Unpopular Opinions 2: Church Edition

A link to the previous post: https://paviddagan.blogspot.com/2018/06/unpopular-opinions-church-ediion.html



post credit from r/dankchristianmemes

In the first and previous edition of this I forgot to mention my credentials to actually create my authority to talk about church matters. As follows:

-Both parents are pastors. Yes. Mother and father. They're a mean tag team duo.
-Both parents are hispanic pastors.
-Attended Baptist school for years in Staten Island
-Pentecostal undergraduate
-Methodist graduate school

My background is church heavy. These pastor's kid rant are coming from a deep insider in this community.

I. Jesus' divinity doesn't override His humanity. It's not a get out of jail free card.

Just because He's Jesus doesn't mean He gets a pass solely because He is fully divine. Yes I believe that He is very God of very God but the gospels play coy about His humanity and divinity. Mark seems to read Him as human with a hue of divinity, John makes Him to be more divine than human, and Luke and Matthew have subtle moments of divergence from Mark (considering that 92% of Mark is in Matthew and 87% of Mark is in Luke, I can't imagine they disagreed on a lot of what they read in Mark but the devil yes a bad pun is in the details with Luke and Matthew's opinions, they're sometimes words apart in the gospels). The only reason we can talk about Jesus in any way is because He's human, the fact that we can't understand Him fully is because He's divine. There are moments in the gospels that will forever have no good explanation to them but be written off as "He's Jesus". He doesn't get off easy just because He's the son of God. We place a lot of stock in His divinity because it's easy to do. As if that's a demonstration of faith. It isn't. It's a demonstration of laziness to learning about how messy it is to believe in Jesus and how you're not supposed to clean up that mess. It serves a purpose.

II. God is not the culmination of the stability and security that you grew up with as a child.

Basic human needs are wrapped around the idea that stability and security are important. We want consistency, we want comfort, we want meaningful correspondences within created spheres of stability and security. None of what I just said is God. God told Abraham to leave His home and go to a random land that He'll show to Him, God delivered His people out of Egypt and sent them (after some serious detours) to their promised land. Paul was going to persecute more followers of Jesus and then he has a conversion experience on the way to Damascus. Jesus said no to healing the Syrophoenician woman's sick daughter and afterwards He went to preach and perform miracles to the Greeks, prior to that point all of His ministry were focused on the Jewish people. Peter kept the old Jewish customs of restricted eating until God came to Him in a dream and told Him otherwise. Samuel anointed David, a shepherd, to the Israeli monarchy. If there is anything that God is, it's unstable. If God is anything, He is the breaking point of security and stability. 

We want to cling to what we know and what we grew up with because it's easy to go back to in our minds. Losing our security and stability is hard and scary sometimes. You'll never find a verse that has God asking if He cares about us being scared of losing our stability and comfort. Clinging to what we know like scared animals cling to their mothers doesn't let God be God through us and in us. It makes Him to be the symbol of the comfort and stability we had growing up but with Jesus talk slapped on it like stickers. God isn't a placeholder for human comfort and systemic security. In the Bible He doesn't care for it and I don't see why the church should care for it either.

III. Your faith is petty.

Oh I'm going to have fun with this one.

People are petty so it's no surprise to me that faith becomes petty. It's a low blow to God to read the Bible, to read doctrine, and to read church tradition as though it somehow chains God. For someone as conflict crazy as me (I do love a good fight and a good shouting match) this is my trigger happy moment. You may or may not be surprised at how many people read the Bible in a literal, absolutist, historically accurate way (this is somewhat the job of Biblical inerrancy). The Bible is not the arbiter of all truth. I'm not convinced for a second that Jesus went forty days and nights without food. Jesus, being fully human (being fully human, read that again but slower), couldn't have done that (and He doesn't get a pass for it because He's Jesus). It's biologically impossible. More than likely it's an idiom the writers used to mean "really long time". Their audience wasn't going to fact check them. They could get away with it to a certain degree. If you put your faith into these moments then your faith is inherently petty. If Jesus had to starve Himself for forty days in order for Him to be Jesus then your concept of Jesus is petty and weak. If you believe in a literal seven day creation, and if God can only be God if your idea of a seven day creation is maintained and fixed, then your idea of God sucks. If there had to be two thieves between Jesus in order for Him to be the Messiah then you're limiting Jesus. The details don't matter when it comes to salvation. I'm not sold on that for a minute. Jesus saves. Your concept of Jesus saving doesn't save, Jesus saves. We don't have the ability to limit grace with our potentially petty faith.

Unpopular Opinions: Church Edition

This will hopefully achieve the same goal and affect that Monopoly does: Ruin relationships irreparably and leave a bad taste in your mouth.

One: You don't need the Bible to have faith.

Abraham didn't have a Bible and he somehow knew it was Yahweh telling him to go into the wilderness to this random place. Isaac and Jacob also had deep and meaningful moments with Yahweh and they didn't have a Bible. They were pre-Judaic so they didn't have the Torah or the Mishnah. The Torah wasn't even in its final stages until Jesus had began His ministry. So how did they know it was Yahweh specifically? How did they know it was the God of Judaism and Christianity? They didn't. It's that simple. They were all hearing voices. We typically frame our ability to experience God through the Bible or the traditions of our respective churches. The Bible serves as the manual to how most people in humankind experienced God and this is what it tends to look like. But Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, Samuel, Saul, Joshua, Caleb, Noah, Moses, etc. had no Bible and somehow knew it was God. Which makes a strong case for us not needing a Bible in order to have exemplary faith. They followed. Which means Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac by a voice in his head. I'm leaving that there and moving forward.

Two: You don't need a verse for something to be "Christian".

The Bible isn't prescriptive. Sorry. It isn't. The authors weren't capable of imagining, let alone capturing, every single instance of human behavior and thought to list in the Bible. The Bible is a template, a guide to help us rather than a rule book to tell us everything to do in every little instance. You don't need the Bible to tell you to be good to people. "Good" existed way before Judaism and Christianity came around and I can only imagine that people were being good (however "good" took shape back then) long before the Bible came around. You don't need an entire religious book, and a church dedicated to teaching that book, in order to know how to be good to someone. You don't need a verse to tell you how to love someone. Yes it helps but that doesn't make the verse a necessary requirement. If Christianity, boiled to its mere elements, is faith, hope, and love, then you don't need a verse in order to be faithful and hopeful and loving to someone.

Three: The church and its congregation members tend to rationalize their crappy behavior as good. Stop that.

When you sin you look at Christ up on the cross and say "You belong there". When you knowingly sin you look at Christ and go "I'll put the nails in myself". Augustine whines about this in Confessions, his choice sin of stealing pears even though he didn't even need them or want them, himself saying that he had better pears at home, as "sin for its own sake". The worst type of sin to Augustine. If you're going to knowingly sin, then commit to explaining to Christ that you chose to nail Him to the cross. Because that's what sin does. Don't hide from it. Don't sanitize your crappy behavior with rationalizing processes. Own your sin. You did it. You're held accountable for it at the end of your days. The church would be taken more seriously if it collectively went "Yeah we did all of this crappy things and it isn't pretty but it's us". More on this point later.

True faith.


Four: Heresy doesn't really matter.

My favorite one. Strap in kids, it's about to get wicked.

Heresy is a political move. It's a term we use for anything we don't like when it comes to our secure and stable notions of Christ, the church, and all it encompasses. It's a moving target, orthodoxy and heresy constantly shifting with generations and culture. Heresy typically is based off a true moment taken from the Bible and its taken in a contorted direction. Docetism makes sense (The idea that Christ appeared to die because Christ, God incarnate, can't die). Monophysitism makes sense (Jesus had only one nature, not two). Adoptionism makes sense (Jesus was adopted as the son of God at His baptism). Heresy doesn't limit grace though. God's grace is for all people, not the ones that commit to the Westminster Confession or the people that only use the KJV (the 1759 edition no less). I doubt God exactly cares about how we understand Christ's nature or the Trinity and its internal workings. As long as we care for the least of these then we should hopefully be good. Leave the Trinity explanations to God (seriously guys, that stuff is confusing).

Five: Saying "the church isn't perfect" isn't a get out of jail free card towards an aggressive pursuit of being better.

"We aren't perfect". "The church has a long way to go". And then you go back and continue the same nonsense you did last week. Changing is hard. It's scary. It's an uncomfortable, insecure, unstable process. We're used to sinning. We like it. It's fun. Christ isn't fun and He wasn't very likable in the Bible (He came off as an ass in the Bible and no Christ doesn't get a pass because He's God incarnate, He was fully human too so He can be an ass too just like everyone else). So we hear "the church isn't perfect", seek that as passive-aggressive validation for the remission of our crappy behavior for that week, and then go back out AND DO IT AGAIN. Repentance means being better. It means committing to being better. It means going through the ugly moments and forcing yourself to be uncomfortable. It means seeking the discomfort and not sanitizing it, deodorizing it, or bleaching it away. It means committing to the process of becoming more like Christ and less like us. If Christ was comfortable then He'd be a waste of time. But saying "the church isn't perfect" isn't uncomfortable. It still leaves Christ on the cross. And that's a comfortable place for us to leave Him because He can't get down. If He can't get down from the cross then He can't give us hell for our behavior.

But He did come down.
But He did see His disciples. His friends. His brothers. He saw them.
But He didn't give them Hell.

He broke bread with them. He ate fish and bread with them. Bring Him down from there so He can help you be better. The church, believe it or not, can one day say "we're on the way to being like Christ". And mean it.