What Do I Really Believe?

 

What Do I Really Believe?

December 4, 2024

I’m wondering these days what I really believe. I mean, I see so much biblical and theological bullshit on Facebook that I reject most of what the people who put it there seem to believe. It’s fairly easy for me to say what I don’t believe. I don’t believe that God is male. I don’t believe that the Bible comes in any way God. Therefore, I don’t believe that we have to take everything in it seriously. We don’t have to struggle to make everything in it somehow meaningful. A hell of a lot of the stuff in it just isn’t meaningful, and we should just reject it. I don’t believe that what the Bible presents as factual history is, for the most part, factual history. I don’t believe Jesus is coming back. I don’t believe that God damns anyone, not even horrific human monsters like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Mao Zedong. I don’t believe that Jesus has anything to do with causing God to forgive human sin. I don’t believe that his death was a sacrifice. I don’t believe that anyone has to believe in Jesus in order to be saved. I don’t believe that Jesus was literally the Son of God. I don’t believe that God is literally Trinitarian. I don’t believe that salvation is about the fate of the soul after death. I don’t believe that Christianity is the only way to God. I don’t believe that church is necessary for salvation. I don’t believe that homosexuality is inherently sinful. I don’t believe that only sexual relations between one man and one woman within marriage are the only moral sexual relations.  I don’t believe that Christian morality is about obeying laws. I don’t believe that women are in any way inferior to men. I don’t believe that faith is the acceptance of desirable but unprovable facts. I suppose there are other things I don’t believe, but these are the ones that come to mind as I write.

Now, that’s one hell of a lot of traditional Christian stuff that I don’t believe. I recognize and accept that truth. I am in no way a traditional Christian. I like to call myself a liberated Christian, and by that I mean I’m liberated from all of that unsustainable Christian bullshit. So when I clear away all of that unsustainable Christian bullshit, what am I left with? I’m left with a great deal, but that great deal requires a radical restructuring of the Christian faith in essentially all of its aspects. So here’s what I think I do believe in.

I believe that all human knowledge is, in the end, grounded in human experience not in divine revelation. I believe that an experience of a spiritual dimension of reality is a universal human experience. Not in the sense that every single human being has such an experience. Rather, in the sense that every human culture we know of, be that culture alive and active in the world today or be it dead and gone for millennia, has within it a system of myths and symbols that point to a transcendent, spiritual reality beyond our human, physical reality.

I believe that the language of faith is necessarily symbolic and mythic not literalistic. I believe with Paul Tillich that symbol and myth are the language of faith. I believe that the literalism through which most people today approach the Christian faith will eventually kill the Christian faith if that faith can’t overcome it and replace with the much truer, deeper understanding of faith as grounded in symbol and myth not in fact. I mean nothing that I say in this piece hereafter to be understood literally.

I believe the Bible to be a fully human product not in any way a divine one. I believe that it is the foundational book of the Christian faith because it always has been and because it contains the only reliable, or at least semi-reliable, texts that we have about Jesus. I believe that the Bible contains both great wisdom and great error. I believe that sometimes it gets God right, and sometimes it gets God tragically wrong. I believe that we must make choices between its different parts and contentions. It simply is not possible to read the Bible without making such choices. The issue isn’t whether anyone does that. The issue is whether a person reading the Bible can articulate the bases on which she makes her choices. My basis for making my choices is Jesus and the love of God we see in and through him. I believe that Jesus and God’s love should be every Christian’s bases for making their choices.

I believe that God is real. God is a universal spirit that sustains all of existence in existence. I believe that God so utterly transcends human reality that we can never know the fullness of God. Indeed, we can never know that anything we say about God isn’t totally false. Yet I also believe that there is a drive in humanity as a whole, though obviously not in every human being, to speak of God, to speak of those experiences that so many people have of the reality of something beyond our ordinary, physical reality. So we take the inestimable risk of speaking of that which we cannot ultimately know. That’s what theology is. That’s what the stories are in which the world’s numerous faith traditions are grounded.

I believe that faith is trust not acceptance of unprovable facts. It is trust that what we believe but cannot prove about God does not lead us badly astray. It is trust that even if it does, God still forgives and loves us absolutely. I believe that faith is a leap into uncertainty and that in that uncertainty we are sustained not by knowledge but by trust.

I believe that God is love. Love beyond human understanding. Love that encompasses and accepts all of humanity and all of human behavior, even the really, really bad stuff. I believe that God loves that which we love and that, more importantly, God loves even that which we hate both about others and about ourselves. I believe that God loves and saved Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and every other despicable monster of human history and of current human reality. I believe that God’s love so utterly transcends the finite limits of human love that we will never understand it. All we can do is stand in awe of it and give God thanks for it.

I believe that we desperately need to know that God loves us in that utterly transcendent, ultimately incomprehensible way. I believe that we are all creatures not gods, and that means that we are all fallible. We all fail. We all sin. We need to know of God’s universal, eternal love for every human being there ever has been, or is today, or will be in the future, and even for ourselves, because when we don’t know that love we live in fear. With God understood as well as we are capable of understanding God, we need never live in fear. Yes, we all suffer and die. But we need not fear that God ever abandons us in or to that suffering and dying because God is divine not human love.

I believe that God loves us and doesn’t judge us. God knows we’re all fallible. God knows we’re sinners. Yet God isn’t sitting on a throne up in the sky somewhere judging and damning us. If God does judge us, which I don’t actually believe God does, God does it in a way ground in unconditional love and not in some diabolical desire to punish us eternally or even for a time for being who we are.

I believe, with St. Paul, that absolutely nothing in all creation ever will or even can separate us from the love of God. See Romans 8:38-39 if you need a proof text for that contention. What does that contention mean? It means that sin, however dire our sin may be, doesn’t separate us from the love of God because sin is something in creation. It means that being an atheist doesn’t separate us from the love of God because atheism is something in creation. It means that blasphemy doesn’t separate us from the love of God because blasphemy is something in creation. It certainly doesn’t mean that following a faith path other than a Christian one separates us from the love of God because all human faiths exist within creation. We may sometimes believe that we have turned our backs and walked away from God. Whatever. God never turns God’s back and walks away from us. Not ever. Not for any reason in all creation.

I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, but, as I said, I believe that statement to be symbolic or mythic not factual. That means, I believe, that when we look at Jesus as we have him the New Testament but especially in the synoptic gospels we see as much as we are capable of comprehending about God. I believe that when someone asks us who God is, our best answer is: Look at Jesus.

I believe that in Jesus we see not some new divine forgiveness of sin that wasn’t there before him but rather a couple of other life changing things. We see that God loves us. Period. End of discussion. No exceptions. Especially in Christ on the cross, we see that God never forsakes us. We see that God enters into all aspects of life, including suffering and death, with us, holding us, sustaining us, and doing so even when we are convinced that God isn’t doing it at all.

And we see how God really wants us to live and to worship. We see that God has a preferential option for the poor and that God calls us to have one too. We see that God is radically nonviolent and that God calls us to be radically nonviolent too. We see that God accepts everyone and rejects no one for any reason and especially not because of anything about their particular humanity. We see that God rejects the whole notion of sacrifice as what God wants from us. God wants our worship to be done in spirit and in truth, and sacrifice has nothing to do with spirit and truth.

I believe that God absolutely does not want us sitting around on our butts waiting for Jesus to return and set the world right or waiting for God to set the world right in some other way. I believe that God wants us to be building the kingdom of God on earth not hoping that someday God will come and do it for us. I believe that faith is about conviction that that is what God wants from us combined with the courage to do it.

I believe that salvation is about that construction of the kingdom of God here on earth, not about pie in the sky when we die. God’s salvation is present with us here and now. It isn’t something we have to wait to have after we die. It is about salvation of the whole human person not just some spiritual aspect of a person we call a soul.

I believe that salvation is ultimately living in the knowledge of God’s love. See John 17:3 if you need a proof text for that contention. Living in real knowledge of the absolutely unconditional nature of God’s love for all of creation, including every single human being, including even us, saves us. Or at least, it can save us. It can save us from despair. It can save us from fear. It can save us from negative emotions like hatred, jealousy, envy, covetousness, and any other thought or emotion that keeps us from living as the whole, loving human beings God calls us to be. God’s love may well save our souls after death. I don’t think we can really know that for sure because no one has ever truly experienced death and come back to tell us about salvation after death. I do believe that we can live in trust that God’s love saves us after death though I also believe that we can’t ever really know what that means.

I believe that God does not call us to live according to any set of specific rules. I certainly don’t believe that the Ten Commandments contain come truth but are in no way an adequate guide for human living. I believe that morality consists of responding to God’s unconditional love with our own love, as limited and fallible as our love always is. Love must always the basis of our moral decision making.

So. Am I Christian? Yes, but to understand what being a Christian means for me you have to rethink just about everything you think you know about Christianity, everything you probably have been taught about Christianity by people who claim to know what it is. You have to get over all forms of religious literalism. You have to give up the notion that Jesus died to save us from sin and know that God has always saved everyone from sin and certainly didn’t require the suffering and death of God’s Son before doing it. You have to live in trust in God not in the belief that you know things about God you can’t possibly know. You have to give up all ideas of Christian exclusivism, which surely is some of the greatest Christian bullshit there has ever been.

And most of all you have to understand that God doesn’t call us to believe anything. Rather, you must understand that God calls us to love. To love as perfectly as we can while knowing that our love never is nor can it be perfect the way we understand God’s love to be. And you must understand that faith isn’t belief, it is trust. If you need a biblical foundation for that statement (though of course biblical proof texts never prove anything), look up what the Greek word pistis, which is always translated in English versions of the New Testament as faith or belief, really means. It doesn’t mean take unprovable facts as true. It means belove, it means trust.

I do not and never could believe in, that is, trust, a God who I understood to be all about sacrifice, choosing between people, judgment, or condemnation. I do believe in, that is, I trust, a God who doesn’t require righteousness of me or who condemns me when I make mistakes but rather who calls me to respond to God’s love in love. God calls each of us to love one another and all of God’s creation as fully as we possibly can. God knows that we’ll never do that perfectly. Maybe Jesus did it perfectly, but I sure don’t; and I’d be very skeptical if you claimed that you did.

So yes. I am a Christian. I have wrestled long and hard with what saying that I am a Christian means. I have tried here to state as briefly as I can what I think it means. Agree with me or don’t. Call me a heretic if you must. It wouldn’t be the first time I have been called one. I’ll close by saying with Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.”

The UCC Is Only Nominally My Denomination

 

The UCC Is Only Nominally My Denomination

I am a cradle Congregationalist. My mother, may she rest in peace, was raised in the Congregationalist church in Valley City, North Dakota. It was her mother’s church. Her father, after whom I am named, was Roman Catholic; but the family raised their four daughters in the Congregationalist church not the Roman Catholic one. Congregationalism is a Protestant Christian tradition with roots in England going back to at least seventeenth century CE. The Pilgrims who, for better or for worse, settled in New England beginning in 1620, were Congregationalists. The tradition was originally Calvinist, though it hardly is Calvinist anymore. The Pilgrims didn’t come to North America to establish religious freedom for anyone but themselves, but they came.

Three features distinguish the Congregationalist tradition from other Christian denominations. I will address two of them here.[1] It’s not that those two aren’t true of some other denominations to one extent or another as well, but they are central to Congregationalist identity. One is a commitment to social justice. This commitment has been central to congregationalism at least since the late eighteenth century. The Congregationalists ordained the first Black person ever ordained in a predominantly white Christian denomination. They were leaders in the Abolitionist movement. They ordained the first woman ordained in any Christian denomination at least since very early in the Christian tradition. They were leaders in the social Gospel movement. Since the 1970s, they have been leaders in the movement they call Open and Affirming, that is, in accepting people of all sexual orientations and gender identities as fully equal children of God, something I, by the way, fully support. Social justice has always been central to Congregationalist identity.

The other thing that has long characterized the Congregationalist tradition that I will address here is the emphasis it has placed on having highly educated and trained clergy. We see this emphasis early in the Congregationalist tradition in North America through the fact that Congregationalists founded both Harvard University and Yale University primarily for the purpose of educating clergy. Even today, most Congregationalist, now UCC (see below), clergy have MDiv degrees from fully accredited seminaries. Many of them have either a D.Min or a PhD beyond their MDiv degrees. Back in the 1990s, when your humble author first thought of becoming an ordained UCC pastor, an accredited MDiv degree was among the standard requirements for ordination. That’s why your humble author took the time, did the work, and paid the cost of obtaining such a degree.

In the 1930s, the Congregationalist churches merged with a small denomination called simply the Christian Church. It was at least loosely related to today’s Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), with which the UCC maintains a close relationship. In 1957, the Congregational Christian Churches merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ (UCC), the denomination into which your humble author was ordained and in which he served and, to a limited extent, continues to serve. The Congregationalist traditions of social justice and educated clergy continued when the Congregationalists, or at least most of them, became part of the UCC.

The UCC today has warped or abandoned the Congregationalist tradition of social justice and educated clergy in ways that offend your humble author profoundly. I’ll address social justice first. It’s not that the UCC doesn’t stand for social justice. It does, and it does so in clear and powerful ways. The problem with the UCC’s commitment to social justice is that that commitment has essentially displaced Christian spirituality within the tradition. At least for the national leadership of the denomination, today the Christian faith is about social justice and about nearly nothing else. Yet the Christian faith, while it does indeed command us to be committed to social justice, is more than that commitment. The Christian life, in addition to being a life committed to social justice, is a life of prayer. It is a life lived in communion with God the Holy Spirit. It is necessarily a life of prayer and other spiritual exercises.

Yet the UCC today places virtually no emphasis on those foundational elements of the Christian life whatsoever. Your humble author, though he is not and never has been a Roman Catholic, has an MDiv degree from a Jesuit University. He knows more than perhaps most Protestant clergy about the deep, rich spiritual traditions within Roman Catholicism. Prayer and other spiritual practices bring people closer to God and God closer to people; and, after all, the primary purpose of any religious faith is precisely to do that, to bring people and God closer together. It’s not that all UCC people have abandoned spirituality. Many of us have not. But a look any day at ucc.org, the denomination’s web site, will reveal a concern with social justice and will rarely address any other aspect of the Christian faith. The UCC’s abandonment of spirituality as the foundational part of the Christian faith is one primary reason why I say that the UCC is only nominally my denomination.

The other reason is, if anything, even more important. For a long time, the UCC’s standards and processes for ordination have been contained in something called the Manual on Ministry. The version of that manual that was in effect when I applied for ordination provided that an accredited MDiv was the primary, though not the only, criterion for ordination. Several years ago a UCC institution called MESA (Ministerial Excellence, Support, and Accreditation) put out a new Manual on Ministry. The word seminary and the phrase MDiv degree appear in that manual rarely if at all. That manual provides, essentially, that the denomination will ordain anyone who isn’t a child sex abuser to any ministry of whatsoever type anyone wants to pursue. It eliminates types ministry other than ordained ministry, which used to be limited to ministries of word and sacrament. Now it isn’t limited to anything. Rather than require an MDiv and limit ordination to women and men pursuing ministries of word and sacrament, the Manual on Ministry now provides a long list of what it calls the Marks of Faithful and Effective Authorized Ministers. It tells regional committees on ministry, which have long been the institutions through which a person becomes authorized for ministry in the UCC, to judge candidates for ordination by applying to them an unspecified number of unspecified Marks of Ministry by an unspecified method to an unspecified standard. It leaves the requirements for ordination vague at best and completely undefined at worst. The manual specifies no educational requirements for ordination whatsoever. Your humble author served for many years on his regional committee on ministry. He could have continued to serve there. The new manual ministry drove him off the committee and very nearly out of the denomination. What it does to types of and qualification for authorized ministry in the denomination is simply inexcusable.

I remain authorized for ministry in the United Church of Christ. I came to ordained ministry relatively late in life, but for over more than the last twenty years, being an ordained UCC minister has been a core part of my identity. I don’t intend to resign my standing the denomination. But I say that the UCC is only nominally my denomination because I have come to be so out of step with what it has done to authorized ministry and because of its neglect of the people’s need for spirituality, not just for a commitment social justice.

The UCC remains, as it has long been, a denomination of refuge for people who have quit or been driven out of more conservative, biblically literalist churches. I value the UCC greatly for that truth. There is, however, much that I no longer value about it. I won’t leave it. I am, after all, a cradle Congregationalist. There is no place else for me to go.[2] Nonetheless, I mourn what my church has become in at least the two ways I have specified here. Will the UCC change in those regards? I certainly doubt it. But I am old (78 as I write), and I won’t be around all that much longer. So I hang on, celebrate some things about the UCC, mourn others, and continue to live my spiritual life within the UCC. That’s all I can do, and it’s all I will do for the rest of my life.

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[1] The third is congregational polity, with which I have no problem at all.

[2] Other, perhaps, than a church of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, one member church of which I once serve as pastor. For reasons I won’t go into here, that is not really an option for me.

It Ain't Gonna Happen

 

It Ain’t Gonna Happen

November 26, 2024

There simply is no doubt about it. The Christians who wrote the texts that became the New Testament believed that Jesus would come to earth again. Likewise, there is no doubt that they believed that this posited “Second Coming” hadn’t happened yet. The oldest Christian text is 1 Thessalonians. It is a letter from Paul to a church he had founded in the Greek city of Thessalonica. Paul wrote it in the year 50 CE give or take a couple of years. The letter speaks of different things, but it appears that the main concern of the Thessalonians, and Paul’s main concern in writing to them, was that though Jesus had been gone for something like twenty years, he hadn’t come back yet. That was a big problem because these earliest Christians believed that no Christians would die before he came back. Yet of course Christians did die before he came back. The Thessalonians apparently feared that they would not be saved by being raised when Jesus finally did come back because Jesus would come only for those who were still alive when he came.

Paul writes to assure them that that is not the case. He writes: “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died.” 1 Thessalonians 4:15. He the goes on to describe his posited Second Coming: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” 1 Thessalonians 4:16. Paul assures the Christians of Thessalonia that Christ will indeed come back and would do it with a great albeit earthly flourish. Paul tells the Thessalonians that when this happens, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air….” 1 Thessalonians 17.[1] Paul, the earliest Christian writer we have, believed that Jesus would come again.

He’s not the only New Testament author who believed that Christ would indeed return. There is in the Gospel of Mark something called “the little apocalypse of Mark.” It’s at Mark 13:3-37. There Mark’s Jesus says: “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.” Mark 13:26. Matthew has Jesus also refers to the “coming of the Son of Man” at Matthew 24:27. The book of Acts refers to a Second Coming. Acts 1:11. Then, of course, there is the book of Revelation. A great many Christians have thought, wrongly, that Christ’s return is what that book is all about and that they could discern from it exactly where and when Christ would return. I’ll quote the next to last verse of the book to make the point: “The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.’” Revelation 22:20. Many other New Testament verses also refer to a Second Coming of Christ. The early Christians thought Christ would return during their lifetime. He didn’t, and that he didn’t shook the faith of many of those Christians, so strong was their conviction that he would return soon.

Christ didn’t return then, and Christ has not returned now, at least not in the way those early Christians expected. So I think we have to ask: What was that erroneous belief in a speedy return of Christ to earth all about? We explain it, I think, by looking at the context in which early Christians expressed that belief. These Christians believed in a Second Coming for one reason and one reason only. Jesus Christ had been here. He had preached and healed. He was crucified, then rose from the grave and ascended to heaven. But it hadn’t worked! The world was still as unjust and violent as it had ever been, and those God-damned Romans were still doing a lot of the injustice and violence. It seems they believed that the first coming of Christ hadn’t done them much good, or at least that it had not done them the kind of good they wanted.

Surely, these people thought, God wouldn’t let the world’s evil go on indefinitely. Surely God would send Jesus back to finish the job he left unfinished when he left the first time. And, they believed, Jesus would be very different upon his Second Coming than he had been during his first coming. They believed that this time Jesus would come in power and glory. See the quote of Mark 13:26 above. They knew that during his human life on earth Jesus of Nazareth had neither power nor glory, at least not in the earthly sense of those words. He had the power to cure illness and calm storms, but he didn’t even try to get rid of the Romans by using power against them. That, however is exactly what these people said Christ would do when he came back. He’d have power, worldly power, and he'd use it to kill off of the bad guys and set the world aright.

So here’s what I hear these early coreligionists of mine saying. They’re saying: “Hey Jesus! All that stuff about love, acceptance, inclusion, and forgiveness that you gave us when you were here before was nice enough. Sure, those words probably came from God. But they didn’t work! So now, come back and do it our way! Do it with violence. Smite the bad guys. Destroy Rome. Get rid of everyone and everything that is violent and oppressive. Yeah. That’s what we need. So, Lord Jesus, come on back down here and get on with it. Come back and do it our way this time!”

The great Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan characterizes this belief brilliantly. I have heard him say that “belief in the Second Coming is the great denial of the first coming.” Here’s what I understand Crossan to mean. What was the first coming all about? It was about Jesus bringing a word from God about how the world should be and would be if it lived by God’s rules not by human rules. Jesus wanted the world to change, but he didn’t want anyone to use violence to make it change, and he certainly didn’t use violence to make it change. Instead, he wanted to change the world by freeing people’s minds and spirits from the ways of the world so they could be open to the ways of God. See, for example, the story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac at Mark 5:1-13, in which Jesus exorcizes a demon named Legion who was actually a great many separate demons all possessing one unfortunate man. He got Legion out of the man, and the man returned to his right mind. A legion was an organizing unit of the Roman army. So, symbolically, Jesus got Rome out of the possessed man, and the possessed man became sane. Jesus wants us to get truly sane by getting the world out of our minds and souls too. Our scripture tells us that Jesus had power over demons, but it wasn’t the power of physical force. It wasn’t the power of violence. Jesus was all about love and nonviolent transformation of the world through transformation of individual people.

The early Christians who believed in the Second Coming did not want Jesus to come back and do more of that. After all, it hadn’t worked! Sure. Some people experienced the inner transformation that Jesus said was the way to transform the world, but the world most definitely hadn’t been transformed. It looked very much the same as it had when Jesus was here the first time. The early Christians desperately wanted the world transformed, but Jesus hadn’t done it the first time he had a chance. So they said he’d get a second chance. He’d come back and do it right this time. He’d do it our way. He’d employ the world’s ways of hatred and violence not God’s ways of love and peace. nd this time he’d get the job done.

See how all of that denies Jesus’ first coming? It doesn’t focus on divine teachings of love, forgiveness, inclusivity, and nonviolence. It focuses on the world’s ways not on God’s ways. It really does amount to no more than calling on Jesus to come back and do it our way this time. And it ain’t gonna happen. Jesus is not going to come back sometime in the future to scourge the earth with violence. That’s not Jesus’ way. It’s not God’s way.

So we have to ask ourselves: What are we to do with all of this blasphemous nonsense about a Second Coming. One way I’ve heard of dealing with it is to say that the Second Coming has already happened. It happened a very long time ago. The book of Acts tells of when it gives the account we know as Pentecost. Pentecost is the story of the Holy Spirit coming upon the disciple community forty days after Jesus’ Resurrection. The Spirit comes upon them with a sound like the sound of a mighty wind and with tongues as of fire. See Acts 2:1-4. And what does the Spirit do with the disciples? It doesn’t turn them into an army. It inspires them to get on with God’s work in the world. That’s quite a model for us, don’t you think?

In Trinitarian theology, the Holy Spirit is both the same as the Son and not the same as the Son at the same time.[2] But since one of the attributes of the Holy Spirit is that she is identical with the Son, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples is the same thing as the Son, that is, Jesus Christ, coming upon the disciples.[3] The Christian tradition has never thought of Pentecost as the Second Coming; but then, the Christian tradition has gotten a awful lot of things wrong over the centuries. It makes sense for us to look our Christian tradition in the eye and say, “You got this one wrong too.” Which may or may not work for you. It sort of works for me although it goes so against the tradition and the ways I and the tradition have always thought of Pentecost that I don’t really find this solution to the problem of the supposed Second Coming completely satisfying.

The other way to deal with the problem of the Second Coming is simply to reject the whole notion. To say to our forbears in the faith who believed so firmly in it, “Sorry. You were just wrong.” Indeed, I cannot doubt that they were wrong. Even if we overlook the part of their belief that said that Jesus would return during their lifetimes, perhaps even before any Christians died, the belief in the Second Coming remains simply untenable.

There are at least a few reasons why it is untenable. First, the texts that speak of it are nearly two thousand years old; and unless we accept Pentecost as the Second Coming, the Second Coming hasn’t happened yet. If God hasn’t caused it to happen for nearly two thousand years, how can we think that God is still going to do it sometime in the future? I, for one, cannot think that; and I think a great many people today can’t think it either. Believing that it is still going to happen is nonsense. The people who believe it are mostly biblical literalists, but they aren’t perfect biblical literalists because they ignore or somehow try to explain away the part of the story that says the Second Coming would happen in the first century CE. I’m not a biblical literalist, and I am convinced that biblical literalism is killing the Christian faith. Be that as it may, there is no denying that the Second Coming as our forbears expected it hasn’t happened. It is nonsense to believe that it still will.

A second reason for us to reject the notion of a Second Coming of Christ is the harm that notion has caused over the centuries. Time and time again people, well intentioned or not, have claimed to have determined when and where the Second Coming will happen. They usually ground their prediction in an amateur reading of the book of Revelation, believing that it is something that it is not, namely, really a prediction of the future.[4] Time and time again gullible but good-faith people have accepted someone’s prediction of the Second Coming. Sometimes they have done extreme things like quit their jobs and sell their homes because they believed they wouldn’t be needing them anymore. Even worse, the failure of the prediction in which they had put so much faith surely has shaken or even destroyed their Christian faith altogether. Belief in the Second Coming has caused a lot of harm. We really do need to get rid of it.

And there is a perhaps even more compelling reason to reject the idea of a Second Coming of Christ. It calls for God and Jesus Christ to do things neither God nor Jesus Christ would ever do. It calls on God to send Jesus Christ this time not as a poor boy from a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire but in power and glory as the world understands those terms. It calls on God to appear with trumpets and angels proclaiming his coming. It calls on Christ to descend from the heavens through the air not to be born to a virgin mother the way he was the first time around. To come in some way even more unnatural than his virgin birth was.

Worse, it calls it calls for violence. It calls for God and Jesus Christ to rid the world of its bad guys basically by slaying them. That may well be what most of us humans (though not your humble author) would do with them if we could. It is not, however, something Jesus would ever do. He said, “Love your enemies.” A bumper sticker the Church of the Brethren once put out read: “When Jesus said love you enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” Duh! Because it contradicts one of God’s basic characteristics, the characteristic of love, belief in the Second Coming is indeed blasphemous.

And finally, belief in the Second Coming calls us away from that which God calls us to. We know from Christ’s first coming that the work of transforming the world is humanity’s work to do. It is our work to do. God calls us to go into the world to care for people in need and to confront the powers of violence and oppression with God’s word of love. The historical Jesus surely never called anyone to just sit around and wait for God to come to solve the world’s problems. That, however, is exactly what belief in the Second Coming calls us to do. It says to us, “You don’t have to do kingdom work in the world. Just be patient. Someday Jesus will come back and do it for you.”

That notion is simply un-Christian. It is un-Christian because, as Crossan says, it denies Jesus’ first coming. It denies what he came to do. It denies the essence of what he taught us. We really do need to jettison it. It was wrong when the first Christians latched onto it in the first century CE. It is wrong today. So let’s move beyond it, shall we? Let’s get on with transforming the world ourselves. Christ isn’t going to return to do it for us. Folks, it ain’t gonna happen, and that’s all there is to it. Amen.

 

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[1] This is the sole biblical passage that sounds anything like the absurd notion of “the Rapture,” a word that appears nowhere in the Bible in the sense our fundamentalist Christians who believe in it give it.

[2] Yes. I know. That’s not possible. It is indeed not possible, it’s just true.

[3] And at the same time not that at all, but don’t worry about it. Trinitarian theology is valuable precisely because it makes no sense.

[4] It’s really a condemnation of empire, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.

Fools Give You Reasons, Wise Men Never Try

 

Fools Give You Reasons, Wise Men Never Try

In the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, there’s a song titled “Some Enchanted Evening.” The song is about falling in love. It comes when the lead male character Emile has seen the lead female character Nellie and fallen in love with her. He sings to her about having seen her “across a crowded room.” The song includes this line: “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” The line refers to falling in love at first sight. I don’t really believe in love at first sight. I knew the two women with whom I have fallen in love for a long time before I fell in love with them. I was more than surprised when they fell love with me. I still find it rather hard to believe that they did. And I thank God that they did, for they have made my life richer and more worth living than it would have been without them. Love is what makes life worth living. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Yet I believe that the line “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try” applies in more contexts than falling in love. It’s true there, but it has much more truth as well. Thank you Oscar Hammerstein II. It is a profoundly true statement about love; but, perhaps surprisingly, it is also a true statement about faith in God. See, people have been trying to give reasons for believing in the reality of God for a very long time. Thomas Aquinas tried to do it through reason, though he didn’t even really rely on his proof for his faith in God. In our world today, countless numbers of people have rejected the reality of God because the reality of God so vastly exceeds the puny realities of human reason. They believe, so it seems, that you cannot accept the reality of anything that isn’t reasonable, of anything the truth of which you can’t prove or disprove through the scientific method. Of anything for which there are not purely rational reasons.

It’s true. You can’t really reason your way to God. You can reason your way to the question of whether or not there is an ultimate cause of all that is. You can reason your way to the question of an uncaused cause from which everything else proceeds. Aristotle did that a very long time ago. You can’t, however, reason your way beyond the conclusion that there must be an uncaused cause because otherwise nothing would exist. But “must be” and “is” are not the same thing. Reason leads most people today to atheism. At best, it can lead you to agnosticism, to thinking there must be something at the beginning but not knowing whether there ever was an uncaused cause or not.

Acceptance of the reality of God is not rational, but it is not unreasonable. You can get to that point of agnosticism, then make what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” One can choose to have faith that there was and is an ultimate cause of all that is, namely, that God is real. Then you can proceed to live on the basis of that faith. Many of us have done that. Perhaps, in a way, every person of faith has done it.

But faith in God doesn’t actually arise in a cerebral vacuum. There are existential reasons, though not rational ones, for accepting faith in God. One of those reason is that human beings have believed in some kind of supernatural reality for as long as there have been human beings or for at least as long as human beings have left any record of themselves. Every human culture that we know of has or has had some kind of faith system. Every human culture that we know of has had some kind of belief in some transcendental reality beyond the reality we perceive with our usual senses. Such acceptance of a reality beyond normal reality is a perfectly human thing to do.

Moreover, a great many humans have, over the millennia, had personal experience of such a transcendent reality. That’s not true of everyone, but it is true of a lot of us; and it always has been. Things happen in life that, as far as the person having the experience can tell, come from beyond ordinary reality. I once felt myself lifted up as sunk to my knees in grief over the death of my wife when I could not possibly have done it myself. The force that lifted me has to have come from beyond me, and I trust that it did. Years later that same wife appeared to me as I was driving to have the dog that had been hers and mine put down to end his suffering. She’s not God of course, but that experience I had of her appearing to me is, or at least I can trust that it is, an experience of a reality beyond this reality breaking into this reality if only very, very briefly. Believing in such a transcendent reality is not rational in the sense that you cannot reason yourself to it, but it is not irrational either.

Yet, of course, a conviction of the reality of some transcendent plane of being that we usually call God does not prove that that plane of being is real. About the reality of God, fools give you reasons, wise men never try. Reason has little or nothing to do with faith in God. Which does not make God unreal or irrational. It just means that God transcends human reason. Having faith in God has no reasons, at least not in the sense of your being able to reason yourself to it. No one has ever truly reasoned their way to faith in God. Wise men and women don’t try for reasons. They don’t need them. They believe because to them it is just right to believe. They believe from experience not from reasons.

So no. Belief in God isn’t reasonable, but it isn’t irrational. It is human. There is something about us humans that drives us to it. That makes us long for it. Sure. We can deny whatever that is. We can ignore it. We can live, more or less, without it. But that doesn’t make it unreal for those who feel it. For those who heed it. To strive for connection with transcendent reality is a existential thing for us humans to do. It is part of who we are. Reasons? No thanks, at least not rationalistic ones. Experience? Absolutely. Trust? Absolutely. Being fully human? Absolutely. I only wish that more people in my rationalistic culture got it. You can’t reason your way to God. You can reach out for God, and you can trust that God is reaching out for you. May it be so.

 

Pastoral or Prophetic?

 

Pastoral or Prophetic?

November 19, 2024

I belong to a group of four people ordained in the United Church of Christ that meets weekly via Zoom. Two of us, including me, are fully retired. One is transitioning to retirement. One isn’t sure whether she is retired or not. We call ourselves a lectionary group, and most weeks we get around to talking about one of more of the readings for the upcoming Sunday from the Revised Common Lectionary. We also “check in,’ that is, we share what’s going on in our lives. Our doing so is sometimes helpful, sometimes not, but we keep doing it week after week. We’ve been doing it for years. I like and, more importantly, respect the other members of the group, and, as far as I know, they respect me. The group must be meaningful for all four of us or else we wouldn’t keep meeting the way we do. Which doesn’t mean we agree with each other on everything. We come from different backgrounds. We have different strengths and different interests. Still, we meet online and talk, and that is a good thing.

We met this morning, and as we did a difference between the other three members of the group and me became perfectly clear to me. I’ve noticed it before, but it was screaming at me this morning. It is a difference in what we believe ourselves called to be doing these days. In terms of Christian ministry, it is the difference between charity and justice. Put another way, it is the difference between being pastoral and being prophetic. It is the difference between primary focus on the personal or primary focus on the societal or political. It is indeed a significant difference.

It came up this morning because I am scheduled to preach at a local UCC church this coming Sunday. I am using part of one of the readings for that Sunday from the Revised Common Lectionary. It is 2 Samuel 23:3b-25a: “One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land. Is not my house like this with God?” NRSV. The “my” in question here is King David. The “my house” refers to him and his descendants as kings of Israel and Judah.

A couple of my Zoom friends and I drew very different lessons from these words. One or two of my colleagues wanted to dismiss them as meaningless to us because they refer to the house of David. There hasn’t been a house of David for over 2,500 years, and no descendant of David, of course, has ever ruled over our country. I said no. These ancient biblical texts are still alive for us because they have broader meanings that transcend their narrow, technical meaning. I didn’t say, but I understand, that that doesn’t mean you can read anything you want into them. You have to stay true to the text as you seek meaning in it. But that’s not hard to do in the case of these verses. These verses are about the blessing of just rulers whether they be individual people or governmental institutions. Just rule is a great blessing for the people. That meaning is clearly there in these few words. Conversely, these words also at least imply that unjust rule is a curse for the people, which indeed it is.

Whereupon one of our group in particular started talking, as he usually does, about taking care of individual people in need right where we are. He has a great history of doing that. He has worked with unhoused people in the greater Seattle area for years. He has done great work with them. He has aided individual people, and he has advocated for the homeless at the state and local level. I respect him greatly for that work. It is work of vital importance, and this man has done more of it than just about anyone I know, myself included.

This kind of work is what we can call “pastoral.” Most of us ordained folks are or at one time in our lives have been called to pastoral work. That work is often the work of being a parish pastor to a local church, but it can include other things too. Pastoring is the work of caring for people. It is sacred work. It is standing with Christ’s people both individually and collectively, helping them in whatever way we can in whatever is going on in their lives.

We can also call this kind of work, or at least some of it, “charity.” It is giving of what we have to people in need of it. It is often the giving of money to charitable institutions, but it can be other sorts of giving too. It can be giving of one’s time. It can be what may seem to be very little, like simply sitting with someone who is in need, something that is far more powerful than most of us realize. Charity can be using whatever skills, talents, and abilities we have to help others. President Jimmy Carter has famously done that working with Habitat for Humanity. There is no question but that God calls all of us to do as much charity as we can.

But charity is not all that God calls us to. God also calls all of us to be prophets. At Numbers 11:29, for example, Moses says: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Now, to understand what that means, we have to understand what a prophet is. In common parlance, a prophet is often understood to be one who can accurately predict the future. That, however, is not the primary meaning of the word in the Hebrew Bible, where the biblical prophets mostly appear. Yes, the prophets of ancient Israel did sometimes accurately predict the future, especially when they said that the Hebrew kingdoms of Judah and Israel would be destroyed because of their sinfulness. A prophet, however, was, and is, someone who speaks the truth of God to the people, which may or may not include predicting the future. The Hebrew prophets often say that God has given them a word to proclaim to the people, and that’s what they did.

I have a personal experience of God calling me to be in effect if not in title a prophet. In 1994, I was a lawyer trying to run my own law office. I was not succeeding at it, and I was finding it nearly impossible to make myself do the little bit of legal work I had to do. So one day I cleared my mind as much as I could and asked myself: Why am I having so much trouble practicing law? From somewhere deep inside me the answer immediately, instantaneously came: “You’re not a lawyer!” Which was of course ridiculous since I was actually a lawyer; but when I argued with the answer, the answer just kept coming: “You’re not a lawyer!” So I asked myself: “So what am I?” Again the answer appeared in literally no time at all: “You’re a preacher!” Which was of course also ridiculous because at that time I was nothing of the sort. So I ended my psychospiritual exercise and went back to trying, unsuccessfully, to practice law. Years later, of course, a preacher is precisely what I became.

Now, my inner voice, which I now understand to have been the voice of the Holy Spirit, said I was a preacher not that I was a prophet. But what is preaching? Is it not proclaiming, to the best of one’s ability, the truth of God? Is it not attempting, to the best of one’s ability, to bring divine truth to the people in ways that are meaningful to them? One way to do that is to be pastoral, and I am arrogant enough to believe that I have been a good pastor for the people of the churches I served.

But the call to be a preacher is also, necessarily and unavoidably, a call to be a prophet. Or at the very least, I am convinced in the depth of my soul that my call to be a preacher included a call to be a prophet. Of course, I’m no Moses. I’m no Isaiah or Jeremiah or Amos or Micah. I am, however, someone with an understanding of as much of God’s truth as I am capable of having. And I am someone with a certain skill with language both written and spoken. At least since I did that exercise thirty years ago in which God told me I’m a preacher, I have been convinced that I have truth to tell that the world desperately needs to hear. It’s not my truth. It is God’s truth as I understand it, truth that I have discerned over the entire course of my life but most especially since I started seriously to study the Bible and good Christian theology many, many years ago. It is truth I have learned from Tillich, Hall, Borg, Crossan, and other great theologians and popularizers of good Christian theology. It is not truth that God has revealed exclusively or especially to me. But it is truth of which I am quite sure, and it is truth that I truly feel called to proclaim. I truly believe that God calls me to be a prophet to the limited extent that I am able to be and within the narrow confines within which I may have any influence.

Two weeks ago today, my country, the United States of America, elected the American fascist Donald Trump president for the second time. It gave Trump’s cult of personality called the Republican Party control of both houses of Congress. In other words, my country put itself in the hands of American fascists. Donald Trump is following a well known fascist handbook of telling lie after lie after lie and of stirring up public rage at innocent people while telling the public that only he can deal with those horrible peope effectively. That’s what Hitler did with the Jews. It’s what Trump is doing with immigrants.

Now, tragically, Trump will soon be in a position of power from which he can, and will, unleash immense amounts of harm on this country and on God’s world. He will give the selfishly wealthy even more control over the country than they have had before, which was already far too much. He will destroy as many governmental programs that actually care for people as he can. He will at least attempt to do with people who have immigrated to this country what Hitler originally wanted to do with the Jews, namely, not kill them but deport them. Nothing but harm will come from the upcoming Trump presidency, and about that there simply is no doubt.

So, what does God call us to do today? To do charity of course. There have always been far too many people in this country who need charity. The need for charity is one of the primary things the American political and economic systems create. The upcoming Trump administration will make even more people poor. It will discriminate in new ways against people Trumpists don’t like, people like transgender folk. We are in for hard times, harder times, indeed, than this country has faced at least in decades and in some ways has faced ever. And some of us are in for harder times than others of us are.

Therefore, we must be prophetic. We must speak up. We must speak out. We must speak truth to the people. We must speak truth to power. Can any one of us actually defeat the Trump administration? No, of course not. But that truth does not relieve us of the obligation to speak out. To proclaim God’s truths of love, justice, and peace to an aching world. We simply have no choice but to do it.

Now, I just mentioned “peace.” Peace is of course a kingdom value, and I mean in no way to diminish that truth. But during my Zoom lectionary group meeting this morning, one of us spoke of us pursuing “the ways that make for peace.” When I heard that I thought: No. Pursuing the ways that make for peace is not what we are called to do today. In 1933, the Nazis were in the process of taking over the government of Germany. Hitler became chancellor, the head of the government, by legal means in January of that year. But he had no intention of retaining power by legal means. He intended to create a fascist dictatorship grounded in violence, hatred, and fear. The German people were not called to work for peace with the Nazis. Rather, God called them to denounce the Nazis. God called them to be prophets. Prophets for peace, yes; but not peace with the Nazis. Peace opposed to the Nazis. The bringing of peace by getting rid of the Nazis.

Some German Christians got it, but most didn’t. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an anti-Nazi prophet, though we can disagree over whether or not he was justified in joining a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Far too few Germans got it about Hitler, but God was calling all of them to resist. To resist nonviolently I suppose, but still to resist. To be prophets. To speak God’s truth in the face of the diabolical lies the Nazi regime was feeding them.

Far too few Germans got it about Hitler, and far too few Americans get it about Donald Trump. Trump has already begun to create an administration intending to destroy the American government rather than build it up as a source of justice for the American people. He’s doing it because he is a fascist who wants to be an American dictator; and fascist dictators cannot have healthy governmental institutions functioning the way they should, for such institutions get in a dictator’s way. Fascist dictators like the one Trump wants to be need personal loyalty not professional competence. In Nazi Germany, soldiers and civil servants signed the Hitler oath in which they pledged allegiance to Hitler not to the German constitution. Trump and his people will swear an oath to support and defend the US Constitution, but they won’t mean it. Trump is loyal only to himself. His people are loyal only to him. Will he introduce an explicit Trump oath and require all American soldiers and civil servants to take it? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Or not just wait and see. Rather, be God’s prophets in the dangerous, threatening atmosphere Trump is creating and will continue to create in our country. Speak God’s truth every chance we get. Proclaim God’s word of justice for the poor, the weak, and the marginalized every change we get. Speak God’s truth to everyone we know. Speak God’s truth in public every chance we get. Speak God’s truth to power strongly and without ceasing. Will our doing it change anything? Perhaps not, but we know one thing for certain. Our failing to heed God’s call for us to be prophets will only ease Trump’s path to the dictatorship he so wants to create. So let’s be prophets, shall we? It’s the least we can do.

On Trump's Deportation Plans

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to the Everett Herald, my local paper here in Washington state.

President-elect Trump says he wants to deport 15-20 million people. His doing so would destroy the agricultural and construction industries. Beyond that, before they decided to kill them all, the Nazis planned to deport all the Jews. They had a plan to deport them to Madagascar, a plan they gave up only because the British navy stood in the way. Deporting the people you have made your scapegoats and whom you have used to rile up hatred among the people against the people who aren't really the cause of any problems is an old-time fascist tactic. Donald Trump is a fascist, and he is following a fascist playbook. Is it too late for the American people to wake up to who they have actually made president? I pray not and fear so.

Is Trump a Totalitarian?

 Is Trump a Totalitarian?

 

In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder (thank God for Timothy Snyder!) he says that by totalitarianism Hannah Arendt didn’t mean an all-powerful state. She meant the disappearance of the distinction between public and private life. Is that happening among us? Maybe. I mean, I’m not sure I make much of a distinction between my public life (such as it is) and my private life. There is, of course, always an interplay between one’s private life and one’s pubic life; but there is, or at least must be, always a distinction between the two. The example of the disappearance of such a distinction that I know best isn’t Nazi Germany, it is Communist Russia. When the Communist oppression was at its most extreme, people had to treat their private lives as if they were public. The could not, for example, say things in their private lives that they could not say in public because they could never know that the person they said it to wouldn’t report them to the KGB. People of course held private opinions about public matters that they couldn’t express in public. But one of my learnings about Stalinism is that everyone opposed it, and everyone thought they were the only person who did. They thought that because no one could express their opinion even in private. People thought they were the only one who disagreed because the Communists had obliterated the distinction between public and private. 

I don’t think I conform to some fascistic norms in my public life just as I don’t in my private life. But I’m just one isolated individual. What about society as a whole? I don’t think the distinction between one’s public and one’s private lives has disappeared to any significant extent. Trump is, after all, an authoritarian not a totalitarian either in Arendt’s sense or in the sense of an all-powerful government. As an authoritarian, Trump wants to suppress anyone who opposes him publicly. He doesn’t, however, give a damn about what people think in private. That may be the only distinction between him and a true totalitarian.  

So I’m not sure Trump will try to impose totalitarianism on us. Totalitarianism requires an ideology. The Soviet Communists certainly had an ideology. The Nazis certainly had an ideology. The Chinese government today has an ideology, though it isn’t clear that the North Korean regime has one. Donald Trump does not have an ideology. He isn’t smart enough to have one, and he would never take the time to develop one. He does, however, have a desire for power, indeed, much more than a desire but an ego need to have it. So I will not say Trump is a totalitarian—yet. Whether or not he becomes one in the future remains to be seen.