Did Jesus Die to Appease God?

(image from http://www.anchor1611.org, item #4)

Jesus didn't die to appease God. Jesus died because he wouldn't appease men. 

God sacrificed his ineffable infinity to become a finite human with human limits in order to demonstrate The Way of Compassion and a bottom-up society. He was killed "for our sins" in that the society and culture we humans have created, ego-driven and top-down, couldn't tolerate the radical and transformative message. Oppression sells. When the oppressed rise up, the oppressors kill them. That is our collective human sin. And that is what killed Jesus.

Penal substitution is one of the biggest lies Christians tell themselves. When Christ “paid it all, all to him I owe” (as the hymn goes), he wasn't paying a debt incurred by the individual sins of believers (or the world, if you're a universalist). His sacrifice was not death on the cross as some kind of late era human offering. His sacrifice was in accepting the human limits on his infinite divinity in order to teach us compassion and equality. The human culture, created out of the blindly ego-driven human desires for authority, hierarchy, and power-over, killed him to save itself.

Despite the sincere efforts of groups like Anchor Baptist Church, who published the photo above, to establish that Jesus paid a debt to appease a deity whose holiness demanded perfection according to an impossible standard set by himself, the Bible actually never speaks of any debt owed to God (or even Satan, as one version of this doctrine states) nor that Jesus paid it. Nor does the Bible explain how failure to live up to the Ten Commandment standard, which standard even God himself couldn’t maintain in the Old Testament, incurs a debt, demands punitive justice, or is actually in any way responsible for the death of Jesus.

Sin is “having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”, or, having come to a state of consciousness in which duality is possible, believing that separation from God is not only possible but the inherent way of existence.  Sin is living in denial of the fundamental unity of All That Is.  Sin creates the human conditions of power-over and oppression, of hoarding resources and poverty, of In-groups and Othering.  The consequence of such belief and behavior is death and degradation of most of the human race. And a nearly irreconcilable poverty of spirit for those few at the top of the heap.  There is reason to believe that the poverty of spirit is so acute that the One Percenters indeed lack any capacity for empathy or compassion at all.  Sociopathy rules.

Jesus’ death was not to justify some cosmic accounting ledger for a tyrannically holy, fully Other, tortuously punitive deity.  That story isn’t in the Bible.  It’s a story modern Christians have made up for themselves to keep the masses shame-laden and burdened with exalting the few who manipulate the stories.  Much like the few who didn’t approve of the story Jesus was telling of a radical, inclusive, egalitarian compassion. 

Jesus told of unity and oneness and the inseparability of holy and human.  He taught that the weak and the poor are as worthy and powerful as the rich and the strong.  The One Percenters of his day had created a society in which such talk wasn’t only heretical but treason.  The social climbers and power-hungry and would-be rich-and-famous colluded with the society of sin and degradation to put that story to death.

We crucify Jesus again and all like him whenever we allow oppression, hierarchy, poverty, or exclusion to occur.  When we believe in the separation of sacred and secular, when we ascribe to the few more worth than the many, when we deny the holiness of all humanity.

Being Eeyore: When You Are a Melancholy Child

Recently I was talking with someone who asked if I’d ever struggled with depression.  I chuckled ironically and replied, “Eeyore is my patron saint.”  Gloomy, broody, shades-of-grey melancholia has been my gift/curse for as long as I can remember.  For my sixth birthday, my father bought me a stuffed Eeyore because it reminded him so much of me.  I treasured that little donkey for years because he understood me.  Though I lost his pinned-on tail more often than I repinned it. And, eventually, to my continued regret, I lost the animal himself.

When my friend asked if I’d ever been diagnosed with clinical depression and I said, “no, but only because I never went into a clinic for a diagnosis.”  Growing up fundy Christian, we had a horror of both depression and psychology.  “Just give it to God,” I heard, “depression is only the prideful ego holding onto willful selfishness.”  And the only cure preached was a deeper commitment to “submitting to God’s Will” because the Bible says that True Christians will always have joy, which was interpreted to mean being “cheerful and joyous at all times.” 

I faked it as best I could, but still found myself in pastoral counseling with my father as the pastoral counselor (who thought that was a good idea?) and when he gave up in frustration, I was sent with my despair to the senior pastor.  His answer to my 12-year-old inquiry, “how can I ‘love my neighbor as myself’ if I don’t love myself?” was to turn Jesus’s lesson on its head with an explanation of how hating myself was actually a good thing and loving others more than I loved myself was really what the Bible meant to say.

About the same time, my school started a series of suicide-prevention public service announcements and I began to wonder why Christians didn’t just engage in mass suicide and be done with it.  If physical life was just something to be endured until the “race was won” and we achieved our “eternal reward,” then why go through the rigmarole of petty humanity at all?  I determined then never to marry or have children and thereby tie myself to mortal life since spiritual eternity was all that mattered.

Existential angst has been the descant my soul sings against the dueling melodies of fundamentalism and secular materialism.  Both church and culture insist that melancholia and pessimism are wrong, real downers, and avoidable character flaws if only we Grumpy Gus’s tried harder to be happy (or, more recently, would take our  pills to change our obviously pathological brain chemistry).  When I first heard of existential philosophy, a rush of gratitude flowed through me—I wasn’t flawed, deficient or sinful!  Many brilliant mental giants asked these same questions I labored with.  My euphoria was short-lived when I recognized that both religion and psychology still saw them as something to be fixed, saved, analyzed. 

Years later, when I went on to college and studied psychology despite the tut-tutting of my family and church, I came across a little statistic that made me chuckle: depressed people have a more accurate perception of reality than non-depressed people.  So, I realized, happy people were just lying to themselves in order to feel good.  That made so much sense!  If my experience of the world were normal, I couldn’t understand how anyone kept getting up in the morning.  I began to understand that what I’d thought for so long really was true—they were all faking it, but the primary people they were lying to were themselves! 

I felt vindicated but no more able to jump out of bed and be a good little cog in the economic wheel than ever.  I continued faking it, only with the self-knowledge that I was faking it.

He Is Risen

Jesus Christ is risen indeed
Alleluia!


Today, as my Facebook page is rife with joyous exclamations of resurrection and hope, it seems appropriate to contemplate the meaning of Christ Resurrected.  I have no issues with Jesus crucified. I’ve studied enough to be satisfied that, as best we can know, a man named Jesus existed in first century Palestine and quite likely was crucified by the Romans (though no actual first-, or even second-, hand evidence exists). But to accept a literal resurrection with as much confidence as I’ve accepted a literal crucifixion requires a whole different order of questions and criticism.  I’m not one of those scientism-thinkers who relegates any story of the miraculous to the fairy tale pile.  Just because miracles aren’t likely and aren’t explicable when they do, doesn’t mean they are impossible—that’s kinda the definition of miracle, after all. So I leave open the possibility that this guy Jesus did not only literally die but also bodily resurrect.  I think, however, that it is highly improbable and take the line of least resistance—I will only accept a literal miracle when more likely explanations don’t exist.

Many people take the CS Lewis approach to Jesus and say he must be exactly who we’ve decided he said he was (a substitutionally atoning deity, sacrificed on our behalf) because otherwise he was either a liar or insane—as if those are the only options.  Since we can’t believe that Jesus would either lie or be insane (just think what that would do to our doctrines!), we must therefore accept that he is the dead and resurrected God-Man.  Um, yeah, the dead and resurrected God-Man.  Just like the dead and resurrected God-Man of the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Celts, the Hindu, the…. Yeah, dead and resurrected god-men were quite popular in the thousand years before and after Jesus.  Even non-deities like Roman emperors and Greek heroes were talked about as resurrected and coming back in glory. So, thinking of Jesus’s death and resurrection as somehow different, more literal, than all those is pretty crazy to me.

Which all leaves me with the question—who was this Jesus, then?  What was his purpose?  My working hypothesis has been that he was a singularly human teacher who preached a wholly loving God that didn’t need sacrifice or legalism for atonement.  A teacher whose primary and perhaps only message was an overwhelming and transformative experience of this God found through and resulting in the love and service to one’s fellowman.

What a comedown from a resurrected deity!  So commonplace!  Why, Jesus would be no different than Buddha or Lao-tse or even Mohammed.   And not significantly different than the later Jewish prophets of his own tradition. The shock of the idea pointedly illustrates the elitism and entitlement tendencies of Christianity as surely as the fervor with which Christians insist that Jesus is a dead and resurrected God-Man wholly different than all the others.

And all of the clamor of “my god is better than yours” distracts completely from the radical, transformative, salvific Truth taught by every single one of those prophets and resurrected god-men:  recognizing one’s divine worth as wholly loved cannot help but lead one to love others with that same radical grace.  When you know you are loved, you cannot do anything else but love.  In our denominational tribalism, we fight tooth and nail for the doctrinal correctness of our particular formulation of that Truth to the extent that we ignore the Truth itself. 

We are loved.  We are wholly, completely, totally, unequivocally, inalterably LOVED by the Very Being who creates the universe.  We need do, in fact, cannot do anything to be lovable, to be loving, to be loved.  We are loved, we are lovable, and to the extent that we understand our loved-ness, we are loving.  And that really is amazing, radical, transformative, and capable of bringing peace to all mankind.  No matter who teaches a message of Love, under what name, the result is the same.  Recognizing the love brings more love to the world. 

When the love of God enters the world, Christ is risen indeed.  Alleluia.

Universalism

“What are your thoughts on universalism?”

Universalism: a doctrine whereby all people "go to Heaven when they die”.  It is a doctrine that presupposes a definition of both salvation and an afterlife.  In my personal theology, to “be saved”, to “enter the Kingdom of Heaven/God”, or any of those Christian buzz-phrases is closer in meaning “enlightenment” than anything to do with an afterlife.

I believe in the eternal soul but not necessarily in the individual ego that is attached to the soul during a physical lifetime.  Rationally, I’m more inclined to subscribe to a reincarnation of soul through multiple lifetimes with different individual egos than the usual Christian story of individual egos/souls in unchanging eternal torment or adulation of the deity.  So, “to go to Heaven when I die” has a whole different meaning for me now than it did when I was an Evangelical.  

Regardless of what happens to my individual ego after my physical death, I believe that salvation is something that happens in this lifetime.  I use salvation in its more literary connotation of a transformation from one state of perpetual darkness, closed-mindedness, psychological suffering, or selfishness, to a state of compassion, broad vision, service, and enlightenment. Will everyone be saved? That is, will everyone move from a state of selfishness and suffering to a state of compassion and service?  Clearly, one needs only to look around at how many people live and die in a state of selfishness to see that to be untrue. 

Can everyone be saved? Is there anyone for whom enlightenment and transformation is not possible? In this sense, I believe in a doctrine of universalism.  I believe everyone has an equal opportunity to be enlightened, to experience grace, to raise his consciousness.  No one who is willing to commit to the process of transformation will be denied.  Will everyone notice the many opportunities to experience grace in their day?  Of course not.  But everyone, everywhere, everyday has a thousand moments of grace, opportunities to choose compassion over selfishness, and to see manifestations of love and life in the midst of evil and destruction.

At this point, a doctrine of reincarnation becomes desirable and logical.  If one’s theology begins with a loving God creating humanity for companionship, then it is only reasonable to believe that such a God would provide endless opportunities for his eternal companions to reach a place where they can have both a knowledge of Good and Evil and the capacity not to be limited by that duality—in other words, to be able to think/feel/be like God.  A friend recently supported her Christian belief in reincarnation this way:  "if souls are forever, existing in eternity past and eternity future, why would anyone want to limit them to a single lifetime in which to understand spiritual mysteries?  That’s like having a child and then if they haven’t got life figured out by age five, you kick them to the street."

Most theories of reincarnation presuppose a continued connection between the soul and the individual ego (to a greater or lesser degree) and hinge on this very concept of many chances to “get it right” as well as the presupposition of a loving (and only loving) God.  While I have experienced in my visions the immense and total love of God, my reason still convinces me that God is more nuanced than to be only on the Love end of any polarity.  I am absolutely convinced that every conceivable duality is only a mental construct. Each pole of every duality contains and produces its opposite and that the whole meme is a sum greater than its parts.  Therefore, logically, rationally, I have to accept a God that somehow transcends moral definition of loving or fearful, even transcends a morality and somehow includes loving and fearful.  The mystery of God, in my personal theology, includes both Love and Fear yet transcends them so completely as to make such distinction all but irrelevant.  How that can be, of course, is what makes it a mystery.

But any good theologian won’t just leave it all there as mystery. It’s a cop-out. Mystery is all well and good and thoroughly Truth, but damn hard to live well.  How does one live the question of universalism?  How to live in our single known finite physical lifetime with an awareness of all humanity living in a state of potential? For that is what grace is—the moment when potential become transformative action.  How do we treat our fellow man, all our brothers and sisters in humanity, as equally owning this opportunity for enlightenment, transformation, salvation? Doctrine without praxis is useless. Faith without works is dead.

I think it requires our own “conversion experience”, a moment (or lifetime of moments) in which we become aware of grace in our own souls.  Without a sense of our own psychological or spiritual suffering and a transcendence of that suffering into compassion, we cannot see the Divine in all people. Some people refer to this shift in awareness as being able to “see with God’s eyes”.  Until we have met God within ourselves, we can never truly see God within others nor treat them accordingly with the justice and kindness they deserve.

Must this conversion experience or salvation occur within the Christian paradigm? I.e., must everyone “call upon the name of Jesus to be saved”?  Certainly there are those who preach that dogma, denying even the possibility of universalism. I think that is an unnecessarily limited reading of Christian Scripture and seems to limit ridiculously the companionship for God.  Rationally, it seems absurd:  similarly to the argument for reincarnation but on a one-lifetime-only scale, why would God create humanity for companionship but limit its possibility to a tiny fraction of the world’s population?

Again, theologians claim “the mystery of God”.  (On a side note: my experience with fundamentalist thinkers is that they will claim “mystery” whenever they come up against an irreconcilable tangent of their own doctrine rather than struggle through it.) I’m content with mystery as long as it is mystery that leads one into greater communion with the Divine and greater service of humanity.  For me, a doctrine of universalism, either through reincarnation or otherwise, makes me much more aware of grace, gives me a deeper appreciation of my God, and a wider capacity to love my fellow man.  As I see it, a doctrine of “born-again Christianity” as the only means of “salvation” lead to a sense of elitism, prejudice, and hypocrisy, and a condescension and patronization of those I considered “unsaved”. 

In my final analysis, the measure of Truth for any person is how well it encourages that person to Love God and Love Neighbor.  Regardless of how the Truth is articulated, whether in language of universalism or exclusion, if it draws the follower into a place of more Love, then it is Truth.  If, no matter how it is articulated, a doctrine causes hate and discontent among followers, then it is evil.

 _____________________________________

I wrote this post entirely from my own meditations and contemplation of the relevant ideas.  It wasn't until I went searching for images to attach to the post that I found this article:

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/deeper-walk/features/18208-is-jesus-the-only-way

I totally disagree with the conclusion but it raises many of the necessary questions one must consider when one contemplates universalism.  This topic is very difficult to address because it is hardly the simple question that it seems: one constantly trips over one's presuppositions and assumptions based on our increasingly limited interpretations of the Bible.  I think this article notes many of these presuppositions without even being aware of how they limit the possible conclusions.

Original Sin vs. Imago Dei II: Universal Dissonance

Original Sin is the idea that because Adam and Eve sinned, mankind is forever doomed to being inherently evil and redeemed only through an Act of God (or through believing in the Act of God, depending on where you are on the Free Will/predestination spectrum).  While this paradigm may make you delight in the greatness of God, it presupposes that you were in your original state unacceptable to God.  I find that presupposition to be deeply damaging.

During my heathen years I developed a personal cosmology that starts with God as the sentient, eternal, creative, sustaining, resonance/harmonic/vibration, the OM of the yogis, the Word, I AM. My cosmology is in my own mind a nexus of the realms of subatomic and astronomic science with philosophy and spirituality through the ages.  But my Big Idea is, to oversimplify, that this sound (the “Word”) that is God.  All created matter is a harmonic of that sound.  For various reasons, such as entropy, cumulative effects of short-sighted actions during former eras, evolutionary accommodations that are no longer necessary, any individual subset of matter (in this discussion, a person) can become mistuned.

The worse the mistunement (the more we are "separated from God"), the greater propensity for consequences of dissonance: selfish thought, destructive behavior, susceptibility to physical illness.  Physically, we can carry the mistunements of our ancestors in our DNA (perhaps as a kind of retrovirus that develops from suppressing the consequences of their dissonance?) and that acts as a predisposition to various manifestations of dissonance in our own lives—familial disease, inherited “personality quirks”.  

I think the Fall of Adam, Original Sin and the Sins of the Father doctrines are metaphors for this Universal Dissonance.  Grace is the possibility by which this dissonance is brought back into the right harmonic that is God.  This is "the moment of salvation". But because the predisposition for dissonance is hardwired into our matter (the theory of entropy), our souls have a tendency not to stay in harmony.  Wanting to stay in the harmonic, actively doing stuff that keeps us there (do justice, love mercy, walk humbly) increases the pattern that keeps us in harmony.  That is the "working out of our salvation".

A visual metaphor is a guitar: it is created at the factory to resonate at certain frequencies.  When it is strung the first time, it needs to be fine-tuned to the proper frequency.  But over time, through no fault of its own, the instrument will become dissonant and need retuning.  No one imagines it is a “bad” guitar, or that the guitar is “desperately wicked” or “depraved” for needing tuning.  There is no call for the guitar to “repent” from its dissonance and be “saved”. 

There are actions a guitarist can take to help the guitar stay in tune better—not throw it around, expose it to musical vibrations (store it near speakers)—but there is no moral judgment of either the instrument or the owner when the guitar needs constant tuning. 

Original Sin vs. Imago Dei I: Born to Sin

[commenter] What if ...  

• We were CREATED in God's image in Genesis 1-2
  • All God's creation (including man) was declared GOOD (i.e. perfect)
  • Sin entered the world in Genesis 3 and BROKE the goodness/perfection of creation
  • Because of sin, we are incapable of any truly good works/motives on our own (totally depraved, not as in always at the worst, but as in there is no part of us that escapes depravity)
  • Because of Christ, by faith in Him (even for pre-ressurection believers who were looking forward to the coming Messiah), we are RE-created to be perfect again in God's eyes, and to be slowly renewed in the whole man (body, soul, mind, spirit, social, etc.) as a work-in-progress that will be fully completed in the resurrection
  • We still REFLECT God's glory in this life, but imperfectly, as in a cracked and stained mirror

...  just some thoughts....

Interestingly, of all the religions in the world, only Western Christianity, Roman Catholicism and most Protestant denominations, subscribes to the idea that we inherit guilt from sin (or actions that foster less than good) not our own.  Islam, Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, all hold that we are judged strictly on our own choices in this lifetime after reaching an age of reasoning skills. Only Augustine, Luther and Calvin, the biggest names in the Original Sin/Total Depravity game, insist that we are born evil with no capacity whatsoever to do good until and unless we “accept the grace of God”, which phrase will have to be its own whole other post.

The thing about Original Sin/Total Depravity is that it emphasizes the human end of the duality.  I think, from the explanations of those for whom these doctrines work to bring communion with God, that the point of the doctrines is to bring the outrageous grace of God into sharp relief.  To highlight the vastness of his love and the marvel of his works.  All to the good, but my question then is this?  Is God not gracious, vast, and marvelous enough all on his own or does he really need us to be belittled, shamed and beaten down in order for him to look good?

I prefer to worship a God whose people acknowledge that we humans are in our free will sometimes awful, sometimes really great, and usually both at once, and that our God is infinitely more.

I'm reading a book by a fairly traditional (though not at all fundy) preacher--and surprisingly I really am enjoying it--but I'm at a point where he's bemoaning that we don't talk about sin much anymore.  It makes us feel bad.  Well... yeah!  Who wants that? 

Perhaps the Sin/Depravity motif worked in Christianity for so long because it resonated with how people actually already felt about themselves.  I mean, most people in Christendom really had harsh and brutal lives until the modern era so maybe it wasn't so much a beating down of humanity as much as recognition of their place in the world--lowly, abused, exploited, short-lived.

Modernity changed a whole lot about our view of the world and our place in it.  As religion lost favor among intellectuals, psychoanalysis grew in its place.  Sin/redemption themes became alienation and recovering the unconscious.  People still feel separated from the Divine but no longer feel as though they personally are lowly and shameful.  Without Christianity telling me how morally bankrupt I am, any wretchedness I feel has no shame attached.  Most people that I know feel pretty good about their work and their place in the world and see no reason to think of themselves as Sinful--except as it is pounded into their heads from preachers, parents, and religious authorities.

I grew up on the "hearts desperately wicked", "from the moment of my conceiving" (or whatever those verses are that supposedly prove Original Sin). The idea that I started out behind the cosmic eight ball, through absolutely no fault of my own, so that from the very moment that I came into being, God couldn't stand the sight of me and considered me used tampons ... yup, hard to believe in a God as Love after that. 

And I still carry that baggage embedded in my soul--that I am utterly disgusting and that only when God looks at me through the Jesus-colored sunglasses will I ever be anything else. 

Even though, I no longer rationally subscribe to anything resembling an Original Sin doctrine, or any kind of moral overlay to the fact that there is suffering in the world, I can't seem to transform this hideous indictment of myself.



During my time as a heathen, I developed some interesting theories to describe how I think this whole thing works, based on physics and sound theory and other stuff, that took the whole judgment aspect out of it and also gets rid of the whole either/or polemic that Christianity is so fond of---either I am totally depraved or I am perfect in Christ (when obviously neither one is literally true). And rationally I accept these and reject the total depravity BS. Now if I could just convince my psyche to let go of that ghoul...



I suppose there are those who would use my ongoing struggle as proof of the Holy Spirit convicting me of the truth of Original Sin--except that I've supposedly been saved and made perfect from that so why exactly am I still feeling like steaming dog poop on the bottom of God's foot? No amount of reason and intellect is working on this one, nor is praying or meditating. My husband has suggested exorcism once or twice....

(for a fuller explanation of Original Sin and its history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

Basic Christian Doctrine

The Christianity I grew up with subscribed quite explicitly to all the Fundamentals and more or less to Calvin’s TULIP.  When I began to understand these doctrines, rather than to just recite them, and to see their logical conclusions for the world, I concluded that the God that must derive from them was a petty, tyrannical, malicious egomaniac.  Rather like a very overgrown playground bully. Such a judgmental, capricious deity is often at odds with the absolute attributes of God that I also learned in Sunday School: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, immutable, ineffable, impassionate, and infinite. And completely antithetical to the God Is Love refrain. As soon as my neurology accommodated analytical thinking, I began questioning how all these disparate things could be simultaneously Truth.  The answer was, according to those wiser elders whom I asked, “Ahh, that is the mystery of God.”  Or the confusion wrought by man, more likely.

In the back of my mind, like a holy descant, was a visceral knowing of the Divine.  Despite my constant vigilance against the clairvoyance, prophecy, and knowledge of things I shouldn’t, no matter how I prayed for protection against these manifestations of the Evil One, God never “delivered” me from my unwanted mysticism, my forbidden psychic nature.  Against all attempts at unknowing, like I knew water was wet, I knew the Divine.

It wasn’t until I renounced Christianity and shoved the shouting, shaming god of the doctrines into a locked up corner of my mind that I could take notice of that holy descant. When I lay in savasana at the end of a yoga class and heard the empty fullness of my mind, when I sat in silent communion with my baby in the dark of the night, after sex when I was only half in my body, the tears would flow.  A healing rain for my soul.  There was Love.  A constantly moving but never changing river of Love flowing through, over, in, around, under everything in the universe.  That was a Love I could trust. 

Yet, just as my mystical, psychic knowing leaked uncomfortably into my rigid Christian worldview, so too did that shaming god of Christian creedal doctrine continue to control my very way of being in the world.  He may no longer have used Christian vocabulary or take issue with the same lifestyle points, but always he/I preached whatever cause I espoused with the same religious fervor as any Evangelical in a pulpit: organic agriculture, buy local, natural materials for children’s toys, holistic medicine, nutrition, homebirth, homeschool, environmental awareness.  Each and every cause had its own dogma and legalisms that I worked tirelessly to uphold, all in order to be recognized as the best, most-natural, most organic, most homegrown… let’s face it… the most holy mother in the community.  I guilt-tripped newcomers and “heathens” frequently, publicly, and with much self-righteous gratification.  I didn’t use the bible to thump anyone but I sure knew how to quote appropriate texts for whatever sermon I was preaching.

Fortunately, my children refused to live in the same kind of box I was aggressively marketing to other families.  No matter what rules I picked to uphold, my family insisted on blasting through them.  When, finally, my health broke down and my sanity was more than suspect, I couldn’t follow any more rules and I certainly couldn’t try to bully or bribe my family into adherence either.  For the better part of two years, I lived just trying to get through the day.  Everyone fed themselves, managed their own schooling, and hid out in their rooms.  Everything I thought was so important, that made us better than the rest, went right out the window.  Apparently I hadn’t trusted that Love much at all. 

The true breaking point was early in that Dark Night of the Soul when I couldn’t hear the descant anymore.  All my knowing disappeared.  I couldn’t read people, couldn’t feel their emotions or sense their internal dramas; I had no more dreams or visions. I no longer knew the Wet of the River of Love.  It was like suddenly losing my sense of taste and smell—something you don’t think you rely on to make sense (pun intended) of the world until it is gone.  Obviously, despite my avid denials, I had become accustomed to that psychic sense of the world.  After that, my brain function really dried up and I began to beg whatever God there might still be just to let me die.

By spring 2009, just over a year ago, the protocol for recovery was working well enough that I could look at the bigger picture—beyond just my physical functioning, what were the more fundamental problems that disposed me to ruin my health?  And more importantly, how to transform them into factors of healing rather than of disease?  I was genuinely bewildered; there seemed nowhere to look.  I had been doing everything right, followed all the rules: ate well, exercised, lived for others, tried to save the world. I should have been the healthiest person in town.

Then the book that I started this blog with jumped off a table at me and I started this quest into fundamentalism and Christianity (and, of course, where the two converge in my life). Through the summer and fall last year, I began acknowledging how deeply and completely Fear had ruled my life and how my vain were my attempts to control the fears by perfecting the rules.  By the time I was ready to claim being a Christian again, I was only willing to do so on the condition that I not be ruled by the legalisms that Fear begets as well as is begotten of. 

The Rules of any fundamentalism, however well-intentioned originally, always miss the point of the cause.  Just as navel-gazing became the hilarious euphemism for trying to fake enlightenment in the hippy oriental-flavored 60’s spirituality, so too is biblical literalism and other idolatrous adherence to doctrine over Divine communion.  Many people do find enlightenment through meditating on the breath in the belly, of course, that’s how the stereotype came to be.  Similarly, many Christians have found the images of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, Crucifixion as Propitiation, and other doctrines to be devices that facilitated communion with both the Divine and humanity.  But for those for whom the device doesn’t succeed, dogmatic practice of the device becomes ritualized. Rules become the standard rather than relationship. When a device becomes divisive, idolatry occurs.

Being so ill for so long, trying so hard to follow the doctor’s advice, only to have it make me sicker and crazier, made me realize, as nothing else could, that rules never work.  Only principles work.  The rules hadn’t kept me from sickness, rather they’d caused it.  Rules didn’t keep my family functioning during my disability, but having understood principles of taking care of oneself and others was what allowed everyone to pull together to do what needed doing.

Therefore, when I came back to Christianity, I accepted no rules only essential principles.  Creeds and doctrines are more rules than principle.  Creeds state what must be believed—a rule.  Christian principles are those essential mantras that Jesus taught—love God and neighbor, forgive the brother, do good to those who hurt you, do unto others.  I didn't agree that the creedal doctrines are inherent in what Jesus said—rather as what later, sometimes much later, theologians said he meant. It doesn't make the creeds wrong—if they lead to the kind of radically loving life that Jesus did teach. I think ANY doctrine that fosters its believers in a deeply loving life is great—for them. 


For me, I am not convinced that the bible necessarily teaches a Trinity, Original Sin, or Final Judgement. I wanted to start at the absolute foundation and rebuild my new Christian theology from there. My fundamental, doesn’t-get-any-more-elemental foundation I defined as “some kind of God exists and there's this collection of Middle Eastern Antiquities writings about this guy who appears to have been a radical itinerant preacher who taught about this God.”

Starting from that incredibly skeletal beginning, I began reading the scholars of Bible, historians of religion, and mystics (again, still, always).  The one thing they all agreed on—even when they didn’t even agree on a single other point—was that this iterant preacher taught a radical kind of love for God and for fellow man.  So that single point, radical “wasteful loving” as Jack Spong calls it, became my Basic Christian Doctrine.