Book Review: Confessions of a Bible Thumper

Confessions of a Bible Thumper by Michael Camp was both a fun, quick, enjoyable read and a difficult, personal history resurrecting, thought provoking book.  It is part memoir of how Camp got into and out of conservative American Evangelicalism with his Christianity intact, and part deconstructive analysis of the cultural and social opinions that are considered de rigueur for the true believer.  The early part of the book is more memoir and is much more loosely constructed, more like reading a blog than a book--even the editing is sloppier--but as the book continues, the structure tightens up considerably, the vocabulary improves and the editing is much cleaner.  It felt as if the book had been designed from a series of shorter, more intellectual, well-researched articles or lectures and strung together with folksy jaunts down memory lane, then tied up in neat chapters with contrived conversations with conveniently progressive and liberal Christian friends in the brew-pub.

That was the down-side of the this book.  Once I got over my snobbish dislike of what I consider the over-used device of the fake conversation in self-help (especially Christian self-help) books, I actually really enjoyed this book.  Michael Camp's journey through Christianity mirrors mine at so many points that I almost could have been reading my own story. The easiest to read and certainly the most fun blast-to-my-past was the container story set in the microbrewery in Silverdale, Washington.  My family and I used to live in Silverdale, walking distance from the Silver City Brewery in which the aforementioned conversational tidbits occur.  I've even raised a glass and downed a burger there when it was still just a burger joint.  We had a lot of laughs together, snuggled on the couch and peering at Google Earth in the laptop, "omigosh, remember that green belt we used to look out at from our deck?  It's a grocery store now!" and "holy cow, look at what went in there!" and, "hey, right there, that's the apartment you were born in, there's a hospital just up the street now."

And then the memories of trying to find a church home in Silverdale when we moved there as a newly married Navy couple.  Camp's descriptions of the churches in the area make it sound as though not much has changed in the decade-and-a-half since we were church-shopping.  We finally gave up in frustration.  If only we'd stayed in the brew-pub a few years longer and Michael Camp had arrived a few years sooner, we might still be willing to consider ourselves Christians--though certainly Christians as on the fringe as Camp and his brew pals.

As the memoir dug a little deeper into Camp's history, I thought of my own days as the preacher's kid, the one trying so hard to live just right as a witness to my public high school classmates.  I went to more than one of those big sell-out-to-Jesus conferences--none so large as Explo '72 that Camp attended in Texas but Love Europe '89 was only a slightly smaller European version followed by two weeks of street evangelism at sites across Germany.  I'm sure I was that girl who curled my lip and tossed my hair in disdain at people who smoked cigarettes, drank beer and had the temerity to think themselves truly saved!

Although even then, and for some years before that, the issues that Camp raises--inclusion, inerrancy, legalism, abortion, apocalypticism, evolution, sexuality, and universalism--had been nagging doubts lurking in my head.  Granted, my bigger questions as a teenaged girl and young woman in the Church were gender roles, feminism, authoritarian power structures, and exactly why couldn't I offer a prayer in our Spirit-led service but my brother could?  It was hard to read through this book and see my old confused but prejudiced self, arrogantly certain of all the answers even as I secretly doubted even the most basic of the taught truths.

Perhaps if I had read this book back in the Eighties, I might have realized decades sooner that there are many more legitimate expressions of authentic Christianity than my fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing allowed.  I might have never felt that I had to leave Christianity altogether in order to find God.  Then again, perhaps not.

I would hope that a copy of this book finds its way into every church library, trendy-named evangelism-themed coffee shop, and onto the bookshelves of every small group leader, Sunday School teacher, and spiritual director.  Because every Christian who longs for their fidelity to the Way of Jesus to have meaning beyond the social networking possibilities will one day, sooner rather than later, confront every single one of these questions.  Camp provides a template for how to go about thinking through the questions, directions for where to get more information and better research than can be provided in this book, and hope that love can be the gold standard of Christian living rather than rules, dogma, and cultural knee-jerk lockstep.

   See also, the book's website, Michael Camp's blog, and a video promo of the book.  Also available as a Kindle edition.

I was compensated  in advance for this review with a pdf copy of this book regardless of my published opinions of it.

Authority of the Word of God II (finally!)

[comment]  But what about the authority of Scripture? –or, How do you know Truth?

Your question on authority of Scripture is one I keep coming back to myself. I don't place any greater value on the Bible as the final arbiter of Truth than anything else--not because God couldn't assure that every version in every language said exactly what he wanted it to say, but because quite clearly He didn't since the various versions, translations, and manuscript copies disagree with each other and with themselves. The argument then usually comes back that only the original manuscripts (or the King James’ Version, which is scholastically absurd) were inerrant. That logic defeats the purpose, I think, of placing any authority in documents.  What is the point of having non-existent documents be inerrant when the documents we do have are full of errors (or at least questions and contradictions)? Ultimately, in practice, inerrancy lies then in picking the right interpretations of the Bible and whose interpretation do you choose and how?

Determining a “correct” interpretation comes down to a rational decision, made either personally or by assuming that your religious guru made the decision.  Since I don’t like to leave these sorts of things up to anyone else, I study the resources myself and determine what interpretations of Scripture to accept. Then, using the same logic that I apply to choosing a reasonable interpretation of the Bible, I realized that the authority to determine Truth must reside in myself—I have come to know the Divine beyond reason and logic and I hold that visceral knowing as my arbiter of Truth: a doctrine or interpretation of doctrine or Scripture must be for me both intellectually rational and congruent with what I know of God. Or actually the other way around congruent with my mystical knowledge of God and, secondarily, intellectually rational—because there are definitely things I am sure I know that I can't explain.

There are in German (and many other languages) two words that translate into English as "knowing": wissen and kennen. I wish that English had a similar differentiation between rational intellectual knowledge and experiential personal knowledge—the difference between book knowledge and knowing a person.

I kenn God through personal experience therefore I can weis (work out intellectually) doctrine and theology.

It is important to note, however, that kennen, experiential knowledge, is not just some touchy-feely emotional response. It is more like in physics class there are two ways to prove a theory—the least preferred method is to work out a conclusion logically, to derive it mathematically from a previously known law. The most preferred method is to demonstrate a conclusion through replicable experiment. To know experientially is the gold standard of scientific knowledge.

When I know God experientially, it's not a one-off feel-good warm fuzzy in a worship service or a touching sermon; it is a reliably replicable experience of the Divine—my experience replicates the knowledge and it is replicated over and over in the experiences of mystics in every religion from every era.

As a fundy evangelical, I was taught to doubt strenuously my own experience, my own knowledge in favor of "the Word of God", which in practice came down to the interpretations du jour of my dad and/or church. I had to walk away from Christianity entirely (for a very long time) and learn about seeking and weighing Truth from all kinds of secular and heathen sources before I could accept that the same rules applied to spiritual Truth as well. And that they applied universally whether I accepted it honestly or disguised it with doctrines of inerrancy that required the same work in practice.


(Part I of this two-part post can be found here)

Embracing Heresy

her·e·tic [ hérrətik ] (plural her·e·tics) Definition: 1. somebody who holds unorthodox religious belief: a holder or adherent of an opinion or belief that contradicts established religious teaching

2. somebody with unconventional beliefs: somebody whose opinions, beliefs, or theories in any field are considered by others in that field to be extremely unconventional or unorthodox

[14th century. Via French< Greek hairetikos "able to choose" < haireisthai "choose"]

[comment]  I guess that I'm confused about the heretic label you've bestowed upon yourself, for after reading most every post here, I don't think that I see anything heretical -- a very heavy word. … You seem to be professing that you don't really know what to profess -- so long as it’s genuine.

Ah, the short answer is that I am heretical because I choose not to accept any of the doctrinal dogma of Christianity as it is generally understood in our culture.

The longer answer goes like this: My understanding of the nature of spiritual reality is in direct opposition to the teachings about God and humanity and the relationship between the two that I learned growing up.  When I left Evangelicalism (the only version of True Christianity that I knew), I threw absolutely every belief I’d ever been taught into the recycle bin: there was not a single thing that I considered sacrosanct.  I even tried very hard to be an atheist but found that my mystical and psychic experiences made that philosophical position pretty laughable. 

After some twenty years as a non-Christian seeker of Wisdom, I realized a few very basic Truths that have now become my personal Fundamentals.  These are the mantras I’ve been chanting to my daughters since they were old enough to hear:

Treat people the way they want to be treated.

Share the Resources.

It's not funny if someone isn't laughing.

Charity begins at home.

Follow the money.

What goes around, comes around.

People are stupid everywhere; everyone is stupid sometimes; don't be any more stupid than you have to be.

Don't do anything that can get you pregnant until you are ready to welcome a baby, you're not ready for a baby until you pick out a good daddy. (Okay, this one may not be strictly philosophical but darn good advice!)

Here are a few more favorites that pepper the spontaneous sermonizing I do while about my daily business:

God is the creative force.

Hell is other people.

We are Imago Dei (humanity is the face of the divine)

If it is Truth, it is True across Time and Culture.

There are no Either/Or’s—they are always Both/And.

The opposite of a truth is a lie; the opposite of a profound Truth is another profound Truth.

The personal is always political.

Good leaders serve of their people.

Seek and ye shall find (and the flip side: you always find what you go looking for)

God gave us brains; he must expect us to use them.

The measure of holiness, regardless of religious culture, is characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control.

And the most profound truth of all:  Honor the divine, however you find it.  Nothing else matters.

As far as I can tell from my studies, none of my personal Fundamentals is contradicted by either Christian Scripture or the preponderance of nearly three millennia of theologians from any of the world’s Wisdom traditions.

As for the established Christian Fundamentals, I find very little evidence of truth to satisfy my rational mind. Mostly I found only parochial interpretations of tradition and scripture to support the dogma. So, I refuse to confess the creeds or to give intellectual assent to most, if any, of the central doctrines. When I first came back to Christianity, I even doubted the historical existence of Jesus himself.  Now I am willing to concede the likelihood of a historical Jesus of Nazareth, a radical iterant teacher who ran afoul of the Establishment and managed to get executed, but I still think a historical Jesus is irrelevant to the spiritual truth of Christianity.

I have not found convincing argument indicating the validity of anything like Biblical Inerrancy or even that the Gospel Truth is in any way historical truth.  Theological constructs such as the Virgin Birth, God in Three Persons or any other version of the Trinity, Deity of Christ (or in fact the deity of God), Original Sin, or even the historicity of the Resurrection or its physical necessity for spiritual redemption are, in my opinion, best understood from an allegorical point of view—as meditative tools or mythology that illustrates ineffable realities—rather than literal fact.

Being a true scientist, I am not arrogant enough to think that none of these doctrines could be absolute truth.  I am only saying that there is not, nor can there be, any way to prove one way or another what the literal truth of these doctrines might be.  And I choose to define the terms of spiritual reality differently, based on alternate interpretations of Scripture, current scientific thought in nearly every field of study, and my own experiences—all subject to change as I and all other scientists continue to ask questions, seek answers, and find more questions.

I have read extensively this last year on Christian theology, doctrine, church history, and my ever-favorite mystics.  I figured I was pretty well versed in the Evangelical dogma so I concentrated on specifically non-Evangelical sources—my favorites are listed in the Bibliography, Etc. page but that is only the tip of the reading iceberg.  I was more than a little dismayed to find how few writers I agreed with who were still identifying themselves as Christians and that none of those who did escaped rabid accusations of heresy. Then I realized that I was in the best company of all: Jesus himself was the first heretic in Christian history.  He was a Jewish heretic, to be sure, but heretical nonetheless.  If my claim to being Christian is that I follow the life and teaching of Jesus, heresy is a pretty good place to start!

Interestingly, while I was a heathen and espousing these ideas, no one much cared.  Non-Christians I knew took most of my conclusions for granted and Christians apparently considered me so far beyond the pale that I wasn’t worth arguing with.  But now that I have started to call myself a Christian again and I still hold to the same ideas, suddenly I get Hebrews (here and here) preached at me.  It didn’t seem to matter to anyone but me that I risked my immortal soul by not accepting the deity of Christ when I was a heathen but a heretic who questions the same is apparently destined to special damnation. As a heathen, I was generally well-respected; as a heretic, I am threatened with hellfire scare tactics by Christians and regarded akin to a first-grader who refuses to learn her ABC’s by non-Christians.

With all due respect to the commenter who wondered why I identify myself as a heretic, I call myself a heretic because I am heretical.  I put it right in the title so that no one reading my posts can be too surprised when I out some of my more outré ideas—truth in advertising, so to speak.  I don’t want anyone to have reason to feel betrayed when they discover that I don’t toe the party line.

The over-arching theme in this blog is that all of Christianity can be, and was by Jesus himself, reduced to a very simple premise: love God, love your neighbor, love your enemy. Nothing else matters.  Everything else is an add-on and a potential distraction from the Truth.  I don’t want my own heresy to be a similar point of distraction from that Truth.  In my own journey, owning my heresy has been crucial to understanding the radical simplicity of Jesus’ teaching, perhaps someone following my blog will find it equally liberating. 

Fear and God I: Love Equals Punishment

The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be. Katherine Mansfield

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 

I John 4:18

Growing up, I heard this verse countless times. It was for me a measure of my holiness, although I couldn't say whether that was the interpretation preached or simply how I heard it.  Being a child tortured by fears (of the dark; of being alone, of people; of monsters, snakes, dogs, rodents; death, dying, pain, hell, God; separation, annihilation, extermination; ...), I obviously was not anything like "perfect in love".

Within the evangelical, fundamentalist paradigm of God as Judge of Sin, I had absolutely no understanding of Love.  In my world, God's love was what had condemned me.  If he didn't love me, he wouldn't care enough to punish me for the sin I had been born with. God is love. God is punishment. Punishment is fear. But fear cannot be love. A = B. A = C. C = D. But D does not equal B? Yet another place where science and mathematics are proved wrong by the Bible!

It took a baccalaureate in psychology and sociology before I realized how perverted and schizophrenic that juxtaposition of love and punishment was. (Well, that and leaving the fundagelical world where the inerrant trumps science.) I still struggle twenty-plus years later to separate love from punishment in my own head.

But at least, I finally began to value my own mystical experiences of the Divine over the interpretations of the bible I had grown up with.  When I was able to redefine both God and Love according to my divine experience rather than the bible, suddenly the inverse relationship between Love and Fear was not only understandable in theory but also in practice.  When my experience of spiritual reality and secular description of physical reality were both allowed to trump literal, inerrant biblical interpretation, all things did become possible.

I am now so past fundamentalist literal interpretation of the bible.  I wish I were over it. 

Authority of the Word of God I

I am a mystic.  I suspect that I have always been a mystic. Mysticism and fundamentalism are about as diametrically opposed as it is possible for two approaches to the Sacred to be.  Fundamentalism is by definition and by history a rigid adherence to a pre-determined set of legalisms, whereas mysticism is knowledge of the divine by direct experience. I can tell you from long experience that it is categorically impossible to be both mystical and evangelical, even in theory, most certainly in practice.

From the time of my earliest memories I have been highly intuitive, even psychic.  Such things are anathema to evangelical fundamentalism.  My father himself was named after two of the major authors and an editor of The Fundamentals (the set of essays in the early 20^th Century that gave the movement its name).  Staunch doctrinal legalism was obviously important to his family and he passed it along the generations.

Prime among the fundamental doctrinal statements is sola scriptura, which declares that the bible is inerrant, infallible, historically literal, the very Word of God and, indeed, the only source by which God may be known. I obviously had knowledge of things beyond my ken.  When that knowledge didn’t corroborate the bible interpretations being preached, where did that leave me? I can tell you exactly: sitting in the back pew with my mother, worried desperately that I was a witch, that I wasn’t really saved, even that I was possessed by Satan.

Not knowing, or acknowledging, that there was any kind of True Christian other than evangelical fundamentalist, I stuffed my mysticism, my intuitive and psychic knowledge, into the deepest darkest closets of my very Being.  Where, of course, it leaked out constantly to disrupt my practice of Christianity!  Oh, how I prayed that God would take away these weird feelings, these visions, the dreams, the knowledge I had of people and of Life Itself.  And how I wished I had been born in Bible Times when it was still possible, permissible, to hear God directly, to be a prophet.  Everything I was seemed much better suited to some other Dispensation than these Almost End Times (or at the very least some other gender).

Religion, mostly evangelical Christianity but really all religions that I studied, always tries to tell me how to know God—what must I do, actions I must take, doctrinal statements I must believe, attitudes and behaviors I must model, in order to be in fellowship with God. The practice of religion is supposed to make possible a connection to the Sacred Other that is Beyond Me.

But the place where I begin my spiritual seeking (my Fundamental, as it were) is to notice that I already have a relationship with Something Beyond Myself that I call God, or The Divine when I want to differentiate from a specific conventional concept of God.  I am a mystic looking to reconcile my experience--what I know that I know that I know--with the intellectual exercise and physical practice of religion.

As a mystic, my ultimate standard of Truth is this experience of the relationship that I already have, rather than a particular canon of scripture or set of doctrinal statements.  My experience of God is so essential and visceral that I can only describe its validity as similar to the validity of knowing that water is wet.  Wetness is not a quality that you can define or explain.  You can learn the chemical formula for water, or the phase changes of the water cycle, you can learn the uses of water; but you cannot learn Wet.  I know God like I know Wet.  

When I read other people's opinions of the nature of spiritual reality--whether that is the bible or other writings--I compare that to what I already know.  When I read other mystics, whether Christian or not, we all sound the same.  Our words are not always the same but there is this quality of knowing the Divine that is so visceral as to be indescribable.  But when I read theologians, they are always trying to define and delimit what my experience should be.  It often feels like going to school for years to learn all about the properties of water and all the stuff water can do before being allowed to walk outside to step into the stream and JUST GET WET.

That's the number one reason that I don't trust the bible to be the Word Of God but rather lots of words about other people's experiences with God--extremely valuable in their own right but not at all the same thing as an ultimate spiritual authority.  If the bible, or any other teacher, doesn't jive with what I already know about Wet, I will search long and hard to reconcile the differences but the final authority for me is, for lack of a fuller description, that still small voice that speaks to me on my very breath.

And that is only the first of many ways in which I am a heretic.

(Part 2)