I spent the 4th of July weekend in East Texas with my beloved family. My aunt and my older sister threw a party for my uncle's 80th birthday, and just about all of his kids, grandkids, nieces and their families arrived for the occasion. There were about 40 of us, and we had a wonderful time.
I was there for four days, including a Sunday, so of course we went to church. It was a little odd. About halfway through the service I realized I was clenching my jaw so hard that it hurt. I made myself relax but I've been thinking (of course). The whole Evangelical mindset is so firmly embedded in that culture. The town where my mom and my sister live is right in the middle of the Bible belt, and there's not much room for alternative views.
It's the most bizarre feeling--on the one hand, I don't feel at home anywhere in the world like I do in that particular region of the country and with that particular group of people (who don't all live in East Texas, but they are all family). The combination of those people in that place left me feeling at home and accepted in a way that I haven't in a long time.
But on the other hand, I completely and utterly don't fit in. If we sat down and talked theology--which is supremely important to almost everyone there, we are a group that approaches our faith through the intellect--even though I and a few of others would be fascinated to hash it all out, the strict evangelicals among us would be horrified to find out that we don't all agree. At least a few of them would not be OK with what I believe these days, how I think. (although perhaps they wouldn't be as surprised as I think they would be.) There are many things that are absolutely non-negotiable for them that have been untrue in my mind for decades. And to be fair, that I don't believe that way any more is non-negotiable for me.
It's a bit depressing. Evangelicals think they are completely and utterly wedded to the idea of the Bible as the Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit and thus just as applicable to you and me today as it was when it was written. Really they are just completely and utterly wedded to the way they have been taught to think about the Bible. The Bible contains and yields myriad interpretations. wait--stop. I should re-word that and say that they way I used to think about the Bible was more about how I had been taught than anything else. I can't speak to what's going on in anyone else's mind.
So restricting this to my own changes: I don't believe in the inerrant, absolutely authoritative Bible anymore, but it was a long journey. I started out slowly thirty years ago--first recognizing some of the Bible's obvious contradictions and repetitions, then learning more about the historical context, then starting to see how my reading had been slanted by certain assumptions that were based in Evangelical sub-culture rather than any ultimate truth. Finally I've come to see it as a huge, sprawling, colorful, fascinating, inspiring book of wisdom and spiritual advice, entirely worth studying, but not authoritative in the way that I used to think it was. It wasn't written to me, it was written to the Hebrews, the Corinthians, the Christians in Rome, the Galatians.
But it was a scary trip, leaving that traditional, ingrained view of the Bible behind. I was several years into it before I could say with any confidence that I was OK with my new point of view. Now I can say that the further away I am from that old way of seeing scripture, the more irrelevant that it seems to me.
From my current point of view, the way I used to read the Bible seems almost like idolatry--worshiping words on a page instead of the living God. A living relationship with the Divine Being is completely different than measuring my thoughts and actions against words written a couple of thousand years ago in another time and place. I've been trying to think of an analogy--maybe this: if you found a box of your grandparents' letters written over the course of their long marriage, you might find them inspiring and moving and instructive for your own marriage, but it wouldn't even occur to you to worry about disregarding things that were no longer applicable to your own time and situation.
But that would be completely wrong to most Evangelicals. That belief in the universal, absolute authority of Scripture is the cornerstone, the bedrock of their belief system. For most of them, it's non-negotiable.
There are some beautiful things about that. Many Evangelicals take the study of scripture very seriously, which means they have ready familiarity with some of the greatest wisdom literature ever written. I'm the direct benefactor of that one--I passed my first Master's written exam back in 1985 in no small part because there were 4 (out of 15) questions in the short answer section that were about the Bible. I knew the answers without even thinking, while others of my classmates were despairing afterward (who the hell are Ruth and Naomi?).
Also, Evangelicals' sincerity, faithfulness, and devotion are rare in a culture that more and more tells us we should just do whatever we want, believe whatever we want, be cynical about anything other than cycnicism.
But even though I see things to admire, I can't go there anymore. It just doesn't make sense to me, and as I've said a gazillion times before, I can't agree with their opinions about many issues.
That's all. We have company coming (yay!!) for the next two weeks, and the day they leave, we are headed to Italy, so it will probably be a month or more before I post again. Hope you are all enjoying summer.
Showing posts with label inerrancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inerrancy. Show all posts
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
rightly handling the word of truth, part 1
(Remember a couple of posts back when I told you I was going to post some stuff that was pretty nit-picky about how Christians think? This one and the next one are those posts, so move right along if it's a topic that doesn't interest you.)
So I've been thinking about another post by John Shore, and it will work much better for what I was trying to say, which just kept getting more and more convoluted when I was using the homosexuality example. You know by now how strongly I feel about that issue, but it isn't the point I want to make in this post, and I kept getting distracted by how strongly I feel about it. Much to my fascination, Mr. Shore's blog has surprised me into realizing how capable I am of still thinking like an Evangelical. I don't respond as an Evangelical, but apparently I still remember how to think the way I did thirty years ago, because it happens automatically without me even trying to recall it.
Anyway. Mr. Shore's post is about whether or not Christians should marry non-Christians. Once you've left the Evangelical mindset behind, the question is only mildly thought-provoking. Of course Christians can marry non-Christians, and maybe that will be a problem in their marriage, or maybe not. Maybe it will be the least of their problems. There are inter-faith marriages all over the place. I know from talking to people in inter-faith marriages that it can be painful and stressful--one friend I know found it very hurtful that her husband wouldn't accompany her to church under any circumstances, even when it was very important to her that he do so (and they did end up divorcing, although for far more complicated reasons than just that). But other people I know seem to manage it OK.
Mr. Shore agrees, but he bases his argument on verses in the Bible that don't apply--and this is where I find myself still capable of thinking like an Evangelical. I completely agree with his point-- there are other factors more important than whether or not both partners are Christian in deciding whether or not to get married. But the verses he uses to illustrate his point are taken out of context. He quotes Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul is urging spouses who converted to Christianity after their marriage not to leave their partner, because through them their partner might be saved. Pulling the verses out of context, Mr. Shore points out that if Paul was OK with Christians and non-Christians being married, we should be, too.
Evangelicals use a different verse (2 Corinthians 6.14) to show what a bad idea it is to marry a non-Christian: "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?" But interestingly, in using that verse, Evangelicals are doing the same thing as Mr. Shore-- pulling it out of context. The verse doesn't refer to marriage--Paul is talking about idolators, and there is nothing about marriage, home, or family life in the surrounding verses. He is talking about ministry. But to the Evangelical mind, the restriction is clear enough and would certainly include marriage. In fact, the restriction is so universally taken for granted among Evangelicals that it is enough to just use the phrase "unequally yoked" to invoke the whole idea that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians.
See how complicated this gets? It's one of the main reasons I left Evangelicalism and inerrancy* behind. Because once you start arguing from specific verses, it's difficult NOT to start splitting hairs, taking things out of context, and misconstruing the author's intent. If I were an Evangelical, Mr. Shore's argument would have no effect on me at all, because he's using verses out of context that are therefore irrelevant. But the verses that I used to form my opinion are also taken out of context. It's just that the Evangelical idea that Christians should not marry non-Christians is so firmly entrenched in tradition, nationalism, ethnography, and even racism that it comes across with the power of ordained truth. "Rightly handling the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2.15) turns out to be much more complicated than it sounds.
I'm not linking to Mr. Shore's post because I'm hoping he's disappeared by now. I don't want to argue with him, I just want to write out what I've been thinking about. If you want to read it, it's easy enough to find by googling John Shore.
*inerrancy: the belief that the Bible is the literal Word of God, and that every word of it is intended for today's reader just as if it had been written specifically for that reader.
So I've been thinking about another post by John Shore, and it will work much better for what I was trying to say, which just kept getting more and more convoluted when I was using the homosexuality example. You know by now how strongly I feel about that issue, but it isn't the point I want to make in this post, and I kept getting distracted by how strongly I feel about it. Much to my fascination, Mr. Shore's blog has surprised me into realizing how capable I am of still thinking like an Evangelical. I don't respond as an Evangelical, but apparently I still remember how to think the way I did thirty years ago, because it happens automatically without me even trying to recall it.
Anyway. Mr. Shore's post is about whether or not Christians should marry non-Christians. Once you've left the Evangelical mindset behind, the question is only mildly thought-provoking. Of course Christians can marry non-Christians, and maybe that will be a problem in their marriage, or maybe not. Maybe it will be the least of their problems. There are inter-faith marriages all over the place. I know from talking to people in inter-faith marriages that it can be painful and stressful--one friend I know found it very hurtful that her husband wouldn't accompany her to church under any circumstances, even when it was very important to her that he do so (and they did end up divorcing, although for far more complicated reasons than just that). But other people I know seem to manage it OK.
Mr. Shore agrees, but he bases his argument on verses in the Bible that don't apply--and this is where I find myself still capable of thinking like an Evangelical. I completely agree with his point-- there are other factors more important than whether or not both partners are Christian in deciding whether or not to get married. But the verses he uses to illustrate his point are taken out of context. He quotes Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul is urging spouses who converted to Christianity after their marriage not to leave their partner, because through them their partner might be saved. Pulling the verses out of context, Mr. Shore points out that if Paul was OK with Christians and non-Christians being married, we should be, too.
Evangelicals use a different verse (2 Corinthians 6.14) to show what a bad idea it is to marry a non-Christian: "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?" But interestingly, in using that verse, Evangelicals are doing the same thing as Mr. Shore-- pulling it out of context. The verse doesn't refer to marriage--Paul is talking about idolators, and there is nothing about marriage, home, or family life in the surrounding verses. He is talking about ministry. But to the Evangelical mind, the restriction is clear enough and would certainly include marriage. In fact, the restriction is so universally taken for granted among Evangelicals that it is enough to just use the phrase "unequally yoked" to invoke the whole idea that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians.
See how complicated this gets? It's one of the main reasons I left Evangelicalism and inerrancy* behind. Because once you start arguing from specific verses, it's difficult NOT to start splitting hairs, taking things out of context, and misconstruing the author's intent. If I were an Evangelical, Mr. Shore's argument would have no effect on me at all, because he's using verses out of context that are therefore irrelevant. But the verses that I used to form my opinion are also taken out of context. It's just that the Evangelical idea that Christians should not marry non-Christians is so firmly entrenched in tradition, nationalism, ethnography, and even racism that it comes across with the power of ordained truth. "Rightly handling the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2.15) turns out to be much more complicated than it sounds.
I'm not linking to Mr. Shore's post because I'm hoping he's disappeared by now. I don't want to argue with him, I just want to write out what I've been thinking about. If you want to read it, it's easy enough to find by googling John Shore.
*inerrancy: the belief that the Bible is the literal Word of God, and that every word of it is intended for today's reader just as if it had been written specifically for that reader.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
me and Mr. Shore
I've run across a blog by a guy named John Shore, which would probably only appeal to a niche interest group, but I guess that's the way most blogs are. Mr. Shore is Christian, enthusiastically so, and also married and straight. Lately he has been writing quite a bit about the illogic of Christians opposing homosexual love. He has an interesting point of view, and I love reading it.
But I don't think he gets the Evangelical mindset. He didn't grow up as an Evangelical, he converted to Christianity as an adult. He seems to think that if you point out the logical fallacies in Evangelical thought, they will realize the error of their ways and lighten up. But that's not the way most Evangelicals think. For most Evangelicals, the fact that homosexuality is defined as a sin at some point in the Bible (any point) is enough.
They don't want to discuss it, think about it, or question their own assumptions and biases. In fact, in their minds, to do so would be moral weakness. If their arguments are illogical, they will simply tell you that what seems illogical to human beings is not necessarily illogical to God ("Because that which the world deems foolish in God is wiser than men's wisdom" 1 Cor 1.25). Their arguments don't have to make sense, because that would be relying on the human intellect instead of relying on faith in God's Word, and in their opinion, God's Word says that homosexuality is a sin.
All they need is to be able to point to a verse that says that backs up their belief --and in spite of what most liberal Christians want you to believe, there are verses that say that homosexuality is a sin (try Romans 1.26-27, or 1 Corinthians 6.9-10, for example). And that's all they need. God said it, I believe it, that settles it, a favorite Evangelical phrase goes. It's maddening and infuriating, because exactly what "God says" is often far from obvious (and has to do as much with what they've been taught to believe as it does with what the Bible actually says), but that's the way it is.
I haven't read everything he's written, but Mr. Shore seems to argue that Bible doesn't really say that homosexuality is a sin. I think that's the wrong way to approach it. Evangelicals love to get nit-picky about what Bible verses say, you'll never convince them that way. They'll just get more and more stubbornly attached to their interpretation of exactly what the Bible says in verse x, y, or z. What might work instead is examples of faithful, committed Christians, who go to church and participate in outreach and ministry, and study the Bible and pray, but don't believe in shaming, judging, or condemning other people because their sexuality doesn't match up with traditional heterosexual norms.
Actually, I think we should meet the madness head-on. Yes, the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, but I disagree. I am a Christian and I do not think this is a problem. God gave me a brain to use and I'm going to use it, and it just doesn't make sense that God would have a problem with monogamous LGBT couples.
But then. I started looking up verses in the Bible for this post, and you know what? Mr. Shore has a point. I hadn't done this in a long time--looked up all the references to homosexuality in the New Testament (I'm not worrying about the ones in the Old Testament, because if we have to follow Old Testament law, we're all in trouble. Read Galatians if you think Christians still need to keep Old Testament law.) Those two passages (Romans 1.26-27 and 1 Corinthians 6.9-10) are really the only problematic ones if you ask me, and as plenty of other people have said, Jesus never mentions it at all.
The rest of the references could very well be about sexual promiscuity or unspecified "unnatural" sexual acts rather than about gay-ness. It says a great deal about homophobia in our culture that it is possible to see the words "unnatural" and "unclean" and immediately assume that they refer to homosexuality. But the Jews probably had a far wider definition of those words, especially "unclean." There were many ways you could be unclean that have nothing to do with homosexuality--by violating certain dietary restrictions, or having sex with your wife while she was menstruating, for example.
-------------------
So this has been sitting in my draft box for a month now because I didn't really come to any conclusions, it ended up with me just thinking out loud. (Well, the internet equivalent of thinking "out loud.") I have no idea what the best approach is. But there are going to be several of these this week (I hope), not necessarily about homosexuality but about Christianity--some of them inspired by further reading of John Shore's blog--so here you go. I know for those of you who aren't interested in Christianity this and some of the others this week are going to be far more information than you want, so feel free to tune out.
But I don't think he gets the Evangelical mindset. He didn't grow up as an Evangelical, he converted to Christianity as an adult. He seems to think that if you point out the logical fallacies in Evangelical thought, they will realize the error of their ways and lighten up. But that's not the way most Evangelicals think. For most Evangelicals, the fact that homosexuality is defined as a sin at some point in the Bible (any point) is enough.
They don't want to discuss it, think about it, or question their own assumptions and biases. In fact, in their minds, to do so would be moral weakness. If their arguments are illogical, they will simply tell you that what seems illogical to human beings is not necessarily illogical to God ("Because that which the world deems foolish in God is wiser than men's wisdom" 1 Cor 1.25). Their arguments don't have to make sense, because that would be relying on the human intellect instead of relying on faith in God's Word, and in their opinion, God's Word says that homosexuality is a sin.
All they need is to be able to point to a verse that says that backs up their belief --and in spite of what most liberal Christians want you to believe, there are verses that say that homosexuality is a sin (try Romans 1.26-27, or 1 Corinthians 6.9-10, for example). And that's all they need. God said it, I believe it, that settles it, a favorite Evangelical phrase goes. It's maddening and infuriating, because exactly what "God says" is often far from obvious (and has to do as much with what they've been taught to believe as it does with what the Bible actually says), but that's the way it is.
I haven't read everything he's written, but Mr. Shore seems to argue that Bible doesn't really say that homosexuality is a sin. I think that's the wrong way to approach it. Evangelicals love to get nit-picky about what Bible verses say, you'll never convince them that way. They'll just get more and more stubbornly attached to their interpretation of exactly what the Bible says in verse x, y, or z. What might work instead is examples of faithful, committed Christians, who go to church and participate in outreach and ministry, and study the Bible and pray, but don't believe in shaming, judging, or condemning other people because their sexuality doesn't match up with traditional heterosexual norms.
Actually, I think we should meet the madness head-on. Yes, the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, but I disagree. I am a Christian and I do not think this is a problem. God gave me a brain to use and I'm going to use it, and it just doesn't make sense that God would have a problem with monogamous LGBT couples.
But then. I started looking up verses in the Bible for this post, and you know what? Mr. Shore has a point. I hadn't done this in a long time--looked up all the references to homosexuality in the New Testament (I'm not worrying about the ones in the Old Testament, because if we have to follow Old Testament law, we're all in trouble. Read Galatians if you think Christians still need to keep Old Testament law.) Those two passages (Romans 1.26-27 and 1 Corinthians 6.9-10) are really the only problematic ones if you ask me, and as plenty of other people have said, Jesus never mentions it at all.
The rest of the references could very well be about sexual promiscuity or unspecified "unnatural" sexual acts rather than about gay-ness. It says a great deal about homophobia in our culture that it is possible to see the words "unnatural" and "unclean" and immediately assume that they refer to homosexuality. But the Jews probably had a far wider definition of those words, especially "unclean." There were many ways you could be unclean that have nothing to do with homosexuality--by violating certain dietary restrictions, or having sex with your wife while she was menstruating, for example.
-------------------
So this has been sitting in my draft box for a month now because I didn't really come to any conclusions, it ended up with me just thinking out loud. (Well, the internet equivalent of thinking "out loud.") I have no idea what the best approach is. But there are going to be several of these this week (I hope), not necessarily about homosexuality but about Christianity--some of them inspired by further reading of John Shore's blog--so here you go. I know for those of you who aren't interested in Christianity this and some of the others this week are going to be far more information than you want, so feel free to tune out.
Thursday, February 07, 2013
sojourn part 3
Sadly I have to say that figuring out what I believed about gays wasn't a pressing issue for me after college. I was getting married and I had my first "real" job and (as far as I know) no one I was hanging out with during my post-college years was gay. There was no burning need for me to figure out how to resolve the conflict between my experience (gay people are just fine as they are) and what the religion of my youth said (homosexuality is a sin).
But that disconnect was part of my growing overall discomfort with Evangelicalism--which grew out of a number of issues besides those posed by the Bible's teachings on homosexuality. I could branch off here into a long discussion of why I left Evangelicalism, but I've already done that in previous posts, so I'll try to stay on topic. But it's impossible to describe how I resolved the LGBT issue in my own mind without touching on the larger issue of how to interpret scripture.
The first thing that happened was that I started attending an Episcopal church. It was the first time in my life that I met Christians who were at least as dedicated to their faith as I was (in some cases, far more dedicated), and yet they didn't read the Bible as if every single word was God's message directly to their individual lives. They read the Bible as a historical document, the founding document of their faith, but not one that applied to them in the same way that it applied to the people to whom it was written. They took it very seriously, but they didn't have a problem with re-interpreting it in light of their own experience and our present day situation.
This was profoundly, jaw-droppingly, utterly astonishing to me. It was like living under an anvil, and suddenly having someone lift it off. I was raised to believe that the Bible was the inerrant, universally applicable Word of God. Every word of it, I had been taught, applied to me just as if it had been written expressly for me. Somewhere around 1984 I heard a preacher at a Bible church give a sermon on what it means to be an Evangelical, and the first item on his list was believing that the Bible was completely, unalterably, capital-T True.
Evangelicals don't want to budge on this issue for the same reason conservatives don't want to budge on any issue. If you start to compromise, the reasoning goes, you're starting the downhill slide. Before you know it, disaster will occur--and the biblical proportions of disaster (Armageddon, anyone?) can get pretty harrowing. A highly educated, highly intelligent Christian woman whom I dearly love told me once, "If you start to question that creation happened in seven days, you can question anything. Who knows where you'll end up." Which is a whole 'nother issue, obviously, but you get the idea.
In my experience of more than 25 years of having left that kind of thinking behind, they're panicking for no reason. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and a wide variety of other Christians may have changed their traditions to allow the ordination of women and members of the LGBT community, but their core beliefs are solid and their ministry to their community is vital. Evangelicals see these changes as being wishy-washy, a sign of moral weakness. I see it as a courageous willingness to take on the complexities of faith, to dive in and re-interpret scripture the way that every generation has re-interpreted scripture.
Jesus spent hours arguing with the Pharisees and Sadducees (Jewish religious leaders). There was no New Testament then. The Old Testament was the Bible. The Pharisees could quote scriptures to Jesus in the same way that fundamentalists quote scripture now. The Torah says this, and now you are telling us that's not true? they would argue with Jesus. Their faith was based on the words of the scriptures in the same way that mine was before I left Evangelicalism. And Jesus didn't hesitate to dive in and disagree. The scriptures may say an eye for an eye, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, but I say to you, if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek to them as well.
Of course, in Christian theology, Jesus is God, and He can interpret the Torah however he wants. But I still think there's a point to be made here. The Pharisees were often arguing directly from Jewish law. When they argued with Jesus about the Sabbath, they were right. Jewish law did say that Jesus's disciples were violating the Sabbath. They could point to the verses in their sacred texts. But they were still wrong in a broader sense, in the sense of knowing how to apply their knowledge of God's love and God's purpose in the world. Their blind devotion to ink on a page sometimes sounds awfully similar to an Evangelical saying "but the Bible says right here on this page that homosexuality is a sin" while stabbing their finger at a verse.
There are plenty of other ways to approach this issue of interpreting the Bible, and some of them I've written about before (try this post or this one). Another approach is to closely study the actual words to see if they mean what we've interpreted them to mean (and/or translated them, as Julie pointed out in the comments yesterday). For example- word studies have been done trying to prove that the word translated as "homosexuality" really means something different than committed, monogamous LGBT couples, and actually means male prostitution.
Or I could point out (going back to the second half of this post) that it's hypocritical to get up on a moral high horse about certain verses in the Bible, while other verses that you don't hear about so much get ignored or dismissed. For example, hardly any men "lift holy hands" during worship as the writer of 1 Timothy instructs them to do, and plenty of women wear gold, pearls, and expensive clothes to church, which he tells them not to do (1 Timothy 2.8-10). But the problem with that approach is that when those inconsistencies are pointed out, instead of seeing that "oh! you're right, we already ignore certain verses of scripture, so we maybe we can ignore the ones about homosexuality, too!" conservatives are more likely to start requiring all men to lift their hands in worship and women to strip off their jewelry as proof that they really do interpret scripture literally.
Or I could bring up historical studies that show that in a culture with high infant mortality rates, non-procreative sex was sinful for a different reason than what we think. Since our problem today is more likely to be over-population, non-procreative sex is no longer a problem. So we can see the bible's teaching on homosexuality in a cultural context that no longer applies.
Or I could say-- as Nell said when she previewed this post for me-- well, no matter what they believe about homosexuality, they don't have the right to force their religious beliefs on anyone else. But for me, I don't want to mess with splitting hairs about interpretation and who meant what when. It sounds defensive and desperate. I'm OK with just saying: the Bible says homosexuality is a sin and I disagree.
After all these years, I still have a functional inner Evangelical who asks insidiously how I will feel about this "when I stand before God's throne on judgment day" (those old phrases still reel right off my tongue), and I think my response is, if I'm going to risk being wrong, I'm going to be wrong boldly for reasons of respect and compassion, rather than standing on some theoretical moral "Right" that is based on a rigid interpretation of words on a page.
So. I think that's all I have to say about this, although of course we can discuss further in the comments if you'd like. Although I just remembered that I neglected to address the whole Roman Empire argument, which inevitably comes up when you hear this discussed among Evangelicals, even though what they're describing has virtually no correspondence to --for example-- a couple we know and love in Seattle who have been together longer than Dean and I have been. (This article probably refutes it better than I could anyway, if you're interested.) Whatever. I'm done.
But that disconnect was part of my growing overall discomfort with Evangelicalism--which grew out of a number of issues besides those posed by the Bible's teachings on homosexuality. I could branch off here into a long discussion of why I left Evangelicalism, but I've already done that in previous posts, so I'll try to stay on topic. But it's impossible to describe how I resolved the LGBT issue in my own mind without touching on the larger issue of how to interpret scripture.
The first thing that happened was that I started attending an Episcopal church. It was the first time in my life that I met Christians who were at least as dedicated to their faith as I was (in some cases, far more dedicated), and yet they didn't read the Bible as if every single word was God's message directly to their individual lives. They read the Bible as a historical document, the founding document of their faith, but not one that applied to them in the same way that it applied to the people to whom it was written. They took it very seriously, but they didn't have a problem with re-interpreting it in light of their own experience and our present day situation.
This was profoundly, jaw-droppingly, utterly astonishing to me. It was like living under an anvil, and suddenly having someone lift it off. I was raised to believe that the Bible was the inerrant, universally applicable Word of God. Every word of it, I had been taught, applied to me just as if it had been written expressly for me. Somewhere around 1984 I heard a preacher at a Bible church give a sermon on what it means to be an Evangelical, and the first item on his list was believing that the Bible was completely, unalterably, capital-T True.
Evangelicals don't want to budge on this issue for the same reason conservatives don't want to budge on any issue. If you start to compromise, the reasoning goes, you're starting the downhill slide. Before you know it, disaster will occur--and the biblical proportions of disaster (Armageddon, anyone?) can get pretty harrowing. A highly educated, highly intelligent Christian woman whom I dearly love told me once, "If you start to question that creation happened in seven days, you can question anything. Who knows where you'll end up." Which is a whole 'nother issue, obviously, but you get the idea.
In my experience of more than 25 years of having left that kind of thinking behind, they're panicking for no reason. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and a wide variety of other Christians may have changed their traditions to allow the ordination of women and members of the LGBT community, but their core beliefs are solid and their ministry to their community is vital. Evangelicals see these changes as being wishy-washy, a sign of moral weakness. I see it as a courageous willingness to take on the complexities of faith, to dive in and re-interpret scripture the way that every generation has re-interpreted scripture.
Jesus spent hours arguing with the Pharisees and Sadducees (Jewish religious leaders). There was no New Testament then. The Old Testament was the Bible. The Pharisees could quote scriptures to Jesus in the same way that fundamentalists quote scripture now. The Torah says this, and now you are telling us that's not true? they would argue with Jesus. Their faith was based on the words of the scriptures in the same way that mine was before I left Evangelicalism. And Jesus didn't hesitate to dive in and disagree. The scriptures may say an eye for an eye, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, but I say to you, if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek to them as well.
Of course, in Christian theology, Jesus is God, and He can interpret the Torah however he wants. But I still think there's a point to be made here. The Pharisees were often arguing directly from Jewish law. When they argued with Jesus about the Sabbath, they were right. Jewish law did say that Jesus's disciples were violating the Sabbath. They could point to the verses in their sacred texts. But they were still wrong in a broader sense, in the sense of knowing how to apply their knowledge of God's love and God's purpose in the world. Their blind devotion to ink on a page sometimes sounds awfully similar to an Evangelical saying "but the Bible says right here on this page that homosexuality is a sin" while stabbing their finger at a verse.
There are plenty of other ways to approach this issue of interpreting the Bible, and some of them I've written about before (try this post or this one). Another approach is to closely study the actual words to see if they mean what we've interpreted them to mean (and/or translated them, as Julie pointed out in the comments yesterday). For example- word studies have been done trying to prove that the word translated as "homosexuality" really means something different than committed, monogamous LGBT couples, and actually means male prostitution.
Or I could point out (going back to the second half of this post) that it's hypocritical to get up on a moral high horse about certain verses in the Bible, while other verses that you don't hear about so much get ignored or dismissed. For example, hardly any men "lift holy hands" during worship as the writer of 1 Timothy instructs them to do, and plenty of women wear gold, pearls, and expensive clothes to church, which he tells them not to do (1 Timothy 2.8-10). But the problem with that approach is that when those inconsistencies are pointed out, instead of seeing that "oh! you're right, we already ignore certain verses of scripture, so we maybe we can ignore the ones about homosexuality, too!" conservatives are more likely to start requiring all men to lift their hands in worship and women to strip off their jewelry as proof that they really do interpret scripture literally.
Or I could bring up historical studies that show that in a culture with high infant mortality rates, non-procreative sex was sinful for a different reason than what we think. Since our problem today is more likely to be over-population, non-procreative sex is no longer a problem. So we can see the bible's teaching on homosexuality in a cultural context that no longer applies.
Or I could say-- as Nell said when she previewed this post for me-- well, no matter what they believe about homosexuality, they don't have the right to force their religious beliefs on anyone else. But for me, I don't want to mess with splitting hairs about interpretation and who meant what when. It sounds defensive and desperate. I'm OK with just saying: the Bible says homosexuality is a sin and I disagree.
After all these years, I still have a functional inner Evangelical who asks insidiously how I will feel about this "when I stand before God's throne on judgment day" (those old phrases still reel right off my tongue), and I think my response is, if I'm going to risk being wrong, I'm going to be wrong boldly for reasons of respect and compassion, rather than standing on some theoretical moral "Right" that is based on a rigid interpretation of words on a page.
So. I think that's all I have to say about this, although of course we can discuss further in the comments if you'd like. Although I just remembered that I neglected to address the whole Roman Empire argument, which inevitably comes up when you hear this discussed among Evangelicals, even though what they're describing has virtually no correspondence to --for example-- a couple we know and love in Seattle who have been together longer than Dean and I have been. (This article probably refutes it better than I could anyway, if you're interested.) Whatever. I'm done.
Friday, August 17, 2007
So, after you decide you're not going to take the Bible literally as if God dictated it, the next question is: how do you read the Bible? The simple answer, and the one I used for years, is: seriously. You read it seriously, but not literally. It turns out to be much more complex than that, but it is the answer I keep coming back to. (someday I'm going to quit apologizing for dangling prepositions, but not yet: sorry about that one.)
Early on, I went through a number of moments of panic about this, because it is inevitable that you will hear derisive comments made by those who are still literalists and it's hard not to take them personally. My favorite is: "It must be nice to be able to cherry-pick which verses you're going to pay attention to." (do I have to apologize for other people's dangling prepositions?) And the only advice I have is: you just have to let that stuff roll off your back. Because all Christians cherry pick verses. You can't give equal weight to all the thousands and thousands of verses in the bible. It's just that literalists don't admit this, even to themselves-- they hide under the banner of "God wrote it, I believe it, that settles it," often without really being clear about what that means.
this is going off in a direction "on which I had not planned" when I sat down to write this post, so maybe I will stop there and re-start in the next. Which may have to be Monday since the rest of today and the weekend are dang busy. We're taking 15 high school seniors camping tonight. No, I'm not making that up. I have cooler full of hamburger fixings and a case of Red Bull.
It's pretty smoky here-- there are three major and a half-dozen smaller forest fires near the town where I live, and some sort of inversion is holding all the smoke in where we can breathe it more deeply. I should post a picture. Maybe I will for once. If you can see blue sky where you live, appreciate it.............
Have a great weekend and be good.
Aunt BeaN
p.s. (posted later) the case of Red Bull wasn't nearly enough. ack.
Early on, I went through a number of moments of panic about this, because it is inevitable that you will hear derisive comments made by those who are still literalists and it's hard not to take them personally. My favorite is: "It must be nice to be able to cherry-pick which verses you're going to pay attention to." (do I have to apologize for other people's dangling prepositions?) And the only advice I have is: you just have to let that stuff roll off your back. Because all Christians cherry pick verses. You can't give equal weight to all the thousands and thousands of verses in the bible. It's just that literalists don't admit this, even to themselves-- they hide under the banner of "God wrote it, I believe it, that settles it," often without really being clear about what that means.
this is going off in a direction "on which I had not planned" when I sat down to write this post, so maybe I will stop there and re-start in the next. Which may have to be Monday since the rest of today and the weekend are dang busy. We're taking 15 high school seniors camping tonight. No, I'm not making that up. I have cooler full of hamburger fixings and a case of Red Bull.
It's pretty smoky here-- there are three major and a half-dozen smaller forest fires near the town where I live, and some sort of inversion is holding all the smoke in where we can breathe it more deeply. I should post a picture. Maybe I will for once. If you can see blue sky where you live, appreciate it.............
Have a great weekend and be good.
Aunt BeaN
p.s. (posted later) the case of Red Bull wasn't nearly enough. ack.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Having recently returned from a week at a family reunion (as far as I know, all of whom are still conservative Christian), the topic of recovering from fundamentalism seems more relevant than ever. The problem, though, is that I can't think of anything to say that won't sound ridiculously obvious to anyone who wasn't raised that way. Which brings up the question: are these posts even worth writing? You can tell by the sparse number of posts over the last few weeks that I've been asking that one a lot. Hmmm. Well, they are for me. The process of writing the previous posts about inerrancy made me much more confident about my opinion. Even though I ended up editing out most of the arguments, a lot of thought went into that. Usually when I go to family events it takes weeks for me to recover-- they really throw me off center. But this time I didn't feel that much at all.
The main thing I noticed is that none of them believe strictly in inerrancy, either. At least some of them would protest vociferously about that if they were to read this. But in practice, I really think it's true. Though there were a number of prayers, none of the women covered their heads (I Cor 11:5). None of the men raised their hands (I Tim 2:8). And those are just the obvious examples. Others would be much more subtle.
For me, once I started thinking about inerrancy, it just didn't hold water. Fundamentalists are fond of phrases like: "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!" As if everything were perfectly clear. But the reality is that scripture is always interpreted. You read I Tim 2, the most problematic chapter in the New Testament if you ask me, and there are parts of it that just can't be right. Women will be saved through the bearing of children? (v. 15) How in the world does that fit in with grace? (Ephesians 2:8, among many others) So everyone tends to ignore that verse. but then the one that is most often quoted to justify banning women from positions of authority in the church is just three verses earlier: "I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet." (v. 12) That one gets quoted all the time.
I don't think you can have it both ways, so to me inerrancy is an untenable position. But you know, there are plenty of people, millions of them, that don't see that as a contradiction. They work it out in their own minds somehow (or maybe they just ignore it) and they're fine with it. Does that mean that belief in a particular theological point is more a matter of personality than anything else? You believe what you can live with? With the way my brain works, I can't accept the contradictions raised by I Timothy 2 (and others, that's just the most obvious), so I can't buy inerrancy. Ha. I've always thought of fundamentalists as people who like to have things black & white, no gray areas. But apparently they're just fine with gray areas when it comes to inerrancy, and I'm the one that can't tolerate them. How can you say that all scripture is the literal Word of God, but then pounce on one verse while ignoring the one that occurs three verses later?
But that works just fine for many. Maybe it just comes down to your comfort level with the way you were raised. If you had a happy childhood and you respect your parents and the leaders of your church, you're not likely to want to question their opinions and want to leave.
I'm not sure. I'm starting to believe that religion is more about choices, choosing the way you want to interact with your experience, than it is about ultimate truth. If the way you were raised works for you, you stay with it, even if it has some rough edges. If it throws up too many barriers, if it just refuses to match up with the way you experience life, you start looking for something else. Some other way of thinking about, interacting with your experience.
hmmm. more thought required.
AB
The main thing I noticed is that none of them believe strictly in inerrancy, either. At least some of them would protest vociferously about that if they were to read this. But in practice, I really think it's true. Though there were a number of prayers, none of the women covered their heads (I Cor 11:5). None of the men raised their hands (I Tim 2:8). And those are just the obvious examples. Others would be much more subtle.
For me, once I started thinking about inerrancy, it just didn't hold water. Fundamentalists are fond of phrases like: "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!" As if everything were perfectly clear. But the reality is that scripture is always interpreted. You read I Tim 2, the most problematic chapter in the New Testament if you ask me, and there are parts of it that just can't be right. Women will be saved through the bearing of children? (v. 15) How in the world does that fit in with grace? (Ephesians 2:8, among many others) So everyone tends to ignore that verse. but then the one that is most often quoted to justify banning women from positions of authority in the church is just three verses earlier: "I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet." (v. 12) That one gets quoted all the time.
I don't think you can have it both ways, so to me inerrancy is an untenable position. But you know, there are plenty of people, millions of them, that don't see that as a contradiction. They work it out in their own minds somehow (or maybe they just ignore it) and they're fine with it. Does that mean that belief in a particular theological point is more a matter of personality than anything else? You believe what you can live with? With the way my brain works, I can't accept the contradictions raised by I Timothy 2 (and others, that's just the most obvious), so I can't buy inerrancy. Ha. I've always thought of fundamentalists as people who like to have things black & white, no gray areas. But apparently they're just fine with gray areas when it comes to inerrancy, and I'm the one that can't tolerate them. How can you say that all scripture is the literal Word of God, but then pounce on one verse while ignoring the one that occurs three verses later?
But that works just fine for many. Maybe it just comes down to your comfort level with the way you were raised. If you had a happy childhood and you respect your parents and the leaders of your church, you're not likely to want to question their opinions and want to leave.
I'm not sure. I'm starting to believe that religion is more about choices, choosing the way you want to interact with your experience, than it is about ultimate truth. If the way you were raised works for you, you stay with it, even if it has some rough edges. If it throws up too many barriers, if it just refuses to match up with the way you experience life, you start looking for something else. Some other way of thinking about, interacting with your experience.
hmmm. more thought required.
AB
Thursday, June 21, 2007
So I figured out this afternoon that the reason why I'm having such a hard time getting started on this is that I don't want to argue about inerrancy (the belief that the Bible is "inerrant," without error). Since that is the lynchpin of the conservative Christian mindset, it seemed like the place to start. But every time I start lining up my ideas, I hear knives being sharpened in the background-- people girding up to do battle with my meager little arguments. I don't have anything to say that will change the mind of someone who is already convinced. So I just don't want to do it.
And of course I don't have to. So I'm not going to. Whole books have been written on this topic and you can read them if you want. (Try Bart Ehrman and Timothy Paul Jones, who take opposite sides, for a start). I'm just going to chime in with my little bit of experience, the thing that turned the tide for me once I started questioning.
So imagine me, about 23 or 24 years old, still more Evangelical Christian than not, but questioning and thinking and questioning and thinking. And it occurred to me that I had never had the experience of God requiring someone or something to be perfect before God could use it. My experience had always been (and still is, although I would use a different vocabulary to describe it now) that God works through imperfect human beings, messed-up situations, and so on. Moses, David, Peter-- they all had many moments of highly imperfect human-ness. So why would God's scriptures be any different? Why would God cause human beings to supernaturally create an absolutely perfect book, when that isn't the way God has done anything else? Why wouldn't God have scriptures that were messy, vibrant, open to interpretation, a bit confusing, somewhat chaotic-- just like the rest of the world that God created? (again, remember this is me 20 years ago, not the way I would phrase it now).
And that was the grain of sand that tipped the scales for me. You could argue, of course, as Paul does in several of his letters, that Jesus was perfect. But even if you accept that, Jesus didn't write the Bible. Several dozen regular people did. So there it is and I'm moving on, after having been stuck on this topic for weeks trying to figure out how to say it. I know that's not going to convince anyone, so no drive-bys, please. I know it's not an airtight argument. It's just what was helpful to me.
And Happy Summer Solstice to all, by the way...........
Aunt BeaN
p.s. sorry about some of the awkward wording in there, but I was trying to avoid using the male pronoun for God. Even at that stage when I was still mostly Evangelical, that would have been important to me, which I suppose would be the main reason I was only "mostly" Evangelical.
And of course I don't have to. So I'm not going to. Whole books have been written on this topic and you can read them if you want. (Try Bart Ehrman and Timothy Paul Jones, who take opposite sides, for a start). I'm just going to chime in with my little bit of experience, the thing that turned the tide for me once I started questioning.
So imagine me, about 23 or 24 years old, still more Evangelical Christian than not, but questioning and thinking and questioning and thinking. And it occurred to me that I had never had the experience of God requiring someone or something to be perfect before God could use it. My experience had always been (and still is, although I would use a different vocabulary to describe it now) that God works through imperfect human beings, messed-up situations, and so on. Moses, David, Peter-- they all had many moments of highly imperfect human-ness. So why would God's scriptures be any different? Why would God cause human beings to supernaturally create an absolutely perfect book, when that isn't the way God has done anything else? Why wouldn't God have scriptures that were messy, vibrant, open to interpretation, a bit confusing, somewhat chaotic-- just like the rest of the world that God created? (again, remember this is me 20 years ago, not the way I would phrase it now).
And that was the grain of sand that tipped the scales for me. You could argue, of course, as Paul does in several of his letters, that Jesus was perfect. But even if you accept that, Jesus didn't write the Bible. Several dozen regular people did. So there it is and I'm moving on, after having been stuck on this topic for weeks trying to figure out how to say it. I know that's not going to convince anyone, so no drive-bys, please. I know it's not an airtight argument. It's just what was helpful to me.
And Happy Summer Solstice to all, by the way...........
Aunt BeaN
p.s. sorry about some of the awkward wording in there, but I was trying to avoid using the male pronoun for God. Even at that stage when I was still mostly Evangelical, that would have been important to me, which I suppose would be the main reason I was only "mostly" Evangelical.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
One of the best things about having a teenager in the house is that you keep up with what's going on in popular music, books, and movies. My daughter has me hooked on her radio station, which plays far more interesting stuff than my old classic rock station. But with a few exceptions like Good Charlotte and Pink, we end up buying different CDs. Well, actually, she doesn't buy CDs, she downloads them from iTunes, but that's an aside. She likes the techno-dance-rap stuff that is to me scarily reminiscent of disco music, while I like Robert Randolph and Ben Harper.
I've become a bit obsessed with Ben Harper's new double-disc album, Both Sides of the Gun (you have to wonder if he knew about Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience). He's the guy that did the pop-ish song that was on the radio all the time a few months ago "Always have to steal my kisses from you" --which probably will pay for his children's college educations and many vacations in exotic locations, but most of his music is profoundly thoughtful. I find as I listen to it that lines from the songs pop up in my head in contexts that he probably never anticipated. "Fools will be fools and wise will be wise, but I will look this world straight in the eyes..."
Which brings me to the real topic of this post, which is the relationship that believers have with their sacred scriptures. It's difficult to describe if you've never experienced it. What makes the headlines are things like the Christian Right's insistence on a literal interpretation of the creation story and Muslim suicide bombers who are supposedly acting out the commands of the Koran. But what doesn't make the headlines is the way the wisdom of the sacred words informs all of your actions in a way that makes them both meaningful and thoughtful. The closest I can come to explaining how it feels is the analogy of immersing yourself in someone's lyrics or poetry (Ben Harper, U2, Shakespeare, Keats), which probably everyone has done at some point. The words begin to float around in your ahead, coming to mind at the oddest times-- sometimes adding meaning that you wouldn't otherwise have noticed, sometimes reminding you that others have been where you are.
I think if you weren't raised in a conservative religious environment, any religion, it is difficult to understand how deeply the faithful love their scripture. For Muslims, it's the Koran; for Jews, the Torah; for American Evangelicals, the Protestant Bible. I don't know that much about the eastern religions, but I imagine for Buddhists the sutras of the Buddha and for Hindus, the vedas or Upanishads hold a similar place of veneration.
I still feel a great deal of love for and devotion to the scriptures on which I was raised-- and I use "on" advisedly there, because we were raised on the Bible the way other children were raised on meat & potatoes, or organic foods. I suppose it would be more accurate to say I still feel this love among a blend of other emotions which includes fear (because every time my dad opened the Bible in a disciplinary setting, we knew we were about to feel really, really bad); guilt (of course, because I never have been able to measure up to the teachings of Jesus); and even a bit of embarrassment, because the way we were taught to read the scriptures sometimes led to opinions that (now) I can't believe I ever endorsed.
But there are so many supportive, enriching, marvelous words in the Bible. When I worry about the way I am raising my children, "Perfect love casteth out fear" comes to mind, (I think only those of us who were born up to about 1965 still memorized the King James Version) reminding me that it is more important to love them than to worry about them. When I'm worried that I'll never figure out how to integrate who I am with what I believe, there's James: "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault..." and looking that up to make sure I had the wording right reminded me of another good one: "Consider it all joy my brethren when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be full and complete, lacking in nothing." That was always quite comforting to me. That translation is the NASV, I had to try three different versions to find the one I memorized. My sentimental favorite bible is an NASV (New American Standard Version). I could go on and on but it's probably not all that interesting.
This post has been pieced together because I've been working on it all week. It seems an important thing to say before I go on to the next one I'm working on, which is why I'm not a literalist anymore. So this one is "to be continued......."
Aunt BeaN
Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a Light unto my path (Psalm 119)
My soul wait in silence for God only, for my hope is from him.
He only is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I shall not be shaken. (Ps 62.5-6)
How blessed are they who walk not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scoffers, but their delight is in the Law of the Lord, and on it they meditate, day and night. (Psalm 1)
As the deer pants for water, so my soul pants for Thee.... The Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and His song will be with me in the night, a prayer to the God of my life. (Psalm 42)
The Lord's lovingkindnesses never cease, His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22-23) which of course brings up the whole topic of hymns, which also live in your head, because there is a great one based on those verses: Great is Thy faithfulness, Great is Thy Faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed thy hand hath provided, Great is Thy Faithfulness, Lord, unto me.
ok, I'll stop now. but I could go on and on.
I've become a bit obsessed with Ben Harper's new double-disc album, Both Sides of the Gun (you have to wonder if he knew about Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience). He's the guy that did the pop-ish song that was on the radio all the time a few months ago "Always have to steal my kisses from you" --which probably will pay for his children's college educations and many vacations in exotic locations, but most of his music is profoundly thoughtful. I find as I listen to it that lines from the songs pop up in my head in contexts that he probably never anticipated. "Fools will be fools and wise will be wise, but I will look this world straight in the eyes..."
Which brings me to the real topic of this post, which is the relationship that believers have with their sacred scriptures. It's difficult to describe if you've never experienced it. What makes the headlines are things like the Christian Right's insistence on a literal interpretation of the creation story and Muslim suicide bombers who are supposedly acting out the commands of the Koran. But what doesn't make the headlines is the way the wisdom of the sacred words informs all of your actions in a way that makes them both meaningful and thoughtful. The closest I can come to explaining how it feels is the analogy of immersing yourself in someone's lyrics or poetry (Ben Harper, U2, Shakespeare, Keats), which probably everyone has done at some point. The words begin to float around in your ahead, coming to mind at the oddest times-- sometimes adding meaning that you wouldn't otherwise have noticed, sometimes reminding you that others have been where you are.
I think if you weren't raised in a conservative religious environment, any religion, it is difficult to understand how deeply the faithful love their scripture. For Muslims, it's the Koran; for Jews, the Torah; for American Evangelicals, the Protestant Bible. I don't know that much about the eastern religions, but I imagine for Buddhists the sutras of the Buddha and for Hindus, the vedas or Upanishads hold a similar place of veneration.
I still feel a great deal of love for and devotion to the scriptures on which I was raised-- and I use "on" advisedly there, because we were raised on the Bible the way other children were raised on meat & potatoes, or organic foods. I suppose it would be more accurate to say I still feel this love among a blend of other emotions which includes fear (because every time my dad opened the Bible in a disciplinary setting, we knew we were about to feel really, really bad); guilt (of course, because I never have been able to measure up to the teachings of Jesus); and even a bit of embarrassment, because the way we were taught to read the scriptures sometimes led to opinions that (now) I can't believe I ever endorsed.
But there are so many supportive, enriching, marvelous words in the Bible. When I worry about the way I am raising my children, "Perfect love casteth out fear" comes to mind, (I think only those of us who were born up to about 1965 still memorized the King James Version) reminding me that it is more important to love them than to worry about them. When I'm worried that I'll never figure out how to integrate who I am with what I believe, there's James: "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault..." and looking that up to make sure I had the wording right reminded me of another good one: "Consider it all joy my brethren when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be full and complete, lacking in nothing." That was always quite comforting to me. That translation is the NASV, I had to try three different versions to find the one I memorized. My sentimental favorite bible is an NASV (New American Standard Version). I could go on and on but it's probably not all that interesting.
This post has been pieced together because I've been working on it all week. It seems an important thing to say before I go on to the next one I'm working on, which is why I'm not a literalist anymore. So this one is "to be continued......."
Aunt BeaN
Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a Light unto my path (Psalm 119)
My soul wait in silence for God only, for my hope is from him.
He only is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I shall not be shaken. (Ps 62.5-6)
How blessed are they who walk not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scoffers, but their delight is in the Law of the Lord, and on it they meditate, day and night. (Psalm 1)
As the deer pants for water, so my soul pants for Thee.... The Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and His song will be with me in the night, a prayer to the God of my life. (Psalm 42)
The Lord's lovingkindnesses never cease, His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22-23) which of course brings up the whole topic of hymns, which also live in your head, because there is a great one based on those verses: Great is Thy faithfulness, Great is Thy Faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed thy hand hath provided, Great is Thy Faithfulness, Lord, unto me.
ok, I'll stop now. but I could go on and on.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Part I- from November 2004
This is a combination of two posts, you'll probably be able to tell where I pasted them together, written in 2004 and early 2005, and edited in early January 2008. Both this post and the next one seem a bit gush-y and naive, even just four years later, but there aren't any major changes so I'm leaving them here.
My father is an ordained Southern Baptist minister, although he never had a church. He was a seminary professor, a college religion professor, and the director of an Evangelical retreat center and youth camp for many years, as well as a few other things along the way. He was from the Midwest, the son of a GARB (more conservative, fundamentalist Baptist) minister. My mom was raised in the South in a well-to-do home. She is as sweet and lovely a person as you can imagine, but she has her occasional rebellious streak (which I love), and one of her most amazing rebellious acts was to marry this Yankee with few prospects for success in the way her parents defined it.
My father is a theologian, by training and temperament. He loves to think about God and the nature of the universe and the beauty of the Christian scriptures. We had amazing conversations around the dinner table. For his time and his upbringing, he was quite progressive in his thinking. He was far less concerned about the externals of his fundamentalist upbringing, concentrating instead on the love and mercy of God, and how that can be expressed in our lives. I didn't always agree with him, but he was/is a powerful, charismatic speaker and it is hard to disagree with him. If I disagreed, I didn't say it. And if I said it, I caved in quickly, even if I still didn't agree. All in all, I was pretty happy with my faith, and I was sure it was Right. The Truth.
The turning point for me was when I went off for my freshman year of college at a conservative Christian school. It was far more conservative than the way I had been raised, but I was convinced it was going to be wonderful-- all those Christians together in one place? it would be like one big love-fest all the time, wouldn't it? Well, of course, that turned out not to be the case. There were cliques and popular people and snobs, just like at any other school. They just said they were Christian. I don't want to be too hard on that school, because I met some wonderful people there and had a great time. But I became increasingly uncomfortable with the larger picture, what was happening outside my group of friends.
So after two years, I transferred to a secular school on the West coast. I was in nirvana. I loved it there. Oddly, my new friends, none of whom were Christian, were so much more honest. There was no striving to be achieve the outward look of a "good" Christian. They were just good people, learning and growing and questioning like I was-- well, of course, they weren't asking the same questions I was, since none of them came from a similar background, but their attitude toward the search was similar. I was so much happier, and I felt at home. That was the first stage.
At the end of my junior year, I had a tiny experience that had large consequences. There was a housing lottery to see where we would live the next year. I don't remember exactly the mechanics of how it worked, but I remember what my prayer was: I prayed and prayed not for any particular outcome, but that I would get some sort of housing in the lottery so I wouldn't have to worry about housing over the summer. I prayed about it a lot, and I was confident that God would grant my request, as "he" had so many others.
But it didn't happen. My friends and I that had gone into the lottery together didn't get a spot, and were left without knowing where we would live the next year (which wasn't uncommon, I don't want to make this sound like it was a big tragedy, it just meant we would have to find our own housing the next fall).
But that little thing totally threw me off. It was like someone sticking a rod in the spokes of my bicycle. I had been trundling along just fine with a set of beliefs I had outgrown without realizing it, and suddenly there I was with a broken bike. What happened? The bible says, explicitly, that if you ask in faith, your prayers will be answered. I had asked with the same faith that I had had for many other prayer requests, but this one wasn't answered. Now, I know the standard evangelical responses to this dilemma, you don't need to reply and tell them to me. I could tell myself all the things I had heard all my life about why God doesn't answer prayer. And it seemed silly to be so upset about a prayer request that was so small. I wasn't the only person in this boat, there were hundreds of us who didn't know where we would be living in the Fall. But suddenly the logical inconsistencies of my faith were right there staring me in the face. When my prayers were answered, I took it as proof that God loved me and cared about every detail of my life and had a plan for me. When my prayers weren't answered, it didn't prove the opposite. I was supposed to just shrug and say, "I guess it wasn't meant to be." I decided at the very least that I had to stop believing that answers to prayer were proof of God's existence, because when "he" didn't answer, I didn't therefore believe that it proved God's nonexistence. It just didn't make sense. That was the second stage. But I wasn't nearly ready to break away. It was just another nail in the coffin.
But where I finally just couldn't come to terms with it anymore was over trying to convert people. I just could never believe the whole evangelizing thing. Sure, talk about your faith and how it works in your life. But this whole organized drive to convert people -- I just could never buy it, even when I was younger, and I was ashamed and embarrassed to be part of a group that would do it. They have ways of dressing it up so it doesn't sound anything like that, but that's what it is: manipulation, pure and simple. They can rationalize any tactic because after all, they're saving your soul from eternal damnation, right?
But it didn't take me three months out there in the real world to realize that a lot of people who weren't conservative Christians had spent way more time thinking about Christianity than I had and were perfectly capable of coming to their own conclusions without any help from me. Many of the non-Christians I met were far better people than I was, in terms of taking responsibility for themselves and their world, and relating openly and honestly with others. I just couldn't believe that kind of evangelism was what Jesus wanted, if he wanted it at all. It was such a huge lack of respect for other people and their beliefs and experiences-- to assume that I had the answer and that they were desperately in need of it (they just didn't know that, you see) was more than I could tolerate. So, with all these things and a bunch of others, by the time I was 25, my spouse and I left the Bible church we had been attending and I no longer considered myself an Evangelical.
So .. there were a number of intervening years here where I was sorting things out... but the next thing I tried was more liberal Christianity, which I loved at first (and it's where I've ended up, although there were some intervening things, as you'll see) (not sure why I had to give away my ending there, but this isn't exactly a mystery novel). It was absolutely amazing to me at first to find out that there were Christians who read the Bible as a book of wisdom and inspiration, but didn't seem to believe that it had to be taken as literally true in every single syllable. If you don't know much about conservative Christians, that might seem odd, but that is the single most important defining characteristic of being a conservative Christian: you believe the Bible is literally, word-for-word, capital-T True. It is the "inerrant" word of God: without error. Yes, it was written by human beings, but they were "inspired" by God to write what He wanted them to write (masculine pronoun used on purpose, since this crowd almost always sees God as male).
I had been raised with phrase after phrase of Scripture thrown at me constantly to reinforce every belief that I questioned or disliked. For example, it is easy-cheesy to "prove" that Jesus wanted us to go out and hit people over the head with Americanized Christianity if you want to: for starters, Jesus says right before he returns to heaven, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations," in the Gospel of Matthew. This is known, in conservative circles, as "The Great Commission." And then you can prove that women can't be pastors: St Paul says "I would not have a woman be over a man," and that's not even touching all the stuff about wives submitting to their husbands in the Letter to the Ephesians. These verses can be interpreted in lots of different ways, starting with setting them in their historical context, but when you're eight, nobody tells you that, they just say these phrases over and over until they ring in your head and the interpretation you've been handed is the only one that you can imagine.
So anyway, back to the Episcopalians (because that's where I went after I left the Bible church I had been attending). It was exactly the same Bible and exactly the same set of characters and basic outline of beliefs that I'd grown up with, but so different it literally astonished me. There was a woman pastor; I found myself moved to tears the first time I saw her in the pulpit and heard her preach. I still have difficulty putting into words how much it meant to me.
But then we moved, and the Episcopal church in our new location was not a good situation. So more searching ensued. to be continued.
I've eaten half a jar of dill pickles while I've been sitting here, how weird is that.
yours in a vinegar-y state,
Aunt BeaN
My father is an ordained Southern Baptist minister, although he never had a church. He was a seminary professor, a college religion professor, and the director of an Evangelical retreat center and youth camp for many years, as well as a few other things along the way. He was from the Midwest, the son of a GARB (more conservative, fundamentalist Baptist) minister. My mom was raised in the South in a well-to-do home. She is as sweet and lovely a person as you can imagine, but she has her occasional rebellious streak (which I love), and one of her most amazing rebellious acts was to marry this Yankee with few prospects for success in the way her parents defined it.
My father is a theologian, by training and temperament. He loves to think about God and the nature of the universe and the beauty of the Christian scriptures. We had amazing conversations around the dinner table. For his time and his upbringing, he was quite progressive in his thinking. He was far less concerned about the externals of his fundamentalist upbringing, concentrating instead on the love and mercy of God, and how that can be expressed in our lives. I didn't always agree with him, but he was/is a powerful, charismatic speaker and it is hard to disagree with him. If I disagreed, I didn't say it. And if I said it, I caved in quickly, even if I still didn't agree. All in all, I was pretty happy with my faith, and I was sure it was Right. The Truth.
The turning point for me was when I went off for my freshman year of college at a conservative Christian school. It was far more conservative than the way I had been raised, but I was convinced it was going to be wonderful-- all those Christians together in one place? it would be like one big love-fest all the time, wouldn't it? Well, of course, that turned out not to be the case. There were cliques and popular people and snobs, just like at any other school. They just said they were Christian. I don't want to be too hard on that school, because I met some wonderful people there and had a great time. But I became increasingly uncomfortable with the larger picture, what was happening outside my group of friends.
So after two years, I transferred to a secular school on the West coast. I was in nirvana. I loved it there. Oddly, my new friends, none of whom were Christian, were so much more honest. There was no striving to be achieve the outward look of a "good" Christian. They were just good people, learning and growing and questioning like I was-- well, of course, they weren't asking the same questions I was, since none of them came from a similar background, but their attitude toward the search was similar. I was so much happier, and I felt at home. That was the first stage.
At the end of my junior year, I had a tiny experience that had large consequences. There was a housing lottery to see where we would live the next year. I don't remember exactly the mechanics of how it worked, but I remember what my prayer was: I prayed and prayed not for any particular outcome, but that I would get some sort of housing in the lottery so I wouldn't have to worry about housing over the summer. I prayed about it a lot, and I was confident that God would grant my request, as "he" had so many others.
But it didn't happen. My friends and I that had gone into the lottery together didn't get a spot, and were left without knowing where we would live the next year (which wasn't uncommon, I don't want to make this sound like it was a big tragedy, it just meant we would have to find our own housing the next fall).
But that little thing totally threw me off. It was like someone sticking a rod in the spokes of my bicycle. I had been trundling along just fine with a set of beliefs I had outgrown without realizing it, and suddenly there I was with a broken bike. What happened? The bible says, explicitly, that if you ask in faith, your prayers will be answered. I had asked with the same faith that I had had for many other prayer requests, but this one wasn't answered. Now, I know the standard evangelical responses to this dilemma, you don't need to reply and tell them to me. I could tell myself all the things I had heard all my life about why God doesn't answer prayer. And it seemed silly to be so upset about a prayer request that was so small. I wasn't the only person in this boat, there were hundreds of us who didn't know where we would be living in the Fall. But suddenly the logical inconsistencies of my faith were right there staring me in the face. When my prayers were answered, I took it as proof that God loved me and cared about every detail of my life and had a plan for me. When my prayers weren't answered, it didn't prove the opposite. I was supposed to just shrug and say, "I guess it wasn't meant to be." I decided at the very least that I had to stop believing that answers to prayer were proof of God's existence, because when "he" didn't answer, I didn't therefore believe that it proved God's nonexistence. It just didn't make sense. That was the second stage. But I wasn't nearly ready to break away. It was just another nail in the coffin.
But where I finally just couldn't come to terms with it anymore was over trying to convert people. I just could never believe the whole evangelizing thing. Sure, talk about your faith and how it works in your life. But this whole organized drive to convert people -- I just could never buy it, even when I was younger, and I was ashamed and embarrassed to be part of a group that would do it. They have ways of dressing it up so it doesn't sound anything like that, but that's what it is: manipulation, pure and simple. They can rationalize any tactic because after all, they're saving your soul from eternal damnation, right?
But it didn't take me three months out there in the real world to realize that a lot of people who weren't conservative Christians had spent way more time thinking about Christianity than I had and were perfectly capable of coming to their own conclusions without any help from me. Many of the non-Christians I met were far better people than I was, in terms of taking responsibility for themselves and their world, and relating openly and honestly with others. I just couldn't believe that kind of evangelism was what Jesus wanted, if he wanted it at all. It was such a huge lack of respect for other people and their beliefs and experiences-- to assume that I had the answer and that they were desperately in need of it (they just didn't know that, you see) was more than I could tolerate. So, with all these things and a bunch of others, by the time I was 25, my spouse and I left the Bible church we had been attending and I no longer considered myself an Evangelical.
So .. there were a number of intervening years here where I was sorting things out... but the next thing I tried was more liberal Christianity, which I loved at first (and it's where I've ended up, although there were some intervening things, as you'll see) (not sure why I had to give away my ending there, but this isn't exactly a mystery novel). It was absolutely amazing to me at first to find out that there were Christians who read the Bible as a book of wisdom and inspiration, but didn't seem to believe that it had to be taken as literally true in every single syllable. If you don't know much about conservative Christians, that might seem odd, but that is the single most important defining characteristic of being a conservative Christian: you believe the Bible is literally, word-for-word, capital-T True. It is the "inerrant" word of God: without error. Yes, it was written by human beings, but they were "inspired" by God to write what He wanted them to write (masculine pronoun used on purpose, since this crowd almost always sees God as male).
I had been raised with phrase after phrase of Scripture thrown at me constantly to reinforce every belief that I questioned or disliked. For example, it is easy-cheesy to "prove" that Jesus wanted us to go out and hit people over the head with Americanized Christianity if you want to: for starters, Jesus says right before he returns to heaven, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations," in the Gospel of Matthew. This is known, in conservative circles, as "The Great Commission." And then you can prove that women can't be pastors: St Paul says "I would not have a woman be over a man," and that's not even touching all the stuff about wives submitting to their husbands in the Letter to the Ephesians. These verses can be interpreted in lots of different ways, starting with setting them in their historical context, but when you're eight, nobody tells you that, they just say these phrases over and over until they ring in your head and the interpretation you've been handed is the only one that you can imagine.
So anyway, back to the Episcopalians (because that's where I went after I left the Bible church I had been attending). It was exactly the same Bible and exactly the same set of characters and basic outline of beliefs that I'd grown up with, but so different it literally astonished me. There was a woman pastor; I found myself moved to tears the first time I saw her in the pulpit and heard her preach. I still have difficulty putting into words how much it meant to me.
But then we moved, and the Episcopal church in our new location was not a good situation. So more searching ensued. to be continued.
I've eaten half a jar of dill pickles while I've been sitting here, how weird is that.
yours in a vinegar-y state,
Aunt BeaN
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)