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.