Christianity: The Missing Years

Posted on April 28, 2023 by me

If you’ve been raised in the western world, chances are pretty good that you are completely unaware of 600 to 1,000 years of Christianity, even if you’ve gone to seminary. In the same way that conservatives don’t like to talk about our racist history, the western evangelical church doesn’t like to acknowledge that a different Christianity once existed (and still does, but it’s largely ignored). The reason that it’s ignored is because early Christian history not only disagrees with western theology, it undermines it.

What we know as Eastern Orthodoxy is the continuation of traditions that began before Constantine made Christianity legal, before Augustine perverted the gospel, and before the enlightenment created the western mindset, and before the reformers reformed anything. The Eastern Church was never reformed; it didn’t need to be. While not perfect, by any means, the Eastern Church avoided the western pitfalls such as Augustine, Cartesian philosophy and the errors of the Roman Catholic Church, and certainly has avoided Christian fundamentalism. I believe there are many things we can learn from the Eastern Church without becoming Orthodox, although they frown upon that concept.

Several years ago I began studying a bit about Augustine, clearly the inspiration for both Luther (who was an Augustinian monk) and John Calvin. What I found was that Augustine had some very strange ideas about the nature of good and evil that predated his conversion to Christianity, and seemed to be continually plagued by his very worldly past. I believe these things contributed to his concept of original sin (not an early Christian belief) which in turn spawned doctrines of the total depravity of man, penal substitutionary atonement, eternal damnation, and more. Good stuff, right?

The main reason that he got away with these teachings is that he wrote in Latin, which the Church leadership didn’t read; they were a Greek-speaking Church. It wasn’t until long after that they discovered his ideas, which they have rejected. As a result, Augustine is not considered a saint in the Orthodox Church, although he is respected as having been a Bishop.

I have been writing what someday might be a book, tentatively titled Unboxing God. I’ll be posting tidbits here from time to time.

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Evangelical Shadow Games — Plato’s Cave Reimagined

Posted on April 21, 2023 by me

I was in the shower a while back thinking about Evangelicalism’s newest boogeyman, Critical Race Theory, and I thought of this analogy. (Yes, being pelted with steaming hot water can have revelatory effects.)

Some of you will be familiar with the Plato’s Cave analogy, where reality exists outside the cave, creating shadows on the walls of the cave. The shadows are the cave-dwellers’ (i.e. us) view of reality—they have no concept of the 3-D, full color reality outside. Likewise, the world we see is a mere shadow of reality which exists outside of our view.

The Cave is an interesting concept. Now imagine the world of Evangelicalism, the post-Enlightenment, Modernist theological construct that Evangelicals call reality, is a cave. Along comes something called post-modernism, which starts throwing unwanted shadows as well as some light on the wall of Evangelicalism. Then along comes “emergent” or “progressive” Christianity, throwing more shadows and light. If that isn’t enough, an imaginary monster they wrongly call Critical Theory comes along, throwing even more shadows and light. The original shadows are being threatened. The Modernist evangelical cave-dwellers go crazy.

Evangelicals cannot deal with anything from outside of the cave. They must do one of two things:

  1. Retreat further into the Cave.
  2. Coax you inside the cave with them so they can argue with you about the shadows. Once that happens, you have lost, as you are no longer talking about reality, but about the 2-dimensional shadows of the cave.

This is why the responses to “progressive Christianity” and so-called Critical Race Theory that I’ve seen are complete nonsense. Much of it boils down to “it doesn’t fit in our cave décor, so it’s wrong,” or more simply, “it’s wrong so it’s wrong.” In philosophical terms, it’s a hodgepodge of fallacious reasoning, including strawman, generalization, false dichotomy, false equivalence, slippery slope, and the list goes on. Basically, it is the same collection of logical fallacies used to combat any other non-evangelical thoughts. Even if their arguments are technically valid (the form of the argument is logical), their presuppositions are flawed—so garbage in, garbage out. Everything eventually goes back to their foundational premisses which need to be challenged.

Here are some takeaways from my analogy and related thinking:

  1. I have, over time, developed an anti-Evangelical bias with, I believe, valid reason.
  2. The prime directive for Evangelicalism is to protect Evangelicalism at all costs, even at the expense of truth and the gospel.
  3. Don’t get stuck arguing about the meaning of shadows.
  4. Stay outside of the cave.
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America’s acceptable human sacrifice

Posted on March 1, 2023 by me

Many years ago I knew this guy named Rodney who was killed at this particularly horrific intersection, where an earlier death had occurred. Everyone knew it was a crazy dangerous intersection. Sometime after Rodney’s death, they redid the intersection. It’s still a mess, but far less dangerous. I remember thinking, “we had to sacrifice at least 2 people to get this problem fixed.”

From that time on, I have viewed progress as a type of acceptable human sacrifice. By raising speed limits, deaths increase. So, we sacrifice a few hundred people a year to the god of expediency. We had an extremely dangerous intersection near our house where countless collisions had occurred–I have no idea how many people were sacrificed over 22 years before they made it a 4-way stop.

We know certain industries like mining result in a predictable number of illnesses and deaths, but we willingly sacrifice them to the gods of energy and progress. And let’s not forget the god of the 2nd Amendment. I don’t have to say any more about that. We have gods of policing, law and order, gods of races, and the list goes on, each involving the sacrifice of human lives.

Will future civilizations look back on us as a culture who routinely engaged in human sacrifice to their gods? Will they recognize our culture not as the pinnacle of progress and human rights, but as a culture of brutality?

Are human sacrifices necessary for our society to exist (and “progress”)? Must there be homeless and poverty for the “greater good?”

I don’t pretend to have the answers, I just anguish over the reality.

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When I read the Bible for the first time

Posted on February 20, 2023 by me

One morning a few years ago, I sat down on our couch and started to read the Gospel of Matthew from start to finish. I had, of course, read the book before, but perhaps not as one cohesive work. It would prove to be quite dangerous.

As I read through the story, I began to realize that the story it told, and the teachings of Jesus, presented what could be described as a “liberal” worldview. Capitalism didn’t fit into the picture, nor did any kind of superiority. The Gospel of Matthew contains the Sermon on the Mount, several parables, instructions to love your enemy and to forgive others. Jesus quotes the Old Testament to “liberalize” it, turning it from a “judge others” approach to a “forgive others” one.

“They” say that Matthew’s purpose is to show that Jesus is the Messiah. I think the Gospel of Matthew revolutionizes first Century Judaism.

Anyway, my mind turned completely around, as if I’d read this stuff for the first time, and also realized that Jesus did not support the kind of world that Sean Hannity (who I listened to daily) and Donald Trump espoused. In fact, there was nothing conservative about Jesus at all.

This doesn’t mean that Jesus would be a Democrat–his kingdom is definitely not an Earthly one (at least at this point), but his dream was that his Kingdom would be done on earth. This means radical love, radical forgiveness, and radical humility, which means more liberal than American politics in total.

Who is my neighbor? Forgive how many times? Blessed are the who?

So yes, that day was the first day I had actually read this book, and it changed my life.

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