Searching for God # 52

 Many Christians in the West, N. T. Wright says, have the goal of their faith completely upside down. Instead of seeing Christianity as God renewing the whole world and uniting Heaven and Earth, many believers think the point is simply for their souls to escape to Heaven when they die.

Wright argues the New Testament teaches the opposite: God comes to dwell with us, and Jesus’ resurrection launches a new creation that’s already underway. Ephesians shows that God’s plan has always been to unite all things in Christ—and the Church is supposed to be a preview of that new creation right now.

Because of this misunderstanding, Christians often misread the End Times, spiritual warfare, and even the afterlife. Wright says ideas like the rapture and apocalyptic timelines aren’t in the New Testament—they’re modern distortions mixed with Western philosophy.

True spiritual warfare, he says, isn’t about blaming people or seeing demons everywhere. It’s about living faithfully as a united, Spirit-filled community that reflects God’s future in the present. (N. T. Wright*, from Facebook page of Will Horn)

*Rt. Rev. N.T. Wright or Tom Wright is an English New Testament scholar, Pauling theologian, and Anglican Bishop. He is currently Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford

I recently heard a professional woman declare, ‘I know that Jesus is coming back and I sure do want to be ready, ‘cause I sure don’t want to have to stay here.’

The apocalypse is a word that has been used to anticipate a second coming, tied to the Judgement Day, coming in part from the book of Revelation, a mode of literature with which the contemporary world is unfamiliar. Linked with the Crucifixion and Resurrection, it provides considerable ‘cover’ for the justification of the proposition of judgement that has plagued the church and its adherents for centuries. And, let’s acknowledge that a metaphor of classical conditioning, with rewards for ‘good behaviour’ and ‘surrender’ to a saviour have served the ecclesial development movement for a long time. God as critical parent, with a clear and readily grasped set of goals and objectives, is a metaphor that can be grasped by both child and adult, on a literal, empirical level. It supports the privatizing of sin, and the capacity of all to make judgements about the sins of others. It also supports the ‘moment of ‘conversion/confession’ and surrender, for the fulfilment of the ‘fishers-of-men’ image that is frequently deployed by the evangelists.

Enabling and even ‘arming’ ‘believers’ to ‘save the world’ from the sins of which each of us is responsible, provides a template for many to serve both church and self in piling up numbers of new ‘believers’. The notion/teaching that a new creation is already underway, at least from this perch, is congruent with Tolstoy’s non-violent confrontation of evil with force, without the added appendage of dividing the ‘superior converts’ from the ‘inferior pilgrims.’

It is the waves, ripples, and even rivers of division and conflict with each parish that, from my limited experience, have left parishes foundering on the shoals of a deep divide between the literalist judges and those who read and understand with more of a metaphoric and poetic perspective. Little, if any, formal discussion is available on the subject of how, if at all, the imagination plays a part in the formation and sustaining of a faith perspective. If faith is defined as ‘holding an intellectual conviction’ about specific truths of history, as in ‘I believe that yesterday’s temperature was a minus 5 Celsuis’ then dispute about that ‘conviction’ is without recourse to appeal, irrelevant, dismissable and abhorrent.

Such a divide of both perception as well as ‘perspective’ and the attitudes and emotions that come with each perspective, is frequently cause for bitter and intense disagreements. I once heard a professor of theology note that he had spent much of his scholar-life attempting to wrestle with the conflict between science and religion. Does such a continuing study not begin with a proposition of incompatibility? And what if such incompatibility does not exist and each is reconcilable with the other?

The notion of ‘time’ and a savior’s literal, historical, as well as meta-historical return at some far-off time in the distant future, enables those who favour such a vision to take much less seriously the conditions under which we are living right now. Conversely, some might even believe that their ‘charge’ and conviction is to ‘bring about the Kingdom of God right here right now’ as we have heard from some in the MAGA movement.

Finite perceptions of both time and money, especially, bring with them a degree of urgency on the one hand and obsessive-compulsion on the other. Scarcity of both, as an over-riding metaphor, perspective and even ‘belief’ have plagued the church in many quarters for centuries. Sanctity and reverence for God have both been encaptured, as some would see it, in the church’s ‘poor church mouse’ image as well as in such attitudes as silence on steroids within the sanctuary, constricted notions of legitimate subjects for church formal debate, and a reductionistic God as ultimate ‘super-ego’ or critical parent or final judge.

How, pray tell, is such a retinue or menu of scarcities congruent with the abundance of God’s unconditional, unrestrained, and ubiquitous love in all of its many forms? That question is not ‘penned’ as rhetorical! Too many lives have been twisted, torpedoed, submarined, sabotaged and utterly decimated by failing to ‘live up’ to the standards of morality, ethics and religious commitment, or by believing that those lives were ‘beyond redemption’ given an ethos of choking judgement.

And one of the more tragic aspects of such a cultural dynamic has been the impunity of accountability and responsibility of the Christian church for limiting the imaginations of millions as to the nature of God, the nature of ‘living a good life’ and, of course, the inverse. I once heard another Anglican bishop comment, ‘The church has fallen into the trap of being ‘politically correct’!’

Politically correct has so many implications that it is likely impossible  to account for all of them. Being agreeable, being friendly, being of good humour, being kind, and being uplifting and inspiring are all reasonable expressions of being ‘politically correct’ and have been adopted almost as a template for the contemporary transactional culture. As a life-long retailer, my father knew that by restraining his choice of topics with customers to the weather and perhaps the latest Maple Leafs’ score, he would avoid tension and conflict. Concentrating on the needs of that customer, for a specific piece of hardware, fishing equipment, paint selection, building material or bone china, he rarely if ever strayed outside the boundaries of ‘nice man’ in order to preserve his reputation as a ‘nice-guy’ with whom to do business. Taboo were both religion and politics!

Think for a moment about those moments in our lives when ‘something went wrong’ and how each and every time we asked ourselves ‘what did I do wrong?’ as the initial emotional and intellectual assessment of the situation. Millions of us have lived with a proverbial ‘cawing crow’ sitting on our shoulder as an inheritance of the Christian church. How many times have we measured our moments of specific choices as ‘different’ from the example of our parents, whose example was set from such constrictions as ‘sobriety,’ ‘abstinence’ or ‘excess frugality’ or ‘reticence’ or ‘withdrawal’ or ‘not volunteering’ or ‘not applying’ or ‘failing to disclose how I feel’….all because, whether consciously or unconsciously we ‘thought’ or ‘believed’ or ‘considered’ or ‘were told’ that to open up was ‘too much’….and ‘too much’ came from  morality and an ethic as well as a conventional social tolerance, all of it conditioned by an underlying religious imperative?

For these and many other constrictions we have the church to ‘thank’ if only we would dare.

Is this legacy in part an inheritance from scripture read in a constricted and constricting manner?

It simply will not do, it is a cultural luxury that we can no longer afford, if ever we could, for any Christian on the whims of an uninformed and culturally driven piety to read the Bible and to pronounce upon its meaning with any less effort than these questions (in this case antisemitism) require. (Peter J. Gomes*, The Good Book,  Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, p.119) (Gomes was arguing against the case that Jews had fallen from God and that the only way back was to cease to be Jews and to become Christian.)

*Peter J. Gomes, ordained a Baptist clergy, was professor and Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and Professor of Christian Morals at the Harvard Divinity School. He died in 2011.

Gomes observes the ‘assigning of sin’ to institutions as compared with the privatized sin of personal malfeasance. He notes that social activists who discern and disclaim the sin of the institutions call it a ‘system(s) failure. And he notes that such sin is abstract, with juxtaposed with personal, private sin.

What I am positing here is that much of the theology of the Christian church, as practiced, is (or has been) focused on private sin, given its clear dimensions, diagnosis, and irrespective of whether scripture holds a strong position of concurrence. An example, from Augustine would be that ‘sex is sin’ while not all sex is sin and not all sin is sex.

Such a perception can be applied to homosexuality. We read in Gomes:

In his study Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, John Boswell concluded his chapter on the New Testament texts having to do with homosexuality with these words:

The New Testament takes no demonstrable position on homosexuality. To suggest that Paul’s references to excesses of sexual indulgence involving homosexual behavior are indicative of a general position in opposition to same-sex eroticism if as unfounded as arguing that his condemnation of drunkenness implies opposition to the drinking of wine.

Gomes was asked to speak to a rally at Harvard in 1991 about the expressed experience of abuse of gays and lesbians, Gomes, himself a homosexual. Here is a direct quote from that address from the New York Times reprinted on npr.org in a piece entitled Peter J. Gomes, ‘Harvard’s Pastor dies by Korva Coleman, March 1, 2011

I do not know when the quality of life has been more violated….I am a Christian who also happens to be gay…Those realities, which are irreconcilable to some, are reconcilable in me by a loving God.

In his own work, The Good Book, writing about that same incident, Gomes writes:

I warned of the dangers of Christian absolutism, with the appropriate references to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials and I dismissed the easy references to scripture and the rathe glib social analysis as unworthy of thinking of charitable Christian debate. (Gomes op. cit. p 165)

And after the barrage of criticism that greeted him subsequently, much of it from the Bible, (he writes):

Many of my critics, chiefly from within the religious community, asked if I read the same Bible they did, and if I did how could I possibly reconcile my position with that of scripture? When arguments failed, anathemas were hurled and damnations promised. The whole incident confirmed what had long been my suspicion (as it is also this scribe’s). Fear was at the heart of homophobia, as it was at the heart of racism, and as with racism, religion---particularly the Protestant evangelical kind that nourished me (and this scribe too!)---was the moral fig leaf that covered naked prejudice. I further concluded that more rather than less attention must be given to how we read the scriptures, what we bring to the text, what we find in the text, and what we take from the text.( Gomes op. cit. p. 166)

With respect to ‘constrictions’ based on some kind of assumed piety, I was accused by a supervisor, while a deacon, of being ‘much too intense for me’….to which I responded without skipping a breath, “Well, I am also too bald; deal with it!” She phoned the bishop later that day to recommend against my ordination. With respect to biblical interpretation, my homilies have been dubbed heretical, and I the antichrist, by those whose reading of scripture echo those of Gomes’ scriptural-based critics.’ In first year of theology studies, I encountered a literal interpretation of scripture from class mates who upon hearing one member of our Field Education Class claim that Hitler had gone to heaven, (a provocative statement uttered doubtless to arouse the ire of those known as ‘fundies’) retorted, “That’s not true and I know it isn’t true because the Bible says so!”

There is much to ponder upon reading the Bible, and one starting place might be that of a kindergarten kid, ‘I’m in kindergarten here; please help me and my wonder! I am in awe but not in fear!’