movement's harshest critics.

Ligonier Ministries has made this video available for your viewing pleasure. If you would like to hear the entire message, you may purchase it at their website. (Don't worry, gentle readers, content on the good ol' B&D will remain free of charge.)



In the video, after defining post-modernism as a rejection of truth ("all the rest of it is really decoration,") radio host Al Mohler says this: "Today’s liberals were evangelicals yesterday, and what we continually have are break-offs in which people who are the sons and daughters of the ones who rejected the liberalism, you know, bring it in in a different way and in a new form, and… just to be short, let me tell you that if you get the truth-question wrong, you’re going to be abhorrent in every dimension of the life of your church and in your personal understanding of Christianity."

I think Mr. Mohler is making a mistake if he is afraid of an abhorrent understanding of Christianity. What should terrify him is a comforting, rigid understanding rooted in the assumption that Truth is simple and well within our grasp.

In the New Testament, I see a Jesus who is radical, angry, contrarian, heretical and furious with the intellectual and moral pretension of the pious and powerful. I see a Jesus whose messy, confusing message is offensive and upsetting to almost everybody. It is abhorrent. Objectionable. Repugnant.

If you want someone who will tell you what you want to hear and confirm the rightness of your doctrine, Jesus is not your man. He is perfectly unacceptable. He is an utter scandal.

Despite the best efforts of the pious to sanitize and domesticate this scandal, there is a contagious fury burning in those red letters, a fury against everything we stand for and everything that comforts us.

If we follow someone so utterly obscene, our church will be abhorrent and we will remain always among the marginalized. Exactly where we should be.

On this virtual spot I am going to explore that abhorrent Christianity.