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The Dark Side - Chapter 7The Lion and the Lamb This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth , by Valerie Tarico, www.lulu.com/tarico The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. —Isaiah 11:6–7 HUMBLED AND ENTHRALLED, THE WRITER OF PSALMS MARVELED AT THE GLORIES of God displayed before mortal men in nature’s grand design. His poems of worship pay tribute to God’s awesome handiwork. Not only is God the maker of heaven and earth, he is involved in the tiniest details of the natural world. “Every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine” (Psa. 50:10–11). A later psalmist, St. Francis of Assisi, wrote: “All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing, Alleluia, Alleluia. Thou burning sun with golden beam, thou silver moon with softer gleam! Oh, praise Him.”1 Worshipers through the ages have followed suit. They still do today. In hymns, sermons, poetry, and individual testimony, Christians express delight in the intricacies of the natural world and voice their praise of the creator. Many aspects of nature: beauty, complexity, balance, majesty, the sustenance provided for humans, the tender caretaking that can be seen between animals, and not least, the terrifying power of forces such as wind, water, lightning, and earthquakes—all are assumed to reflect the character of nature’s God. On this point, Evangelicals are in alignment with other Christians and non-Christian theists. Virtually all agree that the natural world reveals the character of the creator or the creative force. Even agnostics and atheists assume, for the most part, that a design ought to reflect the forces that designed it. But the more we understand the principles guiding nature’s intricate design, the more we have to wonder about the kind of creator that is suggested. For those who argue that nature reflects an omniscient, omnipotent, and loving God, two issues in particular, predation and animal suffering, pose complicated challenges. On these two, the psalmist and those who have followed in his footsteps are strangely silent. What Predation Tells Us About the Design of Nature In modern fiction and science writing, predators are finally getting their due. After centuries of stories in which wolves, leopards, lions, and bears have given name and form to human darkness, modern fiction, with a note of thanks to modern ecology, has brought them out into the light. A recent novel by Barbara Kingsolver practically lectures readers on the point: predators are precious, each poised at the pinnacle of a food chain. Kill a predator and you risk destroying a precarious balance that sustains hundreds, maybe thousands of other forms of life. Predators, from an ecological standpoint, are essential. Without them, the whole system breaks down.2 Biologists teach us that the bodies of predators are optimized for predation: teeth that tear into muscle or crunch bone rather than grinding vegetation into paste, jaws that unhinge to accommodate large, infrequent prey, claws that cling, muscles that spring, padded feet for silent stalking, digestive systems that separate meat and blood from useless bits of fur and bone, poisons that can paralyze, kill, or even dissolve the innards of a hapless victim. The words of the prophet about lions and lambs are beautiful to me, as beautiful as the notion of beating swords into plowshares (Isa. 2:4). But a lion that eats straw isn’t a lion. In Thailand I once visited a monastery where Buddhist monks cared for tigers that had been orphaned by hunters. Years were spent in taming them, and it was said to be possible to walk up to an uncaged tiger and stroke its back—a childhood dream. A slight man in a saffron robe led my group of visitors into the enclosure of the sanctuary. We passed deer grazing, and a herd of wild pigs shuffled and snorted by. Peaceful tigers that could live with deer and wild pigs? Amazing! Then we saw the first of the tigers, young ones panting in the shade. They were chained. A monk trainer stood next to each. One had superficial scars running up and down his dark calves. “Wait,” a translator cautioned us, “always approach them from behind, and only when they are lying down.” As she spoke, a tiger playfully leaped up and chomped onto a trainer’s arm, like our housecats go for the feather toys that we dance on the ends of sticks. No harm done. I asked how long the training takes. “Years,” was the answer. “Most of them are never trained.” The translator pointed to a long row of cages, each housing an individual adult. Only a handful could be taken out, and only under very controlled circumstances. One by one, we were allowed to approach and touch an uncaged adult in a stark, bad-lands ravine that effectively trapped the animal on three sides: always approaching from behind, always with the animal lying down, always with two monks standing watch. A family brought their two children into the mouth of the ravine, into the tiger’s line of sight. “No children!” shouted the monks, waving vigorously. “No children!” It was Thailand. I can assure you their concern wasn’t the cost of liability insurance; tigers are tigers. I have never heard a description of paradise on Earth that included predators acting like predators. Nor, in all of the hymns and poetry that celebrate God’s glory as revealed in nature, have I heard any that celebrate the extraordinary design of these creatures: those amazing reptilian jaws that drop down and forward, little lights that wiggle in the depths of the sea and lure fish close, rows of sharp teeth waiting to replace any that might fall out, the smooth coils of the constrictor. Why not? Most of us don’t like predators when they’re doing their thing. We like our tigers tame; we want our lions to lie down with lambs; most of us don’t enjoy feeding a live mouse to a snake. When the cat next door eviscerated a squirrel in our yard, my daughters, then seven and five, cried and screamed about that horrible cat which deserved to die a horrible death. The five year old, who could barely write, joined her sister in penciling a letter to the neighbors asking them to keep the cat indoors. (At least that’s what she said it said if you asked for a translation.) I tried to console them. “She’s not a bad cat,” I said. “That’s just what cats do.” It is what cats do. A predator is a fine-tuned hunting and eating machine, which has, depending on its level of complexity and its ecological niche, a few other functions as well. We don’t like to think of them this way, because we have an uncomfortable ability to see things from the point of view of the prey. That mouse in the snake cage wanted to live. So did the squirrel in my yard. So did the gazelle on a National Geographic special, the one that raised its head to watch a lion tearing out its intestines. This is the quandary. Prey animals want to live. Predator animals want to eat them. And the predators aren’t bad. The whole system is built to require them. The way of the world may not be dog eat dog but it is lion eat gazelle and snake eat mouse. How Does Pain Fit In? Could It Be the Result of Sin? Not only do prey animals want to live, they experience fear and pain when attacked. And the whole system is built to require this as well. An animal that is being stalked can’t afford to base its survival on the mere thrill of living: Gosh it’s nice to be alive, filling my belly, living in the sun, sleeping in the shade. The comfort, the reveling, need to disappear fast when that good living is threatened. And they need to be replaced by a discomfort that increases with the intensity of the threat, a discomfort that becomes so acute that it can’t be ignored. Something inside the animal— and it can’t be conscious thought—has to convey the awfulness of potential damage and destruction before it’s too late. That pretty much defines pain, and fear, which anticipates pain. Even for humans, reasoning alone, understanding cause and effect, isn’t enough to keep us alive. What jerks your hand back after you bump the inside of a hot oven? It’s out before you even have time to realize what just happened, let alone to think: Gosh it’s nice to have a left hand. What gets you out of the street when you see a car careening toward you? It’s only afterward, after your heart rate slows and your muscles stop shaking that you notice the prickly sweat on your face and under your arms and think: That could have killed me! If you had reacted after you thought, it would have been too late. The reaction needs to be systemic, instantaneous, and unpleasant. It needs to start before your body is damaged and it needs to get worse when the damage starts and continue to get worse until there’s no chance of your doing anything to protect yourself. That is both the beauty and the horror of pain. The disease of leprosy illustrates for us the importance of pain sensation in day-to-day living. Leprosy is a bacterial infection that often attacks peripheral nerves in the hands and feet of the person infected. When this happens, victims lose sensation in the damaged areas. They can’t tell when a toe is pinched, a blister has been rubbed raw, a finger is cut, or a foot is literally cooking because it’s been too close to the fire for too long. As a consequence, they suffer repeated injuries and secondary bacterial infections. These, in turn can cause scarring and even the loss of fingers and toes. This is in spite of the fact than a human can know what the risks are and can watch for dangers. Now think about an animal with impaired pain sensitivity. Inability to feel discomfort is a death sentence. Some Evangelical apologists have tried to argue that the natural world minimizes pain, that really, only a very few species experience pain similar to what we feel, and no other living being has to fear or remember suffering the way that humans do. The natural order is naturally merciful. But this argument fails to acknowledge the very nature of pain and its function. Pain needs to be as powerful and compelling as possible in order to motivate animals, humans included, to take care of themselves. This means that the more able an animal is to experience anything and the more it is able to make choices, the more functional pain becomes. An amoeba doesn’t need to feel pain. If it’s going to die, it’s going to die, and there’s not a thing it can do about it. A snail, some of whom have fewer than a hundred cells in their brain, doesn’t get much value out of experiencing pain either. It can go forward slowly, turn to the left, turn to the right, or pull into its shell. It does make sense, however, that a snail can experience hunger and that a hungry snail might be a miserable snail. A monkey, by way of contrast, has thousands of behavioral options. And sure enough, monkeys seem to be capable of tremendous suffering. Their distress can be caused not only by physical injury but by more abstract threats like solitude, confinement, or the loss of a parent. The ability of animals to suffer corresponds closely to their ability to experience themselves in any way at all and to act willfully. In other words, it corresponds to consciousness. More awareness means more pain. Why Predation and Animal Suffering Are Problematic from an Evangelical Perspective Evangelical Christians acknowledge in all kinds of ways that pain matters. People pray to have it taken away—some even pray about the suffering of their pets. Missionaries frequently promise that conversion will ease suffering, replacing it with peace, happiness, and joy. Heaven is full of these three. Hell is not. Hell is pain perpetual. Pain is bad. Few of the justifications given for human suffering apply to animals. These justifications are addressed in the next chapter; suffice it to say they include trial-by-fire, personal growth, and strengthening faith. The suffering of animals has no such redemptive value, for Christianity excludes animals from the afterlife. They have no souls, that is what makes humans so special. When you’re an animal, what you get here on Earth is what you get. Now, one might try to argue that predation and animal suffering, however brutal, somehow benefit us humans. But think about this: the word justify has to do with justice. It has to do with finding an explanation that makes things fair. The Christian God is said to be absolutely just and loving. All animals are his creatures. How then, do we “justify” the suffering of some, however lowly, for the benefit of others? Some theologians sidestep this question by saying that pain, along with death, illness, aging, and, in fact, everything we consider bad with a capital B, is not God’s fault. As a child, I was taught that pain and death came into the world by way of sin, the very first sin, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. We did it to ourselves and to all those animals too. However, according to the book of Genesis and to modern creationists, God had created the animals well before that first act of disobedience, every species that now exists, including, one must assume, those predators with all of their specialized equipment. What was he thinking? The explanation that pain came into the world with sin simply doesn’t work. To stay alive, most species need something intense, immediate, and averse to let them know when their existence is threatened. Furthermore, ecosystems, with all their herbivores, are set up to include predators. To stay in balance without them, all the other creatures would have to have different bodies and reproductive cycles, both of which are optimized to take into account predation. Talk about a world with no pain or death, and we’re talking again about an entirely different set of critters: no lions, no lambs. No humans, either. Our bodies, too, are intricately, precisely tailored to the world we live in. As omnivores, we have digestive systems tailored for processing meat as well as plants. Our instincts are optimized for avoiding predators. Our reproductive physiology is tuned to compensate for the premature death of embryos, fetuses, and live offspring. If death and pain came into the world via human behavior, then the original humans had bodies radically different from our own, and they lived in a world of plants and animals radically different from the ones we know, so radically different as to be unrecognizable. One would have to argue that after that first sin, God re-created the world; He not only reconfigured the species, but reworked the whole design from the ground up. It seems like an odd response to human defiance. Either way, it means that God designed the system in which we now live. We are told that a creation reflects its creator. Many arguments for the existence of God are built on this notion. A clock must have a clockmaker. The grandeur of nature reflects the glory of God; “the firmament showeth his handiwork” (Psalms 19:1). As hymn writer, Isaac Watts put it, Nature with open volume stands, To spread her Maker’s praise abroad; And every labor of His hands Shows something worthy of a God.3 So, what does the natural world tell us about its designer? By all appearances, on this planet, predation (and, by implication, death) is an integral part of the whole. It maintains the balance of nature. Pain, also necessary, has a different function. It works in the service of survival, and it does that job beautifully. But here is what these remarkable systems don’t do. They don’t systematically or predictably comply with the attributes for which we pay tribute to God: mercy, peace, compassion, tenderness, kindness, fairness, and love. Quite the opposite, in fact. Not that the natural world lacks these attributes. They too appear in nature. The problem is not that they are absent but that they are not the underlying principles guiding the system. To view the natural order as primarily peaceful and benign means either you are viewing through a distorted lens or you need a magnifying glass. Who gets injured, who gets eaten, who starves in the winter, whose offspring flourish, whose don’t, all of these are decided by nature in ways that are indifferent to morality and goodness as we humans normally define them.4 Our values and the values we like to attribute to God are, for the most part, irrelevant. So is our wishful thinking about lions and lambs. If God is the God of nature, then he is the God of all nature. We can’t look at it selectively, pick the parts that give us a sense of awe or delight or mystery, and then say that those reflect the nature of God, while ignoring the parts that inspire fear, sorrow, or revulsion. To Consider Nature may be indifferent to morality and goodness, but we are not. Part of the bittersweet beauty of being human is that we dream of something better: a world in which survival is not competitive but collaborative, a world in which compassion, mercy, love, and mutuality are the fundamental operating principles, a world so fair that ill intent turns back on itself, a world where life does not require death. Our visions of the afterlife give form to this world. So do our fantasies and stories. It is something we struggle to create, however imperfectly, in our families, our friendships and our societies. A few political or economic philosophies such as libertarianism and free market fundamentalism, reflect a belief that natural selection (survival of the fittest) is the best we can do. But most of us strive for something different, a world that is gentle toward the lowly and weak and that rewards goodness over strength. Whether these yearnings come from some power external to us or from within the human spirit, they are transcendent. They imbue us with a vision that transcends individuality and survival, and they enable us, at least in part, to attain that vision. Ironically, orthodoxy and dogma often have the opposite effect. They seek to address our longing for goodness by providing concrete answers, often in the form of social scripts from the past and a hope of the world to come. In doing so, they end up obstructing the very processes that work here on earth to create what the Shakers called The Peaceable Kingdom. This need not be the case. By unpacking the answers, by moving beyond them to the underlying questions, we have the power to help create real-world societies that reflect our desire for goodness. The Dark Side - Chapter 6All Truth Is God's Truth
This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, by Valerie Tarico, www.lulu.com/tarico
This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, by Valerie Tarico, www.lulu.com/tarico The Dark Side - Chapter 5Females, Gays, and Other Samaritans
This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth. (www.lulu.com/content/220355.)
There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious of as the extent and strength of his prejudices. —Francis Jeffrey1 Several of the writers of the Bible didn't care much for females. More than one thought homosexuals were vile. Some considered foreigners to be slightly less human than God’s Chosen People. If the Bible is the record of imperfect humans, each limited by his own historical and cultural context, struggling to comprehend the divine, then we can approach its contents as those who carry forward this legacy. We can marvel at what our forebears achieved in their attempts to see Goodness "through a glass, darkly” and to model their societies and their individual lives on what they saw. We can look with humility on their failings, knowing that, if we are willing, they can teach us about our own. If, on the other hand, the Bible is the perfect revelation of an unchanging God to humankind, then he feels the same as those early writers about females, homosexuals, and foreigners, and a host of social issues like privileged blood lines, vengeance, and slavery. People who commit themselves to biblical literalism should know what this means. Recently, I read an essay in which an ex-believer told the story of his journey into and out of the faith. He said something like this: “Finally I found a church that was warm, loving, and accepting. Same sex couples were welcome, women were involved in the ministries, and members came from many different cultures. I didn’t know at the time how much of the Bible they had to ignore to create that kind of worship community.” How much did his church have to ignore? Let’s take a look. What the Bible Teaches About Gender Equality For starters, the God of the Bible is irrefutably male. The pronouns used for God are one indicator, and they are consistent throughout the Old and New Testaments. When God appears in human form, both in the Old Testament and in the incarnation of Jesus, he takes the form of a male human. Now, presumably, this male-ness isn’t sexual. It doesn’t mean that God has a penis. At the very least it doesn’t mean only that God has a penis. It means that in those core character traits that make the average woman different from the average man, God is more like the average man. Here are some things we can say with confidence about the ways male humans on the average differ from females: more physical strength, higher aggression, more focus on uniqueness and difference rather than similarities and shared themes, more mathematical ability, less verbal ability, more self-focus, more independence, and lower empathy.3 Together these qualities lead men, generally, to be dominant, to innovate more, and to nurture less. Exactly which combination of these qualities, or other differences yet unknown, cause the Judeo-Christian God to be described as a male, we don’t know. What we do know, if we take the Bible literally, is that overall males are more God-like than females. The rest follows. According to the second chapter of Genesis, the first woman, Eve, is made from the rib of Adam to be a companion to him after God finds that Adam is lonely. God brings all the animals to Adam, one by one, and he names them. But none is found to be a suitable companion, so God makes Eve.* From that beginning, it is clear that power and authority are in the hands of men.** The genealogies of the Old Testament list fathers and sons. When God blesses sterile women with babies, they are male. Righteous men offer up their daughters and concubines to marauding rapists, rather than offering up their male houseguests or themselves, and they remain righteous. When the Law is given, menstrual women are designated as spiritually unclean, as are women who have recently given birth. A woman is unclean longer after giving birth to a girl than after giving birth to a boy, twice as long, in fact (66 days vs. 33 days; Lev. 12). If a female is killed accidentally, the fine is less than for the accidental killing of a male. The Patriarchs are patriarchs, not matriarchs. They have sex with their female slaves and concubines, but their wives have no parallel privilege. Priests are male, the greatest prophets of God are male, and when the civil authority of the Hebrews transitions from tribal chiefs to a monarchy, the Hebrews get kings, the wisest of whom has seven hundred wives. Women are veiled and are forbidden to wear men’s costumes. They worship in separate compartments from men, as do Orthodox Jewish women today. The writer of Proverbs complains that a nagging wife is like the relentless dripping of rain. He says that it is better to live in a corner of the housetop, or even in the wilderness, than in a big home with a contentious woman (Prov. 21, 25, 27). The Bible contains no analogous complaints about obnoxious husbands because there are no female writers. Does the New Testament get better? “The head of every man is Christ,” says Paul in 1 Corinthians, “and the head of the woman is the man…” (1 Cor. 11:3). If a woman prays or prophesies with her head uncovered, she dishonors herself and should be shorn or shaven. If she doesn’t want her head shaved, she should keep it covered! (1 Cor. 13:5, 6). “[A man] is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (1 Cor. 13:7–11). Women are forbidden to speak in church, even to ask questions. “If they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church” (1 Cor. 14:34). The book of 1 Timothy elaborates. “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding, she shall be saved in childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:11–15). Modern literalists often say that it isn’t that women are inferior, it’s just that men and women have different roles. And besides, men are taught to be loving and respectful toward their wives and to take good care of them. But those fundamentalists who boldly assert the inferiority of women are more aligned with the actual words of scripture and the attitudes of biblical figures from the patriarchs to the apostles than are their egalitarian brethren. What the Bible Teaches About Homosexuality I admit it. In contrast to what I’ve written about women, I’m on shaky ground accusing the Bible authors of a distaste for homosexuals. Scholars arguably have demonstrated that most Bible verses which appear to condemn homosexuality are mistranslations, deliberate substitutions of clearly anti-homosexual words for ambiguous Greek or Hebrew words, or scripture taken out of context. Even the term sodomite meant something different to the writers of the New Testament and the early church fathers than it does today. In the centuries before and immediately after the death of Christ, the core sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not seen as sexual. “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen” (Ezek. 16:49–50). For much of Christianity’s first fourteen hundred years, homosexual behavior was seen as a minor sin like gluttony or greed.6 Even so, I don’t believe that verses like the following can be adequately explained, except in the context of the tribal, patriarchal desert society they were written in: If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall be put to death: their blood is upon them (Lev. 20:13). God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error (Rom. 1:26–27). The word that is translated abomination in Leviticus is the Hebrew to’ebah. This word has a specific use: to condemn pagan religious cult practices. Thus, it is likely that Leviticus refers to homosexual acts in the context of pagan worship. Furthermore, this verse is part of the Hebrew Holiness Code, which also condemned cutting beards, wearing cotton mixed with wool, and eating seafood, rabbits, or rare meat. So the prohibition against man-to-man sex must be considered in its context. Nevertheless, the behavior in question is condemned strongly, more so than most other code violations. It is condemned as strongly as premarital sex, which also carries the death penalty, though for females only (Deut. 22:20–21), and extramarital sex, which carries the death penalty for both participants (v. 22). The verse from Paul’s letter to the Romans seems more clear. It expresses the view that homosexual acts violate God’s intentions. Again, this must be taken in context. Paul describes marriage between a man and a woman as a concession to prevent the temptation of promiscuous desires. Ideally, believers should be abstinent. (Paul’s writings inspired the celibacy of the priesthood in Catholicism and the exhortation for universal abstinence by Shakers.) So to some extent, sex itself is seen as a violation of God’s intentions. However, this perspective is interwoven with the idea that the union of a man with a woman is holy and provides an earthly model for Christ’s mystical union with his bride, the Church.7 No such beautiful words about homosexual unions are evident anywhere in Paul’s letters. If we accept these direct incriminations of homosexual acts, then other, more ambiguous passages of the Bible appear consistent with this view (e.g. Jude 1:7). Several places in the New Testament, male prostitutes and [a word that may possibly mean gays] are barred from the kingdom of heaven, along with thieves, drunkards, and adulterers, which includes anyone who is divorced and remarried (1 Cor. 6:9–10; Matt. 5:32, Matt. 19:9). And gays (possibly) are listed among men who are lawless and rebellious along with murderers, people who kill their parents, slave traders, perjurers, and liars (1 Tim. 1:9–10). Biblical passages regarding homosexuality are open to interpretation, but most likely they reflect actual negative attitudes that existed in the culture surrounding the writers. It is not unusual for patriarchal cultures to look negatively on non-procreative sexual behavior or any kind of behavior that might blur loyalty, lineage, or a man’s claim to his wife(s) and offspring. Since the fifteenth century, the position of orthodox Christianity has been profoundly unambiguous, labeling homosexuality as contrary to reason and to natural law, and condemning homosexuals to ostracism and eternal punishment.* If we take the Bible literally, female believers have at least a shot at righteousness, if not equality. “Women will be saved through childbearing —if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Tim. 2:15). By contrast, homosexual believers, unless they are abstinent and avoid committing sodomy in their hearts, are doomed to live in the shadow of God’s disapproval along with remarried couples and liars. What the Bible Teaches About the Brotherhood of Mankind In the land of Palestine at the time of Jesus, there lived a tribe of people called Samaritans. Genetically and culturally related to the Jews, they were nevertheless distinct, having split from the rest of the Hebrews hundreds of years before. The Jews thought them lesser, unclean, and had no dealings with them. They were not the Chosen race. And racial purity mattered. The patriarch, Abraham, from whom all Jews are said to be descended, married his half-sister to make sure he got the bloodline right. He later sent a servant back to his ancestral home to fetch a wife for his son, Isaac. “Put your hand under my thigh. I want you to swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac” (Gen. 24:2–4). But for his son, Ishmael, born of a slave, he had no such concern. God had already declined to make Ishmael the favored lineage. The message of Genesis is clear. God may appreciate good behavior, but his chosen ones are his Chosen ones, and being chosen is about ancestry. From Genesis on, God promises the land of Canaan not to those who worship him in spirit, but to the children of Abraham. As the descendants of Abraham claim this land, Canaanite children are cursed and killed for the sins of their fathers. Families are annihilated, not for individual wickedness, but because they belong to the wrong city and tribe. Always, massacres are justified because the people killed are heathens, enemies of the one true God. But the lines are drawn almost exclusively along tribal boundaries. And the deaths of foreign innocents warrant nary a mention. Jump ahead to the New Testament. In Matthew, a Canaanite woman, a non-Jew, calls out, begging Jesus to heal her daughter, who is possessed by demons. “Lord, Son of David,” she calls him. But he ignores her. Finally, his disciples get sick of her following them and shouting, and they ask him to send her away. Finally, Jesus tells her he was sent only to the lost children of Israel. She keeps begging. In the end he heals her daughter, but listen to their conversation as depicted by the gospel writer: The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.” “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted” (Matt. 15:25–28). If the image doesn’t bother you, try to imagine an American slave or a South African Black having to do and say the same things to get health care for her child. “Please, sir, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Jesus himself preached to the Samaritans, and his disciples took the message of salvation to the Gentiles—to the far corners of the world, they claimed. Paul, the Apostle, declared that in Christ there was neither Gentile nor Jew. But does that mean there were no longer Samaritans? I’m afraid not. Salvation was open to all, but as we will see later, God’s chosen people continued to behave much as the chosen people have behaved since the beginning of Genesis, four to six thousand years ago. Women aren’t the only ones who have been obliged to worship in separate compartments in the last 200 years. Logically, one could argue that just because the Bible teaches that women are inferior, homosexuality is evil, and some races are Chosen while others are “dogs,” this does not mean that the Bible is wrong. Maybe women are inferior in some critical way. Maybe unrepentant gays are going to hell. And maybe God does prefer some bloodlines over others. But other explanations are possible. We know factually that male humans are, on the average, more aggressive, more status oriented, and physically stronger than females. (So are male chimpanzees.) We also know that throughout the natural world, this combination results in dominance, the dominance of males over females in some species, females over males in others, and certain individuals over others within species, independent of gender. This has nothing to do with morality or with any of the virtues we cherish and attribute to God. Aggression is power. Strength is power. And, status orientation provides a strong motivation to use both in the service of dominance. In other words, we know that independent of any God-given mandate, male humans would pursue the top role and would largely succeed in obtaining it by virtue of biology. We also know that humans use rules and religious doctrines to maintain dominance once it is established. Consider, for example, the Hindu caste system, which maintains the status of the Brahmins, or the European feudal system that once protected hereditary nobility. So, which is more likely: ? That the God who created the universe, the laws of physics, and sexual reproduction commands that one gender be subservient to the other. ? Or that males, being more aggressive, status oriented, and physically stronger than females set up the rules that way? We also know that humans, like every other life form that depends on sexual reproduction, are, on average, preferentially attracted to members of their own species who have the potential to produce and rear viable offspring. Any species that wasn’t, would be at quite a disadvantage. The physical attributes that human males typically find attractive in human females are linked to fertility: large eyes, small waists, developed breasts, curves, smooth skin, and thick hair. Together these are suggestive of premenopausal sexual maturity and health, in other words, what scientists call reproductive fitness. We also know that these preferences are not cognitive but rather instinctive. Male humans, on average, are programmed to be turned off by characteristics which suggest that a potential sexual partner is post-menopausal, pre-pubescent, or male. The “yuck factor” kicks in. So, which is more likely: ? That the God of mercy, justice, and love, (who, by the way, made a variety of animal species that engage in homosexual behavior) finds homoerotic behavior and same-gender love relationships to be morally abhorrent in humans. ? Or that humans (who must be attracted to the opposite gender for the sake of species survival and who, in consequence, typically have a built-in aversion to “misplaced” sexual attraction) mistake their own instinctive distastes for morality?* We also have mountains of evidence that humans show a universal tendency to see the world in tribal groupings: in-groups and out-groups. Children form cliques, team loyalties, and school rivalries. Nationalism is easy to arouse in adults, and even within geographic boundaries, a Milosevic or Hitler has no trouble splitting a nation into opposing factions based on race, language, or religion. All humans have different norms for how we treat insiders and outsiders. Sometimes these are very explicit, like rules prohibiting interracial or inter-sectarian marriage. Sometimes these are subtle, like differences in altruism or empathy. We perceive outsiders as slightly less human than our own group, are less horrified by violence committed towards one of them, and are less likely to help them at our own risk. Our natural tendency is to value our countrymen and co-religionists more than others, and we expect God’s loyalties to reflect our own. How many times have you seen a sign that says, “God Bless America?” How many times have you seen one that says, “God Bless the World?” So think about it. Which is more likely: ? That the God of the universe has a favorite bloodline of humans and intervenes in tribal territorial disputes in their favor. ? Or that members of each tribal group and culture including the descendants of Abraham, think of themselves as the most important and assume that their god shares their bias? These are grave questions, because the biblical attitudes described in this chapter promote division and oppression. They place the interests of one group above those of another. They justify behavior that contradicts other moral values including, ironically, those most emphasized in the gospels: peacemaking, caretaking, healing, and love. And they do so in the name of God. It is convenient to believe that God sanctions our instincts to dominate certain others, to reject them, or to see their needs and suffering as lesser than our own. God’s stamp of approval removes the need for us to wrestle with ourselves. But are these instincts righteous or base? And does the existence of these attitudes in the Bible add credibility to the attitudes themselves or raise questions about the Bible as the timeless and inerrant word of God? To Consider In absolute terms, the Bible codifies sexism, anti-homosexual attitudes, and racism. Literalists have little choice but to embrace these three attitudes, thus arguing that inequality is God’s will, or to deny that inequality is inequality, typically by using the same kind of “separate but equal” arguments that were once used to justify segregation. The one stance pits them against morality and the other against reality. Biblical literalism has a long history of pitting believers against morality and reality. Most of the harm done by Christians through the ages has been because of the tendency of church leaders or individual believers to take biblical texts literally and out of context, to develop doctrines based on this approach, and then to use these doctrines, or the texts themselves, to rationalize bigotry, violence, insularity, or self-interest. In the past, many believers had no better way to understand the Holy Book. Mysticism seemed incomprehensible to most, and the tools of textual analysis had not yet been invented. Today, these tools are available to anyone who cares to understand the roots and essence of the ancient documents that make up the Bible. And yet many churches continue to ignore or deny the complicated history and ugly parts of scripture. In this way, they bind themselves to some teachings that are simply distracting and others that promote evils, both great and small. A different approach looks at biblical mandates not in absolute terms, but in relative terms. It asks: how can we understand the Bible in the context in which it was written? How did Mosaic Law, the attitudes of Old Testament writers, the living example of Jesus or the teachings of Paul compare to what came before? Seen in this light, in their cultural context, many Judeo-Christian teachings can be seen to promote progress toward more egalitarian gender relations or a more inclusive understanding of humankind.* This allows a different set of questions. Instead of looking at a Bible passage in absolute terms and asking: does this passage teach racism or sexism, and does that racism or sexism constitute goodness?, one may look at the same set of verses in relative terms and ask: does this passage reflect progress, a trend, and does that trend constitute goodness? *What God would have had in mind for reproduction before that is an interesting question. Whether Adam had genitalia before that; whether God then reconfigured the other animal species to add genitalia and females and sexual reproduction, these also are interesting questions to ponder. **Christians who assert the equality of women emphasize Genesis 1, in which male and female humans are created simultaneously and two sexes share the image of their creator, or possibly creators. *The “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude frequently encouraged by Evangelical churches toward homosexuals is thin. It is one thing to say “love the sinner, hate the sin” when a person has stolen a candy bar or a car or engaged in some other behavior that is transitory or intermittent and contradicts that person’s own sense of identity. It is another thing altogether to promote this attitude when being gay (being attracted to/falling in love with/bonding intimately with people of the same gender) is core to someone’s sense of self. One cannot reject the sentiments and behaviors in question without rejecting the person. *I mean misplaced only from the standpoint of evolutionary biology with the assumption that sexual attraction is fine-tuned to serve the purpose of reproduction. In actuality, humans create loving sexual bonds for all kinds of reasons, social and emotional, and these may have little or nothing to do with reproduction. It is noteworthy that people often have the same reaction to a relationship between a young man and a much older woman that they have to homosexual relationships—yuck. It is also noteworthy that heterosexual couples who choose not to have children or who remain sexual after childbearing have been condemned during some epochs of Christian history. *This is the stance of modern Judaism. Judaism values inquiry, “wrestling with God.” Consequently, in the 2500 years since the last manuscripts of the HebrewBible were written, Jewish scholars have produced a broad body of sacred interpretiveliterature. This provides a nuanced understanding of early religious textsand practices. Like Christianity, Judaism includes Orthodox members of thefaith who believe they adhere to literal interpretations of ancient rules. However,the strong tradition of inquiry means that these orthodox believers are asmall portion of those who call themselves Jewish. If you found this chapter thought-provoking, the book is available at www.lulu.com/tarico. Previous chapters and other musings by this writer can be found at www.spaces.msn.com/awaypoint. The Dark Side - Chapter 4This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth. (www.lulu.com/content/220355.)
House Built on a Weak Foundation All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
—2 Timothy 3:16 One day the older daughter said to the younger, Our father is old, and there is no man around here to lie with us, as is the custom all over the earth. Let’s get our father to drink wine and then lie with him and preserve our family line through our father.” That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and lay with him. —Genesis 18:31–33 “THE B-I-B-L-E, YES, THAT’S THE BOOK FOR ME.” WE SANG LOUDLY, SCRUBFACED, girls in dresses and boys in tidy pants. The year was probably 1968 or ’69, and scores of us were attending Vacation Bible School, a week-long event like a day camp that is still held each summer by churches across America. One summer, not long ago, my nephews attended four of them back to back. Some churches use commercially published curricula; some make up their own. The advertised materials have catchy themes, like “Power Up! (Jesus helps you to power up),” or “Rickshaw Rally (Racing to the Son),” or “Mission Possible (sharing your faith with your friends).” If the church is large enough, children split by age groups and, in the company of their peers, do art activities, sing songs, and listen to stories taught by enthusiastic volunteers. Bible Schools vary, but they share the same intent: to introduce children to God’s wonderful Word. “I stand alone on the Word of God—the B-I-B-L-E.”1 What they don’t teach in Vacation Bible School is that the Bible is laden with contradictions that can be reconciled only by contorted logic, improbable conjecture, and leaps of faith. These range from transcription errors to historical inaccuracies, internal contradictions, and logical impossibilities. Evangelicals who have left the faith often attribute their de-conversion to the fact that they finally sat down and studied the Bible, including the parts that are neglected in sermons and Sunday schools. A number of books and websites now catalog the errors in the Bible. One particularly thick tome is called The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy (to contrast with the doctrine of inerrancy).2 For over a decade, its author, C. Dennis McKinsey, also produced a monthly periodical on the topic. Some biblical “errors” are stories that contradict each other, since many Bible stories are repeated more than once. Other errors are texts that align with pre-scientific understandings of the natural world but contradict what we know now about chemistry, biology, or physics. Another category of problems involves opposing commands, incompatible images of God, or contradictory theological statements. Yet another category includes failed prophesies and promises. Occasionally, even, one book of the Bible misquotes another or distorts the meaning of an earlier text. For modernist Christians, who acknowledge the human construction of the Bible, the actual contents of the book come as no surprise and pose no threat. From their perspective, it may even seem petty to harp on errors and contradictions that are simply to be expected when humans struggle to comprehend the Divine. And yet, the importance of such harping cannot be overstated. Millions of people believe the Bible to be inerrant, and their numbers are growing. This belief leads them to adopt social and moral priorities that range from silly to cruel to dangerous. This chapter contains a small sampling of obvious contradictions in biblical texts.3 Acknowledging small errors such as these can open the door to examining deeper moral and spiritual flaws in the Bible texts. How Bible Stories Contradict Science The Bible records histories that contradict what we now know to be the laws of biology, astronomy, and physics. These histories also contradict findings in the fields of linguistics, neurology, and infectious disease. While they contradict recent discoveries, they are consistent with pre-scientific understandings of how the world works. In other words, they fit the scope of human knowledge, and misinformation, that would have surrounded the writers during the period when they were produced.
The Bible contains mandates that are mutually incompatible. It is impossible for them both simultaneously to express the will of God. Many of these are differences between the Old and New Testaments which Evangelicals explain by saying that Jesus created a “New Covenant” or new agreement between God and humans. However, inconsistencies also exist within the Old Testament and within the New Testament. Furthermore, the old-covenant vs. new-covenant distinction is dubious given that Jesus himself is quoted as saying that he had not come to abolish the (Old Testament) Law. The distinction is also logically dubious given that Evangelicals believe that God is unchanging and that the Bible, from the very first page, conveys his highest priorities for humans. Thus, it is worth considering contradictions wherever they may occur.
The gospel stories alone contain a host of inconsistencies. In Matthew, Herod slaughters innocent babies to destroy the Christ child, in Luke he does not. In Matthew, Jesus says that John the Baptist is Elijah the Prophet, yet in the Gospel of John, the Baptist denies this designation. In one account, a Roman centurion comes to beseech Jesus to heal his servant. Another text reports that the centurion sends the elders of the Jews on his behalf. When Jesus is arrested, Roman soldiers dress him in a scarlet robe or in one that is purple, depending on which account you read. Perhaps the most well-known conflicting stories in the New Testament are the varying accounts of the resurrection. A tongue-in-cheek quiz that can be found in Appendix I illustrates how widely they differ.8
To Consider
Footnotes: *The same Greek word mo-ras’ meaning stupid or dull, is used in both Matthew 5:22 and Matthew 23:17 and 19. In other places Jesus uses even stronger words that are translated “fool.” *In Isaiah 7:14, the Hebrew word translated “virgin” in most English language Bibles is actually ha’almah or “the young woman,” not habethulah, meaning“the virgin.” Some English translations have corrected this, including The New English Bible, The Good News Bible, and The Revised Standard Version. Furthermore, taken in context, the verse is a promise to King Ahaz and Judah of deliverance from their enemies during a time of war.
The Dark Side - Chapter 3This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth (www.lulu.com/tarico). The Bible Stands The Bible stands like a rock undaunted ‘Mid the raging storms of time; Its pages burn with the truth eternal, And they glow with a light sublime. The Bible stands like a mountain towering Far above the works of men; Its truth by none ever was refuted, And destroy it they never can. —Haldor Lillenas1 WHEN I WAS A CHILD, THE BIBLE WAS AS TIMELESS AS MY PARENTS. Along with the foundations of the earth and the valleys of the sea, it had always existed in its present, unchanging form. As a teenager, I spent hours weekly studying its passages under the guidance of others, wiser and more experienced than I. The contents of the Bible opened up to me. I learned the basics of “biblical exegesis,” the methods by which Evangelicals analyze scriptures phrase by phrase, word by word, even turning to the original Greek or Hebrew to better mine the depths of meaning layered into each perfect word of God. It never occurred to me to ask the book’s history, because it had no history. Like God, it simply was. Even through college, when I took one course called Old Testament as Literature and another called New Testament Theology it never occurred to me to ask about the histories of the Bible rather than the histories in the Bible. This may sound odd to someone from a more liberal background, one in which Bible texts are taught and studied in their historical context. It may sound even more odd to someone from a background external to Christianity. But as humans go, my ability to hold unquestioned assumptions is not unusual at all. In childhood and adolescence, each of us spends years building a world view, a mental house that we can live in comfortably for the rest of our lives. This is a process that psychologists call identity development.2 The deep structure of this house includes our basic ethnic identity, political orientation, religious beliefs, occupational goals, and moral framework. As adults, most of us do at least some cosmetic remodeling— shifting our priorities and fine tuning our values—but it’s rather unusual for an adult to go back and re-excavate the foundation. Unless a life event, often something traumatic like a divorce or a death or a failed career or emotional breakdown, opens up cracks in the deep structures, we normally limit demolition and reconstruction to the upper stories. Constantly remodeling our foundational assumptions is simply too costly from the standpoint of emotional energy and life disruption. The earlier a foundation block was set in place, the more expensive it is to dig it out. If I hadn’t spent years as a high school and college student wrestling with depression and bulimia, both of which failed to respond to devotion and prayer, I might never have begun the process of questioning that ultimately dismantled my faith. It is curious—and curiously human— that even after my faith lay in rubble, I still was able to walk past that familiar rubble without seeing it, without ever picking up and turning over individual bits of my old foundation, like the Bible itself. Once I did examine the Bible of my childhood more closely, here is what I found: The Bible is a collage. It is a collection of documents written over a time span of 600 years or more. These documents take many different forms and reflect the varying socio-political context and intent of their authors. Like middle-aged lovers, each piece has a complicated history. Some show signs of having their roots in oral traditions, in storytelling or chant. Others appear to be fragments of liturgy. Older documents may be quoted loosely or even misquoted. The Bible occasionally refers to other texts, some no longer in existence. Every piece of the Bible existed in some form as an independent document before it found its way into the Holy Book. Pieces of text written at different times circulated separately from each other. Later, some of these manuscripts were brought together into canons: agreedupon sets of most sacred writings. Experts argued about which ones should be in and which ones should not. The canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures was left largely in the hands of Jewish scholars, while Christian authorities made decisions about the collection of writings that would become the New Testament. How the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible Came To Be I said the Bible was written over a time span of at least 600 years. But some of the content of the Old Testament had circulated for centuries in earlier religious traditions. The first five books of the Bible, are known as the Pentateuch, Torah, or books of the Law. According to tradition, Moses gets credit for authoring the Torah, but linguists and antiquities experts believe this authorship is unlikely. Evidence for authorship by Moses relies simplistically on the claims the books make for themselves. Analyses of individual texts suggest multiple authors and imply that the books were crafted later. (The Moses story is set about 1,500 years before the time of Christ.) The books of the Torah integrate stories and legal codes inherited from cultures that inhabited the Middle East at the time that the tribes of the Hebrews emerged. For example, the story of the Great Flood appears in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, an Akkadian religious text that pre-dates the time of Moses by about five hundred years. The hero, Utnapishtim, is warned by the god Ea to build a ship 120 cubits in length, breadth, and height. (Noah is told to build one of different dimensions.) Utnapishtim brings into the vessel not only the seed of all of the animals, but of all the craftsmen as well. It rains for six days and nights, in contrast to the biblical forty, before the boat lands on Mount Nisir. He releases a dove after seven days, while Noah sends a raven first and a dove later.3 Similarly, the story of the baby Moses parallels the earlier story of Sargon, who united the Sumerian and Akkadian kingdoms 800 years before the time of the Israelite account. In the Sumerian tale, Sargon is put into a basket of rushes and floated down a river. He is rescued by a woman named Akki, who raises him in the royal court. But he eventually breaks away and becomes a powerful ruler in his own right.4 The baby Moses, too, is put into a basket of bulrushes by his mother and rescued by a woman who raises him in the royal court. He breaks away with power given directly by God and frees the Israelites from their Egyptian masters. Other examples are scattered through the Old Testament. The creation story of Genesis parallels the creation myth of the ancient Babylonians. Out of primeval chaos and darkness, a divine spirit creates light; firmament; dry land; the sun, moon, and stars; and man, before resting. In some places, Hebrew writings draw on the surrounding Canaanite texts. The sacred writings of the Canaanites depict their God, Baal, wrestling against an evil one whose form is that of a serpent. Some hymns praising Yahweh literally draw their words and cadences from hymns praising Baal.5 The code of the Law, although it claims to have been given by Yahweh to Moses, not only borrows legal concepts from earlier codes but even at times imitates their linguistic structure.6 These elements inherited from earlier traditions nourished Hebrew religious thought, which then produced additional sacred stories and laws. Over time, fragments were woven together by scribes, and a specific ordering of texts began to be handed down from generation to generation. A small but important set of Hebrew writings would have been recognized as sacred more than a thousand years before the Christian era. These may have been primarily chants, prayers, and ritualized stories that were used during worship. It appears that the writings gathered into the Torah were accepted as a sacred body by about 400 BCE, but evidence for an earlier date is scant. The Samaritans, who split from Judaism in around 300 BCE, recognize only the Torah as scripture, so scholars hypothesize that the other books of the Hebrew Bible were not universally accepted within Judaism before then. Over time, the Hebrew understanding of their God expanded, and later writers documented this theological progression. Some of their manuscripts would come to be seen as particularly sacred. The last books now included in the Hebrew Scriptures were written more than a century before the birth of Jesus, probably about 160 BCE. They would not become an official Bible for another 250 years. The Hebrew Bible was not finalized until nearly a century after the death of Jesus. At the time, Judaism was threatened by both the growth of Christianity and the loss of the Jerusalem temple, the center of worship and society, which had been destroyed twenty years before. From records that remain, it appears that about 90 CE Jewish scholars gathered in a town called Jamnia, currently Yebna in Israel, to resolve disagreements about the canon of Hebrew scripture. They feared that without a clear center, Judaism itself would die. This center could no longer be a place, it needed to be something Jews could carry with them no matter where they might live. Ultimately, they declared thirty-nine books to be essential to the Hebrew Bible. These books are the same as the current Protestant Old Testament. Modern scholars disagree about how important this process was. Some argue that the participants merely formalized what was already broadly agreed among Jewish leaders and worshipers. However, we know several books were disputed by those present, including Esther, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel, and Proverbs; and disagreements about whether certain books belonged in the Hebrew Bible continued to spring up in the centuries that followed. The earliest existing manuscripts of much of the Hebrew Bible are from a set of scrolls found between 1947 and 1956 in caves near the Dead Sea. It is believed that the scrolls were hidden for safekeeping by a messianic Jewish sect that lived in the area.7 The Dead Sea or Qumran Scrolls, as they are called, contain fragments of all of the books now in the Hebrew canon except Esther, which has led scholars to speculate that the sect that hid the scrolls may not have accepted this book as scripture. (It is interesting to note that at the time of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther also questioned the inspiration of Esther along with the New Testament books of James, Hebrews, and Revelation.)8 Also interesting is that the scholars of Jamnia did not endorse seven books Catholics call the Deuterocanonicals, also known as the Apocrypha. The Deuterocanonical books are Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach), and Baruch. They were a part of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used by Christians in the first centuries CE. In other words, at the time Christianity was first spreading among the Gentiles, these books were packaged with the other books of the Hebrew Bible. When the Apostles in the New Testament quoted from the Old Testament, they almost invariably quoted the Septuagint translation, which suggests the sacred body of writings on which they drew included these books.9 Even after they were separated officially from the Hebrew Bible in Jamnia, these books remained in the Christian Bible. When challenged by some reformers, they were reaffirmed as biblical canon at the Council of Trent in 1500. In the years after the Reformation, they continued to be regarded as scripture by many Protestants and as important sacred texts by almost all. Ultimately, though, the Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Puritans rejected these books, and today most Protestant Bibles are printed without them. I have never met an Evangelical who has read the Deuterocanonicals. This history poses some thought-provoking challenges to the doctrine of inerrancy. Councils are committees—human committees, presumably fallible. Few Evangelical Christians, or other fundamentalists, would insist that the decisions of church leaders, or, in this case specifically, Jewish scholars, are perfect and without error. But in their fevered defense of biblical inerrancy, this is exactly what they do. How the New Testament Came To Be The books that make up the New Testament were written over a time span of about seventy-five years beginning about 50 CE. Thus, the books that describe Jesus and claim to quote his words verbatim were compiled a generation or more after the events they report.10 The first known proposal for a Christian canon came from a second century Gnostic, Marcion. His list included a partial Gospel of Luke and some of Paul’s letters, the only Christian writings he saw as inspired by God. Marcion was considered a heretic, but he got things moving. In the centuries that followed, Christian leaders responded to his challenge by putting forth their own lists of sacred texts. The first surviving list that includes the books of the modern New Testament was written by Eusebius in the early fourth century. Eusebius divided existing sacred texts into four categories: agreed on, disputed, spurious, and those cited by heretics. It is noteworthy that he listed James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John as disputed, and Revelation and Hebrews as spurious.11 A generation later, church leaders adopted the modern canon at a council held in 382 CE. Yet the Greek Orthodox Church continued to debate the book of Revelation until the tenth century. The Syrian Church, even today, excludes 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation from its canon. The Copts and Ethiopians, both ancient Christian traditions, have additional books not accepted by the Roman Catholic Church and its Protestant offspring.12 Competing interpretations of Christianity flourished during the first centuries of the Christian Era. Both Arianism and Gnosticism had particularly widespread followings. Their power threatened the unity of the church and prompted the church hierarchy to create unifying doctrinal statements known as “creeds.” The Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed, statements of orthodox doctrine that are still recited by many believers today, were developed to refute the “heresies” of Arianism and Gnosticism, respectively. Christians who held the Arian view believed that Jesus was of different substance than God, created by him, and that the Holy Spirit was secondary to both of these. To combat such beliefs, the Council of Nicea established the doctrine of the trinity and then drafted a creed to be recited by believers, specifically asserting that Christ was equal with God. “Only-begotten of the Father, that is to say, of the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father …” Gnostics emphasized the spirit over the body. They believed that matter is inherently evil and that only spirit can reflect the goodness of God. For people who worshipped in Gnostic variants of Christianity, it was impossible that Christ could be fully human. Gnostic believers had their own version of sacred Christian scriptures. Many of the texts were burnt or otherwise destroyed by advocates of the orthodox view and are known of only because they are mentioned in other manuscripts. However, treasured portions of these writings, now known as the Gnostic Gospels, survived because they were hidden in jars beneath a boulder in the Egyptian desert for almost 2000 years.13 These gospels offer a very different perspective on the person of Jesus than do the writings adopted by the orthodox hierarchy. Once an orthodoxy became established, communities of believers that disagreed with this orthodoxy were persecuted and their sacred texts destroyed.* As a consequence, much of the rich early history of Jesus worship is lost. More than twenty gospels were produced during the first three centuries of Christianity. Many were systematically purged by believers who held the dominant views. Some that remain have been gathered into a book called Lost Scriptures along with non-canonical Acts of the Apostles, epistles, and apocalypses or prophesies.14 Those gospels that made it into the Christian New Testament—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—reflect the orthodox perspective. Whether they were the ones that most accurately described the life of Jesus or his teachings, we will never know. The earliest surviving fragments of these books date from about 175 years after the death of Jesus, and our first complete copy is from 350 CE Paul’s letters make no mention of the gospels, and few non-Evangelical scholars believe they were actually written by the apostles whose names they bear. The structure and wording of three (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) suggest that they drew on each other or an earlier text, now lost. John is a later document and differs from the others, not just in its structure, but in its emphasis on the deity of Jesus. Literally thousands of copies of New Testament books in Greek and Latin exist. These manuscripts are impressively consistent. Evangelical apologists, or defenders of the faith, point to the similarity of these manuscripts to illustrate how little the Bible changed across centuries of transmission. However, virtually all of these copies date to the time when Christianity was already the state religion of the Roman Empire. The collection of writings contained in the New Testament had become an official sacred bible by that time. As a consequence, the agreement among these texts tells us little about how true they were to the literal words of an historical Jesus. Anthropologists point out that the time when traditions and texts would have evolved and changed most was during the early period— before an official canon of sacred texts was finalized. The record of those early years is spotty at best partly because early Christianity spread by word of mouth and partly because, as mentioned, once a view became dominant, its adherents worked to obliterate all others. How Do Modern Scholars Study the Scriptures? Lives have been spent, and as we shall see in later chapters, lives have been taken, in the quest to define one inspired body of scripture. The resulting collection of sacred texts bears the marks of cultural evolution and borrowings, of debate, of political influences, and of centralized power imposing consensus by force; in other words, of human history. Few worshipers may ask about the history of their Holy Scriptures or about the criteria used for inclusion or exclusion of specific passages. Fewer still may revisit the decisions made by their ancestors in the faith. But among theologians, there have always been dissenting opinions about the content of the biblical canon and the merits of different passages. At the time of the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin penned the following words: “But in regard to the Canon itself, which they so superciliously intrude upon us, ancient writers are not agreed. Let the mediators, then, enjoy their own as they please, provided we are at liberty to repudiate those which all men of sense, at least when informed on the subject, will perceive to be not of divine origin.”15 Thomas Jefferson, deeply versed in theology, went so far as to dissect a copy of the Bible, retaining those passages he deemed worthy inspirations for worship and morality. His goal was to excavate the authentic teachings of Jesus from under the Platonist philosophy superimposed by early Jesus worshipers. The text he created is known as The Jefferson Bible and is still available today.16 In the mid-twentieth century, Bible scholars from universities on both sides of the Atlantic formed a group called the Jesus Seminar. Some were believers; some were not. None were inerrantists, since inerrantism doesn’t allow the type of inquiry they were about to undertake. Over a period of years, seminar members examined the gospels using the methods historians apply to analyzing other ancient texts. These methods are called “higher criticism.” They looked at similarities and contrasts within and among the gospels. They studied other texts from the same time period, made linguistic comparisons, and dissected content. In the end, they voted on which parts of the gospels they thought reflected the actual words of a historical Jesus. This process outraged conservatives, who said the vote trivialized the sacred word of God. Yet in reality, the Jesus Seminar scholars were following a time-honored tradition and engaging in the very process by which the content of the Bible was established. Their criteria were new: they based their decisions about each piece of text on linguistic patterns rather than doctrinal orthodoxy or reputed authorship. Also, their level of analysis was more detailed. For the council that ratified the New Testament canon in 393 CE, the Synod of Hippo Regius, a “book” of writings was either in or out. For the members of the Jesus Seminar, a phrase was either in or out. But their goal– to make a best guess about the real teachings of a real Jesus—was the same. So was their democratic approach. Catholics who believe in biblical inerrancy are at least logically consistent. They believe that God grants infallibility at times to the church hierarchy and that he did so during the process of canonization. For Evangelicals to insist on biblical inerrancy is bizarre. Evangelicals repudiate the authority of the Catholic hierarchy and God’s control of Roman Catholic history. In other words, they reject the very processes that brought their Bible into existence while at the same time claiming that the end product of those processes is perfect. Some modern Christians call this stance “Bibliolatry.” Inerrancy, in their eyes, is idol worship. It makes the Bible itself into a Golden Calf. Inerrancy elevates a collection of human musings to a status that should be accorded only to God himself. By doing so, it detracts from the human struggle to grasp the sublime otherness of the Divine, whom we humans see “through a glass, darkly.” Biblical scholar Karen Armstrong argues that many literalist teachings were created by a misunderstanding, a misapplication of the humanist tools of reason and individualism to a body of ancient spiritual mythos that was never meant to be interpreted in the concrete, and consequently superficial, way it is now understood by modern Evangelicals.17 If we step back from debates about higher criticism and inerrancy, a larger question looms: suppose God really wanted to make a perfect revelation of himself to humankind. Does it not seem likely that he would show himself in some form equally accessible to all rather than in a specific, corruptible literary tradition? To Consider Biblical inerrantists insist that the Bible is the perfect, unchanging, and final work of God. They argue that if we do not take it literally and defend its perfection, then we cannot take it seriously. But I, myself, wonder if the opposite is true, if taking the Bible literally prevents the reader from taking it seriously. It puts the reader at odds with the stance of the writers themselves. Each author labored to reach beyond the traditions that had been handed down and to move forward in understanding the realities, moralities, and mysteries that we call God. All wrote during a time when people didn’t keep journals just for personal satisfaction, which means they wrote because they were interested not only in personal spiritual growth, but also the spiritual growth of the societies in which they lived. Instead of fostering growth, biblical literalism locks the believer into a state of developmental arrest. A literalist can progress as far as the authors of the Bible did in their struggles to comprehend reality and goodness, but no farther. Worse, literalism demands the suspension of learning and of critical thought. As external knowledge accumulates— knowledge of science, history, linguistics, and human nature—this stance becomes more rigid and brittle. And as moral comprehension deepens, this stance becomes more regressive. Many apologists who defend a literal interpretation of the Bible become contortionists or even sophists. Though they claim to worship the God of Truth, they risk joining those whom Christian author Scott Peck called “people of the lie.” By contrast, understanding the construction of the Bible allows scholars, seekers, and worshipers to honor it in keeping with its history. As a collection of sacred documents spanning more than a thousand years, it records the struggle of our ancestors to establish fair societies, to empower moral instincts, to identify and explain evil, to comprehend the cycles of birth and death, and to reach for meaning beyond the day-to-day struggle for existence. Seeing the Bible in this way means that wisdom can be gleaned from both the attainments and the failings of those who have come before us, from their insights and from their errors. How can one approach such a task but with both reverence and caution? *The first of the Crusades that targeted other Christians was a pogrom to exterminate the Cathars, who lived in the region of modern France and practiced a Gnostic variant of Christianity. It is estimated that 20,000–70,000 Cathars died in the first wave of assaults, with an estimated half million killed in total, the last being burned at the stake in the mid-14th Century. Did you like this chapter? Check out the book at www.lulu.com/content/220355. The Dark Side - Chapter 2One Way There is one Way, and only one, Out of our gloom, and sin, and care, To that far land where shines no sun Because the face of God is there. —Cecil F. Alexander 1
“I AM TOO A CHRISTIAN,” MY HUSBAND, BRIAN, ARGUED WHEN I FIRST MET him. “I come from a Christian family. I sang in the choir as a kid. I was raised Presbyterian.”
“You are not a Christian,” I repeated in a withering tone. “You’re a bleedin’ agnostic. You don’t even know what ‘being a Christian’ means." He was wounded. I was astounded. The word “Christian” means a lot of different things to different people.
Several years ago, I traveled in Malaysia. In Malaysia, you’re either Muslim or you’re not, and the laws that apply to you are different depending on which camp you fall in. This is not a matter of personal belief; it’s about how you were raised. It’s about birth and ethnicity. More than anything it’s about culture. This is the sense in which Brian was Christian. His parents were born Christian. He was raised on Christmas carols and Easter eggs and some nominal participation in a Christian community. Therefore, he was a Christian.
“Everyone has to have a religion,” I was told by an educated tour guide in Sri Lanka one summer. “Otherwise what would they do for your funeral?” In his classification system, Brian and I were both Christian. We weren’t Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu. We fit, instead, in the box with the Sri Lankan Catholics whose families had converted under the Portuguese colonists and with the Baptist and Mormon missionaries who were actively building churches and pursuing converts as we spoke. Our personal beliefs were largely irrelevant—interesting, perhaps, but if our minivan had gone off the road and they couldn’t ship our bodies home we would have received a Christian burial.
In Evangelicalism, this kind of Christianity doesn’t count. Being a Christian means something quite explicit. Evangelicals don’t typically think of themselves as Evangelicals the way that Catholics think of themselves as Catholics; they think of themselves as Christians. And, they think of those other folks: Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, twice-a-year churchgoers like Brian, and even many devout Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians and members of older Christian lineages as not-Christians.
What Do Evangelicals Believe?
To be a Christian in the eyes of an Evangelical, you must take the Bible literally, accept a set of doctrines that derive from this biblical literalism and have a born-again salvation experience. Though even Evangelicals have their minor theological differences, Evangelical Christianity demands allegiance to a very specific set of beliefs. 2
1. There is one God who is immutable, supreme, eternal, and perfect. Moreover, this God, the one and only God, is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and Good. That means he is everywhere, knows everything, is all powerful, and essentially defines the concept of goodness. God is perfectly merciful, just, and loving. He is unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He is the God of Truth, opposite in this regard to Satan, the devil, the Father of Lies. Evil is external to the Christian God, alien, outside of him. Sometimes, in fact, that is how evil is defined: anything alien to the nature of God. God is not capable of evil.
2. This one God consists of three “persons.” At some level not quite comprehensible to us, God has three parts, called the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit. This is considered to be one of the glorious mysteries of the Christian faith. God the Father is localized in heaven, his dwelling place, but can also be thought of as existing throughout the universe. On Earth, he is present in all of nature, which he created, and we may see his power, goodness, and glory in the wonders of the natural world. In the Old Testament, he occasionally spoke audibly to selected humans or took on human form to converse with them. Jesus, the second part of the trinity, was a historical human being who was also fully God. The third part of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, does not have a human form. The Holy Spirit is a power or a presence which participated in creation and dwells in believers, enlightening and guiding them. These three persons constitute God.
3. Humans are made in the image of God but are inherently evil. All humans commit acts of evil or sin. Even if they didn’t, they would still be sinful because Adam and Eve, ancestors of all humans, broke God’s law in the Garden of Eden. They were told not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they did. This is how sin and suffering entered the world. Prior to this, the world was perfect. All humans have inherited the guilt of this sin simply by being born. This is called original sin. Humans are born sinful. In addition, all humans break God’s laws of their own volition. This can be called universal sin.
4. Each human has an eternal soul that remains conscious individually in the afterlife. The biblical descriptions of heaven and hell are woven into the very fabric of our culture. Who has not heard of the streets of gold and the fiery pit? Many take these descriptions literally; some do not. At minimum though, believers seem to agree that heaven constitutes some eternal state of bliss and union both with God and with other believers, while hell is some state of anguished separation from God and goodness.
5. Because of sin, both original sin and universal sin, the eternal soul of each human is alienated from God for eternity. For the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). All humans deserve and are condemned to an eternity of torment, which they have brought upon themselves by their sin.
6. The perfect blood sacrifice could restore the relationship between God and humans, but only Jesus Christ (God incarnate) is/was perfect enough to become this sacrifice, which he did. This is called “substitutionary blood atonement.” We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isa. 53:6). Jesus was perfect enough to do this because he did not have a human father and thus had no original sin, which is passed on to children through their fathers.* Mary, the mother of Jesus, was impregnated by the spirit of God. This is called the virgin birth.
7. The sacrifice of the human-God Jesus restores a pure relation between God and humans only if humans believe in and accept this sacrifice. This theme repeats throughout the New Testament. Acts 16:31 says, And they [meaning the Apostle Paul and Silas, the first Christian missionaries] said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved, you and your household.” Conversely, those who are not saved by Christ’s sacrificial death are doomed. In the words of the gospel writer: “He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned” (Mark 16:16). Anyone who does not believe in redemption through blood sacrifice is not a real Christian.
8. Jesus will return to earth in immortal but human form and will
take all real Christians to live with him eternally. The world as we know it will end. Jesus will appear in the clouds and those believers still remaining alive will rise up to be with him. Then, in a tempest of plagues, famine and bloodshed, nonbelievers and this earth will be destroyed, and the “God of This World,” Satan, will be cast into a fiery pit for eternity along with demons and anyone who is not a real Christian.
9. God cares about individual humans and intervenes in the course of nature in response to the prayers of Christians.
Each individual is precious to God and is a part of his awareness. “His eye is on the sparrow,” we are told. The relationship between the believer and God is a personal one. Christians are commanded to pray, to talk to God as a form of worship and confession. Prayer, in the Bible, is described as an attitude of spiritual communion, as in pray without ceasing (1Thess. 5:17), but Christians are urged also to make specific requests of God. Prayer is an opportunity to ask for what you want. “For what man is there among you when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he shall ask for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!” (Matt. 7:9–11). God answers prayer by giving people what they ask for.
10. God performs miracles. This means he makes exceptions to the laws of nature to show his power and to assist his faithful. A miracle can be in response to prayer, as when a prayed-for healing occurs, or it can be a spontaneous act of God, as when he strikes unbelievers with plagues or drought. It can be a simple sign of God’s existence, as when the face of Jesus appears in a puddle of paint or it can result in the annihilation of an entire people. Protestants tend to emphasize small miracles, events that could occur within the bounds of nature but wouldn’t have without God’s intervention—in other words, God tweaking the system. Catholics are more open to unexpected signs and wonders. Both believe that Jesus performed a wide range of miracles during his time on earth.
11. The natural world and the Bible are God’s revelations of himself to humankind. God not only created the natural order but actively sustains it. As a work of art reflects the artist, so nature reflects the character of her designer. By experiencing nature and by using reason to study natural processes, we can learn about God who created those processes. This is called natural revelation.
But nature reveals only part of what God wants us to know about himself. The rest is known through special revelation. This can include miracles, visions, spiritual intuitions, or the spirit of God speaking through church leaders, but by far the most important special revelation is the Bible and the life of Jesus as documented there.
Orthodox Christians believe the Bible, in its entirety, was uniquely inspired by God. Most Evangelicals take this a step further and argue that the writings in the Bible are “inerrant,” meaning perfect and without errors. No other writings, visions, or sermons have been inspired in this way, nor will they be. Since 400 CE, no new texts have been admitted into the Bible. God is done revealing himself in this way; it is up to us to accept what has been offered us.*
Where Did These Doctrines Come From?
These doctrines were inherited, largely in their current form, from Protestant orthodoxy, and before that, from Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Evangelicalism is the child of Protestantism, which is the child of Roman Catholicism. These three make up a family; a rather conflicted, dysfunctional one perhaps, but a family nonetheless. Evangelicals often deny this heritage and pretend they are only distant relatives. But don’t be deceived. After all, children rarely like to acknowledge how much they are like their parents.
The family that includes Evangelicals, traditional Protestants, and traditional Roman Catholics can be called Western orthodoxy. "Orthodoxy" means that a specific set of beliefs are agreed upon by a church hierarchy and are non-negotiable. They are right, and alternatives are wrong. "Western" orthodoxy distinguishes this family from the Eastern Orthodox family of religions and several ancient Middle Eastern lineages that predate the Roman Catholic Church.
Evangelicalism began as a movement to reform Protestantism, which began as a movement to reform Catholicism. As a consequence, Evangelical reform elements can be found within major Protestant denominations and within the Catholic Church. But many Evangelicals have split off from the mainstream denominations and have established independent “nondenominational” churches. They reject the authority of any ecclesiastical hierarchy and, in particular, scorn the Pope and institutions of Roman Catholicism.
Despite the similarities, Evangelicals differ from other orthodox Christians in important ways.
More literal interpretation of the Bible.
More emphasis on a specific single point of conversion—
the born-again experience.
An image of God that is more human-like and personal.
A priority on individual righteousness over societal goodness.
Concern about a literal Satan who works to undermine believers.
Wariness of church establishments, authorities or hierarchy.
Belief in a specific set of end-times prophecies.
A central emphasis on proselytizing or winning converts.
Although these differences seem subtle and mostly matters of priority or degree, in actual practice they can put Evangelicals at odds with other Christians. An Anglican theologian may see God as a goodness and power beyond human comprehension, while an Evangelical may see him as a friend who can be asked for favors. A Quaker may be willing to die in the service of peace, while an Evangelical may approve preemptive war and manifest destiny. A Mennonite may pour her efforts into missions of mercy, and lobby for resources to tend the poor, while an Evangelical preaches individual redemption and, at a societal level, individual consequences for individual behavior. A United Church of Christ member may insist that Christ’s model demands loving acceptance of homosexuals, while an Evangelical ministry tells gay teens that they are condemned unless they go straight. A Presbyterian may be horrified by the thought of a mid-eastern bloodbath, while an Evangelical may welcome it as a sign that Christ’s return is imminent.
If Evangelicals deny their family ties and doctrinal heritage, Catholics and mainstream Protestants often underestimate the differences. They may see themselves as part of a brotherhood of faith, failing to recognize that some Evangelicals share their core doctrines without sharing their moral and spiritual priorities. Consequently, they tend to be uncomfortable speaking out even when Evangelicals violate these priorities. It’s all in the family, right? Imagine their surprise when they find themselves targeted by Evangelical missionaries who see them as either heathen or fallen from grace.
The very real overlap and equally real differences between Evangelicals and other orthodox Christians make it hard to talk about Evangelical beliefs and practices without drawing in other kinds of Christian orthodoxy.
Some topics in this book apply only to Evangelicals. Other parts apply more broadly to the Western orthodox family. When Evangelicalism shares the beliefs and practices of her parent religions, I cannot address one without the other. Also, because Evangelicalism builds on her ancestor faiths, the history of Evangelicalism is the history of the Western Church, which becomes a part of my discussionHere is one additional and important point of clarity: this book makes no attempt to address the entire spectrum of Christian belief.
Historically, Many Kinds of Christianity Never Fit the Orthodox Family
“Behold,” says the psalmist. “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is forbrethren to dwell together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1 KJV). I wonder what he would have thought of Christendom. In the two thousand years since its birth, Christianity has encompassed an enormous range of theism centered on the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The boundaries of Christianity include many who have believed in the deity of Jesus and many who have not. Some have held that the Judeo-Christian God was just one of many supernatural beings; some have been monotheists to the point of rejecting the doctrine of the trinity: one God consisting of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Some have insisted that heaven is rewarded to those who believe, while others have retorted that heaven is for those who emulate the compassion of Jesus. Some have held that without the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, humans would be doomed to eternal anguish; others have argued that this notion of human sacrifice is a perversion, introduced into Christian thinking by surrounding pagan beliefs. Some have studied the sacred feminine, pointing out that God must encompass all virtues, male and female others have insisted that God is a father and that the gender of Jesus reflects the nature of divinity. It is virtually impossible to address the range of Christian beliefs without resorting to a general discussion of monotheism.
Today, Many Christians Have Left Orthodoxy Behind
In the twentieth century, faced with findings in the fields of anthropology, archeology, physics, geology, biology, neurology, and psychiatry, as well as linguistic and historical analysis of the Bible itself, many Roman Catholics and Protestants adopted a symbolic interpretation of the Bible and Christian doctrine. These Christians are called modernist or liberal, which, according to my dictionary means favorable to progress or reform. Liberal Christians may think of the stories of the Bible as sacred metaphors. They may believe that the scriptures imperfectly reflect the struggle of imperfect humans to conceive of a Power and Goodness beyond imagining. They may be more inspired by the life of Jesus than by his death. Many of these Christians would find the issues discussed here largely irrelevant to their faith, my book examines beliefs they simply do not hold.
I should note that, although such Christians are called “modernist their lyrical worship is ancient. So is their struggle to see beyond sacred writings and rituals to incomprehensible truths. The profound spiritual experience of mystics, the cloistered contemplation of monks and nuns and the simple routines of ascetics all share core elements with modernist worship. In each of these, the Bible and Christian creeds are experienced not as scientific or historical records but as finite, imperfect tools that open paths to transcendence, to deep communion with God and creation. Modernist Christians believe that this type of worship is closer to that of the Christian fathers than is the literalism of today’s Evangelicals. In fact, they may see the biblical literalism of their orthodox brethren as a kind of idol worship: as taking something made by humans and elevating it to a status that rightfully belongs to God alone.
The Evangelical view that the Bible is perfect and that each verse is an intentional message from God cannot be overemphasized. Orthodox Catholics believe that God guided the composition of the Bible, lending perfect judgment to the church authorities about which of the many available writings to include and which to reject. Other orthodox believers tend to agree with them. Most Evangelicals take this a step farther and insist that the Bible is inerrant, meaning without error, and that each word of the original was essentially dictated by God to the authors. The Bible can make no mistake. Where it appears to be mistaken or contradictory, this is simply a result of our human limitationsThe only errors are errors in translation or transcription, of whichthere are very few and none that would change our understanding of major doctrines.
Many of the differences between Evangelicalism and other forms of Western Christianity derive from the extraordinary status given to the Bible by Evangelicals. Taken out of historical context, freed from its ancestor documents, writers, compilers, and translators, the Bible becomes a timeless direct communication from God to the believer—or to the believer’s pastor who acts as God’s translator.
Virtually all of what this book calls the dark side of Evangelicalism stems from this one aspect of the faith. This context-free literalism ties Evangelicals to the traditional doctrines listed above, preventing the theological growth that might otherwise accompany our growing understanding of ourselves and the world around us. It allows Evangelicals to disown the ugliness of Christian history, to deny that it is the history of their own faith, and, consequently, to deny their own potential pitfalls. Worse, it binds Evangelicals to a series of ancient concepts ranging from the inferiority of women to blood sacrifice to holy war, concepts that threaten the fabric of our pluralistic society and ultimately the viability of human life on earth.
To Consider
The issues explored in this book would be irrelevant to Christians were it not for two key claims made by virtually all forms of Christian faith. First, any form of Christianity stakes its legitimacy as a moral and spiritual practice on the nature of God himself. Christians claim to worship the God of Love and Truth, the God of Goodness, Mercy, Justice, Joy, and Peace—the only possible kind of God worthy of worship. To the extent that the beliefs and practices of any Christian religion violate these Divine attributes, that religion violates its own God and claim to legitimacy.
Second, virtually all Christians believe that their faith is reasonable. God makes his truth recognizable to us humans through our minds as well as our emotions. Without this assumption, the whole field of theology would disappear. Two thousand years of theologians and evangelists, from the Apostle Paul to Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther to Pat Robertson have spent their lives propagating their beliefs by appealing to reason and real world evidence. Defenders of the faith argue that belief is rational: although faith may be beyond reason, it is not counter to reason. Again, to the extent that any Christian religion clearly violates reason, it violates its own reason for being.
In the coming pages, I will show that Evangelical teachings counter both reason and morality. If, as Christianity claims, we were created by a God whose defining attributes are Goodness and Truth and whose greatest commandment is Love, then Evangelical doctrines and practices violate this God. And to the extent that any of us care deeply about honoring truth and goodness in our personal lives and in our society, we should care deeply about the growing power of Evangelicalism to distort both.
If you like this chapter, you can find the book at www.lulu.com/content/220355. The Dark Side - Chapter 1Leaving Home
Faith of our fathers, holy faith! We will be true to thee till death. —Frederick Faber1
WHEN I FIRST STARTED HAVING MISGIVINGS ABOUT MY FAITH, I DID WHAT ANY GOOD Evangelical would: I prayed. I was fifteen at the time, earnest and devout; an eldest daughter with a caretaker’s heart and responsibilities; a good student surrounded by a good family, good friends, and a good church community. Even so, the cognitive changes that beset teenagers: increased ability to introspect, to think critically, and to envision the possible, were giving me trouble. As they do to most teens, these changes chewed at my self image. The world became one gigantic mirror, and I noticed for the first time that I had been born ugly. By extension, they chewed at my image of my parents, who became more and more annoying and less and less smart. But they also chewed at my Answers, at the carefully constructed world view that I had built during years of listening to my elders and thinking and reading. (Yes, children and teens can and do think deeply about spiritual matters.) It was a world view with clean lines and clean answers, not always simple, but solid. Now parts seemed a little fuzzy, dubious. I didn’t like the feeling. Fortunately, I had learned my lessons well. I knew what to do. I prayed and read my Bible at night before I went to bed. My home church, a nondenominational congregation called Scottsdale Bible, offered lots of opportunities to reinforce faith, and I took advantage of them. I attended Pioneer Girls, like Evangelical Girl Scouts, on Wednesday nights. Mom shuttled me to Bible study on Thursdays, and, of course, I was there with the family for Sunday morning worship. In the summer, I volunteered as a counselor at a Child Evangelism camp, working to win inner city children to Jesus. I led my little troop of dark-eyed campers through prayers at breakfast and bedtime and many times in between. During the school year, I attended Young Life meetings. Young Life provided after-school fellowship and wilderness adventures for teens like me, combining music and Bible study with a sense of belonging to something exciting and fun. For my high school biology class, I wrote a scathing paper attacking the theory of evolution with information I got from the Creation Research Society. I was thrilled that neither my biology teacher nor her young assistant knew how to rebut my arguments. In the early seventies, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey2 made the rounds in my church community. It has since sold over fifteen million copies. Intended to fuel anxiety about godlessness, this book depicts our age as the “End Times,” culminating in a world ruled by a brutal Antichrist before God’s final judgment. It is based loosely on the apocalyptic visions in the book of Revelation and on a scheme of theology called dispensationalism that emerged during the 19th Century. In recent years, Evangelical author, Tim LaHaye, has written the bestselling Left Behind series on the same topic. You can find them in any airport bookstore; fear sells. It worked on me! I redoubled my efforts to live a Christ-centered life. I even participated in the “I Found It” campaign. After billboards that said “I Found It” appeared all over the country, Evangelical Christians fanned out, telling the world what they had found: Jesus Christ. I, who hated selling even candy bars for marching band, sat at a phone bank and talked strangers through the Four Spiritual Laws and the prayer they needed to be saved. Late in high school, I joined thousands of others in the Phoenix Coliseum for the Bill Gothard Seminar, a modern equivalent of the old tent revival, which was touring the country at the time. The focus wasn’t on hellfire and brimstone, but it was on repentance. With notebooks in our laps and pencils in hands we talked through rituals of renewal: setting right our relationships with others by confessing to them any ill will and making amends, then returning to devoted Christian living, giving, and worship. I painstakingly and often tearfully completed the steps at home. Does this sound like insider talk: jargon and buzz phrases and name dropping? It is. I was an insider. And I was trying very hard to keep it that way. My faith had been the center of my life since I was small. In the fifth grade, my best friend, Jeanine, and I used to sit in a corner of our public school playground during recess and complete Bible study workbooks. Not, mind you, that there was much else to do. We were both outsiders, new to the school, and we shared bookish tendencies as well as our faith. But this episode illustrates an important point. Evangelical Christianity was what I fell back on when I felt lost. It was my home. If I said the doubts made me uneasy, I lied by omission. In actuality they terrified me at times. I remember kneeling one night on the floor of my bedroom, crying, pleading for God to take them away, and then crawling into bed with some sense of relief. I read, desperately, whatever I could get my hands on that might solve this problem. Your God is Too Small,3 Evidence That Demands a Verdict,4 The Problem of Pain.5 Often this worked. I would find myself comfortable again, at least temporarily, and could divert my attention to the playful fellowship of my church youth group: water skiing trips with small fireside chats, backpack trips during which we meditated and sang God’s praises in lush alpine meadows, a kiss after Wednesday night Bible study for my sixteenth birthday. When I left for college, I headed, by my choice, to Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, where the graduate school, called the Billy Graham Center, houses a museum of American Evangelicalism with a focus on Graham’s fearsome crusades. Wheaton is the elder statesman in a group of Evangelical colleges that have grown in recent decades to include Bob Jones University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College. Since 1860, Wheaton has been a bulwark of conservative Christian education. Thanks in part to the college, the town of Wheaton is dry to this day, and church attendance is stellar, even for the Midwest. Wheaton made national news in November of 2003 by allowing its first on-campus dance. In my day, students signed what we called “The Pledge,” promising, as I later joked, not to drink, dance, swear, or sleep with anyone who did. Actually, the promise was not to sleep with anyone at all. I presume married students got an exception. For twenty years I have thought that the Wheaton motto was “All Truth is God’s Truth,” meaning that since God is the source of all that is true (by contrast with Satan, the Father of Lies), there can be no evil in the honest pursuit of truth. I’m not sure where I got that impression. The actual motto is “For Christ and his Kingdom,” which, in reality, fits much better. By the time I arrived at Wheaton, my Evangelical faith had become somewhat convoluted and confusing, not in the basics, that Christ had died to save me and that I otherwise, thanks to original sin and my own behavior, was doomed to an eternity of anguished separation from God and goodness. That part seemed clear. But the rest was muddier. I was struggling, trying to hold together what seemed, to my finite mind, to be a complex lot of logical and moral inconsistencies. What does it mean when the Bible says ask and you shall receive? Why is our youth minister, Bob, so full of himself when he is supposedly full of God’s spirit? How could God torture my Mormon friend, Kay, for all of eternity when she is the nicest person I know? By then I also had a frightening eating disorder, which I now look back on as the end result of several factors: unresolved family conflict, a genetic inclination toward anxiety and depression, and a societal context that looks down on short, sturdy physiques like the one I inherited from my Italian grandmother. My symptoms didn’t go away in response to determination, tearful confessions, spiritual devotion, or bedside pleas, and I fell into a suicidal depression. While in high school, I had once confessed my humiliating symptoms to a youth minister who seemed particularly wise. “Pray,” he advised. He gave me a penetrating look. “Remember, if we ask anything in prayer believing, truly believing, it shall be done unto us. ‘If you have faith as a mustard seed you shall say to this mountain “move from here to there,” and it shall move’ (Matt 17:20).*[1] You need to align your will with the will of God.” He took my hands and we knelt and bowed our heads together. I went home, hopeful. But my will, it appears, had not been aligned with that of God, or my faith lacked strength, sincerity, or resolve. My symptoms gradually got worse, until, in the fall of my sophomore year at Wheaton, they overwhelmed me. I promised the one person in the know that I wouldn’t try to take my life, and then broke that promise. Even if doctors or counselors could make me better, what was the point? I was a failure in the eyes of God, a moral and spiritual failure, and I couldn’t stand living day to day knowing that. I plunged into absolute despair and self-loathing. Alone, one wretched evening, I swallowed a bottle of pills. They didn’t bring the relief I wanted, just hours of vomiting and, when I failed to convince my parents and school authorities that the whole incident wasn’t a big deal, a month-long hospitalization. I was provided with excellent Christian counselors who sidestepped the question of why my faith had been inadequate to heal my bulimia and dealt instead with my family dynamics, my griefs, and my misconceptions about myself. The symptoms subsided. As I had so many times before, I found a way to interpret my experience within the structure of my Evangelical beliefs. I left aside questioning why I hadn’t been able to come up with faith the size of a mustard seed and decided that if God gives us tools, whether they be table saws, surgeons, or psychologists, he expects us to use them rather than trying to build our houses, fix our broken bones, or heal our psyches by prayer alone. Moving mountains by prayer must mean something else. I returned to my studies. Wheaton, as an Evangelical college, embodied a dynamic tension: the mission as an institution of higher learning to foster inquiry, and the mission as an Evangelical institution to maintain boundaries around the nature and shape of that inquiry. Some answers were Given and thus were off limits. Take biology for example. It was fine to contemplate the mechanisms of microevolution as long as we didn’t extrapolate too far. Fortunately for the professor, who needed to teach within the boundaries of her mission, few of us did. We didn’t know that Christians in other traditions and places had accommodated their faith quite comfortably to the evidence that species emerge by natural selection. Even if we did, it might not have mattered. Our kind of Christianity was the most real kind, and our kind had pegged itself firmly to belief in a literal six-day creation. It was fortunate also, for the biology professor that the students in my class accepted that human life becomes uniquely valuable at conception, not before, not after. (Except for one, who kept her questions to herself.) They remained in agreement even after we contemplated the writings of Malcolm Muggeridge, a Catholic who argued that God knows/envisions/ loves a human soul well before conception and that even family planning is a violation of God’s law. Muggeridge obviously was wrong, as wrong as the folks who argued that life becomes valuable gradually during gestation. Consensus kept our class discussions tame. Mostly, we stayed far away from such complexities and focused instead on mitochondria and mitosis. Here is another example of the tension between Wheaton’s two missions. Generally at Wheaton, compassion was considered a good thing. After all, Jesus lived his ministry among the downtrodden. In keeping with his life model, the college had a program called Human Needs and Global Resources, known by the acronym HNGR (to sound like hunger), that placed students in downtrodden communities overseas. The goal of the program was to help students follow the path of Jesus, leaving home and caring for the needs of those he called “the least of these.” But the head of the program started showing excessive sympathy for the collective uprising of the downtrodden in Nicaragua and was heard spouting a little too much liberation theology,[2] and he had to find a new job. Compassion too, had its limits. Yet even within the walls defined by the Given, there was plenty at Wheaton to broaden as well as to prolong my faith. The theological differences of opinion that were debated in the Wheaton community might sound trivial to an outsider, but to me they would prove vital. For example, my New Testament class included both pre- and postmillennialists. Evangelicals believe in something called “the Rapture,” a miraculous event in which all the living Christians (of our type) will be taken up to heaven. At Wheaton, I learned that some Evangelical theologians think this would happen before the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, while some think it will happen after. My upbringing had tolerated no such diversity: we were in the pre- camp. Also, there were scattered Lutherans and Presbyterians on campus, even the occasional Catholic. I discovered that my favorite writer, C.S. Lewis, was Anglican. Yet, oddly, they all seemed to be real Christians, even the ones who believed in infant baptism, an abomination to my spiritual guides, who held that baptism must be a mature and voluntary decision. In these small ways, the sheltering walls of faith at Wheaton College were farther apart than those I had grown up in. They were less confining, and yet, at the same time, they were close and familiar enough to be secure. It was this combination, I think, that ultimately encouraged my path of inquiry. Thanks to my professors and classmates and many hours of animated discussion, I came to accept that some differences in doctrine or interpretation of the Bible were reasonable, in spite of what I had been taught. I felt safe acknowledging these differences because they occurred within a community of devoted believers, between people whose faith I could not deny. I discovered, in the process of wrestling with these small differences, how good it can feel to ask and resolve questions rather than struggling to suppress them. And so, resting in the confidence that all truth is God’s truth, I kept asking. Not that I always got the answers I was looking for, nor answers that were acceptable to my peers, or even many satisfying answers at all. Instead of getting smaller, my list of tough questions seemed to grow:
After Wheaton, I moved on to graduate school in Iowa to study counseling psychology. There I lived in an ecumenical Christian community run by Lutheran Campus Ministries, and the space within the walls of faith grew larger still. I hoped that I had found my spiritual resting place. Indeed, worship as a part of that community felt deep and beautiful, full of humble gratitude for the gifts of life and eternal life, rooted in the compassion and love of Jesus and steeped in divine mystery. And yet, sometimes I couldn’t help applying the methods of inquiry I was being taught: logic, analysis, and empirical research, to questions that threatened the delicate balance of that beauty. Even as I sang praises to the creator, I was learning that creation science was neither science nor faith, but rather a peculiar amalgam that relied on one set of rules at one time and another set when those became impossible. Even as I turned to the Bible for moral guidance, I was discovering that some forms of moral, or immoral, behavior are caused by biochemistry or neurological damage rather than free will. The process didn’t stop when I finally left Iowa for Washington, where I would continue my clinical and research training. Attending church became difficult. I found many details of Evangelical theology increasingly difficult to justify, and I struggled to sit through sermons, frustrated by faulty logic and simplistic answers. For a while, I dealt with this by avoiding dogma. I turned to older traditions, Catholic and Anglican, in which the Sunday focus is not on teaching but on worship, expressed through ancient music and ritual. In this way, I was able, for a time, to split off my critical rational training from the part of me that yearned for a spiritual center. I built my own walls around my faith. But walls hadn’t worked when other people built them, and they didn’t work when I built them either. In spite of myself, I kept tunneling under and out, carrying secret, scary, confusing discoveries back in with me until, finally, I got to a place where I stood and looked back, and the walls looked to me like a prison instead of a sanctuary. I had come to the place where I now live. It is a place of freedom, the freedom to accept the evidence of my senses and my mind. It is difficult to describe the peace that comes with giving yourself permission to know what you know: to have hard, complicated realities staring at you and to be able to raise your head and look back at them with a steady gaze, scared maybe, grieved perhaps, but straight on and unwavering. I spent years contorting myself as an advocate for my beliefs, finding complex arguments to explain away the fossil record, the suffering of innocents, the capricious favoritism of my God, the logical inconsistencies of scripture, and the aberrant behavior of my fellow believers. And, rather like your average conspiracy theorist, when I went into my mental exercises with an a priori conclusion, I could make the pieces fit. But when, finally, exhausted from the strain, I untangled myself, sat back and looked at those pieces all together, there weren’t many conclusions that made much sense. I no longer had clean answers about what was true, but my old ones clearly contradicted both morality and reason. The only hope I had of pursuing goodness and truth was to let those answers go. At times, when you look at an entire body of evidence, when you look at it all together, some possibilities are pretty easy to rule out. You may not know exactly what is real, but you can be confident that some things are not. So it is with Evangelical teachings. When one examines the evidence related to Evangelical beliefs—the content and history of the Bible, the structure of nature’s design, the character of the Evangelical God, the implications of prayer and miracles, the concepts original and universal sin, the mechanism of salvation by blood atonement, the idea of eternal reward and punishment, the behavior of believers—when one examines all of these together through a lens of empiricism and logic, the composite suggests some kind of reality that is very different from the ideas that dominated my thinking for so long. Many books depict the Evangelical experience as a spiritual journey, a journey from darkness to the light of salvation. But few describe a path that leads people out of traditional faith to another place and another source of light. When ex-believers write, they usually write about the things that do make sense to them, not about the contradictions they have left behind. Rare exceptions include: Losing Faith in Faith by Daniel Barker and Annie L. Gaylor,6 Farewell to God by Charles Templeton,7 and The Event Horizon Rider by Brian Elroy McKinley.8 Edward Babinski’s book, Leaving the Fold,9 contains testimonials by ex-fundamentalists who have found their way to other forms of thinking. Equally rare are Christian scholars like Don Cupitt and John Shelby Spong, who, from within the faith, unflinchingly examine every dogma as a possible source of idolatry, expose each to the light of reason and compassion, and then ask what core of transcendence remains.10 To these voices in the wilderness, I add my own, not as an ex-minister or scholar, but as an ordinary ex-Evangelical who thought too much about questions that wouldn’t go away. Is it possible to make a case for traditional creeds in general or Evangelical orthodoxy in particular? Can someone embedded in such a perspective justify the contradictions inherent in his or her faith? The answer to these questions is an unqualified yes. But they are not the right questions to ask, if what we’re after is truth. Instead, we must ask this: when no sacred assumption is untouchable, when we cherish honest inquiry more than any set of handed-down answers, when we follow the questions where they may lead, what looks to be real? What are the most likely conclusions, based on the whole stack of messy evidence? What are our best, wisest, most honest judgments, knowing they will never be beyond a shadow of a doubt, if we trust that all truth really is God’s truth?
Like this chapter? Check out the book at www.Lulu.com/content/220355 [1] Unless otherwise specified, all biblical quotes in this book are from the New International Version. Occasionally a verse is quoted from the King James Version for the sake of familiarity or poetic flow. In such cases, the letters KJV follow the reference. [2] Liberation theology is a movement that arose in Latin America in the mid twentieth century. Members of the clergy came to believe that it was blasphemous and contrary to the ministry of Jesus to focus on men’s souls without focusing as well on their hunger, illness and need. This movement aligned the clergy with the politics of social reform.
The Dark Side: PrefaceA Nation under God Our goal is a Christian nation.... We have a biblical duty; Not long ago, an Associated Press story caught my eye. Texas governor Rick Perry signed two bills into law, one opposing gay marriage and the other restricting abortion. Rather than conducting the ceremonial signing in a state office, flanked by officials or staff, he stationed himself in the gymnasium of an Evangelical school, with Christian symbols in the background and an out-of-state evangelist at his side. Shouts of "amen" rose from the audience.[2] The afternoon after I read about Perry's bold fusion of Christian symbols and governmental powers, I went to my hair dresser, Ann. While Ann worked, she told me a story. The night before, she had gone to a movie with an old friend, Grace. Afterward, over coffee, Grace expressed how worried she was about Ann going to hell. Grace insisted that the only way out of this fate was to be saved by the blood of Jesus Christ. "I told her that I just couldn't believe that stuff," said Ann. "I didn't want to get in a fight, but she wouldn't stop. Finally I said that I had to leave because I needed to get up early. But I was so upset that I didn't get much sleep afterwards. I can't believe the same things she does, but I get scared that maybe something is wrong with me. I don't want this to wreck our friendship, but I don't know what to say." The questions in this book have never been more relevant. When I was growing up in Arizona, most of my friends, neighbors, and role models shared my Evangelical beliefs, and when they did not, we didn't talk about it. When I was in graduate school working on a degree in psychology, most of my fellow students and professors shared my religious misgivings, but we didn't talk much about that either. When I settled in the Northwest, I also settled into a posture of "don't ask, don't tell" with regard to spiritual questions. Religion had little place in conversations, whether among colleagues or friends. In this, I was not alone. Except in churches and religious forums, the general consensus in our pluralistic society during the latter part of the twentieth century was to keep private faith out of social conversation and public debate. Since the year 2000, something has changed. Religious beliefs and moral values are now discussed in every form of mass media. They have become topics of conversation among even casual acquaintances. George Bush and the religious right, for better or for worse, have reopened a conversation in America, a conversation about faith and morality and the meaning of Christianity. This conversation has been driven by Evangelicals, and consequently, much of the debate has been about Evangelicalism itself. Led by organizations that focus more on advocacy than theology and emboldened by increasing political clout, Evangelicals have come out of the closet. In November 2004, the religious right claimed credit for putting George Bush back in office and demanded payback in the form of laws that advanced their social agenda: funding for faith-based social services; restrictions on reproductive education, contraception, and abortion; bans on civil unions for gays; and revisions in science curricula to make allowance for the biblical creation story. The media sat up and took notice. Articles began cropping up in the mainstream press about "dominionism," the belief that Christians have a moral responsibility to run the country (and ultimately the world) according to biblically derived principles of governance. Conservationists bewailed "end-times" theology, which predicts the impending return of Jesus Christ, making the health of the planet a matter of indifference for some believers. Recently I had lunch with a small group of people who are trying to build public policies that protect the poor, the ill, and children—those whom Jesus called "the least of these." During the conversation, one person, a young attorney, announced that he was Evangelical, adding for emphasis that he prayed to Jesus every day. No one else had announced his or her spiritual beliefs, and yet nobody flinched at the proclamation or thought it off topic. The Evangelical said that if the group wanted to succeed in helping vulnerable populations, they needed to engage others who shared his beliefs. All at the table agreed. Why could the young attorney make his announcement, confident that it would be well received? For two reasons. First, although he may not have been among other Evangelicals, in virtually any gathering in the United States it is safe to assume that the majority of people present are people of faith. Second, thanks to the prominent role of Evangelicals in the press and in public life, non-Evangelicals are increasingly aware of the growth in Evangelical religion and are anxious to understand how this growth may affect their own communities, deeply held values, and spiritual priorities. Newspaper headlines, evangelists, and astute politicians may talk about a secular assault on religion,[3] but the truth is that the United States is more religious than any other developed nation. In a recent poll, ninety-eight percent of Americans said they believe in God (in contrast to about fifty percent of Germans). In U.S. census data, less than one half of one percent self identify as atheist, and another five percent or so call themselves agnostic. About eighty-five percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian and forty to fifty percent call themselves born again or Evangelical. A secular assault on religion? Politicians know better. They accuse their opponents of shunning faith and religious values precisely because Americans across the political spectrum are virtually all people of faith in one form or another. The strong inclination of Americans toward religious belief is neither new nor news. Non-Christians have always been a small minority of the American population and non-theists an even smaller minority. The change that has occurred in recent decades has been primarily a shift within Christianity itself. For over thirty years, while enrollment in traditional denominations has been declining, Evangelicalism has been quietly gaining ground, offering a very clear set of core beliefs and behavioral rules to those who otherwise might hold more complex or vague forms of faith. Utilizing good marketing practices and modern technologies, Evangelicals have built communications empires that broadcast their message around the globe. As traditional communities have fragmented, Evangelicals have built church communities that offer not only meaning but also friendship, counseling, legal advice, leisure activities, and mutual aid. These benefits come with conditions attached. Social services are offered to outsiders first and foremost as a means of winning converts. This means that testimonials, Bible studies and so forth are a part of the package. Evangelicals call this witnessing or sharing the faith. Without this piece, which offers the hope of salvation to those who are otherwise lost in sin, social services (from an Evangelical perspective) have little value. In fact contact with non-believers in general has little value, and when Evangelicalism is at its worst, the non-believers themselves have little value. Evangelicals, as they like to say, prefer to be "in this world but not of this world." They see themselves as a people apart. The most devout buy their books almost exclusively at Christian bookstores. A small but significant minority home-school their children if they can't afford private Christian schools. Many socialize only with members of their own church communities or people they meet through related organizations. In spite of their growing influence Evangelicals often see themselves as an embattled minority. And because many don't believe that other Christians are Christians, they see Christianity per se as an embattled minority religion. On a plane in India, I once sat in front of an American teenager who was part of a youth missions trip. He was talking earnestly to an adult companion about how hard it had been to approach young Indians, interrupting their conversations and activities to tell them the Good News: that they, too, could be saved by Jesus Christ. The young man speculated: "What if someone threatened me? What if they even threatened to kill me? Would I have the courage to face death in order to carry God's message to the world?" I remembered, as an earnest Evangelical youth, asking myself these very same questions. The adult mentor might have reassured him. (History suggests that Christianity has been lethal to missionaries far less often that it has been lethal to those on the receiving end of the message.) Instead, the mentor responded as such mentors often do, with stories of martyrs and language of warfare that both affirmed the rightness of their mission and cultivated a sense of imminent threat. Otherness and threat, political power, and moral certainty. It is no surprise that this combination is generating anxiety among non-believers and non-Evangelical Christians. In the past, when political power has accrued to a Christian orthodoxy that demands exclusive allegiance, the result has often been lethal for both outsiders to the faith and Christians who don't hold the dominant view. Is such an environment in the making? At least among some Evangelicals such a possibility has become thinkable. A recent book review in Christianity Today, a mainstream Evangelical publication, ends thus: "[Flannery] O'Connor once wrote that 'more than ever now it seems that the kingdom of heaven has to be taken by violence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.' . . . we mortals are playing in a world increasingly given to moral relativism. As the title of one of [O'Connor's] best stories put it, 'The life you save may be your own.'" [4] "What is Evangelicalism?" a bewildered friend asked recently. "How does Evangelicalism relate to fundamentalism?" These questions are not easy to answer. The term Evangelical has been around since the Reformation, and its meaning has varied. In modern terms, Evangelicalism is a kind of Christianity that structures itself around one particular, ahistorical interpretation of the Bible. From the Bible, which is taken literally and accorded absolute moral authority, Evangelicals justify a set of doctrines that govern day-to-day life in realms ranging from prayer and parenting to civic duties. These doctrines are described in detail in Chapter 2, and their implications fill the remainder of this book. Fundamentalism is a movement that arose within Protestant Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, largely in reaction to modernism. The name comes from a set of essays called The Fundamentals that were published between 1910 and 1915. These essays were intended to combat the ways that theology was changing in response to scholarship in archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, psychology and biology. They reaffirmed the traditional Christian doctrines that form the basis of modern Evangelicalism. Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism are closely related offspring of traditional Protestant orthodoxy. However, the term fundamentalism is now used to embrace a variety of absolutist approaches to religious faith both inside and outside of Christianity. Few Christians call themselves fundamentalist. Many call themselves Evangelical. Those who do, hope and pray that others will join them. In their eyes, there is no alternate path to God and, ultimately, no other form of goodness matters. This means that, as context and culture allow, Evangelicals will continue to speak out, both in the public sphere and over coffee. What should you say when a dear friend or family member expresses concern for your soul and offers you a path to Salvation? How should you respond to Evangelical advocacy in your community, your workplace, your school, or your government? The answers depend in large part on your own values and spiritual identity. But in order to form those answers, it helps to have a clear understanding of the core teachings of the Evangelical movement, the implications of those doctrines, and the threats they can pose to love and truth.
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