Persnickety

I’ve been asked if I am a Christian. I said that No, not in the way that most people think of the term. I wanted to say more--so much more--but felt that there wasn’t enough time and besides, I was too tired to get into it. So I’d like to get into it. When someone asks me Am I a Christian, I want to say Yes, but… or No, but… I also want to just say what someone wrote in a blog on Patheos (apologies but I cannot find the source) when she said that she was “a human being.” It would be nice to just sometimes leave it at that. I do and I don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus. I do and don’t believe in his divinity. By that, I believe in the narratives (there are more than one) and their power and their truth. But I don’t understand those narratives to be some overarching historical artifact. Because I don’t feel that there is any overarching historical foundation to any narrative. In other words, there is only narrative. That is it. There is nothing beyond that. Nothing...

There is a sense in which you can take any sign whatsoever, whether a tree, a musical note, a word, and find ambiguity, find a space that resonates and echoes until you lose it completely and you wonder, What did that mean? There is also a sense in which you can take any sign and apply it almost exactly, precisely to a given situation. You have the sense that you know it completely. Signs are like this, like a jazz composition, that the composer has written down and gives to a few different bands to play. All the bands have the same musical notations, the signs, and they appears exactly the same on the page. Yet all the bands will play a different song, if only slightly different, playing within the ambiguous space of the composer’s signs. That is language. Everyone knows what it is; and no one knows what it is. Nietzsche apparently felt that truth is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms...illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten.” Umb...

[I was going to title the blog post as "The Greatest Enemy of Religion," since it is pithier; but the point isn't truly Religion's enemy, as an institution...and I like Spirit instead of God because Spirit is more numinous, more hazy: God cannot be a "being" but must be seen as more of a verb--so say I.] The greatest enemy is...The Bible. Now, it doesn't have to be, need to be; but it currently is the greatest enemy. I am going to use a metaphor that Timothy Beal uses in his  book, "The Rise and Fall of the Bible." Professor Beal compares the Bible (which he notes in the sixth chapter of that book, which I like quite a bit, is actually a mistranslation as the original Greek  ta biblia truly means the scrolls , or the books) to a rock which people cling to, unchanging, hard, a foundation we can firmly stand on. Or...we could choose to see it as a river, which can carry us onward, to a journey that we leap into, that carries us to unknown p...

So what is evangelical Christianity? There are the basics, or five fundamentals (or more depending on your particular denominational flavor): Biblical inspiration and the impossibility of error within scripture; the virgin birth; Jesus' atonement for sin; bodily resurrection of Jesus; belief in Jesus' miracles. Okay, so that is a beginning. But at some time, not sure when but probably around the mid-century, something else happened, something that created a sub-set of fundamentalism: the evangelical movement. They still liked the five F's but seemed squishy regarding other non-fundamentalists, more likely to reach out, as Billy Graham did, to the youth. Youth for Life and like-minded organizations sought out the young with rock concerts (Christian rock concerts, but still) and Bibles that emphasized paraphrastic interpretations, emphasized form over content one might say. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Timothy Beal, a professor of religion at Case Wester...

The churches where I live are experiencing highs and lows. Most have decreasing congregations, and whether they are so-called Bible-believing churches or more liberal mainline, it doesn't seem to matter. The Southern Baptists have for the past few years come into New England with an influx of leadership and money and are attempting a large church planting effort. Hundreds of small churches are being seeded here in New England. But these are pitiful efforts (just speaking honestly). They involve grabbing some Bible believer and trying to make a pastor out of him (it is always a man). The congregation might just be his family. A cynic could be forgiven, I think, for suggesting these plantings are an effort to show the hand of God on some spreadsheet handed around a table back home in the more fertile fields of the South: See! The Hand of the Lord is at work in New England! New Englanders have voted with their feet. They do not like going to church. Not on Sunday, not on Wednesday...

Is Evangelical Christianity the worst evil ever manifested by humanity, as averred by a recent online article ? No, I do not believe that. I put that in there to manifest not its inherent evil but to 1) prod the reader; and 2) to bring up the underlying premise of that article: what is required of a Christian? The blog's author, CK Ratzer, basically states that nothing is required. Christ has given his Grace once and for all and the Law is without effect (this is the antinomian view, from anti= against; nomos= law). That is the Good News. He then postulates that Evangelical Christianity preaches a "mixed" gospel, one of repentance and grace, then one of required action, action that never accumulates into goodness, but is a cause of guilt and shame and never-ending judgmentalism. Anyway, I didn't want to argue what he has already argued. Read the article and see for yourself. As to what is required... We know that "repent" is a mis-translation. It m...

Franklin Graham is the son of America's leading evangelist, Billy Graham, and runs Samaritan's Purse, a Christian international relief organization. He also runs the Billy Graham Evangelistic organization and he gets a hefty compensation package for both, totally over $880,000 per year (last figure reported in 2015 ). So we can assume it is higher than that at the present time. That figure is in the upper tier of compensation packages for mega-pastors and their ilk. Some such as Pastor Rick Warren "reverse tithe" and give much of their salaries back to various charities and their own congregations. Graham has said that he is not doing so in order to accrue enough money so that he can work for free when he is 70. One wonders how much work he will be doing at that age. It must be said that Samaritan's Purse receives a high rating by Charity Navigator, despite Graham's salary being about 50% higher than average for aid organizations such as Graham's. Hi...

Much of what I have lately posted has to do with a general criticism of the current state of the Christian church. I have criticized it for its dogma and doctrinalism, its closed-mindedness, and its adherence to anti-scientific principles. It's all well and good to point out the weaknesses within a movement or organization; but without a perspective on what might replace it or at least remedy it, then what good has been done? If the Church is now dead or dying, if it is a mere matter of a generation or two from disappearing, it would be well to begin the work of the New Church, la iglesia nueva (I've recently begun to learn Spanish, and here I thought a different language might underline the near complete break with the past that I see as necessary: queria destacar una ruptura completa! ). Although I've only just begun to formulate these ideas, I think that the New Church must have within it certain descriptors: 1) "There is no religion higher than Truth....

I of late have attended, much to my dismay, a Bible study. Not a mere discussion of the Bible but one formed around fundamentalist doctrine. Of a sort. The study was basically independent of leadership, which is to say it had no church leader leading the group around some central theme or book (other than The Holy Bible itself), as is the norm in such things. I was intrigued because the instigator of the group titled it An Inquiry into the Bible. That was intriguing since I welcome such inquiries. There are, to my mind, too many "certainties" around the biblical Word. Some questioning is very much welcome in my world. We began with Genesis. It began quite slowly. We could not make a lot of headway past the first two verses. The idea of a "Gap Theory" loomed and this lead to a discussion on how old the earth was (between 5,000 and 8,000 years old). Evolution crept in, but only to be dismissed as an example of what is wrong with the teaching within our public s...

Last night I viewed The War Room, a film produced by the Kendrick brothers, directed by Alex Kendrick (who also has a bit part in the movie). This is the latest production from them, others being Courageous, Facing the Giants, and Fireproof. The only other film of theirs that I have seen is Fireproof, and I cannot recommend it for its horrendous acting, and tendentious storyline. The viewing for The War Room contained the trailer for Courageous, which apparently fits neatly into the high school mythology of football in America. How football, with its history of violence and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, fits into a Christian lifestyle--all of these are Christian movies--I cannot fathom. I won't be seeing Courageous anytime soon. [Photo by Matthias Karlsson .] The movie is possibly slightly better acted than in Fireproof, but that isn't saying much (the ever-present Kirk Cameron, king of evangelist acting, is thankfully absent). The direction is ham-handed and the writin...