Lenten Meditations In The First Person (3): Getting The Old, Old Story Straight

When I got converted, I had the trembles inside, like most of my religious friends had been praying that I would. But it was not those trembles that, as they loved to say, "led me to Jesus." It was God and not Jesus who played the prominent role in first opening up a new way of life to me, and a God of a quite different sort than the god who had been laying in wait for eons to stick it to his only begotten.

The heart of my experience was an ineffable experience and a decision to believe, first, that a Creator of all things existed at all, second, that he created and creates out of and for the sake of love, and third, that I would have to begin turning my life over to living as I believed such a loving Being would expect me to live. Later, I would learn that the word "conversion" itself has little to do with the trembles and a lot with the deliberate turning away from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. Much later still, I would finally get it that being a Christian means most especially to let the God-centeredness of Jesus be the principal guide to developing our own, precisely because Jesus was a consummately God-intoxicated man, not another man full of himself like most of the rest of us are.

Part of the getting-it process had to do with coming to terms with "Jesus Loves Me." The song still sounds too precious for my liking, and its Jesus-ology makes it less God-centered than I came to understand Jesus himself to be. But its rarely sung third verse introduced me to a Jesus far more interesting than the failed, flesh-flayed, disappointed proclaimer of a message with which at the end no one remained willing to deal. Here, Jesus is a friend who wanted more than anything else to "give light and love to all who live." Mercifully, the song leaves out the part where he died because self-serving Jewish religious leaders and self-protective Roman politicians elected to do him in, with a lot of support from the crowds that had filled up Jerusalem for Passover the week they did it.

The old, old story could never leave it at this, however. It deformed the acknowledgment of an historical inevitability into an ill-thought-out and morally outrageous dogma of divine necessitation, predicated on the decidedly un-biblical notion of a universal and total human depravity overcome only by a divinely wrought atonement through a fellow human being who was wholly undeserving of the fate his God meted out to him. The outrageousness of this dogma is compounded exponentially when to it is added the notion that the sacrifice had to be made by the Incarnate Logos himself.

What is fundamentally wrong with this article of traditional Christianity is its incompatibility with a still more fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human being created in the image of God. We are created, in finite measure to be sure, with the divine capacities for thinking, deciding, communicating, and loving. Precisely because they are of divine origin, these capacities can never be wholly overwhelmed by the sinful misuses to which we as sinful people put them. In a word, the divine image we bear within ourselves is indestructible. And because it is, we remain fully responsible for the uses we make of our God-given capacities, for good and for ill.

Or at least this was the way it looked until theologians began toying around with the notion that, somewhat like the first use of crack cocaine, the first disobedient act of Adam and Eve immediately hooked them into a destructive pattern of behavior that soon would cross the placental barrier to infect their children, and then their childrens' children, and finally all the generations to come. The result, according to this bewildering logic, is a human race addicted to sinning, bearing a fallen nature utterly bereft of its original resemblance to the Creator, and exhibiting a condition so corrupted as to merit only everlasting punishment.

By the time I graduated from seminary, I knew that I would continue to have major difficulties embracing this basically Augustinian line of thinking. But what I discovered in those hallowed seminary classrooms was that my own hard-won version of the Christian story also had a rightful place in the traditions of the church, and that there were more than a few believers across Christendom who were as "lost" as I was, not in hopelessness but in "wonder, love, and praise" for the offer of fellowship with Jesus’ God, now and forever.
　

Lenten Meditations In The First Person (2): A Full, Perfect, And Sufficient Sacrifice

It is quite a leap, theologically, from the idea that Jesus loves the world’s children to the idea that Jesus died for the world’s sins. “Christ died for us while we were yet sinners,” Paul wrote, as a kind of bottom line statement of what grown up Christians are supposed to believe. (Romans 5:8a) Even so, the first idea still seems the better one, particularly when to the second is added the Pauline embellishment “and that is God’s proof of his love to us.“ (5:8b) What should be the old, old story of Jesus and his love becomes instead the tough, tough story of Jesus’ pain --- pain that is properly ours to endure. At every telling of this latter story, my mind is aswirl with questions more than my heart is becalmed by gratitude.

What questions? Well, for one, proving his love by sending an innocent man to die raises makes one wonder about what kind of a God it really was who was moving over the swirling turbulence of that primordial chaos. In spite of its many inspired flourishes, the Bible sometimes seems to bring God down to the least attractive levels of human behaving, after the fashion of pagan mythologies long rejected by philosophers and plain-speaking believers alike. If the Bible’s God is truly an atonement-obsessed God, there seems little difference between him and the capriciousness of a mountain-dwelling Zeus, except perhaps in the former's graciously refraining from messing with people sexually. (Although on this latter, there is still Genesis 6:2,4 to be dealt with.)

Another question has to do with the proper way to give this one true God his due. Most certainly, everyone owes God a lot. For our sins, we all have a lot of making up to do. But I find neither credibility nor comfort in the idea that someone else has already paid the price for those sins, that a deal made long ago between him and God (and possibly the Devil as well) was accepted long before we would commit even the first of them, and that we are now free from having to make anything up to the God we continue to dishonor.

Closely related to this question about giving God his due should be at least some wonderment about what we hear from a lot of sweat-soaked preachers about the cost to Jesus of saving us from our sins. Mark's Passion Narrative --- the one that Mel Gibson parlayed into a blockbuster movie --- powerfully exhibits the pain and humiliation God's only Son had to endure to free humanity from its Creator’s wrath, but with a result quite different from what its author/compiler intended. Instead of making thoughtful people humbly grateful, Mark's account (and Gibson's even more so) should only leave them astonished, angry more with God than at the Jews and the Romans. What kind of strange logic is it to claim, with Isaiah, that by his stripes, we are healed?

And then there is the question of why a gracious, merciful, forgiving, and loving God keeps getting calumnied by references to the divine rage, reprisals, violence, and terrorization that dominate so many of the Bible's pages. My own first encounter with God was with a Being patient enough to have listened to my doubts that he even existed, and caring enough to have assured me that he still loved me with all his heart, in spite of both my doubts and my sins. (I never considered doubts themselves to be sins.) No one had to get up on a cross to make this God more hospitable to me than he otherwise might have been inclined to be. Forgiveness from this God is one on one, wholly undeserved on our part, a transaction that leaves no one else writhing in agony or despair, and that asks of us only a loving, not a blind loyalty, and a willingness to share a loving spirit wherever we can, asking nothing in return.

It is still blindingly clear to me how much greater God's capacity to love is than human beings‘, and that this gap is not something to be narrowed by any third party acting on our behalf, whether Jesus as an agent of pardon or the Holy Spirit as an agent of perfection. The only way that I can see toward becoming a more loving person is to traverse a lonesome valley that I and everyone else --- and not just Jesus --- must walk alone. The idea that Jesus somehow loves us for doing it, though, still counts for a lot.
　
　
　

Lenten Meditations In The First Person (1):Not So Good News From An Old, Old Story

When I was a kid, the time of the week I dreaded most was Sunday morning. On every one of them, my mother and I trundled off to church on the city bus at the time my father headed out in the family car for the golf course. It never seemed quite fair to me, Dad lining up long putts while I suffered through hell-fire and damnation sermons and Sunday School classes that always began with "Jesus Loves Me" sung off-key. When my sister came along belatedly, Mom gladly swapped the pew for the nursery, Dad eagerly made me his caddy, and I suddenly had a new lease on life, freed from preacherly harangues about having to be the kind of boy my pain-wracked Savior wanted me to be.

What eventually changed my Sunday apostasy was a group of lively, fun-loving, and occasionally spiritual high school buddies from the local Methodist Church who with their counselors set out to bring me back to Jesus. When they got through with me, Jesus and I had yet to become good friends, but a pretty primitive version of a "natural theology" was working well enough to make me do something almost unprecedented for my generation. I joined the church the first week of college. There I was: an almost Christian, sitting in the pews gladly, but watching with chagrin as a lot of my church gang declared a moratorium on religious practices altogether.

At one level, it is no mystery why leaving home and blowing off church still go hand in hand. For one thing, it is generally safer not to try church at all the morning after a grab-all-the-gusto-you-can soiree the night before. But for the more thoughtful late adolescents in my generation, there was something more important involved in the defections than mere wastedness: they were no longer making much sense out of the Christian story that they had been told from earliest childhood. By this time in my life, even my Mom had given up on it.

The story added up to something like this: The first two human beings on earth, who had everything going for them, went bad, passed their badness on to their offspring, and threw their Creator into several millennia of hand-wringing, second-guessing, and hissy-fits. His temper aside, the Creator had good reason to be righteously angry, and to demand recompense for the disobedience and dishonor done him. But, wonder of wonders, he chose to pay what was due him out of his own largesse, by sending his own son to sacrifice himself in our place.

The details were always a little fuzzy on the connections between Adam's sins and ours. But the big point seemed to be that unless all of us in the here and now get to thanking Jesus enough by being loyal to him and to his holy church, we will go to hell and remain there forever. I skipped enough of the high school and college soirees to make my way down the church aisles on Sundays without swaying, but not enough to render blotto my nagging questions about the story we were supposed to take as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I now think it was during those Sunday bus rides to church that I first began to sense how much coercion is involved in the church’s getting people to believe what its leaders have determined everyone should believe. One kind of coercion depends upon the promise of reward, e.g.: support our church and we'll support your advancement in life; praise and pay God enough and your life will be long and prosperous. Another kind depends upon threats and punishments, e.g.: believe and act as we do or there will be no place for you among us now and later on in the hereafter. Notwithstanding the frequency across the centuries of evangelization by coercion --- it began rather early with the baptism of whole households --- peoples’ allegiance to beliefs is more honestly won by credible arguments and a respect for genuinely held differences.

There may be some good reason lying around somewhere for believing that coercing religious behavior and the correct religious attitude through rewards and punishments is justifiable, but I have yet to discover it. Pressuring people to assent unquestioningly to prescribed religious beliefs and practices --- especially about the Atonement --- and always with a "proper" religious attitude, amounts to nothing less than repudiating one of the most precious of all God's gifts to humanity, the gift of freedom. With that gift comes the responsibility to choose wisely and well on the basis of the most reliable knowledge available and the most thoughtful deliberation of which human beings are capable.