The Gospel of Matthew is written from a time of crisis and presents an urgent message in response to that coming crisis. While its apocalyptic tone can be confusing and even off-putting, I believe that Matthew has something to say about the “end times” that ― far from being irrelevant ― contains a profoundly good, life-changing message that we desperately need to hear in our time, right now.

Many feel that we are in a time of crisis today. Donald Trump’s campaign capitalizes on those feelings and fears. At the RNC Trump began his acceptance speech by saying “Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation” before launching into a long dark litany of signs of the end that he promised to rescue us all from.

In these times of crisis, it is common for people to say that the morality and values we would ordinarily hold to should justifiably be abandoned. We can see that throughout history, and we can see it now as well. This has been the argument of those evangelicals who support Trump. They are aware that he is morally the polar opposite of a family values guy, and further aware that he is not someone who will promote peace or work to resolve conflict. Quite the contrary, he is someone who they hope will use extreme strongman tactics to “make America great, ” such as banning all Muslims from the country, killing and torturing the families of suspected terrorists, breaking off our NATO treaty agreements unless we “get paid” by other countries, using more nukes, revoking the freedom of the press to say anything critical of him, and a host of other things one commonly associates with the behavior of a demagogue or tyrannical dictator. Those are considered a necessary evil that is warranted in the present crisis. Indeed these evangelicals do not see these as a problem to be tolerated, but as strength and virtue. They see violence as good and trust in it as the means to being “saved” in the crisis.

This all echoes the messianic hopes people held at the time of Jesus.  Then as now, in a time of crisis people look for a strongman, a savior who will rescue us with his mighty sword. That was the messianic hope, too. They were expecting for the messiah to be a warrior-king who would kill the enemy Gentiles. They did not expect a servant-Lord who would die for sinners and offer salvation to both Jews and enemy Gentiles. The religious leaders did not expect Jesus, and it seems that many evangelical leaders are looking for a different kind of messiah today as well.

In times of crisis, the common response is to feel the need for extreme actions in response to the crisis. As Jerry Falwell Jr. put it in his speech at the RNC, “We are at a crossroads where our first priority must be saving our nation.” Consequently,  as he clarified in an interview, social issues, personal morality (not to mention basic human decency) all fall to “the last ones on the list – very bottom.” The basic logic here is that these things that we would normally see as immoral and hurtful are all okay in the crisis. 

What is unique about Matthew’s Gospel is that he proposes that our response to crisis should be the opposite ― we should not seek to justify extreme and violent responses, we should not seek to justify throwing decency and morality out the door in the state of emergency. Instead, Matthew stresses, over and over again, that the way we will save ourselves from the coming crisis is by exemplifying the way of radical love and forgiveness in the face of evil and oppression. We need to overcome evil, not by returning harm for harm, but by loving our enemies. That’s the message we find repeated over and over in Matthew’s Gospel. In the crisis we should not justify being less good, rather we must rise to become more good. Michelle Obama summed this up well when she shared the advice she gives to her children,  “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

Viktor Frankl had the opportunity to observe people from a place of profound crisis ― as a prisoner  inside of a Nazi concentration camp. There the psychologist observed that a time of crisis has the potential to bring out the best in people, and the absolute worst. He witnessed people become both angels and demons, ordinary people who in the time of crisis would either show incredible acts of selfless love and kindness or exhibit the most inhuman cruelty. We kid ourselves when we think these were monsters who do these evil things. A mother can show heroic love and “go high, ” but a mother can also justify unspeakable cruelty in the name of protecting her family. Frankl observed both in Auschwitz. The nature of evil is almost always one where the person committing the atrocity feels justified in their actions.

We do truly stand at a crossroads, a crossroad of the soul. In the time of crisis we have a choice to make. Will we sink to justifying hurt to protect our self interest, or will we rise to show grace, mercy, and goodness in the middle of all the ugliness and fear? In that sense the gospel is deeply personal, but it is not only personal, but also social and political. The central message Jesus preached was the “kingdom of God” ― a term whose meaning is perhaps better conveyed today as “God’s politics” that is, God’s way of organizing life together. The values and way Jesus showed us do not stop when we get to the political or public sphere. They are not intended to be tossed aside when things get tough. As Jesus says on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel,  

You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend, ’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves.

 

This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.

 

In a word, what I’m saying is,  Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.” (Mt 5:43-48, MSG)

Speaking from a time of crisis himself, Matthew has an important message that we need to hear today in our time of crisis. He calls us to respond in the way of Jesus, a way characterized by grace, forgiveness, and enemy love. When they go low, you go high.

“I am a Christian, not because someone explained  the nuts and bolts of Christianity, but because there were people  willing to be nuts and bolts.”

This quote is attributed to Rich Mullins, from the docudrama Raggamuffin which tells the story of his life. It’s a touching story of one man’s struggle to find grace. You can watch the film on Netflix streaming.

I really love the idea of people being the “nuts and bolts” of Christianity. I’d love to go to a church like that. But my experience has unfortunately been very different. Regrettably though, I don’t think my experience is atypical. I wish it were.

In my experience, in every church I have been a part of, over the course of many decades, across many denominations, both liberal and conservative, and even different continents, over and over it was the pastor alone who was expected to be the “nuts and bolts” for everyone. There was talk about how we should do this, too, but the reality was that it was just one guy (who on some rare occasions happened to be female).

This is reflected in the name “pastor” which means “shepherd, ” implying that the rest of us are basically sheep. The pastor cares for the flock, and the fear is that if any of us leave church we will fall away like a little lost sheep.

Baaaaa.

Our faith and morality will crumble if it is not held up by our shepherd. The catholic idea of a “father” is basically the same. They are the father, and we are all dependent little children.

Waaaaa.

This infantilizing creates a learned dependency where adults learn not to think and act as moral adults. If anything, the role of a pastor should be the opposite. It should be to empower people to think morally and to be those “nuts and bolts” in a loving community.

But this unequal “division of labor” is not just a major disservice to the congregants. It is also deeply unfair to the pastor who is saddled with an impossible burden.  They are typically expected to be an example of moral perfection. Consequently, they fear to voice any struggles or doubts or failures they may have for fear their congregation may turn on them. The result is not only that they hide their real struggles (and like the rest of us, they of course have struggles, too), but they often work themselves to the point of burnout.

J.R. Briggs, in his book Fail catalogs some alarming statistics:

• 1, 500 pastors a month leave the ministry forever due to burnout or contention in their churches.
• Pastors who work fewer than 50 hours a week are 30% more likely to be terminated.
• 70% of pastors say they do not have a single close friend.
• Medical costs for clergy are higher than for any other professional group.
• 50% of pastor’s marriages end in divorce.

As if this all was not enough, many pastors feel obligated not only to serve as a teacher, but also to act as a marriage counselor, social worker, therapist, addiction specialist, community organizer, and a host of other jobs that — I can tell you first hand  — you learn next to nothing about in seminary. It’s then not at all surprising that, as Briggs notes, 90% of pastors say they were inadequately trained to cope with their job.

In short, pastors — in trying to take on all these jobs — act as if we were living in the middle ages when the local pastor really did need to be all these things since there was no such thing as mental health experts or doctors back then. But we don’t live in the middle ages. To take this all on now is just nuts. Pastors don’t know how to deal with clinical depression any more than they do a ruptured spleen.

What pastors (and the rest of us as equal members in a community) can do is love people. We can be a friend. That is something that is deeply important, and something a therapist or social worker can’t do. Loving people is not a job you get paid for or get a degree in. But love is the central thing that Jesus said should characterize our lives as Christians.

It’s important to note that this should be understood as a deeply important addition to the vital work that mental health experts provide, not a replacement. When you are sick, you need a doctor, but you also need human care and support.

People with terminal or debilitating illnesses can often feel cut off from life and dehumanized. That’s why it’s so profoundly important in our struggles to have that human connection. We need people to support us, to stand beside us, to bring a casserole, or call on the phone to see how we’re doing.

That’s what the “nuts and bolts” of our faith are all about. This is not the job of one person, it is the job of all of us in a community.

There are a number of things in the Bible that should trouble any reader. We find in its pages things like genocide, gang rape, and slavery — not only sanctioned, but at times commanded by God. For example, we read in the law of Moses the divine command for God’s people to “show them no mercy” (Deuteronomy 7:2) and to “kill everything that breathes” (Deuteronomy 20:16).

That’s not the whole story. Alongside these troubling texts, we also find many passages in the Bible affirming a message of compassion and care for the poor and the stranger. In short, we find both wonderful things and horrible things in the Bible.

The fact is, the Bible is multi-vocal. It does not contain one single position, but a multitude of conflicting visions of what justice and goodness mean. In some places, we find hatred and killing presented as God’s will. In other places, we find a counter-argument proclaiming grace, mercy, and love as God’s way.

Each side is presented as being the “correct” position–presented as speaking for God–but with opposite and contradictory views of what God’s will is. The Bible is a record of dispute, a catalog of opposing arguments. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls this “witness and counter-witness, ” evoking the image of two opposing sides in a courtroom, each making their case.

This might lead us to ask,

“Why would God allow for immoral things like genocide or slavery to be portrayed in the Bible as God’s will if they are not? Why are these books part of our canon?”

We might wish the Bible were a book to tell us the right answer to moral questions so we could open it up and find out what God’s will is. But as reasonable and noble as that desire may be, the Bible is simply not that kind of book.

Instead, the Old Testament in particular is a record of dispute containing conflicting visions of what God’s will looks like. In my book Disarming Scripture, I identify these two opposing ways as the way of unquestioning obedience and the way of faithful questioning. What is remarkable about the Hebrew canon is that it contains both, allowing the voice of faithful questioning to speak out in protest against the dominant voice of unquestioning obedience.

This record of dispute pulls us into the argument where we must engage with the text morally. The picture here is that of Israel whose name literally means “wrestles with God, ” and there is a long history of Jewish interpretation that is characterized by a healthy and faithful questioning.

One example of this way of faithful questioning can be found in the New Testament Gospels which record an intra-religious dispute between two opposing ways of reading Scripture. On the one hand we have Jesus who follows in the prophetic tradition of faithful questioning, and on the other hand we have the Pharisees who represent the way of unquestioning obedience.

It’s important to stress that this is not a conflict between Christianity and Judaism. Jesus was a Jew, and as noted earlier, there has been a long history of Jewish interpretation characterized as faithful questioning — both before and after Jesus. At the same time there have also been plenty of Christians who, despite the example of Jesus, read the Bible like the Pharisees in the Gospels, thereby following in the tradition of unquestioning obedience.

The fact is, both in Judaism and Christianity, the way of faithful questioning has always been a minority voice, a voice of protest from the margins. This voice can be heard in the Hebrew prophets, and it can be heard in Jesus, but the majority voice of unquestioning obedience can certainly also be found in the multi-vocal Bible as well. This is the voice that says with hellfire and brimstone “obey without question or face God’s wrath!” It is the voice of religious violence, thundering down with absolute certainty.

Returning to the above question of why the Bible contains immoral things like slavery and genocide, I want to suggest that the question actually inadvertently assumes the way of unquestioning obedience, and that the key to answering it is to instead adopt the way of faithful questioning. That is, it assumes that the Bible ought to tell us the right answer, and that if something is wrong it should be removed from the canon. That way we can just read unquestioningly and know that our sacred text will give us the right answer. If it says slavery is God’s will, then it must be. If it is not God’s will, then it should not say it.

But if we instead recognize that the Bible — and in particular the Old Testament — is indeed multi-vocal, containing both messages of compassion and hate, both things we can embrace and things we must reject — then we can engage in the dispute as moral agents. Just as the news contains pundits on both sides of any issue, each claiming to be right, the multi-vocal Old Testament likewise contains many conflicting views of what is good and right.

Here it is important to stress that we do not find the “right side” and the “wrong side” presented side-by-side in the Old Testament in the way a multiple-choice question purposely lists wrong answers along-side of the right one. Rather, each side believed that their position was right. Those who called for people to commit genocide in God’s name in the Old Testament believed it was good and right, just as many Christians today believe that it is right for our government to use torture. Other Christians believe that it is deeply immoral to torture. This might prompt us to ask a second question,

“If Jesus is the key to identifying what moral vision to embrace in the Old Testament, why not simply read the New Testament and discard the Old?”

Again this seems at first blush like a reasonable and compelling approach. The problem is when this is done from the perspective of unquestioning obedience, history demonstrates that it has led Christians to endorse the institution of slavery based on an unquestioning reading of the New Testament. Likewise, an unquestioning reading of the words of Jesus has led some Christians to perpetuate cycles of domestic abuse, in a tragic attempt to be faithful to the way of self-sacrificing love. The answer therefore is not to find a perfect text that we can read unquestioningly, but to learn how to faithfully question ourselves, our culture, our religion, and our sacred texts.

This is what Jesus models for us, and as his disciples it is simply not enough to thoughtlessly copy his answers, like a poor student copying answers to a test without understanding them. We need to understand what motivated Jesus to ask the questions he did; we need to learn how to think morally, critically, and creatively as Jesus did.

The simple fact is, obedience absent of reflection or understanding inevitably leads to abuse. We therefore cannot unquestioningly follow the New Testament or even Jesus. Instead, we need to learn to adopt Jesus’ method of faithful questioning motivated by love and compassion.

As moral agents, we must not unquestioningly accept whatever the Bible says (including the New Testament). Nor should we accept without question whatever our culture says is right (whether from the left or the right). Rather, we must learn how to step into the dispute — both within the pages of the Bible, and in the public square — and make our case for what is good. This is exactly what we find Jesus doing in his time. For those of us who call ourselves his followers, we need to learn how to do the same in ours.

Some Christians seem to talk about little other than sin. In reaction, others try to ignore it. But we can’t understand Jesus’ plan to redeem the whole universe without understanding sin.

The best antidote for bad theology isn’t no theology. It’s good theology.

So, how should we understand sin?

We can be separated from God, life, and love in two ways. One is by our doing hurtful things, and the other is by getting hurt ourselves.

When the Bible speaks of “sin” (in the singular), it’s a bigger concept than individual “sins” (note the plural). Biblically, sin equals all that can separate us from God, including the damage done to us.

Often this larger aspect of sin is overlooked, and we focus solely on the hurtful things we do. But people do hurtful things because we’ve been hurt.

That’s the spiral of sin.

An obvious example of this is how retribution leads to more retribution, the violence ever escalating. We see this in the Old Testament story of Lamech who declares, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me.” After he is injured, Lamech kills.

“If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times” (Gen 4:23-24).

We hear the same sentiment expressed by political leaders today who speak of retaliatory violence in terms of “justice.” Payback “justice” responds to an attack with something bigger. “Shock and awe, ” perhaps.

This is why the sin of violence is the most deadly of all sins. It some cases, violence immediately results in death. In others, such as physical abuse, the trauma caused can leave lifelong scars that do far more damage than the physical wounds alone.

But that is not all. The sin of violence can also masquerades as goodness. When people beat children, they do it “for their own good.” When a nation retaliates against another, they do so in the name of “justice.” Often we say that this state violence (whether it is war, capital punishment, or torture) is enacting the will of God.

Consider that in churches that speak of “the problem of sin” the focus is almost always on individual sins, and virtually never on the sins of those in authority–let alone the sins of the religious system itself. The focus is exclusively on sins of “missing the mark” (like marital unfaithfulness), not sins like beating children, which are seen by those doing them as a virtue.

In the United States, while it is illegal in most states to beat children in public schools, it is legal to beat children in private schools, and the vast majority of those schools who practice this are conservative evangelical ones. So while we are aware as a society how profoundly damaging it is to beat children, the people who are advocating this abuse are the ones who preach every Sunday against “sin.” It is defended as a “Christian” value to uphold against the stream of culture. To call this a blind-spot in our understanding of sin would be an understatement.

When Jesus condemns and rebukes, his focus is always on the sins of those in religious authority. He is constantly confronting the Pharisees and religious leaders for how their following of the Law is leading to people being hurt, excluded, shut out from the grace and healing that they need. The response that Jesus gives to sin is not punishment, but healing and forgiveness that restore people. How is it that we evangelicals have managed to have the opposite emphasis?

Our focus is almost entirely on individual missteps (usually focusing on sex), and we are silent about the sins of those in authority that are far more damaging than individual sin, both because they affect more people, and because they claim to be done in the name of God.

Consider the story of Paul: We read in 1 Timothy that Paul came to regard himself as “the greatest of all sinners” (1:15). When Paul writes of his struggle with sin in Romans 7, we are likely to imagine a struggle with women or booze, but this was not what Paul’s struggle with sin looked like.

Paul tells us that his background was that of a Pharisee, and that he was, as far as keeping the Law was concerned, “blameless” (Phil 3:6). We often attribute to Paul the idea that no one can keep the Law. But Paul tells us that he was able to keep it. Yet, at the same time, he describes himself as the “greatest of sinners.”

So what did Paul see as his sin?

Paul tells us, “I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man.” Paul’s great sin, as he saw it, was the sin of violence committed in the name of God. Paul as a Pharisee had seen the Jesus Movement as heretical and had attempted to use violence to stop them, thinking he was doing this for God. His conversion therefore was not a conversion from one religion to another (Paul continued to see himself as a Jew), nor was it a conversion of a prodigal returning to religion.

No, Paul’s conversion was a conversion from violence in name of religion. It was a conversion away from thinking that the way to bring about justice was through violence.

The greatest sin, according to the New Testament, is the sin of violence, and in particular violence that calls itself good.

Looking at the headlines over these last several months, we’ve been inundated with story after story of violence–both abroad and at home. It’s overwhelming, and the pull for us to want to respond ourselves with more violence is powerful. But Paul councils us “do not be overwhelmed by evil, but overwhelm evil with good.”

I pray that we could begin to see what Paul did in regards to the seduction of violence, so that we could be agents of peace in this broken world of ours.

This past week the Christian corner of the internet has been somewhat abuzz with headlines like: Gungor drifts from biblical orthodoxy (World Magazine),  Dove-Award Winning Gungor Rattles Christian World, (Christianpost) and Singer to Answer for Controversial Views (Breathecast). These articles then go on to accuse the band of “unorthodox theology” leading them to pronounce the band’s “departure from traditional Christianity” and their “wandering away from a biblically defined Christianity.”

So what are these “unorthodox” and “controversial views” that put Gungor outside of the bounds of “traditional Christianity” and has thus “rattled the Christian world”? Apparently they don’t believe in Young Earth Creationism (that the earth is only 6000 years old), and they don’t believe that all of the stories in the Old Testament should be taken literally (for example the story of Noah and the flood).

Really? That’s it? This is what makes them not Christians?

As Michael Gungor writes in a blog post entitled What Do We Believe,

“Over the last year, I have had so many questions asked of me about what I believe. Just tonight I had a conversation with someone extremely close to me that said that he wouldn’t consider me a Christian anymore.

 

Why?

 

Not because of my life. Not because my life looks like Jesus or doesn’t look like Jesus. But because of my lack of ability to nail down all the words and concepts of what I exactly BELIEVE.”

This gets us into bigger question of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to call Jesus our Lord and savior, what it means to be Christ’s disciple? Is this defined by our holding certain doctrinal formulations like the Trinity or the deity of Christ? Or is it about a relationship with God in Christ shaping our life inside and out, so that we come to treat others with the same grace and mercy that we have known first hand in Jesus? Put briefly, is Christianity about creeds or deeds?

Growing up Evangelical, the understanding I learned was always focused on having a “personal relationship with God” centered around a “born again” experience where a person would “give their life to Jesus.” Being in that living relationship, as we pray, worship together, and read our Bibles devotionally, the result was to grow to care about what Jesus cared about, and to have that shape our lives. That experience of God’s love turned my whole world upside-down, and like so many others it made me want to share God’s love with others (evangelism), and to express my love and gratitude to God in worship. Singing songs like the ones Gungor writes from the top of my lungs each Sunday.

Related: We Need New Wineskins (or why Evangelicalism Needs to be Abandoned)

That is the face of the evangelicalism I knew, and it is one I still deeply relate to. At the same time there was another face of evangelicalism known as the Neo-Reform movement. This “New Calvinism” is focused on correct doctrine (from the perspective of a 5-point Calvinist) and is often characterized by an embattled, belligerent tone. Think of John Piper or Mark Driscoll and you get the idea. This group focused on declaring who was “in” and who was “out” based on these hyper-Calvinist doctrinal markers (I add the qualifier “hyper” here as there are many Calvinists who disagree with this brand of Calvinism, let alone Wesleyans like myself who certainly do).

Now there are two important points to glean from this: First of all, even within conservative evangelicalism there is quite a bit of diversity in regards to what is considered “orthodoxy.” Wesleyans (who were by the way the driving force behind the revivals of the Second Great Awakening that gave birth to American Evangelicalism as we know it today) disagree doctrinally with the Calvinists, and the majority of Calvinists disagree with the New-Calvinists. So the whole idea of being outside of “traditional Christianity” depends on what tradition that is exactly. The fact is, a whole lot of evangelicals, perhaps most even, do not believe in a 6000 year old earth, and never have. I certainly never did. I don’t recall that being part of the sinners prayer or in any of the historical creeds either.

Secondly, and more importantly, doctrine can’t be the most important thing about the Christian faith. Love is. Do I believe in the Trinity? Yes. Do I believe in the deity of Christ? Yes. But what really matters is how these beliefs translate into my actions and my life. For example, how does my belief that Jesus reveals God’s character and heart translate into how I love others? That’s why correct doctrine matters, and why when we divorce doctrine from love it is neither correct nor Christ-like.

When you get down to it, this isn’t about whether Gungor (or the rest of us) believes in a literal Adam and Eve or in the story of the flood. It’s about something much bigger; it’s about how we define our faith, about whether it is characterized by reflecting Jesus or focused on believing the right stuff even if we do this in a hurtful and unloving way that looks nothing like Jesus. Correct belief is important, yes, but it is primarily important in how it leads us to love like Jesus did. If it does not lead to Jesus-shaped love then it is simply wrong. Michael Gungor sums this up well when he writes,

“There are lots of people that have all sorts of beautiful ‘beliefs’ that live really awful lives. If I’m on the side of a road bleeding, I don’t care if the priest or the Levite have beautiful ‘beliefs’ about the poor and the hurting. Give me the samaritan. The heretic. The outsider who may have the ‘wrong beliefs’ in words and concepts but actually lives out the right beliefs by stopping and helping me. That’s the kind of belief I’m interested in at this point.

 

What do I believe? Look at my life. That’s what I believe. And that’s the kind of belief I’m interested in for my friends as well. I don’t care so much about what their words and unconscious assumptions are (even though that can make for some enjoyable pub conversation). I care about what kind of lives they live … Do they believe in loving their neighbor or do they believe by loving their neighbor?”

Jesus demonstrates this focus on love as the aim of Scripture (and doctrine) when he declares that the “greatest commandments” are to love God and others. The apostle Paul echoes this as well, saying that the entire law can be summed up in the command to love. Jesus said this in the context of his repeated conflicts with the Pharisees. Paul, himself a former Pharisee, again echoes this same conflict in his contrasting of the “spirit of the law” characterized by love and the fruits of the Spirit with the “letter of the law” which kills.

The Pharisees of Jesus time have a lot in common with the New-Calvinists of today. So if we believe that the message of Scripture should be applied to our own lives today, it would behoove us to pay attention to what Jesus criticized about the Pharisees.

The Pharisees prided themselves on their “orthodoxy” i.e. on their correct application of the law. Jesus did not fault them on this. What his critique was focused on was that the Pharisees had done this at the expense of mercy and justice. They had shut out the very people who were in need of God’s love. The fruit of their doctrine was not love.

It isn’t hard to recognize these same patterns playing out among the New-Reform today—focusing on correct belief with a seeming disregard for whether in doing this they are hurting others, often disparaging ideas like compassion as weak, and speaking mockingly of love. When told that their actions and words are hurtful, rather than repenting they frequently turn to the Bible for a justification of their hurtful actions. These are a group of people who are afraid of being wrong, yet ironically they are deeply wrong in the most important way—in divorcing their doctrine from love. If you look at all the times that Jesus warned people about hell, it is never about false doctrine, and instead always focused on their failure to show love. So if they want to be afraid of judgment, if they want to focus on being “right” then according to Jesus the place to focus is on love. “A new command I give you” Jesus says, “love one another as I have loved you.” That’s how we are “right” with God and Jesus.

Now, I do believe it is important to lovingly correct those who are in error for the simple reason that it is not okay to stand by while others are being hurt, especially when that hurt is being done in the name of God. But frankly it is not Gungor—as they wrestle through their own doubts and struggles trying all the while to cling to Jesus and to love—who needs to be corrected. If anything we should thank them for being real. No, the ones who need to be corrected are the “Pharaseevengelicals” of our day who have forgotten that what matters most is love. It is the angry preachers and pundits spreading an anti-gospel of fear and hate who need to be rebuked, rather than passively tolerated to the point where being evangelical has become virtually synonymous with being judgmental and embattled. 

Some of us are still hoping that the word “evangelical” can again be known for its focus on love and grace centered in a vibrant and life-giving relationship with God. Others have given up on the “evangelical” label and are instead focusing on following Jesus and the way of grace, identifying as “progressives” (or as I do, landing somewhere in the middle, as a “progressive evangelical”).

Whatever we call ourselves, it is high time for those of us who desire to live out Jesus-shaped lives to stand up and say to these self-appointed doctrine police that it is simply unacceptable for a follower of Jesus to act in such an un-Christlike manner. Because if we really read the New Testament we can clearly see that a “biblically based Christianity” as it is understood by Jesus and Paul is one focused on the fruit of love. As Paul says, without love, all our doctrine is just worthless noise.

Also by Derek: How Can a Fallible Bible Be Inspired?

In doing this, my hope and prayer is that we could do so in a way characterized by grace, recognizing that as hurtful as their actions may be, these are nevertheless human beings loved by God, and therefore seeking their redemption and good as our beloved brothers and sisters in the faith. Again, the words of Gungor are instructive,

“It would be easy and just as destructive for me to write off all THOSE people who believe those things as something less than beautiful, complicated and intelligent human beings … So be careful of labels. Be careful who you judge as ‘in’ or ‘out’ of your camp. It’s a destructive way of seeing the world.”

With that in mind, let me open this up for discussion: How can we take a stand against people’s hurtful actions, while at the same time doing so in a way characterized by grace and focused on the good of the other? Let’s see if we can practice that in the comments section here.

Photo Credit: Carlos E. Santa Maria / Shutterstock.com

Over the past several months we’ve been doing a lot of deconstruction work with the Bible on my blog, discussing how an unquestioning reading of Scripture leads to a lot of hurt. It’s an important conversation to have, one motivated by compassion. Because we care about people, and because we love the Bible we need to confront a way of reading that justifies harm as wrong. Still, even so, it’s hard. It takes a toll because, even though we believe we are doing something good, it cuts away at our old beliefs in the process, and that means it cuts us.  After doing that kind of hard deconstructive work it can feel like there’s nothing left to stand on.

Brian McLaren recently compared this process of deconstruction to peeling an onion,

“Every new conception of God necessarily requires doubting or rejecting the prevailing conception of God… For many, the process is like peeling an onion. First they lose faith in the 6-day creationist god, then in the bible-dictation god, then in the male-supremacy god, then in the european-supremacy/western-civilization/colonialist god, then in the anti-gay god, … eventually, every layer of the onion is peeled away and one is left with nothing, but maybe some tears.

 

The fear of being left with nothing leaves many people desperately afraid to question anything, which might be a good definition of fundamentalism. … The question, I think, is this: what happens after one peels away the onion and faces the possibility that there is nothing left”

With the Bible in particular the  question we are left with in the end boils down to this: After we strip away the hurtful unquestioning way of reading the Bible, what does it then mean to read Scripture as scripture? Once we lose the “God said it that settles it” approach, in what sense can we say the Bible is inspired if that doesn’t mean “everything it says should be followed without question”?  Are we left with seeing it as just a “human book” or is there a way to find God in there, just as we find God amongst the mess of our own broken lives and world?

Related: Have We Misread the Bible?

Jesus said that all of the law and the prophets hang on two commandments: Love God, and love others as you love yourself. That’s not just a summary, it’s the very aim of Scripture itself:

The Bible is intended to lead us to love God, others, and ourselves.

That’s the ultimate aim and purpose of the Bible as Jesus saw it. If we are reading in a way that leads us away from love, then we are quite simply reading wrong. That was the mistake of the Pharisees, and continues to be the mistake of many Christians today. If we see that our interpretation is causing hurt, we need to pay attention to that and make a course correction.

Seen positively however, the purpose of Scripture is to lead us to love, and since God is love that means first and foremost the  purpose of Scripture is to lead us into an encounter with God. Scripture is therefore not meant to be our master, rather it is meant to serve the roll of our servant leading us to love God, others, and ourselves.

That begins with our experience of God’s love and grace. Scripture is a vehicle meant to bring us into an experience of God’s love that shapes us, forms and transforms us, making us whole and deeply alive, setting us free. Being loved like that then spills over into every area of our lives as we show others (including the people we don’t like or respect) the same love and mercy we have known.

Here Scripture takes on the role of a servant which brings us to encounter God’s living Spirit. It acts as a window to the divine, as a vehicle that leads us to Christ. Not Jesus in a book, but the living risen Jesus known through the Spirit. In that sense the Bible becomes a sacrament,  that is, it becomes a means for us to encounter the divine.

Scripture is therefore not “inspired” in the sense that it is a static book of eternal laws that are beyond question, rather it is inspired when it is read by us so as to lead us to love. It is inspired when it becomes a sacrament leading us into an encounter with the divine, an encounter with the risen Jesus, leading us into a life-transforming relationship with God.

The word “inspired” literally means in-spirit-ed. That is, to be indwelt by the Spirit. Without the spark of life from God we have no life in us. In the same way, apart from the Spirit the Bible is simply a dead letter. The Bible is therefore inspired … in(Holy)Spirit-ed … when we learn how to read it in a way that leads us to meet the one who is love, who is truth, and who is the way.

Also by Derek: Can a Red Letter Christian Question the “Red Letters”?

That is what a devotional reading of Scripture needs to look like, what it means the read Scripture as scripture. This is a truly evangelical reading of Scripture because it puts the focus on the gospel, the good news of God’s kingdom impacting our lives — both on a personal and societal level. It’s a way to read the Bible that keeps God at the center, rather than making a book central, or more truthfully making our interpretation of a book central.

So while it can be a painful and scary process to let go of the unquestioning Pharisaical way of reading the Bible that many of us grew up on as our mother’s milk, what we gain (in addition to a faith rooted in humility rather than certainty) is a way to read Scripture as a sacrament which can lead us into a life-changing encounter with the living God who is love.

Many people have proposed the need to interpret Scripture through a Jesus-shaped lens. In many ways this is a parallel to the idea of being a “red letter Christian” which places an interpretive emphasis on the red letters of Jesus. Some recent proponents of the Jesus lens approach (also known by the more academic term Christotelic Hermeneutic) include Peter Enns in Inspiration and Incarnation, Christian Smith in The Bible Made Impossible, Eric Seibert in Disturbing Divine Behavior, as well as Wayne Jacobsen in his video series The Jesus Lens, and many others.

It’s an attractive proposal, but as soon as we attempt to practically apply it we bump into a lot of questions as to what this would look like in practice. The first question is what one means exactly. There are basically two camps here: One uses the Jesus lens to show how all Scripture points to Christ and thus would argue that troubling texts like the commands to commit genocide in the Old Testament are actually good and loving (Wayne Jacobsen for example takes this approach). Others would instead use the Jesus lens as a way of evaluating which texts reflect Christ and which do not, and conclude that genocide and Jesus are incompatible (an example here would be Eric Seibert). While I have a deep appreciation for Wayne Jacobsen in many regards (there is a lot of great stuff in his series!) I’d like to make the case here for the latter approach of taken by folks like Eric Seibert and argue that Jesus shows us a way to question religious violence in Scripture motivated by compassion which follows in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, rather than one of legitimizing it.

Now once we make this move, once we recognize that this is what Jesus himself is doing (as is Paul) when he reads Scripture, it still leaves us with the question of practical application: How does this second approach of using a Jesus lens to critique religious violence play out in practice exactly? With Many Old Testament texts the answer seems pretty straightforward: We read for example Psalm 137 saying “Blessed is he who dashes the heads of toddlers against a rock” and it’s pretty easy to see how this in in conflict with how Jesus saw little children (as well as how he thought we should treat enemies). Where things get tricky is when we hit the New Testament. If it is not only okay to question Scripture, but a moral imperative that we see modeled not only by Jesus, but throughout the Old Testament itself — in the Prophets, in the Psalms, in Job, and even in the examples of Abraham and Moses — how does that work with the NT and with the “red letter” words of Jesus? Can we question those? Or said differently: Does Jesus call us to question even the NT as an act of faithfulness to him and his example?

Related: Rwandan Genocide Survivor Speaks Out

Of course the expected answer would be “No! This is our lens and so must be fully accepted and obeyed” but this very quickly gets us in trouble. Consider Jesus’ statement “if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.” Raise your hand if you have obeyed this 100%. Gosh, that’s funny, I don’t see any hands (or should I say amputated stumps?). How about where Jesus says “If anyone does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” Which of you who are parents hate your kids? Would you want to go to a seminar on parenting where they taught you to hate for Jesus (and also taught your kids to hate you, too!). I don’t think so.

So when reading Jesus it becomes imperative that we not simply and uncritically apply what he says without question. In fact, taking Jesus literally would clearly lead to abuse–hatred, chopped off body parts, and so on. We thus need to really think through how we can apply the teaching of Jesus in a way that is not hurtful. While I don’t know anyone who has chopped off a limb, there are quite a few people who have been told by their pastor or priest to stay in a physically abusive domestic environment because Jesus would want them to.

The point of all of this is that we must question as we read the New Testament, we must seek to understand, otherwise if we instead blindly accept and obey without understanding this will inevitably lead to abuse and hurt. Obedience is simply not possible without understanding. So we must approach the text critically, we must question, and that includes the “red letters” of Jesus. Anything less is morally irresponsible. Jesus’ own practice of questioning Scripture models this for us, and it applies equally to our reading of Jesus. After all, the main thing Jesus is trying to do with his provocative statements of “love your enemy” and “hate your family” is to get us to think. They are purposely formulated to throw us off balance,  to get us to question our assumptions of how the world works and what justice and power are like. Jesus does this constantly (the greatest is the servant, the last are first, blessed are the poor, die to live, lose to find, etc.) and all of this invites us to think, to question. To not do this is to completely misunderstand Jesus.

Now there’s more to be said here. The issue is not only with misunderstanding or misinterpreting the words of Jesus, as in the above examples. There are other issues in the New Testament that go beyond this. For example I have not addressed the New Testament in regards to the issues of slavery, the corporal punishment of children, and state-sanctioned violence (torture, execution, etc.) all of which the New Testament does not seem to speak out against in a way that we would want to today. That brings up the question: Do we follow the NT in what it affirms (and thus we can keep slaves as long as we are kind to them) or should we go further in the trajectory it begins which leads us to abolish slavery, not hit our kids, and outlaw capital punishment and torture.

Let’s have another show of hands: Who here owns slaves? Nobody. We now call that human trafficking. It’s the other things that we are inconsistent with–corporal punishment of children, how we see the legitimacy of the state to torture people or to kill them in the name of justice, claiming to be a “Christians nation” as we do. We could of course add to this how women and sexual minorities are treated by the church.

Also by Derek: Healing Toxic Faith…Did Jesus Die to Save Us from God?

The fact that we can all agree on the moral imperative of the abolishment of slavery as a Christian necessity shows that it is possible to faithfully recognize the trajectory of where Jesus and the New Testament were headed, and thus to faithfully take that further in the 21^st century in a way that the first Christians could not in the 1^st century. We have done the same with caring for the poor, going far beyond what Paul and Peter were able to do in their own time with the establishment of orphanages, shelters, rehabilitation programs, as well as organizations like Compassion International or Bread For The World. I’m sure Paul never imagined an airplane carrying food across a continent!

Jesus shows us that to be faithful means that we must question and think critically in love, rather than blindly adhering to scriptural precepts despite how hurtful they seem today. That is what the Pharisees did, and what Jesus was so adamantly opposed to.  Jesus calls us instead to look at the fruits — working out how we can best find a way to treat each other—including those we regard as “the least” and as our enemies–that bears the fruit of flourishing and life, rather than a way that hurts and harms. That means Jesus calls us to question, to engage, to think critically, and thus to continue to move forward in his name.

These are all issues that can raise a lot of emotions, and there are Christians on both sides of the many hot button issues listed above. My prayer is that we can, despite our differences  work this out together in a spirit of grace as part of a diverse and messy Jesus-shaped community we call the body of Christ. That means listening to one another, hearing each other’s stories with compassion, not writing the other off just because you strongly disagree. Not insisting on “my way or the highway” and “God said it that settles it” but instead in humility interacting with one another in grace. As Jesus says, you will know them by their fruits. A good place to start demonstrating that would be in the comment section here.

I often get emails from people, stuck in dogmatic churches, who are hungry for grace. They hear the message of the cross expressed in terms of God’s restorative justice, rather than divine wrath and revenge, and they ask me where they can find a church that teaches that, too. They hear the focus on unconditional grace and radical acceptance and long to be part of a church with that focus as well. So they write to me asking “Where do you go to church?”

I wish I could say I have found a great church where people are focused on being real and loving each other, warts and all. A place where asking hard questions is not a sign of moving away from Jesus, but a sign of moving closer to him. A place where the goal is not for one guy in authority to control people’s morality like they were infants, but to empower everyone to develop a mature adult faith.

That’s what church ought to be like. So why is a place like that so hard to find?

Maybe it’s because pastors feel a pressure to act as if they are perfect, and so end up leaving no room for us to ask healthy questions either. Instead, they’re pressured to act as if they have it all together. With us its the same: We get up and sing happy and triumphant songs that often don’t really reflect our reality, instead of creating an atmosphere where we can be real and loved for who we really are.

I’d love to go to a church that was focused on grace and messy radical love. I haven’t found a place like that where I live yet. But I have been “attending” Revolution Church for quite a while via their podcasts from Pete’s Candy Store in NYCand more recently from a bowling alley in Minneapolis, and I am proud to call Jay Bakker my (virtual) pastor. What makes Jay so awesome is that he is an open book. Rather than being authoritarian, he gets us all to think and reflect by modeling this for us—including humbly questioning himself. Rather than acting like he has it all figured out, he demonstrates what normal and healthy struggle looks like, and in so doing creates a space for us to face our questions, too. He has real authority because he uses his power to lift up those who are often marginalized and kept down. He’s my hero precisely because he is not invulnerable and perfect, and makes it a little more okay for the rest of us to admit we aren’t either.

I wish there were more churches like Jay’s. I’d be the first in line if there was one near me! The trouble is that because he is focused on taking a stand for love alongside the marginalized, rather than making money his main goal and bottom line as so many churches do, that means he struggles sometimes to make ends meet. It’s the opposite of the mega-church, and that is good because it means that it’s the kind of radical place that Jesus wanted us to be a part of, and at the same time hard because the way of Jesus was never intended to be a business model.

Now of course face to face is always better than through a wire. So please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that I think a virtual church is ideal over face to face relationships. If I lived in the same town as Jay, I’d much rather go there in person. That would be ideal, but the fact is, many of us (myself included) don’t always have access to the ideal. So we need to  find a way to deal the best we can with the messy imperfect  reality we find ourselves in.

So if you find yourself in the same boat, and are looking for a church that is focused on grace but just don’t have anything like that in your neck of the woods, I’d like to invite you to come to my “church” next week. There’s no commute, no problem with parking, you just need to stick some headphones on your ears and tune into the podcast. It’s not perfect, but I’m learning that maybe that’s okay.