A book that is making me angry

I have been reading a book. The title translates to “There is no man or woman” it is written by Thoralf Gilbrant. When my father bought it for me I thought it was going to be different than it was. I thought it was going to be a book that did not do me violence, but it does. Practically every page I read batters me, disappoints me and makes me profoundly sad and less than. If you can’t guess it is about the sex roles in the church and to me that is not a make or break issue but as you well know I am of the opinion that Jesus meant complete equality in church that people should be given tasks based on their calling and ability. This writer, however, believes it is extremely important. He quotes a Bo Giertz who believes it to be “a litmus test of Biblical faith” (the book is in Finnish and the translation may not be the best but it is as I understand it).

This book seems to draw a strange line in the sand when it comes it the power women can wield in the church. It does not say women are not allowed to have no power, they are but he mines the post Christ texts of the New Testament to the point of absurdity. Women are allowed to be deacons, but not elders and definitely not pastors. He really feels a call to put women back in their rightful places in the Church while beating them down. It is a ridiculously hair splitting experience. I have read only a few chapters but am very confused. Let me present my main questions I have and would hope he would address later in the book as I read further:

What about women who feel the call to be the leaders of churches and to teach both men and women and have the talents and abilities for it?

Why can a prophetess, like Deborah, be a prophet/leader and be okay in Gilbrant’s estimation but a woman who is not a prophet cannot be a leader? This seems to me to be a distinction without a difference.

If all women have a natural tendency to submit and nurture how come I don’t?

If all men have a natural tendency to protect and lead does that make me a man regardless of my anatomical femininity?

If servanthood is a special honor accorded for women how come Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and in this way brought out a style of servant leadership?

Why would I want to serve a God as unjust as the one Gilbrant is espousing?

There are more questions but they are wrapped up in many questions and would need for you to read the passage in the book. Maybe I will share my confusion regarding some of these more complicated bits in another post.

My biggest confusion is when my father asks me how I liked the book what will I say? The truth is that so far what I have read seems like a steaming pile of poop. I can’t tell him that. My father needs to be treated gently on issues like this or he gets authoritarian and I am too old to put up with that.

How can you believe that and call yourself a Christian?

How can you believe that and call yourself a Christian?

That is a question I have heard a few times. Most recently I heard this in regards with me expressing approval for the term of the previous president and her leadership while proceeding with hope for the new president’s term. Well, I think I have mentioned, and you can probably guess, some Christians have a problem with a woman having been the president.

The answer to this largely rhetorical question is: Because Jesus died on the cross for my sins and by that method gave me the gift of salvation and eternal life saving me from Hell and I accepted it. That is how I can call myself a Christian. That is the method of becoming a Christian my church believes in. There is no other step. Some people approach it a bit differently but nowhere in the scriptures does it say you must accept this gift and then firmly believe that women are not to be in leadership.

Also, I hate rhetorical questions. They seem to stay in the air begging for an answer regardless of the speaker not wanting one. They are like a story that has no denouement after the climax: Infuriating, in other words.

There is also another important bit to know about how I work, if you ever ask me that question, or a variant of it, there is writing off that happens on both of our parts. You write me off as a Christian and I write you off as a potential associate and begin to avoid you at all costs. This is the most toxic question I can think of. It is judgmental and the most uninquisitive inquiry I have ever heard. You come across as a nitpicky legalist. Jesus is the one who told us how to attain salvation, not Paul, not Peter and not the Old Testament. The Old Testament told us how sinful we are and how short of the glory we fall every time we try. Paul and Peter tell the early church in general, or some churches in particular, now to proceed after salvation but none of these rules, regulations and suggestions have anything to do with getting saved, becoming a Christian.

I would prefer not to atrophy, I like gains

Today I came across two articles about Christianity that made me think and want to write blog posts. The first one is The Advice the Western Church Never Heeded. While I do not completely disagree with the collection of quotes here, some I find to be absurd like the first one about the scientist dissecting the bird. Unless this scientist is an idiot, very rare in my experience among scientists, he would not be studying the bird by dissection alone but get several and observe their behavior in addition to doing vivisection. As far as I know the point of vivisection is to not have your subject die, but to sew them up afterwards so what happened was an accident especially when searching for the source of its life. I hate when people make metaphors when they do not know what they are talking about. It undermines your aim. Talk about things you understand when making a metaphor. I mean that is a bit of hair splitting on my part but it really annoys me when people do that. Also the ostrich metaphor bothers me too it could not fly no matter how hard it tried, it is just too heavy and, if I remember correctly, lacks the hollow bones of its fellow avians. It simply does not need to fly because it runs any more than I do.

What do I agree with? I suppose the fact that American Christianity is saturated with materialism. Other than that I am not in agreement because the overall tone is anti-intellectual, anti-thought and anti-questioning. To use a metaphor myself, one I hope to execute better than the person being quoted on this blog. Your faith is like a muscle if you never use it, it will not be challenged it will atrophy and disappear. If you lift weights it will get bigger and stronger. Weight lifting is based of challenging and hurting the muscle to break it down in order to build it up better than before. The exercise of questioning your faith will break it down in small ways but it will make it stronger and more apt to take on greater challenges in the future. I for one lift weights. My progress has not been astounding in the past year but there has been a little progress. One year ago I did eight bicep curls with a 5kg weight, now I do 12 bicep curls with a 7.5kg weight. Soon I can move up a weight and will do a significantly lower number of reps with a 10kg weight (I have adjustable weights they do not alter in traditional increments of 1kg). Why do I do this? Well I really hate people falling over laughing when I flex.

Anyway, enough about my puny arms. I think the biggest problem in Christianity is the lack of questioning and encouragement to really figure out your own faith. If you rely on others to tell you what to believe unquestioningly in the best case scenario you miss the point of Jesus dying for us and giving us a direct line to God, in the worst case scenario you end up drinking some Kool-Aid with some outwardly happy people in matching track suits and die. Think about what you believe in and if a pastor says something you don’t understand, ask him or her, or look it up in the Bible yourself but most of all think about it yourself and pray about it. God gave you brain and he is not above answering your questions. If you don’t understand something in the Bible the same principle applies.

Santa, Toothfairy and Jesus: What is the Difference?

I am a huge party pooper when it comes it innocent childhood beliefs. I have been called mean by old ladies because I won’t pay my son money and tell him a magical fairy brings it when he loses a tooth. I never grew up with it and I just can’t make myself pass down the story. I do tell my son about Santa Clause but I could not keep up the pretense that there is a magical gift giving man who is able to ignore the laws of physics and give all the kids presents. We pretend there is a Santa because it is fun at my house, we don’t actually believe, neither does my son.

Why can mean mommy not let her little boy have a beautiful story about a man who gives gifts to all kids out of the goodness of his heart? I am a bad liar, I feel quilt when I keep up a pretense without saying it is a pretense. Still that is not all. We are not wealthy enough to pull it off. We cannot buy our son what he asks for, just a few items and then have the grandparents provide a few more. He asks us why did Santa not bring him something he really wanted. What am I going to say? I don’t know, ask Santa. Then he asks me, why did so and so get a lot more presents than him. He was a better kid than you son. How can I answer this question and keep it within the realm of the story without making him feel bad about himself? I feel bad saying, I don’t know, because that is a lie. I very much know why. It is because we are poor. Santa did not bring him as many presents because we are poor. Santa believes in prosperity theology. He measures how naughty or nice you are based on your parents’ income. Wait, no, that is not right either.

I approach the story of Santa as a fun little fairy tale and I also tell him about house elves and other fun stuff. I don’t believe in these stories and so I don’t present any of them as the truth. My son has a pretty well developed sense of skepticism about crazy stuff people make up. My husband has not been able to fool him with a crazy story for a while. He is getting to be about seven so it is a good time to start spotting when other people are trying to fool you. I was really gullible on the other hand well into my teens. Skepticism is a defense mechanism I learned the hard way. There is a difference between being optimistic and an imaginative skeptic and an uninspired cynic. Not that there is anything wrong with being a cynic, it is just nothing one wishes on a child.

So you might ask me, I hear you: What about your religious beliefs? How can you perpetuate that mythology on your child? The simple answer is that I actually believe in that. My son can tell I am sincere. I do also communicate to him the value of other systems of belief and non-belief and tell him they are sincere too. I introduce my son to other belief systems. I also tell him that the people believing them are just like us in their sincerity. This way he can evaluate things on a more realistic footing. He does not seem to be too interested in religious things, he has not asked me a lot of questions, but that is fine. He is more interested in science, cars, Legos and sledding down hills at the moment. Still, I think I am ready for the hard questions. I have asked them myself and I am not afraid to admit what I don’t know or understand. I always try to approach whatever my son asks with age appropriate honesty and I will continue that.

What I don't like about Christianity Part 1: The Old Testament

I have been feeling rather angry, depressed and disappointed lately so I have decided to vent some of that by writing about all the things I do not like about Christianity. Yes my disappointment has to do with Christianity and Christians but instead of getting into that I want to discuss the Old Testament.

I really do not like the Old Testament. I don't like it in the same way that I do not like brussels sprouts. They are one of the few vegetables I hate. I mean I like the idea of them they are like tiny cabbages and I want to eat them by peeling off the little leafs one by one. The only thing stopping me is the taste. It is really horrible. My brother actually loves brussels sprouts so I know this dislike is not universal by any means. It is merely my opinion. No reading weird stuff into this and saying I am implying no one should eat brussels sprouts or they are a bad thing, no one should infer anything like that about the Old Testament either.

I was not always a disliker of the writings of the Old Testament. I used to enjoy the fun stories a lot as a kid. I did have some trouble reconciling it with the New Testament but I compartmentalized it in my head and no problem. As I got older I started to understand the Old Testament better and being able to reconcile it with the New Testament in my own way. Also as I did this my dislike of it grew. I have no idea why this is. I have no real reason to dislike the book just people's interpretations of it and the way they try to defend it.

What do I think the old testament is? This would be a good question to answer at this point. It is the chronicle of the Jewish people. It is their story. Christianity was an outgrowth or Judaism and therefore the main influence on the New Testament. It was heavily cited by Jesus and others in it. That is the simple answer that I can articulate with no problem. The long answer that I have a harder time putting into words is: What does it mean to me? Part of my acceptance of the apparent contradictions of the book and understanding them was phasing the Old Testament out in importance. Just like the New Covenant is greater than the Old, the New Testament is greater. I see the Old Testament as incomplete. It is attempting to state the same thing as the New Testament without Jesus and failing at it. Instead of Jesus it uses the law and gets tangled up in it and spans twice the pages of the New and fails to make the point. The New Testament, however, has Jesus and makes the point already in the Gospel of Mathew.

What I mean is I find references to salvation, or hints of it all over the Psalms. They are the one book of the Old Testament that lets its hair down and forgets about the rules and merely revels on the greatness of God. Rest of the time it is all about the rules, how we should follow the rules and stories about people trying to follow the rules and usually failing at it.

There was one story that bothered me as a child. I cannot find the exact location because I cannot figure out what words to use exactly. It took place while Moses was leading the people of Israel to the promised land. They attacked a town and no one was supposed to keep any loot for themselves. God told Moses someone had kept some loot so they threw lots to determine the tribe then on down until they got down to the nuclear family unit and the culprit. He confesses and gives back the item he had taken. Then in true Old Testament style he gets killed and so does his entire family unit, his kids wife and, if I remember, pack animals.

This was really hard to swallow. When my mother read it to me as a child out of her grown up Bible I really shocked and confused me but I tried not to think about it. As a little child it seemed so wrong, so contradictory of the God I believed in. With the faith of a child I shut the entire story out off my mind and separated that cruel petty unforgiving God from the one I believed in. Still it stayed with me and as I got older until I had to think about it and wonder at it. I had to either accept it as a story of my God or reject it.

It was at this time I considered the Old Testament as a whole and I considered weather or not to reject the whole thing because it seemed to me this was not the God I wanted to believe in. I have always had very well defined ideas of right and wrong, sure they have evolved over time and have incorporated a lot more gray area but they are still very well defined. The God of the Old Testament seemed to me to be so cruel, petty and xenophobic. This God did not seem to give a hoot about the rest of the people he created just his chosen people. F those pagans. Lets not even try to make them one of the Chosen people He loves. They can just go die in a fire set by the Chosen.

So you can see what a dilemma I had. The image of the Old Testament god contradicted so fiercely with the truth God had set in my heart from birth about what I saw as my God. What to do? I was able to reason away the problems I had with bits of the New Testament a lot easier. In the end I realized something. The Old Testament was given to us to show what a world with out grace was like. I personally think they could have done it in a fewer pages but it seems to make the point very well. Only a very few people are capable of even being good enough to communicate with God personally and no one is perfect and transgressors get destroyed instead of forgiven. As the Psalms hint, salvation was still there but much harder to find and not available to everyone. When Jesus came he fulfilled the law and swept it aside and we no longer had to be tangled up in it to attain salvation. We can just go to Him and be forgiven. The message of salvation is so clear when seen through the lens of Jesus and an impossible jungle of confusion and fear when seen through the lens of the law. The law can only show us our sin it cannot save us. Jesus can save us and remove the sin that the law showed us.

This is my opinion on the subject and I guess I don't like the Old Testament because to me it is a scary vision on a world where grace is so rare and the Law so abundant. I know I am incapable of being good. Even with grace I fail daily, no hourly, and the thought of not having forgiveness and understanding for this fills me with dread. This is why I hate it when people quote the Old Testament or try to defend the law so profusely as to make it seem like it is a good thing instead of a failed method only conceived to show us how woefully deficient we are. In my opinion, if you cannot make you point using the New Testament you are making the wrong point. If there are no relevant scripture in the New Testament it is simply irrelevant. Also if Jesus did not speak about it it obviously was not the point. The rest of the New testament after Jesus's death was written to answer questions people of the time had and they were written by biased flawed men about their biased flawed opinions. I am not saying they are not worthwhile and useful, I merely am saying I do not hold them nearly in the same esteem as the words of Jesus. If I can understand all that Jesus said, or nearly all, and attempt to live based on that I think I am in good shape. I have decided to focus on Jesus and his words because they are more than adequate. They are perfect and the rest is just periphery.

Jehovah's Witnesses Revisited

In my post What to do About those Jehovah’s Witnesses I expressed a sentiment that the name of God is not all that important to me. It happens to be very important to the Witnesses so it was the first thing they asked: Does God have a name? What is it? You know, I knew what they meant. They showed me passages in the Bible etc. I mean they are Jehovah's Witnesses.

I had an anonymous commenter disagree and point to some parts of the Bible where this matter was discussed (Lords prayer and the ten commandments). I felt like he assumed that I did not know the Bible very well, I am sure that is not what he meant but I had not missed these passages. I said as much in my reply. In light of this I feel like I need to explain that point.

It is not that I do not believe in a specific God with specific attributes. It is very clear to me what my God is like and if I were to call him a proper name I would rather use the name Jesus than Yahweh. Three in one trinity and all that jazz.

Why is it that I don't see it as important, unlike the missionaries and the commenter. Well, let's use an analogy the ladies who came to my door used. What they said was: If there was a group of men and one of them was her husband if she just called out “man!” they would all turn, but if she called her husband by name only he would turn (well, perhaps another would turn too if there was more than one man with the same name but she did not include this in her analogy). My version of this is: My husband is not only a man he is my husband by virtue of our relationship and if I see a group of men and my husband is in it and I call out “Husband, get over here and get me my dinner!” ('cause I am a jerk). All the men that are husbands might turn around but only my husband would trot on over because we have a special relationship that requires him to do that. The other husbands would not recognize me as their wife so they would get back to what they were doing.

I see calling out to God in prayer to be the same way. Only my God would recognize me and come to me. My husband would not be offended if I were never to call him by his proper name again. I could just call him sweetie or honey or other saccharine things. He knows I mean him.

Also there is the assumption that there are other gods. The Jehovah's Witnesses are monotheistic but this analogy does kind of assume more than one entity listening to the prayer. I do not personally believe there are other entities out there to listen to my prayer and only the God I believe in.

So I am a little confused as to why it is a big deal especially since most translations of the Bible do not say Yahveh on these instances. My New Jerusalem Bible does. It is not usually used by evangelicals. We usually use the NIV. The Lords prayer does not use the name Yahveh even in the NJB. It just says “Father in heaven”. How ever His name is to be kept holy but does not mention what that name is so it is not really any proof for the Yahveh side of the argument. Hope that clears up my personal position on the point.

Älä alistu!/Don't submit!

So, I found this video because it has caused quite a bit of controversy in Finland and caused 500 resignations from the Lutheran Church the day it was released. It was not put together by the Evangelical Lutheran Church but it was done with their money.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfPjTvTx5-U

Campaign official pages: http://www.nuotta.com/kampanja

If you do not speak Finnish here is the over long and tedious video in a nutshell. "Anni's Story" is the title it is from the "Don't Submit" video campaign. Anni was a bisexual girl. She realized in high school and became quite involved with gay rights and dated a girl in the ninth grade and then they broke up. During this time she was having some problems and met a girl who wanted to just help her with them. One day this girl asked to pray with her and Anni saw the holy spirit. She went to a religious youth camp and became saved. She prayed hard to leave her unholy desires behind and God heard her and she stopped dating girls nor did she really want to. She has been engaged to a man for a year now, she is twenty. She said that being with a woman never really made her feel like a woman, because one had to take the man's role etc.

What really stood out to me is that it is so simple to be rid of lustful impulses. Just admit what you are and give it to God, he will heal you. I would like to say, I do believe that God can heal everything from gout to cancer and it is very much in his power to change a person's sexual orientation or to curb lustful impulses. That being said, lets talk about the practical implications for a young person who hears this. I bet any God believing young person who has this or similar problems has prayed for them. Asking God to change a perceived flaw in you is nothing new. I cannot count the hours I prayed as a teenager begging God to change me, to cure me from this or that affliction. Lustful thoughts were very much featured in those prayers, as was my laziness and other assorted general "badness". God did not cure me, at least not then, of one single one of my flaws. I felt like crap. I felt like a failure. I felt like a bad Christian. I prayed everyday for God to take me to heaven so I could stop constantly failing and sinning. I was tired, I was desperate. What would have Anni's message of easy, reachable fixing have meant to me? It would have meant an ever compounding sense of guilt. It would have isolated my lust for women as an even more heinous crime than my lust for men. Here I had been beating myself up for both indiscriminately.

I call this a suicide inducing flick. Say, it is wrong! It is Sinful! Älä alistu! Don't submit! It can all be made better. God is waiting for you to give your burden to Him and heal you! All that can hold you back now, sinner, is your own lack of faith! Only one you have to blame is yourself. Maybe Anni has more willpower, maybe she has more faith, maybe her prayers are special. Maybe I am failing at this like I fail at everything else because I am too damn lazy to change. Way to rip old wounds open and make me feel like that girl again.

As an end note, God did heal me, but not in the way I expected. He healed me by giving me perspective, understanding and self acceptance, flaws and all. I was good enough for him to die on Calvary for my sins when I was at my worst. Not because I was special or good but because he was and he loved me. He cleansed me when I accepted his cleansing. It does not matter that I am lustful. It does not matter that I am lazy. I am exactly as he created me. This does not mean I need to whore around and not do any work because that is not how he intended me to behave. He intends me to strive for a healthy balanced life. My flaws are really the other side of my virtues. I am lazy because I am laid back. I am content to contemplate and not worry too much about having a spotless house there are more important things in life. I am lusty, but I love my husband and it can be a very positive quality in a marriage when channeled properly and understood for what it is. Now that God has healed me from my low self esteem and depression I can no longer really care about my flaws and can really give them to God, and you know what, stopping the demonization of that part of me has allowed me to not be trapped by lustful thought. When they are no longer forbidden or wrong they take a backseat to more important and interesting thoughts. I am no longer paralyzed by fear and anxiety due to my laziness and am actually able to break the inertia and do what really matters and needs to get done.

Self-acceptance is a wonderful thing. Do not submit to thoughts of self loathing and accept that if you do seek help from God for your problems, which I do recommend, he may not give you the quick fix you want but will allow you to walk down a longer, harder path that will make you a better person and accept yourself, and in the long run that beats a quick fix.

The Holy Spirit

"Same river different parts." Is what my husband says when talking about the way his Quaker beliefs see the holy spirit and the way my Pentecostal back ground sees it. Pentecostals focus on the strong events of encountering of the holy spirit, and from what I have seen the Quakers focus more on the quiet gentle, still small voice of daily guidance the holy spirit offers. We are swimming in the gently quiet shallows of the spiritual river basking in the love of God. The Pentecostals are in the rapids in their canoes wearing crash helmets and seem to be having a whole lot of crazy fun, WOOHOO!

I like the rapids, I do. I like strong tearing up shaking encounters with the spirit, I just cannot be sustained from day to day on them. I had a few good encounters like that as a child with God, when I was saved and when I received the holy spirit a different time some years later. These were wonderful experiences of closeness with God that probably resembled, in a small way what Moses felt when he saw the Lord pass by.

The danger of these experiences is sometimes you wish to "feel the presence of God" and forget that he is always present. He never leaves, you can always feel him, talk to him and listen to him with out crying screaming and begging for that next strong hit of the holy spirit, like a heroin addict begging for credit from his dealer. Christians, at least in America, often like to compare God to drugs. There is a song by a Christian alternative group, either Skillet or Thousand Foot Crutch, I forget which that is called "Better than Drugs". This is a cute, if over played metaphor many American Christians like to use but when Christians start acting like drug addicts it is no longer cute, it is alarming. It is alarming when a Christian cannot get by with out having a "profound spiritual experience" complete with crying, gnashing of teeth, writhing on the floor, passing out and spewing nonsense. I am not saying these things are somehow not true manifestations of the baptism in the holy spirit but what I am saying is that they are darn exhausting and alarming to the uninitiated, and even those who know what is going on and often indistinguishable from a classically demon possessed person. There is so much wrong when that high is all you are chasing and attaining it is about begging and pleading with God, like you are still a sinner, to come to you. What is wrong with shutting the frack up and listening for a change?

It works for me and when I stopped chasing that high and just listened and relaxed I started to feel and appreciate the daily presence of God more and I no longer felt unworthy because I had no apparent gifts. What God taught me in the silence is that I am good enough for him to love the way I am and there is no need to worry about any special gifts, just living my life for him is good enough. If I fail to enjoy his presence today, I can still do it tomorrow. He is always there for me and more like a warm cup of tea, a blanket and a hug from a loved one than a syringe full of whatever or a noseful of cocaine. Maybe I am just getting old and just no fun spiritually.