Anything that leads to murder should raise doubts about its legitimacy when put in service of so-called spiritual truth. That killing was done "for God" and yet didn't lead to a complete re-think about the theological "approach" to a relationship with God is simply insane. Yet this madness persists today. Every time a sermon is preached where someone says "the Bible says God says" the lie continues to be spread. The answer to all such claims is a loud "Says who?"
Listening to the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time, hosted by the always wonderful Melvyn Bragg about Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563) one story hit home -- hard! One of the show's contributors told the story of Perotine Massey, a Guernsey woman burned for heresy by the Roman Catholics. She gave birth while in the flames. The baby was tossed back into the fire after it burst from her burning stomach and landed -- alive -- at the feet of a soldier guarding the pire.
This awful event was described in the quaint "Old English" title given to a contemporary engraving depicting the burning as: "A lamentable spectacle of three women, with a child infant brasting out of the Mothers Wombe, being first taken out of the fire, and cast in agayne, and so all burned together in the Isle of Guernsey, 1556 July 18."
Such an account might confirm the superiority of Protestant Christianity to the brutality of Roman Catholicism -- except that Protestants did the same sort of things to Catholics, not to mention to Native Americans.
There is a "reason" for such viciousness: theology practiced as if it is an exact science. Call this the Roman Church/Protestant idea of spirituality as "correct" belief. That's a liability. The equivalent would be to say that you're only married if you can pass an exam on the correct details of your spouse's life history, beliefs, likes and dislikes, blood-type and food preferences.
A theological approach to religious faith attempts to reduce something intuitive to an exact "science." Tick the "wrong" box and you fail the exam.
From liberal to fundamentalist to charismatic, the Protestant denominations are still as united in their commitment to salvation-through-correct-ideas as are the Roman Catholics. The root of the Protestant commitment to salvation through correct belief lies in the retributive and juridical "rationalistic" history of the Roman Catholic Church from which all Protestant denominations evolved. Western Christianity has relied heavily on signing up to "correct" doctrines in order to be saved. Catholics and Protestants may disagree on what is correct but they agree that correct doctrine is needed for salvation.
Believing "wrong" was for much of church history called heresy and punishable by excommunication or death. Religious "certainties" were so fragile they had to be protected by violence by all sides. That should have eliminated this theological correctness retributive and juridical rationalistic approach long ago. It didn't because religion was never about God but about a way to dominate people and keep rulers in power. It still is.
The problem is that the book around which these "correct" doctrines are spun is not a book at all. In that sense it "says" so many things that it says nothing. So the book is a great mine to dig anything out of needed to support one's personal tyranny over others but it is nothing more than that.
For any book to "say" something it has to fulfill 2 tests: First it has to be a work of non-fiction whose truth claims can be corroborated from outside of itself. Second, it has to be by one author or at least by authors who know each other and collaborate to bring their message to readers.
What it can't be and at the same time be said to have a single coherent message worth killing people over, is a collection of myths, essays, letters, stories, recorded oral history, misinformation and fables that were gradually collected and added to over thousands of years without the authors being aware that their bits and pieces of writing would someday be seen as "chapters" in one "book." And since little to nothing in the book can be corroborated from outside testable sources, its truth claims (real or imagined) are worthless if taken as "fact"-based let alone in a juridical sense and then used to judge others.
When I run into the idolatry of Bible worshiping I'm reminded of something I observe with the folks raised in the age of texting and cell phones. I see them expect "answers" from the little black box they hold. They seem to trust it rather than the reality around them. They seem to be losing a tactile sense of how the world works because their connection to it is mediated through their phones, tablets and computers. For instance I know a young woman who tends to check the weather by looking at her phone instead of up at the actual sky. And that reminds me of the people I know who argue about what the Bible "says," for instance "about" gay people, rather than trusting what they know to be true about the gay people they actually know.
At least the weather report on the phone someone is checking (rather than just looking up at the real sky) was put together by well intended sane meteorologists who were actually trying to tell their audience what was happening. But those who look to the Bible for instruction in a way that overrides the reality they actually experience are like people trying to find out what is happening with the weather who watch a cooking show to get a weather report!
Since what is being said on the cooking show has nothing to do with the weather the person looking for information has to come up with an elaborate "explanation" of just how it is that a show about -- say -- making fried chicken actually is about thunderstorms and what to wear to a family picnic.
When absurdity is being rationalized and explained things get a bit crazy, say like this:
"We're having fried chicken at the picnic, they are talking about fried chicken on the show and so they must know all about our picnic and so when they say to use corn flower to bread the chicken because it doesn't burn as badly at regular wheat flower that must mean that there will be no sun today but clouds so we need to bring umbrellas so we won't burn and that just proves that real believers will only be saved because corn flower saves chicken from burning so from now on real believers will never eat white bread again or go out without rain gear. White bread is sinful and a sign of true faith is wearing a raincoat at all times! Amen?"
Here's a theologian at work "explaining" his equivalent of mistaking a cooking show for a weather report, and no less nuts: "Solomon also teaches us that not only was the destruction of the ungodly foreknown, but the ungodly themselves have been created for the specific purpose of perishing (Prov. 16:4)." (Calvin's New Testament Commentaries: Romans and Thessalonians, pp.207-208)
Nothing much has changed since Calvin's day. Franciscan University (Steubenville, Ohio) classifies gay people with murderers and rapists. This is a course description on their website: "SWK 314, DEVIANT BEHAVIOR focuses on the sociological theories of deviant behavior... The behaviors that are primarily examined are murder, rape, robbery, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness, and drug use (3 credit hours)"
The fact that theologians waste their lives is too bad but the problem is they've taken the rest of us with them into a labyrinth of absurdity where one can imagine a "god" creating the "ungodly themselves... [for] the specific purpose of perishing." I mean can you imagine seriously looking to -- say -- the life work of John Calvin for "answers" as to how to be saved when he said the system was rigged? And can you imagine going to a university where "murder, rape, robbery, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness" are lumped together? Would taking this course be useful for learning how to relate to your gay daughter? And can you imagine how thinking of a gay friend as having been created for the specific purpose of perishing will help you love her as a human being?
The self-evident ridiculousness of "Bible-based" theology -- a ridiculousness evident to all but those who buy into it as the needed passport to salvation and/or to those who earn a living through it -- is due to the fact that most theology is as farfetched as trying to come up with a way to understand fried chicken recipes as actually being about the "meteorology" of salvation. This isn't because theologians are bad people. It is because they are trying to "interpret" a book that isn't a book. They are looking for a coherent single message in a book that the authors never knew they were writing. They are trying to explain the inexplicable and find coded "messages" where there are none. In that sense theology is the domain of the ultimate conspiracy theorists.
So perhaps it's no coincidence that atheism emerged in the context of the Western Christian expression of both Roman Catholic and Protestant "intellectual" and "rational" religions that carried on doctrinal disputes over their "facts" to such a degree that those theological issues became the root cause of endless wars, persecutions and killings. Beside the idea of correct doctrine leading to actual war Western Christianity paid another price in that it built a house of cards wherein if you remove one card the entire edifice collapses. Since religion was reduced to belief in the right ideas religion became more about the "recipes" in the "cookbook" than about cooking itself.
The problem is that this approach to faith (and cooking) flies in the face of all the rest of human experience which is a matter of trial and error, mixed motivations, sincerity seesawing with bad motives and healthy doubts about everything we encounter. Life is lived on an experiential plain that has less to do with coming up with the right formulations than with passing on wisdom gained by our experience. In other words "correct" ideas don't take into account changed minds.
In reality church for most folks is about community, family and continuity rather than about believing the ideas spouted from the pulpit. For most people the truth is that sitting through sermons is the passport to the coffee hour when the real business of church is conducted in conversations with family and old friends.
Most things we do have a human community reasons for doing them rather than an ideological or theological "reason." I go to church because of my grandchildren. I enjoy taking them to the liturgy. But I'm fortunate because the liturgy I take them to the Greek Orthodox service that revolves around doing of liturgical practice rather than talking about belief systems. What you believe isn't the point. Showing up is. We light candles, take communion, make the sign of the cross, and kiss icons. The comfort I derive from these inane rituals is much the same as the comfort I get from gardening.
The plants I like best in my garden are those plants that have survived many winters like the old rosebush climbing up against the porch. They can be counted on. They are not new and improved and I don't enjoy them by reading about them or talking about them but just by coexisting with them. The doing of rituals - like old plants in old gardens -- also binds us into familiar pathways where others have gone before.
Like caring for an old tree the pleasure is in the stewardship of continuity. And the "point" isn't knowing about roses, it's the pinprick form the thorns, the smell of the flower, the wife who you have taken the flowers to from the same rose tree each year, the grandchild next to you helping you water the rose while you're telling her that you did the same thing with her father "when he was little."
Faith is about finding contexts where we feel comfortable and where we don't have to constantly question ourselves on our motives or how we feel about the "facts" or if we "believe" this or that. Instead we just are. This just being in the moment, this "stillness of the heart" is a completely different experience than sitting through sermons and taking notes or turning to biblical passages and weighing up in one's mind whether you "believe" (whatever that means) in what's being said.
Certainty based on "facts" is a delusion since no information is complete and there's nothing we "know" that later we might not change our minds about. But experience is something that grows and can be added to organically. Learning by hands-on experience is not an either-or proposition. It is a matter of looking up at the sky to see what is happening in reality instead of down at an electronic device. And connecting with the experience of grace is better than looking at a book and reading about it.
A "fact based" religious life -- in other words the idea that theology is a road to knowing the "right way" to love God -- is like a fact-based marriage where each person has to be "right" about everything. It's devoid of hope on those days when you don't agree. And spirituality like a marriage only works when the prime directive of love overrides who is right or wrong.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer
I am always shocked at how Frank keeps writing as if reading my mind. All religion should be based on the prime directive of love for the people in our lives both family and friends. And any in need of help.
I was raised in a Roman Catholic household but I very young learned that many so called Catholics and others focus on the sins of others as they see them in the Bible. Love too often is only for those living the correct way.
I am a believer in equal marriage for gays and hetero couples with all the protections and rights. What makes most angry are the parents which place their views of a correct life ahead of the happiness of their gay children.
It takes great courage and faith in their parents love for a child to come out. I have read often it asked, Why must they tell others about their private relationships? The question I have is, How can a gay young person not come out? Their loved ones always want to know when they will bring a girl home? What a pressure to place on their shoulders.
Some real theologians worth reading are: Jurgen Moltmann, Bernard Lonergan, David Kelsey, Karl Barth, David Ford, Oliver O'Donovan, David Tracy, Karl Rahner, John Cobb, Benedict XVI, Wolfhart Pannenberg.
http://www.amazon.com/Theology-Hope-Jurgen-Moltmann/dp/0800628241
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Christianity-Communio-Cardinal-Ratzinger/dp/1586170295/ref=sr_1_16?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348358240&sr=1-16&keywords=Benedict+XVI
http://www.amazon.com/Method-Theology-Collected-Bernard-Lonergan/dp/080206809X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348358271&sr=1-2&keywords=Bernard+LOnergan
Either the Bible was written/directly inspired by God, or it wasn't.
If it was, then it seems beyond the reach of man to questions to the various edicts, measurements, and orders of the Bible, regardless of contradictions, imagined or otherwise.
If it wasn't, then following the divine commands of the Bible has the believer running the risk of not doing God's will. And if the Bible was not written/directly inspired by God, then we have no source of knowledge for what God wants for us, what he likes and doesn't like.
The problem with removing God's authorship from the Bible is that it removes the sole underpinning of the Christian faith. There is no other source for knowledge of the Christian God and Christ if the Bible cannot be taken as wholly true.
Save yourself all this time and pain. Take the good philosophy, 'love thine neighbor as thy self', ignore the questionable, 'love they God with all thy heart, soul, and mind', and drop the bad, 'if a man's eye causes him to sin by looking at a woman with adultery in his heart, let him pluck out his eye that he may sin no more'. Philosophy > divine revelation.
The Bible has no more authority than humans give it and is not, in and of itself, holy. It did not proceed directly from God's hand or God's mouth. It was written by humans who may or may not have been inspired by their worship of God, copied by other humans who were not only subject to human errors but may have had political, social or religious agendas to add or omit ideas and then further translated into other languages by still more humans with all the flaws listed above. The best advice I believe has ever been given us concerning the Bible is laid out by the author of the epistle to Timothy, who tells us how to test whether something is Scripture by asking ourselves whether it is inspired by God, whether it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction and for instruction in righteousness and will help us to be equipped to live our faith before others.
It would be silly to even think that the bible is perfect in every way.There are even contradictions in the bible.With the proper mindset,the bible can impact and challenge a persons spiritual lens for the better if they do not take every word as literal.
There is no such thing as a myth, in the modern rationalist use of the term: because all myths are essentially true! As they describe some historical event that was actually REAL!
But as for Christians, most would hardly give a thought that the God of the Bible was unthinkable without writing, and more precisely, without the wheel: innovations which reduced human dependence on time and space, respectively. Oral societies did not have the notion of a covenant or the concept of eternity.
The Eternal One did not, one fine morning, on a peak in Sinai, discover an opportunity to reveal Himself. Rather, it was a political use of technology, a singular use to alphabetical writing in the context of the desert that enabled His appearance.
And it was the psycho-theological work it performed in engendering a disembodied, invisible Being.
Yes, He is actually in the words. Which is just why the Bible would go on to say: "And the Word became flesh and dwelled among men.
There was a lot of history before the Book of Genesis was written, which is why we find it anti-myth from first word to last.
Why.
Because all myths throughout all history, the world over are about the "gods", the Nephilim, the fallen ones: not God.
And all myths are etiological: Legends-that is, poetical sayings and stories of some actual historical event, the supernatural occurance of which is embedded in traditions, which were used to explain these "gods".
As impossible as it is for modern rationalism to imagine the human race wholly devoid and innocent of the least superstition, looking as they do, through the dark lense of Midieval European Catholicism, and thusly contribute those superstitions to the ignorance, has the cart turn the wrong way!
For it was the appalling fierceness of these "gods" which originally gave rise to the human race's fear: of lightening, storms; for omens, and every superstitious search for any kind of protective spell, beads, amulete, incantation, and giving rise to a thousand religions dead and gone.
Which is just why the anti-myth 6th chapter of Genesis was written to explain those so-called "god".
I'm curious, how is the story that man came first until a creator god fashioned woman out of the rib of said man qualify as 'history' and not as a myth?
I read your article, and I am left with the opinion that for you religion is not at the "heart of the matter". You identify "power and control" as being the reason behind the wrong doings of Protestants and Catholics. Yet, regardless of your own identification of the motive you list the Bible as being at fault. Isn't that sort of like your "fried chicken" analogy for the weather report. You're frying chicken while blaming the Bible.
If you are more attuned to gardening than religion, then, by all means, stay in the garden where a pinprick from a rose will teach you about God. Or, if it's only a communal experience that you desire, then there are many activities in your community you can join without having to degrade churches, the Bible, and people who attend church.
Something about this article is like taking a shotgun approach and firing it...but, even the scatter misses the target.
Throwing "bombs" is not a good way to make your argument. Take the time to speak with solid scholars of Protestantism and Catholicism. They will tell you that Christian dogma was not some exercise in creativity issued for the frustration of mankind. Christianity was early on called "The Way" and on it was built the beliefs that help us eventually return to God by following the Way set by Jesus Christ. Try it. You might like it.
Um, mydogoreo, are you not aware that Frank Schaeffer is the son of one of the most famous theologians of Protestant scholarship - Francis Schaeffer? Do you read? At ALL?
Please get your facts correct before you throw out your tired old backwash from whatever century it is you are living in. Because it sure ain't the last century or two else you would know who Francis Schaeffer is.
So true about so many things that you say.
Thank you for your writing.