Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde

This is my reading of Isaiah 53:

There is the deep magic of the prophetic voice as it speaks of the one to come, and how he will be treated, and what that treatment will accomplish. But there is an even deeper magic here. God was pleased to allow God's own face to be bruised, that in God's own face there would be no beauty that we should desire. God bore our own likeness in God's own self to such a degree that he became a god that would bruise and wound its own creation. That it would become an angry, jealous tyrant laying waste its own creation in fits of rage by flood and pestilence and sword. That it would strike its servant dead for daring to reach out and steady the Ark of its very Covenant. That it would rejoice as the heads of infants were dashed against the rocks.

This is Odin, becoming stronger as the blood of the fallen flows. This is Kali dancing on the body of her beloved. This is the Morrígan, washing the bloodstained garments of those about to die. This is the very creator, being birthed into its own creation as a projection of our own duality of darkness and light. Just as all gods arise out of our collective unconsciousness, bearing to their very core the conflicted iniquity and beauty of us all.

And why should this god be any different? Why should this god not die, as all gods die, when they have worn out their welcome. When we have hid our faces from them and despised them for their ugliness, their pettiness, and their ultimate ineffectiveness.

And yet here is deepest magic of all. Here is a god who did not just take upon itself the punishment for our sins. Here is a god who suffered itself to BECOME sin. Here is a god become so twisted and depraved that it would birth an entire race of children with the express intention of killing (or in some versions eternally torturing) all but a small remnant. A god become the ugly thing that clawed and crawled its way out of the darkest places of the human heart, gorging on the body and blood of sacrifice, until one day we could no longer keep pretending we believed.

And on the day of our unbelief this god died. And it is good that this god died. For when a god dies, might not something it is bearing in its own body die with it?

But the story didn't die. A myth is woven into the fabric of the universe. And in the telling and retelling the myth is being redeemed. The story is being rehabilitated. The monsters of our own creation come to be seen as more than they once appeared. There is beauty, truth and goodness woven into the tapestry of sorrow, death and pain.

We get the god we ask for. We get the only god our imaginations are able to conceive. And as we grow to ask for better gods we begin to catch a glimpse of what was always there behind the veil. Of that which the seers and the prophets, the oracles and the shaman, the dreamers and the mystics, have been hinting at, however imperfectly, all along.

The death of Jesus was apropos: all gods must die.

Then when the ship rode the water, fires mounted on the ship. And in the blaze of the fires one was seen bending over the body of Baldur and whispering a father's last farewell into his dead son's ear. It was Odin All-Father. Then Odin went down off the ship and all the fires rose into a mighty burning. Speechlessly the Æsir and the Vanir watched with tears streaming down their faces while all things lamented, crying, "Baldur the Beautiful is dead, is dead." -Norse myth

The Son...can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. -John 5:19

But stories don't end, they get retold. And the tale grows in the telling. And one day we'll tell it aright.

The arc becomes a circle.

As above, so below.

When I got to the section where Jesus on the cross forgives them I said to myself, I might not even know if God exists, but if the giant nihilistic shit-hole we call planet earth is going to have hope in it I'm going to arbitrarily, but for aesthetically persuasive reasons, choose the narrative where the homeless dead Jew tells the person who just killed him, in front of God, "forgive him", 'cause that's beautiful.

-Tripp Fuller

https://homebrewedchristianity.com/2016/08/25/live-from-vancouver-with-sallie-mcfague-and-john-cobb/

Well I'm actually still alive... who knew...

Deconstruction has (thankfully) finally ended. I waited all this time to be sure it really was over. Apparently it is.

Emerging from the rubble we find that god is dead. Good riddance I say. God was a right nasty old bugger who deserved to be deaded. That god was no different from the rest of us who bore the seeds of our own deadness in our very DNA. The "Walking Dead" you might say. We kill off the "other" and find that they come snarling back to take their revenge (ISIS kills the gays in Orlando and Christians everywhere find themselves a bit confused).

Or it's a Game of Thrones where the Donald, the Bern and the Hillary battle it out for a seat on that most uncomfortable of seats. All iron swords piercing your backside in some demented S&M game where the winner gets flayed and frozen in the winter of our discontent is coming so pray to the mother of dragons for some goddamn heat.

More to follow I presume. Meanwhile this Amber by birth has passed (ever so briefly) through Orange and thought Green was a right nice place to hang out til Teal came calling and I never looked back. If that confuses you then good... it confuses me too. Check out a bit of integral theory here.

Oh... and lest you worry about the fate of my immortal soul... I'm a bigger fan of Jesus then I've ever been before. It's just that his father turns out to be a lot different than what I'd been led to believe.

Again... more to follow.

Peace out!

Could Hitler be "Saved" - A Thought Experiment

Having been around the around the Christian theological block a few times I think I have a pretty good basic grasp on the subject of salvation (the theo-nerds call it soteriology) and various theories of the atonement, eschatology, the afterlife and so on. I was reading a blog post about Hitler in Heaven and I thought it would be fun to try and figure out just how that might be possible, or even IF that might be possible, within the various doctrinal systems that would pertain to such a thing. I'm sure I'm over simplifying, but here is a quick list of possible scenarios that could allow for Hitler being in Heaven. Note that these scenarios fall within the generally accepted Christian range of belief systems. Certainly people will argue vigorously between the more Reformed side (options 1 and 2) and the more Arminian side (option 3), but you generally won't get thrown out as a heretic for falling into either of these camps.

1. Eternal Security (Once Saved Always Saved)

2. Election

3. Deathbed Conversion

So lets quickly think through these options.

Eternal Security, referred to by the nerdy as perseverance of the saints, would hold that anyone, even someone like Hitler, could technically make it into Heaven by virtue of having had a valid and true conversion experience at some point in their life. If it was a true and valid conversion experience, then God is essentially honor bound (by virtue of certain passages of scripture) to honor that salvation experience. Of course the sheer lunacy of applying this doctrine in a rigid and un-nuanced way has resulted in a sizable number of escape clauses that God can presumably use to avoid having Heaven populated by the likes of a Hitler. Most popular would be the question of whether or not the conversion experience was true and valid. It seems to go without saying that if Hitler was going to make it into Heaven purely by virtue of his true and valid conversion experience at the age of 15 or so that it wasn't actually a true and valid conversion experience. Or something like that...

Election is the idea that God chose in eternity past, before the creation of the world, just who would be saved and who would be damned. From this it generally follows that the elect person would (obviously?) have a conversion experience at which point the perseverance of the saints kicks in and we can jump up to the above paragraph and follow it through from there. Well sort of. With election you don't have the possibility of an untrue or invalid conversion experience so God doesn't have that escape clause open to him should an elect Hitler make it to the pearly gates. Fortunately you can just push things back up the line a bit and deduce that if an elect Hitler showed up at the pearly gates he wasn't actually elect. Never was and never could have been. Phew... 

There is a school of thought that subscribes to once saved always saved but doesn't subscribe to election (Free Will Baptists, etc.). In other words, the conversion experience is a matter of free will but once you've had the conversion experience your will (at least in regards to salvation) is no longer free. Technically your will in regards to, oh lets say, genocide is still free, but those who commit genocide obviously didn't have a true and valid conversion experience... And, well, you get the point...

Having eliminated the first two options we are obviously left with the deathbed conversion. Interestingly the deathbed conversion works just fine with the first two options so I guess we really didn't eliminate them after all. But anyways... the idea here is that a person could live a completely horrible life, they could be as evil as, lets say, a Hitler, and if, for whatever reason, they had a conversion experience at some point prior to their death (even if only minutes or seconds prior), they're good to go. They've got their pearly gate pass in the pocket of their white robe and they're golden.

As I said, this works fine with option 1. They were elect, but perhaps for the purposes of demonstrating God's glory it was determined that Hitler wouldn't have his actual conversion until right before his death. In Hitler's case this is made a little harder by the fact that his death was a suicide (historically a sin), but there's still at least a second or two of consciousness after the trigger is pulled for the conversion to take place. It also works fine with option 2 for pretty much the same reasons.

I don't know about you, but this all leaves me a bit dissatisfied. However, I assure you this conversation has been had many many times in Christian circles. I've been a part of many many such conversations. I don't think I've ever heard a thoughtful and sincere Christian say that it was simply impossible that Hitler could make it to Heaven. Most people are pretty sure he won't be there, but all the various doctrinal systems pretty much have to allow for Hitler to make it to Heaven.

I'd say most people, regardless of their theology, would agree that Hitler showing up in Heaven via any of the above scenarios is kind of hard to swallow. But we have to accept the possibility, because after all to deny it would be to essentially deny that God is all powerful and God can make anything work out. Even a sociopath showing up at the pearly gates with a free pass. Another thing that makes it hard to swallow is that inherent in all of the above doctrinal systems is the idea that when a "saved" person dies they are immediately made perfect (theo-nerds call it glorification) either at the moment of death or at the moment of the resurrection (depending on your doctrinal system). They were "counted" as perfect at the moment of their conversion, but are actually "made" perfect at that post-death point. Nowhere in here is there any notion of making restitution for wrongs done or having to suffer any sort of punishment for the vile deeds done. At least not for Protestants. Catholics have purgatory which, at least in the case of Hitler, sounds pretty good.

If you made it this far you should be wondering something, and if you're not it's probably because I'm not a very good writer. You should be wondering how it's possible that anyone could NOT end up in Heaven. If God is powerful enough to get even a Hitler into Heaven by election, by choosing them before they were ever born and then working things out from there, why wouldn't he just choose everyone? On the other hand, if God can step in between the time a trigger is pulled and the time a brain is splattered and bring even a person like Hitler to conversion, then why wouldn't he do this for everyone? How do we know he WON'T do it for everyone?

By this point you're probably coming to the conclusion that this whole things is starting to get a bit silly. How did we get to the point where we've got to make up all these convoluted scenario's when trying to figure out how a person like Hitler could make it to Heaven? Maybe all our systems and doctrines and rules have boxed us, and God, into a framework that seems to make sense if you don't really push too hard on it, but once you really start pushing at it, and drawing things out to their logical conclusions, you end up with scenarios and arguments that are just plain silly.

Maybe the real story of how God will get people like you and me, even people like Hitler, into Heaven actually makes sense. Maybe it is a lot less silly, and a whole lot more beautiful, than we're making it out to be.

Stay tuned...

George MacDonald and C. Baxter Kruger

I have read, listened to, and watched, a huge amount of "Christian" (and other types of spiritual) content during the past decade. I have followed more rabbit trails than I care to remember. In that sea of words, George MacDonald and C. Baxter Kruger are the two voices that have risen buoyantly to the surface and that I have been unable to sink with my caustic volleys of hurt, fear, anger, doubt and suspicion.

C.S. Lewis famously said of MacDonald:

I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.

In the introduction to an online version of Unspoken Sermons is this quote from Dr. Rolland Hein:

The purpose of Unspoken Sermons is to arouse the reader’s will so to choose, by imparting a clearer understanding of what God’s Will is. It is not to argue doctrines intellectually. It is not to formulate a systematic theology. MacDonald’s insights are not for the mind alone, but for the heart. They afford the reader glimpses of truths which to the child-heart of the true Christian are undeniable. MacDonald avows: “I believe that no teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks, but to lead them to the living Truth , to the Master Himself, of whom alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it.” The careful reader (and this material may not be read otherwise) will certainly have such a confrontation with Truth in the pages ahead. More than once reading here has brought sudden tears to my eyes and an involuntary thrill to my breast, and I have seldom had a stronger feeling of certainty that I was standing in the presence of valid insights into the Eternal Mystery than during the reading of these Unspoken Sermons.

When I read that quote I knew EXACTLY what he meant. The "sudden tears" and "involuntary thrill" have happened many times while listening to the words of both these men. I will go one step further than Dr. Hein: I have NEVER had a stronger feeling of certainty that I was standing in the presence of valid insights into the Eternal Mystery than during the reading of these Unspoken Sermons. Indeed, it is only now that I am nearing the end of reading them that I can start to imagine being able to read the Bible and discovering the Christ in its pages that for so long has been hidden by the "doctrines" and "teachings" of men (not to mention my own self-obsessed blindness).

George MacDonald - Unspoken Sermons (all these are free)
Kindle: http://amzn.com/B00849E492
Audio: http://librivox.org/unspoken-sermons-by-george-macdonald/
Web: http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/

C. Baxter Kruger - Lecture (audio or video)
http://www.perichoresis.org/free-resources/free-lecture-series.html

I would highly recommend the audio version of Unspoken Sermons recently made available at Librivox by David Baldwin. It is very obvious that it was a labor of love and I feel like I am in the presence of MacDonald himself when I listen. Blessings upon you David.

The Problem with Unbelief

This post by Peter Rollins is absolutely stunning. I have been trying, and failing, to make this connection for years. To think that the root of my traumatic relationship with Christianity and Church was believing TOO much. And here I always thought the problem was my doubt. This makes so much sense.

The John 14:6 Challenge

Recently a challenge was given over at Homebrewed Christianity. The challenge was to record our responses to the John 14:6 quote bomb about Jesus being the exclusive way to God. I'm not sure if I'll send this in, but I at least wanted to commit some thoughts to writing.

There are a lot of ways this passage could be, and has been, spun. I think that scholarly examinations of the text have proved, and will prove, very useful and enlightening. As with most texts, it will be possible to come at this from a variety of angles and wrest from it a variety of nuanced interpretations which will mostly be congruent with the mindset and tradition the interpreters bring with them. I would like to simply respond with a story.

My wife was raised in a home that was essentially non-religious. Her father is of Jewish ancestry and her mother of Christian, but both are non-practicing. As far as I can tell they are not Atheist's, they simply seem to have a willingness to accept that God is whomever or whatever God is, and don't seem to have any compelling need to "figure it out".

Of course my story is the exact opposite. I was raised in a very biblicist and legalistic Christian environment. Our denomination was so concerned about maintaining doctrinal purity that we even had our own schools. It was of paramount importance that we knew and understood the (somewhat distinctive) fundamental beliefs of our church and we were guilted into encouraged to "share our faith" whenever and wherever we could. We were so conservative and confident in our beliefs that we would consider even the Southern Baptists as apostate and liberal.

By the time I married my wife I was no longer attending church on a regular basis, but I still held to the beliefs instilled in me by so many years of attending church and 14 years of "christian" education in denominational schools. My wife was attending a United Methodist church and had no problems identifying as a Christian, but was completely free of religious baggage (a state I envy more and more all the time).

Several years ago, early in our marriage, we had our first theological discussion. I think it was prompted by seeing a couple of LDS missionaries riding their bikes into a neighborhood. The conversation reached its crux when I stated that however genuine their faith and admirable their intentions, since they didn't believe the right things about Jesus and were not "christian" (as defined by my beliefs of course), they were almost certainly lost. My wife then calmly asked if that meant her father would not go to heaven even though he was a very good man and a kind and loving father. I immediately kicked into full-apologetics mode and explained why it didn't matter how good or kind he was, it all hinged on him accepting the free gift of salvation offered by Christ. She, again quite calmly, made a statement that has triggered a complete deconstruction of not only what I believe, but the very nature of belief. She simply said that when she stood before God she would ask God where her father was (heaven or hell), and if God said her father was in hell then she would reject God to God's face and go to be with her father. That she would rather spend an eternity in hell with her kind and loving father than spend an eternity in heaven with such a monstrous being.

Only someone steeped in the biblicist/evangelical mindset can understand the way in which that statement rocked me to my core. Here is someone I love saying something that, on the one hand, makes perfect sense, but on the other hand seems utterly blasphemous and horrifying. I tried my best over the ensuing months to convince her of the error of her ways, but to no avail. You see, her threat to reject God was purely theoretical because she never had believed, and never could believe, that such a scenario could ever happen. Her worldview and view of God just simply wouldn't allow for such a thing to happen. She instinctively knows, without any biblical, philosophical or theological education, that she can affirm the value, and even inspiration, of the scriptures, while at the same time understanding that all attempts to construct airtight theologies and interpretations of scripture is simply an impossibility. And this causes her absolutely no angst, concern or confusion.

It has always been so important to me to "get it right", to find the truth and figure out what I should believe in order (I suppose) to "be saved" or avoid hell. My wife instinctively knows that trying to define and believe the right things, as it comes to these matters, is not only impossible, but is totally wrongheaded and a supreme example of missing the point. She instinctively understands that following Jesus is not a matter of believing the right things about Jesus, but is a matter of actually following him. She instinctively understands that even if John 14:6 means that the only way her father can come to God is through Jesus, that, far from being a scary thing, that's really quite a good thing. She instinctively understands that if Jesus was just a good man or a prophet whose example we should follow, that her father is in pretty good shape. But that if Jesus is actually God incarnate who came on a mission to save the whole world then he probably, being God and all, is able to actually accomplish that. In which case her father is in even better shape.

So when people quote bomb John 14:6 at me, I can't do any better than my wife. The only thing I still lack is the utter and complete innocence and guilelessness with which she can completely fail to understand why John 14:6 is a problem. May she never lose that childlike faith. May she never ever hold up the Bible and eclipse the face of God.