21 Best Episodes of The Office

Well, The Office is finally ending tonight after nine years on the air, at least two of which should probably never happened. I’ve been quietly saying goodbye ever since Steve Carell left near the end of the seventh season, but it doesn’t make the reality that there won’t be any more episodes that much easier to deal with.

As The Lord of the Rings did with movies, The Office might be the show that taught me how to appreciate television. I had a memorably insular childhood, only reading novels by Victorian writers. But then one night (one night!) during the summer of 2006, my best friends Booth and Corey invited me over to their place to watch this new show that seemed to be a documentary look at working life in the United States.

The first couple of episodes confused me because I didn’t know they were actors. But I figured it out near the end of the first season (which we finished in a single, marathon session), and begged Booth to take me back the next night so we could watch the second.

So The Office is inextricably bound up for me in those memories of being in college, of late nights and broken hearts, and those ominously quiet evenings during the snowstorm in 2007 when Booth and I stayed up in his room and watched the third season unfolding. It was through The Office that I reconnected with Betania*, who had been avoiding me for about a year and a half but was now suddenly conciliatory and eagerly joined the two of us week after week as the Stamford branch merged with the Scranton branch, Andy Bernard wreaked havoc, and Michael Scott—my television hero—made a perpetual fool of himself.

Because, let’s face it, Steve Carell’s character was the heart and soul of The Office. I suspect that in one hundred years when students in film school want to know what genius looks like, their professors will dust off old recordings of his performance on this show because he illuminated just about every single scene he was in with his warmth, instinct for characterization, and effortless hilarity. This gift for creating a fully-developed character with all the subtleties of bodily expression was already evident in the second episode (“Diversity Day”), but it wasn’t until fifteen episodes later, in “Booze Cruise,” that it became obvious we were dealing with a comical behemoth, a true artist. Michael Scott is one of the greatest creations in the history of television, and perhaps of all comedy, and if he happens to make an appearance in tonight’s finale, I might reconsider my stance on these last two years of the show.

So, in that spirit, here are my twenty-one favorite episodes of The Office.

21. “Safety Training” (Season 3)

          When Michael tries to draw the office’s attention to the dangers of work-related depression by jumping off the roof of the building onto a bouncy castle, Jim (John Krasinski) sums up the situation nicely: “He’s going to kill himself… by pretending to kill himself…”

20. “Health Care” (Season 1)

          While Michael tries to find a surprise for the office, we get our first glimpse of Jim and Pam’s relationship with Dwight. “Count Choculitis? Why did you put that, Jim? Is it because you know I love Count Chocula?”

19. “Murder” (Season 6)

          A surprisingly funny (and emotional) late-period Office, this episode centers around the relationship between Jim and Michael as the office is threatened with termination and Michael seeks to distract everyone with a murder mystery game.

18. “The Convict” (Season 3)

Not nearly as funny on repeat viewings, but the “Prison Mike” sequence is priceless.

17. “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” (Season 4)

Everyone hates on this episode, but watching it again I’m amazed at the number of now-classic moments per minute. Like many over-long Season 4 episodes, it only falls apart as it reaches the end.

 

16. “Dinner Party” (Season 4)

          The apotheosis of The Office’s darker fourth season, when it was on its way to becoming a nightmare comedy.

15. “Initiation” (Season 3)

Noteworthy if only for being the first appearance of Mose, this episode also features Michael at his zaniest. Probably The Office’s most representative episode.

14. “The Dundies” (Season 2)

Just a classic episode on all fronts, our first glimpse of the revamped Michael Scott, and the introduction of so many iconic Office elements.

13. “The Job” (Season 3, finale)

The show could have ended with this episode and it would have gone out flying.

 

          12. “Conflict Resolution” (Season 2)

All the tensions that had been swirling in the office for two seasons came bubbling over in one golden half-hour.

11. “Drug Testing” (Season 2)

“NO! You told me when we came in here that I would be conducting the interview, now exactly HOW MUCH POT DID YOU SMOKE?!” Plus: Dwight in a hat!

10. “Ben Franklin” (Season 3)

Coming in the very middle of Season 3’s streak of near-perfect episodes, this one—in which Jim, assigned with the task of finding a stripper for Phyllis’s bachelorette party, hires a Ben Franklin impersonator—is hysterical and effortless. Season 2 gets a lot of praise, but in Season 3 the whole crew was working at the top of its game.

9. “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” (Season 2)

The show had worked hard to define Michael in the first couple of seasons, but this episode – and one moment, in particular – cemented his character forever.

8. “Goodbye, Michael” (Season 7)

          The episode so honest, it felt like an actual goodbye. This is the only episode I refuse to watch again.

7. “A Benihana Christmas” (Season 3)

The merging of James Blunt’s music with Michael’s singing is so perfect, it’s hard to imagine one without the other. It remains the crowning moment in the greatest of all Office Christmases.

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v210499584HzJ3M?h1=goodbye+my+lover

6. “Booze Cruise” (Season 2)

This has three of the greatest moments in the whole show – Michael trying to compete with the captain (“Iiiiiiii’m your party captain, TOO!”); Michael dancing; and Michael’s motivational speech (“This ship is sinking! And there aren’t enough spaces on the lifeboats!”).

5. “The Merger” (Season 3)

The Office’s first long episode feels a lot shorter than it is because it’s so packed with classic moments, among them the long-awaited first encounter between Andy and Michael, “Lazy Scranton,” Andy singing, “What is love? Baby don’t hurt me,” and Michael’s failed attempt to unite the office.

4. “Goodbye, Toby” (Season 4, finale)

There aren’t enough words to express how giddy this episode makes me, what with the first appearance of Holly and Michael singing (wailing, really), “Goodbye, Toby.”

 

3. “Product Recall” (Season 3)

Probably one of the show’s most under-rated episodes, this one has two perfect story lines. In the first, Michael has to apologize to a disgruntled customer. In the second, Jim and Andy take a trip to a high school, where Andy has an awkward encounter with his girlfriend. Also, the best cold opening the show ever did. “Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica!”

2. “The Injury” (Season 2)

From beginning to end, this might be The Office’s best half-hour. Billy Merchant’s speech in the conference room is a scene-stealer and everyone delivers fantastic performances (even Ryan, who is supposed to be dead).

1.      “Traveling Salesmen / The Return” (Season 3)

A great television show, like a great work of literature, is built from the infinite possibilities occasioned by the interactions between each of its characters. Regardless of the stylistic flourishes or structural brilliance, what really makes our most memorable examples of long-form storytelling memorable is their ability to create a whole cast of beloved characters, put them in a single room together, and watch the sparks fly.

“Traveling Salesmen / The Return” aired at a point in The Office’s history when the show was beginning to experiment with the template that over two and a half seasons had established it as the smartest and most inventive show on television. In the course of this season, one of the most perfect seasons in television comedy, it also attained a degree of reflectivity that was almost Shakespearean in the way it used mirroring characteristics and situations to create dramatic tension. (The lifting of an entire subplot from Twelfth Night in “The Convict” solidified this feeling that the show had gone beyond ordinary television to become a work of literature).

Never was this more intentional than during the series’ peak in the middle of Season 3 (what Oscar Dahl has called “a historic run of consistently great episodes”), where the love triangle between Pam / Jim / Roy and Pam / Jim / Karen meets the dueling ambitions embodied by Andy and Dwight as they struggle for Michael’s affections and, by extension, mastery of the office.

“Traveling Salesmen” tests and explores the relationships between each of these characters as they leave the office in pairs for a day of sales calls. Angela unexpectedly asks Pam out for coffee, Karen bonds with Phyllis and learns some surprising news about Jim’s past, Jim and Dwight are unstoppable, and Andy sets in motion a series of schemes that are intended to bring down Dwight. By the end of the episode, Dwight has been fired and Andy is now second-in-command in Scranton, thereby setting the stage for the absolute mayhem that is his brief run as assistant to the regional manager.

It all implodes in glorious fashion in the second half of this classic two-parter, as Jim, realizing how much he misses Dwight (“Congratulations, universe: you win”) teams up with Pam to play one of his best pranks, and Michael—being steadily driven insane by the only person in the office more irritating than himself—goes in search of the truth. When he finally faces off with Andy in front of the whole office, a timely phone call from Jim pushes our beloved usurper over the deep end in The Office’s most shocking moment.

The Infinitely Gentle, Infinite Sufferer

I don’t think I even glimpsed the meaning of the cross until I read the Harry Potter books.

I first read the series in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. At the time I was only vaguely aware that the author was a Christian woman; I was just looking for an enjoyable story and trying to explain some of the mysterious things that were happening in my life. Not being able to find the answers in the usual places, I took refuge in fantasy.

Books one, two, and three were pretty good; but four and five were electrifying. I loved the progression of Harry’s character from an innocent, young orphan suddenly thrust into a strange and chaotic new world to an emotionally tormented, temperamental teenager who at the end of one novel narrowly escapes being tortured and murdered, and in the next one has to contend with the fact that the whole Wizarding world thinks he’s crazy (or a liar) and the Ministry of Magic’s increasingly sinister attempts to silence his voice.

Book five was and remains my favorite, partially because it’s the most vividly and beautifully rendered, the most like being at an actual school, but also, I confess, because it’s the one where Harry is beaten into a fine mess. His teacher tortures him, his classmates won’t speak to him, Dumbledore is ignoring him, people are dying all over, and he can’t play Quidditch. That final scene where he finally loses it and destroys the headmaster’s office was a triumph of devastation. “My only defense,” says Dumbledore, “is this: I have watched you struggling with more burdens than any student who has ever passed through this school, and I could not bring myself to add another—the greatest one of all.”

It was because of moments like this one, because of the inescapable aura of gloom that was slowly settling over the series and its young hero, that I felt drawn to Harry in his sufferings. I felt I could relate to him on a profound level, though I struggled for years to explain exactly how.

But over time I began to notice a pattern: the fourth movie was my favorite of all the movies, and the one that most powerfully and eerily depicted the traumas of being Harry. Likewise my favorite character in The Lord of the Rings was Frodo, and my favorite of the three movies was The Two Towers—that moment, in particular, where he stands on the terrace at Osgiliath and offers the ring to the Lord of the Nazgul, Sam rushing to help him, but almost too late.

Only later did I discover that this kind of character is an archetype in literature, “the Woobie,” that authors include them in stories to allow readers to experience vicarious relief from their own suffering by fantasizing about helping them, and that at least one of the world’s major religions is built around it. At this point my relationship with the Woobie was still subtle, only half-understood, and more literary than real, but once I knew what it was I began to see it in all my preferred forms of media: in the book of Job, which I read religiously, in the Bourne trilogy which serves mostly as a way of finding new and ever-more ingenious ways of tormenting Matt Damon’s character, in the song that played at the end of each movie that Betania* would always get up and dance to, “Extreme Ways” by Moby (the video at the top of this post, by the way, is exceptional):

“Extreme sounds that told me

            They helped me down every night

            I didn’t have much to say

            I didn’t give up the light

            I closed my eyes and closed myself and closed my world

            And never opened up to anything

            That could get me along

 

            “I had to close down everything

            I had to close down my mind

            Too many things could cut me

            Too much could make me blind

            I’ve seen so much in so many places

            So many heartaches, so many faces

            So many dirty things

            You couldn’t even believe…”

Or those terrible lines from T. S. Eliot:

I am moved by fancies that are curled

            Around these images and cling:

            The notion of some infinitely gentle,

            Infinitely suffering thing.

When I tried to explain my feeling to Tyler, he of course brushed it off. He said I was being melancholy, and it was a sin to be melancholy. He suggested that I was trying to turn myself into a tragic hero. Once when I accidentally filibustered a house meeting by reading the entire third chapter of Lamentations (“I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath”), he asked me to hand over my Bible and forbade me from reading it again for the rest of the summer.

I hadn’t yet gotten to the point of seeing the suffering servant in the pages of the New Testament. But I would soon endure a series of events that changed my perspective.

First, Tyler’s group became flagrantly malevolent and I found myself being scapegoated not just subtly (as I had been for about a year), but openly. Second, shortly after I left the Group and just a few months into their marriage Betania* died under mysterious circumstances and one of our friends, Micah, came forward with a bizarre story about killing her under pressure from Tyler.

Intuitively, as I struggled to process that whole experience of being in the Group and the meaning of Betania’s death, I began to sense the purpose of the cross.

What I’m about to say is controversial and unpopular in some circles, especially in churches that believe they have the right answers to every question. But I worry that we may have created a system of theology around the cross that has emptied it of all meaning.

It is widely taught in legalistic churches that the purpose of Jesus’ death was to pacify the wrath of God. You see, all human beings are depraved and deserve to spend an eternity in the searing hot fires of hell. Because God is holy, He would not be righteous unless He poured out His wrath on us in our sinfulness. However, Jesus offered Himself in our place. He was tormented by God instead of us. He bore the wrath of God in our place.

This is called “penal substitutionary atonement,” or the idea that Jesus’ death was a kind of cosmic transaction in which, having undergone the full fury of God’s wrath, He was able to make atonement for our sins so that we would never see hell. All our sins were placed onto Jesus and if we believe in Him, His righteousness will be imputed to us. This doesn’t actually make us righteous, but it makes us appear righteous so that when God looks at us, He sees us covered in the blood of Jesus and no longer wants to destroy us.

Micah once explained it to a friend of ours, Veronica,* like this. “God can’t tolerate sin,” he said, “not even a little bit. God is so pure, and we are so sinful, the only way we can even go near Him is because of Jesus. Without Jesus, God can’t even look at us.”

(“I felt a little shiver of apprehension,” Veronica* would later recall. “This wasn’t a God I had ever heard of, and I wasn’t at all sure I liked him.”)

Now, having grown up under this teaching I understand what a radical departure it can seem from the true faith when someone comes along and contests its orthodoxy. But while I believe that in some mysterious way the death of Jesus has made a way for broken humanity to be reconciled with God, while I believe that the events of the last week of His life initiated the redemption of the whole cosmos, I feel equally confident in saying that Jesus did not quench the wrath of the Father, that such an idea is nowhere to be found in the Bible, and that the practical implications of such teaching on the character of God are abusive and destructive.

For one thing, given that these doctrines are usually framed in terms of “the Father” taking out His wrath “on His only Son” (notice there are only men in this relationship!), it’s no wonder that many Protestant churches are islands of patriarchal, woman-hating, child-abusing oppression. Statistical evidence overwhelmingly points to the fact that child abuse is endemic in fundamentalist Protestantism, and this is one of the reasons: because we believe in a God who is Himself a child abuser.

But ironically, the second major problem with this “theology of wrath” is that it shields us from having to look at the cross.

When I believe that the central event of the Christian faith was a cosmic transaction “offering up a weak, poor lamb to appease an angry God,”[1] I don’t feel an obligation to think much about it. I’ve heard multiple preachers and teachers say, within the last couple of weeks, “The cross is important to us because it saved us from the wrath, we’re grateful for it, it paid for our sins, but it’s the resurrection that we need to be focused on because that’s where we become conquerors who walk in victory over sin.”

And I’m sorry, I love the resurrection as much as the next person, but given all that I’ve been through in the last couple of years, I just can’t buy this anymore.

The death of Jesus is inexpressibly important and comforting because it means that a horrible, incomprehensible event like Betania’s death hasn’t been passed over lightly by God. It means that I and her best friends and her family aren’t alone in being shocked and appalled by the brutal ways she was systematically dehumanized, alienated from anyone who might have been able to help her, shunned by the rest of her group in the weeks after her marriage, and ultimately murdered. It means that when one of us asks, “Where was God in this?” He can truthfully say He was right there beside us. It means I can place my trust in a God who “offered up prayers . . . with loud cries and tears, to Him who was able to save Him from death,”[2] a God who was terrified, a God who was beaten, a God who was dragged through the streets.

It means that God is not finally a punisher, but a sufferer. It means that I have, in the cross, the ultimate self-revelation of God’s character as one who was willing to be human, willing to die, willing to share with us in the most tortuous aspects of the human experience by being a criminal and dying a miserable, lonely death.

It means that when I read those frightening passages where God orders the slaughter of whole nations, I can recognize that they were “shadows” of what was to come, but the fullness is Christ (Col. 2:17). It means that I don’t have to view the Holocaust as entirely or primarily a punishment for the Jews’ unbelief, but as a mystical participation in the suffering of someone whose own suffering knew no limits[3].

It means my faith is in a God who “felt the worst of death’s destroying wound,” and “lay full low, grav’d in the hollow ground.”

I’ll be honest: I get worried when I hear people going on about the depravity of all unbelievers, the evils of this world, and the hope of Jesus’ soon return to annihilate the nations with a literal sword in His hand if the cross is not central to their life and teaching. Because when they paint Him in those terms He doesn’t sound anything like the Jesus who refused to take up arms against His enemies and spent His final hours bleeding to death in public view. He sounds like the opposite of that Jesus. He sounds like an anti-Jesus.

An anti-Christ.

But it wasn’t until, last night at a friend’s birthday party, I came across a copy of Jurgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God that I finally found words to express why it bothers me so much.

Moltmann was a German fighter pilot during World War II and spent the last months of the war in an Allied prison camp. After being confronted with the atrocities the Germans were inflicting on the Jews, he found himself drawn to the Christian faith—though he claimed his remorse was so great, he would rather have died than have to live and face up to what his country had done. After the war, he became prominent among a new wave of theologians who were seeking to make sense of their faith in light of the Holocaust because, as he put it, a theology that does not speak from the perspective of the afflicted and crucified no longer has anything to say to us.

Moltmann, like Luther before him, distinguishes between the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross.” This is how he explains the difference between the two:

            “‘[Luther said], ‘The theologian of glory calls the bad good and the good bad; the theologian of the cross calls things by their right name.’

“The theologian of glory, and that is the natural man, who is incurably religious, hates the cross with a passion. He seeks works and success and therefore regards the knowledge of an almighty God who is always at work as being glorious and uplifting. But the theologian of the cross, and that is the believer, comes to knowledge of himself where he knows God in his despised humanity, and calls human things by their real names . . . as they are accepted by the boundless suffering love of God.”

And after I had read that, I realized, “I think I know more Christians who are offended by the cross than unbelievers.”

Not many people are converted to the love of this person and His ways in a moment. For me it was a very gradual process. In the same way God had permitted the snake to be raised up on a pole in the wilderness for the healing of the Israelites, I moved through a long succession of fascinations with characters like Jason Bourne, Harry, and especially Frodo who always seemed to be suffering terrible things with no explanation. I couldn’t have realized, until after it was too late to do anything about it, that I knew a real person whose misfortunes would rival and come to surpass even theirs.

“God lived as fully human,” said Veronica, “even dying a cruel death the way some humans are forced to. You’d been seeing Jesus as Tyler in your life theology, but Jesus actually played the role of Betania.”

---

[1] Macbeth!

[2] Hebrews 5:7

[3] St. Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who perished in the fires of Auschwitz, had this to say: “I understood the Cross as the destiny of God’s people, which was beginning to be apparent at the time (1933). I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody’s behalf . . . Beneath the Cross I understood the destiny of God’s people.”

“The Heart, that Dark, Celestial Flower, Bursts into a Mysterious Bloom”

As difficult as these six and a half months have been since my friend’s death, life has been good to me in some surprising ways. In February, Maggie (my boss) invited me to come and work in the Editing department at IHOP with the rest of the editors. I formally joined a denomination that encourages the use of my reason and emotions. The cross began to play a central role in my life, and as it did so I moved beyond merely hating fundamentalism to understanding what Christianity is really about. I wrote one-third of a memoir and became an outspoken defender of poetry, humility, love, and the goodness of God.

I began to feel things. After Betania’s death I was extraordinarily attuned to my own emotions. I cried regularly, sometimes for no reason. And the more I began to feel things, the more I felt free to express myself.

Those who have never struggled with feeling and expressing their own emotions probably won’t understand what a dramatic change this is. Elizabeth Esther has written movingly on her blog of growing up in a cultish fundamentalist environment, of being abused on a near-daily basis. It was only when she discovered God’s maternal compassion that she realized it was safe to be who she is, and to let who she is come forth. “Where words have often destroyed and damaged my concept of God, feeling the feelings God gave me is leading me back to myself. God gave me my feelings and I’m allowed to feel them. I don’t need to repress, avoid, manipulate, deny or shame my feelings.”

Probably the hardest thing for me about being raised in an abusive home, going to a legalistic church, and ending up in a cult was the loss of my own voice. I have never felt safe expressing what I really feel in front of other people. I willfully suppress my own wants and desires and concerns and suspicions so the other person doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Last night I had a long talk with a friend about some concerns we had both had about our relationship, and I told her very forthrightly what I had been feeling and I realized we should have had this conversations weeks ago but I had been putting it off because I worried that if I confronted her about our problems it would be the end of our friendship. “I think if the other person knew what I was feeling,” I told her, “they would destroy me.”

Ironically, this willful suppression of who I am, and a near-total caving in to the other person, has been the death of more friendships than my wanton self-expression.

Slowly, very slowly in these last six months I’ve been sounding the extraordinary depths of my own emotional sensitivity and calling out what I need, what I fear, what I hate. In spite of the ugly rhetoric that sometimes imbues our Bible study, I’m finding there a place where I can air my potentially dangerous and criminal views about God without fear of reprisals. Out of those tragic events God has brought me friends who are not at a loss to express themselves. I’m rereading the novels of Charles Dickens and finding in them a model for the kind of acutely-felt and impassioned writing that I aspire to write. Because I’m tired of writing without a voice, and I’m tired of living without a voice, and I want to feel things and say things and be known and heard, and I think I could be really beautiful if I learned to stop living for others and began to feel and think and speak freely, as me. Lately, my heart is so soft; there are so many feelings; the profusion of everything is overwhelming. I just stare at it, marveling. And sometimes it aches, and even bleeds, but it’s the best kind of bleeding, I think, because I feel my own joys and griefs so keenly, and the joys and griefs of so many others.

Sometimes the Questions are More Important than the Answers

In an email exchange with a friend this morning over some harsh words that were spoken during Sunday’s Bible study, he expressed genuine concerns over the false gospel of love apparently being taught by “some” in our group.

 

He worries that some of us have embraced an “ecumenical position that all religions are right and lead to the same God and that all people will eventually be saved and God would never send anyone to hell because God is love and he just loves everyone and love will assure that no one goes to hell. This is as far off base and unbiblical a position as anyone could take.”

 

While acknowledging that the emphasis of some others on God’s wrath and destruction is worrisome, he adds, “God does love all people, but, not all people who God loves will repent of their sins and turn to God. Many will be cast into the lake that burns with fire that will never go out.”

 

I’m glad that we had this discussion because I didn’t realize that some of my recent musings on kindness and compassion were being misunderstood in this way, and I can see why as a pastor he would be troubled by the things I’ve said.

 

But it got me to thinking…

 

I think a lot about heaven and hell. And while I don’t think I’ve found all the answers to my questions, after ten or twelve years of sometimes agonizing searching I think I have a decent understanding of what happens after death, of who goes there and who doesn’t, of what it means to be saved and how that happens.

 

But I’m not here to talk about that at the moment. All good answers begin with a willingness to ask hard questions. And—setting aside, for the moment, my conversation with my friend—I worry that too often in our churches we simply accept the answers that have been given to us as though they were scriptural, without ever pausing to question how we feel about what’s being spoken, whether it agrees with our reason, our emotions, and our conscience. Some of us grew up being told it was wrong to engage our hearts and our minds when we read the Scriptures, because it could lead to believing in the wrong answers, and there was nothing that God hated more, nothing that could be more perilous to our souls in an ultimate sense than to believe the wrong answers.

 

And I think some of us have a view of God as a universal dictator who’s coming to establish a global theocracy, whose truths are not open for discussion, who would not permit us to dissent if He was being murderous or authoritarian because whatever He does is somehow good even if it contradicts all that we know about goodness. A God who permits only one style of worship, only one kind of novel, only one kind of music. A God who has no respect for the differences between peoples and cultures and customs.

 

I remember after an especially nasty dispute with Tyler in October 2010, I told him, “I just think we have different ways of looking at God.”

 

And one of the girls said to me, “Boze, in the end there can only be one way.”

 

But I believe in a God who is comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, I believe in a Bible that is filled with multiple perspectives, many of them contradictory—compare the book of Psalms with the book of Job if you want a very clear example—and I believe that the God who created people with the ability to think critically and feel deeply is exalted when they challenge what folks say about Him.

 

And so I’m going to start raising some of these questions, not because I’m trying to lead people into a fiery pit of darkness but because I respect God enough to believe that He’s not a tyrant handing down a uniform set of truths that have to be received and obeyed without question, but a splendid, multifaceted being not unlike us who by His life and death embodied mysteries that are beyond comprehension. A God who created us with a capacity for mystery, symbolism, poetry. A God of the hard things. A God whose heart is deep beyond all knowing.

 

The human heart is so full, so complex. As is life, which Ralph Wood (in his book on Chesterton) beautifully describes as “a paradoxical and multifold affair of deeply layered levels of meaning, from the strictly literal to the profoundly spiritual.” But our modern way of looking at things reduces life to its shallowest layer of meaning. But when I think about the cross, when I drink from the grail during mass, when I read the book of Job or the tales of King Arthur, I know there’s something more, something deeper.

 

And I may not have it yet, but I’m going to. Because I want it. Because I’m hungry. And because God will not always deny Himself to the one who is hungry.

“He was Led like a Lamb to the Slaughter”

“He was oppressed and He was afflicted,

Yet He opened not His mouth;

He was led as a lamb to the slaughter,

And as a sheep before its shearers is silent,

So He opened not His mouth.
“He was taken from prison and from judgment,

And who will declare His generation?

For He was cut off from the land of the living;

For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

“And they made His grave with the wicked -

But with the rich at His death,

Because He had done no violence,

Nor was any deceit found in His mouth.”

*    *    *

Yesterday during Bible study, Rich talked about the passage in Matthew 16 about “taking up one’s cross.” He said, “We need to forsake the life of worldly pleasures. Being satisfied with the world and the pleasures of the world. If a soul does not permit himself to suffer now, he will suffer later. If a person refuses to deny the pleasure of his own soul, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The Son of Man is coming in the glory of His angels. Some will reign with Him. Some will not.”

I didn’t entirely see how he was getting all this out of that passage, so I drew our attention back to the story a few verses earlier where Peter rebukes Jesus for saying He has to die. “Get behind Me, Satan,” He tells him. “For your mind is not set on divine things, but on human things.”

“Peter was upset with Jesus,” I said, “because he wanted Jesus to ride into Jerusalem as a conqueror and destroy Israel’s enemies. He wanted to see Him brandishing a sword in His hand, and Jesus said to him, ‘That’s not who I am.’ And I think sometimes it’s so easy to get confused about the real nature of Jesus, and what He’s telling Peter, what He’s telling us, is, ‘Look at the cross. That’s who I am.’ He’s up there, nailed to a cross, bleeding to death, barely able to breathe and in His deepest agony He cries out, ‘Forgive them!’ He was helpless, defenseless. He didn’t lift His hand to strike a single person. He didn’t slay His enemies, He blessed them as they took His life.”

There was a brief silence after I said this, and then Josh said, “But He’s GOING to, when He comes again!”

“Josh,” I said, “your mind is not set on divine things, but on human things.”

“But the Bible says He’s going to trample them like grapes! I just picture them being squished!”

“Of course you do!” I replied. “Don’t you love that? And you’re making the exact same mistake that Peter made in this passage. We need to read the whole Bible through the lens of the cross. The cross is God’s ultimate self-revelation.”

“But what does Revelation 1:1 say?” said Josh. “The REVELATION of Jesus Christ!”

I nodded. “And it needs to be read through the cross.”

“But that’s what it says,” said Rich, intervening. “Jesus is going to march through the land. His garments will be stained red, why? Because of the people He’s killed.”

“That’s a highly symbolic passage,” I said coldly.

“Yeah,” said Rich. “It symbolizes what He’s going to do!”

Then Josh read a passage from Isaiah 30, and then I read the story of the crucifixion in John 19, and then Josh read Isaiah 63 as Chay dozed on the couch. “Josh,” I told him finally, “it’s so hard to be mad at you. Every time I try to argue, you’re such a nice guy, I can’t do it. And I think if Jesus actually came down and started killing people with His bare hands, you would be horrified, because you’re a good person.”

Who is Jesus to you? Do we diminish His character by seeing Him through the lens of the Gospels? Is He a warrior king, or a prince of peace?

“But at Least it’s a Christian Cult…” Part 2

  I spent yesterday afternoon reading Schoeman’s book, Salvation is from the Jews. Chapter 6, “Ideological Foundations of Nazism,” shows the horrible, step-by-step progression through which Hitler led Germany (the most civilized nation in Europe) into the depths of Satanism. All in the name of Jesus.

Step 1: The Subversion of Christianity from Within

Central to Hitler’s movement was his ability to convince the Christians of Germany that Nazism was God’s chosen vessel for the salvation of the people of Europe. The Nazis borrowed the concept of the Jews as a “chosen race” and replaced them with the Aryan race. Jesus was still worshiped, but increasingly Hitler was seen as Christ incarnate. When a Nazi journal asked readers what Hitler meant to them, these were some typical responses:

            “The Fuhrer is the visible personal expression of what in our youth was represented as God.”

“I have never felt the Divine Power as near as in the greatness of our Fuhrer.”

“[The Fuhrer] is the bread of which the soul stands in need. I would like to say openly that the high teaching of the Fuhrer is to me a religion, the German religion!”

What I find significant here is that while at the highest levels the leadership of Nazi Germany was deliberately reintroducing ancient pagan ceremonies, the people on the streets by and large were unaware of the changes taking place in their midst. There was no distinction between their Nazi ideology and the Christian faith. Being a good Christian, for them, meant being a good Nazi.

In our group, Tyler was seen as the ultimate manifestation of God’s voice. Allen Hood, the president of IHOP University, says that when he went over to one of the houses after Betania’s death (but before the leadership realized that they were a cult), eighteen people all told him separately, one after the other, “Tyler just hears God better than the rest of us.” To challenge Tyler’s authority was to challenge God. We all thought we were worshiping Jesus. And at first, I think we were. But over time, subtly, gradually, our allegiances began shifting. When we gathered in the living room, when we went to the prayer room, it wasn’t Jesus we were singing about; it wasn’t Jesus we were celebrating. It was Tyler.

Step 2: Magic

          It’s no secret that the heart and soul of the Nazi religion was magic. Schoener writes, “Throughout it was imbued with a fanatical sense of national / racial superiority, and permeated with a revival of romanticized Teutonic paganism, replete with the revival of ‘ancient’ gods, rites, rituals, and symbols, including the swastika, and imbued with an active occultism coming from Eastern religions via Theosophy.”

I don’t think most of the folks in our group would have described what we were doing as magic. But that’s not so much an indication of the innocence of our doings as it is in Tyler’s ability (conscious or not) to veil occultic practices beneath the mask of prayer and worship. When the prayer group started he confessed to us that he had willfully practiced magic in junior high, and that there were still moments when he found himself using some mysterious power to control others in ways that were unexplainable. In the years I was with him, things were constantly happening that I had to shrug away as being “the work of the Holy Spirit” for the sake of my own sanity. He would raise his voice and say, “Jesus!” and the neighbor’s music would immediately stop playing. He would tell the birds to fly away and they would fly away. He knew things about us that no one had told him. He knew our secrets. Sometimes I felt like he could see inside my mind. He would place curses on my appliances so they wouldn’t work.

And over time it became clear that what we were doing when we gathered to pray together wasn’t really prayer. It was magic. That was probably my biggest realization on the night when I overheard them praying against me, calling on God to punish me because of the demons I was supposedly sending against them. It happened so gradually, but so inexorably it’s hard to believe it wasn’t intended from the beginning.

Step 3: Sexual Degeneracy

This is so horrible I don’t want to get into it much, but a huge aspect of Satan’s degradation of Germany was its calculated descent into sexual deviancy—specifically, older men initiating younger men into coercive homosexual relationships. The leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, “was arrested by the police for perverse sexual practices and liberated on the intervention of Hitler, who soon afterward made him leader of the Hitler Youth” (Samuel Igra, Germany’s National Vice, 1945). Schoener notes, “In 1934, the Gestapo reported over forty cases of pederasty in a single troop of the Hitler Youth . . . the Storm Troopers fared no better.”

I suspected that Tyler was pursuing intimate relationships with guys in the house, but none of us knew the full extent of it until the Group was broken up. He was in a sexual relationship with everyone in the house with the exception of his own wife [and one visitor, whom he had been subtly grooming]; and the other guys—only one of whom was actually gay—were in sexual relationships with each other. It was a skillfully orchestrated system of debauchery that shattered the wills of the boys under his care and completely crushed their spirits.

So much for heaven on earth.

*           *           *

One more memory:

It’s the summer of 2011. I’ve just returned to the Group after being shunned for eight months. (During those eight months I was still living in the house, but had no contact with anyone in it). In the four days since my return, we’ve had one “end-times training” meeting and Tyler has mandated that I can no longer read or write.

I’m standing in Tim’s bathroom on the morning after that eventful meeting, brushing my teeth, when the thought finally occurs to me: We’re actually becoming a cult.

It’s the first time I’ve ever allowed myself to voice that thought. In the past, Tyler (who knew I had read books about cults and the dynamics that shape them) had placed such a stigma on the word cult that I was afraid even to think it. But now, after eight months of shunning, I can no longer bring myself to care too much what Tyler thinks.

I hesitated, wondering at the line I had just crossed. Is it true? Is that really what we’ve come to?

 

            I thought about the prayer meetings and the worship meetings and the way Tyler had attacked Hannah* when she dissented from what the Group heard during prayer on the previous night. I thought about the evacuation drills. I thought about the weird spirit of communal self-love that I saw seeping over my friends during dinner and in the room where we gathered to hang out afterwards.

By definition, I reasoned, it’s hard to deny that we’re acting very cultish. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Why do cults have such a bad name? It could be a lot worse. At least we’re a Christian cult.

What worries me is that I know I’m not the only person who’s ever said this to himself in a moment of clarity. It can be so easy to rationalize the reality with which we’re presented; and the temptation to justify the deeds of those close to us, or those over us—especially in a high-pressure religious environment—can be irresistible.

 

          Jean-Marie Lustiger was born and raised Jewish under the Nazi occupation, and later become Archbishop of Paris. Commenting on the depravities of Nazism, he has said:

            I mention in passing that Nazism perverted the notion of a chosen people in order to create a diabolical messianism of their own. It was not subjected to God, but on the contrary looked to the coming of the Superman and thus to the annihilation of the rest of humanity. Nazism identified “election” with domination and unconscionable privilege.

This is dense, Catholic language, but essentially what Lustiger is doing is identifying Nazism with three characteristics:

(1)    The concept of a chosen people, an elite group of apostles living at the end of history

(2)    The coming of a savior who will vindicate the elite group in its own specialness while annihilating the rest of the human race

(3)    The chosen ones are not called to suffering and the laying down of their own lives but to the violent subjugation and domination of all other peoples. The message of the cross is inverted, weakness is insulted, and Might is Right.

Towards the end of my time in the house, while I was looking for a new place to live, I watched both versions of the classic sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In these movies, the main character and his girlfriend discover that giant seed pods from outer space are falling all over their town. Folks are behaving strangely; they’re all thinking and acting alike. Turns out, the pods are replacing their old personalities with a hive mind, and the horrible revelation near the end of the movie is that these pods are now being exported all over the country.

What happened in Tyler’s group for five years was disturbing, and it should never have happened, and one of the reasons my friend is gone is because the rest of us were unable to see how drastically our own faith was being subverted in the name of Jesus. But Tyler’s group is not the only group in which this is happening, and the kind of religion he practiced is growing, and will continue to grow as long as good, Christian people can’t tell the difference between the true Christian faith and its satanic perversions.

“But at Least it’s a Christian Cult…” Part 1

On the afternoon of August 1, 2009, I moved to Grandview, Missouri. Improbably, almost miraculously, Tyler Deaton had found us a house on the very day God had promised. The phone call that ultimately saved us had come when we were loading up the moving van on the morning of the day we left for Dallas. It was his cousin’s girlfriend: she wanted us to know there was a family of renters in Grandview who were very interested in renting us their house.

“I can’t believe this,” Tyler had said. “What would we have done, Boze? What would we have done when we got there and we had no place to stay?”

“I told you it would all be taken care of,” I told him. “You should have had more faith.”

Still, troubles abounded. When Betania* (who was already living in south Kansas City) went over to see the new house, she had a terrible feeling about it. I got into an argument with Tyler as we were leaving her parents’ house in Dallas—where he had just asked for, and received, Betania’s hand in marriage—because I had spent five minutes too long getting ready; then got into another argument immediately after when I suggested that perhaps he wasn’t as cured of his homosexuality as he thought he was. Then, when we finally arrived, we spent the entire afternoon arguing about which rooms we were going to live in. I wanted to live in the downstairs basement, and Tyler thought that was a terrible idea.

“Boze,” he said, “it’s dark down here, this room is way too big for you, and you already have a propensity to isolate yourself. If you had this room, you would just hide in here all the time. Upstairs there are three bedrooms right next to each other and you wouldn’t be able to hide in them like you would in here.”

Tyler was so adamant about me not having the room I wanted that eventually (after we had been arguing for about an hour) his cousin Tim accused him of wanting the room for himself. At this point I stood up for Tyler and told him I knew he had my best interests at heart.

And in a way, that was true. Tyler wasn’t just thinking of me; he was thinking of everyone. “I think I might turn this into my ministry room,” he told April* and Betania*. “God has already told me that I’m not supposed to have a normal job because I’m going to be so busy ministering. And when I start counseling people, this won’t just be a bedroom; it’ll be like my own private office.”

And there was one final consideration: I would never be willing to share a room with any of the other guys in the house. But when Peter* moved in at the end of the semester, Tyler was already planning on sharing a room with him.

“Tyler, I can’t explain it,” I told him, beginning to sound like Bethany, “I just really like this room. It’s not because I’m an introvert, or an artist, or trying to hide from everyone. I just… I have a really good feeling about it. I really want to live here.”

“Boze,” said Tyler, “‘the man who isolates himself seeks his own agenda.’”[1]

*           *           *

Now, of course, Betania* is gone, the Group is dispersed, Tyler is back in Texas, and the house in which I spent three and a half years of my life is all over the local news. Thinking back over the events of that long-ago August, it seems disturbingly clear that Tyler already had an agenda in place on the day we moved in, and that, however much he insisted he was fully cured of his “idolatrous homosexual attractions,” the real reason he wanted the room, and the real reason he fought with me over it, hour after hour, until finally I realized I was being selfish and let him have it, was because of those terrible things he would soon be practicing in secret.

That’s not to say he was entirely conscious of his own intentions. He may not have been. That evil thing inside of him, that controlled all of us, controlled him even more.

I’ve written before on this blog about the dangers of misunderstanding people like Tyler—of turning them into a caricature of evil. It seems to happen every time some deceiver emerges to lead a whole group of people into satanic debauchery, and it doesn’t matter how extraordinary the crimes they committed—whether David Koresh, or Jim Jones, or Tyler, or Hitler—we reduce them to spectacles of such outlandish villainy that folks see them and think, “No one in their right mind would ever follow that person.” It can be comforting to pretend that our own sons and daughters would never be led astray when the Piper came calling.

During this past week Father Dwight Longenecker has written a series of posts on his blog about how to recognize a dangerous movement. In the first, “Cults and Common Sense,” he goes through the standard list of cult characteristics; but in the second, “Real Religion and Nazi Zombies,” he does something even more daring: he draws a decisive line between religious movements that are healthy and those you absolutely need to stay away from.

Inspired by one of Pope Francis’s recent invectives, Father Longenecker wants us to know that the most dangerous things in the world are ideologies. It’s not without reason that the Eastern Orthodox Church considers ideologies to be demonic manifestations, capable of whipping whole groups of people into mass hysteria.

He writes:

            The People of the Lie are those types of people who are basically and fundamentally self righteous. They believe in their cause. They believe in their religion. They believe in their ideology 100%. That’s okay. The sickness comes in when they see their group, their belief and code of behavior as a way to change the world (or create a utopia) not as a way to change themselves. At that point the focus shifts away from themselves to others. They’re okay. Others become the problem. Others need to fall into line. Other people need to get with the program. Other people need to conform. Other people need to help create the perfect world the ideologues envision.

It gets worse. The ideologue soon attracts other people who share his vision. They form a group, and that group is the elite. You are either in or out. If you are out you are considered as the enemy. Having enemies is the best way to bolster the group’s coherence. Having an enemy bolsters the ideologue’s self righteousness. Having an enemy helps build fear in the group and loyalty to the leader. Using the image of the righteous crusade bolsters the ideologue and his group so they launch themselves and their self righteous campaign to change the world.

The mentality of the ideologue is also the mentality of the cult leader.

That’s exactly what happened. Even at Southwestern there was all this division between us and the rest of the Christians on campus because we were the great ones, the heroes, who were going to change the world.

Tyler said God was calling him to “rebuild the apostolic community.” What this meant, essentially, was that we were going to model what a Christian community should look like for the rest of the Body of Christ. Christians in America didn’t know how to date rightly, so we were going to show them. He was using our marriage-prophecies as a witness to the rest of the world of what love really looks like. As we moved into the last days, young couples were absolutely going to need the prophetic assurance that their marriages had the blessing of heaven. Few people, even at IHOPKC, were willing to countenance this way of thinking—but that, after all, was what made us special.

As it happens, Tyler and his group were not only ideologues but millenarians. Sociology, history, and Church teaching all agree that millenarianism is the single most dangerous of all ideologies. (The Catholic Church has taken the unprecedented measure of declaring it “the Antichrist’s deception”). Nazism was a millenarian movement. So was Soviet communism. So was the Peoples Temple, a Pentecostal religious sect originating in Indiana led by the charismatic evangelist Jim Jones. And so were we.

Put simply, millenarianism is the belief that a special, select group of people (1) is going to initiate a cataclysmic event (2) that will ultimately lead to heaven on earth (3). These people have been specially chosen (1) to lead a revolution (2) that will overturn the existing order. And out of the ashes of the apocalypse, utopia will spring forth (3).

But the funny thing about millenniums is that they have a way of not happening. The Nazis believed they were inaugurating the 1,000-year messianic era prophesied in the book of Revelation; what they got instead, in the words of Roy Schoeman, “was an almost pure outpouring of hell’s hatred.”

Tyler considered himself a last day’s apostle, someone who was going to be a “pillar of the church” in the final generation, whose preaching would lead to the salvation of the leaders of the Israeli government. But just a few years later his movement is in ruins and one of my best friends is dead. And I have to ask myself, as I have almost every single day since I first heard the news, what was the point of that, and what did he think he was doing when he called us away from our jobs, and our families, and our callings, and moved us a thousand miles from home to this strange place?

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[1] Proverbs 18:1