Losing Orthodoxy
I never meant to be a heretic. Quite the opposite, in fact. I thought there was plenty of room to be creative and original within the context of broadly accepted Christian doctrine. I knew, of course, when I started writing Love's Anarchy that it would stray from the evangelical party line, but anarchy is not necessarily the same as heresy. Nevertheless, by following the peculiar logic of my writing process I ended up leaving many of the major tenets of orthodoxy abjectly in the dust. It reminds me of the time I attended a court-ordered alcohol awareness program in college: One of the couselors there told me he was being "kind" by saying I was in the "early stages" of "alcoholism." Likewise, it would now be "kind" to call me "unorthodox." I'm a heretic. I believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, but I can no longer subscribe to the doctrine of the Trinity, which is more or less the touchstone of midwestern evangelical, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox orthodoxy.
It's been said that a little knowledge is dangerous, and I have but little knowledge of the Council of Nicaea convened by the emperor Constantine, and that but recently, but that knowledge has convinced me that the Nicene Creed is a purely political document and that orthodoxy itself is ill-advised. The Arian heresy that the creed was created to counter is simply the belief that the the Son is not coeternal with the Father—that there was a time when the Father existed and the Son did not. Arius, the heresy's namesake, did believe that the Son existed before Jesus was born (in accordance with the Gospel of John, which states in the first chapter that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God… . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth" (John 1:1-2, 14 NRSV)), but he believed there was a time when God the Father existed alone, before he spoke the Word that was his Son. Many a conservative theologian will insist that belief in the coeternal nature of Jesus is absolutely crucial to a proper understanding of the Christian faith, but I say (with a hint of a British accent), "Bosh."
For one thing, such a fact is unknowable. Obviously. For another, the doctrine exists largely to defend against the charge of polytheism. God is One, say those of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, so you can't worship Jesus the Son and God the Father without worshiping a plurality of gods. Christianity answered by proclaiming the Father and Son to be of a single essence and by more-or-less inventing the identity of a third person of equal essence who proceeds from one or both of the other two-in-one. It's patently absurd. And I say that as someone who once considered it a true and beautiful mystery. I still agree that it's an elegant solution to a number of thorny problems in Scripture, but I also now believe it to be pure crap.
The Holy Spirit is God. Full stop. Not two persons with one essence, but one and the same, without distinction of any kind. The Bible states that "God is spirit" (John 4:24) and that "God is love" (1 John 4:8, 16). The Holy Spirit of God is just that: God's holy spirit. Jesus ascended into heaven in order to send us the entirety of God to be our paraclete, our helper, comforter and friend. Jesus himself is God's son, begotten by God on the day he was baptised by his cousin John. To believe anything more than that is to take John the gospel-writer a bit too literally.
"In the beginning was the Word" and "the Word became flesh." This is high-level theology, and I don't question it's truthfulness as such, but if the baby Jesus was in any sense God, no matter how emptied, the baby qua baby becomes nonsensical. How can a baby be God in any meaningful way? Was God not capable beforehand of so fully identifying with any human child that there was no aspect of being a baby with which he was not already intimately familiar? I say thee nay.
I suspect Jesus' father was not Joseph but some other human male, and while I can hope that the relationship was between two star-crossed lovers, I further suspect that it was forced. I would go so far as to assume that his father was a Roman soldier, and that the experience of being impregnated was not pleasant for young Mary. For anyone incapable of reading between the lines (and, if the comments section of various websites are any indication, there are always a few), I'm talking about rape, and when I say "not pleasant," I mean, "painful and horrifically traumatic."
I also believe that Jesus was and is the Messiah, the Chosen One, anointed by God to redeem the whole of creation. I believe that his literal resurrection is the sine qua non of humanity's escape from the fires of hell.
Are you confused? Well, so am I, a little bit, and I don't presume to believe that I am actually correct in all my beliefs, even if I honestly believe I am correct in some of them, even (or perhaps especially) the heretical ones. Call it speculation, intuition or the leading of God's Holy Spirit, but I believe that I have been given special knowledge of various facts that have remained hidden from the time of Adam. Not that I think I'm the only one to whom they've been revealed. It's just that a thing may remain hidden even after it's been found. It's highly unlikely, for instance, that enough people will read my conjectures that my discoveries will no longer be hidden even now.
The revelation started when I was going through Genesis, offering my thoughts on the various stories contained therein. When I reached the bit about Abraham's nephew Lot hiding out in a cave after the destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah, I found that I couldn't accept the idea that Lot's daughters, concerned about who would continue their father's line, decided to get him drunk in order to sleep with him. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a bald-faced, and even an obvious, lie. Lot got drunk and raped his teenaged daughters. They got pregnant at a place and time when there was no one else around to blame, so he blamed them. I trust this is not an unfamiliar story.
The fundamentalists are correct in at least one assertion: to question the absolute authority of the Bible at any one point is to call the entirety of scripture into question. If Genesis 1 is false, then so is Revelation 22. By pulling one weak thread out of Genesis, I ended up unraveling my whole Bible. Is there anyone who can help me weave it back together?
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Freddy, thanks for playing Peter's advocate. His name, you'll remember, was Simon, until Jesus redubbed him The Rock (Cephas, Petrus) and said that it was upon this Rock that he would build his church, and forthwith he gave to Peter the keys to the gates of heaven and hell, that whatever he bound on earth would be bound in heaven, and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven. This is precisely what I am lamenting in my blog post—this notion that, because I have strayed from certain doctrines of the church, the church can no longer receive me. But here's the thing: Calling Peter "The Rock" was a joke. Jesus was teasing him. The man first distinguished himself by declaring Jesus the Messiah, which Jesus credited to God speaking through Peter. Not two verses later Peter is telling Jesus that they cannot allow him to suffer and be crucified, which Jesus credited to Satan. At every turn Peter is a waffler, prone in equal parts to error and ardor. He loves Jesus more than the others do, but he is wrong over and over again. He steps out of the boat into the lake and stands for but a moment before sinking and crying out for help. He denies Jesus three times, even after being warned in advance that he would do so. When the resurrected Jesus gives him three chances to affirm his love, he does so, and each time Jesus says, "Feed/tend my sheep," but even after that, even after the sheet descended from heaven and a voice declared, "Call nothing unclean which I have made clean," he still, out of fear, sided with the circumcision faction, and Paul, who never even met Jesus in the flesh, had to confront him publicly to convince him that Gentiles didn't need to become Jews before being baptized as Christians.
This, to me, is the picture of your "pillar and foundation of truth." Jesus said only a fool builds a house on sand, where it will be washed away in the flood, but the wise build their homes upon rock to withstand every storm. And yet, what I see when I look back over the past two thousand years is evidence that Jesus chose to build his house (his church) on the shifting sands of people who (like Peter, like me) get things wrong with distressing regularity.
And yet there remains this beautiful, fragile thing called the church, found wherever two or three are gathered together in his name, whose very weakness presents the clearest picture we have of the glory of our heavenly father.
So will I accept the help you offer? No, though I sincerely appreciate your offering it. It is to the holy spirit of God that I look for help in weaving, through prayer and hard experience, the tangled, tattered story of the Bible back together.
First, by refusing the trinity you are separating yourself, as you recognize, from Christianity. But you compound that error by insisting that you are the recipient of special knowledge and personal revelation that transcends the knowledge given to man by the pillar and foundation of truth.
On the one hand, you seem to accept that some knowledge comes via revelation, but then you make the contradictory statement that the co-eternal nature of Christ is unknowable.
Claiming that truths about God are unknowable is not the position of Christianity, either. For we know that it is wholly keeping with the character of God that he should reveal himself to men. It is also the position of Christianity that truth is truth. Two plus two cannot equal three, no matter how much we desire it to be so. You are free to believe as you will, but that doesn't alter the objective reality that remains... two plus two will always be equal to four.
By asserting that the mother of Christ was raped, and that Lot raped his daughters, you are performing an act of isogesis. That is, reading into the scriptures your own prejudices. Moreover, to hold those things as true absent any evidence whatsoever is as irrational a proposition as anything you have already decided is unknowable.
You have argued that what you cannot understand must not be true, but you have not left the door open for the possibility that some things are beyond your maturity to apprehend and still others may be beyond your ability to apprehend. Are you disposed to treating all things that you do not yet understand as false?
Moreover, the fundamentalists you mention are not correct in their assertion that to believe that Genesis 1 is wrong is to believe that Revelation 22 is also wrong. Such a view is only consistent with believing more facts not in evidence, namely that the Bible is a single tome intended to be read as such. The Bible makes no claim like that and neither did the men who assembled it.
Within its own pages, it is everywhere asserted that it is a collection of various writers at various times on various subject matter. It comes to us as one volume because the pillar and foundation of truth handed it to the faithful as a useful instrument for guiding them and teaching them.
Here again, I come to the pillar and foundation, which we learn from studying Scripture is the Church itself. You are blown about by every wind of doctrine because you have not submitted yourself to the standard of that pillar and foundation and because you have not submitted yourself to the authority of those whom God would have over you.
It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
There is two thousand years of reason and faith working in concert to support the Church. You do well to abandon your pride, humble yourself in the pursuit of knowledge and see where it takes you. I advise seeking a priest to make a general confession of sin and then to approach these matters with the clarity of mind and soul required to make logic and love the cornerstone of your existence.