The Uniqueness of Christianity Among Other Religions, Part 2

“We Become What We Worship”
The Story of Israel’s Encounters with the Gods of the Nations

When studying the Bible, it is inevitable that the delicate issue of religious pluralism will come up. In my previous post, I talked about the myth of neutrality when it comes to discussing different religions and made the point that the writers of the Bible were themselves very much aware of the existence of other religions. Indeed, the common symbiotic relationship between those ruling the state and those ruling the temples was an ordinary, mundane feature of ancient civilizations that was pretty much taken for granted in the ancient world. These predictable alliances between the kings and priests of any culture formed the backdrop of the stage on which many of the biblical prophets stood in defiance, from Moses to the apostles. In this post, I would like to trace the story of Israel’s perceptions of the gods of the Gentile nations in light of their experience as the redeemed people of Abraham’s God.

The world known by the people of the Old Testament is known today as the “ancient near East,” or ANE for short. The ancient near Eastern world basically refers to the cultures that sprang up in the Fertile Crescent region, from Egypt to Mesopotamia. The people of these cultures viewed gods and religion in a broadly similar manner. Geography and politics were often intertwined with religion. People groups inevitably identified themselves with tribal or national gods who stood for their political, ethnic and moral identity.

This last feature, the moral values that accompany a religion, cannot be stressed enough when it comes to the biblical story. G. K. Beale is one theologian who has emphasized the point that “we become like what we worship.” Because of what worship is (the praising of something or someone as the highest value), we cannot help but make this statement true in our own lives. Consider the Greco-Roman gods—they had a god for just about everything. Gods had their own franchises throughout the entire Mediterranean world, just like a religious version of McDonald’s or Wal-Mart. If I worship a god of war, like the god Ares/Mars, it is because I value war. If I worship a goddess of lust and fertility, like Aphrodite/Venus, it is because I value lust and fertility. If I worship an abstract god like Pax, it is because I value peace. If I make offerings to the genius (guiding-spirit) of Caesar at any ekklesia (a Greek word that incidentally was later subversively adopted by Christians—we translate it “church”) throughout the empire, it is because I am giving my undivided support to Caesar to advance the Roman Empire throughout the world.

With regard to the Hebrew Bible, we encounter the gods of the nations from the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent (Gen. 11—the city-state gods Abraham would have been familiar with before leaving Ur) to Canaan (the tribal fertility gods Abraham would have encountered as a nomad) to Egypt (the imperial gods of the sophisticated Egyptian civilization) and then back again. As the Hebrews left Egypt during the Exodus, they also left behind the gods of the powerful Egyptian empire that represented the nationalistic ideals of the ruling class. Access to a major waterway (the Nile) was represented in their pantheon, since it provided a predictable basis for agriculture, which led to a civilization, which led to a standing army. The divinely-sanctioned power of the state represented in the office of Pharaoh was also represented in their pantheon. These Egyptian gods represented oppression and death all throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. For example, Kenneth Bailey has pointed out that the “deal with death” in Isa. 28:14–22 is an agreement that Judah had made with Egypt. Egyptian religion reflected the interests of the state. The message for the Hebrews was to leave those gods behind.

As the Hebrews left Egypt, they faced Canaan. The gods of the local Canaanite people groups were mostly concerned with scratching out a subsistence level agricultural lifestyle as evidenced by the main players in their tribal pantheons: Baal (the sky-god of thunder, lightning, and rain) and Asherah (the high goddess in Canaanite religion). All of this painted a picture of basic fertility religion, resulting in ritual prostitution as a normal way of life and worship throughout Canaan. This act of “worship” was supposed to get the local gods to do the same, resulting in life and fertility: more flocks, more crops, more people. Unfortunately, this frontier sexual lifestyle promoted sexual oppression and tore at the fabric of any normalcy for building a family (see Lev. 18). The message for the Hebrews was to kick those gods out.

As the Hebrews settled Canaan, turning it into Israel, they themselves turned into the oppressors according to the prophets. Evidence of this could be seen in the fact that they changed gods and began worshiping the oppressive gods of other nations around them. Again, we become what we worship. As a result of breaking covenant with their One True God, YHWH, they were defeated and taken into captivity by the Babylonians in the east, where the city-state gods from Abraham’s day had now given way to more powerful state gods, oppressing them just like before in Egypt. Babel had grown up and had now become Babylon. Access to major waterway (the Tigris and Euphrates) that could support agriculture and in turn a civilization and in turn a standing army? Check! An imperial cult of emperor-worship representing the divine power of the state? Check!

The story of the Hebrew Bible is a real God of love telling people to leave fake gods of power and avoid fake gods of lust, because if they don’t, then these fake gods will betray them, turning around and oppressing them. And just like God burst back into the lives of Abraham’s descendants to rescue them from oppression in Egypt, Jesus suddenly appeared on the scene as a manifestation of that same God continuing that same message beginning with that same people. There is an organic unity here between the story of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament. Leave all other gods. They result in oppression. Love the one true God and love your neighbor as yourself, since he or she is made in the image of God.

In true Christianity, we see the portrayal of a desperate rescue operation of real spiritual, personal, relational, and social change. The One God Who is over all has humbled Himself and come down in order to suffer. In the midst of an oppressive empire that encouraged self-promotion by rewarding those who exercised power over others with honor, titles, and elevated status, one innocent person willingly endured the injustice of extreme humiliation through publicly bearing the curse of torture and death, with the aim of reconciling us to Himself and with each other. Such a God is worthy to be worshiped and loved since He has demonstrated His parental love of humanity through redemptive suffering. Many religions tell us that we have to suffer to reconcile ourselves with a god. Others dismiss suffering as unreal. Such gods or religions are not worthy to be loved or followed, since there is essentially no demonstration of love through redemptive suffering. If Christianity is not true, I wonder where we could find a God of love?

The religious landscape of the ancient world was no less pluralistic than our culture today. It was even more pluralistic. You could shop around for the story you thought was true and better and cut and paste them together however you wanted for the most part. It’s still like that today to some degree. The Hebrews stuck out like a sore thumb, though: one God, one story, one value: love. If “we become like what we worship” holds true, Jesus is hard to beat in that regard.

The Uniqueness of Christianity Among Other Religions, Part 1

The Forbidden Topic of Discussion
(…and It’s My Job to Discuss It!)

The etiquette police say there are two things you should never discuss in polite public conversation: religion and politics. In case you weren’t aware, those are the two most important things hanging over our entire lives like an umbrella—our beliefs and practices in light of the ultimate nature of reality, value, and knowledge, and the way our lives are governed in this world. Since most people believe that the quality of our lives is affected greatly by both areas, I can see how someone’s passion (or even apathy) for such subjects could ruin polite conversations in public!

As an online adjunct instructor of religious studies, however, I’m in between a rock and a hard place! A major portion of my duties involves facilitating discussion on one of these subjects among a group of people for an extended duration of time. I believe I’ve been able to avoid political discussion fairly well (and for good reason, since my own political stances tend to offend the sensibilities of the majority of both of America’s major political parties!). But when it comes to religion, I have been commissioned to gently shepherd students (wherever they may be in their spiritual development or affiliations) toward thinking critically about the challenges that the ancient texts of the Bible pose to all of us today. This necessarily involves engaging people and their ideas, neither of which are neutral when it comes to dialoguing about religion.

Is it possible to facilitate such conversations from a personal standpoint of neutrality? While there are some out there who seem to naively think so, the plain truth of the matter is that everyone (no exceptions) already comes to the table of discussion with a worldview that is at least in part conditioned by innumerable factors that are beyond anyone’s control, whether they know it or not. The best one can do in such a situation is to acknowledge the impossibility of neutrality and move on from there. This is because ideas themselves are not neutral. What we call an idea presupposes the basic laws of logic: the law of identity, the law of the excluded middle, and the law of non-contradiction. In case you didn’t know, here’s a quick rundown:

• The Law of Identity: A = A. “A” equals “A.” Something is what it is. Seems simple enough, right?
• The Law of the Excluded Middle: A ∨ ¬A. Either “A” or “not-A.” Either something is the case or it’s not.
• The Law of Non-Contradiction: ¬(A ∧ ¬A). Not both “A” and “not-A” at the same time and in the same respect. Something cannot both be the case and not be the case in the same instance.

When one takes the laws of logic above and applies them to religious studies, it should become clear that comparing one religion with another religion means you are looking at two different things. They are not in reality, or behind the scenes, the same thing. While there may be similarities, it becomes necessary to respect the fact that, at the very least, you are comparing two different culturally-conditioned understandings about the nature of ultimate reality, value, and knowledge. No two religions are the same thing. With that said, this childish nonsense floating around in our popular culture that all religions are the same is just stupid and needs to be gently corrected at the appropriate time.

For my part, as an instructor, there can be no feigning neutrality. It would have been hard for any of my students over the years to miss early on that I am one who believes the Bible, likes its message, and thinks that we should follow the way of life it puts forward. Even though there are various definitions floating around out there about what it means to call oneself a “Christian,” I self-identify as a Christian and hopefully, most people who know me would call me a Christian. As someone who has an affinity for both the Bible and apologetics (making a case for something, in this instance, the truth of Christianity), I feel compelled to gently sort out misunderstandings that arise when someone thinks they are dropping “truth-bombs” or “wake-up calls” on Christians whose level of understanding might be underdeveloped for whatever reasons.

It is all too often the case that both believers and non-believers read the Scriptures anachronistically. This is the tendency of unwittingly allowing our own current understanding of “the way things are” now to affect our understanding of “the way things were” in the past, when the biblical documents were developed. In these situations, it becomes necessary to kill people’s anachronisms softly. For example, the existence of other religions sometimes becomes one of these “truth-bombs” that someone inevitably drops on a discussion. The vibe one gets is something akin to, “See, there are other religions, too. Now quit acting as if yours is the only one that is ‘right.’” My point about anachronism in this regard is that the “truth-bomber” is speaking as if no one involved in the development of the biblical documents was aware that there were or ever would be other religious perspectives. This presumption ignores that the very existence of most of the literature making up the Bible is due to one culture’s apologetic need to answer the existence of the other oppressive religions of the other oppressive cultures around it. The biblical writers were very much aware of the existence of other religions! The biblical documents were themselves ways of subversively revolting against very real oppression that resulted from the way that religions of other cultures played into the oppressive socio-political structures of those cultures!

All that to say this: Sooner or later, any religion is going to have to deal with the existence of other, different religions. It is my belief that genuinely following Jesus liberates people from all kinds of oppression, and that anything less allows oppression to remain and continue. The God of the Bible, and the writers of the Bible, have dealt with the existence of other, different religions. The message of the incarnation, life, miracles, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus was God’s answer to the oppression caused by our sins of not loving God and not loving our neighbors as ourselves. The Great Commission of Matthew 28:18–20 was Jesus’ divine imperial decree to apply God’s solution to the problems of this world to the nations. And that includes confronting oppression wherever we find it, even in religions (even if we find it in our own!). On this point, I agree with some atheists who have opined that religions should not be exempt from criticism simply because there should be some mystical respect that comes along with being a “religion.” The prophets and the biblical writers themselves knew no such respect, since they did not pull any punches in criticizing false, oppressive religions, whether they were located outside or even inside the boundaries of their nation or even their own Temple. According to the end of the biblical story, every other religion (including anything less than the realization of the “gospel” among people claiming to follow Jesus) is going to have to deal with the existence of one religion—the “gospel of the kingdom of God” proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth.

The Covenant Story of the Bible

בריתעלם—The “Eternal Covenant”

This past week, the online class that I am teaching covered units on the Patriarchs and the Exodus. Our discussion forum for the week focused on the nature of covenants, since the covenant concept figures so prominently in both the “prequel” of the Torah (the patriarchal narratives of Genesis) and the rest of the Torah proper (Exodus–Deuteronomy). Amidst all the discussion, one of my students referred to the Abrahamic Covenant as “foundational,” which reminded me of the time my wife and I attended a Bible study where a couple was explaining the nature of the relationships among all the covenants. To aid them in their explanation, they held up a familiar visual object that I remembered from my childhood! It was a Fisher-Price Rock-a-Stack®! According to Fisher-Price’s website, this toy allows babies and toddlers to “sort and stack the rings, then bat at the base to watch it rock back and forth.” It goes on to say that “This classic teaches about size and sequence as baby learns to put the rainbow rings on the rocking base.” Talk about a blast from the past!

They immediately got my attention! (I know, I’m easily entertained) I was interested to see how they were going to use this cherished toy to illustrate the nature of the covenants. What followed was simply brilliant. The main point of the toy was to show that the narrowing nature of the covenants did not negate previous covenants. In fact, the bigger covenants with the most people lay at the bottom. Ever since then, I have wanted to integrate that insight with a step-by-step explanation of the biblical covenants in order. So, here goes…

BLUE RING - If there is such a thing as an Adamic Covenant (there is debate over this, even though there might be some support for it in Hosea 6:7), it obviously lies at the bottom of the stack of rings as a covenant with all humanity, broken by Adam. If Gen. 3:15 is part of that covenant, we see that God is faithful to graciously make provision for humanity even in light of our failure and inability to make things right on our own.

GREEN RING - The Noahic Covenant was like the Adamic Covenant in that it also has a broad base. This covenant was made with those who survived the Great Flood of the ancient world. Since the “Table of Nations” follows not long after, the basic laws laid down in Gen. 9:1–17 are seen to apply to all the Gentile nations from the perspective of the Hebrews.

YELLOW RING - The Abrahamic Covenant was made with one man that God seemed to “cut from the herd” of the nations that split off from the Babel event. Among the nations that carried away the idea of an oppressive civilization that had a habit of building pyramid-shaped religious structures, God’s people would always seem to be unique nomadic wanderers—citizens of a different kind of kingdom. Abraham’s covenant began with the leaving of the kind of civilization he knew and the commitment to journey to a land that was not his own, but that God would make his. This realization would come true in the lifetime of his descendants, even though he didn’t have any at the time! Through these descendants, living in that promised land, God would make the faithfully kept promises between them a blessing to all the nations! In short, this covenant involved God’s promise of: 1) Land → 2) People → 3) Universal Blessing!

ORANGE RING - The Mosaic Covenant rests on the Abrahamic Covenant in that the God of Abraham has kept His promise to Abraham concerning the People part! Against all odds, God first gave Abraham descendants (Isaac → Jacob → Twelve Tribes), then preserved them (Joseph), and then grew them to the point where it was time to draw them out of Egypt (Moses) and get them into the Land (Joshua). Such a large people would need a way of life to unify them, so God reintroduced Himself to them as the One and Only God who lovingly and graciously rescues from oppression. One God with a perfectly good moral nature could serve as the basis for one way of looking at people. As a result, the Law can be summed up with 1) Love God and 2) Love neighbor as self.

RED RING - Eventually, this tribal nation became a more sophisticated civilization, complete with a monarchy to match. Their first king, Saul, was indeed a king “like all the nations,” but David turned out to be God’s choice (this is what is meant by “a man after God’s own heart”). The difference between Saul and David was their willingness to repent upon being confronted with God’s Law. Saul thought he was above the law (Lat. rex lex—“king is law”), whereas David saw himself to be under God’s law (Lat. lex rex—“law is king”). When David brought the ark of the covenant (containing the two tablets of the Ten Commandments that summarized the law) to his capital city of Jerusalem, it showed everyone how important he viewed God’s law to be. The idea is that he needed it in order to rule Israel righteously. Instead of a nomadic, wandering manifestation of God’s presence among His people, David intended to build a permanent Temple where God’s presence could be manifested in the same place where the Land was ruled. When God revealed His desire for David’s Son to build the Temple, He made a covenant with David (referred to as the Davidic Covenant) to establish an eternal dynasty of Davidic rulers over His people. Solomon succeeded David’s throne and built the Temple. It is easy to forget one thing when considering the Davidic Covenant, though! There must be a people in the land for a Davidic king to rule! The Mosaic Covenant was still in effect and the major curse of disobedience to that covenant was exile from the land. God had fulfilled the People & Land aspects of the Abrahamic Covenant. Where is the Universal Blessing? As the heart of the king goes, so the hearts of the people go. If the king will not love God and love his neighbor as himself, neither will the people, and the People & the Land will come under the curse of exile. And that is exactly what happened. The tension between God’s promises and the continual unfaithfulness of the people prompts the question of whether or not God’s ultimate purposes of blessing can be derailed by sin. This question leads to an answer that comes through Israel’s prophets while the very curse of exile and destruction is taking place…

BASE & PEG - Ever since Deuteronomy, there was the expectation that Israel would eventually fail to keep covenant to the extent that the curse of exile and destruction would kick in. In Dt. 29:4, it seems the problem is internal! In the likely event that Israel fails to the extent that the curses kick in, God will enact a plan to restore His people to the land by doing an internal work in their hearts (Dt. 30:1–6, especially v. 6!). It was made known to Moses and the tribal leaders that Israel would eventually break the covenant to this extent and a song was given to them to pass down throughout their generations in order to serve as a witness against their covenant-failure once it occurred (Dt. 31:16–32:47). By the time of Hosea, it was understood that the covenant had been thoroughly broken in the northern kingdom of Israel, but that beyond the horizon of judgment lay an eventual restoration (Hos. 2:14–23; 3:4–5; 14:4–9). Hosea had a definite influence on the prophet Jeremiah, who prophesied in Jerusalem, the capital city of the southern kingdom of Judah before, during, and after its fall to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians in 586/587 BCE. Jeremiah had long prophesied this exile, but also looked ahead to a future time when God would make a “New Covenant” with His people by engraving His Law internally in their hearts, from their King all the way down to His subjects, and their sins would be forgiven (Jer. 31:31–34). The priest and prophet Ezekiel added that God would give them “one heart,” a “new heart,” and “put a new spirit in them,” and that He would give them a heart transplant of sorts, removing their hard hearts of stone and exchanging them for soft hearts of flesh (Eze. 11:14–20; 36:24–27). The effect of this New Covenant is clear—God’s people would finally and faithfully keep the Law of Love: Love of God and Love of Neighbor as Self. According to the prophet Daniel, this kingdom of God, where God rules in the hearts of His people, would begin with a King (revealed by the other prophets to be a descendant of David) descending from heaven and bringing and eventually receiving the kingdom of God that will overcome all the oppressive kingdoms of this world (Dan. 7). This righteous King will rule over all on behalf of God.

When one considers that all of the covenants find their fulfillment in the New Covenant, it seems appropriate that the New Covenant is not represented by just one more ring on top of the previous covenants, but an eternal plan, God’s purpose that has undergirded every stage of salvation-history all along. Thus, I would say the New Covenant would be better represented by the actual base and peg around which the other rings rest, and which sticks out at the end!

Now that we see the significance of God’s eternal purpose of blessing all peoples of the world, I say to you, “BLESSINGS!” ☺

My Theological Journey, Part 4

Daddy Issues: An Awkward Search for a Father

Did I mention that I was raised Baptist? I mean that. I was raised Baptist. Baptists are fond of pointing out that the New Testament Greek verb baptizo should be translated with the sense of “immersion.” Well, I was immersed in fundamentalist Christianity from the very beginning. I was in church from the womb onward—every time the doors were open: Sunday school, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening, and every night during revivals and prophecy conferences. Yes, we had prophecy conferences. Doesn’t everybody? Anyway, if that wasn’t enough, my single mom scraped enough together on her secretary’s salary to send me to a private Christian school from kindergarten all the way through 12^th grade. We had Bible classes once a day and a chapel service once a week. Let’s add all that up now. Between church and school, I was swimming in a sea of Christianity. OK, maybe more of a lake of Southern-fried fundamentalist Christianity, but I was immersed in this worldview nonetheless.

And by the way, the church we were members of was not Southern Baptist. Our church was much too stubborn to participate in a convention like those other guys. Any association of different churches cooperating together to accomplishing some goal would sound too much like “ecumenism,” we were told. Ecumenism is the attempt to recover the unity of the church. Even though Jesus talked about the unity of His church, this was somehow understood to be a tool of the devil. At any rate, it was just much too messy to figure out whether another church was as right as we were. It was no use finding out another group’s essentials and comparing them. Our entire statement of faith was essential as written! Beyond that, there was the unwritten statement of faith—we were a peculiar subculture where a lot of things were taboo. We were an independent, fundamental, KJV-only, pre-everything (millennial, tribulational), ultra-dispensational Baptist church, where the women only wore dresses and the men didn’t sport long hair or facial hair, since that was a sign of rebellion back in the 60’s and 70’s.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think I may have been one of the first males to grow facial hair in that church. No joke—it was commented on from the pulpit. At some point, I became a sort of black sheep. It might have had something to do with music. I was actually quite fond of some of the hymns we sang, but not as much with the twangy tones of Southern gospel that regularly accompanied them. I had a deep, dark secret. Yes, I was among those who instead enjoyed when the signal of an electric guitar was overdriven resulting in a sound effect called distortion. I loved the sound of someone shredding a metal guitar solo. I loved the rhythm of a heavy-hitting, head-banging guitar riff. I was a rocker. I couldn’t help liking what I liked. I liked rock and roll. I did not like Southern gospel. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to change what I liked. Try it sometime. Hook up a polygraph test to someone who does not like brussel sprouts and offer to pay them a million dollars to like brussel sprouts when the question, “Do you like brussel sprouts?” is asked.

What I did like was the idea of combining the music I like with the best of the religion I liked. I wanted to take the kind of music that people were actually listening to on the radio (there’s a reason it’s called “pop” music—because it’s popular!) and put lyrics reflecting my Christian faith with them. I wanted to write, sing, and play Christian rock songs. The problem was that my church, the Chick tracts that they used, and some individual named Texe Marrs (no relation to Mick Mars, the guitarist for Mötley Crüe) believed that rock and roll had been invented by the devil in the fiery pits of hell. There was never any logic or evidence presented for this claim. There was some racist nonsense about African beats that had entered rock and roll via the music from the voodoo ceremonies of the slaves in the Caribbean.

To make matters worse, I wore all black to church one Sunday: black tie, black shirt, black belt, black pants, black socks, black shoes. This was before the whole Goth thing hit, mind you. A few old timers nodded approvingly, mumbling something about Johnny Cash. I just thought it looked cool. I was ahead of the curve fashion-wise. The whole monochromatic suit look of the late 90’s and early 00’s had not taken off yet. After all, black goes with everything, right? Whispers began floating around that I had been running with the wrong crowd. A dislike of Southern gospel plus an affinity for distorted guitar plus a goatee plus that all-black outfit? Somebody finally asked my mom if I had been involved with Satanism or the occult.

I remember when my Sunday school teacher (I was in the College and Career class) came over to find out why I had not been coming to their church. It was refreshing to finally have somebody talk to me directly.

“I think I should probably find someplace else, since the church thinks the kind of ministry I’m pursuing is the devil’s music,” I said.

“Let’s forget about what the church thinks or what you and I think about it. What do you think the Lord thinks about it?” he asked.

“I am really glad you asked that, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that. As far as music itself and style, I don’t see approved time signatures or chords in the Bible. I don’t see any differences between a Christian A minor or a secular A minor. The only thing I can think of that would make something good or bad would be the intention and the message. So unless there’s some verses I’m unaware of that speak more clearly on these issues, I would think the Lord is fine with the music we’re doing.”

There was nothing he could really say after that. It ended awkwardly. Later, I heard that my ministry was used as an illustration from the pulpit for a sermon on the necessity of keeping separate from the world. My mom left after that. We had spent the better part of two decades in that church. It was where I learned about God, Jesus, and the Bible growing up. It represented what I thought was Christianity, and the crumbling of that picture in my mind led to a search for something new, different, authentic, and real. But it was not a place I could have taken tax collectors and prostitutes. I was embarrassed at my church. I needed to go someplace where I could bring anybody and not be embarrassed.

What’s missing here? What’s not in the story that should have been? In place of dialogue, there was dogmatism. In place of real relationship, there was formality. Even though they taught grace, they lived legalism. Where was the church that valued relationships and modeled grace? I set out on a search to find it.

My Theological Journey, Part 3

Daddy Issues: An Awkward Search for a Father

After I prayed the “sinner’s prayer” at age 5, I was told I needed to get baptized soon. It was expected of me that I should change into one of those weird white baptismal robes, descend into the weird big bathtub full of water mysteriously located behind the choir, and the let the minister thrust me all the way under the water. Again, I did not really understand what any of this was all about. I was told that Jesus and the disciples did it to people, and so we should do it, too. This time, I balked. I did not get baptized immediately after my prayer of salvation. First, I have to make some kind of prayer pact with the distant God who calls Himself my Father yet would have sent me to hell, and now you’re telling me I need to let an authoritarian adult male in a suit that I don’t know very well put me under the water? This was fear compounded upon fear—too much, too soon. And why is this guy wearing a suit in the water? That doesn’t make any sense!

My first memories of my father involved these weird clothes referred to as a “suit.” My father was a lawyer and had to wear this special outfit to argue the rightness or wrongness of cases in a courtroom before judges and juries. This was all adult stuff I didn’t understand at first, but gradually it was simplified for me. It was all about proving who was right and who was wrong, and what they got as a result of being proved right or wrong. More on how all that affected my view of relating to God later. To this day, I still have problems trusting people who wear suits. Unless someone is at a wedding or a funeral, I subconsciously think that anyone wearing a suit is trying to: 1) sell me something—whether it be goods, services, ideas, or religion, and/or 2) take something from me—whether it be money, information, or freedom. Not only do I find suits suspicious, I also find the entire concept of suits to be silly. Have you ever looked up the history of how the “business suit” came into being? But I digress… I will have to save the subject of how a “formal dress code” could ever have come about in churches for a different post. In the meantime, the prospect of this man in a suit, standing in water, waiting to put me under the water all smacked of some trial by ordeal and no doubt conjured up images of my own father—and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable letting my own father dunk me under water. I managed to hold off on baptism until I was 7 years old, when I finally mustered up enough courage to wear the emasculating white gown and let the minister dunk me in the baptismal tank in front of the congregation.

On both occasions, my sinner’s prayer and my baptism, I did not recall feeling anything special. No bells and whistles. No magical fireworks in my soul. At the very least, I was looking for a sense of peace and relief from the terrifying prospect of hell, but that “feeling” of being “born again” that adults told me about was not there from what I could tell. I eventually reasoned that there must have been some kind of technical mistake on my part. It must have been that because I rushed through the understanding part. I didn’t really get what it was that God really wanted. As I struggled during the remaining years of my childhood and adolescence to understand what exactly that was, I came to find that the words most often alternatively used in describing God’s main requirement were “faith” and “belief.” I also came to find that when pressed for a definition of “faith,” adult believers used the word “belief,” and that when pressed for a definition of “belief,” they would use the word “faith.” This circular game they were unwittingly playing with the definition of these words drove me nuts. I was exasperated because I was being told that my eternal destiny hinged on having whatever these words meant, yet defining them was like nailing Jell-O to a tree. The message I got from this was that what God really wanted from me in order for me to avoid hell couldn’t really be nailed down, since whatever I was told didn’t really cohere into anything meaningful!

Frustrated, I continued “getting saved” whenever certain opportunities presented themselves at camp, revivals, children’s church, etc. When some time had passed and an invitation was given at the end of a message, I would raise my hand in response. I figured it was kind of like renewing an overdue library book. It began to bother me, though—like, really bother me. This was not good enough. I couldn’t keep doing this. I needed some kind of once and for all, ironclad contract. Because of the emphasis placed on knowing that you know regarding your salvation status in the church I was raised in, I needed to know. I needed an agreement in writing that I could hold over God’s head if He dared to go back on His end of the deal. Why did I think God’s character could possibly not come through on His end of the deal? Probably because I had known of another man who had made important promises and had important obligations who didn’t meet those responsibilities. What if God’s character was fickle enough to alter the terms of the deal to my disadvantage? OK, I can’t help it—Now I’m thinking of Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back again. You know, the part where he tells Lando Calrissian: “I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further!” I had a father I didn’t really know and therefore could not trust. If I was going to relate to God at all, I would have to find out if He was the kind of God I could trust. How could I ever find this out?

My Theological Journey, Part 2

Daddy Issues: An Awkward Search for a Father

Like I said at the end of my last post, being raised in the Bible belt in the South, I found church confusing, but I knew better than to question it!

At the age of five, I had been exposed to a hellfire and brimstone sermon and wanted to get things squared away with the distant, remote God so that I myself would never end up in such a situation. I indicated to my mom that I wanted to get “saved” and she eagerly took me forward to sit down and talk with one of the men who worked with the children’s ministry. As he tried to explain what the exact nature of the deal was, he used the example of one generous person who had money writing a check to put money into another person’s account who had insufficient funds to cover a debt. Never mind the fact that as a five year old, I did not have a grasp of basic banking. I didn’t know what an “account” was or how to balance a ledger sheet. All I knew about “checks” was that mom wrote them when she didn’t have enough money to pay for something at the store. If I wanted a piece of candy or a toy at the checkout and she protested that she didn’t have enough money, I would of course remind her that she could do what she always did and just write a check! At any rate, I didn’t understand what this guy was talking about (even though I got the drift that understanding it was a very important part of it, if not the most important part) but I still wanted to seal the “deal” with God, and I was presented with the opportunity to “pray the sinner’s prayer” and “repeat these words” after the counselor. “OK, so maybe I don’t fully grasp how the ‘deal’ works,” I thought to myself, “but here this guy is offering me the chance to close the deal and we’re already at the magic words part.” If I remember correctly, the main elements of the deal were: believing Jesus died on the cross for my sins, repenting of my sins, asking for forgiveness of sins, and accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior.

As a five year old, I don’t know how much “sin” I was repenting of… It is hard to find a five year old that knows what “repent” means by the way. It is hard to find an adult who knows what it means, too, for that matter. I do know that at the urging of some neighbor kids, I had partaken in stealing an apple from a neighbor’s apple tree, the branches of which hung over the fence into our back yard. Of course, in my mind, I was reenacting the fall that plunged the whole world into ruin!

I had been taught that the main problem was that a long time ago, in a garden far, far away, somebody was tricked into breaking one rule (eating a piece of fruit, no less), and that as a result:

• I had entered the world with a “nature” (once again, try defining that term to kids or adults) preset to sinning,
• and that made me bad (I didn’t want to identify with the “bad guys” team!),
• and if I didn’t take advantage of this offer to believe what God wanted me to believe, say what God wanted me to say, and do what God wanted me to do, that I was in real immediate danger of literally (metaphors were not an option for explaining this to children) burning in hell forever.

Did I understand what any of this meant, or how any of it cohered? Absolutely not! Was I going to say those magic words? You bet—of course I’m going to “pray the sinner’s prayer” and “repeat those words” after him!

Speaking of something that happened a long time ago, in a garden far, far away… (I do hope you’re getting the obvious Star Wars reference by now). How do children perceive a heavenly Father when He is presented to them in this way? I’ve got to say that when I saw Darth Vader reveal himself to Luke as his father in The Empire Strikes Back, I really identified with Luke and the emotions that screamed out through his face… the bewilderment, the disgust, and the fear. I remember being confronted with the stark image of Luke’s ultimate denial and protest, when he decided that if leaping off that tower was the only way to flee his father, then it was worth it. The way I saw my earthly father combined with the way the plan of salvation was being offered to me resulted in an uneasy feeling about the love of a heavenly Father that would fry children in hell if they didn’t think, say, and do what He wanted. But like Luke, I was stuck with the idea that this was Who the Father was—this looming, mysterious, dark and distant figure whose presence was now closing in for some unknown reason. However could I trust such a Father?

My Theological Journey, Part 1

Daddy Issues: An Awkward Search for a Father

Some would say I am a statistic. Like so many others, I came into the world doomed to experience a broken home. In the past generation, they say that over half of all marriages failed. The family that I was born into was part of what made up these statistics in that it experienced such a failure. That broken covenant would produce awkward and surprising consequences for the rest of our lives. But it does not do justice to that fateful decision and the ensuing consequences to describe it merely in statistical terms. It was more than just statistical—it was personal. It involved real people and people are more than statistics. I am a person, not just a statistic of changing socio–cultural dynamics, and the main way in which this event affected the trajectory of my life was personal, subjective, and relational. I would eventually come to find that I was left with a deep relational need, not for an object, but for a real person. I needed a “Father.” This gaping chasm of what should be there but wasn’t—it was not immediately perceived as a grief of a lost relationship because of how young I was at the time. It was more like the absence of something that had never been—something I had never really known to begin with.

Around the time when I was four years old, it was decided that my father could not live with us anymore and had to leave. Instead of getting a divorce, though, my parents were legally separated for almost two decades. That’s right—I said two decades. Legal separation, but not divorce. I know, weird. The net result of this is that I had this vacancy in my life where a father should have been. I didn’t have a model of what a father really was since he wasn’t around that much to begin with and was gone before I was old enough to really get a picture of who this person was in my life. Whenever someone periodically talked about my “father,” the picture that I got in my mind was of a distant and remote person that was somehow supposed to be connected to my life, yet was paradoxically disconnected from what was going on in my life since they were not present. The situation that this paradoxical aspect of my personal identity (that there was this patriarchal person out there that I was somehow related to, yet they weren’t around to relate to me) engendered was not always in the forefront of my consciousness, but was always a current running underneath in my subconscious. I was someone’s “son,” and they were alive, and they were not that far away, but they were not around, so they might as well have been a million miles away.

In case you have not been able to tell, the reason I am breaking all of this down to this level so far is because I am trying to paint a picture of the confusion that enters a child’s mind when someone tells them that there is:

• a “God” (a hard to define term containing ideas paradoxical to adult philosophers—how much more to children!)
  
• in “heaven” (a place that might as well be a million miles away in its remoteness)
  
• who “loves” them (a word that obviously carries great importance yet is rarely defined concretely for children)
  
• like a “Father” (a person who in my mind was a mystery, a variable, an unknown).

As I was raised in the buckle of the Bible belt in the Southern United States, I found the religious aspect of our lives mysterious and confusing. At the same time, it was something to be accepted and gone along with unquestioningly.