Quote of the Week

"I'm still struggling to break free of the notion that faith is an argument to be won. Lord have mercy."
-Rachel Held Evans

God knows it's a tough habit to break...

Unfundamentalism

Lately I've been coming across a lot of good reading material at Unfundamentalist Christians (which I keep up with through their Facebook page.  Here are a few of those items of interest:

1. A post with a few thoughts on the doctrine of "Biblical" Inerrancy.  A watershed moment in my own journey was coming to the realization that this doctrine was neither biblical nor helpful.

2. This is the second time I've come across the blog Sacred Tension.  This post on the tragically high cost of forcing celibacy on gay people nails the problem on the head, through individual stories that deserve to be given a fair hearing by those who make that demand.  One of these days I hope to get around to writing about the compartmentalization I did in (and prior to) my ex-gay days and the ways that continues to impact my own life.

3. Finally, a quote:

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error…

- Benjamin Franklin, Speech before the Constitutional Convention, Sept. 17, 1787, recorded by James Madison

Scandal

It is really shocking how little Jesus is shocked by human failure and sin. In fact, it never appears that he is upset at sinners at all. He is only and consistently upset at people who do not think they are sinners. This momentous insight puts him centuries ahead of modern psychology and right at the center of rare but authentic religion. So much so, that most Christianity itself never notices or addresses this pattern. It is an “inconvenient truth.”

-Richard Rohr

What we get out of the Bible seems to say far more about us than it does about the Bible itself - the legalists find rules and punishment, the skeptics find inconsistency, the revolutionaries hear a call to arms, the compassionate see grace and mercy.  But that is, perhaps, a separate topic - one that could no doubt fill volumes...

Identification

[G]roups define themselves and even hold themselves together largely negatively—by who they are not, what they are against, and what they do not do. We need a problem or an enemy to gather our energies. We usually define ourselves through various “purity codes” to separate ourselves from the “impure” and the presumably unworthy. Simple worship (“what we are for,” or in support of, and what we love) is much harder to sustain.

-Richard Rohr

(hat tip: Wendy Gritter)

Judgment

Edward didn't know what to think about the killing of Askama or the violence said to have been triggered by the Jesuit missionaries.  But if Emilio Sandoz, maimed, destitute, utterly alone, had turned to prostitution, who could condemn him?  Not Edward Behr, who had some measure of the man's strength and of what it must have taken to bring him to the state he'd been found in, on Rakhat.

Johannes Voelker, by contrast, was convinced that Sandoz was simply a dangerous rogue, gone to appalling excess in the absence of external controls.  We are what we fear in others, Edward thought, and wondered how Voelker spent his time off.

-Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (page 169)

Resistance

With society's growing acceptance of its LGBT members, especially among the younger generations, it's no surprise that gay students are becoming vocal even at the more conservative Christian colleges.  So the rise of LGBT-supportive groups at schools as conservative as Oral Roberts University, Wheaton College and now Biola University was really just a matter of time.

And I do support the right of these schools to maintain theologically conservative stances on any and all issues they see fit.  So while some of the doctrines taught in their Bible classes may do a mind job on the gay members of their student body (I speak from my own experiences at such a school), nobody is truly being forced to attend them.  I do agree with Misty Irons' point about allowing gay students to live honestly, but at the schools in question it should be possible to accommodate that without any major change in doctrinal stance.

I do, however, have to take issue with a statement that Biola's president, Barry Corey, made in a recent address to the student body (as relayed by John Shore):

Who did He [Jesus] rise up in anger and not receive? Those who quoted scripture like the Pharisees, who wanted to legitimize a certain way of life that Jesus said was not right.

This from the president of a university that includes a theological seminary?  I can see where he's trying to go with that thought, but it's a rather ironic stretch for someone accusing others of twisting scripture.  Jesus' anger at the religious leaders of his day was directed at their hypocrisy and self-righteousness, at the people they drove away from God (both directly and indirectly), and at the higher value they placed on the letter of the law over the people the law was written for.  In the rare cases where those leaders were permissive rather than legalistic, it was primarily for the benefit of a privileged few.

It's one thing to debate what Christian sexual ethics should look like, and quite another to turn Jesus' righteous indignation upside-down to condemn those who call on the church to stop driving LGBT individuals away from God.  The fact that the top spokesman for a highly regarded evangelical institution would engage in such sloppy exegesis suggests that the Biola Underground has him far more rattled than he would ever publicly admit - and perhaps even that there are cracks in the dam that aren't yet visible to outside observers.

Projection

Kathy Baldock has generously contributed a considerable amount of her time to read and review the latest book by a Christian purporting to offer a "compassionate" response to the issue of homosexuality. Among other things Kathy observes that, while the author (Michael Brown) appears to sincerely believe he's being compassionate, she found nothing in the content of the book that any outside observer would be likely to interpret as compassion.

Based on my own experiences growing up in fundamentalistic churches, I don't find that surprising. While believers in such churches are routinely exhorted to harbor warm thoughts toward others in the name of love, compassion is inevitably divorced from empathy (and thereby reduced to an abstraction) since the idea that anyone could genuinely view and interpret the world differently than they do borders on heresy. Such differences of perspective must be denounced as either willful rebellion against "the Truth" or satanic deception. Any factual or experiential evidence that contradicts what they have defined as Truth is likewise beneath consideration.

In the twisted version of the Golden Rule that emerges from such conditioning, fundamentalists are taught to "do unto others" by first projecting their own feelings and opinions onto everyone around them and then demanding absolute conformity to that narrow vision. That they are conflating God's will with their own never occurs to them, since they have been armed with a list of Bible verses that appear to support their arguments.

While individuals trapped in this mode of thinking are not irredeemable by any means, it's not always feasible to remain in relationship with somebody who considers you to be a hell-bound apostate. But at the very least we can temper our reactions with an understanding of where they are coming from, extending the same grace we would hope to receive were our positions reversed.

Maturity

[I]f we were studying the Bible together over a period of time, we could trace the maturation process among biblical writers regarding God's character. In some passages, God appears violent, retaliatory, given to favoritism, and careless of human life. But over time, the image of God that predominates is gentle rather than cruel, compassionate rather than violent, fair to all rather than biased toward some, forgiving rather than retaliatory. In this more mature view, God is not capricious, bloodthirsty, hateful, or prone to fits of vengeful rage. Rather, God loves justice, kindness, reconciliation, and pace; God's grace gets the final word.

People who are part of what is often called fundamentalism today, whether Christians, Muslims, or Jews, often find it difficult to acknowledge this kind of progression in understanding across the centuries. If anything, they feel obliged to defend and give priority to the early, raw, more primal, less-tested and -developed views of God, minimizing or marginalizing what I am calling the more mature and nuanced understandings.

So the God of the fundamentalists is a competitive warrior - always jealous of rivals and determined to drive them into defeat and disgrace. And the God of the fundamentalists is superficially exacting - demanding technical perfection in regard to ceremonial and legal matters while minimizing deeper concerns about social justice - especially where outsiders and outcasts are concerned. Similarly, the fundamentalist God is exclusive, faithfully loving one in-group and rejecting - perhaps even hating - all others.

The fundamentalist God is also deterministic - controlling rather than interacting, a mover of events but never moved by them. And finally, though the fundamentalist God may be patient for a while, he (fundamentalist versions of God tend to be very male) is ultimately violent, eventually destined to explode with unquenchable rage, condemnation, punishment, torture, and vengeance if you push him too far.

-Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, pages 101-102

The fundamentalist God is also a being that can ultimately only be feared, not loved. Under such a deity every activity of the Christian life - worship, evangelism, charity, etc. - is an act of appeasement, driven by the need to escape unspeakable punishment (or to rescue others from that doom). Even the most conservative Christian would never verbalize it in that way, but when Hell is defined as an eternal state and salvation is viewed as the "fire insurance" that must be obtained to avoid it, declaring one's love for God becomes first and foremost an act of survival and only secondarily one of devotion.

In most evangelical churches the reality lies somewhere in between; the New Testament is given enough weight that God's love can sometimes be understood. But the Old Testament's God of wrath still lurks just beneath the surface, unwilling (or unable) to show any mercy to anyone who doesn't offer verbal assent to the correct creed. The perceived need for an inerrant Bible precludes the possibility that its early books might be the product of a more primitive understanding of God, rather than a timeless portrait to be placed on an equal plane with the example set by Christ.

If perfect love casts out fear, then perhaps any doctrines that lead to fear need to be reconsidered. Such growth in our theology need not suggest that God has changed, merely that our understanding of God has matured.

Life Soundtrack 24

This Is Your Life, by Switchfoot

Although dwelling too much on all we haven't accomplished can lead to depression, we do sometimes need a nudge like this before we can get out of our chairs and make the most of the time that we still have. This song came along when I was first struggling to escape the mindset of avoidance and suppression that had been drilled into me from years of fear-driven legalism and ex-gay teachings.

I don't know that I've entirely succeeded yet, but life is too short to spend hiding from the ever-present possibility that something bad could happen when we dare to experience what lies beyond our front door.

Quadrilateral

Craig Adams posted this excerpt from N. T. Wright addressing what is commonly referred to as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (a concept I touched on at an earlier point in my own journey). Wright disparages the idea of allowing personal experience to influence our theology, pointing out how often it ends up becoming a trump card in which one's personal feelings override all other considerations.

And certainly Wright's concern is valid, if we allow something as shallow as how a particular command or belief makes one feel to dictate whether or not we accept it as valid. I would argue, though, that experience plays an inextricable role in one's theology whether or not it is consciously acknowledged. How a person interprets the Bible is going to be colored by one's culture, language, teachers, peers and personal biases as two thousand years of church history - and countless theological disputes - ought to make abundantly clear.

"The heart is deceitful above all things," Wright quotes from Jeremiah 17:9 - but that applies just as much to the sola scriptura adherent as it does to those who employ the quadrilateral. Scripture may be a Christian's primary source of information about God, but our ability to interpret scripture to correctly divine God's will is considerably more fallible. One need look no further than the abuses (and even atrocities) that otherwise devout Christians have cited "Biblical" commands to justify to recognize the danger of declaring that scripture is the sole source of our doctrine.

Hence the quadrilateral (and the Anglican church's "three-legged stool" from which it was derived). Scripture constitutes a single leg of the stool not because it is of limited value, but because we humans need additional guideposts to keep us from straying too far off course when we make errors in our interpretations of what God is trying to tell us through its pages (as we inevitably will).

The ex-gay movement is a textbook example of how focusing entirely on scripture (with perhaps a nod to tradition) can lead to harm. Based on the prevailing evangelical/fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, it seemed logical to conclude that God ordained that everyone was really heterosexual, and that homosexuality was therefore just a sinful illusion that could (and should) be dispelled through prayer, counseling and/or conditioning.

By the time that Exodus was founded, however, reason already stood in opposition to that conclusion. The APA's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders is still dismissed by some Christians as a purely political move, even though it was the "Christian" side of the debate that refused (and all too often still refuses) to even acknowledge the existence of any evidence that didn't fit its preconceived dictates.

And since that time, the experiences of countless participants in ex-gay programs have demonstrated that "freedom from homosexuality" is little more than an exercise in semantics; extremely few have experienced a genuine shift in their attractions, while far more have found that wholeness lies in self-acceptance and living openly as gay and lesbian individuals. Even most of those who remain committed to the ex-gay path acknowledge that their "change" is primarily in behavior and perhaps in the intensity of their same-sex attractions. The idea that one can name and claim one's way to heterosexuality has led to far more harm than good, as disillusioned ex-gay participants have left the church in droves.

While it is possible to sincerely disagree over whether God will bless a same-sex union, the allegedly biblical notion that being gay is merely a sinful choice or a psychological aberration has led to a trail of damaged lives and done much to undermine the church's credibility. Through such episodes we see the value of the quadrilateral:

-Scripture necessarily plays a central role in the formation of any Christian doctrine; without the Bible, Christianity could never be more than a hollow institution or a vague cultural notion. But as history has demonstrated over and over again, interpreting the wisdom contained in the Bible's pages is a considerably more problematic venture.

-Tradition, the second side of our quadrilateral, helps us to understand how we got to where we are today. Just as parents can continue to offer valuable advice long after their children are fully grown, so past generations of believers can guide us around certain pitfalls and give us a leg up in our own explorations. But an overemphasis on tradition can lead to stagnation and irrelevance; just because people did things a certain way for centuries doesn't guarantee that those methods will continue to work in our current situation.

-Without reason, we might still live as peasants subject to the whims of all-powerful kings as we burn alleged witches at the stake and kill the cats that could have stopped the latest plague from spreading. Although most churches in the West now champion the ideals of democratic society and individual rights, they came to do so in the wake of the Enlightenment, not at its onset. Human reason is not infallible by any means, but to ignore what the philosophers and scientists have to say is to surrender to superstition and impoverishment (both material and spiritual).

-Experience is, admittedly, the most easily abused of the four. If we allow experience to be shallowly used as a trump card whenever a proposed doctrine makes us uncomfortable (as Wright accuses others of doing), then we might as well quit pretending that we have anything worth taking seriously. But to dismiss experience because some would abuse it is equally shallow, and equally dangerous.

Experience is the forum in which our theology becomes practical. If we never stop to evaluate the fruits of our beliefs, then we risk becoming oppressors of the worst sort. When a doctrine of ours demonstrably causes more harm than good, it is time to reevaluate what we thought to be true rather than blaming those we have harmed for their supposed failure. Without experience as a guidepost, our mandate to love others eventually devolves into an abstraction in which the needs of the people we claim to love are not truly the focus of our concern.

By listening to experience we have one final quality test to ensure that we have not veered too far off course. We allow our lives and the lives of those around us to inform our doctrines, not because we don't value the Bible, but because we value it too highly to allow it to become a symbol for oppression and injustice. We take the experiences of others into account not because truth is relative, but because truth is complex and so much larger than our finite ability to fully grasp it.

Stated in this way, I don't know for sure how far apart Wright and I really are on this issue. Since I haven't read much of his writing I hesitate to put words into his mouth. But I would hope that he recognizes the importance of stepping outside the sterile confines of the seminary before claiming to have divined God's will for those who live in the everyday world.

Foremost

One of the key turning points in my theological journey - and in the journeys of many gay Christians - was coming to realize the full implications of the law of love: if all of the biblical Law can be summed up in the command "Love your neighbor as yourself," then any commandment that does not make sense within that context must either have been misinterpreted or misapplied.

Far from being a license to do whatever feels good, as some worry, the law of love forces us to get out of our own heads and consider the needs of others - needs we can only understand as we get to know them beyond the acquaintance level. Still, not everyone is convinced that the Christian life can really be boiled down to something that seems to dismiss so much of the Bible. "Ah," they say, "but that is only the second greatest commandment. The greatest is love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind."

It's a valid point, even if those making it see it as justification for retaining whatever legalistic strictures they deem important. Who could argue, after all, against the idea that a Christian's highest priority should be to love and honor God, whatever the cost? Indeed, that priority lies at the heart of ex-gay theology - that no sacrifice is too costly if it is done to please God. That the need for the sacrifice in question cannot be reconciled within the context of "love your neighbor as yourself" (except through broad speculation) is quickly dismissed, since love for God necessarily comes ahead of all other considerations.

What this argument necessarily sets aside, however, is what the biblical authors lay out as God's primary requirement from his followers:

"I desire mercy, not sacrifice." (Hosea 6:6, Matt. 12:7)

Matt. 25:34-46, Luke 6:32-38, James 1:27, Isaiah 58:6-12, Jeremiah 21:11-12, Ezekiel 16:49, Micah 6:8 and numerous other passages reiterate that God is honored by how we treat others - not by how many vices we can catalog to be avoided. That's not to say that God is unconcerned with any other aspects of our lifestyles, but those areas, when they don't overlap with how we conduct our human relationships, are left to God's direct governance through the Holy Spirit (an agent that legalistic believers inherently distrust, since the personalized nature of the Spirit's ministry leaves them without any leverage that they can use to regulate and micromanage the behavior of others).

The only topic in the Bible that comes up more frequently (at least in the Old Testament) is idolatry - which makes perfect sense when one realizes that the Israelites did not truly become monotheists until after the Babylonian captivity. Idolatry can also be understood as anything we allow to take priority over God in our lives, which takes us right back to the previous argument about the greatest commandment.

Were it really all about following a bunch of rules, one would expect the New Testament authors to have written in a style that could more easily be codified into lists of commands and restrictions. And one would have expected a far different outcome to the parable of the Good Samaritan; from our vantage point it may seem like a no-brainer that the priest and the Levite were in the wrong for refusing to aid the injured man, but in fact they were honoring the requirements of the Levitical law by avoiding any activity that would have rendered them unclean, and thereby disqualified for service in the temple until they had properly atoned.

In other words, meticulously observing the letter of the law does not produce righteousness - it gets in the way of righteousness! As Jesus emphasized repeatedly in his teachings, it's not the person who colors neatly within the lines whose conduct is pleasing to God, but the one who is extravagant in the love that he or she shows for others, especially "the least of these." I can attest from my own experience that a lifetime centered around the negative (and self-centered) goal of abstaining from a laundry list of sins leaves little energy left over for the positive goal of selfless compassion.

Again, all of that isn't to say that God doesn't care about the other aspects of our lives, but we would do well to take more care in the judgments that we make about the behavior of others. Perhaps that person isn't ready to deal with what we see as their sin - or perhaps it really isn't a sin for them. It is the Holy Spirit's job and not ours to guide each individual believer according to God's unique, personalized plan for their lives.

And for those points where individual interpretations of what constitutes a loving action begin to conflict, the church exists. Not to issue authoritarian edicts or enforce conformity, but to provide a community in which our efforts to become more compassionate can play out. The church can offer both a forum to share and debate those ideas, and a testing ground for discovering what does and doesn't work.

Within such a functional, loving community we would most likely find ourselves making greater sacrifices than we would in an institutional church - not to appease a picky deity or to earn another check mark on our list of dos and don'ts, but because we have cultivated a desire to do what we can to improve the lives of those around us according to their unique needs. Not to increase our suffering for the sake of earning heavenly brownie points, but to decrease the suffering of others.

Such an ideal community seems like a pie-in-the-sky notion most of the time. My own selfish preference is for that old list of rules, where I can still make everything revolve around me. But in the end it's not God I'd truly be pleasing.

Quotes

A few random thoughts to ponder...

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
-H.L. Mencken

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
-Oscar Wilde

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-Blaise Pascal

But the fundamentalist reserves his greatest creativity for the fashioning of Satan, the image of his foe, in opposition to which he defines and gives meaning to his own life.
-Steven Pressfield

Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
-Darwi Odrade in Chapterhouse Dune

Links

Some food for thought for the week...

-Wendy Gritter considers the question: Did God really say? There are few tactics more effective in Christian circles than accusing an opponent of "twisting Scripture." But who really benefits when we close off an issue from debate?

-Along similar lines, Misty Irons exposes the gulf between those who are seeking answers that apply to flesh-and-blood people that they care deeply about and those who are simply concerned about being right. Unsurprisingly, the latter seldom have much of value to contribute to the former.

-Craig Adams offers a good quote about the danger of certainty: "The man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong; and he has the additional misfortune of inevitably remaining so. All our theories are fixed upon uncertain data, and all of them want alteration and support... The man who wishes to advance in knowledge should never of himself fix obstacles in the way."

-CLS shares some stories that poignantly illustrate how fear-based religion can become - and all too often is - a far greater curse on society than the "wicked gays" it so often scapegoats could ever be.

Weighty Matters

A few thoughtful and pertinent links:

1. Ted Olson's conservative case for same-sex marriage. Most likely everyone who reads this blog has already seen it elsewhere, but it's an encouraging enough sign to be worth repeating again.

2. On a different note, I was recently steered toward this analysis of Europe's changing demographics. Nobody really knows what the world will look like in 50 years (or even 20), but it's encouraging to note that the alarmists predicting a Muslim-dominated Europe are, in fact, alarmists. There's still room for concern, as witnessed by the riots in France a couple of years ago, but such matters are better addressed from a clear-headed perspective.

3. The tragedy in Haiti is at the forefront of the news this week, as well it should be. Donald Miller has written a thoughtful (and grace-filled) response to Pat Robertson's atrocious comments.

It's worth noting, though, that Robertson's view of the earthquake in Haiti as divine judgment is a logical extension of the belief expressed by many fundamentalists that God will destroy America if gays are given equal rights. His words don't represent an inevitable leap by any means, but the progression is logical nonetheless. And while James Dobson and most of his allies are intelligent enough to distance themselves from Pat on this one, they're really not that far apart in their conception of a God of endless anger and violence.

4. In light of the above items (and the Uganda situation and the many other negative things going on around the world), Karen Armstrong's call for the revival of the Golden Rule by people of every (and no) faith is as timely as ever. No crusade on behalf of theological or ideological purity has ever made the world a better place, but a little more compassion (genuine compassion, not another "I must save you from hell" bludgeoning) might just make a difference...

Prioritizing

I've been thinking for some time about commenting on the Manhattan Declaration, the religious right's latest political manifesto masquerading as the Infallible Writ of God Almighty. Six years ago I would have had few if any issues with such a document; when one lives inside the echo chamber of the evangelical subculture, there are a great many things one is conditioned to take for granted. Today I see so many problems with it that it's hard to know where to even begin.

Numerous others have already responded to the declaration, so there's little need for me to go into detail about many of the document's more glaring absurdities: the persecution complex that causes conservative evangelicals to view every disagreement as a sign that concentration camps lurk just around the next bend; the narcissistic self-comparisons to great historical leaders who really did face persecution; the assumption that no good Christian could possibly disagree with any of their dogmatic claims; the conspiracy theories that thinly mask their animosity toward any gay person audacious enough to demand to be treated as an equal; the thoroughly unbiblical notion that the church's role in society is to rule over nonbelievers for their own good.

Theologically the declaration is a highly questionable work. Readers who haven't studied the Bible for themselves would be forgiven for coming away with the impression that "traditional" marriage and the nuclear family are the Bible's (and, by extension, God's) single most important emphasis, trumping all other concerns. Indeed, the brief lip service that the declaration pays to the existence of other Christian concerns has the effect of trivializing them as matters of minimal importance.

Yet the notion that marriage and family represent the centerpiece of biblical Christianity requires a highly selective reading of the Bible, one that regards Genesis 1-2 as its most important passage and a lens through which all others (including the Gospels) must be interpreted. And even then, it requires picking out scattered verses (disregarding their contexts when necessary) and cobbling them together in piecemeal fashion.

Such an emphasis also places the church at odds with Jesus, who called on his followers to leave family and familial obligations behind to follow him, and who warned that families would divide over him. And it does little better by the Apostle Paul, an unmarried man who described marriage as a concession to those too weak to handle celibacy, and who declared that there was no male or female in the Kingdom of God.

It is true that the Bible contains commands related to how spouses, parents and children treat each other; indeed, it would be odd for any religion to overlook matters so elementary to the human experience. Those commands, however, constitute a smaller percentage of the biblical text than most people have been led to believe.

Likewise, the biblical authors demonstrate a concern for sexual ethics: adultery, promiscuity and pagan fertility rites are all strongly condemned, and divorce is discouraged. It's more debatable how the passages that refer to specific types of homosexual activity should be applied to modern contexts, but either way it's clear that our sexual relationships matter to God (as do all our relationships). Even so, sexuality is not the number one concern of the biblical authors (however much the church may make it seem like it is), and arguably doesn't even qualify as a top tier issue.

I am leery of declaring that I have God pinned down so well that I can speak on his behalf. But it would be logical to assume that, if the Bible is a reliable source of information on God, that one could get a sense of his priorities based on the amount of space that the biblical authors devote to different topics. Based on that assumption, the following priorities would seem to be at or close to the top of the list.

(I am omitting the concept of holiness from this list, since that term has become conflated with sexual purity and heterosexuality, even though holiness, at its root, is simply about being "set apart" - a concept that goes far beyond the sin avoidance that consumes the attention of most evangelicals. I would also argue that holiness cannot be properly understood without taking into account all of the biblical priorities I list below.)

Justice. Justice is a broad concept that can be applied both to legal matters and personal situations, but at its most basic one can understand what is just through application of the Golden Rule (a concept most commonly attributed to the teachings of Christ, though many of its truest adherents follow other belief systems). If you would not want to be treated the way you are treating another person, then you are acting unjustly.

Unfortunately fundamentalistic thought has twisted application of the Golden Rule, since individuals driven by a fear of being cast into hell by an easily offended god logically consider any action taken (no matter how abusive) to save another person from eternal damnation to be loving and just. And indeed, the authors of the Manhattan Declaration no doubt consider themselves striving to save souls when they lobby to politically and socially oppress gays and other sexual minorities. In reality, though, if some future majority were to persecute them in similar ways "for their own good," not one of the declaration's signers would consider it just.

Humility. This is another concept that must be rescued from fundamentalistic thinking. To the fundamentalist, being humble is all about obedience, as understood by their own interpretation of the Bible. Since, by this definition, anyone who disagrees with their interpretation is not humble, it becomes entirely appropriate for them to look down on (and even persecute) such dissenters. That the resulting superiority complex is the very antithesis of humility never even occurs to them.

Likewise, the authors of the Manhattan Declaration are quite proud of their own self-proclaimed humility. From the opening of the document they waste no time establishing themselves as the sole brave defenders of Western Civilization and every single thing that is good in the world, and pile on the self-comparisons to leaders representing nearly every great social movement in history. Again, the irony is completely lost on them.

Compassion/Charity/Hospitality. Numerous actions fall under this category, including helping the poor, providing for widows and orphans, welcoming strangers, tending to the sick, showing mercy, etc. One would have to discard most of the Gospels - and much of the Prophets and Epistles - to avoid the commands related to this concept. Throughout church history, countless Christian endeavors have been launched toward these ends over the centuries, and such selfless charity was one of the qualities that drew early converts to the faith.

Such concerns seem to be secondary to the authors of the Manhattan Declaration, however. Throughout their manifesto, charity gets attention only through the lens of the nuclear family, and even then seems more to be a byproduct of marital procreation than a mandate that captured more of Jesus' attention than any other subject. Certainly no compassion can be spared for those the declaration views as enemies of God and destroyers of civilization, except within the same hell-centric paradigm through which its authors redefine justice.

Idolatry. If I were to single out one theme as the most important of all, it would be idolatry. No other subject receives as much attention in the Bible, and many other concerns intertwine with it. Anything that a person gives priority over God constitutes an idol. Even an otherwise good thing can become an idol when too much value is placed upon it. The doctrine of inerrancy is a perfect example of this, as it elevates the Bible to the status of a comprehensive rulebook free of even the slightest error (a claim never found in the Bible itself - God alone merits being described as perfect), and the only source through which God can reliably communicate with his people. With an inerrant Bible in hand, a believer need never wrestle with the doubts that drive us to press further into relationship with God.

The pedestal on which many evangelicals have placed marriage and family is another example. By elevating an institution that validates their feelings and brings them personal happiness above priorities that receive far more attention in the Bible (and this from inerrantists, no less), the authors and signers of the Manhattan Declaration conflate their own will with God's, thereby completing the very usurpation of divine authority that they accuse their "liberal" brothers and sisters of.

It would be easy to give into the notion that one could do some good by pointing these things out to the declaration's supporters, but few of them are ever likely to see the false god they have created for what it is, steeped as they are in the all-too-human notion that the infinite Creator of the universe and the Author of unfathomable wonders is small enough to be contained in a book and petty enough to share all of their likes and dislikes. Such is the tragedy of the fundamentalist mindset. And such is the legacy that created the Manhattan Declaration.

Life Soundtrack 19

Because of You, by Kelly Clarkson

Much of what Kelly Clarkson expresses about growing up in a broken home also resonates with the experience of growing up in a heavily legalistic church. The net result of a childhood steeped in fear of hell, obsession over sin and a need to always paste on a happy face is a considerable amount of emotional and relational dysfunction, which is frequently passed down to the next generation as well...

Avoidance

Throughout the Gospel accounts, Jesus teaches through parables. While Jesus taught this way to obscure the meanings of his stories from those who weren't among his followers, they can be equally hard to decipher for those who strive to follow him today, as evidenced by the numerous debates one can find over the interpretation of nearly every one of his parables.

The Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30) is no exception; many different ideas exist as to what Jesus' point really was. And it is a curious tale; a master entrusts a portion of his wealth to three servants (five talents to one, two to another and one to a third - a "talent" being a measure of weight that would have represented a significant amount of money no matter what the actual commodity was) and then leaves on a long trip. The first two servants put his assets to work and double what was given to them, while the third buries it in the ground and is harshly punished for not investing it.

In many churches, the "talents" are seen as an allegory for a believer's spiritual gifts, which are to be used for the advancement of the church. Too often, however, what constitutes an acceptable use of one's gifts ends up reflecting the agenda of whoever happens to be doing the teaching, and the Parable of the Talents becomes a guilt trip to club over the heads of members who fail to properly conform. Even when personal agendas are not present, insufficiently active churchgoers may be threatened with the fires of hell if they don't do enough to exercise their gifts in certain preapproved ways.

But is that necessarily what this parable was meant to convey? Jesus wasn't in the habit of motivating his disciples through threats and guilt trips. Indeed, he always saved his harshest words for those religious leaders who burdened their followers with legalistic regulations and who valued outward conformity more than mercy and compassion.

And a closer look at the parable reveals that the third servant was driven by a specific emotion: fear. He was afraid of his master, whom he described as "harsh" and implied was somewhat unscrupulous as well. He buried the talent entrusted to him because he was afraid of what the master would do to him if he lost it. And investment entails risk; the third servant's reaction confirms that the other two servants could have ended up losing their master's money had their business ventures not gone well.

The third servant's fearful attitude is reminiscent of the legalist who lives in constant fear of eternal damnation. God has given each of us the gift of life and the opportunity to make an impact in the world, but in legalistic theology the cost of failure (or of being wrong) outweighs any possibility of success; it's far better to live life as restrictively as possible, for the sake of sin avoidance. Bury that gift of life in the ground, where it can be safely preserved and returned unused when the Master comes back for it.

While no devout Christian would ever describe God as unscrupulous, the fear that dominates the lives of legalistic believers belies the fact that they see God as a harsh and easily offended taskmaster who must be properly revered OR ELSE. Like the third servant, they understand that God will have his way anyway, so they conclude that it's better to lay low and stay far away from anything that might potentially get them into trouble.

Yet it's the first two servants who took risks who are rewarded by their master. What would have happened if they had lost their talents? It seems noteworthy that Jesus never addresses the possibility. Perhaps, in God's accounting, the greatest failure lies in doing nothing at all. That doesn't mean that all risks are equally worthwhile or that we can validate anything we do by attaching God's name to it, but it does suggest that this lifetime wasn't meant to be spent avoiding as many things as possible while we count the days until we can escape to the next life.

As for the punishment the third servant received, there's a tragic irony in an individual earning the very punishment he feared as a result of his efforts to avoid punishment. Whether or not the parable is meant to be taken literally, it's worth noting again that most of Jesus' pronunciations of judgment were aimed at those members of the religious establishment who valued the letter of the law above all else. And legalism becomes its own punishment as it slowly sucks the life out of its adherents, confining them to a fear-ridden prison of their own making.

One of the most frequent commands in the Bible is Do Not Fear. While the freedom of unconditional love is never a license to pursue one's own pleasure to the detriment of others, it is a liberation from the legalistic chains that would hold us to the ground that was meant to be our launching pad. It's an invitation to discover the wonders of God's creation and to play an active role in shaping what happens next.

So dare to live. Explore. Innovate. Befriend a Samaritan woman. Reach out to a leper. Heal the sick on the Sabbath. Color outside the lines if it improves the picture. Make the world a better place even if the religious right condemns you for it.

I don't presume to present this as the interpretation of Jesus' parable (if finding a single definitive interpretation is in fact possible or even desirable). Rather, I would hope to demonstrate how the Bible can speak to us and breathe its life into us when we stop treating it like an encyclopedia and give up our demands for a life that can be spelled out in simple black-and-white terms. Such an approach requires more from us than a life of fear and hiding, but the rewards are far greater as well.

What Have We Become?

Sex offender laws were birthed out of a perfectly understandable concern; if I had children, I'd want to know if one of my neighbors was a convicted rapist or pedophile. Unfortunately, these laws that were designed to protect us have morphed far beyond their original intent.

My first encounter with how the law has been abused came when I met a man in Utah who had been on the wrong end of another person's prejudice. "Matthew's" first mistake was that he happened to be gay in an extremely conservative state. His second was falling in love with a boy two years younger than him. His third mistake was getting caught in an intimate moment by his boyfriend's homophobic father when he (Matthew) was 18. The father had Matthew arrested, and a hostile judge threw the book at him for statutory rape.

"Matthew" spent the next twelve years in prison - years he might have spent graduating from college and becoming a productive citizen. Since then he's repeatedly tried to get on his feet and rebuild his life, only to be slapped back down every time. Whenever he finds a job or a new place to live, it's only a matter of time before somebody discovers that he's listed on the sex offender registry and raises hell until he's fired and/or evicted. Who wants a sex offender in the neighborhood, after all? And what difference could it make why he's on the registry?

Last time I talked to Matthew he was living in a homeless shelter and trying to save up money from the latest menial job he'd managed to find. Through it all he's never resorted to crime, despite the state of Utah's efforts to turn him into the hardened criminal it deems him.

It would be easy to chalk stories like this up to the famously repressive atmosphere of a state like Utah, and in fact I didn't realize just what a huge problem these abuses of our sex offender laws had become until I read this essay (and its follow up with corroborating links). No doubt some states are worse than others, but the list of activities that can get a person branded as a sex offender continues to grow - even streaking is now treated as a dangerous and predatory crime in the eyes of the law.

Read the stories in the linked articles. Does anyone seriously think that branding these kids as sex offenders for life will in any way improve anybody's safety? How many of them will ever be able to hold onto a good job or live in a decent neighborhood, thanks to their "criminal" record? Is there anyone this side of Sally Kern who can look at this long trail of ruined lives without being outraged?

This is what happens when people begin to view government as the solution to every problem and the provider of every need. Soon everyday life is so regimented by well-intended efforts to mitigate every risk and eliminate every ill that the law becomes a club that can be wielded by anyone with a grievance against anyone else whose behavior they happen to disapprove of. This is how free nations cease to be free, when safety becomes such an overriding priority that no sacrifice is too great to achieve it. In the end the world is just as perilous as it ever was, but the things that once made it a better place to live are gone.

Items of Note

In no particular order, a few posts of interest from around the blogosphere...

1. Greg Boyd offers a thoroughly biblical refutation to the fundamentalistic notion that God uses natural disasters to punish "immorality." Not that the fundamentalists who make such claims would ever allow a well-reasoned argument, no matter how biblically supported, to get in the way of their latest crusade, but we can at least try to limit the amount of damage that such people routinely do to the church's reputation.

2. Doorman-Priest weighs in on the ELCA's recent decision to allow member churches to fully include GLBT individuals in the life of the congregation, and the ways that conservatives use the Bible to argue against inclusion. Key quote:

The situation we face is one where people believe they know their Bibles: after all they can quote verses at the drop of a hat as if that were somehow evidence. That is not the same as understanding their Bibles and without understanding there is not knowledge. Without understanding and knowledge there can not be evaluation.

3. Groups like Exodus and Focus on the Family would flatly deny that they in any way support miscarriages of justice like this one. And I believe that, from their perspective, they sincerely believe in the goodness of their own cause. Yet it's precisely because of their tireless efforts to pathologize and stigmatize homosexuality in the public arena (couched in plenty of talk about "compassion," but still geared toward equating "gay" with mental illness and sin of the worst sort) that an innocent man could be presumed guilty simply because he was gay.

Granted, much has changed since the late '80s when Bernard Baran was imprisoned on false charges, but the attitude of the court that convicted him was fully in line with what one still hears from the religious right during public policy debates.

4. Peterson offers some more thoughts on mixed-orientation marriages. While such unions can occasionally work, I'm very thankful that I never entered into one myself - as much for the sake of the woman I might have loved but would have never truly desired as for myself.

Life Soundtrack 16

What About the Love, by Amy Grant

Another song that I listened to without really hearing in my evangelical days. It was easy enough to nod and generally agree with the statement being made without really seeing how much a part of the problem I was; there's always someone else who's more legalistic and more judgmental, and that's who the song is really directed at.

And then came the revelation that one of the song's cowriters (Janis Ian) is a lesbian and, well, certainly we didn't need to concern ourselves with the opinions of somebody like that...