Undeception

I don’t often link to the big name bloggers: I assume everyone’s either already reading them or consciously ignoring them. But in this case I can’t help but stand up to lodge an “Amen”–and add a few notes of commentary.

First, please read this excerpt from Rachel Held Evans’ blog. I feel I could have written every thought in it.

Frankly, I find the whole conversation a bit depressing. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want either group to “meet its demise” because I love elements of both! In fact, I think there are a lot of progressive, mainline churches that could benefit from a shot of evangelicalism, and a lot of evangelical churches who could benefit from a shot of progressivism. We have so much to learn from one another, but instead we’re like a pair of toddlers fighting over space in the sandbox.

But if the early church could survive—and in fact, thrive amidst persecution—when it included both Jews and Gentiles, zealots and tax collectors, slaves and owners, men and women, those in support of circumcision and those against it, those staunchly opposed to eating food that had been sacrificed to idols and those who felt it necessary, then I think modern American Christianity can survive when it includes democrats and republicans, biblical literalists and biblical non-literalists, Calvinists and Arminians…so long as we’re not rooting for one another’s demise.

With this in mind, maybe being “in between” isn’t so bad. Maybe being “in between” puts those of us who find ourselves torn between conservative Christianity and liberal Christianity in a position to act as peacemakers and bridge-builders between the two groups. Maybe it enables us to help break down these binaries altogether, as we are living proof that you don’t have to choose one or the other.

I’m not exactly sure what this peacemaking process will look like, but I have a few ideas of how we can get started:

Let’s be ourselves.

This may surprise you, seeing as how I’m a blogger with an outspoken opinion on everything, but when I’m a part of a conservative Christian community, I tend to keep my more progressive views quiet, and when I’m a part of a more liberal Christian community, I tend to keep my more liberal views quiet. I don’t want to cause division. I don’t want to be shamed. I don’t want to make Sunday mornings any more difficult than they already are.

And so I essentially fake it through worship and community activities, accepting whatever “package” that particular church has to offer, then feeling distant and removed as I go through the motions before eventually quitting.

But what if I stopped faking it? What if I brought myself—my gifts, my questions, my opinions—to church? What if, instead of conforming to the mold, I refused to accept it?

[from "Liberal Christianity, Conservative Christianity, and the Caught-In-Between"]

I’ve certainly been thinking along these lines lately. A couple of weeks ago I toyed with the idea of starting something of a campaign among bloggers of my theological ilk, those of us whom Rachel Held Evans might call the Caught-In-Betweeners. This grassroots movement would be about coming out of the theologically liberal closet. If I judge the enthusiastic response to Evan’s latest post aright, it looks like she’s beaten me to the punch!

In my conservative environment, I’ve recently started being convicted that these conservative Christians really need to know that people like me exist. I guarantee that a preposterous number of people in my church have never even considered the possibility that you could trust in Jesus as Lord of all creation and be an evolutionist, despite the fact that I am aware of a couple people in our congregation beside myself who accept evolutionary theory. No wonder they view us as outsiders: they haven’t ever met us inside!

Like Evans, many of us are playing it safe, being in our conservative environments with our in-between-stolid-conservative-and-flaming-liberal faith incognito. Lord knows it’s not easy to “come out”, is it? I have some things at stake, unfortunately: in particular, I have a side job doing something I really enjoy, but it’s run by an outfit that wouldn’t be happy to know my stances on these contentious issues. I have several friends who have suffered some painful emotional persecution when their beliefs were made known. But in most of these cases, it seems they did not freely divulge themselves: they were “outed” by someone else. And that always looks worse, doesn’t it?

I’m not saying that there wouldn’t be negative repercussions from a decision to “stand up and be counted”. But as long as we act in humility, not as evangelists for our pet causes but as honest people who occasionally find the need to gently correct misconceptions about our beliefs when presented as fact within our churches and faith communities, I think we can weather the inevitable storm better. I know it’d be more healthy for me and my poor wife.

If I felt I were part of a bigger movement, one of many friends taking our shades off, hanging up our trenchcoats, and removing our disguises, I think I could handle it. I predict that it would be good for them as well as for us In-Betweeners. It’s one thing to hear that there are weirdos who believe that God created through evolution; it’s another to know and rub shoulders with those people in intimate social settings like being members of the same church. It’s much harder to dismiss them and their strange beliefs when you know them personally.

So again, I’m toying with the idea of advocating a campaign, or probably better, a resolution to decloak.

Not sure how thrilled the Romulans will be about the Enterprise “boldly” showing up like this.

Abandoning the most conservative brands of Christianity doesn’t entail either abandoning the faith or, at best, adopting a wishy-washy spirituality. Our hard-won faith and theological perspectives are worth more than that: if we believe our understanding of the faith is true and worth holding onto, then it deserves attention and devotion; it deserves to be understood by our fellow believers; at least it deserves to have its existence acknowledged.

I know what many of you are thinking. “Why rock the boat?“

I want to address one of the better reasons for remaining quiet and not disturbing things. Many of us do so out of a conviction that we don’t need to challenge people’s faith when they’re not ready for it. I hear a couple of my friends saying things like, “Far be it from me to upset them and send them on the sort of precarious journey I’ve been on. They’re happy in their faith, not hurting anyone.”

But they are hurting someone.

• They’re hurting their children by leaving them unprepared for incontestable scientific evidence against their creationism.
• They’re hurting society by polarizing political, social, and religious positions on dramatically sectarian lines, painting Evangelicalism and the GOP platform as coterminous, etc.
• They’re hurting the viability of faith in Christ in a world that won’t simply accept their claim that the inerrant Bible dropped in our laps from heaven above.
• And they’re hurting us, by persecuting us and making us so frustrated with them that we are reluctant to even fight to have fellowship with them, when we should and could be learning things from them.

To return to the first bullet point above, the biggest reason they need to know this is the biggest reason they fear us: their children. These kids going off to college have been prepared for assaults on their faith by their families and their faith communities, but research shows that whatever they’re doing is just not enough. And as we are now seeing highlighted in the news story prompting Evans’ post, it’s not just conservative forms of Christianity that are losing the battle. Kids who are taught to accept the whole package or throw it all out, who are never told that they must examine the contents and accept what’s good, are leaving the church in droves.

No matter how kind and loving they’re being, no matter how much sin they’re resisting, no matter what lives of holiness they are striving to live, there are factors endemic to mainstream Evangelical theology that disqualify it from being sufficient salt and light in this world. Indeed, in some of the most important ways Christianity is supposed to be ministering to our world, Evangelicals are far behind unbelievers.

For instance, look at the most common Evangelical response to homosexuals or to those in need: first we blame the individual, try to get them to repent from their lifestyles that leave them where they are, demanding that they jump through difficult hoops while offering the hope of communion with God as a carrot. Christians have to be able to minister to and accept those groups, no matter what we think their sin is, be it the sexual deviancy that is allegedly responsible for homosexuality or the laziness and selfishness that supposedly causes people to become parasites on society, rob the upstanding producers through taxation, and vote Democratic. Christians have to dine with those groups as Jesus did with the “tax collectors and sinners” of his day. We have to engage them, love them, and let God deal with the personal holiness of each individual as He sees fit.

Letting conservative Christians be without challenging their assumptions will eventually have the effect of leaving Evangelical faith with a pretty short shelf life. Isolating ourselves and simply letting them soldier on will render them irrelevant. Among those unbelievers who believe conservative Christians when they say, “It’s conservative or nothing,” our non-conservative theology is flushed down the same toilet as conservative theology. Remaining cloaked is a no-win situation.

By all means, be tactful. Know your audience. I’d caution against intentionally rocking the boat at all: that’s not what this is about. But let me make a couple of suggestions about what adopting this decloaking resolution might look like.

When someone in Sunday School waxes eloquent about the evils of godless evolution, swallow your fear and tactfully suggest that however evil godless evolution might be, evolution isn’t necessarily godless. When your Bible study assumes the legitimacy of capital punishment or the divine justice of U.S. foreign policy, be the voice that encourages them to be consistent in their convictions about the sanctity of life.

But whatever you do, remain engaged. Don’t lie, and don’t stay silent. Don’t withdraw to a safe distance. Try to learn what you can from them; share life with them. Don’t zealously divulge all of your heretical beliefs and them expect them to come around to them. Live out your beliefs with fear and trembling, including the belief we liberals think should stand out the most: love one another. Maybe even these conservative Christians will fulfill Jesus’ words and eventually be convinced that we are Jesus’ disciples by our love.

So what do you think? Are you in?

If I were to ask you why you believe in inerrancy, would you answer with any of the following?

1) The Bible affirms that it is inerrant.

2) It’s a logical inference from other things I believe (e.g. about God’s perfection).

3) Without a perfect record of divine revelation, anything goes. What’d be the point?

I left off one likely response, as it doesn’t get to the root cause: “Because it’s never been proved wrong.” The problem here is that this response shifts the burden of proof off of the inerrantist, despite the fact that an expectation of complete perfection is not a natural position; no one expects that anything is perfect until it is proved to be flawed unless they have a prior reason for that expectation. So assuming the Bible is perfect until proved otherwise assumes something not in evidence. What I’m asking is, “Why do you expect it to be perfect?”

Let me look at the remaining answers one at a time.

1) For the Bible tells me so.

Ok. Forget the circularity of “I trust X because X told me to”; after all, presuppositionalism has nifty ways of embracing such circularity as a “feature, not a bug”. There are other problems.

Where does the Bible tell you so? Before answering that, realize what that question really means: does any passage ever refer to this specific collection of books as they were canonized centuries after the individual books were written? If so, does it additionally refer to them as entirely free from error? In other words, can you find even a single passage that refers to the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible (“the word of the Lord” doesn’t count)? Do those passages also refer to this canon as inerrant, or with an unarguably synonymous term? If not, does it even say something like that in a way that doesn’t require philosophical/theological (i.e. extrabiblical) extrapolation?

Pretty sure I know what the answer is. But I won’t spoil it for you: go look for yourself.

2) Ok, maybe it’s not spelled out precisely in the Bible, but it’s a logical inference based on other Scriptures and on what one should expect from a perfect God.

A common pitfall is to suppose that because Passage X:YZ makes a claim about a passage or portion of “Scripture” (e.g. Psalm 119 speaking of the Law), we can extrapolate that everything the Church eventually determined to be “Scripture” somehow gets grandfathered in. So when one verse proclaims, “The Word of God shall stand forever,” it must be referring to what inerrantists now think of as the totality of the Word, the Bible. That’s clever: but it’s not biblical. In fact, it’s unapologetically extrabiblical; that is, it requires you to add other assumptions to the text, assumptions about the Church’s role that Protestants by definition reject when applied outside this one issue. What I mean is this: you’re rallying around Source A for authority while rejecting Source B, yet citing Source B as the authoritative body that proves Source A’s authority.

Many hold on to inerrancy because they believe that God does not lie, and so by extension we must assume that this must be applied to everything we call Scripture. By now you should be able to anticipate my response: what makes you think that everything we call Scripture is comprised of God’s words? This is yet another mask of a presupposition that needs to be peeled away so that we can ask the underlying question. There has to be a reason you believe that Scripture = God’s very words, and preferably it’s more defensible and less based on personal ignorance/incredulity than, “I can’t imagine it being any other way.”

A typical response to this is rhetorically asking why God would leave us without an unimpeachable source about Him and His ways. I return, do you mean to ask why He wouldn’t ensure that we had a source of knowledge that was capable of proving His truth to us and that was free from human obfuscation, manipulation, misunderstanding, and exploitation? Why indeed! Instead, what we actually have is a book whose truth claims are very easily disputed and that has been obfuscated, manipulated, misunderstood, and exploited for all kinds of nefarious purposes–and all the more because of its supposed authority! If God intended to invest it with an authority used properly so rarely and misused so commonly, it would not go toward lessening the problem of God’s transcendence from our plane of existence: if anything, it would compound the problem of why He has chosen to (ineffectually) intervene in our affairs only to deliver us a much misinterpreted and too often dangerous collection of ancient writings while leaving everything else in our world in such a state of glaring imperfection. On the other hand, if our very human Bible is instead yet another example of humanity’s grasping after the ethereal, always just out of reach, and frequently misunderstood regions of the Transcendent, there’s no hollow exception. All told, everything makes much more sense: the Bible’s not perfect because its authors weren’t, either. Nothing’s perfect.

At this point, most will have asked or at least thought the third possible response to my initial question.

3) Without an inerrant Bible, why should I believe in Christianity – or God Himself – at all? How are we supposed to know what to believe? Christianity is just not intelligible unless God left us a clear, miraculously accurate demonstration of His activity in the world, which is what the Bible is.

What it comes down to for those of you asking that is that you were sold a bill of goods. You believe the Bible, and therefore Christianity, because the Bible is inerrant; the moment you stop believing the latter, despite having had no good reason for starting to believe it, your foundation is gone. You become fallible; your beliefs become less than 100% sure; you stand the chance of being wrong about it all. And it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it? I felt more secure when I was confident I knew everything–or if not everything, I at least knew enough to consult the complete Source of All Knowledge, which conferred absolute truth to me on demand (magically, my interpretations were spot on as well). How much simpler things were then!

Let’s just say that, given only a Bible that’s human rather than divine, you decide that it’s all a sham and a scam. Let’s say you throw in the towel on faith. Are you so worshipful of Almighty Certitude and the Right to Be Right that, in place of your shattered inerrancy, you’d be willing to embrace a version of certainty that affirms, “There is no God, no transcendent meaning, and nothing but the material world”? (This is a very popular choice, unfortunately.) If so, I weep for you and for all the people you take with you into that rigid, harsh realm of fundamentalism. Good thing you don’t base everything in your life off of complete certainty, or you’d never leave your bed in the morning!

The difficulty is in managing expectations and dealing with disappointment: if you were never accustomed to forming your beliefs and outlook on life from the belief that the Bible is a codified list of unquestionable direct messages from God, I don’t think you’d miss it. It does, however, hurt a bit to have what you’ve planted your feet on suddenly jerked from underneath you.

Thankfully, the situation for the non-inerrantist isn’t nearly so bleak as the former inerrantist might be tempted to believe. Most of us are used to living in expectation of things not seen (that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?). Human beings can’t escape living by induction; the assumption that the sun is going to come up tomorrow is based only on inferences from our prior experiences and our unverifiable trust that past events are indicative of the future. We assume a lot in our daily lives, and have literally nothing we can say with certainty. We use Wikipedia. We Google to find answers from fallible people all over the Internet, having to pick through what is and isn’t credible on our own (well, Snopes helps). And by and large, we’re ok with that. That’s just the way it is. And for non-inerrantist Christians, the same goes with our faith; we don’t go around pretending we’re exempt from uncertainty because of some special knowledge we have about the world through our divinely authored handbook. We don’t set our gaze on the window with all its smudges and imperfections, but on what’s on the other side, which we can still see remarkably well.

For those brought up without such unrealistic expectations of the Bible as inerrancy, the faith is still communicated as it always was: the sacred but not necessarily infallible word of the saints’ testimony, leading to personal encounters with God. The earliest church spread by passing on their beliefs about their encounters with Jesus by word of mouth long before it was written down and spread around: even then, there were soon quite spurious testimonies as well, and so, like us, they couldn’t just trust that everything they read was…well, the gospel truth. The testimony of those changed by God in Christ was passed down and continues to be replicated. My father was brought to faith in his adulthood not because anyone had demonstrated the Bible inerrant, but because someone demonstrated the risen Christ in his life.

A faith without a perfect, unquestionable source for knowledge and truth is a light that shines in darkness without completely eliminating the darkness; in fact, when pointed in the wrong directions it can cast some pretty ominous shadows. Dim places are navigable as long as we tread lightly, but the inerrantist plows through boldly while pretending to see it all clearly, often with results that harm others more than themselves (which is the only reason I bother critiquing inerrancy). For instance, without permission to critique the Bible, we cannot convincingly condemn slavery, which is prescribed (by God, apparently) in the first part and never truly repudiated in the second.

“The faith once delivered to the saints” is bigger than will fit between the covers of a book. It’s unwieldy at times, and full of mysteries that can frighten some of us (and thrill others). But it’s entirely adequate for giving us insight into the backend of our universe and teaching us to recognize our place within it.

So what’s your answer? Why are you an inerrantist?

I realize this is a week old, which in the blogosophere can make something quite stale, but I had some thoughts on James K. A. Smith’s surprisingly negative review of Peter Enns’ recent The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

Smith’s criticism focuses on Enns’ methodology, which is based on the reasonable belief that we can’t decide what God may have meant by a passage until we know the immediate, contextual meaning of that passage.

On the contrary, says Smith, “The church has always staked its reading of the Bible on the conviction that Scripture’s meaning exceeds what the original human authors could have intended.” Smith expects the Church to derive the most appropriate and relevant interpretations of Scripture by basing our interpretation in “worship”, whatever that means, “which will generate meanings…that could never have been intended by [the] human authors,” meanings that are “intended as meanings to be unfolded ‘in front of the text’ by the divine Author.”

The notion that there may be meaning in Scripture above and beyond the original meaning may be a conceivably defensible position (a position I once espoused on this site), but he doesn’t stop there: Smith insists that Enns is wrong to try to recover the meaning of the authors for the original audiences because of the danger of it hindering us from extracting a more appropriate, divinely intended meaning for us. So in reading Genesis, Enns should not expend so much effort in recovering the Ancient Near Eastern context, including relevant literary and archaeological backgrounding. That sort of research is well and good, Smith allows, but it doesn’t tell us what the Bible really means now, because it doesn’t take into account the meaning intended for us as contextualized within the Christian canon:

First of all, the Christian church is not a recipient of the book of Genesis as a discrete unit; we receive the book of Genesis within the Bible and that Bible is received as a whole—as a “canon” of Scripture.  Second, internal to the canon is the conviction that meanings God intends are not constrained by what human authors intended.

Although he puts his preferred hermeneutic in terms of “recontextualizing” Scripture, in essence Smith is wanting to theologize the text before situating it in history, because we are apparently not allowed to come to any conclusions by examining individual texts like Genesis and Romans that make it hard for this recontextualization (which in practice looks like front-loading) to occur.

Because Jamie Smith is no fundamentalist, or even a Chicago style inerrantist, he concedes, “Enns is exactly right to push back on ‘conservative’ or ‘literal’ readings of the Bible that anachronistically impose a ‘journalistic’ sense of ‘history’ on ancient texts.” But in this review specifically he seems uncomfortable with Enns’ claim that Paul and the author Genesis might not have intended the same meaning in their passages on Adam and Eve: “In fact, if it becomes a contest between ‘the authors of Genesis’ [note the scare quotes, presumably to flag Enns' avoidance of "Moses"] and Paul, Enns sides with ‘the original meaning’ of Genesis as the determinative meaning.” Not having read the book but broadly being aware of Enns’ perspective, I doubt that Enns would actually say either is determinative to the subjugation of the other; instead, it is Smith who wants to subjugate the intended message of both “Moses” and Paul to the meaning of the “divine Author”…whatever that might be. (I presume by Smith’s objection to letting Genesis carry its own meaning that he expects that God’s intended meaning happens to correspond more closely to Paul’s.)

But what of Smith’s “divine Author”? Should we put so much energy into finding the original meaning that we miss the message God intended for the Church to receive? My understanding is that Enns would affirm divine authorship in some capacity, although he rightly cautions us to avoid the “priority of the divine” that Smith here advocates.

To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of “what God meant” sauce; neither do I believe that the Bible is composed of the flesh of human words attached to a divinely crafted backbone. Nor am I enamored with Peter Enns’ incarnational model of Scripture as I understand it, which is built off of the belief that divine and human authorship overlaps. In short, I have seen no compelling, non-circular reason to maintain the belief that God should in any meaningful sense be considered the author of the Bible. To believe in God’s providential intentions for the Church in the production and canonization of the Bible is one thing; I can affirm as much myself. To credit Him as the publisher might even work. I have sometimes drawn the analogy of God’s purposing of Scripture to that of King James commissioning the translation of the Bible. It occurs to me now that my view of Scripture as the response of humans to divine revelation and inspiration strikes me as fairly well analogous to a Festschrift. But God as author? Hardly. And the contention that He was the kind of author who overlaid the glaringly human text with some esoteric meaning recoverable independently of the meaning it had to the original audiences and available only to subsequent theologians reminds me quite a lot of the infamous “Bible Codes” from a couple years back. It sounds even more like Gnosticism.

But even if God did ordain a higher meaning upon the text, surely we can only hope to find it by first contextualizing and resituating each passage back in its original habitat and going from there. Otherwise the original meaning becomes completely incidental, despite the fact that something much closer to the original meaning than Smith’s canonical reading was the only one actually available to those who canonized it! They canonized the texts for what they were, not for some divine meaning that would override what they were after their canonization.

For these reasons, Jamie Smith’s canonical approach falls far short, and Enns’ approach – by no means uniquely his – of putting the effort into letting the original authors speak for themselves so that we can attempt to interact with each of them on a case-by-case basis handily continues to carry the day.

Over a year ago I started a closed, hidden Facebook group for a few of my friends and me so that we could share links and discuss issues swirling around our rejection of inerrancy. It was an experience of much empathy and encouragement that most all of us really appreciated.

Then around the time my blogging slacked off in the late summer of last year, I also began frequenting the group less and less. I was recently asked by a dear friend from the group to explain what was going on with me. He was specifically referring to my less frequent interaction with the group, but as it’s related to my coincident lull in blogging, I thought I’d put more words into explaining what I think lies behind it all.

I do often miss the “good Christian fellowship” of those days. At times I also miss the probing discussions we had, but to a markedly lesser extent. This isn’t because they weren’t good discussions: it’s just that I’m not as much in that stage of my journey right now. I don’t know…I suppose I’m just tired of all the over-thinking, the second-guessing. After studying and reading and hashing and rehashing, the simple fact is that when it comes to the most fundamental questions (regarding the existence of God, the problem of evil, soteriology, etc.), one of two situations obtain: I know what I believe on the subject and I know enough about why I should and shouldn’t believe it to last me for some time, or at least I am content to abide in hopeful uncertainty. My faith is a choice, a step out into the unknown, not because, as Evangelicals do, I’ve convinced myself that I’m sure I’m headed the right way or that what I’m stepping onto is secure, but because my deepest hunches and most profound philosophical speculations lie in that direction alone. But I don’t pretend to know it’s true. So I stand here shrouded in uncertainty where I have ventured. The fruitless effort of obsessing about these questions about which we can never have full certainty has once again brought me into a forced humility. My consequent unwillingness to trumpet my tenuous conclusions around as the solution to everyone else’s searches is one part of the equation that has led to my being much quieter of late.

Another part of disentangling myself from the world of biblio- and theoblogging is something I’ve just finally worked out in my mind. Although I had managed to avoid these feelings for quite some time, in the last year I finally succumbed to a constant state of annoyance and even disgust at the constant self-justification, drummed-up confidence, and especially the rarely restrained personal vitriol and arrogance on the part of one group of people I had long counted among my closest allies: atheists. Not all of them are like this, I’m obliged by fairness to qualify, but these attitudes generally correlate directly with the degree of satisfaction they get in proclaiming their unbelief; sad to say, the distribution of atheists on the Internet is a rather lopsided (and I hope, unrepresentative) ratio in favor of this genus of atheist. It’s gotten to the point that if I find out someone’s an atheist within five or ten minutes of encountering him, I can depend on his being obnoxious on the subject.

Around the time I started recognizing that the New Atheist “civility” was spreading among even more mainstream non-theists, I noticed the disease showing up among many of those even closer to my ilk, i.e. post-Evangelical and otherwise “liberal” Christians: the ones who seem to take every opportunity to belittle and shame conservative Evangelicals, a group of believers whom I also consider to be sorely in need of correction. By all appearances, it’s not enough to be convinced that Evangelicals and other theologically conservative Christians are wrong: they’re obviously [blankety-blank] morons, due no more attempts at civil, intellectual interaction than the clinically insane. Ridicule is the medicine prescribed to those who believe that the Bible is inerrant, the world was created in 6 days, and that conservative American politics are the direct reflex of biblical morality. Frankly, the eternal obsession with bawling about the idiotic, hypocritical foibles of Evangelical Christianity has gotten really, really old.

But on further reflection, this exposed in me something I didn’t like: God forgive me, I also had been letting my disgust for things like inerrancy, creationism, and penal substitution displace my loving concern for those who believed those things.

My dissatisfaction with this state of affairs led to a number of posts on my blog (this one included) targeting a different audience than was originally intended for it. I had always focused on “challeng[ing] unquestioned Evangelical assumptions about Scripture, theology, the creation/evolution debate, and biblical studies.” My efforts were for them, but in reality it was no less for me as well, as I hammered out the wrong things I thought important not to believe. But at the bottom of the slippery slope, having stripped away many if not most of the beliefs that conservative Christians hold as sine qua non‘s of Christianity, the loss of which were the last straws for ex-Christians I have encountered in my journeys, somehow I found my faith afresh. The tide turned from finding thing after thing to disbelieve towards finding new ways to act on things I found worth believing. I’m sure I’ll never really stop thinking about these things and finding new things to question and/or critique, but at some point you’ve just got to live it and hope for the best.

Look, I know it’s hard dealing with some of these conservative Christians when it comes to theology. OK, most of them. And I know there are some pretty harmful consequences to some of their beliefs that we need to stand up and counter. I’m certainly not calling for détente, or for burying our heads in the sand while the victims of bad theology pile up. And I realize that sometimes there’s no better way to show someone an idea is wrong than to show them how silly the idea is. But trying to force people to laugh at themselves as hard as you’re laughing at them is simply not realistic. Yes, in many cases we’ve got to shake them, raise our voices, and tell them to snap out of it — but always after examining our motives and our methods to ensure we are speaking the truth in love.

The temptation of Internet exchanges to be entirely immune to the checks of face-to-face interaction has fairly well saturated the church, I fear. I’ve gotten much further convincing my Evangelical friends to soberly reanalyze the harmful behavior driven by their bad theology by engaging them in confrontational yet personal conversation than I have with exasperated, sarcastic, snarky retorts thrown at them in disembodied e-text. I’m ready for these people to come around, and I don’t think shaming and gleefully castigating them is cutting it; in fact, it alienates them yet further by giving them a martyr complex as they understandably suspect that their positions are more righteous due to the manifest unrighteousness of the anger being hurled at them in response.

Although we might like to think of our diatribes as humorous constructive criticism, by examining my own heart I can see that much of what is passed off as well-intentioned criticism serves another, ulterior purpose: like a teenage girl desperately trying to be popular by disowning her annoying, dorky brother in front of her friends, we want to show everyone that we’re not as unreasonable as those other people so no one lumps us in together. My friends, Jesus didn’t seem to suffer from this form of pride.

We all want to battle dangerous forms of ignorance and lessen its influence in those groups (such as many conservative forms of Christianity) that seem to defend it the most confidently. And I don’t doubt that you can lampoon, mock, and marginalize a group of people into oblivion. But it’s wrong: we have to remember that conservative Christians are not just perpetrators but also victims of bad theology, and my religion tells me not to hope for the physical, spiritual, or emotional destruction of those who are wrong but their deliverance. Granted, if you’re one who doesn’t believe there’s anything transcendent that stands as the basis for ethics or morality, I can understand wishing for the former, even as I shrink back in horror from such a world as yours. But I should be able to count on other (theologically) progressive Christians to show more patience, sympathy, and love for others — in short, living in the way the founders of our faith told us should be our hallmark. The authors of the New Testament consistently advised believers to nurture one another and shore up unity within their community of faith, so much so that many scholars have expressed doubt that the first Christians cared for anyone outside of their community at all. Rather, I think the sensible plan was always “Jerusalem first, then Judea, then the uttermost parts of the earth,” a strong, healthy core with influence rippling outwards in concentric rings. Make sure your own house is in order first — and that means tidying up the messy rooms rather than demolishing them. One of the many sound critiques of Evangelical culture is that they tend to “shoot their wounded,” which is something sensitive and responsible “progressive” Christians have disavowed. Yeah, well, I’m just not seeing it, folks, and neither is the watching world: liberals hardly less than conservatives round up the ones who we think hold us back and/or make us look stupid, bind them to piles of sticks and dry grass, light the match, and hold a public spectacle of the whole affair.

I realize I’m laying it down pretty hard on my own allies here; I don’t really mean to bust anyone’s chops – how hypocritical would that be! – and as I alluded earlier, I think this problem is in large part attributable and endemic to the medium of online interactions, which tends to desiccate interpersonal exchanges into impersonal ones. It’s just that I care for everyone involved in these debates and want to insist that tough love can be shown without it looking indistinguishable from a drive-by shooting. I emphatically agree that we need to make taking care of the oppressed, marginalized, and suffering in this world our chief priority as Christians, and that Evangelicalism doesn’t seem to have the tools or even the motivation to help us, but it’s really not too much to ask to insist that we treat them with concern as well. In actuality, we are harming our world if we let our disgust poison the portion of it that sits in conservative churches. “Love your enemies” applies even if those enemies are family. And honestly it looks a lot different than what I’ve been seeing.

I expect to be dismissed by many as preaching sentimentalism and maybe even, despite my protestations above, a non-violence that enables more violence: “Easy for you to say, Steve: you’ve never suffered gender discrimination for church office or been kicked out of Christianity for being gay.” But I’m not saying we shouldn’t address those issues: I’m reevaluating how we’re going about it. If you haven’t noticed, our results in getting these people to both a) change their minds and b) not become disillusioned, bitter atheists are pretty abysmal.

I write this for those in whom the all-inclusive heart of God is being cultivated. It’s not easy to show patience and speak the truth in love in this environment, and those of us earnestly attempting it really need all the help we can get. I’m just asking that you consider how inadvertently destructive your publicly posted incendiary content might be. Meanwhile, if I decide that I can be of some use by continuing to keep up this blog, I’ll try to refocus on exemplifying the kind of engagement that I have advocated above. Engage them, get to know them and love them, bring them alongside. As we tell the Calvinists who insist that God’s “justice” trumps His love, there is no justice without love.

From no dark came I, but the depths of light;
From the sun-heart I came, of love a spark;
What should I do but love with all my might?
To die of love severe and pure and stark,
Were scarcely loss; to lord a loveless height–
That were a living death, damnation’s positive night.

- G. MacDonald