On the Russian Claim of Ukrainian Nazism

 

On the Russian Claim of Ukrainian Nazism

Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has repeatedly claimed that the sovereign nation of Ukraine is a fascist state. He accuses the Ukrainians of being Nazis. I have never understood how he could say these things about Ukraine, which is a democratic country with a constitution and the rule of law. Of course the Ukrainians don’t do democracy and the rule of law perfectly. It’s not surprising that they don’t given Ukraine’s tumultuous history and centuries of rule by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Still, Ukrainian President Zelensky is not a Nazi. He is, in fact, at least ethnically Jewish. I have always thought that Putin’s claim that the Ukrainian government was Nazi was total hogwash. However, I just finished reading The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes.[1] Putin’s claims are still hogwash, but I have learned that there are some things going in Ukraine that feed into Putin’s claims.

Those things have to do with someone named Stepan Bandera (1909-1959). I knew a little bit about Bandera before I read Figes’ book. I do, after all, have a PhD in Russian history, but I learned more from the book and from some follow up research I did online.. Bandera was a Ukrainian fascist. He was born in what was at the time part of Poland, but he was a Ukrainian by nationality. He had a complicated, on and off relationship with the Nazis after 1941, but he is primarily known as a Ukrainian fascist who fought with the Germans against the Soviets. His aim was to create an independent, sovereign, fascist Ukrainian. Like all fascists of his time, he was violently antisemitic. He believed that only military force could create the independent Ukrainian state of which he dreamed. He was indeed an anti-Soviet, anti-Russian Ukrainian fascist. His efforts to create a Ukrainian state connected with the Germans failed at least in large part because the Germans were never going to let the Ukrainians, people they believed to be subhuman, create an independent nation.

In recent years there has been something of a Bandera revival in Ukraine. To understand that revival, however, we must understand once crucial fact of Ukrainian history. Until the Soviets invaded Poland from the east as the Nazis invaded from the west in 1941, much of what is now the western part of Ukraine belonged to Poland and a couple of other central European countries. The city of Lviv was in Poland. The Soviets invaded those Ukrainian lands and made them part of the preexisting Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Because of this history, and because of an older history when western Ukraine was ruled by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, western Ukraine is largely orientated toward the west and considers itself to be a western nation. Most of those Ukrainians by far want no part of being ruled by Russia.

The same is not true in eastern Ukraine. There, and in Crimea, native Russian speakers are a substantial minority. In places they are a majority. At least many of those Russian-speaking Ukrainians are more oriented toward Moscow than western Ukrainians are. Many of those Russian speakers actually consider themselves to be Ukrainians not Russians, but the presence of a significant Russian-speaking population in parts of Ukraine makes it possible for Putin to claim that he invaded Ukraine to protect native Russians from genocide by the Ukrainians.

Among Ukrainians who look toward the west and want nothing to do with Russia, Stepan Bandera has emerged as a Ukrainian national hero. He was a fascist. He was antisemitic. But those aren’t the things that matter to Ukrainians who see him as a hero. To them, he is a Ukrainian national hero because he fought for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state, albeit one under the protection and no doubt control of the Nazis. In recent years Ukrainians in many towns and cities have changed the names of streets to Bandera Street. They have erected monuments to him. For many western Ukrainians, Bandera has become a symbol of their desire for the Ukrainian nation to be free from the Russians.

Ukraine’s relationship to Bandera is complicated. He is much less popular in the eastern part of the country than he is in the western part. At one point the Ukrainian government declared Bandera to be a “Hero of Ukraine,” but that honor was later rescinded. Ukrainians are actually quite divided in their view of Bandera, which doesn’t make the appearance of a Bandera cult insignificant.

As much as Bandera may be a hero to many Ukrainians, most Russians despise him because he fought against them and for the Nazis during World War II. Bandera lived mostly in West Germany after the war. It was there that a KGB agent assassinated him in 1959, apparently with the approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who was Soviet leader at the time and who had spent a lot of time in Ukraine. For the Russians, anything and anyone in any way associated with the Nazis is still anathema.

That a significant number of Ukrainians see the fascist Stepan Bandera as a national hero gives Putin a narrow platform from which to launch his attacks on Ukraine as fascist. Ukraine is not fascist, but to this day essentially all Russian people hate anyone labeled as fascist. That they do is not hard to understand. The suffering of the Russian people during World War II is beyond the ability of most Americans even to imagine. Here’s just one statistic from Figes’ book. Of the eighteen year olds drafted into the Red Army in 1941, by 1945 only 3% of them were still alive. The currently accepted number of Soviet people killed in the war is twenty-eight million.[2] Yes, Soviet military tactics led to more casualties than western military tactics do. That’s because for centuries the only advantage the Russians have had over western militaries has been large numbers of soldiers to throw into a battle. Putin calling Zelensky and his government Nazi or fascist is a surefire way to stir up Russian public opinion against them.

So no, today’s Ukrainians are not fascists. Sure, there may be a small number of them who hold fascist views, but their country is not fascist. The Germans hit Ukraine particularly hard in World War II because it was an important agricultural, mining, and industrial part of the Soviet Union. Surely most Ukrainians have learned that the Nazis considered them to be subhuman and intended to kill all of them, which the Nazis indeed did intend to do. Ukraine has no more of a democratic history than Russia does, or it didn’t until Putin destroyed post-Soviet Russian democracy while Ukraine remained democratic at least in form. But they are making a better effort at being democratic than Putin ever did in Russia.

If anyone in this story is fascist, it’s Putin. Figes makes the point that authoritarian regimes collapsed twice in modern Russian history. The first time was the collapse of Imperial Russia in 1917. The second was the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Both times, authoritarianism reasserted itself in Russia. The Communists did it after 1917. Putin has done it after 1991. Russia may (or may not) be doomed to authoritarian government for a very long time. Most Russians want a strong, authoritarian state. To them, a strong, authoritarian state means order and security while democracy means chaos and risk. Russia may be content to live with Putin’s sort of Orthodox Christian Russian nationalist fascism indefinitely. Most Ukrainians are not. Putin is in many ways a Russian fascist. When he calls Ukraine fascist he’s mostly projecting himself onto them. He can call the Ukrainians fascists all he wants. The truth is, they aren’t.

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[1] Figes, Orlando, The Story of Russia ( Metropolitan Books, New York, 2022).

[2] I was born in 1946, not long after the end of World War II. Still, the first time I was in Russia in the summer of 1968, Russians would ask if my parents were alive and were surprised when I said yes.

Conclusion to a new book

 This is the conclusion to a book I'm working on with the title How Can I Be Christian. It is about as good a summation of my Christian faith that I can create.

Conclusion

(c) Thomas C. Sorenson, 2024

 

So how can I sum up my Christian faith? This whole book is an effort to express my faith, but summing that faith up is not an easy task. To me, faith is a very complex thing. It starts with ontology, that is, an understanding of the nature of being. It includes an understanding of the nature of human language and proceeds from there. Most Christians, indeed, most people, assume an understanding of being and of language unconsciously. They can’t articulate their understandings, but they have them nonetheless. I believe that we must discuss and decide about them openly, consciously. Here’s how I understand them.

Being is multidimensional. There is physical, material being, or at least we assume that there is and act as if there is.[1] We take material being as real. Since the European Enlightenment, much of western culture has assumed that this material reality is the only reality there is. Western culture is wrong about that. There is another dimension to reality. It is the dimension of the spiritual. Spiritual reality permeates material reality. It is the depth dimension of reality. All human cultures, though not all human beings, have recognized the reality of the spiritual. Even the materialistic culture of western Europe has never completely lost knowledge of the spiritual.

Human language is incommensurate with the task of speaking about the spiritual. The spiritual both inheres in everything that is and utterly transcends everything that is. We humans can speak meaningfully about the spiritual only in the language of symbol and the mythic. Most people take their words about the spiritual literally, that is, factually; but the spiritual cannot be reduced to fact. Factual truth is important in its own realm, but it is unavoidably superficial. The language of symbol and myth connects us with the spiritual in a way mere fact never can. I understand all statements about God and Jesus Christ as symbol not as statements of fact.

I believe that spiritual reality is a higher reality than material reality. It is ultimate reality. It is the reality on which all other reality depends. That is what we mean when was call God the Creator of all that is. Our call as humans is to conform our lives to the ways of spiritual reality. None of us will ever do that anywhere near perfectly. That doesn’t mean we are not called to do what we can to live according to spiritual values not material ones.

My primary symbol for the spiritual is the word God. God is Spirit. As Spirit, God both inheres in everything that is and totally transcends everything that is. God is not a person, but we can relate to God personally through the use of symbolic language. Though God is not a person, we can relate to God as a person as long as we don’t reduce God to humanlike personhood.

I believe that God has God’s ways of being, has God’s own values, and that those ways and values are totally different from the ways and values of the world. God has thoughts, but they aren’t like our thoughts. God has a vision of the world transformed from the way it is to the way it would be if it operated according to God’s ways and values rather than its own corrupt ways and values. God’s ways and values are so grounded in love that we can truthfully say that God is love. God’s ways are the ways of nonviolence and radical, distributive justice for all of God’s people. God calls all people to the work of creating a transformed world through nonviolent action against the powers of the world and for the wellbeing of all people. The first step in doing that is inner transformation. God calls us to rid our minds and spirits of the worldly ways we have internalized so that we can better conform to the ways of God.

I believe that all profound truth is paradoxical. That God both inheres in all created being and utterly transcends created being at the same time is a paradox. It is something that isn’t possible, it’s just true. The Incarnation is also a paradox. It is simply impossible that Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine at the same time. It isn’t possible, it’s just true.

I believe in the Trinitarian conception of God symbolically. We cannot say anything that is directly, factually true about God. God is too transcendent for that. We can speak of God in the language of symbol. That’s what the Trinity is, a symbol for one way to understand God’s reality. The great virtue of the Trinity is that, because it makes no rational sense at all, it preserves the ultimate mystery of God. It is a paradox. It is impossible but true. Nothing can be three and one at the same time, but God is. I believe that the trinitarian conception of God gives us a mysterious but dynamic and active God.

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate. The Incarnation is another paradox. It is both impossible and true. No mere human could possibly also be all of God, but I confess that Jesus was. He was fully human and fully God at the same time. In this sense my Christian faith is quite conventional. I accept both foundational doctrines of traditional Christianity, Trinity and Incarnation, though I understand them symbolically not literally.

I believe that in Jesus as God Incarnate we humans see and can learn as much about God as our finite minds are capable of learning. I believe that if you want to see God, look at Jesus. As God Incarnate he was born, lived, and died as a human being; and in everything he did God was fully present and doing it with and in him. In Jesus we see God entering into every aspect of human life, even, or especially, the difficult, painful parts of human life. In Jesus’ death we see the death of God. Yet God is paradox. On the cross of Jesus God dies, but God remains the infinite, immortal God at the same time. That, of course, is another paradox. It’s impossible, but it’s true.

I believe that in Jesus Christ we see how God relates to us humans, to human suffering, and human sin. God does not scorn human suffering and death. God enters into them with us. No matter what happens with us during our lives and even after our deaths, God is with us and for us. Human sin no doubt angers God, but God does not punish it either in this life or after this life. God is infinite, universal, unconditional love; and divine love could never punish anyone because doing so would make God’s love conditional and therefore far too human.

I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, but I do not believe that the Christ event (the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ) brought anything new into being. It did not get God to forgive sin God had never forgiven before. It makes no sense to me to say that it did. I see Jesus as Savior because he shows us in the most direct and powerful way possible that we’ve always been saved because God scorns none of human life. Rather, God enters into human life and thereby sanctifies it. All of it.

I believe that after Jesus’ death his followers had a powerful, life changing experience of Jesus’ continuing presence with them. We call that experience the Resurrection. It has great symbolic meaning and power. It means that with God death is not the end. It wasn’t the end for Jesus, and it isn’t the end for us. At least, it allows us to trust that death is not the end for us. Jesus’ Resurrection is another thing that isn’t possible, it’s just true.

I believe that Jesus calls us, as God does, to a nonviolent revolution on earth to make real what Jesus called the kingdom of God. In Jesus we learn that the values of the kingdom of God are basically the values of the world turned completely upside down. The kingdom of God is totally nonviolent. In it, people never resort to violence for any reason. In the kingdom of God those the world calls first are last and those the world calls last are first. In the kingdom of God the rich are brought down to the level of the rest of us, and the poor are lifted up to that level too. In the kingdom of God everyone has enough because no one has too much. In the kingdom of God the spiritual life and values are more important than material life and values. In the kingdom of God we humans relate to each other in love rather than in the world’s ways of competition, one-upmanship, oppression, and dominance.

I believe, as I believe Jesus did, that transformation of the world begins with the transformation of the self. The world will change when enough of its people change. Change their ways from violence and domination to the ways of nonviolence, justice, and peace. To attack the world for its faults without having first discerned and dealt with your own faults is just the way to more violence and domination, not the way to true peace.

I believe that morality is grounded in God’s unconditional love not in codes of laws and commandments. We can never reduce God’s love to ten commandments or even to the six hundred thirteen laws of the Torah. Morality is situational, and that is moral which facilitates wholeness of life for the people involved in the situation. Morality is always nonviolent. It says “thou shalt not kill” and means it. Always. In every situation. What is moral in one situation may be immoral in some other situation. Morality is always judged under the rule of love, not by whether or not an act conforms to some rigid code of conduct.

I believe that Christianity is far more about how we are to live this life than it is about how we are to get our souls to heaven in a next life. Jesus said almost nothing about how we get our souls to heaven. I believe that if our souls do go to heaven, we have nothing to do with it. We don’t save ourselves. Whether there is any reality for us after death, and what that reality is, is entirely up to God not to us.

I believe that salvation is more about this life than it is about a next life. Jesus spent his ministry calling people to be people of the kingdom of God in this life not to be people in heaven in some afterlife. Salvation in this life is coming to know God’s unconditional love. It is to rest our minds and our spirits in that love. It is to live out of that love and to share it with as much of the world as we can.

I understand faith as trust not as the acceptance of unproven factual assertions. I know that everything I believe about God may be wrong. The possibility of error is unavoidable when we speak of that which transcends our ability to speak about it. Yet in faith I trust that what I understand about God is not false, or at least that not all of it is. I don’t know anything about God. I try to understand God as best I can, then live in trust under that understanding of ultimate reality.

I do not believe that Christianity has the only truth or that it is the only way to a proper relationship with God. Both Christianity and other faith traditions are true to the extent that they connect people with ultimate reality, which a tradition may or may not conceive of as God, and false to the extent that they connect people to something else. It’s obvious, if we’ll just open our eyes and our minds, that people all over the world find their connection with God in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Sikhism,  Bahia, and a great many other faith traditions. We Christians have no right to condemn them just because they don’t find their connection with God the way we do. We should thank God that we humans can find God in so many different ways.

I believe that the Bible is a purely human product. It was written by men (sadly not by any women) who were people of their own times and places. Their writings express their understandings of God, which are not necessarily God’s understanding of God, nor must they be our understanding of God. I see the Bible as an invitation into dialogue with its ancient authors. There is much wisdom in the Bible, but there is also much that is false, some of it appallingly false. One of the challenges of faith is to discern which Bible passages express divine wisdom and which express earthly error. The Christian’s standard for making that distinction is Jesus, and therefore it is love.

The basics of my Christian faith are then these: God is real. God is Spirit. God is love. Jesus Christ is God Incarnate. God calls us to lives of love. God calls us to transform the world into a one ruled by love, and God demands that we do it nonviolently. I believe with Jesus that transformation of the world begins with transformation of the self. Without individual transformation away from the ways of the world and toward the ways of God, transformation of the world is not possible. I believe that God’s grace is universal and unconditional. I believe that we humans are called to behave properly not from fear of punishment but in response to God’s love for us. So my bottom line is this: God is real. We know God in Jesus. Love is the standard for everything.

I don’t live a life of love better than anyone else, but I know that God has forgiven my failures and everyone else’s before we even commit them. For that greatest of all of God’s gifts, for God’s universal and unconditional grace, I say with all my heart: Thanks be to God!

 

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[1] For a much longer discussion of this issue see Appendix 1 of my book Liberating Christianity.

Faith as Trust

 

Faith as Trust

© Thomas C. Sorenson 2024

 

This is part of a chapter of a book I’m working on titled How Can I Be a Christian?

 

I have long understood faith as trust. Faith is not primarily believing things you can’t prove are true, though that is what most people in our context think that it is. Faith as trust isn’t belief that facts are true. It is accepting and relying on the reality of the spiritual dimension of existence. All human civilizations have had an understanding of that spiritual dimension. Sometimes they have called it God. Sometimes they have called it something else. They have all, however, reached for understanding of the spiritual. They have expressed their understanding in their system of symbols and mythic stories.. The primary system of symbols and mythic stories in my context, though certainly not the only one, is Christianity. I have accepted Christianity as I understand it as my way of comprehending the reality and the character of the spiritual dimension of all that is. That I consider my faith to be primarily trust means that I live as though I knew that what I learn of the spiritual through Christianity were objectively true though I know that I can never prove that it is. Faith as truth is a leap of faith, to use Kierkegaard’s term for it. The Christianity that I trust is my faith because I choose it as my faith.

It is perfectly legitimate for anyone to ask me: Why do that? What do you get out of it that you wouldn’t have without it? Whatever that is, aren’t you just deluding yourself that it comes from something real? Isn’t it true that you have no real reason for doing it, you’re just doing it because you want to? Aren’t you just being self-indulgent? Isn’t it still true that you do and can know nothing about this ultimate reality on which you say you rely?  Isn’t living in trust in it the same as just pretending? You can pretend any damned thing you want. Pretending doesn’t make it so.

In a way all of that is true, but here is another truth. Everyone needs a way to get through life. Life is precarious. Life is contingent. Life always includes pain and loss. Life always includes death. It is of course perfectly possible to live life superficially despite all that. It’s easy enough to avoid the hard questions about life, to live life not just not knowing all the answers but not even knowing that there are profound questions. That there are questions about the nature of reality, of what is real and what isn’t, about how we know what is real and what isn’t, questions about the meaning of life. It’s easy to live not even knowing that such questions exist. That’s how most people live, not knowing what they don’t know.

Yet some of us do ask the profound questions. We ask about ontology. We ask about epistemology. We ask about meaning. The post-modern existential questions really are “what is real” and “does it mean anything at all.” The easiest answers to those questions for those of us raised in a secular age are “only the physical world is real,” and “I don’t worry about what it means.” Yet that way of living is ultimately existentially damaging. It leads to one of two things, despair or unchecked hedonism. Of course, not everyone who lives this way experiences either of these things, but they don’t only because they neither think nor live their way of life to its unavoidable conclusion. Indeed, unchecked hedonism is almost certainly a vain attempt to avoid dealing with the despair that eventually comes to everyone who lives only on a superficial plain and for whom only the material is real.

Yet here’s a truth about our experience of physical reality that few people today recognize. We think physical reality is real because we experience it, but all we really have is our perception of what appears to us to be a reality outside of ourselves. We can’t prove that it is real. All we can prove is that we perceive and experience it as real. This limitation to our ability to know is existential. It comes from our nature as centered selves. From a center that we perceive to be ourself we experience something that appears to us to be other than ourself. To live in the material world that we perceive is to choose to accept what we perceive as real, and it is to rely on the reality of that which we perceive. Even people who are totally unaware that they are making such a choice are making such a choice. Not to decide is actually itself a decision. It is the decision not to decide. Even for those who live this way, acceptance of physical reality as real is a choice.

As we choose to accept the physical world we perceive as real, we can also make a different choice. We can choose to accept the reality of the spiritual and live trusting in its reality. To do so is not to engage in individualistic fantasizing. It is in part reliance on one’s own experience that there is something more to everything that is than is immediately apparent, but it is also to look beyond oneself to the experience of humanity generally. We don’t need to rely on ourselves alone in our seeking to understand the true nature of reality and to find meaning in life. We have millennia of human experience to turn to and to learn from. That universal human experience says that the physical world in which we perceive ourselves to live is not all there is to reality. Though humanity generally accepting the truth of something does not prove that the thing is true, it is as possible and reasonable to choose to live accepting and trusting in the reality of the spiritual dimension as it is to choose to live without accepting and trusting in it. Those two choices are in fact existentially identical in that they are both choices. There is no way to avoid living in trust, trust, that is, of some understanding of reality as real. That’s what all humans do whether they know it or not. Therefore, choosing to accept and trust in the reality of the spiritual is at least as existentially justifiable as is choosing to live without the spiritual.

We all live in trust. The only questions are what we trust and what it means for us to trust it. To trust in something is to assume that it is real, but it is also more than that. It is to rely on the reality of that which we trust. Rely on it for what? Rely on it to shape the reality in which we live. Most people in my context trust only in the reality of that which they perceive as the material world. We people of faith make a different choice. We choose to live in a world that is shaped by an additional dimension, the dimension of the spiritual. We people of faith believe that we gain things from our choice that the other possible existential choice cannot give us, and, if we’re honest, we concede that we are indeed making a choice about which world we will live in.

So is it self-indulgent to trust in the reality of the spiritual? In a sense yes, but only in the sense that any decision about what to trust as ultimate reality is self-indulgent. The choice of what to trust as ultimate reality is unavoidably self-indulgence. Whether we know we’re doing it or not, no one can avoid making a decision about what to accept and trust as the ultimate truth. In our secular, western culture it is actually easier to accept and trust in physical reality alone than it is to accept and trust in spiritual reality. The dominant culture of North America in which I live and from which I write was formed by the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Those profound historical developments produced a culture in which the findings of science are accepted as true. Our culture accepts as true that to which human reason leads us whether through the methodology of science or through rational thought alone. Our culture predisposes us toward choosing only the material as real.

To choose to accept and trust in the spiritual is countercultural. I don’t mean a superficial choice to call oneself a Christian or some other type of person of faith. Most Americans probably still do that. I mean to accept and trust in the reality of the spiritual with all of one’s being—body, mind, and spirit. Not to give a faith tradition lip service but really to live into it. To understand its teachings. To understand its history. To critique both its teachings and its history in a way that makes it more true to its real nature than faith traditions usually are, Christianity perhaps least of all.

Few people in my culture ever accept and trust in the spiritual at that depth, yet only accepting the spiritual at that depth truly makes it real for us. Only accepting the spiritual at that level truly leads us to shaping our reality on the basis of what we trust is true of the spiritual. Doing that is what faith truly is. It isn’t mere acceptance of alleged facts as true. It is choosing to devote one’s whole self to living with the reality of the spiritual in trust that what one understands of the spiritual does not deceive. Very few if any of us ever do that perfectly. I know I certainly don’t, but it is still true that faith is trust. Deep trust. Existential trust. This is a truth I try, rarely very successfully, to live into. Christianity would be truer to its true self, and it would avoid the negative conclusions so many people draw from it, if more people understood faith as trust.

 

On the Paradox of Human Nature

 

On the Paradox of Human Nature

 

I’ve never written anything on human nature. What do I think of human nature? Well, I wonder how anyone could do what Descartes, Kant, Hume, Kierkegaard, van Gogh, or Mozart did. I also wonder how anyone could do what Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did. The human spirit can reach unimaginable heights and unimaginable depths. We are capable of great works of thought, art, science, peacemaking, and love. We are also capable of the Holocaust. We are capable of Stalin’s Gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. We create the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, then Israel invades Gaza and kills 14,000 children, a horrific number but one that pales in comparison to the number of children Hitler killed. We are capable of great acts of charity, and we create a world where a tiny number of people control unimaginably great wealth while children starve to death around the world.

 

What does it mean to be human? We are, first of all, animals. We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, but that’s what we are. We are homo sapiens who have evolved from other primate species that no longer exist. Like all animals, we have biological needs–air, food, water. Like all animals we have biological drives–sex and survival primarily. Our bodily functions are not significantly different from those of all other mammals. We eat like they do. We reproduce like they do. We die like they do. The similarities between us and other mammals are too great to ignore. We are, first of all, animals.

 

But we are also somewhat different from all other animals. We have cognitive abilities that, as far as we know, no other animal has. We are self-aware in a way that, as far as we know, no other animal is. We ask questions about ourselves, the world, and the nature of reality that, as far as we know, no other animal does. We aren’t the only animals who use tools. We aren’t the only animals who build things; but we do those things on a level no other animal can remotely approach. No ape has ever built Chartres Cathedral, and no ape ever will. No ape has ever written Critique of Pure Reason, and no ape ever will. Our cognitive and creative abilities exceed those of all other animals by orders of magnitude. After all, we study them, they don’t study us. 

 

So our starting point is as animals but as unique animals. We have free will, or at least we delude ourselves that we do. We go to the moon with far less computing power than is in this computer that I’m typing on, then we create thinking machines with far more computing power than is in this computer or than is in the cell phone in my shirt pocket. It seems there is no limit to our creative abilities be they artistic, philosophical, or scientific. 

 

We are capable of so much good, and we are capable of so much evil. We use enormous amounts of financial and human resources inventing more effective and efficient ways to kill people, then we delude ourselves that we do it to defend our freedom. We give some resources to charity, trying to address immediate human needs; but we pay much less attention to justice. We create a world tarnished by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and any number of other evil ways of thinking. Then we convince ourselves that these ways of thinking aren’t really evil at all but just reflect how things are. 

 

I always reject the Christian doctrine of original sin. It is based on an awful exegesis of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and it makes no biological sense whatsoever. Yet when we look at both human history and current human reality, it is obvious that there is something wrong with us humans. We did, after all, commit industrialized genocide against millions of people because we didn’t like them and blamed them for our problems though they had little or nothing to do with them. We did, after all, starve around four million Ukrainians to death to make them do something an ideology said they should do but they didn’t want to do. We did, after all, kill millions of people in an effort to erase thousands of years of great Chinese culture. We do, after all, fight war after war after war in which we kill and maim countless numbers of our fellow human beings and think we’ve done something good in doing it. We let children starve to death when there is enough food in the world for everyone. We convince ourselves that hatred is good, and we dehumanize other human beings to make it easier for us to kill them with a clear conscience. 

 

Yet there is something right with us humans too. For starters, we have the ability to distinguish right from wrong. We’ve never all agreed completely on what is right and what is wrong, but at least we all make that distinction. Most of us truly do care about at least some other people even if it’s only those closest to us. Nearly all of us love our children and want only the best for them. We create intimate personal relationships that lift our spirits and make our lives fuller than they otherwise would be. The human spirit sinks to the deepest depths imaginable, but it also soars to the highest heights imaginable. 

 

I feel no need to explain how we get to the heights. I just thank God that we do. What I’m struggling to understand is how and why we sink to the depths of violence and hatred that so often we do. That we do seems to be beyond critical understanding, yet it seems somehow to inhere in what it is to be human. We can try to blame it on the devil or some other concept we create that personalizes evil; but that’s just avoiding the issue. The Holodomor and the Holocaust are as human as are St. Basil’s Cathedral and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. What is it about us that allows us to sink so low so often?

 

I don’t have an answer. All I know to do to try to reach an answer is to start by considering just how we humans exist in the world. We exist as centered selves. From what we experience as a center, as a self, we discern what appears to be a world around and outside of us. Whether that’s just how we evolved or is how God created us, that’s how we are. Within us we have a biological drive for survival. It’s hardwired into us. We have a fight or flight instinct no different from that of other animals. Because we exist as centered selves, everything other than ourselves appears to us to be outside of us and other than us. Because it does, we can and often do perceive it as a threat rather than as a blessing. 

 

One of the things we do when we interact with that external world is associate ourselves with different groups and identities. I’ll use myself as an example. I am an American, and I am one whether I want to be one or not. I had nothing to do with my being an American, America is just where I happened to be born. I am a citizen of and reside in Washington state. I am a progressive Christian, and that’s something I choose to be. I am a member of the United Church of Christ, which is also something I choose to be despite my reservations about it these days. I am a member of a family that consists of myself, my wife, my two children, their five children, and my daughter’s husband. I self-identify as an Oregon Duck. In all of these ways I interact with what appears to me to be a world outside of me.

 

We naturally want what we consider to be good for everyone and everything with which we associate ourselves. We always want better for those things than their present reality seems to us to be. We perceive what to us are problems with which our associations must deal. We have a natural aversion to accepting responsibility for those problems. We’d much rather blame them on something or someone else. We do that because of our natural drive for personal comfort. If something other than us is responsible for a problem, we don’t have to blame ourselves. We don’t have to look inside ourselves for a source of the problem. We can direct our concern elsewhere. When we do, that concern often becomes anger. We get furious with whoever we can convince ourselves is responsible for the problem as long as it isn’t us. And anger often becomes hatred.

 

Germany after World War I is a classic example. Things were very difficult for the German people at the end of that war. They had lost a war they thought they couldn’t lose. Their economy was in shambles. Then the victorious allies made things worse by imposing the grossly unjust Treaty of Versailles on them. They created a democratic government of sorts, but few people had much faith in it. Then inflation got so bad that money literally was not worth the paper it was printed on. People’s life savings were wiped out overnight, and their futures became even less secure than they would otherwise have been. 

 

Post-World War I Germans were, of course, as human as the rest of us. They were faced with immense problems they had thought they would never face. Germans by the millions found it impossible to ascribe blame for their problems to themselves. As we humans are so wont to do, they looked for someone else to blame them on. Then Adolf Hitler and his Nazis came on the scene. He said the Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s problems. There wasn’t a shred of objective evidence to support that claim, but there didn’t have to be. By blaming the Jews for their problems, the Germans avoided blaming themselves; and we humans hate to blame ourselves for anything. Doing so conflicts with our instinct for survival. Hitler told the German people that Jewish people weren’t really people at all. They were a sort of subspecies that had corrupted every aspect of German life. Like the rest of Christendom, Germany had a centuries old history of anti-Judaism. That history made it easier for large numbers of Germans to buy into Hitler’s lies. 

 

The Jews were a perfect scapegoat for the Germans. They were different. They had a different religion, and the church had told people for ages that the Jews were all Christ killers. Most Jews were just ordinary people living lives not that different from anyone else’s lives, but a few of them were very wealthy. A few of them held positions of power and responsibility in the financial world and elsewhere. Mostly, the Germans had convinced themselves for centuries that Jews weren’t Germans. Even Martin Luther, the founder of the church of most Germans, had been a horrific anti-Semite. The Jews were, of course, guilty of none of the things of which Hitler accused them, but they were an easy target for him. Only a minority of Germans ever voted for the Nazis, but they grew big enough that the conservative powers of the country thought they could put Hitler in charge and control him. Of course, we know that they couldn’t.

 

So for most Germans, whether they ever voted for Hitler or not, the Jews were an alien enemy that was responsible for all of the woes Germany faced after World War I. After he had been in power for a while, Hitler gave them the “final solution” to the so-called Jewish problem. The only way to defeat them and take Germany back from them, he said, was to exterminate them. After the war, most Germans said they didn’t know what the Nazis with their soldiers and SS murderers had done. Many of us find that hard to believe, but it may be true. Whether it was or not doesn’t really matter. As a culture, as a people, they had done it.

 

Here’s a story from my personal experience that may be illuminating. When I was eleven years old my family lived in Berlin for an academic year while my father did historical research. It was 1957-58. My time in Berlin began only twelve years after the end of World War II. We shared a large apartment with a German lady. Her husband had died, but he had been a member of the Nazi party. She still had his Nazi uniform hanging in her closet. One day she said to us: “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews. But then, something had to be done.” There you see the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. Blame the Jews for our problems. Let the powers exterminate them. That way we don’t have to blame ourselves.

 

How was it possible? Christian history in general and German history in particular had prepared the ground for it. National crises provoked it. Hitler and the Nazis manipulated the German people into going along with it. Nothing in their human nature stopped most of them from going along with it if only through passive acceptance of the Nazi lies. In times of national crisis the German people looked for someone to blame other than themselves. And they conducted the Holocaust. They killed six million Jews and countless other people as well.

 

What is it about human nature that made the Holocaust possible if not inevitable? It is that we have no built-in bottom to our evil. None of us does. There is nothing inherent in our nature that can stop us from doing massive evil once we’re set on doing it. We like to think civilization and religion or just a supposed common sense of what is right and what is wrong can stop us. Sometimes they do, but far too often they don’t. We deceive ourselves if we think something like the Holocaust couldn’t happen in our country. It could. It could because we Americans are structured no differently than Hitler’s Germans were. They had no moral bottom. Neither do we.

 

So what are we to do? The only answer to that question that I can come up with is that we must never forget that we have no moral bottom, then we must be ever vigilant to stop any movement among us that tends even slightly in the direction of other national regimes that have committed mass murder. That includes the Germans of course. It also includes the Russians and the Chinese. And though most of us don’t know it and none of us likes to admit it, it includes us white Americans. We committed genocide against the people of the First Nations of North America. We did it so effectively that Hitler thought it meant we would not object to what he was going to do to the Jews. All of us humans are constructed the same way. Any differences between us are merely superficial. None of us has a bottom to our ability to commit evil. Of course, neither do we have much of a ceiling on the good we can do. How creative we can be. How caring we can be. How loving we can be. That’s the paradox of being human. We are potentially toweringly good and potentially bottomlessly bad at the same time. Sure. It would be great if we had something built into us that stopped us from committing evil. Having such a thing sure would make life easier. We don’t have it. So in its place we have to put awareness and a willingness to step forward to stop evil before it starts.

 

Today we can do that by defeating the MAGA movement and making sure Donald Trump never again occupies the White House. He is using immigrants the way Hitler used the Jews. Of course, he hasn’t constructed an American Auschwitz—yet. But Hitler didn’t start out with genocide either. He sort of slid into it. One anti-Jewish measure led to another, then to another, and then to another. Pretty soon, the Nazis were shooting and gassing millions of people to death. Hitler blamed Germany’s problems on the Jews, who weren’t responsible for them. Trump blames America’s problems on immigrants, who aren’t responsible for them. Trump and his MAGA movement are dire threats to American democracy. They are threats to American decency. They have the potential to do great harm to this country and to the world if we don’t stop them. So let’s stop them, OK?

 

The Worst Book Ever?

 

The Worst Book Ever?

Recent news reports say that the actor Brian Cox has called the Bible “the worst book ever.” Is he right? Is the Bible the worst book ever? I suppose it depends on what you mean by “worst,” but in any event my answer to that question is a qualified no. The Bible is an immensely complex set of documents. There is a widespread conception among Protestant Christians that anyone can pick it up, read it, and understand it. That conception is simply false. The Bible contains sixty-six different documents. They were produced over the span of nine hundred years or so. They were all written in socio-cultural-political-religious worlds that were radically different from ours. Yes, anyone who is literate can pick up the Bible, read it, and have some understanding of what at least most of the words in it mean. That does not, however, mean that that person has really understood what she is reading. Unless she has done a lot of study, she very probably hasn’t.

What might someone mean when they call the Bible “the worst book ever?” I haven’t bothered to find out what Cox meant by it, but to me the worst book ever would be the book that has caused the most damage in the world. Is that the Bible? It has a lot of competition for that dubious title. Hitler’s Mein Kampf comes to mind. It lays out the blueprint for all the horror the Nazis inflicted on the world, including but not limited to the Holocaust. Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital certainly began a journey into immense evil for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? has misled generation after generation with regard to what Christianity is really about, and Christians have inflicted one hell of a lot of damage on the world as a result. These books only scratch the surface of all of the really bad books we humans have produced.

So what about the Bible? Well, on the one hand, it is indeed a really, really bad book. There’s no point in denying that truth. Parts of it are horribly violent. In the Old Testament, the ancient Israelis are at war almost constantly, and they do it with God’s blessing. The God of the Bible either uses violence to accomplish God’s ends or is terrifically violent Godself. In the Old Testament, God sends snakes that kill thousands of God’s people. In the Old Testament, God uses the Assyrians and the Babylonians to inflict horrific suffering on the Hebrew people. Moreover, much of the Old Testament reduces faith to a set of laws we’re supposed to obey, which isn’t what true faith is at all. The book of Leviticus prescribes death as punishment for a violation of many of those laws.

But there’s even worse in the New Testament. In the book of Revelation God and Jesus Christ use unspeakable violence to wipe out a very substantial portion of the human population. The divine violence in the Bible has functioned as a justification for a great deal of Christian violence over the centuries. That Jesus was radically nonviolent has not stopped Christians from engaging in massive violence at will. Christians used the Bible to justify their imperialistic crusades against Muslim believers. They used its claims of Christian exclusivism to justify the destruction of native cultures around the world, including killing a great many people who were part of those cultures.

There’s more bad stuff about the Bible. Christians have used passages in it for millennia to condemn God’s LGBTQ+ people. Never mind that the ancient world of the Bible had no understanding of homosexuality and other sexualities as naturally occurring varieties of human sexuality the way we do. Christians have used passages in the New Testament, attributed to St. Paul but not really by him, to justify cultural oppression of women nearly from the beginnings of the Christian faith. One passage in the Gospel of Matthew has been used to elevate a mere human being who happens to be the Bishop of Rome to the level of Christ’s infallible vicar on earth. The Roman Catholic Church continues to use the fact that Jesus Christ was a male human being to justify its sinful exclusion of women from the priesthood. There’s a lot of really bad stuff in the Bible, a fact which any openminded reading of it will confirm.

Among the most evil things in the Bible is the New Testament’s anti-Judaism. There is no doubt that as a matter of historical fact the Romans not the Jews crucified Jesus. Yet the New Testament authors, including especially the authors of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, tried to shift the blame for that act of profound cruelty and injustice from the Romans to the Jews. Matthew even has the Jewish people say as they demanded Jesus’ crucifixion, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Christians have used the New Testament’s anti-Judaism as the basis for their claims that all Jews are “Christ killers,” which of course they aren’t and never were. Christian violence against Jewish people is one the faith’s greatest sins. It is something of which we must repent and for which we must atone.

But. On the other hand. There is great wisdom in the Bible. The prophet scholars call Second Isaiah gave the world true monotheism. For all its shortcomings, the Old Testament gives us a God who truly cares about and for God’s people. In at least the good parts of the New Testament, we see God in human form. We see as much of God as we humans are capable of understanding. We see that God’s ways are the world’s ways turned completely upside down. We see that God is nonviolent and calls us to nonviolence too. We see that God demands distributive justice for all people. We see that for God gender differences between human beings make no difference. All are equal in God’s sight.

We see that God has no time for the power of empires. We see that God prefers the poor and lowly to the high and mighty. We see that God calls us to lives of inner transformation in which we love our neighbors as ourselves, and everyone is our neighbor, even people we really wish weren’t.

We see that God is love. God is a God of universal grace freely given to everyone. We don’t have to earn it, which is good because we couldn’t earn it even if we had to. God gives it as God’s free gift for every human being there ever was or ever will be. If we read the New Testament aright, which, sadly, Christians seldom do, we see that nothing in all creation can or ever will separate us from the love of God.

The Bible is the foundational book of Christianity. What Christians call its Old Testament is the sacred scripture of the great, ancient Jewish faith. Yet, perhaps unfortunately, it is impossible to make any other valid generalizations about it. It is an immensely complex book. Great evil has flowed from it, but so has great good. Its diverse, complex texts have helped people find a meaningful relationship with God for nearly three thousand years. It has been a source of comfort, courage, and inspiration for more people than we can possibly count, and it continues to be that today.

So is the Bible the worst book ever? No, it isn’t. That is not to say that there isn’t much evil in it. There is. It is not to say that Christians have never used parts of it as justification for great evil. They have. Yet there is also much that is good in it. There is much wisdom in it. We have to read it carefully to find that wisdom. We need guidance from people who understand it better than we do to find that wisdom. Yet that wisdom is there. There is no wisdom in Mein Kampf. There is nothing but evil. There is no wisdom in Mao’s little red book. There is nothing but evil, and it led to nothing but death and destruction.

So no, the Bible is not the worse book ever. There are worse books than the Bible. Yes, there is a lot about the Bible that is really, really bad. Yes, I know. We Christians aren’t supposed to say that, but it’s true. But unlike many other books humans have created there is also great good in it. It’s not the worst book ever. It is a book that it is difficult not to misunderstand. It is a book we must read carefully and from which we must draw wisdom selectively. The Bible’s far from perfect, but it’s far from the worst book ever. Thanks be to God!

A Balm in Gilead

 I've been working on a new book with the working title There Is a Balm in Gilead. I don't know if it will ever see the light of day, but here's the current draft Introduction.

Introduction

(c) Thomas C. Sorenson 2024. All rights reserved.

 

What is Christianity? Is it accepting certain alleged facts as true? Is it believing the right dogmatic assertions about God and Jesus Christ? Is it living according to the dictates of some ecclesial authority? What does Christianity require of us? To convert everyone else to our version (or any version) of the faith? To condemn people we think the Bible condemns? Or to comply with requirements we think are imposed by a particular book? To believe in the divine inspiration and infallibility of that book understood literally? Never to sin? To believe in God as cosmic judge just looking for reasons to condemn people to hell for all eternity? To tell people who do what we consider to be sin that they are in fact damned for all eternity? To build up and defend ecclesial structures as our primary task? To isolate ourselves from the world in what we think are truly righteous, closed communities? There are and from the beginnings of the faith there have been people who identify themselves as Christians who think that Christianity is indeed one or more of these things.

Here’s a profound truth that we must grasp if our sacred Christian faith is to have a future in today’s world. Christianity is none of those things. Those ways of understanding the faith are among the major things that have produced the crisis Christianity is experiencing among us today, and they get the actual truth of the faith all wrong. Christianity asserted to be one or more of those things does not speak to the existential needs of today’s people. In fact, it causes far more harm than good in the world. People in our context today, both outside churches and inside them, have a particular way of understanding the faith. It is what I here call Evangelical Christianity. We will examine this way of understanding Christianity in what follows.

For now we need only to understand that Evangelical Christianity, that is, Christianity as most people today understand it, is indeed causing immense harm to the church, to individual people, and to the world. It has caused immense harm in the past. In its zeal to make everyone Christian generally and more specifically Christian on the European model, it is responsible for European genocide against native people the world over. It has taught and practiced anti-Judaism so extreme that its entire history can, indeed must, be seen as preparation for the Holocaust.

Christianity hasn’t stopped causing great harm in the world today. It is wounding countless individual children of God. It is buttressing cultural prejudices against LGBTQ+ people. It is making these beloved people of God wonder if there is a safe place for them anywhere. It is causing some of them to take their own lives. It is propping up the hoary notion that women are to be subordinate to men. It is impeding human intellectual pursuits by insisting that nothing can be true that contradicts the way adherents to Evangelical Christianity understand the Bible. It is requiring church people to check their brains at the church door, and it is discouraging or prohibiting them from raising doubts about their faith or even asking serious questions about it. A tragic number of Christians today use their harmful faith in support of American nationalism and imperialistic American policies the world over. They even use it in support of white supremacy, thereby telling all of God’s people of color that they are somehow less than those of us who happen to have been born white. Christianity today, as most people understand it, produces far more harm in the world than it produces good. It wounds far more people than it heals.

So what is Christianity really? It is to follow Jesus Christ as best we can. The Christian tradition calls this way of seeing the faith the imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. To do that we must, of course, know who Jesus Christ was and is, which of course includes knowing what he wasn’t and isn’t. Evangelical Christianity understands Jesus as having been about saving our eternal souls from damnation. In truth however, Jesus was hardly about that at all. He was, more than anything else, a healer. In the Gospels, when crowds of people come to Jesus, they mostly come to have him heal them of their diseases and disabilities. And when they come, he heals them. For example, in both Matthew and Luke, the first thing Jesus does in the story of the feeding of the five thousand is cure people of disease. See Matthew 14:14 and Luke 9:11.

I have heard John Dominic Crossan say that what distinguished Jesus from many others of his time wasn’t that he was a healer, it was that he healed free of charge. All Jesus needed for him to heal someone was for him to realize that someone needed healing. Sometimes he would say to someone he had healed something like “Your faith has made you well.” But most of the time he just healed without the person healed doing anything but come to him for healing. Jesus healed every sort of human affliction. He enabled the paralyzed to walk. He enabled the blind to see. He cured what we would consider to be mental illnesses when he exorcized demons from one possessed. He even revived at least a couple of people from the dead. The gospels of the New Testament are filled with stories of Jesus being a healer. They have him say or do next to nothing about saving souls from eternal damnation.

The way in which the Christian faith today causes far more harm than good in the world is nothing but a gross betrayal of Jesus Christ, the one we call Lord and Savior. Jesus healed, he didn’t harm. He and the God we know in and through him call us to heal not to harm. That doesn’t mean heal in the sense of saving someone’s soul by converting them to Christianity. Jesus never converted anyone to Christianity. In fact, he was Jewish not Christian himself. He healed more people physically and psychically, that is, spiritually, than we can even know of. He healed people one on one. He healed people in large groups. He healed every sort of malady that afflicts God’s people here on earth without worrying about their future in heaven.

The Christian’s great call today is to follow Jesus into being a healer, a healer of all of the world’s wounds but especially those wounds Christians have themselves caused. Certainly we are called to do charitable acts of healing when we can. Most of us aren’t physicians, but we can support the healing work of those who are. We can volunteer with and contribute money to a vast array of worthwhile charitable institutions, and a great many Christians are very good at doing so. Doing charity is indeed part of the Christian call. But there is more to the Christian call than that. We humans cannot, even with the help of God, solve any serious problem without understanding the underlying causes of the problem. Unless we can transform that cause from something bad into something good, the problem will persist indefinitely.

It is the thesis of this book that the underlying cause of the harm Christianity has done and is doing in God’s world today is bad theology. I can’t begin to tell you how many times people have said to me, “Actions are more important than thoughts.” There is some truth in that assertion I suppose, but here’s a significant truth that it misses. All actions (except for purely instinctive or biological ones) begin with thoughts. Our hearts beat without our thinking about it. Many other bodily functions work on their own too. But every intentional thing we do begins with a thought in our heads. I feel thirsty, so I think “I’ll go get a drink of water.” That thought leads to the action of my going to get a drink of water.

It works the same way with far more significant matters than a passing thirst. Here are some extreme examples from fairly recent history: I think Jews are subhuman and the cause of all of my people’s problems, so I construct gas chambers and set out to kill every last one of them. I think Black people are subhuman and a threat to my way of life, so first I enslave them, then, when I can’t do that anymore, I pass Jim Crow laws and practice redlining and other forms of discrimination to deprive them of rights, keep them separate from me, and keep myself above them in the social hierarchy. I think American Indians are subhuman and stand in the way of my people’s conquest of new land. So I conduct wars against them for over a century. I turn a blind eye as my soldiers use Indian men, women, and children for target practice. I push Indians off of land their people have occupied for millennia. I confine them to small, generally undesirable places. I break every single treaty I sign with them. All of those horrors plus a tragically great many more are actions, but they all begin with thoughts. Bad thoughts. Wrong thoughts, but still thoughts. Thoughts really do matter—a lot.

Then there is the harm that Evangelical Christianity is doing to planet earth. The way that kind of Christianity distracts people’s attention from this life on earth and focuses it on a posited next life in heaven or hell has led far too many Christians to ignore the way we humans are harming the earth, the way we are causing global climate change that is threatening life on earth itself. Evangelical Christianity does nothing less than wound the only planet we have.

The harm that Christianity has done in the past and continues to do in the present all begins with thoughts. The foundational thought of Christianity is theology. In theology we develop our understanding of ultimate reality. We usually call that ultimate reality God. The word theology means logos about theos, word about God. All human faiths are grounded in a theology. They all have their foundational story. The foundational story of Christianity is, of course, the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a first century Jewish Galilean peasant named Jesus of Nazareth. We call him Jesus Christ, with Christ being a title not a last name. We confess him to be God Incarnate. Our whole faith tradition is grounded in the stories we tell about him. Everything in our faith looks, or at least should look, to him for information and inspiration. Our faith is not true to its better angels when it fails to do so, and it has failed to do so again and again and again throughout its long history.

Christianity has again and again substituted distorted human ways of being for the divine ways of being we see in and learn from Jesus Christ. That demonic substitution results in very bad theology. That bad theology produces a great deal of harm. It is the underlying cause of the harm Christianity caused in the world in the past and causes in the world today. In this work we will dissect popular, harmful theology. We will examine how that theology is causing harm in the world today. We will propose a better foundational theology for our faith. Finally, we will consider how that better theology can heal the harm Christianity has done. And when it does that, it even heals itself.

There are a couple of different images we can use to designate the transformation we believe Christianity must undertake if it is to survive. One is to think of that transformation as a new Reformation. Its complete historical accuracy may be questionable, but in common understanding the Reformation began on October 31, 1517 CE. On that date an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed a document containing ninety-five theses about issues in the church to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther’s theses challenged many things about the structure and practice of the Roman Catholic Church of Luther’s day. He intended them as a basis for academic discussion not the creation of a reformed Christian church and faith, but that’s what happened. Other reformers like Zwingli, Calvin, and the leaders of the Radical Reformation made their own contributions to different strains of what became Protestant Christianity.

Christianity needed reformation in the early sixteenth century CE. It needs new reformation today. I have not cast this work in the terms of a new reformation, though I am thoroughly convinced that a new reformation is precisely what Christianity needs today. I have not used those terms mostly because the notion that the Christian church and the Christian faith itself needs a new reformation is hardly a new one. It has become almost trite in some Christian circles. The world does not need me adding to the discussion of our faith needing a new Reformation.

I began this work with the original working title A Balm in Gilead, Liberating Christianity for the Healing of Our Wounds. The phrase “liberating Christianity” is one I have used over and over again for many years. The first book I ever put out was titled Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium.” I began drafting this book using “liberating Christianity” for the Christianity I believe we need to bring into the world. As I began writing this work, I used the term “Biblicism” for what I believe we must overcome if we are to save the Christian faith. Like liberating Christianity, Biblicism is a term I have used countless times over the years. If you want to know what it is, read Liberating Christianity in either its original or its revised form.

But then I began to wonder: What do those terms have to do with healing, which is what the book’s title and subtitle suggest it is about? Not much, I decided. So I became more intentional about writing this book in terms of harm and healing. In what follows I will refer many times to “Evangelical Christianity” and “Healing Christianity.” What I mean by those terms will unfold as you read the book.

The main title of the book, however, is There Is A Balm in Gilead. So perhaps it will be worthwhile if here, in the book’s Introduction, I say a bit about what “a balm in Gilead” means. It is a term that comes from Hebrew scripture, though it is not used often in those sacred texts. A balm is an ointment, or more generally a source, of healing or restoration. Gilead is the northern part of the region east of the Jordan River. The Balm of Gilead was a perfume used medicinally and named for that region because that’s where it was produced. It has become a term no longer limited to that perfume.

At the beginning of this Introduction I placed the words “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” That line comes from a well-known African-American spiritual. That spiritual begins, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” Perhaps the Black Americans who created that song knew where Gilead was and what its balm was, but it isn’t necessary that they did. “A balm in Gilead” has passed into common English usage as a reference to any cure-all, anything that heals a wide range of ailments. I believe that the world today suffers from a great many aliments. I believe that what I here call Evangelical Christianity is one of the causes of those ailments. I believe that Christianity properly understood can be a balm that cures at least those ailments bad Christianity has caused. Hence the title of this book.

Some, or even much, of what you read here may be new to you. It may very well challenge some of your long-held and firmly believed understandings of God, of Jesus Christ, of the nature of faith, of the Bible, and of what you understand your faith to require of you. So be it. It is precisely disordered theological thinking that causes Christianity to do the harm it does. In this work I will spare no sacred cows. Our Christian faith is in crisis today. It has been shrinking in numbers for many decades now. Only a radical rethinking of the foundational nature of our faith can save it. I will, to the best of my ability, do some of that rethinking here. I pray that you will make this journey with me and that in the end you will find your Christian faith transformed and strengthened. May it be so.