Throwing Paul Under the Bus

There they were, the dad and his daughters, picnicking before an outdoor concert.  They were just a yard behind me to my left.  We were waiting together for the show to start, and as I sipped my refreshing pilsner and soaked up the late-day sun, I did some good old-fashioned eavesdropping.

Daughter One was tall and dark clad, sitting in front of Dad and Daughter Two.  Daughter Two was a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties.  She was wearing a funky little hat and modest but graceful clothing, a pageboy bob framing her face.  Dad was in his fifties, trim and tan, with a Ron Burgundy mustache that was just a tiny bit too large for his pleasantly impish face, a face that could be seen echoed in his daughter.

 Dad was talking to Daughter Two about Jesus.

And Lord have mercy, was she not enjoying it.  She was enduring it, being polite, trying not to say anything encouraging.  It was one of those conversations that will be recounted later to Daughter One, I suspect, although describing it as a conversation isn't particularly accurate.

It was a monologue delivered at slightly more volume than was entirely necessary, the sort of thing that Dad had cobbled together at whatever church Dad was attending.  "How to Talk To Your Liberal Daughter Back from College about Jesus," or so I'm sure the pamphlet goes.

So he talked, talked about how radical Jesus was, how unusual he was for his day, that sort of thing.  It wasn't bad stuff, not really, but it wasn't a conversation she wanted to be having.  "Sure, Dad."  "Well, I don't know."  "Uh huh."

There was no asking, or any real back and forth.

Then, Dad started in about Paul.  How Paul had completely ruined Christianity, how he'd taken the radical things Jesus had done and messed them all up.  Jesus never said most of the things Paul said, intoned Dad, with Dadly Authority.  Paul really said some stupid things about women, Dad said, with Dadly Certainty.  Paul came later than the Gospels, said Dad with utter Dadly Confidence, and turned the Jesus of the Gospels from a revolutionary thing into something completely different.

Oh Lord, was it hard not to jump in.  Were I Russian, or Israeli, I'd have insinuated myself in a heartbeat.  And despite my near-pathological introversion, I almost did.  But as I watched them, drawn to theological conversation like a moth to a flame, Daughter Two saw me and met my eyes. She gave me a sheepish little smile.  "Sorry you have to hear this," it said.  I gave her a shrugging grin back.  "I feel you," it said, and she registered it.

I wasn't going to wade in, because it would have made her more uncomfortable.  "Now Dad's Getting Into It With A Strange Pastor."  Yeah, that'd help her a whole bunch.

It was still tempting, not just because Dad was factually wrong, though he was.  Wherever Dad goes to church, they clearly don't teach about the dating of Paul's letters and how the Gospels were written.

But because Paul deserves none of that rap.  None of it.

Oh, he gets that a whole bunch, as folks try to adapt the New Testament to our egalitarian culture.  It's a familiar critique, one I heard a whole bunch in the progressive church in which I grew up.  But it's just not right.

The more you get into historical critical study of the Bible, the more obvious that becomes.  Paul himself--not the followers who wrote in his name, but Paul himself--was certainly not Jesus.  But the heart of what Paul taught in the seven letters we can attribute to him with integrity harmonizes beautifully with the Jesus we hear in the Gospels.  If you really get into the scholarship--the serious, objective, critical scholarship--the Paul that emerges is a remarkable person.  Perfect?  No.

An Apostle bearing the same sacred and transforming message that Jesus himself bore, one that shattered cultural expectations, class lines, and gender roles?  Yes.

You just can't throw that guy under the bus.

Passionate Visionary: Leadership Lessons from the Apostle Paul

Having worked through books about David, Saul, and Moses as models for organizational leadership, I find myself now chugging my way through an assessment of the leadership style and approach of the Apostle Paul.  The book, entitled Passionate Visionary: Leadership Lessons from the Apostle Paul, was written by Dr. Richard Ascough and Dr. Charles Cotton, respectively a Professor of New Testament and a leadership consultant hailing from Canada's Royal Military College.

Entering into the book, the concern puttering about in the recesses of my subconscious was that it would shoehorn Paul into a box of current leadership literature, or misrepresent the core of authentic Pauline theology.  Neither of those fears proved justified.  With the input of both authors, the book moved seamlessly between the world of contemporary organizational dynamics and Paul's teaching and sociocultural context.

I particularly appreciated the decision of the authors to focus on the seven undisputed letters of Paul, and to leave the pastorals and the other deutero-Pauline letters out of the assessment of Paul's impact on the Jesus movement.  In doing so, Ascough and Cotton present a more accurately nuanced picture of Paul in all his bright, ferocious complexity.

In reading through this well-structured and conceptualized book, a few key features leapt out.

The end of chapter "questions for reflection" were actually rather engaging.  This is not always the case in  but I found myself consistently meditating on how and in what ways my own experience of leadership were reflected in the themes from the chapter.  In chapter fifteen, for instance, the reflections on the honor/shame dynamics that can stifle authentic conversation in communities resonated strongly.  Having recently left a ministry that was deeply influenced by the honor/shame dynamics of Korean culture, I found the assessment of those influences (standing in opposition to the Christ-centered freedom encouraged by Paul) to be accurate.

I found myself powerfully resonating to the chapter on the "bottom line" for Paul.  Keying off of the soaring hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13, and echoing off of other core Pauline texts, the authors accurately present love of other as absolutely central to Pauline theology.  By extension, this is also the bottom line in Paul's approach to leadership, and the core measure by which anyone in leadership needs to be assessed.  As Ascough and Cotton put it:

Vision counts for nothing without compassion, charisma fades without it, and all the spin doctors in the world produce meaningless words if the leader does not connect with followers in a caring, compassionate way. (p.146)

This measure, I think, gets to the core of what is most vital and life-giving in organizational leadership, whether it be in a congregational context or, quite frankly, in any gathering of human beings.

Finally, the emphasis on Pauline "chaordic" leadership...meaning leadership that embraces, directs, and empowers the generative character of human communities...was also resonant, although it was not clear as I was reading it whether or not this was simply because I grok to this approach.

Ultimately, this was a solid, well-developed, and readable work, rooted strongly in both organizational literature and the theology of one of the most influential individuals in the Christian faith tradition.  It's a fine read, both for pastors and for any Jesus folk struggling to see how they might apply some of the core principles of our faith to their life out there in the world.

Spiritual Bodies

Here's a little remnant of speculative esoterica from a recent meditation, one that came as I prepared to eulogize a recently passed member of my teeny little church. As I searched for a passage to illuminate the Christian understanding of death, I found myself musing over the paradoxical Pauline claim that we have "spiritual bodies."

That particular bit of theological fuddliness comes to us from the letter to the church at Corinth. It's a puzzler because it seems to describe an impossibility. The soma pneumatikon that Paul says is our true nature seems on the surface to be in unresolvable tension with itself.

The word soma describes meatspace reality, our bones and sinews and loins and giblets. It is material. Pneuma is classically understood as spirit, intangible, ineffable, and impossible to quantify and measure. How can it be that they are somehow the same thing? It seems an impossibility.

For those who would see Paul as a dualist, the kind of Christian who thinks Body=Bad and Spirit=Good, this passage is a serious stumbling block. And for good reason. Paul, being of a semitic persuasion, could not be further from that binary understanding of being. This existence matters for Paul. It matters infinitely. If it did not, then our actions in this short span of being would have little relevance to our eternity. As it is, though, this life is the seed, containing the fullness of our eternity within itself.

As Paul describes it, our spiritual body is different from flesh, but it is also different from our psyche. But...how?

As I read Paul with unabashedly mystical eyes, I hear him speaking to a self that transcends self. The boundaries of flesh and the boundaries of individuation do not define the soma pneumatikon. Instead, my sense of that reality is that it is the totality of our transpersonal being. Our awareness of pneuma, of the Spirit, is at it's most essential about our connectedness with both Being Itself and other beings. That would seem to give a particular shape and form to the seeming paradox Paul describes.

Our spiritual bodies are the fullness of our place in being, as our actions and intentions play their way across inanimate being and through the other seemingly discrete selves that we encounter. Those influences are permanently part of the reality of creation, from the intense passions and anguishes and joys of our first love to that cutting remark we offered to our lazy, good-for-nothing daughter to the careless touch of a hand brushing across a painted wall. Those things and their echoes and ripples are part of our eternity, as surely as the hands that type this are part of me.

We do not perceive them as such now, of course. We can't begin to fully grasp who we are. But we're on the other side of the veil.

Fortunately, I had the good sense not to ramble on about this at the funeral.

You Know A Knockoff When You See One

Earlier this week, one of my daily meanderings through the Bible...which I realize may well entertaining only to myself...surfaced something that I hadn't anticipated.

In this week's Bible Puzzlah out the book of Ezekiel, I surfaced two separate passages from the New Testament that stood in apparent tension with Ol' Zeke.

One was from Paul, writing in the Book of Romans. The other was from deutero-Paul, writing in 1 Timothy. Meaning, many scholars of the Bible look at these two books and see such a wide divergence of voice, style and theology that...for the sake of the integrity of the text...they can't bring themselves to say they're written by the same person. "Deutero" Paul means "Second" Paul...a disciple of Paul writing in Paul's name. It's a significant element of the historical-critical approach to the Bible, and, honestly, I've been sold on it since I first encountered it in undergrad. In part, that's because it just makes so darn much sense.

But more significantly, it gives Scripture a depth and richness of reality that makes the stories it tells all the more spiritually potent. That's not how my literalist brethren understand it, of course. The Bible simply is exactly what it says it is. If the book says Paul wrote it, then, by golly, that begins and ends the discussion. Messing with that absolute certitude would mess with the entire foundation of scriptural literalism.

Problem is, it just doesn't feel...real. Paul's seven authentic letters all share a recognizable voice and theology. If you read 1 Timothy 2 with an open mind, well, it just ain't the same. The passage from early this week is particularly egregious. Yeah, it ain't a favorite of mine, but it also just plain meaning doesn't jibe with the rest of Paul.

Take, for instance, the assertion that "Adam was not deceived, it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner." There's not a chance in heck that the Paul who wrote Romans ever, ever said this. It flies utterly, totally, and completely in the face of everything Paul had to say about Adam and sin. You just can't read Romans 5:12-21 and reconcile it with that statement. It undercuts the entire core of Pauline understanding of human sinfulness, which is at the foundation of orthodox understandings of salvation.

1 Timothy also makes the rather impressive statement that sinful women will be "saved through childbearing." Gawrsh, and here I was thinking that our pitch was that all humankind was saved by Jesus Christ. Guess for da ladiez it's "Jesus Christ plus babies."

This peculiar statement trivializes Paul's understanding of the role of grace and faith in reconciling us with God. It just, well, can't be Paul. It doesn't sound like him, smell like him, or taste like him. There are echoes of Paul's thought in 1 Timothy, sure. But if you are as gifted a rhetorician as Paul shows himself to be in Romans, Galatians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians, that sort of flagrant inconsistency seems...well...pretty freakin' unlikely.

It's also rather difficult to believe that the Paul who wrote Galatians and declared that in Christ gender categories no longer matter would bother with this passage in the first place.

1 Timothy seems to reflect the incursion of Roman sociocultural expectations into the church...which would be expected as the church grew and spread in the time after the Apostolic Era. As such, it makes sense. It reflects the beginnings of the devolution of the Primal Church into a servant of the state. What just doesn't compute for me is the argument that it is somehow saying exactly the same thing as Paul's writings, any more than it would make sense to say that a Geely Merrie 300 is the same thing as a Mercedes C Class.

Guess you just need a discerning eye.

Fencing the Table

My Presbytery today moved over to a completely different approach to handling our meetings. For the past several years, the National Capitol Presbytery has run meetings like, well, business meetings. We had an agenda. We used parliamentary procedure. There was debate and dissent and political maneuvering...and the meetings could go on and on and on. It wasn't something I tended to look forward to.

Today, the Presbytery meeting was part of the new model, meaning mostly worship. We gathered in small groups at tables. There was a lecture on Scripture, and then small group discussion, followed by a sermon, and more discussion, after which we shared Communion. It was actually sorta fun, and the discussions were both intellectually and spiritually engaging. The focus of the day was Mark 14, and as part of our conversations about the dynamics of the Christian communion meal, I bumped into something I can't quite recall having encountered before.

Meaning, I probably have encountered it, but I just don't remember. One of the great things about getting older is that I get to experience so many things again for the first time.

As we discussed the meaning of the Lord's Supper in the context of Mark and the other synoptic Gospels, I popped over to 1 Corinthians 11 to make sure that the Apostle Paul's perspective was included in our small group conversation. What whapped me upside the head about Paul's description of the communion meal was the very particular way he "fenced the table."

What "table-fencing" means, for thems of you who don't follow the in-group talk of Jesus people, is keeping out the folks who don't belong. The bread and grape juice that comprise the Lord's Supper are part of something sacred, so we need to boot the unworthy. It is, quite literally, excommunication.

Many churches set and enforce particular standards based on Paul's assertion that eating and drinking the Lord's Supper with the wrong attitude is "sinning against the body and blood of the Lord." People who run afoul of those standards are not welcome at the Lord's table. Keep 'em out! No Christ for You!

But if you get past our human love of sticking out our tongues at people we don't like, and actually read Paul, that isn't what he tells us to do at all. He never says, not ever, that our task is to judge others worthy or unworthy of the communion meal. What he says is this:

A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. (1 Corinthians 11:28-31)

It is not "figure out who doesn't meet our standards." It's "take a hard look at ourselves, to see if we meet Christ's standards."

There's a huge, huge difference there.

Will You Will or Will You Won't Be Mine?

"There is no deadlier weapon than the will! The sharpest sword is not equal to it! There is no robber so dangerous as Nature...yet it is not nature that does the damage: It is man's own will." Chuang Tzu

Sin is, at its essence, a corruption of the will. The orthodox Christian position is that our desire is flawed, not our bodies. Sin is a matter of software, not hardware. Our flawed desire takes the form of that "blind self-love" that Calvin describes, or the pride that Augustine condemns. Whenever love of self is placed above love of God and neighbor--we sin. That is at the heart of what Paul speaks about when he describes sin as living kata sarka, or "in the flesh." (Romans 8:5) We orient ourselves towards our own physical desires, and allow our own needs to rule over the needs of others.

That can't be understood to mean that the fulfillment of physical needs itself is evil. It isn't wrong to be hungry, or to eat. But the Ultimate Colossal Burger at Ruby Tuesday's has more calories than most sub-Saharan-Africans get in a day...and that's before your side of fries and half-gallon of soda.

It isn't wrong to feel sexual desire. Sharing that intimacy with a partner is good, and the potential for the creation of new life is a blessing. But when other human beings become just a means to our own pleasure, and all we think about all day is bangbangbangbangbang, then we live not according to our physicen kresin, our "natural functions" (Romans 1:17), but according to sin.

So now I'll weave this thread into my prior musings--where does this leave us relative to homosexuality? The condemnations of the "homosexual lifestyle choice" that arise from many Christian leaders have at their heart this understanding of sin as a flaw of the will. That's why the emphasis on homosexuality as a choice must be vigorously repeated and defended. This, of course, flies in the face of what science and our God-given ability to examine our world shows us-but so what?

Common sense on sexual identity seems to have a sharper edge here. Take me, for instance. I'm a heterosexual male. I have always been attracted to women. Sometimes--sophomore and junior years in high school come to mind--that attraction has been so intense as to be almost a form of madness.

I could no more choose to be attracted to another man than I could choose to be a duck. It isn't how God made me. If you're similarly heterosexual--ask yourself the same question. Could you make that choice? Didn't think so. Choice, volition, and will have nothing to do with orientation itself.

If that is so, then how is homosexuality itself a sin?

Therefore...

So what’s Paul doing rhetorically in Romans 1? In terms of ethos, logos, and pathos, Paul starts, appropriately, with ethos. Remember, Paul hadn’t yet visited Rome. This letter was his best foot forward, a sincere effort to establish himself and his authority in a church that didn’t really know him yet. It was like that sermon a pastor preaches the very first Sunday in their new church. You pull out the stops. Read through Romans 1:1-17, and you see him establishing common ground, and presenting his spiritual credentials.

When we reach verse 18-32, Paul moves to pathos. He’s trying to evoke a sense of indignation at the sin of idolatry, which is the root sin expressed in Romans 1:22-23. It is idolatry that drives human beings to fall from God. The link between idolatry and the practices that Paul cites is cemented by his use of the Greek word dio, which we see translated as “therefore.” One thing happens, therefore another follows on.

According to Paul, what follows on from idolatry is twofold. First, there is degradation of desire (Romans 1:24-25), and second, the degradation of the mind (Romans 1:28). As an example of the first, Paul cites the giving up of phusiken kresin, or the “natural function” between men and women. As an example of the second, Paul runs through another one of his naughty lists, in verses 29-30.

Let’s set aside for a moment the argument about the root cause of homosexuality. Most people who are so inclined will tell you that they knew they felt same-sex attraction from childhood. Very few of them—at least in the survey and scientific data I’ve seen—indicate that they began feeling same sex attraction after they set up a small shrine to Regis Philbin in their basement. The causal link between worshipping idols and gayness is, shall we say, tenuous.

But I’m willing to spot Paul that point of fact, for two reasons. First, he’s using this as an example of fallenness—and idolatry as a concept, not a practice--based on his own observations of Roman Imperial culture. Second, it’s not his purpose. This section isn’t the point of his message. It serves much the same function as that cheesy canned anecdote your preacher uses to get you laughing before he gets around to the real message. The clear effect of Paul’s use of pathos is to make his listeners nod their heads at these wretched, godforsaken souls. They lived in Rome. They knew what went on. It would have lead some of his hearers, perhaps, feel a little more sure of their own righteousness under the law.

So when Paul continues on to the point of his argument in chapter two—an argument that will be sustained through to Romans 8:39—his listeners may well expect the “Therefore..” that begins chapter 2, verse one to lead to more of the same. They’re expecting Paul to lay in to a familiar list of known sinners in a way that would do Ann Coulter proud. Instead, having used pathos to stir that feeling, Paul switches to a formal rhetorical style known as diatribe, and they get this:

Romans 2:1-5 Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. You say, "We know that God's judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth." Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.

Paul's point--and a core theme of Romans--is that all of us are sinners, and that all fall short of the demands of the law. If we only nod along to the pathos, and fail to hear the sharpness of Paul's challenge to our graceless judgments that this pathos establishes, then we've missed that point.

Back to Pastor Strangelove

Will and Grace are Pauline Theological Concepts

Romans, Romans, Romans. It's the very pinnacle of Paul's theology, a complicated and passionate letter that establishes how we as Christ's people understand what it is that Christ has done for us. Here Paul lays the foundation of our understanding grace as triumphing over the condemnation of the law. Here Paul *defines* the saving power of faith. This essential book also contains--in Romans 1--the most explicit condemnation of homosexual behavior in all of scripture.

In a speech given several years ago to a group of evangelicals, conservative Bible scholar Paul Achtemeier asserted that if the church is to meaningfully wrestle with this issue, it first needs to come to terms--honestly and openly--with what Romans 1 is actually saying. So...what does it say? Here are the specific verses in question:

Romans 1:21b-27 "...although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-- who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."

There we go! Here we have Paul clearly--clearly--telling the church at Rome that being gay is a "shameful lust." Case closed. Right? That was the point Paul was trying to make, right?

But Romans is not a book that can be understood verse by verse. It isn't a series of pithy little proverbs and aphorisms. It isn't a *simple* book, to be easily grasped by a casual reader. To understand it, you have to read it as a whole, following the arguments as they develop. Then you scratch your head, pray, and read it again. And again. The whole book is a carefully assembled and complex argument for the necessity of Christ's grace, crafted by a brilliant, passionate, and Spirit-filled rhetorician.

For in addition to his rabbinic training and his part-time camping supply business, Paul was also clearly a master of the art of Greco-Roman rhetoric. Rhetoric gets a bad rap nowadays, but it was an essential part of any educated person's training in the ancient world. To succeed in life, you had to be able to persuade people with the spoken and written word. That's exactly what Paul is doing with the whole letter of Romans. He's persuading Rome--and us--of the saving grace of Christ, using all of the tools in the classical rhetorician's toolbox. In classical rhetoric, the many tools of a speaker or writer fell into three primary categories: ethos, logos, and pathos.

Ethos is, in essence, laying a common groundwork with a listener. It establishes the authority of the speaker. Ethos helps an audience understand who you are, and why you're someone to be trusted.

Logos is a particular type of argument, using data and the application of logical proofs as evidence for the rightness of your position. Understood simply, it is an argument from reason, the Mr. Spock school of persuasion.

Pathos is another type of argument, which is intended to stir an emotional response in it's listeners. You stir a crowd to laughter, you move them to tears, you goad them into anger, you cajole them into uncontrollable flatulence, and having evoked that feeling in them, you lead them to agree with your position.

The educated and erudite church in Rome would have expected--needed--Paul to approach them with a letter that showed a mastery of rhetoric, and Paul did not disappoint.

So what point is Paul making, and what place does Romans 1:21-27 have in his argument?

Back to Pastor Strangelove

Beavis and Butthead Snicker When They Interpret This Verse

1 Corinthians 6:9 gives interpreters and translators something of a challenge. It's a list of sins--Paul loves firing off lists--but what exactly are those sins? Particularly, what are the last two sins listed in the verse? The King James and its updates in particular render the verse in a marvelously obtuse way...heaven is forbidden to the "..effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind."

You're damned if you're effeminate? But...Alberto Gonzales is such a nice man otherwise.

In the Greek, the last two items on Paul's naughty list are "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai." Read literally, the verse condemns the "soft ones" and the "man-bedders." While Paul coined the word "arsenokoitai" from the Levitical injunction against homosexuality, the term "malakoi" was actually used in the Greco-Roman world to describe a young man who sells himself, typically to older, more powerful men. So why the repetition? Is Paul saying: "I condemn homosexuals, and homosexuals, too!" Or is it the professional gay v. amateur gay distinction? "It's a sin if you get paid for it, and a sin if you don't!"

Some have suggested that it refers to the passive versus the active role in the relationship. Others have interpreted it as specifically condemning homosexual practices at the time, which usually involved wealthy and powerful men indulging themselves with young men-- "arsenokoitai" and "malakoi" referring specifically to that dynamic.

But whichever way you slice it, both of those words are really tangential to Paul's point. He's not talking about sexual sin here. 1 Corinthians 6:1-11 deals with the issue of lawsuits among believers, not sexual immorality. He's just firing off a list of commonly known vices, to reinforce to the Corinthians that they're being wicked when they go after each other in court. Paul's fond of "vice lists," because they make for a good, punchy spoken argument. For another example, look to Galatians 5:19-21, where Paul seems to leave being gay off the list entirely. Relying on this verse, or the deutero-Pauline 1 Timothy 1:10, just doesn't give you enough of a solid theological grounding to oppose committed same-sex relationships. 1 Corinthians is a pastoral letter, dealing with pastoral issues in the church at Corinth. Homosexuality just isn't one of the issues that Paul is centrally concerned with in Corinth. It isn't. To argue otherwise is to violate the plain and evident purpose of the text in service of a pointless and idolatrous literalism.

Not that I have any opinion on the subject.

That leaves us with only one passage left to explore, the Mac Daddy of the scriptural teachings on homosexuality, Romans 1.

Back to Pastor Strangelove

Yeah, You're a Nice Person, but Jesus Hates You Anyway

One of the biggest sticking points I have with the core evangelical savedness script is the peculiar insistence that Hell is full of people who don't appear to in any conceivable way to have merited eternal damnation.

I was reminded of this while watching the highly entertaining film Ghost Town, in which Ricky Gervais plays an isolated and insufferably misanthropic dentist who ends up able to "see dead people." His partner in practice is a kind, gentle, genial Hindu. Even though he's constantly being graceful and pleasant to his maddening workmate, he's also precisely the sort of person who...according to the Good News of Jesus Christ, American Evangelical Edition...is going to burn forever in the fires of Gehenna as his nice unbeliever flesh is flayed from his nice unbeliever bones by an unrelenting personal incubus.

The reasons that Christians invariably give for this are twofold. First, you can only be saved by Jesus Christ. Not a Christian? Not saved. Of course, that's not how Jesus describes the final judgment in the only place in the Gospels he talks about it directly...but that's a minor detail. We're sure Jesus didn't actually MEAN that.

The second and more prevalent is this: we Christians assert that you are saved by grace, and not by works. Therefore, or so the argument goes, someone who does good but has not proclaimed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is just doing "works righteousness," which is pointless and worthless.

There is, under this rubric, no difference between an "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, stopping, bandaging your wounds, and getting you to the hospital and that same "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, taking your wallet and shoes, punching you repeatedly, and then slitting your throat so you can't tell anyone. From the perspective of the evangelical movement, any distinction between these acts is meaningless to God. Both are equally evil, for the person undertaking them is automatically damned no matter what they think or how they act.

What's most difficult about this for me..beyond it's self-evident disconnect from the idea of "Good News"...is that it seems to radically misrepresent Paul's essential point about works, faith, and righteousness. What are "works?" Well, they're anything you do. Anything. Building a Habitat for Humanity house? That's a work. Popping a cap into some fool who disrespected you? That's a work. Taking a dump? That's a work.

What is Apostle Paul is talking about when he describes "works" that do not save? Random actions? Any actions? Evil actions? No. The "works" being challenged are "works under the law." What Paul is challenging is the idea that obedience to an external code of conduct...in this case, the Torah...has any power to restore our relationship with God. Why?

Because law and legality assume an underlying enforcement through coercion. It's how the state runs. In the contract between a ruler and their people, failure to comply with the terms of a social compact will result in unpleasantness for those who mess up. That ranges from small fines to more unpleasant things, particularly if you live in the district of Sen. Vlad Dracul (R-Transylvania).

But if that's the reason you engage in moral action it means that you are, as Paul puts it, a slave to fear. You are not acting as one moved by Christ's grace, meaning you are not inwardly conformed to God's will through the action of the Spirit. You're just doing what you're told. It's a shallow, meaningless, untransformed obedience, rooted in a terror of divine punishment.

What Paul was doing was to proclaim that through Christ, that whole dynamic was shattered and replaced with an awareness of God's grace. Not God the divine autocrat...but God who moves to change our hearts to the good with a relentless and inexorable grace.

Yet when we see individuals who are not law-driven, when we experience souls that seem driven to show care for others not because fear of God but by some deep upwelling grace, for some reason we feel compelled to declare them damned by the name of Jesus.

In the name of grace, a sizable percentage of Christians are willing to be graceless. To fairly paraphrase Paul, "you who brag about grace, do you dishonor God by showing no grace? As it is written: 'God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'"

Still Saving...Please Don't Turn off X

Most of this probably comes from my Presbyterian upbringing, but there's something I've never understood within the evangelical movement. What I find particularly baffling are statements like: "It's been six years since I was saved." Or "I got saved watching a Billy Graham revival on TV." Or harder still: "Have you been saved?"

Maybe it's because I'm running a different Spiritual OS, but ce ne computez pas. I do understand the need for powerful spiritual experiences that help define and reinforce our relationship to God. I do feel and have felt the intensity of a sudden heart-driven response to the divine presence.

But I think we're overreaching when we try to define those moments as the specific point in time when we "were saved." In fact, defining salvation in that way can be deeply counterproductive, for two reasons:

1) It's just too easy. Praise team cranking, pastor belting out the percussive alliteration, you get caught up and swept up and Badda boom! Badda Bing! I'm saved! If your spiritual growth never needs go beyond that moment, it's too easy to end up in a stunted and static faith.

2) It doesn't leave any room for the realities of our ongoing stumbling and weakness. You've been saved, gol'dangit. Justified! Sanctified! Washed in the Blood of the Lamb! Preacher said so himself when you came up to get baptized. How can you possibly be struggling? How can you possibly still be tormented by doubts?

Salvation is, instead, a life-long process of building a relationship with God, the Beloved Community, and the world around us. It is a growing, living, dynamic thing. We are, as Paul said to his dear friends in Philippi, always "working out our salvation with fear and trembling." If we approach our theology of salvation in that way, there's room for those days when prayers hang dead on our lips, or those nights when one little glass of wine somehow becomes a whole bottle, or when we find Firefox inexplicably pointed at www.scarlettjohansseninlatex.com.

Instead of viewing those stumblings as evidence that somehow gettin' saved musta not took right, we can instead see those difficult spiritual times as particularly challenging moments in our salvation walk. They are hurdles to overcome, a part of the journey, not evidence that we've deluded ourselves about God's love for us.

So to the question "Have you been saved," the only answer I can truthfully speak is, "I am still being saved."

While the Weak Eat Only Vegetables

It's been...what...over 15 years since I ate meat. Initially, it was more a question of convenience than anything else. When you marry a vegetarian, you've got to be motivated to prepare your own meat for meals. And I wasn't. Just too lazy. I'd eat meat when we went out, though. Like this insanely delicious steak salad at the Little Viet Garden in Arlington. Cubes of steak marinated in red wine, salt, and garlic, placed hot atop a bed of cool crisp greens. It's been ten years, and I still have Pavlovian slobber in my mouth at the thought of it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought theologically about it, the less I was able to sustain it.

From the standpoint of our God-given stewardship over creation, I couldn't justify it. We are given dominion, sure. But the purpose of that dominion was to exercise care over the Eden into which God placed us. Eating the flesh of other creatures was not a part of that plan, or part of what God called good (Gen. 1:29). If in Christ I am a new creation, and if Christ's work in me is to restore the breach established by our fall from Eden's grace, then not eating meat can be one way of personally affirming the healing of that rift.

Further, I feel that it is my responsibility as a Christian to minimize the amount of hurt and suffering I cause in the world. That's what it means to live according to God's law of love. Though chickens, pigs, cows, and the occasional possum are not as sentient or aware of their mortality as we are, they suffer nonetheless. They know pain, they know fear, and they die just as we do.(Eccles. 1:18-19) I personally prefer not to harm another creature if I don't have to.

And I don't have to. So I don't.

Notice the recurrence of "personally." I'm more than happy to tell people the variety of reasons why I don't chow down on animal flesh. But if you choose not to, I have no right to judge you. God alone judges. That's the whole point Paul's making in Romans.