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.