Three Traps

Three Traps

For the past several years, with one year off as required by the Conference’s bylaws, I have served on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. One of the things we do on that Committee is examine candidates for ordination in the UCC and either approve them or not. Part of the ordination process is for the candidate to write an ordination paper that sets out her beliefs and understandings of theology, church history, the UCC, the practice of ministry, and other matters. I just finished reading one such paper. It is a very good one, far better than most. Yet as I read it I noticed that this well qualified candidate fell into or just skirted around three traps that far too many progressive Christians fall into. I’d like to explore those traps here. They are:

1.       The assertion that all are welcome in church.

2.       The assertion that the Bible is somehow divine or divinely inspired.

3.       The assertion that we progressive Christians are always to be nonjudgmental.

I’ll consider them in that order.

1. All are welcome in church. That is something that almost every church asserts. The non-UCC Congregational church from which I resigned at the end of 2017 says “All are welcome” on its sign on the street in front of the church building. In the UCC we tend to wear a universal welcome on our sleeve as some sort of badge of honor. A great many UCC churches, including the one to which I belong and now attend, say either out loud or in their weekly worship bulletin “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” Those words have practically become the mantra of the UCC. On one level that mantra serves a good and necessary purpose. For far too long most Christian churches have excluded certain people. They have excluded LGBT people. Some of them have excluded divorced people. If what we mean by “all are welcome” is that we do not discriminate against people on improper grounds, fine. We shouldn’t discriminate like that, and more and more churches today are doing less and less of that kind of discrimination. The problem is, that’s not what our signs say. They say all are welcome. They say “no matter who you are” you are welcome here. I object to that notion on a variety of grounds.

First, it almost certainly isn’t true. One problem is that while many churches say they welcome LGBT people they really don’t. It makes us all feel warm and fuzzy to say all are welcome, but church people are like people everywhere. There are those of us who have not gotten over the prejudices we all grew up with, or at least those of us of a certain age grew up with. I know, for example, that while that church I recently resigned from says all are welcome there are all kinds of people who actually are not welcome there. I suppose that’s one reason I resigned. At least some of the people of that church cling to prejudices against gay people. I could never convince myself that an openly gay or lesbian person really would be welcome there.

There are other reasons why a claim that all are welcome isn’t true too. I’ll cite that church I resigned from again as an example. Before I became their pastor that church had to ask the son of one of the members not to attend because he is a person with mental illness who would not control his behavior at church. He made people uncomfortable or even made them feel threatened. Is anyone who disrupts the life of a church really welcome in it? Is anyone who makes people feel unsafe at church welcome? Probably not. People come to church for a variety of reasons, but everyone who comes to church expects it to be a safe place. If a person makes it an unsafe place, that person is not welcome.

Nor should that person be welcome. It simply isn’t true that a church should in fact welcome all people. Someone who constantly disrupts the worship service isn’t and shouldn’t be welcome. Yes, perhaps the pastor and/or others of the church could work that person to help them change their behavior so that they would be welcome. That would be a good and worthwhile thing. But sometimes it just isn’t possible. Mental illness and personality disorders are realities, and sometimes people suffering from them just can’t control themselves. In that case a church may, indeed must, exclude that person from some or all of its activities.

Here’s another example of someone who shouldn’t be welcome in a church. For years I served a church that became what we call Open and Affirming shortly after I joined them as their pastor. Open and Affirming means that that church claimed to accept and affirm LGBT people, people so often excluded from church life. The church I served actually did welcome such people. Being Open and Affirming became a big part of that church’s identity in a town in which no other church openly welcomed LGBT folks at the time. Now say someone who opposed the acceptance and full equality of LGBT people came to that church for the express purpose of making LGBT people uncomfortable and working to get the church to repeal its Open and Affirming commitment. Would that person be welcome? No. Should that person be welcome? No. Becoming part of any institution requires accepting what the institution is and what it stands for. That doesn’t mean we don’t work to transform the institutions of which we are a part. Not at all. It does mean that we work to make our institutions, including our churches, more fully and authentically who they really are. It doesn’t mean we come in expressly to turn back who they have become.

Every institution or organization must have a boundary of some kind. Boundaries define identity. An organization with no boundary is no organization at all. Oh, I suppose you could form an club for example that said we are a club of whoever shows up. Yet such a club would have no purpose other than as a place for people to show up. A church certainly has more purpose than that. Church’s have identity. There are a great many churches and a great many church identities. A church’s identity shouldn’t be static. It should be something the church is aware of and always working on improving. Yet no organization can remain what it is at it most basic level if it welcomes people who want to change it at that basic level. Should a Christian church welcome people into the life and membership of the church who want to turn it into a church that worships the devil? Of course not. Like all institutions churches have boundaries. Boundaries create identity. Boundaries are necessary, and they are good when they are appropriate for the institution that has them.

“Christian” is itself a boundary. It doesn’t mean that the people of the church condemn or even dislike people of other faiths. Today many of us Christians fully accept the validity of other faiths for the people who live their connection with ultimate reality within those faiths. It does mean that this particular institution places itself within a particular faith tradition, the Christian one. It means this organization is a Christian church and not a Jewish synagogue, not a Muslim mosque, not any other kind of place of worship and any place other than a place of Christian worship. Most churches have other kinds of boundaries too. A UCC church is not a Roman Catholic church. That doesn’t mean UCC people necessarily have anything against Roman Catholic people or the Roman Catholic church. It does mean that someone who wants to come into the UCC church for the purpose of trying to turn it into a Catholic church isn’t and shouldn’t be all that welcome. A church has to have a boundary; and as much as it may proclaim that all or welcome, that boundary means that some people aren’t.

Of course my Christian sisters and brothers who proclaim that all are welcome in their church mean well. They are on the whole good, decent people who want to overcome centuries of prejudice inside the church. I want to overcome it too, but “all are welcome” is a trap for so many of us. In that ordination paper I mentioned above our candidate says all should be welcome in the church, but then even she qualifies that statement. She says all should be free to have a voice in the church as long as they aren’t harming anyone else. Ah, there’s the rub, or there’s one rub out of several. We don’t want anyone coming into our churches and harming anyone there. That’s a boundary. That’s a limitation to all are welcome. We get so enthusiastic about being welcoming that we say things that aren’t true and that really we don’t and shouldn’t mean. That’s the trap. I wish more of my progressive Christian colleagues were more aware of it.

2. The assertion that the Bible is wholly or partially divine or divinely inspired. I have written at some length on this one, so I’ll just treat it briefly here. For a fuller discussion of the issue see Part One, Stop 11, titled “Inspired?,” in my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians.[1] We all grew up, I suspect, hearing the Bible called the word of God. I’ve heard lay people in very progressive Christian churches call it God’s word when they read a passage from it in worship. We’ve all heard it called divinely inspired. For most Christians the Bible has authority because, as they believe, it somehow comes from God. The very good ordination candidate who wrote the ordination paper I keep mentioning seems to understand the Bible quite well, but she too calls it both human and divine. Calling the Bible divine or divinely inspired is a trap because of the insurmountable difficulties that classic contention raises. God’s can’t have written or inspired everything in the Bible because it contains things that just can’t be true if we understand them literally, that is, factually. We know, for example, that the plant Earth has developed over several billion years, not that it was created in seven days as Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 says it was. We know that there is no dome in the sky holding back water as Genesis 1:6-8 says there is. We know that Joshua did not make the sun stand still in the sky as Joshua 10:12-13 says he did. We know as the author of the book of Joshua did not that the apparent movement of the sun across the sky results from the rotation of the earth, not from actual movement by the sun. There are of course a great many other things in the Bible that cannot be factually true though they sound to us like assertions of facts. Some of them are assertions of facts and some of them actually aren’t, but God would not have made the factual errors we find in the Bible. God didn’t write the Bible.

The Bible also contains numerous seemingly factual contradictions that, we assume, God would have avoided had God written the Bible. Did God create the world in seven days as in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 or in one day as at Genesis 2:4a? Did Noah take one pair of every animal into the ark as at Genesis 6:19, or did he take one pair of “unclean” animals and seven pair of “clean” animals as at Genesis 7:2? In neither of these cases can both passages be factually true. They plainly contradict each other. Did Jesus fall on the ground in agony in the Garden as at Mark 14:35, or did the armed band come to arrest him fall to their knees before his divine majesty as at John 18:6? It’s unlikely to have been both. Both of those accounts can be, and are, spiritually true; but they cannot both be factually true. Factually, they are just contradictions. So no, God didn’t write the Bible.

Saying that the human authors of the Bible were divinely inspired but that they included human error in their writings also raises insurmountable problems. If some things in the Bible are divinely inspired truth and other things are human error, how do we tell those two things apart? There simply is no objective way to do it. We may have criteria for making the distinction that work for us, but they are just our subjective criteria. We can’t impose them on anyone else. When we say the Bible is either wholly or partially divinely inspired as weave a tangled web that there is no getting out of.

That’s why it is a trap. It is so easy to say that the Bible is divine. It is so easy to say that it is divinely inspired. We’ve heard it so often. Perhaps we so want it to be true. The trap is that we say it without awareness of the insurmountable difficulties it raises. We say it uncritically, and when someone of a more critical bent raises questions about it we are surprised. The questions hadn’t occurred to us, and we are unprepared to answer them. We’re actually much better off admitting that the Bible is a wholly human document. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t true or that it doesn’t contain truth. It does, but not because it is divinely inspired. Here’s how I summarized what I think is the proper approach to the Bible and its human origins in Liberating the Bible:

Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.[2]

3. The assertion that progressive Christians must be nonjudgmental. I hear it all the time. Not long before I came to be their pastor the first church I served had adopted a “mission statement” that included the phrase “Being nonjudgmental….” The ordination candidate I mentioned at the beginning of this post said that she tries to be nonjudgmental in her pastoral relationships, or words to that effect. On one level these assertions of non-judgmentalism serve an important purpose. Over the course of its long history Christianity has been far too negatively judgmental of people, positions, and practices that in fact should not be negatively judged at all. The best example in our day is the way Christians have in the past and today far too many still do condemned LGBT people simply for being who they are. Moreover, the church has been far too eager to dictate to people how they should live rather than listening to people, their cares, and their concerns and to meet them where they are. It is so easy to judge others. It is so easy to condemn others, and we humans so often do it for all the wrong reasons. The church truly must repent of its past wrongful judgments against God’s people. To the extent that people who call us to be nonjudgmental seek to right that ancient wrong, God bless them. They are doing holy work.

Yet the claim that we are simply to be nonjudgmental without more is simply false, and it is a trap. It feels so good to say we’re nonjudgmental. It is part of our efforts to welcome into the faith and the church people who have been excluded for far too long for all the wrong reasons. Yet simply saying that we are nonjudgmental is still false, it is still a trap. The truth is that there are ways in which God calls us precisely to be judgmental. After all, we can hardly say that many of the leading figures in the Bible were never judgmental. Listen, for example, to the great eighth century BCE prophet Amos[3]:

Hear this word, you cows

                of Bashan

   who are on Mount Samaria,

who oppress the poor, who crush

                the needy,

   who say to their husbands,

                ‘Bring something to

                drink!’

The Lord God has sworn by

                His holiness:

   The time is surely coming

                upon you,

when they shall take you away

                with hooks,

   even the last of you with

                fishhooks. Amos 4:1-2

Nonjudgmental indeed! Amos just let the idle wealthy who oppressed the people have it but good.

Then of course there is Jesus. Hear again this familiar story:

     Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written,

                ‘My house shall be called a house

                                of prayer for all the

                                nations?’

                   But you have made it a den

                                of robbers.’  Mark 11:15-17

Hardly what you’d call nonjudgmental, is it.

Consider too the story of the so-called “widow’s mite” at Mark 12:38-13:2. There we read that Jesus said:

Beware of the scribes, who like to walk abound in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.

Jesus then observes a poor widow putting into the temple treasury “everything she had, all she had to live on.” In other words, the temple of the scribes has just devoured her house. So Jesus says: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” Again, hardly nonjudgmental, is it.

Amos and other great Old Testament prophets judged and condemned those who oppress the poor and the vulnerable in the name of God. Jesus judged and condemned those who used the most sacred place in Judaism to exploit the people. Amos spoke up for those whom his culture condemned as sinners because they were poor. Jesus condemned religious authorities who exploited rather than served the people and who used their ministry for their own ego gratification. Judgment was very much a part of what both Jesus and prophets were about.

So if we can’t say that Jesus and the prophets were nonjudgmental, and we can’t, how are we to understand judgment as a part of the life of faith? We understand first, I think, that evil is a reality in the world. Amos saw it. Jesus saw it. Prophets of many different faith traditions have seen it all over the world. Our call is to judge, denounce, and (nonviolently) oppose evil.[4] That’s what Jesus did, and it is what he calls us Christians to do. It is what God calls all people to do. And as we judge, denounce, and (nonviolently) oppose evil we must make a distinction that Jesus made (even if prophets like Amos sometimes weren’t very good at making it). We must distinguish between the evil that people do and the people that do it. Of course that isn’t an easy distinction to make. How can we condemn the evil Hitler and Stalin did without condemning Hitler and Stalin? Maybe we can’t, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.     

The problem with saying that we progressive Christians are nonjudgmental is that it fails to make that necessary distinction between evil and the people who do it. Failing to judge and condemn evil leaves us passive. It makes us useless in God’s struggle against the evil that we fail to judge. Of what use to the world is a church that just sits there and lets evil have sway without even saying much less doing anything against it? None, that’s what. God doesn’t need uselessly passive allies. God needs prophets. God needs disciples of Jesus, and both the prophets and Jesus has no qualms at all about judging and condemning evil. Yet we must of course be cautious. Is what we’re condemning as evil really evil? Christians judged faithful same gender relationships as evil for centuries, and far too many still do. Now we know that they are nothing of the sort. Are we condemning evil and not people? We must be cautious, but we mustn’t let the need for caution stop us from making prophetic judgments. It’s not easy, but judging evil is part of our call as Christians. Let’s not let the fact that Christians have often judged wrongly stop us from judging as are called to judge.

So our faith is filled with traps. We make easy statements about important matters without giving them sufficient thought. Let’s stop doing that. Lets recognize the traps that our faith sets before us. Then let’s avoid them, OK?

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Archway Publishing, Bloomington, Indiana, 2015.

[2] Id., p. 134.

[3] The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[4] Yes, I know. At Matthew 5:39 Jesus says “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” The late Walter Wink has conclusively demonstrated that the Greek word that always gets translated as “resist” in this passage is a military term that means something like “go out in ranks against.” The line would be better translated “Do not resist an evildoer violently” See Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium, ” Doubleday, New York, 1998, Chapter 5, “Jesus’ Third Way,” pp. 98-111.