Category: The Pentateuch

Trust and Obey

~ phroneticchristian ~ 1 Comment

As a young evangelical, although I grew up surrounded by fundamentalism, I didn’t know much about it. Until the first week at Wheaton College, when most of my dorm-mates used their evenings to attend a Bill Gothard seminar, known then as Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts. I didn’t partake in that extra-curricular exercise, but I glanced through the hefty notebooks issued to each student.

Here was the cult-like teaching of neo-fundamentalism, spelling out in no uncertain terms who’s in charge. Contained therein was an overdose of hierarchic control. Trust and Obey, For There’s No Other Way. Being under authority is one of (since disgraced) Gothard’s most central teachings. Through copious diagrams, he stresses that a woman is subject to her husband; if single, her father remains in charge of her life. The husband is like a High Priest in charge under Christ and the wife totally subservient to the husband; her access to God is through her husband. The mother in turn exercises authority over the children. Presumably, likewise the children over the pets as being the least significant members of God’s family system. Bad, sinful things happen when that divinely ordained chain-of-command is violated.

I think back to Genesis 2, where God made a woman from a rib he had taken out of Adam. It’s a fascinating story. One which makes me have faith not so much because of what the Bible says, but often in spite of it. But for neo-fundamentalist literalists, they not only believe the Bible, they know its true in every respect. Things happened exactly that way because the Bible and Ken Ham say so.

In essence, Eve was a mutant. God made a new being from somebody’s body parts. Most people familiar with Frankenstein would consider that as creating a monster. And that is how neo-fundamentalists (i.e. – evangelicals) view women. A monster which must be controlled; caged by her master. Bad things happen when the monster is let off the leash.  

H.L. Mencken once observed, “morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.” As religion, evangelicalism tends towards being a cult of (often blind) obedience. An old Gospel song recites, “Fix Your Eye Upon Jesus”. That’s great, except we need our peripheral vision to not bump into things. Or obstacles, like other people and their annoying problems and demands, disturbing our blissful, solo walk with the Lord. The boss takes no crap from underlings in a scheme where all the shit flows downhill anyway.

Take the family, for instance. Jesus said, “I have come to divide people against each other! From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me, and two against—or two in favor and three against.” Most people interpret this as you suffering because of your faith.  I see as well as other family members suffering because of your faith. Especially today, when religious organizations use the euphemism “Family” to disguise the fact they are really Extreme Right Wing lobby groups. And Christian families cheering on Trump’s border separation of minors from their undocumented parents. Or like the six-year old looking forward to kindergarten until being expelled from the Christian school because her parents are gay.

I’ve covered a lot of ground here. Let’s just summarize by saying evangelicals put the “nuclear” into family, where rigid conformity to a fundamentalist Diktat is more important than spiritual damage being done to the family. Trust and Obey: use carefully. Among other regrets, I obeyed James Dobson’s advice as a Godly father in spanking the kids. As Mencken implied, a person can be utterly spotlessly religious and still be an asshole. I was that asshole. And I repent.

The (Not-So) Inerrant Bible

~ phroneticchristian ~ 1 Comment

The antediluvian world intrigues me. For what the Bible says about it, but more for what it omits. The Bible is the word of God. I get that. Meanwhile, the universe God created is given short shrift in the beginnings of Genesis. We read where He created the heavens and the earth. He had a lot of creating to do, of which much is left unsaid.  Frankly, I’d like to know what was going on in the 400 billion Milky Way stars, with 1-to-10 trillion orbiting planets. Not to mention the 2 trillion galaxies within our observable Universe. We are only beginning to understand things out there. Planet earth is but a grain of sand on endless miles of beach. Taking the Bible purely as an astronomy text makes for a very frustrating read. Apart from but a few brush strokes on a broad canvas, the Bible is silent. Let’s just say, there’s little help for cosmologists there.

Literalists don’t look at that as a weak point. Theirs is the conversation-ending “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” The fact that there’s a lot that God didn’t say doesn’t deter literalists from presuming to know he meant. In The Lost World of Scripture, John Walton and Brent Sandy observe there’s a considerable “lostness” in how the Bible came into being. This is the literalist’s dilemma throughout the pre-flood account of Genesis. Christianity is great at reading between the lines; the most malleable religion of all. The materiality of the Biblical ante-diluvian world is as ineffable as Heaven, given that an epoch terminated by a cataclysmic worldwide flood defies outside scrutiny. Even God to have delivered all of that pre-history into Moses’ hands is not specifically stated in the Bible. Nor is it a sure thing that Moses even wrote the Pentateuch – which somehow doesn’t explain how he could write the account of his own death.

“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?, asks the Psalmist. The Bible soon segues into what was revealed to human beings, using anthropomorphic language. God walked in the garden of Eden. (Gen. 3). “There’s no definitive proof, but the passage’s implication seems clear to me”, writes evangelical defender Randy Alcorn. Implication, surmise, presupposition, conjecture. Literalists twist themselves into logical pretzels reading into the Bible what isn’t there, or simply talk godly twaddle like Sunday School teachers to their 3rd grades. “Evangelicalism is not fundamentally an intellectual organism”, Peter Enns writes, “but an apologetic one”. This explains why evangelicals cannot be silent even where the Bible is silent.

Indeed, evangelicalism has been afraid of intellectual honesty since the Scopes trial, which exposed the empty-headed, predetermined conclusions of their doctrinal beliefs. Like Ken Ham, where his concrete boat, The Good Ship Eisegesis, teaches there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. There is much to unlearn at his Kentucky religious theme park, where a little embellishment of the Biblical text might be necessary here and there to properly defend it. Temptation lurks in an apologetic that goes beyond the sacred page, seeking to control the text rather than submitting to it. God’s history is wild thing, which we profanize by domesticating it.

It’s easy to have these apologists drag you down into their “never contradicts itself” weeds, but the broad contours of literalism have been pretty well covered by Scopes. Suffice to it to say, that since then plenary inspiration has been a fundamentalist axe to grind against “liberal” Christians who see the Bible trustworthy so far as it is necessary for our salvation, and that it is to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and practice. Funny that two pillars of fundamentalism – Machen and Warfield – rejected literalism in favor of “theistic evolution.” It wasn’t until the first Cultural War first salvos fired by Harold Lindsell, and later sanctified (or embalmed) by the Chicago Statement, that it became a doctrinal hill to die on.

Gallup published a poll this week showing a declining proportion of the overall American population — now 20% — believes the Bible is literally true, word for word. (This is down from 49% in 2011). Half of evangelicals polled did not believe every word should be taken literally. Most evangelicals look to the Bible for answers – not questions. If evangelicals were the least bit self-aware, they might appreciate that NO ONE wants to adopt an anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-educational faith that is so absurdly and proudly detached from reality. Personally, I can’t accept a faith – much less a supernatural faith – where I have to check my brain at the church door. And I find it distressing that, despite overweening confidence in knowing what the Bible clearly teaches, fewer and fewer evangelicals are able to articulate the essentials of faith in even an elementary way.

I recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday, believing God “spoke through the prophets.” I believe in the nearness of a personal God, under whose providence we have the Bible as the written history of salvation under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And that the Scriptures are sufficient in fulfilling their purpose and function. Just as God had intervened in time and space, He was making himself known by history in story and story in history – a narrative unity inextricably linked to form what might be called true myth. That is to say, the Bible is to be read more as the history of revelation, than the revelation of history. It is sacred history, which Walter Bruggemann observes “stands some distance from what modern people might call history”. In that regard, “history” in the Old Testament is backgrounded to the metanarrative of love relationship between living God and broken creation. The subject matter of the Bible is God as He deals with His creation. Its attention is on Divine doing; the history of the hidden God gradually lifting the curtain on himself for the redemption of a fallen world.

The Bible is the word of God. Once again, I get that. I completely believe in it; except in the ways I don’t.

Naked Christianity

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A recent news article caught my attention: “Christians strip down at a South Texas nudist community”. It describes evangelical Christians who take it all off. Nudity is shameful, according to Focus on the Family. “From Genesis 3 onward Scripture seems to make it clear that, except in the case of sexual activity, it’s a shameful thing to ‘uncover one’s nakedness’”. I see just the opposite. Most people see nakedness as shameful because of sexual activity. “At Nature’s Resort, public nudity is not sexual,” the owner says. “The initial conception is that this is a sexual thing. People think we’re all out on the front lawn having sex with each other, swapping partners. In fact, if there is any overt sexuality, you see that gate open real fast and somebody is ushered out.”

“I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” God, it seems, intended for humans to live in the nude. That it didn’t bother Adam before the Fall; it would seem that his fear arose more out of the new-found exposure to vulnerability rather than embarrassment.

Nudity was a taboo in the ancient Israelite society. Beginning with Adam’s sin, the Bible frequently associates nakedness with humiliation and dishonor. Noah’s drunkenness, Lot’s daughters – “uncovering nakedness” connotes inappropriate sexual activity. But there are other passages where nakedness has nothing to do with that. Jesus hung naked on the Tree. And we have St. John matter-of-factly reporting that Simon Peter put clothes on when he jumped into the water. In the pre-mechanized world, there were occupations where nakedness was (no pun intended) best suited – those predating physical contact with whirling industrial machinery. Juxtaposed with Jewish morality is a Biblical ambivalence to nakedness where sexuality is not at issue.

Not making a big deal about seeing someone naked is a difficult question for us, in which there is a tension between the modesty of Christians, and the hyper-sexualized, X-rated society in which we live.  That said, I point to C.S. Lewis in saying there is no absolute Christian edit concerning the unclothed human form. One would never think of banning C.S. Lewis as a smut author. But in Perelandra, he casually describes how clothes are unnecessary on inter-planetary visits.  Indeed, in Heaven we are clothed with garments of salvation and arrayed in a robe of his righteousness. (Isaiah 61).

In Mere Christianity, Lewis opines that: “The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of ‘modesty‘”… While the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rules of propriety change. Even Pope John Paul II remarked that “nakedness itself is not immodest”. Context matters. I think of native tribes who lived naked for eons, until missionaries came to inform them it was evil.  Or, my elementary school experience, where we third grade boys didn’t think anything wrong in having to swim naked during pool time.

A stay at a German hotel might shock American tourists, with a sign at the indoor pool saying “No Bathing Suits Allowed”. Whenever I visited friends in Helsinki, we men would nonchalantly head into the sauna –sans clothes, of course.  I was too Puritan-minded to chance a mixed-gender sauna, also a common Finnish practice. In explaining how freeing the experience was, it was incomprehensible to American friends , who asked me whether/why I went to a gay bathhouse! Somehow, Finnish bathing culture escaped our remnants of Victorian prudery.

What person has never dreamed of bathing naked? I’ve done it! I was swimming at a sparsely-occupied beach on the Adriatic. What a sense of non-conformant liberty it brought. Or, at least partially. I kept my trunks on until in the ocean, and tied them tightly around my ankle – in constant fear of the knot becoming untied. And yes, I did pee in the Ocean!

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart,” says Job. Maybe there exists a “naked and without shame” setting in-between where God wouldn’t get mad if you did the same. You don’t stop being a Christian just because you happen not to be wearing any clothes.

I condone a group of naked Christians, who aren’t gathered for an orgy. Those who patronize a naturist retreat on Saturday, and sit in the front pew on Sunday. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. But looking in the mirror, I see almost seven decades of beauty-robbing decrepitude. Believe me, there’s nothing there there. I probably would not accept an invitation, especially since I wouldn’t go unless my wife came with. And that, my friends, would never happen!!

Old Age Senility and an Inerrant Bible.

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Person, woman, man, camera, TV. Donald Trump bragged that he aced a “difficult” cognitive test by remembering five words and reciting them in order. Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador – and strong evangelical – who resigned under good terms with Trump carries a Republican gravitas. She recently alluded to President Biden, noting “anyone above a certain age in a position of power… should have some sort of cognitive test”. She parrots many right-wing pundits who insist the lights are out and nobody’s home in the White House. (Of course, they skip over the previous President, who many in his own administration (and his siblings) believed had early onset Alzheimer’s.)

Conservative evangelicals like Ken Ham believe that if Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, it calls into question the truth of Scripture. One question Mr. Answers in Genesis has never asked is, did Moses ever take a cognitive test?

Exodus 7 informs us that Moses was eighty years old when he challenged Pharaoh. Did we get the Torah from a Moses suffering from old age dementia? It seems that if we can question a 78 year-old President’s mental acuity, what conclusions can we draw from Sinai? Here we have an elderly, perhaps senile, man who trudges up a mountain and comes down saying he saw G_d. Couldn’t the rhetorical argument be made that an aged, maybe hallucinatory, Moses saw something that wasn’t really there?

Conservative evangelicals believe the Bible’s divinely-inspired authority is not limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes but includes its assertions in such fields as history and science. I believe the miracles of Exodus and agree the Bible is infallible in terms of faith and practice. But the same can’t be said for the accounts in Genesis being historically, scientifically, and factually inerrant. And conservative evangelicals believe the first five books were all written down by Moses.

I’m not a geriatric physician diagnosing Moses’ cognitive impairment. I’m merely pointing out that making reckless age-ims about President Biden’s mental acuity logically leads to places where conservative evangelicals are loath to go.