I Do Not Think Christianity Means What You Think It Means

Ex-pastor Ryan Bell experimented lately with living without God, blogging about it at YearWithoutGod.com, and more recently he penned a column for CNN.com in which he details some of the reasons behind his de-conversion. Conversion and de-conversion are always fascinating to me. They give brief glimpses into not only ‘reasons for’ and ‘reasons against’ their beliefs, but glimpses into the conditions that led to a person’s decision. Bell writes straightforwardly and honestly about several of his conclusions, and it has given me reason to process what he said.

Having skimmed through some of his blog, I see that he writes with an irenic tone and I appreciate that. Additionally, I have no pretense of trying to answer his questions and attempt a re-conversion. But I am moved to reflect, for a few reasons, on what he said and I think a few reflections are in order on this kind of disbelief.

First, if circles of Christians are as shallow and simplistic as he makes his upbringing out to be, they need to repent and reclaim the depths of their faith. Bell portrays a faith, either purposefully or tangentially, that simply was not able to deal with some very straightforward issues. The problem of evil is ever present in de-conversion stories and his is no different. He is attracted to current cultural morays and considers Christian doctrine to be out of step. He actually believes that the Christian faith degrades the value of this world and this life. All of these issues are easily dealt with by Christian doctrine and life, but he was not apparently around people who thought so. And if so, that is a crying shame. There are plenty of pockets of anti-intellectualism within the Christian world, and it need not be.

That being said, all of us are intellectually responsible for these kinds of decisions, and to caricature the faith in such simplistic terms, leave it there, and come to unreasonable conclusions as a result, partakes in a rising form of anti-intellectualism. It is the rational sloppiness at the very core of New Atheism that labels faith as irrational and simplistic, and thus dismisses it by definition and not by argumentation.

Secondly – and this is true of every atheist I have ever personally interacted with or watched online – I simply do not recognize the faith they left. When they describe what ‘Christians believe’ I have no idea where they got their ideas. When they ‘argue’ against Christian doctrine, I see straw-men made of flash paper. I am not moved by their reasons because they make no sense to me. I am not startled by their arguments because they were answered centuries ago. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I do not think Christianity means what they think it means.

For example, Bell goes on about how the Christian faith degrades the value of this world and this life, and that he feels he has found a much more meaningful life without God. He writes:

As I come to terms with the fact that this life is the only one I get, I am more motivated than ever to make it count.
 I want to experience as much happiness and pleasure as I can while helping others to attain their happiness. I construct meaning in my life from many sources, including love, family, friendships, service, learning and so on.
 Popular Christian theology, on the other hand, renders this life less meaningful by anchoring all notions of value and purpose to a paradise somewhere in the future, in a place other than where we are right now. Ironically, my Christian upbringing taught me that ultimately this life doesn't matter, which tends to make believers apathetic about suffering and think that things will only get worse before God suddenly solves everything on the last day.

Bell has rejected a bad Sunday school version of the Christian faith, a faith that has raised the lives of untold millions of people in systems that would have otherwise destroyed them like so many sick dogs. A simple review of Christian history (as it actually happened, not as the NAs tell it) contradicts his conclusion. In addition, one of the core tenants of the Christian faith sanctifies this life in this flesh – the Incarnation of God himself. Yet, Bell is hardly alone. It is common fare to accuse the Christian faith of looking too much to the other side and stripping this life of meaning. But here is where an ex-pastor has the intellectual responsibility to dig a little deeper than a bad Sunday school teacher and spend a little time with Augustine or Aquinas. How about St. Patrick? Why not learn about the theologically rooted and radical hospitality and generosity of Oswald Chambers?

In another place he makes an obviously false observation when he writes:

It struck me this year that nihilism is a disease born of theism. Some people have been taught to expect meaning outside of this world beyond our earthly experiences. When they come upon the many absurdities of life and see that it's "not as advertised," an existential despair can take hold.
 The problem is not solved by inventing a God in which to place all our hopes, but rather, to face life honestly and create beauty from the absurd.

The critical error here is equating finding meaning ‘outside this world’ with the idea that therefore, this world has little to no meaning. Christians root existence itself in the being and loving creative activity of God, but that has literally everything to do with this life and this physical world. The contradiction follows necessarily from the error in the premise: the belief that all is meaningless comes from a belief that infuses the universe with meaning. And then the silly conclusion follows: so we strive against the darkness and make our own meaning. Well, so did Pol Pot and the Nazis.

I literally do not recognize the faith he, and countless others, claim to have rejected.

A new reality is creeping up on us from the corners. There is a new fundamentalism among us. There is a new conventional wisdom and popular consensus that refuses to countenance rival ideas, and it has everything to do with belief in God but not in the way you have been told.

A Naked Public Square?

‘Merry Christmas Charlie Brown' Performance Canceled Following Atheist Complaints

Lawsuit Threat Cancels Christmas Concert (to benefit African children)

These kinds of stories are becoming more frequent around the Christmas holiday.  Some Christian group or church somewhere does something about Christ on Christmas, some atheist group complains, public officials get worried and the public display of a Christian Christmas is somehow muted.  Each circumstance is different, but there is an underlying assumption that needs to be challenged.

The atheist public square is not a religiously or morally neutral public square.  It is a false assumption, though a powerful one in our culture right now, that removing religious influence from culture somehow makes it more ‘neutral’ when it comes to religion and morality.  Atheism as a public disposition (what some have called the “naked public square”) is just as much a religious and moral statement as is the expression of Christianity.  

Why would I believe that public discourse where God is not a possibility is better than one where God is?

I have had several conversations in which people want to claim that atheism is the “objective” point of view simply and humbly aimed at the truth of the matter, while Christianity is opposed to reason and inquiry and forces belief on people.  This is a position argued for by the so-called New-Atheists, but it lacks the value of sustainability.  In arguing against the worldview of Christianity and for the worldview of atheism, people accept, both explicitly and implicitly, a set of moral and religious beliefs.

Instead of, “there is a God,” or, “there might be a God,” their assertion is, “there is not a God,” or, “there is probably not a God.”  Every one of those propositions will have consequences in the public square, and to deny that is to plead a special exemption for your point of view.  So if each assertion about ultimate reality has public consequences, then what is each believer to do?

Stand up in public and present the best case you can for your point of view.  If each has consequences that affect our lives in powerful ways, and they all do, then it really matters how they are presented to everybody else.

What should we avoid doing?  Exactly what is revealed in these kinds of stories – whine about Christians, squeeze them out of the public discourse, and pretend everything will go along as usual.

A Mushy, Fuzzy God?

I received this in an email newsletter the other day:

God is not a Christian

We should in humility and joyfulness acknowledge that the supernatural and divine reality we all worship in some form or other transcends all our particular categories of thought and imagining, and that because the divine -- however named, however apprehended or conceived -- is infinite and we are forever finite, we shall never comprehend the divine completely.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I know this will ruffle a lot of feathers, but I find this meaningless. From beginning to end it is full of nice-sounding puffery, but fails to provide any good insight into who God might actually be.

First of all, why would God be a Christian? Christians are humans who are followers of Jesus Christ. The title is category mistake masquerading as profundity.

Humility is not the same thing as ceasing to think about issues and draw boundaries, distinctions and judgments. Humility is more about a disposition to the truth, not our refusal to distinguish the truth from falsity.

The idea that the divine transcends all our categories is a popular way of stopping thought about who or what the divine really is. In one way Tutu is right, but in significant ways he is wrong. It is true, as the Christian tradition has always taught, that our conceptions of God are analogous – not exhaustive. Being analogous means we have a grasp on true ideas, but only a grasp. It is true that God is love, and that love has boundaries, but we will not know completely what that means until the next life. Where he, and so many others, goes wrong is concluding we can’t know anything about the divine with certainty.

We can know with certainty that the divine is not both triune and not triune in the same way at the same time. We can know with certainty that salvation is not both through martyrdom and not through martyrdom at the same time. The list of contradictory beliefs between different religious systems is longer than we care to acknowledge in our age of religious tolerance and to brush them aside with a slightly dismissive wave of the hand is to treat every religion on the face of the planet as insignificant and unserious. No religious system of any consequence ought to be happy with his assessment of their beliefs and practices.

This email was produced by the Emergent Village. I am frustrated, but not all that surprised, that this seems to fit well with their vision of the Christian religion.

Separation of Church and State?

The role of the state vs. the role of religion and spirituality in public life is at once one of the most hotly contested issues in our culture and one that suffers from the largest set of misguided assumptions. The phrase, “separation of church and state,” is a bumper-sticker polemic whipped out at the first sign of religion and moral thinking intended to put a stop to all meaningful interaction – what a professor of mine used to call a “thought stopper.”

But this stunted shape of the public discourse has left us in a position where we are overly sensitive to and under-prepared to think about the role of religion (and, gasp, organized religion) in the public square.

A wonderfully clear thinker, Thomas Sowell, deals with a handful of the political misgivings of the “separation of church and state” in this article, but it is left to us to continue to deal with the very real and necessary role of religion in our culture.

Christians and Politics

This piece in USA Today addresses one of the pressing issues for Christians in our current cultural climate – the relationship between the faith and the cut-and-thrust of politics. The author is concerned with how it seems that the involvement of religion in politics hasn’t lifted political life, but seems to have soiled religion. In a lot of ways, I think he is right. We have probably tied ourselves too much to political figures and victories (to the left and the right) instead of speaking and living the truths of the Christian faith in our world.

Politics are important and have serious real-world consequences, but Christians need to remember their first and deepest allegiance to Christ.

The article is hit and miss. He is concerned with the loss of civility in our public discourse, and I think we can agree on that. He, however, cites Jim Wallis of Sojourners as a seriously civil voice. That’s a joke. As long as you are willing to avoid any principled or absolute stands on faith or morals, Wallis is civil. Wallis is a cut-and-paste religious relativist and if you are to the right of him, politically and theologically speaking, you are a target for ad hominem attacks. Just ask Olansky of World Magazine.

Even in his conclusion, Krattenmaker gets some things right, and others wrong:

The wise course is not withdrawal from public life. The task is to find and hold an appropriate distance, a place from which faith can exert principled influence and inspire the body politic's best instincts and intentions.

Especially these days, politics as usual seems to drag all who play right into the gutter. That's no place for religion.

The Christian needs to recognize that faith should inform and influence politics, not the other way around – we should not withdraw from public life. But the Christian should never accept the position that faith belongs as an “appropriate distance” from public life. Our public life needs a core that only the Christian faith can provide.

Christians are called to do something that I’m not sure anyone else is doing: contend for the truths handed down to us while leading the way in civility and reasoned discourse. Do that now, and you will stick out like a sore thumb – in a good way.

Do Christians Cherry-Pick the Bible?

The religion reporter at the local paper, The Gazette, recently did a short piece titled, “Is Bible an all-or-nothing proposition?” The piece was precipitated by the recent move in the ECLA regarding homosexual lifestyles and marriage, and was intended to ask the question whether Christians cherry-pick from the Bible. Barna notes:

The crux of the issue comes down to the Bible — or, more specifically, how one views it. Is it the literal word of God, and if so, shouldn’t the faithful follow everything in it? You might be surprised by how some religious leaders answer the question.

Several Colorado Springs evangelical pastors I interviewed contend that the Bible is the absolute word of God, yet they acknowledge that they dismiss or de-emphasize various biblical passages.

In other words, they cherry-pick the Bible. (To be fair, most everyone else does, too, but biblical literalists sometimes criticize other Christians for not accepting Scripture in its entirety.)

After very short blurbs from each of three interviews, Barna accuses the pastors of cherry-picking from Scripture. The only minister not accused is the one who agrees with the premise of the article.

So, is it true? Do Christians simply agree with those portions of Scripture they find comfortable and gloss over the rest? Because this is such a serious, not to mention complicated issue, I am going to split my thoughts up into a couple of posts (at least).

First of all, let me say I feel the accusation. I have spent my entire adult life dealing with Scripture, and there are still plenty of stories and passages I don’t know exactly what to do with. But, after my time in Scripture and the development of my own belief system, I tend to agree with C.S. Lewis when he says in Mere Christianity that the God of Christianity is far too uncomfortable to be made up by us. So, if we believe in someone who betrays our natural comforts, chances are good we aren’t making him up or cherry-picking according to our own pleasures.

Secondly, the Bible is not a simplistic document that can be handled with simplistic notions. The Christian Scriptures contain the legal and cultic (cult = having to do with the practice of religion) documents of an ancient middle-eastern people, the religious documents of a theocracy, history, prayer and wisdom books, prophetic oracles, spiritual biographies, epistles, apocrypha, and more. Each literary milieu comes with all the standard hermeneutical principles, just like we would expect to use when comparing the writings of Abraham Lincoln, Emerson, and Emilie Dickenson. It would be simplistic silliness to “exegete” all three of those authors the same way. So it follows it is simplistic silliness to exegete Leviticus, Psalms, Jeremiah and Paul in exactly the same ways.

Therefore, we need to avoid the phrase, “I take the Bible literally.” You don’t. Even if you say you do, you don’t. What should be asserted is something more like: I take the Bible seriously, or, I affirm all the Scriptures affirm. Take for instance my belief that I take the Bible seriously and Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” I don’t take that to literally mean that the sky speaks like humans speak. Taking it seriously avoids the silliness of taking it “literally,” and yet allows me to believe what the original author intended to say. The complexity and beauty of creation reveals to me a God.

But, of course, Barna is not that worried about my hermeneutical method and metaphor. He wants to know about the biblical injunctions about homosexuality. So then we will need to continue…

What Was Important to Mother Teresa?

The LHC book club is reading the biography of Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light. Early on, I was moved by a powerful insight into her deep and primary motivations for doing what she did. How do you think the average person would answer the question, What were the most important things Mother Teresa did? More than likely, we would get answers along the lines of her compassion and "social justice" work.

According to her, however, two things were at the root of what she did. First, she prayed. When she suffered, she prayed. When she anticipated suffering, she prayed. She asked everyone she wrote to to pray for her.

Secondly, she wanted to satiate Jesus' thirst for the love of souls by leading the poorest of the poor to Him. She was an evangelist with almost no equal.

In other words, the compassion was the means to her own ends of leading people to Christ.

Do the current "social justice" movements in evangelical and main-line circles have it exactly backwards?

Cult of Charismatic Personality

This article in Christianity Today by Collin Hansen details yet another integrity problem within the larger Charismatic movement. The Lakeland, Florida revival lead by Todd Bentley had credibility problems from the beginning, yet it attracted tens of thousands of people and took on a life of its own over TV and the web. The article comes on the tail of quite a bit of outspoken frustration on both sides. From the beginning of the revival, a lot of people questioned Bentley, his personal integrity, and his tendency to hit and kick people when praying for them (no kidding!). In the article, one of the standard defenses of Bentley and Pentecostal revival is given by the pastor currently mentoring him and encouraging his return to the ministry after his divorce and marriage to his former assistant:

"If you are such [a] judge of this what gives you the credentials?" Joyner asked Grady on March 12. "What moves of God have you led? What have you built?" He went so far as to allege that Grady's judgment matched Bentley's infidelity in the economy of sin. [Joyner is the pastor defending Bentley and Grady is the journalist for Charisma who has questioned Bentley’s capability]

This kind of reasoning and deliberate manipulation of the situation infuriates me. What Joyner (and so many like him) said was grossly irresponsible and a naked power-play using God as his personal sledge-hammer.

To me, this raises much larger issues. Though all of us from any denomination are human and fallible, why is the Pentecostal movement so prone to following people whose only credentials are their eccentricity and ability to use the right vocabulary and inflection? The Pentecostal movement (and I speak as a Pentecostal pastor) needs some serious reflection and reform. For what it is worth, here are some things I think need to change on the grand scale for us.

We need to redefine “revival.”
Whether Pentecostal pastors admit it or not they tend to equate revival with emotionalism. And emotionalism is a horrible place to put your faith in God. Revival is not measured by the number of bodies that hit the floor; by the number of unsubstantiated miracle reports; by the amount of media buzz generated; by the number of international attendees. It is measured, pure and simple, by the fruit of the Spirit.

Revival happens when lives are genuinely, and in a lasting and growing way, changed by God. It is measured by the furtherance of the Kingdom of God over the kingdom of this world in families and social structures.

We need to wean ourselves from the milk of “ends justify the means” ministry.
This is clearly the defense used to justify the ministry of dozens of heretics and spiritually abusive ministries. If it “works,” obviously God is blessing. The number of “humanist churches” is growing across the country, obviously God is blessing. Thousands of people flock to the pagan Burning Man festival every year, obviously God is blessing.

If the fallacy is not clear to you, you may be beyond hope.

We need to reestablish orthodoxy as the litmus test of revival and ministry success.
Instead of being tempted to cast a blind eye to obvious problems with spiritual power-plays the way Joyner did, we should learn to value fidelity to Christ and His Word over personality. The current culture of Pentecostalism has become idolatrous in the way it holds men up over doctrine.

Our denominations need to make doctrine more of a priority than charisma or “leadership.” After all, we are called to preserve the faith once and for all handed to the saints, not to make effective CEOs out of our pastors.

We need to stop hiding behind the canard, “you can’t touch the Lord’s anointed.”
In case you don’t know, that phrase was used to describe Saul at the pinnacle of his sinful behavior. In deference to God, not to Saul, David did not kill him. David was honoring God, not Saul, when he spoke those words. So, it is a biblical fallacy to use that phrase to defend people who are making clear mistakes. God was on His way to destroying Saul when David spoke those words—is that how we want to use that phrase?

We need to reevaluate who we consider ministry “heroes.”
For all of its influence in the Pentecostal movement, the Azuza Street Revival is deeply misunderstood. The man at the middle of it all, William J. Seymour, was a little unorthodox in his methodology to say the least, but his writings after the revival reveal a deep commitment to the core ethic of Christian orthodoxy – love. Seymour watched the power of God transform lives and tear down the economic and racial barriers the structures of the world erected with such ease. Ironically, his influence was overshadowed by more charismatic and influential white men who tended to be racists, and we have suffered from a cult of personality ever since.

Our heroes are not the most popular, the ones with the largest churches, book sales, or their own TV shows. Our heroes are the faithful preachers of the Gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ. They toil week in and week out to be faithful to God’s Word and the congregation they oversee. Some of them have answered God’s call to the corners of the earth and we will not know anything about them until we learn of them in God’s glory.

Embryonic Stem Cell Decision: Morally Serious?

This is an excoriating critique of the position President Obama has taken regarding embryonic stem cell research. If you are not familiar with Dr. Charles Krauthammer, he is paralyzed from about the shoulders down, a Ph.D. psychiatrist, a columnist, and as far as I can tell a kind of agnostic. As a member of Bush’s Council on Bioethics, I didn’t always agree with his positions but I always appreciated his moral argumentation. He was invited to the signing ceremony where others in wheelchairs surrounded the President providing photo-ops. He declined, and he is glad he did.

President Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, President Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn.

Though I believe conception is that crucial moment of conferred personhood, I like what he has to say. To use embryos for this kind of destructive research is to treat them as fetal pigs purchased for junior high biology classes.

Krauthammer goes on to bemoan the kind of ignorance-based arrogance that often accompanies scientism.

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part -- the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" -- would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

He notes later on that there needs to be moral, and I believe, religious reflection guiding scientific advancement.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.

(The Washington Post article requires a free subscription, you can read it for free on Towhnall.)

The Growing Religious Divide

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the host of the quietly intriguing show, Faith and Culture. She writes about the recent major religious survey done among Americans and though much has been written about its implications, and I like what she has to say:

The recently released results of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey…found that while most Americans today identify as Christians, the proportion of Christians has dropped by 10 percentage points since 1990. The only religious group that has seen population increases in every state is the "nones": a category of atheists, agnostics and spiritual freelancers like Sheila that now includes 15 percent of Americans, up from 8 percent in 1990.

The after noting that the percentage of evangelicals has risen, she notes:

So what does all of this mean for American public life? For starters, the numbers suggest that Americans increasingly are gravitating to one of two religious poles: Either they are becoming more committed to churches that make strong moral and religious demands or they are rejecting religion altogether.

I find that a fascinating conclusion. If you have been following the furor caused by the new atheists and the Christians who have responded, I thing Campbell’s observation rings true. In many ways, I believe there is a growing hostility between the Christian faith and the (more faithful) atheists in our culture.

Her final observation is right on the money:

The implications of this trend extend beyond religion. Just as more Americans are moving toward stronger religious observance or none at all, a related divide is widening between Americans who fear the growth of government as a threat to religious liberty and those who welcome it as a means of secular salvation. It's no coincidence that we are witnessing an unprecedented expansion of government at the same time that more Americans are disengaging from the faith traditions and communities that provided social, spiritual and economic support for the generations before them. Nor is it surprising that the president driving this expansion inspires religious fervor bordering on idolatry among many of his followers, particularly those with no religious affiliation. The human yearning for adoration of some higher power -- be it God, government or Barack Obama -- dies hard.

I would only add that because we are creatures created to worship, that yearning will never die. It is a void in the human soul that will always seek to be filled.