No. Jesus Was not Killed by the "Religious People"

The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath.
But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
John 5:15-18

I have seen many memes during Lent and Holy Week reminding us that Jesus was killed by the “religious people,” and I know that they are well intended.

It is not a bad thing especially at this time of the year for Christians to look critically at themselves. 

But there are two problems with the popular meme.

The first problem is that it is historically wrong. Jesus was not killed by the religious people; he was executed by the Roman Empire. His crime (or at least his supposed crime) was sedition rather than blasphemy. 

The second problem is that although the meme is well intended, what it is really doing is euphemizing the ancient falsehood that “the Jews killed Jesus.” It is another way to reinforce the anti-Semitism that is so often baked into our Holy Week observances.

Perhaps the most insidious thing about the anti-Semitism in the Gospels is that we Christians are simply oblivious to it. The scholar James Carroll, who is himself a devout Christian, points out in his book, “Christ Actually,” the obvious but generally unrecognized anti-Semitism implicit in our naming the two parts of the Bible the “Old” and “New” testaments.

“New” is always better than “Old.” One clearly supersedes the other.

Jesus was a champion of the poor and the marginalized, but we often portray his advocacy for the “least and the lost” as a contrast to the Jewish perspective. We do this in spite of the overwhelming evidence that Jesus stood in direct line with the Hebrew prophets. 

This anti-Semitism is an underlying theme in Holy Week. And that theme is most evident in the Gospel of John.

John frequently uses “the Jews” the same way that Matthew, Mark and Luke use “the Scribes and the Pharisees.” He is talking about the religious authorities who oppose Jesus. The reference to Pharisees as a synonym for self-righteous hypocrites is historically inaccurate and implicitly anti-Semitic.

(We pause briefly to note first that the Scribes and the Pharisees are the same people. Second, the Pharisees were reformers. Third, that Jesus was almost certainly a Pharisee. And Fourth, that the Pharisaic reform movement gave birth to Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.) 

John was writing at a time when the church and the synagogue were separating. Christianity began as a Jewish sect. The synoptic Gospels portray an internal conflict within the synagogue between the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus. John characterizes the conflict as one between the followers of Jesus and “the Jews” who remain loyal to Judaism. Of course, the followers of Jesus were also Jewish. It was a sibling rivalry.

As a potential source of anti-Semitism, the verses from the fifth chapter are far from the worst passage in John’s Gospel, but they are bad enough. John says that “the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him” for breaking the Sabbath and for blasphemy.

I was in college when I first met someone who had been called a “Christ killer,” by the (so called) “Christians” in his Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. I was appalled, but also perplexed. 

The very simple version of atonement theology I grew up with said that Jesus had died for my sins. He had also died for the sins of the world. But the personal part was where we put the emphasis. The historical roles of Pilate, Herod, the Sanhedrin, and the crowds, were all incidental accidents. The only theologically valid answer to the question, “Who killed Jesus?” was, “I did.”

Over the years I have grown into a very different theological understanding. Jesus died because his absolute faithfulness collided with the sinful violence of the empire. He died because he proclaimed the Kingdom of God as a just and non-violent alternative to the Roman Empire and to every empire. The Romans didn’t crucify people for religious crimes.

In many ways, anti-Semitism is our original sin as Christians. It is long past time for confession and repentance. Until we move past that, we cannot really understand who Jesus is.


Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

*This is a revised version of a post first published on 4-16-14.

This Is What Exile Feels Like

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is an everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary,
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord
shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
Isaiah 40:28-31

After a week of posting pictures that put a happy face on “Sheltering in Place,” a friend confessed that it had been hard and depressing. Although they looked cute in the pictures, the kids were restless and cranky. Working at homes wasn’t really working out and there were worries about their spouse’s job security.

Another friend told of calling the bank to take advantage of a plan to waive three months of mortgage payments after their spouse was laid off. And although the bank was agreeable and friendly, it took an hour and a half because the call volume was so high.

Lost jobs. Failing businesses. And, by the way, there’s that funky the stock market thing.

And as bad as all that is, it’s not as bad as the geometric increase in cases and deaths. The recorded numbers may not seem as scary as the projections, but they are scary enough.

Luckily, for most of us, we see only the abstract numbers. We have not seen the actual deaths. But we will.

It feels like Exile.

I have often said that Christianity begins in Exile. We could date it to the first time that “Followers of the Way” were called Christians, or to the formation of churches apart from the Synagogue. We could date it to Pentecost. Paul Tillich dated the beginning of Christian faith tot the moment when Peter responded to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” by answering, “You are the Christ.”

But for a long time I have believed that Christian faith begins in Exile.

This is the test.

I don’t mean that God sent COVID-19 to test our faith or that God sent the virus to teach us something. I don’t believe God sent it at all.

But it does test us.

When Jerusalem fell and the people of Israel were taken into captivity, the prophets and great religious thinkers asked themselves, “How could this happen? How can it be that the holiest city of the very people God has chosen to bring his message to the world has fallen? If this can happen, then how can we trust God?” This was the greatest challenge that Israel had ever faced.

Israel responded to this theological crisis with some of the most brilliant and beautiful literature that human beings have ever produced. The wisdom and depth of thought were amazing. Israel responded, in the words of Biblical Scholar Walter Brueggemann, “precisely against the data.”

It was out of this crisis, says Brueggemann, that Israel gave birth to the concept of hope. It was in these great reflections on the crisis of exile that the concept of hope was first introduced to the world. Hope was Israel’s gift to the world.

Hope is always “against the data.” It is not an analysis which says that things will get better. It is not the cheerful assertion that every cloud has a silver lining. Hope says we trust in God, regardless of the data; regardless of the presence or absence of a silver lining.

You and I are called to reaffirm our hope: our hope in our fellow human beings, our hope in our nation and in our world. And underneath it all, our hope in God.

This is the The Lord,
the One who created you, O Jacob,
the One who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name,
and you are mine.
Isaiah 43:1

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.

United Methodist Schism and the Global Pandemic

God has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
II Corinthians 3:6

Sky McCracken has one of the best names ever. Obviously, he should have been an astronaut or an astronomer, but apparently he is a pastor.

He is not an in-person acquaintance nor is he a virtual “friend,” but he is an online acauaintance and a colleague. 

(Of course, I don’t really know that, but I believe it to be true.) 

My sense is that we have markedly different theological perspectives, but I very much appreciate his thoughtfulness and his willingness to dialog with others.

I don’t know him, except through his posts and comments in various United Methodist clergy groups.

Yesterday he posted this in the United Methodist Clergy group:

“It might just be me... but right now, a church/denominational schism seems the height of selfishness and hypocrisy. My hunch is, in the months to come it may even become irrelevant, and pushing such in the light of a much greater crisis will further expose our self-centeredness and false selves.”

It was, I thought, an invitation to soul-searching and reflection. A good place to start a reflection on Lent and the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of the United Methodist Church.

There were two short thoughtful reflections and then we were off into crazyland. 

I suppose I should be grateful that we didn’t immediately go to ALL CAPS. But we did get this:

“Irrelevant, selfish? Wow, neither really come to mind. Just because of the virus people are not going to all the sudden uphold the vows they took at ordination or when they became bishop! Nor begin to celebrate sin! Keep dreaming!”

Few things are more important to the world today than the fear that somewhere and somehow there are people who are celebrating sin!

And not just any sin.

This is about same sex marriage. And gay clergy.

Forget about COVID-19 and a global pandemic. We need to focus on what really matters. This is our “Bonhoeffer moment.”

I think as I write this there have been over 100 comments on the original post. Some thoughtful. Some pained. Many sincere.

But there are way too many that seem to come from some strange pseudo-Calvinist belief that the core of biblical faith is found in the total depravity of humanity and the wrath of God, which is mitigated only by right belief in Jesus and absolute conformity to the rules of the Bible as understood by the one writing the comments.

And, needless to say, the folks who write this stuff are certain (absolutely) that they are not mis-interpreting the text because the text does not need to be interpreted. They are just stating the facts.

In this view, the Bible is not a living Word. It is a dead letter. But if the Bible is a dead letter about judgment rather than grace, then we have lost everything matters in Christian faith.

I want to give the last word to Janet Gollery McKeithen:

“I agree with you Sky, but these comments really make me nauseated. Unbelievable that people believe in some kind of God that creates people who will go to eternal damnation. And they act self-righteous about it. They have pride in condemning others and causing suicides and splitting families. I am really sick again. Let's deal with the fact that the most vulnerable among us are going to suffer more that anyone else during this crisis. Let's see how we can help them and then change the oppressive system that brought us to this place. That's enough to do. The UMC is imploding on it own.”

Janet agrees with Sky and I agree with Janet.

I am especially pleased that she used “nauseated” rather than the technically incorrect though commonly used “nauseous” in that sentence.

Like Janet, I was nauseated by the nauseous comments.

(I think I used that correctly, but if I didn't then there are friends who will correct me.)





Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

What Was Good about Good Friday?

Then the soldiers led him into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters); and they called together the whole cohort. And they clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him. And they began saluting him, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.
Mark 15:16-20

The most common (most frequent and crudest) explanation of Jesus' death on the cross is that God sent him to die for our sins. Someone had to pay for the sins of humanity. Jesus suffered so that I didn't have to. He was perfectly sinless and it was a perfect sacrifice.

That is a caricature of what is called the theory of "substitutionary atonement." I have deliberately used the caricature to make a larger point. In spite of the fact that it's the theology I grew up with, and it's still the most common theological understanding of the crucifixion, I am convinced it is wrong. It is wrong biblically, historically, morally, and theologically.

On Good Friday, Jesus was tried, and convicted, and tortured, and killed. It was a triumph for the powers of darkness, and there was nothing good about that Friday. 

Or so it seemed. 

But in his death he exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Empire and the shallow religiosity of the chief priests and elders who collaborated with the oppressors. Good Friday is the story of a collision between the goodness of God in Jesus, and the evil of a violent empire.

Before we go any further, we need to clear up two major misunderstandings:

• The Jews did not kill Jesus; the Romans did. 
• He was not executed for blasphemy; he was executed for treason. 

The Jews did not kill Jesus. We know this as an absolute fact because they did not have the authority to carry out capital punishment. We also know this because if he had been sentenced to death by a Jewish court, he would have been stoned to death. The Romans were the only ones with the authority to kill him, and they did.

We know that the Romans executed Jesus for sedition because they crucified him. Crucifixion was a death reserved for those who committed treason against the empire. It was a form of state terrorism designed to torture its victims and terrify the populace. The Romans did it often so that the people were kept constantly aware of the consequences of defying the empire.

So why did Jesus die? And what does it mean?

I don’t believe that God sent Jesus to die. I don’t believe that it was God’s plan.

That’s partly because I think that speaking of God’s plan is too anthropomorphic. It imagines God as some sort of supernatural version of a human being. But it’s also morally suspect. It suggests that somehow God was sending Jesus on a suicide mission.

Jesus died because he was completely faithful to God and his faithfulness collided with the sinfulness of humanity in the form of the Roman Empire. He died because he proclaimed the Kingdom of God as an alternative vision of how the world could be. Against the normalcy of violence, he proclaimed nonviolence. Against the normalcy of self-interest, he proclaimed self-sacrifice. 

The commandment to love our enemies is about as subversive of what passes for normal as anything could possibly be. And two thousand years later, even those of us who claim to be his followers have a very hard time even imagining what that path looks like, let alone following it.

When he invited his followers to take us the cross, he invited them to follow the path of self-sacrificial love. 

And he promised that the way of self-sacrifice is also the way that leads to life.




Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 



*An original version of this post was first published on April 5, 2015

Losing My Religion

Thirty years ago I mentored a young man who wanted to be a United Methodist minister.

He and his family came to the church looking for Christian education for the kids. They had no real church background. It was all new. They loved the church right away and were soon at the center of church life.

Tom (not his real name) asked lots of questions. He asked about the Bible and about theology and we had some great conversations. He was smart and inquisitive and totally captured by Jesus. He wanted to be a disciple in every possible way.

It was not long before he spoke with me about becoming a candidate for ordained ministry. I remember the excitement we felt when the congregation voted to support and affirm his candidacy.

He left his job and went to seminary full time.

I was convinced that he had the gifts and graces for ministry and that he would be a great pastor.

It soon became clear from our conversations that Tom was becoming much more conservative in his theology and that he was trending toward a much more literalistic reading of the Bible. In my mind, that was less than optimum but I still could see him as an excellent pastor.

But the Conference Board of Ministry did not see him as I did. They turned him down. They continued him as a Local Pastor but they would not recommend him for ordination.

I was outraged.

I made phone calls to everyone I could think of, including the Bishop, to plead his case. I wrote letters and the church wrote letters.

There was plenty of room for Tom, I thought, in the big tent of United Methodist theology.

And I had many conversations about it with friends and colleagues.

One of those conversations imprinted itself in my brain.

My friend and colleague Kent Moorehead listened attentively as I told him what had happened to Tom and how zealously I had advocated on his behalf.

After a short exchange, Kent smiled and told me that he admired my loyalty and my efforts. Then he said this:

“That’s great, Bill, but you do realize that if they are ever in the majority, those people will vote you out in a heartbeat.”

And yesterday in St. Louis that is exactly what they did.

Tom was not there. He drifted  around some very conservative churches in our conference and then into other denominations. But his soul mates were in St. Louis. And by a slim margin they voted to make United Methodism a rigidly literalistic and judgmental denomination with no room for dissent.

They chose law over grace.

They put the highest value on obeying the rules.

They will talk about biblical authority, but what they mean is that everyone should agree with how they read the Bible: with narrow judgment focused on the narrow issue of LGBTQIA exclusion.

That’s it.

Technically, I have not lost my religion. I can still be a Christian. But I have lost my denomination.

I will not go gently.

I will not comply with the demand for a loyalty oath.

And I will work for a new and better church rising from the wreckage.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Traditional Christianity Is an Oxymoron

See, the former things have come to pass, 
and new things I now declare; 
before they spring forth, I tell you of them.
Isaiah 42:9

Traditional Christianity is an oxymoron.

I have said that many times. 

I keep hoping it will become a meme.

Jesus was a devout and observant Jew. But he was not a traditionalist. 

He was continually breaking new ground. He redefined the role of women and the definition of neighbor. He continually challenged his disciples to see the world and their neighbors in new ways. And he preached a message about the Kingdom of God that turned the world upside down.

And Paul made it clear that to be in Christ was to die to old ways and live into a new reality. “When anyone is in Christ,” he told the church in Corinth, “the old has passed away and there is a whole new world.” Everything is made new.

Of course it really begins long before Jesus and Paul. The prophets continually pressed forward in the face of the cultic tradition.  Rather than burnt offerings they demanded justice and mercy. The parables of Ruth and Jonah broke new ground, rejecting exclusionary doctrines in favor of  a new openness. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and through the Greek New Testament there is a continual push toward new insights and understandings. And the movement is always away from the past and into the future.

The genius of great Christian thinkers and theologians is that they were innovators. They looked at things in new ways. They developed new ideas and perspectives. That was true of Augustine, of Luther and Calvin, of Wesley, of Gladden, Rauschenbusch, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Niebuhr.

If John Wesley were with us today he wouldn’t be looking at eighteenth century solutions to our twenty-first century dilemma. He would be looking at how we can use what we know today to solve today’s problems.

And that brings us to the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Although it represents a significant advance in biblical and theological reflection, and provides a key insight into Wesley’s thought, the quadrilateral has been under attack by traditionalists ever since Albert Outler articulated it as a key Wesleyan methodology. 

Simply put, Wesley believed that sound biblical interpretation requires testing individual texts against the whole of the biblical witness, and then reasoning about that text, using the tradition of the church as well as every aspect of our experience. Similarly, ethical decision-making means more than searching the Bible for a text that will tell us what to do. It requires using the whole of the biblical witness, and then thinking it through in terms of the wisdom of the past and the experience of the present.

The traditionalist critique has reshaped the quadrilateral to make it clear that scripture is primary. In one rendering it is pictured as a pyramid, with Scripture in large letters at the top, and Reason, Tradition, and Experience below. In another image, Reason, Tradition, and Experience are pictured as overlapping circles within a larger circle labeled Scripture. 

Paul Wesley Chilcote, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, writing for Good News magazine, begins his critique this way:

 “I will never forget a conversation I had one August afternoon in 1982 at Oxford University with Professor Albert Outler. We were talking about the many terms he had coined over the years. He said rather abruptly, ‘There is one phrase I wish I had never used: the 'Wesleyan Quadrilateral.' It has created the wrong image in the minds of so many people and, I am sure, will lead to all kinds of controversy.’”

Fortunately, Dr. Outler gave a much more complete and nuanced explanation of his “regret” in a 1985 essay in the Wesleyan Theological Journal.

"The term 'quadrilateral' does not occur in the Wesley corpus—and more than once, I have regretted having coined it for contemporary use, since it has been so widely misconstrued. But if we are to accept our responsibility for seeking intellecta for our faith, in any other fashion than a 'theological system' or, alternatively, a juridical statement of 'doctrinal standards,' then this method of a conjoint recourse to the fourfold guidelines of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience, may hold more promise for an evangelical and ecumenical future than we have realized as yet—by comparison, for example, with biblicism, or traditionalism, or, rationalism, or empiricism. It is far more valid than the reduction of Christian authority to the dyad of 'Scripture' and 'experience' (so common in Methodist ranks today). The 'quadrilateral' requires of a theologian no more than what he or she might reasonably be held accountable for: which is to say, a familiarity with Scripture that is both critical and faithful; plus, an acquaintance with the wisdom of the Christian past; plus, a taste for logical analysis as something more than a debater’s weapon; plus, a vital, inward faith that is upheld by the assurance of grace and its prospective triumphs, in this life."

At the time he gave us the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, Dr. Outler was the foremost Wesleyan scholar and theologian. And the Quadrilateral came to us in a time when Methodists believed deeply in theological pluralism and embraced Reason and Experience as the necessary companions of Scripture and Tradition. We were proud to say that in the United Methodist Church, “you don’t have to park your mind at the door when you come to worship.”

But the Quadrilateral does not rest on Dr. Outler’s imprimatur alone. 

Although Wesley himself never used the phrase it is easy to see the quadrilateral in his writing. Scripture, Reason, and Tradition were (and are) the foundational interpretive elements of the Anglican theology in which Wesley was nurtured, and even a cursory glance at his writing shows the importance of experience as a key element in his thought.

There may be many reasons why the traditionalists despise the Quadrilateral, but two of them are critical.

First, if we apply the Wesleyan Quadrilateral to questions of LGBTQ inclusion in the full life of the church, we come down on the side of inclusion. Both scientific reason and personal experience weigh in heavily for openness.

Second, in this dispute and in wider context, the traditionalists want to assert a more literal interpretation of Scripture, believing that this has conservative theological and political implications.

On this second point we can easily go back to Wesley himself to observe how he approached Scripture.

In a sermon “On Charity,” based on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, he begins this way:

"We know, 'All Scripture is given by inspiration of God,' and is therefore true and right concerning all things. But we know, likewise, that there are some Scriptures which more immediately commend themselves to every man's conscience. In this rank we may place the passage before us; there are scarce any that object to it. On the contrary, the generality of men very readily appeal to it. Nothing is more common than to find even those who deny the authority of the Holy Scriptures, yet affirming, 'This is my religion; that which is described in the thirteenth chapter of the Corinthians.' Nay, even a Jew, Dr. Nunes, a Spanish physician, then settled at Savannah, in Georgia, used to say with great earnestness, 'That Paul of Tarsus was one of the finest writers I have ever read. I wish the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians were wrote in letters of gold. And I wish every Jew were to carry it with him wherever he went.' He judged, (and herein he certainly judged right) that this single chapter contained the whole of true religion. It contains 'whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely: If there be any virtue, if there be any praise,' it is all contained in this."

Wesley did not believe, as many literalists do, that all Scripture is of equal value. And for Wesley, the importance of a passage is judged in part by reason and experience, even the reason and experience of non-Christians.

An even more telling example is found in his sermon on “Free Grace.” 

With a theological position firmly rooted in Reason and Experience, he declares that the “blasphemous” lie of Predestination is false and it does not matter to him how many passages of Scripture the Calvinists can cite. 

“No scripture can mean that God is not love, or that his mercy is not over all his works.”

Here is the full paragraph from “Free Grace:”

"This is the blasphemy clearly contained in the horrible decree of predestination! And here I fix my foot. On this I join issue with every assertor of it. You represent God as worse than the devil; more false, more cruel, more unjust. But you say you will prove it by scripture. Hold! What will you prove by Scripture that God is worse than the devil I cannot be. Whatever that Scripture proves, it never an prove this; whatever its true meaning be. This cannot be its true meaning. Do you ask, 'What is its true meaning then' If I say, 'I know not,' you have gained nothing; for there are many scriptures the true sense whereof neither you nor I shall know till death is swallowed up in victory. But this I know, better it were to say it had no sense, than to say it had such a sense as this. It cannot mean, whatever it mean besides, that the God of truth is a liar. Let it mean what it will it cannot mean that the Judge of all the world is unjust. No scripture can mean that God is not love, or that his mercy is not over all his works; that is, whatever it prove beside, no scripture can prove predestination."

For Wesley, Reason and Experience are not the end he seeks. They are the means. They are tools to be used in the understanding of scripture and of the world. But the fundamental theological affirmation on which everything rests, is grace. Wesleyan theology is always about grace.

In 1984, the bicentennial year of American Methodism, Martin E. Marty interviewed Dr. Outler for an article in The Christian Century:

Marty asked him what he has learned about how one translates the insights of Christian history and theology into a sermon for everyday people. The answer says a lot about Albert Outler and about Methodist theology:

“Three things. Somehow you have to be gracious. Then you have to show graciousness, and talk about it. It can be talked about. Finally, you call forth from people some sort of response to grace as unmerited favor, to the fact that our lives are gifted.” 
(Pounce: the mind triggers, “This really is a Methodist!”) 
"Life," Outler goes on, “is not merely fortune or luck, good or bad. When we preach, we tell people that God loves them -- and then we let them go.”

And then he concluded, “The preacher has to say, ‘I live by grace. You live by grace. We can therefore be thankful. We can love.”’ 




Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Darwin's Midrash on Creation

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”
Genesis 1:20-22

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th Century, once wisely observed that the Bible is a Midrash (commentary and reflection) on creation.

Heschel’s wisdom came back to me as I read in the paper this morning that today marks the anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859.

The book was upsetting to those who held a literal understanding of the Bible. There were immediate objections to Darwin’s theory from Christians who saw it as a contradiction of the Genesis account of creation, which they held to be literal and scientific.

Actually, Darwin really only contradicts the second creation story.

On that point, we should give a shout out to the people who put together the Priestly narrative in Genesis one, that has the basic evolutionary order correct a few thousand years before Darwin.

Like the first creation story, Darwin has human beings arriving last, rather than appearing first as they do in the second narrative.  Oddly, the folks who are upset by Darwin are untroubled by the contradictions between the first and second accounts, which come from the Priestly and Yahweh narratives, respectively.

Among the non-literalist Christian theologians and biblical scholars, the reaction was largely positive from the beginning. When they heard Darwin’s theory, their reaction was, “We knew that God created the world. Now we know how.” And the on-going nature of evolutionary change reminded them that God was still at work.

In the “Origin of Species,” Darwin offered his own opinion. “I see no good reason,” he wrote, “why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.”

When the theologians of Darwin’s time saw his understanding of an evolving biological world, it reminded them that social relationships also needed to evolve. They came to believe that the progress seen in nature must be replicated in society.

For the Social Gospel preachers, theologians, and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, progress was not just natural, it was divine. This did not mean it was inevitable; it meant that working toward a more just and humane world was what God was calling them to do.

Technically, Midrash is commentary on the Hebrew Bible. It has two parts: Midrash Halachah, which deals with interpreting the legal portions of the Torah, and Midrash Aggadah, which deals with the non-legal aspects and is filled with morals, legends, parables, and stories. When most people refer to Midrash, they are referring to the parables and the stories.

When Heschel speaks of the Bible as a Midrash on creation, he is not referring to the technical meaning, but to a broader understanding of commentary.

And if we wind our way down that road, then we could see Darwin’s theory of evolution as another layer of Midrash. It is both discovery and revelation.

And the evolutionary process, with all of its amazing and miraculous complexity, is the subject of more Midrash.

Resurrection: You Are the Body of Christ

Now you are the body of Christ
and individually members of it.
I Corinthians 12:27

In the days surrounding Easter I encountered many articles about the resurrection.

A recurring theme was the assertion that belief in the resurrection was essential to being a Christian, and that was followed by the insistence that believing in resurrection meant believing in “bodily” resurrection. And lest there be any confusion, the writers wanted to make it clear that by bodily resurrection they meant the literal, material body of Jesus.

Characterizing the resurrection in literal terms is theologically clumsy, but it is also biblically suspect.

If the resurrection is about the literal, material body of Jesus, then why didn’t Mary recognize him when she saw him in the garden outside the tomb? And how is it possible that Cleopas and the other disciple could talk with him for hours on the way to Emmaus and sit down with him at dinner, and still not recognize him? And when Jesus came to them on the beach, while they were cooking breakfast, why didn’t they know who he was?

Finally, if we can get by all of the strange contradictions, we come to the ascension. Can we really believe that Jesus literally rose up into heaven? Do we believe that his body levitated up into the clouds?

These are not mistakes in the narrative. The Gospel writers knew what they were saying. They were trying to describe something that was fundamentally indescribable. Biblical language is always symbolic. But there is more going on than can be explained in terms of symbolic language.

In order to understand what they were saying we need to read the story backwards.

The New Testament would not exist if its authors had not encountered the risen Christ. They met Jesus in the form of the risen Christ and then they wrote about how that came to be and what it meant. They were looking back and asking, “How did we get here?”

And that message transformed the world. Literally. 

The little band of fearful followers who went into hiding after Jesus’ crucifixion grew so rapidly that within a few hundred years they numbered between a quarter and a half of the population of the Roman Empire.

In an excellent essay in the WallStreet Journal on the day before Easter, Roman Catholic scholar George Weigel explains:

“How did this happen? How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the far edges of the Mediterranean world become such a dominant force in just two and a half centuries? The historical sociology of this extraordinary phenomenon has been explored by Rodney Stark of Baylor University, who argues that Christianity modeled a nobler way of life than what was on offer elsewhere in the rather brutal society of the day. In Christianity, women were respected as they weren’t in classical culture and played a critical role in bringing men to the faith and attracting converts. In an age of plagues, the readiness of Christians to care for all the sick, not just their own, was a factor, as was the impressive witness to faith of countless martyrs.”

True story.

Without the resurrection this would have been impossible.

Their encounters with the risen Christ convinced them that they could live differently. They lived as he lived. They recognized that the Kingdom of God really was among them and they lived that way. They lived the way that they did because they were convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

In the words of the angel in Matthew’s Gospel, “He is risen as he said.”

For the first Christians the resurrection was both the foundation of their faith and an event that they found to be thoroughly incomprehensible.

To speak of resurrection in literal terms reduces its meaning and ignores the biblical record. Resurrection is not about flying bodies or a resuscitated corpse. Easter transcends and transforms our normal categories.

In his earthly ministry, Jesus’ message was that the Kingdom of God was as hand. Weigel argues that the early Christians came to believe “that the cataclysmic, world-redeeming act that God had promised had taken place at Easter. God’s Kingdom had come not at the end of time but within time—and that had changed the texture of both time and history. History continued, but those shaped by the Easter Effect became the people who knew how history was going to turn out. Because of that, they could live differently. The Easter Effect impelled them to bring a new standard of equality into the world and to embrace death as martyrs if necessary—because they knew, now, that death did not have the final word in the human story.”

In his second letter to the Church in Corinth Paul proclaimed that “when anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation. The old has passed away and a whole new world has begun.” (II Corinthians 5:17) Everything has changed. For the early Christians this was the reality of the resurrection. 

In his first letter to those same folks in Corinth, just before he launched into those immortal words about love as the most important characteristic of Christian living (even more important than faith), he reminded them of the meaning of the resurrection: “You are the body of Christ.”






Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.

Holy Week and Anti-Semitism

The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath.
But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
John 5:15-18

I can still see my high school principal standing with his hands on his hips, glaring at me, demanding an explanation for something I had done or not done. “I want a reason,” he shouted, “Not an excuse!”

And I can remember pausing as I thought to myself, “Actually, what you want is an excuse. I’ve got a reason, but you won’t think it’s an excuse.” Wisely, I did not try to correct his mistake. I mumbled something and he threatened dire consequences if it happened again.

There are reasons for the anti-Semitism in the Greek Scriptures, but they are not an excuse.

Perhaps the most insidious thing about the anti-Semitism is that we Christians are simply oblivious to it. The scholar James Carroll, who is himself a devout Christian, points out in his book, “Christ Actually,” the obvious but generally unrecognized anti-Sermitism implicit in our naming the two parts of the Bible the “Old” and “New” testaments.

“New” is always better than “Old.” One clearly supersedes the other.

Jesus was a champion of the poor and the marginalized, but we often portray that as in contrast to the Jewish perspective. Every affirmation of Jesus is matched by a condemnation of the Jewish faith that nurtured him. We do this in spite of the overwhelming evidence that Jesus stood in direct line with the Hebrew prophets.

Anti-Semitism is an underlying theme in Holy Week. And that theme is most evident in the Gospel of John.

John frequently uses “the Jews” the same way that Matthew, Mark and Luke use “the Scribes and the Pharisees.” He is talking about the religious authorities who oppose Jesus. The reference to Pharisees as a synonym for self-righteous hypocrites is historically inaccurate and implicitly anti-Semitic.

(We pause briefly to note first that the Scribes and the Pharisees are the same people. Second, the Pharisees were reformers. Third, that Jesus was almost certainly a Pharisee. And Fourth, that the Pharisaic reform movement gave birth to Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.)

John was writing at a time when the church and the synagogue were separating. Christianity began as a Jewish sect. The synoptic Gospels portray an internal conflict within the synagogue between the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus. John characterizes the conflict as one between the followers of Jesus and “the Jews” who remain loyal to Judaism. Of course, the followers of Jesus were also Jewish. It was a sibling rivalry.

As a potential source of anti-Semitism, the verses from the fifth chapter are far from the worst passage in John’s Gospel, but they are bad enough. John says that “the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him” for breaking the Sabbath and for blasphemy.

I was in college when I first met someone who had been called a “Christ killer,” by the (so called) “Christians” in his Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. I was appalled, but also perplexed.

The very simple version of atonement theology I grew up with said that Jesus had died for my sins. He had also died for the sins of the world. But the personal part was where we put the emphasis. The historical roles of Pilate, Herod, the Sanhedrin, and the crowds, were all incidental accidents. The only theologically valid answer to the question, “Who killed Jesus?” was, “I did.”

Over the years I have grown into a very different theological understanding. Jesus died because his absolute faithfulness collided with the sinful violence of the empire. He died because he proclaimed the Kingdom of God as a just and non-violent alternative to the Roman Empire and to every empire. The Romans didn’t crucify people for religious crimes.

In many ways, anti-Semitism is our original sin as Christians. It is long past time for confession and repentance. Until we move past that, we cannot really understand who Jesus is.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.

*This is a revised version of a post first published on 4-16-14.

Thanksgiving and the Longing for Special Providence

When I was a little boy my mother taught us a bed-time prayer which my sister and I said every night:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

The Lord go with me through the night,

And keep me safe till morning light.

In the more common, older and much scarier version of that prayer, the last two lines are:

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I’m glad Mom gave us the revised version. I can’t imagine teaching a child to say the original.

The scarier version dates from a time when little children did sometimes die in the night from a host of deadly childhood diseases which have mostly been eliminated over the last century. Today our children are safe from those deadly diseases because scientists have discovered vaccinations and medicines that are truly miraculous. Our medical and scientific progress is (I believe) part of what God is doing in the world. It is part of God’s continuing creation

Today we have come to expect that for our children, safety is the norm. And death and disease are rare. At least they are rare among the developed nations of the world. It is easy for us to forget that in other parts of the world children continue to die of disease and malnutrition at an alarming rate.

We expect our children to be safe, and there is nothing wrong with that. All children ought to be safe. And safety is what every parent wants for his or her child.

But the biblical promise is not safety. The promise is that God will not leave us. Or to put it differently, in the context of my bed-time prayer, “safe” meant “safe in God’s care.”

One of the most cherished misunderstandings of biblical faith is the doctrine of “Special Providence.” We want to believe that God loves us more and protects us more than others. Special Providence promises that God cares for me, and for my family and loved ones, in a special and unique way. Of course, that is true in the sense that each of us has a unique experience of God’s care. But as Jesus said, the sun shines and the rain falls, on the just and the unjust, and God’s love is there for everyone.

In a radio sermon preached in 1952, Reinhold Niebuhr said that for many people, believing in God means “that that we have found a way to the ultimate source and end of life that gives us, against all the chances and changes of life, some special security and some special favor.” As an example, he speaks of the prayers “that many a mother with a boy in Korea must pray, ‘A thousand at thy side and 10,000 at thy right hand, let no evil come to my boy.’”

For the mother or father with a child in danger, that is the most natural prayer in the world and it is the deepest desire of our hearts. Yet in the end it is impossible. As Niebuhr explains, “The Christian faith believes that beyond, within and beyond, the tragedies and the contradictions of history we have laid hold upon a loving heart, and the proof of whose love, on the one hand, is the impartiality toward all of his children and, secondly, a mercy which transcends good and evil.”

On Thanksgiving we give thanks for the Providence of God and the blessings that sustain our life on this fragile planet. The promise of Christian faith is not that God will grant us a special exemption from life’s hardships, or give us a special reward for our virtue, but that at the center of life there is a loving heart, which will be with us now and forever.

With Nazis There Is No Moral Equivalence

"There is blame on both sides."
"There were very fine people on both sides."

Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. 
I John 4:20-21

“They are Nazis,” Jurgen Moltmann declared, “and when you are confronted by Nazis you must defeat them.”

Nothing else matters, he insisted, until you get rid of the Nazis.

Moltmann, perhaps the last of the great German theologians of the twentieth century, made that prophetic declaration half a century ago. He was visiting the United States for a theological conference and he was talking about the segregationists in the south.

As my theology professor told the story, Moltmann had insisted  to his fellow theologians that they had no business discussing theology until they had first done something about the Nazis.

I remember thinking that although the segregationists were certainly bad, it was hyperbole to call them Nazis. But the events in Charlottesville this past weekend have proven me wrong. They call themselves Nazis.

Jurgen Moltmann grew up in a secular family in Hamburg. As a teenager he was drafted into the German Army near the end of the war. He was captured by the British and spent several years as a prisoner of war. During that time his captors presented him with descriptions and pictures of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and he was overwhelmed with guilt for what his country had done.

While he was held prisoner an American Army Chaplain gave him a New Testament and it transformed his life. “I did not find Christ,” he would later say, “Christ found me.” After the war he completed a doctorate in theology and his reflections on Nazism and the war led him to develop “A Theology of Hope.”

Moltmann could see, as Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others had made clear before him that the absolute claims of Nazism were theological as well as political. And that those absolute claims made it antithetical to Christianity. 

When Moltmann insisted that there could be no theological discussion until Nazism had been addressed, he wasn’t introducing politics into theological discourse. He was recognizing that until they were dealt with, the absolute claims of Nazism made authentic theological discussion impossible.

I think we can say with absolute certainty that Donald Trump has not read Jurgen Moltmann, or any of the great theologians who could see the dangers of Nazism long before the first concentration camps were built. But one doesn’t need a deep understanding of theology and ethics to make a judgment on the events in Charlottesville.

When it comes to Nazis there are not two sides.

After the violence and death last Saturday, the President condemned the hatred and violence “on many sides.” And for emphasis he paused before repeating, “on many sides.”

On Monday he responded to forty-eight hours of nearly universal bipartisan criticism by “clarifying” his Saturday remarks to say that he unequivocally condemned the KKK, the Neo-Nazis, and the white supremacists. He was reading a script and looking very uncomfortable, but he stuck to his text. 

He did not try to spread the blame.

As CNN’s Dan Merica wrote, Tuesday’s news conference was a different story:

“The news conference laid bare his unvarnished view of who was to blame for the violence and what he thinks about the nationwide effort to remove statues of Confederate leaders. Trump's comments were the latest in what has been a jaw-dropping saga ever since the President made his first vague statement on the violence, blaming the conflicts on many sides.’ The comments also made clear that Trump's speech on Monday -- which vociferously blamed the violence on the ‘alt-right’ and neo-Nazi groups who initiated the protest -- was largely a sterilized version of his view.”

David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, felt vindicated. In a Twitter post he said, “Thank you President Trump for your honesty and courage to tell the truth.”

White nationalist leader, Richard B. Spencer, who like Duke participated in the demonstrations over the weekend and has promised to continue protesting the planned removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee, tweeted that, “Trump’s statement was fair and down to earth.”

At the conclusion of the news conference, as he was leaving, Mr. Trump was asked if he was planning to visit Charlottesville. He answered with a question, “Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville?”

Actually, he owns a winery.

"I mean I know a lot about Charlottesville," said the President. "Charlottesville is a great place that has been very badly hurt over the last couple of days."

He added: "I own actually one of the largest wineries in the United States, it is in Charlottesville."

Even by the strange standards of this administration it was bizarre and unsettling. His defenders will say that he is not a traditional politician and we need to get used to a very different style. But it was appalling by any measure. And deeply troubling.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Why Did Jesus Die?

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”
Mark 8:34-37

The most common (most frequent and crudest) explanation of Jesus' death on the cross is that God sent him to die for our sins. Someone had to pay for the sins of humanity. Jesus suffered so that you and I don’t have to. He was perfectly sinless and it was a perfect sacrifice.

That is a caricature of what is called the theory of "substitutionary atonement." I have deliberately used the caricature to make a larger point. In spite of the fact that it's the theology I grew up with, and it's still the most common theological understanding of Good Friday, I am convinced it is wrong. 

It is wrong biblically, historically, morally, and theologically.

On Good Friday, Jesus was tried, and convicted, and tortured, and killed. It was a triumph for the powers of darkness, and there was nothing good about that Friday. Or so it seemed. 

But in his death he exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Empire and the shallow religiosity of the chief priests and elders who collaborated with the oppressors. Good Friday is the story of a collision between the goodness of God in Jesus, and the evil of a violent empire.

Before we go any further, we need to clear up two major misunderstandings:

• The Jews did not kill Jesus; the Romans did.
• He was not executed for blasphemy; he was executed for treason.

The Jews did not kill Jesus. 

We know this as an absolute fact because they did not have the authority to carry out capital punishment. We also know this because if he had been sentenced to death by a Jewish court, he would have been stoned to death. The Romans were the only ones with the authority to kill him, and they did.

We know that the Romans executed Jesus for sedition because they crucified him. 

Crucifixion was a death reserved for those who committed treason against the empire. It was a form of state terrorism designed to torture its victims and terrify the populace. The Romans did it often so that the people were kept constantly aware of the consequences of defying the empire.

So why did Jesus die? And what does it mean?

I don’t believe that God sent Jesus to die. I don’t believe that it was God’s plan.

That’s partly because I think that speaking of God’s plan is too anthropomorphic. It imagines God as some sort of supernatural version of a human being. But it’s also morally suspect. It suggests that somehow God was sending Jesus on a suicide mission.

Jesus died because he was completely faithful to God and his faithfulness collided with the sinfulness of humanity in the form of the Roman Empire. He died because he proclaimed the Kingdom of God as an alternative vision of how the world could be. Against the normalcy of violence, he proclaimed nonviolence. Against the normalcy of self-interest, he proclaimed self-sacrifice. 

The commandment to love our enemies is about as subversive of what passes for normal as anything could possibly be. And two thousand years later, those of us who claim to be his followers have a very hard time even imagining what that path looks like, let alone following it.

When he invited his followers to take us the cross, he invited them to follow the path of self-sacrificial love. And he promised that the way of self-sacrifice is also the way that leads to a faithful life.


Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 


*A version of this post originally appeared on Good Friday in 2015.

Jesus without Content

Dear Lord Jesus,
I know that I am a sinner and need Your forgiveness. I believe that You died on the cross for my sins and rose from the grave to give me life. I know You are the only way to God. So now I want to quit disobeying You and start living for You. Please forgive me, change my life and show me how to know You. In Jesus' name. Amen.

It is commonly known as “The Sinner’s Prayer.” That particular version comes from the Christian Broadcasting Network.

I visited their website in search of an interview they did with Donald Trump.

If you click on a link labeled “Know Jesus” you will find yourself on a page called “Peace with God.” They have a very simple four step process ending with the Sinner’s Prayer.

Step one is recognizing that God loves you.

Step two is realizing that we are separated from God by our sin which, if unforgiven, will lead to death. But God’s gift is eternal life through Jesus Christ.

Step three is understanding that Jesus Christ paid the penalty for our sin and bridged the gap between God and people.

Step four is receiving Christ as your personal savior. You must do that in order to be saved. Jesus is the only way to God and the only way to escape the punishment we deserve. But (lucky for you!) you can give your life over to Christ right now. All you need to do is to pray the prayer.

As near as I can tell, you don’t even need to be sincere, although that is not clearly spelled out.

G.K. Chesterton famously observed that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” But the CBN version of Christianity is not difficult at all.

Never mind taking up the cross, or loving your enemies, or turning the other cheek, or going the extra mile, or selling all that you have and giving it to the poor, or any of those other teachings of Jesus that seemed so difficult. You don’t need to worry about clothing the naked or feeding the hungry. 

Just say a prayer.

And just to be clear, you don't need to say a prayer for those who are poor or sick or oppressed. You just need to pray for Jesus to save you.

Don’t worry about doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God. Don’t worry about letting justice roll down like a mighty river. Don’t worry about what Jesus taught or how Jesus lived, or what he actually asked of those who follow him.

What does it mean “to quit disobeying You and start living for You”? If we were looking at the teachings of Jesus, that could be a very challenging endeavor, but in terms of the Sinner’s Prayer, one suspects it is a vague reference to conventional morality.

If we reduce Christian faith to such meaningless jargon, it is no wonder that people can call themselves Christians and still embrace racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression. Jesus without his teachings is just an empty shell. You can fill it with whatever suits your fancy.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.

It Is Time to Move On

Lou Ann Sandstrom and Kathleen Kutschenreuter, at Foundry UMC

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Mark 8:34-38

I am not ashamed of Jesus.

And I am certainly not ashamed of his teaching.

But I am sometimes ashamed of those who claim to follow him.

I participate in several social media groups where United Methodists and others share opinions and insights and discuss issues of faith and practice. Last week on one of those groups someone posted this question:

"Does anyone ever post anything about feeding the hungry, providing healthcare for the poor, and other things that Jesus told us about? It seems that most if not all posts are connected somehow to sexuality issues in the UMC. Much energy is being spent on this issue to the detriment of many other issues the church could address. I agree with the idea of removing the restrictions on clergy and members, but it is as if the orthodoxies are holding the entire church hostage with this issue. Perhaps it would be more fruitful to split."

That’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing because it is true. That is pretty much all we talk about. And it has to stop.

We need to move on.

We have spent too much time and energy on this. 

Unfortunately, we can’t move on until we have resolved this. And the resolution can only go one way. We need to stop the trials. We need to let conferences fulfill their responsibilities in determining the fitness of clergy to serve. We need to remove the discriminatory language in the Book of Discipline.

It’s embarrassing.

One thing that both sides ought to agree on is that this has been a public relations disaster for a very long time. 

Think about it.

In the twenty-first century two people celebrating their love for one another in marriage should not be news. We have marriage equality everywhere in the United State and in most of the civilized world. 

This should not be an issue.

For Christians of conscience, our first concern must be the harm done to LGBTQ persons, especially our youth. And our second concern should be the moral issue. The exclusion of LGBTQ people is just plain wrong.

But beyond all of that, it is hard to think of anything in recent history that has done more damage to Christian faith than the persecution of our LGBTQ siblings.

Among the early casualties in this conflict, is our witness to the nature of God. We cannot even imagine having this discussion in the presence of Paul Tillich or Reinhold Niebuhr, or any of the great twentieth century theologians. By reducing God to a rule giver, we have anthropomorphized the Ground of our Being, Being itself, into a grumpy old man in the sky who is petty and mean, judgmental, and superficial, more concerned with rules than with human beings. How absurd that looks from outside the church. 

This “god” we worship must have a very strange sense of priorities.

Of course, the anthropomorphism would be a problem all by itself. And there are plenty of “Christians” eager to embrace an anthropomorphic vision even without the issues around a rule giving “god,” but our current debate has given that vision a legitimacy within the church that it would not otherwise have had. And it has undermined our attempts to invite those outside the church into the spiritual journey.

A second early casualty is the Bible. In this argument the traditionalists have reduced the Bible to a rule book and led us to focus on some of the worst texts in the Bible, take them completely out of context, misrepresent them, and then give them a literal interpretation. If the goal is to invite folks to explore the biblical witness, does anyone really think that Leviticus is a good place to start?

The result of this misbegotten effort is not to legitimize the stigmatization of LGBTQ folks, but rather to de-legitimize the whole Bible. Because of this conflict there are folks outside of the church, and even some inside, whose only encounter with the biblical word is through those “clobber verses.”

By asking people to accept the literal interpretation of these scattered texts, we encouraged them to judge the whole Bible by the truth or falsehood they found there. The emphasis on the literal interpretation of those verses advanced the public perception that the only right way to read the Bible was to interpret it literally. Not surprisingly, many found the Bible to be untrustworthy. 

The final early casualty of our argument is the church itself. If those outside the church could not trust the Bible, then they also could not trust the church which had told them how these strange texts should be interpreted. 

The demographics tell an important story. 

According to the Pew Forum, in 2001 Americans opposed same sex marriage by more than twenty percentage points, 57% to 35%. In 2016 the numbers are almost exactly reversed. Supporters outnumber opponents 55% to 37%. White mainline Protestants basically mirror the national average, and United Methodists show a majority in support. But among younger Americans, Generation-X and Millennials, the support is even higher, with approximately 70% of Millennials supporting same sex marriage.

Demographically, our exclusion and oppression of LGBTQ people is a ticking time bomb.

Our experience of LGBTQ persons is changing and so are our attitudes. Eventually, even the traditionalists will come around. In the meantime, we continue to harm our LGBTQ friends and neighbors, and we continue to marginalize the church. 

If we want to have a credible voice in an increasingly secular world, we need to do what Christian ethics demands. Our present policies will soon render us irrelevant.