I'm finally doing blog entries in sans serif because all my graphic design friends insist it's easier to read on the screen. Here's one I wrote for British Literature I this past fall about Margery Kempe's autobiography and the centrality of guilt in Christian religious constructions.

The Centrality of Guilt in Margery Kempe

In pre-Reformation England, the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in matters of religion was virtually absolute. It was uncommon for anyone to circumvent the authority of the Church and rarer still for a woman to do so publicly. Yet that is just what Christian mystic Margery Kempe apparently did throughout her life, as documented in her autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe. While Kempe describes being accused repeatedly by Church authorities and taken into custody on suspicion of heresy, she managed to successfully defend herself against these accusations. One reason for this was that despite her sometimes theatrical outbursts, Kempe never opposed Church teachings on any major theological point. For this reason The Book of Margery Kempe supplies an understanding of a very orthodox medieval Catholicism, albeit filtered through often drastic forms of expression. A close reading of the first two chapters of Kempe's autobiography depicts in vivid detail what becomes a major theme in the work at large: the centrality of guilt in Kempe's faith and in the Christianity of her day.

The first chapter of The Book of Margery Kempe begins when Kempe—who refers to herself in the third person throughout—is “twenty years of age, somewhat more, [and] married to a worshipful burgess” (532). After illness during pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Kempe experiences a period of extreme instability. The episode, which a contemporary reader might interpret as an acute episode of postpartum depression magnified by poor health, is explained by Kempe in terms of religion, the dominant epistemological framework of her day. Her violent behavior and self-harm are, according to the text, the result of a spiritual assault.

Retracing the narrative to the direct cause of this attack reveals much about Kempe's understanding of herself and her faith. After giving birth, Kempe's health is very poor and she “[despairs] for her life, believing that she might not live” (ibid). She calls a confessor, fearing damnation for some sin about which she has been silent her whole life (the biography never reveals the nature of this sin). She demonstrates here a belief that her thoughts and actions are influenced by evil spirits: ”she was continually hindered by her enemy—the devil—always saying to her while she was in good health that she didn't need to confess but to do penance all by herself alone” (ibid). This passage is also notable for Kempe's designation of counter-orthodox religious ideas as fundamentally evil and even demonically inspired.

When the confessor comes to hear her sin, Kempe's guilt is realized in two conflicting fears, one of the Church's teachings the other in the Church itself. While she fears hell, Kempe is on the other hand equally terrified of her confessor's condemnation. It is her inability to resolve these two conflicting impulses that triggers her psychotic episode: “because of the dread she had of damnation on the one hand, and his sharp reproving of her on the other, this creature when out of her mind and was amazingly disturbed and tormented with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days” (ibid). This passage indicates Kempe's profound sense of religious guilt as a leading factor in her “disturbed and tormented” state. But she experiences this crisis as a demonic one: “And in this time she saw, as she thought, devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire” (ibid).

It is unsurprising that Kempe, operating within this framework, finds relief in a vision of Christ. After months of torment in which she “desired all wickedness, just as the spirits tempted her to say and do . . . our merciful Lord Christ Jesus . . . appeared to his creature who had forsaken him” (532-533). In the wake of this Christophany, Kempe is fully and immediately relieved of demonic oppression. Suddenly, she is “as calm in her wits and reason as she ever was before,” and thereafter “[performs] all her duties wisely and soberly enough” (533).

This passage tells much about Kemp's understanding of herself in the context of her religious beliefs. She is subjected to external influence by both good and evil spiritual forces. The demons' coercion, in fact, is a much more violent influence than Christ's appearance. The spirits assail Kempe in force, “sometimes pawing at her, sometimes threatening her, sometimes pulling her and hauling her about both night and day” (532), whereas Christ appears, speaks a single sentence, and then departs. Despite this, and despite the fact that Kempe seems powerless to resist the demons prior to Christ's appearance, she holds herself responsible for her evil behavior and takes no credit for her recovery.

This attribution of all evil to the self and all good to an external entity is a recurring theme in The Book of Margery Kempe, and it inevitably colors Kempe's understanding of herself and the world around her. That she refers to herself throughout the text as “the creature” is indicative of her disdainful self-image, which becomes increasingly visible in the book's second chapter. Though Kempe is no under demonic assault here, her descriptions of her own actions and motives are unremittingly negative. She dresses vainly, hoping to attract attention to herself, and refuses her husband's attempts to chasten her: “when her husband used to try and speak to her, to urge her to leave her proud ways, she answered sharply and shortly, and said that she was come of worthy kindred—he should never have married her” (534).

Kempe describes her motives in this passage as “pure covetousness . . . pride and vanity” (ibid). These lead her to begin a brewing venture with the motive of maintaining her pride and esteem. Kempe's description of the success and failure of her brewery is ambiguous; the text states that she “was one of the greatest brewers in the town of N. for three or four years until she lost a great deal of money, for she had never had any experience in that business” (ibid).

When her business does begin to fail, another element of Kempe's guilt-driven worldview becomes visible: the belief that her misfortunes are the result of divine judgment. “For when the ale had as fine a head of froth on it as anyone might see, suddenly the froth would go flat, and all the ale was lost . . . Then this creature thought how God had punished her” (ibid). After similar failures in a milling enterprise and her resulting inability to retain servants, Kempe again attributes her hardships to God's wrath: “And then this creature, seeing all these adversities coming on every side, thought they were the scourges of the Lord that would chastise her for her sin” (535).

There is no room in this text for Kempe to celebrate her early success in brewing or even her later decision to do what she believes is right in abandoning it. Again, every action for which Kempe allows herself to take credit is evil, and every good thing she does is attributed to God rather than to her own choice. And these elements of the first two chapters persist throughout the text: Kempe protests sex with her husband, saying “it would be a good thing if by mutual consent they punished and chastised themselves by abstaining from the lust of their bodies” (535). She engages in fasting and various acts of penance throughout the narrative. Her only happiness is in her ecstatic, subtly erotic experience of Christ: “for the joy that she had and the sweetness that she felt in the conversation with our Lord, she was on the point of falling” (544). She is allowed no other satisfaction, be it the simple pleasure of human experience or fulfillment in her accomplishments. Filtered through Kempe's understanding, Christianity takes on an antipathetic, even nihilistic aspect, becoming a worldview that allows no room for good in the individual.

Robert Rusconi writes in Medieval Christianity that “in its effort to establish a clerical hegemony through the systematic application of the sacrament of penance, it may well be that the church achieved greater success in fostering a sense of guilt (especially in women) than in providing a means to deal effectively with that guilt” (Rusconi 225). The overwhelming and central presence of guilt in Margery Kempe's religious experience was not uncommon in late medieval England. The Book of Margery Kempe depicts a theology in which Christ is responsible for all good, man is guilty of all evil, and pleasure is inherently sinful unless it comes from the experience of God. Guilt was a central element in the Christendom of Kempe's time. Though in the intervening centuries it has been tempered with other concepts, it remains a strong force in the faith.

Thoughts: Ben Witherington vs. Bart Ehrman

I just finished reading Bart Ehrman's gripping Jesus, Interrupted, a study of biblical error and a chronicle of the formation of the Bible and the Christian faith. Taken on its own, the book is a profoundly damning review of claims to biblical error; however, in only 300 pages, Ehrman has to condense a whole lot of scholarship, history, and opinion to cover his themes. It serves as a wonderful introduction to the subject of the Bible's composition, but a lot of detail is sacrificed in this succinct account. While the book is pretty convincing in its own right, this lacking detail has sent me looking for more detailed work both supporting and opposing Ehrman's theses.

Most of the direct, opposing responses I've found to the book are, to be frank, idiotic: they're clearly written by inerrantists whose key point of disagreement is not issue with Ehrman's scholarship but offense at his ideas. One evangelical respondent who makes a respectable, scholarly attempt to address Ehrman's book is Ben Witherington, who published six lengthy blog posts analyzing Jesus, Interrupted's claims. Witherington does point out some important mistakes and overreaching on Ehrman's part (as Ehrman himself states, no book is inerrant) but unfortunately glosses over some of the book's significant points.

The Christian orthodoxy has survived by cleverly altering its doctrine to counter new criticism, and Witherington's doctrine of inerrancy is a slippery one. He acknowledges disagreements in the texts and scribal errors in their transmission, but for Witherington, these are not problematic in asserting the Bible's inerrancy. He argues that each work must be understood in its original context and in the way that its genre would have been interpreted by readers of the day. This is a fair argument to an extent, but when Witherington describes the gospels as "portraits, rather than photographs," he takes his reasoning a step too far.

A portrait can be, in a good many cases, a sufficient portrayal of how someone looks; it may even capture an essence of character that few photographs do. However, no artist or art critic would call any portrait "inerrant" or perfect in its accuracy; a portrait is fundamentally a product of the painter's subjective opinion of its subject's appearance. It'ss one thing to say that the gospels are honest, sufficiently reliable accounts of Jesus' character and ministry, and even that these are in fact the accounts God intended us to have. It is another thing entirely to say that they are the inerrant Word of God (which I find to be a disingenuous phrase, as I'll discuss in a later post.)

The difference is blatant in Witherington's analysis of the genealogies in Matthew and Luke. Witherington writes that Matthew "wants to suggest Jesus is the seventh son of a seventh son of David, namely the perfect descendant of David. In other words, the form of the genealogy reflects not just historical but also theological interests." This is clearly the case, but Witherington's understanding of genre allows such lenient treatment of fact that this and Matthew's other drastic editorial decisions pose no threat to his doctrine.

To be fair, Witherington rightly differentiates himself from fundamentalist scholars who hold an ultra-literal view of inerrancy, and he challenges them on unavoidable differences between the biblical accounts (such as the centurion's words at Jesus' death.) but Witherington's looser interpretation of inerrancy doesn't answer these issues; it merely ducks them. It's a view that's much harder to controvert, but in it, the idea of inerrancy loses its meaning. A claim to unquestionable authority should be held to its own standard.

http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2009/04/bart-interrupted-detailed-analysis-of.html

Universalist Themes in Christ's Teachings

Here is a small sample of the some thoughts I've been developing for the past two years or so. I've been planning to write a treatise or book covering this and other subjects and have even begun doing so several times. But it's going to take a lot more time and study to write a book that adequately defends many of these positions, and in the meantime, I thought I'd put some of the basic ideas online for public discussion. After all, if there's any truth to these theories, it was true before I stumbled upon it.

I'm writing tonight about the concept of universalism in the the gospels. Not the "everyone gets saved" kind of universalism, because anyone who's ever read the gospels knows that isn't there, but rather a universalism which posits that people can attain salvation and access God by multiple--even infinite--paths.

A Christian's first reaction is likely that this sort of universalism isn't present in the gopsels either. Of Jesus' countless statements on salvation, a mere two verses form the bedrock of a complex theology on the subject. The first is John 3:16, the most famous verse of the Bible ("that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.") The second, found in John 14:6, is Jesus statement that "I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." In politics, these might be termed "bumper-sticker phrases": short, succinct statements that sound good but mask the deeper complexities of an issue. Beyond these, the Christian theology of salvation comes largely from letters by Paul and James.

This is a drastic oversight on the part of theologeons, as Jesus has plenty more to say on the subject. Contrary to the above statements, Jesus' lengthier teachings on salvation pertain not to acknowledging his divinity but to the cultivation of certain actions and values, values demonstrated by practitioners of many religious faiths: forgiveness, generosity, kindness, humility, pacifism, and the rejection of extreme wealth.

In terms of emphasis theme of forgiveness alone trumps acknowledging Jesus' divinity in his own teachings on salvation. Jesus says that those who forgive will be forgiven (Matthew 5:7) and that each person will be judged by the standard he or she uses to judge others (7:1). In the Lord's Prayer, he asks God to "forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors--" then he interrupts himself, in the middle of the prayer, to emphasize that "if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins" (Matt. 6:12-14.) Nowhere does he stipulate that this forgiveness is only open to those who acknowledge his divinity.

Jesus' longest and most emphatic teaching on heaven and hell (Matt. 25:31-46) describes him returning at the end of the age to “separate the people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (25:32). Here, Jesus states that those who find favor with God are those who have fed the hungry, welcomed strangers, clothed the poor, looked after the sick, and visited those in prison. The "goats" are those who ignored those in need. Mainstream Christian doctrine seems to mandate the presence of a third group: those who fed the hungry and clothed the poor but whose incorrect beliefs keep them out of heaven. This category is conspicuously absent from Jesus' account.

(The other traits I mentioned above, especially rejection of wealth, take up a fair amount of Jesus' focus as well, but I fear this "basic ideas" essay is becoming overlong.)

So how do we recognize these numerous and emphatic passages with the John verses where Jesus talks about being the Way and the necessity of belief? Assuming that these are all statements Jesus actually made (biblical errancy is the subject of a much longer, more studied, more boring essay) and postulating that Jesus' statements are valid to begin with (or this becomes an exercise in futility,) we have to seek an interpretation that balances and fairly represents all the concepts at play.

Since mainstream Christianity has done this dissatisfactoraly, emphasizing a few specific quotations over four books' worth of teachings, I propose a method that calls into question our understanding of the word "believes." What does it mean to believe in someone, and what does it mean to believe in Jesus specifically? The traditional understanding is that belief in Jesus means belief in Jesus' divinity, sacrificial death, and resurrection. But Jesus was talking about salvation long before his death, and "I'm the incarnation of God" comprised only a very small portion of his message. So what would happen if we defined "belief" in Jesus as belief in the worldview he spent 95% of his ministry constructing?

Here's a hypothetical question. We have on one hand a person who has never heard of Karl Marx but who, through indirect exposure to Marx's teachings, has come to assume a philosophy that mirrors Marx's in every meaningful way. On the otherhand is a person who calls himself a Marxist and talks about Marx's writing frequently, but who espouses capitalism, rejects the materialist dialectic, embraces the hierarchy of the traditional family structure, and supports organized religion. Which of these could be more accurately be called a Marxist?

I'm sure you know where I'm going with the example. Here's the parallel: someone, maybe a deist or a Hindu or an agnostic or a UU, who forgives the wrongs done to her, embraces the maxim of "living simply so others may simply live," and invests her life in humanitarian causes that improve the quality of life for disadvantaged people. This person lives the major teachings of Jesus about as well as any can, but--perhaps due to the gross representation of his message by so many Christians--never feels inclined to consider the Christian faith. Contrast this woman with one of those very misrepresentations--a clergyman who uses his station to molest children; a televangelist who exploits gullible people for money; a politician who wields the Bible to defend war, racism, and the concentration of wealth.

Who can more accurately be called a follower of Jesus? I find that it's often not the person bandying his name. And Jesus' own message, taken wholly, vindicates that.

It's funny and sad to me that as exclusive a religion as Christianity descended from one as accomodating as Judaism, which offers the Noahide laws, a specific set of instructions for how people outside the religion can find favor with God. The church understanding of salvation is among the many rigidities the faith has inherited, a product of being intertwined with the state for centuries. Our narrow understanding of Christianity as promising salvation only to those who have been exposed to and acknowledge a certain narrative is the same kind of crowd-control religion that we see in beliefs like the infallibility of the Pope. Those who believe in God need to use their God-given faculties, rather than the artifacts of Roman rule, to inform their opinions about him. God is in everything around us--after all, it's his creation.

The Eye Of A Needle

Hey, everyone!! I hope you're having a good summer.

I've decided to write a short book chronicling the development of my theology over the past year and a half. The book is to be titled "my Jesus: a work in progress". It's going to be a living manuscript; I hope to have an early version of it available online before I move, and I plan to continually add to and change it as I get feedback from readers and further my own studies. The book is designed to be as much a tool for dialogue as a profession of my own beliefs, and I hope that its existence will lead to conversations that will continue to challenge and grow my faith.

This essay, which I first wrote for my World Literature I class in the fall of 2009, is going to appear towards the beginning of the book. It's not nearly as progressive as some of the other ideas I'll be proposing, but I feel it's a good starting point from which I can let my more radical statements grow. The professor to whom I submitted the paper really liked it; let me know what you think!

-Evan

Jesus said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven."

The Eye of a Needle

A persistent widow, a patient father, a needle’s eye, a treasure hidden in a field: These are among the most iconic images of the parables of Jesus of Nazareth. These stories were delivered verbally by Jesus and recorded in the gospels, and they have since been collected in the most widely available work of literature in the world. Yet for all their familiarity to modern readers, at the center of these parables lies an enigma. The kingdom of Heaven, a concept whose meaning and implications have been fiercely debated in the two millennia since Jesus’ life, is the focus of all Jesus’ parables; his stories were intended to provided points of reference for his followers to understand this mystery. The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (EDT) states that the terms “kingdom of God”, “kingdom of the heavens”, “his kingdom”, and “my kingdom” are all equitable to “kingdom of Heaven” in different contexts, and together they appear over one hundred times in the gospels (607-611). It is little wonder that interpretations of the phrase vary so widely, as sometimes its uses within the gospels seem diametrically opposed to one another. In some passages the kingdom of Heaven is at hand (Matt. 3:2, 4:7, 10:7; Mark 1:15; Luke 21:31 KJV), yet at various points in the gospels the term seems to refer to a reign of God that will begin only at the end of the present age (EDT 364-365). These two seemingly contradictory concepts form two poles between which stands a spectrum of interpretations. The fundamentalist Protestant view holds that the kingdom of Heaven is exclusively a description of a coming age, and though it often goes unspoken, that view is echoed in conservative movements throughout Christendom. However, through a precursory understanding of eschatology, a close examination of Jesus’ statements regarding the kingdom of Heaven, and a critical review of the fundamentalist interpretation, it becomes apparent that Jesus’ presentation of the kingdom of Heaven is just as much a message for this world as it is a vision of the next.

The study of what Jesus terms the kingdom of Heaven falls largely within a branch of Christian theology called eschatology. In his voluminous Christian Theology, Millard J. Erickson states that eschatology “has traditionally meant the study of the last things” (1149). In the Old Testament, eschatology was always forward-looking, focused on the coming “day of the Lord” (Isaiah 13:6, 9; Ezekiel 13:5, 30:3 NIV) which is perceived as an age, its beginning marked by a great battle, in which the wicked will be destroyed and the righteous vindicated. In some passages (Amos 5:18-20 KJV) those Hebrews who yearn for the day of the Lord are scorned for thinking they themselves will escape judgment: “Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light--pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?” The first references to the “kingdom” also appear scattered throughout the Old Testament books, sometimes translated “dominion” (Psalm 22:28 KJV). The word from which both of these terms are derived is the Hebrew malekut, which also appears in secular contexts throughout the Old Testament. Malekut is used to refer to the reign of a king, encompassing both his authority to kingship and the domain of his kingdom. “When malekut is used of God, it almost always refers to his authority or his rule as the heavenly King” (EDT 608).

The New Testament eschews any mention of the “day of the Lord”; in the gospels, Jesus instead expounds on the Old Testament notion of the kingdom of God. In these statements and parables, the focus of eschatology shifts. While the notes of the forward-looking mindset from the Old Testament books is still present, in the New Testament “the dominant note is fulfillment--fulfillment by Jesus, who in by his passion and resurrection has begotten his people anew” (EDT 363). The operative word in the New Testament’s kingdom of Heaven is basileia, a Greek word roughly equivalent to the Hebrew malekut. Basileia again refers to both the domain over which a king rules and his authority to rule, so the kingdom of Heaven, like the day of the Lord, refers to a state in which the order of things is in line with God’s will. But unlike the Old Testament concept, the eschatology presented in the gospels is one of immanence, as Jesus declares, “Do you not say, ‘four more months and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest” (John 4:35 NIV). Though the Old Testament view of eschatology held that the day of the Lord would occur only at the end of what was then the present age, Jesus’ of immediacy is contextually warranted: The Hebrew belief was that the coming of the Messiah would mark the beginning of the new age, and the gospels hold that Jesus is the Messiah predicted in the same prophesies that spoke of that coming age.

A contextual understanding is useful in interpreting Jesus’ references to the kingdom of Heaven, but the most useful evidence lies within the passages themselves. If “the kingdom” is equitable to the reign of God, when and where does Jesus say that reign is enacted? The majority of Jesus’ references to the kingdom of Heaven appear in his parables, and these allegories fall within a spectrum between two poles, as do modern interpretations of Jesus’ overall message behind the stories. At one end of the spectrum are the parables that emphasize how the kingdom is enacted through individual, immediate action. These include the parable of the treasure hidden in the field (Matthew 13:44) and that of pearl of great price, found in the following verse. These stories show the reign of God enacted when an individual person abandons the vestiges of his old life in pursuit of the will of God. In contrast to these are stories like the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13:24-29), which speaks of a final division of the saved and unsaved that has clearly not yet occurred. Between these two poles exist most of Jesus’ references to the kingdom; it is a realm that is referenced repeatedly in a future tense (Matthew 7:21, 25:1) yet it has been “forcibly advancing” (Matthew 11:12) since the days of John the Baptist. These opposing ideas are often presented even within a single chapter, so their dichotomy is inescapable.

Jesus’ definitive statement regarding the kingdom of Heaven, however, is hidden in plain view in one of the New Testament’s most famous passages, the Lord’s Prayer. This passage appears in two of the three synoptic gospels; though there are minor differences between the version found and Matthew 6:9-13 and that in Luke 11:2-4, the relevant statement is almost identical in both versions. The prayer opens, “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven (KJV) (Luke’s version reads, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.”) Without reading too much into these brief verses, three simple statements can be made. First, the repetition signifies that “Thy kingdom come” and “Thy will be done” are synonymous, or at least strongly correlated, concepts. The kingdom, or the reign of God, is a state in which God’s will is enacted. Second, Heaven is a realm apart from earth in which we can infer that God’s will is done. Lastly, Jesus wills that the reign of God be enacted on earth in the same way that it is in Heaven. This verse is extraordinarily rich in meaning, as are many of Jesus’ sayings, and a careful examination of it can decode the dichotomy presented in the rest of Jesus’ teachings on the kingdom of Heaven. The kingdom is the reign of God no matter where that reign is enacted, and the power given by Jesus to his followers (Matthew 16:19 NIV) carries with it both the authority and the responsibility to enact that reign.

Consequently, radical views on what the kingdom of Heaven comprises must be measured against this understanding. One such view holds the kingdom of Heaven as purely a prediction of the future, focusing on the book of Revelation and appropriating scattered verses from the gospels and epistles to support the view that the kingdom is not, in fact, at hand. Because a simple reading of the gospels thoroughly debunks this concept, it is very difficult to find a theological treatise supporting it, but it has nevertheless permeated much of Christian thought throughout the history of the faith. Though many groups that support this view, such as many socially conservative movements among American evangelicals, would never say aloud that they deny the kingdom of Heaven as a present reality, their stance is reflected more accurately in their focus on apocalyptic prophecy and insistence that Satan rules the present world and will rule it until the second coming of Jesus foretold in Revelation. Groups who adhere to this view are effectively crippled, unable to emulate the work that Jesus did during his life in pursuit of bringing the kingdom of Heaven to earth. Thus these movements and their adherents are rendered useless to the work with which Jesus entrusted his followers. Conversely, they often tarnish the image of Jesus and pose a direct impediment to the work of those who strive to enact Jesus’ vision in the present day. “We need to recognize,” Erickson insists, “that eschatology does not pertain exclusively to the future. Jesus did introduce a new age” (1164).

Progressive evangelical Rob Bell is even more emphatic. He affirms that the order of things that presides in Heaven can indeed be brought to earth, but complementing this statement is its disturbing complement: Hell, he states, can also be enacted in the present. Following an anecdote about a concentration camp, Bell continues to say that “when we say something was a ‘living hell’, we mean that it was devoid of any love or peace or beauty of meaning. It was absent of the will and desire of God” (22). Bell is a strong proponent of the idea that the kingdom of Heaven exists anywhere God’s will is being done; conversely, he presents that the utter lack of God’s will and intention is the very essence of Hell. “When Jesus talks about heaven and hell, they are first and foremost present realities that have serious implications for the future. Either can be invited to earth, right now, through our actions. It’s possible for heaven to invade earth. And it’s possible for hell to invade earth” (22).

So if it is the responsibility of Jesus’ followers to enact the kingdom of Heaven on earth, what and whom does this kingdom comprise; what are the elements of Heaven on earth? Jesus’ sayings and parables can help to discern this, and though the phrase itself does not accompany every one of Jesus‘ instructions, it is certainly prevalent enough to be called the central theme of his teachings. Though most Protestant groups are emphatic on “faith-alone” salvation, the kingdom of Heaven presented in the gospels is almost entirely action-driven. Jesus’ most frequent command is forgiveness; in Matthew alone, Jesus says seven times that to forgive is to be forgiven (Matthew 6:14-15 NIV). Beyond this, the most detailed statement regarding Heaven comes late in Jesus’ teaching (Matthew 25:31-46 NIV), when he describes returning at the end of the age to “separate the people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (25:32). Here, Jesus states that those bound for Heaven are those who fed the hungry, welcomed strangers, clothed the wanting, looked after the sick, and visited those in prison. Upon reading this passage, it would seem unthinkable that anyone could interpret Jesus’ teachings to say that the kingdom of Heaven is merely a future reality. As shown by an introduction to eschatology, an examination of Jesus’ teachings throughout the gospels, and a critical look at an opposing viewpoint, the kingdom can come to earth just as it exists in Heaven. But there should never have been any question; in a single statement, Jesus makes it clear that the kingdom is something we must enact in the present world if we are ultimately to attain it.

Works Cited

Bell, Rob. Sex God Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality. Boston: Zondervan Company, 2007. Print.

BibleGateway.com - The Bible, New International Version. Biblica. Web. 16 Nov. 2009.

Elwell, Walter A., ed. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Book House, 1985. Print.

Erickson, Millard J. Christian Theology. New York: Baker Book House, 1986. Print.

The Holy Bible, King James Version. Grand Rapids, Mich: World. Print.

(c) Evan Fuller 2009-2010.

The Hand of God

Years ago, if I heard a song that insulted God and faith outright, I'd do the good Christian thing and shut it out. As I've grown, though, I've realized a few things about people who hate God, mostly that their perceptions of him come from other people. I can easily criticize an album like Cursive's The Happy Hollow for Tim Kasher's blind rage and clear bias, but the fact of the matter is that, if Kasher's experience with Christians teaches him that God is cruel and cowardly, that's the Christians' fault more than it is his.

Where do we get the idea that God is indifferent to human suffering? Jesus, as presented in the gospel accounts, is clearly the antithesis of this concept. Yet people outside the Christian church often hold very negative opinions of the Christian God. To me, it's no mystery why, and it's no fault of theirs. On Sunday, when the House of Representatives finally passed a bill for health reform, they did so amidst the protests of countless Republican "Christians" who demonstrated their desire to continually withhold health care from the nation's poor and disadvantaged in order to protect the bank accounts of the rich.

If this is the God that American "Christians" represnt, it's only natural that a anyone who cares about the things Jesus cared about would hate him. If the Kingdom of Heaven is on your heart, but your only perceptions of God come from hateful, pro-war social Darwinists, it's only right that you hate the god they portray. Left-wing liberals don't hate God at all; rather, they hate conservative Christains' idol, which is the only god many of them know.

Read these lyrics and, rather than feeling insulted, ask yourself what experiences with believers in God would lead someone to feel this way.

From Kevin Devine's "Hand of God"

In the hand of God, there's a cattle prod

That keeps shocking us along

Till we're flung from roofs without parachutes

To fill in patches on His lawn

And there's an iron gate where patrolmen wait

To keep the chosen people safe

From the infidels and their terror cells

Rifles blessed with God's good grace

And there's a shining path jeweled with shattered glass

And hemmed in with barbed wire

So you can skin your feet, but you can't come free--

Oh, Hallelujah, higher and higher!

And you curse their Lord for all he ignored

In His flawed and vengeful plan

Cut yourself some slack against a deck so stacked

I mean, come on, you're just one man.

---

DC Talk said, "The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

The vague shape of an idea.

I know I said that I was going to post another essay first, but that one's still in the revision process. In the meantime, I'd like to offer for consideration some of my recent thoughts on another, far more important subject. I haven't been able to write a real position piece on this yet--or hammer out a real position, for that matter--but it's one of three very big, interconnected ideas I've been mulling over in the past few months.

The concept of sin is one of the most critical elements of Christian theology. God cannot abide sin, Jesus died to forgive it, and we must be free of it to partake in the relationship with God that ultimately saves us. But for all its significance, we rarely stop to take a close look at sin on a conceptual level. Somehow, we are told, sin entered God's formerly perfect world, but we never consider sin's actual origin. Having pondered this for quite some time, I've come up with two drastically different possibilities, each of which has similarly drastic implications upon our understanding and practice.

Thirteenth-century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas composed a series of five logical and observational arguments for the existence of God. Three of these are very similar, and are best represented by the Proof for an Efficient Cause. The argument goes as follows: Everything in existence must be caused either by itself or by something else. Since everything we can observe is caused by something else, logic dictates that there must be something that is self-causing and is the root cause of everything else, namely, God. I've heard arguments against this proof that can be discussed at length another night, but the case in point is that Christians generally agree with the idea that all of observable existence is created by God.

When exploring the origin of sin, this concept leaves us with few options. If sin is caused by anything in observable existence, then sin is, in effect, created by God. Even if sin is created by Lucifer (which is a rather shallow idea,) Lucifer himself was created by God. The idea that God created sin would be considered heretical by most Christians, because it flies in the face of firmly held beliefs about the character of God. But based on the idea that God created everything, it's a concept we must nevertheless explore. Besides it, the only other possibility is that sin, like God, is a self-causing phenomenon whose existence precedes creation.

The implications of the latter view aren't nearly as drastic as those of the former, but they are worthy of mention nonetheless. The idea that sin is a self-causing force essentially means that it is a preexisting condition of the universe God has created. This condition, which I'll term "entropy" here, is an outside influence on God's creation that God cannot, or chooses not to, circumvent. It's the metaphysical equivalent of gravity; God can build whatever he wants, but entropy will always be pulling at it. If God simply cannot find a way to exclude sin from his creation, we must question the omnipotence that mainstream Christianity attributes to him; if he could make a sinless world, but chooses not to, the reason for his decision is worth exploring. The Biblical narrative seems to present that God intended to create a perfect world, which was then infected by sin against his will, but that simply cannot be if his will is immutable. In his extensive Christian Theology, Millard Erickson writes: "...God's will is never frustrated. What he chooses to do, he accomplishes, for he has the ability to do it." If this is true and God is in fact all-powerful, then it was by his own will that sin entered his creation.

Which brings us to the other possibility. If God is in fact the origin of sin, then the sin must first exist within his own being. This would mean one (or both) of two things: That God's will is not totally pure, and/or that his ability to enact that will is not absolute. The imperfection of God is one of the core tenants of Gnosticism, a movement against which the Judeo-Christian spectrum of faith has struggled for millennia. Taken literally, the Biblical passages that establish God as a pure and infinite being are legion. These superlative statements could be considered poetry, descriptions of a being so much more powerful than we that we must imagine him to be infinite. Or, to adopt a more hostile approach, they could be the claims of a being who wants us to believe him to be greater than he truly is. Perhaps God tried to create a perfect world and was simply unable, and the whole process of redemption is an attempt to expunge us of the imperfections he never intended us to have.

Clearly, painting a picture of an imperfect God requires a leap outside the bounds of moderate theology and into speculation. But I believe that once a question has been posed, every possible answer should be explored until a suitable one is produced. Personally, I'm not inclined to believe that sin or imperfection originated within God. I think the entropy theory is far more likely, but then the question remains: is God unable to build a universe untouched by entropy, or does he intentionally choose to let sin enter his creation? I'll be working on an answer to that question in the near future, as well as discussing the theology of St. Augustine and Georg Hegel and how their different ideas the origin of sin fit into the two major streams of thought I've outlined above. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

-Evan

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Isaiah said: "Your iniquities have seperated you from your God."

Greetings.

This is Evan Fuller's journal for the publication of essays and other writing on the subjects of religion, theology, and metaphysics. My first essay to be posted here, "Sex as Marriage in the Bible", will appear as soon as I have time to revise it.

-Evan

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Jesus said: "Behold, I have set fire to the world, and I stand guard until it is ablaze."