Restorationism: Why We Can Never Return to the Book of Acts

This afternoon in my blog-scouting I ran across the website of a priest named Fr. Longenecker: he was raised as a fundamentalist Baptist, ordained as an Anglican priest, and converted to Catholicism (while still being married!) when Benedict made his generous offer of amnesty a few years back.

He’s written a series of posts on the roots of the Restorationist movement—the extremely persuasive (and pervasive) idea that we just need to forget the last 2,000 years of Christian history and “go back to the church of the apostles.” In the first one, he wonders who has the authority to tell the snake handlers they shouldn’t be handling snakes? “Who is to say that the snake handlers are wrong and shouldn’t pass rattlesnakes around on a Sunday morning? For that matter, who is to say that the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses are wrong for having extra scriptures that are dictated by angels or prophets or that the Episcopalians are wrong for having gay marriage or that Baptists are wrong for believing in [all] that weird Dispensationalist rapture stuff, or that Presbyterians are wrong for believing in Calvinism or the Fundamentalists are wrong for believing that the world was created on Tuesday morning, March 22, 4006 BC at 11:37am.”

In the second post, he examines the flowering of Restorationism in the history of American religion, and its culmination in the Dispensationalist movement. This post provides some necessary context for the seductive milieu of utopian apocalypticism which is always threatening to overrun Christianity in America:

            What many people consider to be “mainstream” American Christianity is actually a hodge potch of heretical, sectarian beliefs–a weird mixture of conspiracy theories, arcane revelations . . . visions of angels, predictions of doomsday and all gathered up with bizarre and unique theories and theologies and moral teachings. You’ll find rejection of modern technology, acceptance of polygamy, weird theories about the Holy Trinity or the Incarnation tumbled together with prophecies about the end times, American exceptionalism and paranoid ideas about foreigners, other religions and all outsiders.

What is most troubling about this motley crew is that they are actually the face of American Christianity. They do seem to be the “mainstream”. Within world Christianity they are a crazy [minority]. In terms of the numbers of Christians in the world today–not to mention the billions who have lived and followed Christ for the last two thousand years–they are a wild eyed bunch of heretical nut cases. Yet they (and not the Catholics or the liberal mainstream Protestants) represent “American Christianity.”

The third post examines in some detail the historical and psychological and sociological underpinnings of Restorationism. Fr. Longenecker takes pains to point out that what we call “the Restorationist movement” is really thousands of different movements, all of which seem to think that they—and no other movement!—have returned to the original vision of the founders. He traces the history of these movements from the second-century Montanists (who emphasized the work of the Holy Spirit and prophecy, but rejected the organized church) through the restoration movements of the late Middle Ages, and the Reformation, all the way down to the charismatic and community movements of the present-day church in America.

Along the way, he lists what he considers ten problems with the Restorationist movement and its underlying theological assumption, primitivism (“the belief that some earlier, simpler and more basic civilization is better than the present one”). Some of his arguments are more convincing than others. In spite of the fact that these movements are normally just reactions against the age in which they begin, they tend to build upon all the previous Restorationist movements to the point where today virtually all congregations, movements, and churches that claim to be returning to the book of Acts are actually “returning to the book of Acts” as defined and understood by 500 years of anti-establishmentarianism. “For all their rejection of tradition, it seems the restorationists follow their own well-established traditions.” In my opinion, though, his best argument is also his most basic: “Why should it necessarily be a good thing to re-create the primitive church at all?  We live in the twenty first century, not the first. Any attempt at recovery can never be anything more than an artificial reproduction.”

This is all really helpful. But I would have liked it if he had written a bit more about the interplay of Restorationism and Apocalypticism. Robin Cook, the famous novelist, wrote a pretty terrifying article in Foreign Policy a few years back about what would happen if avian flu and swine flu somehow intermixed and made a deadly super-virus. It seems to me that Restorationism is one mighty strand within the long tradition of Christian utopian movements, and Apocalypticism is another. But only on very rare occasions have the two movements converged, and I think if it ever happens again, the consequences would be pretty historic. Traditional (non-apocalyptic) Restorationists are unable to answer the question, “Why are you so special? What makes you think that you’re restoring the original church, when in 2,000 years no one has been able to do that?” Millennarians—people who believe that the end of the world is indisputably upon us—have a ready-made answer: “Because we have been called by God to lead the Church into the last days. We have been chosen from before eternity for such a time as this. We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

The Trouble with Marriage-Prophecies

On the blog forum “Open Salon,” Sharon Kay tells a heartbreaking story of having her husband chosen for her by the elders of a religious community:

Several couples had been betrothed and Uncle Dave didn’t show any signs of calling it a night. One girl was speaking in tongues and seemed to be getting a message to herself. According to her [prophecy], she should not be afraid [to] marry a brother to whom she didn’t appear to be attracted. Some couples had been waiting for this chance but everything, including who you married and when, was tightly controlled by the leadership.

The thought that it might happen to me had not entered my mind that night, so, when I felt someone from behind touch my arm and say, “Stand up”, I did. Turning to see what the person wanted I saw one of the brothers with a big triumphant grin on his face looking at me.

They all started to laugh. Uncle Dave said, “Well, she didn’t have to stand up.”

The horror started to set in. He wanted to marry me and this was my proposal, “stand up”. Under the best of circumstances this would have been considered crude but the worst of circumstances was that this guy gave me the creeps. We were supposed to love all of our brothers and sisters-in-the-Lord so I couldn’t say I hated him or even disliked him.

I immediately sat down and tried to act like it hadn’t happened. When we finally took a break, Karen, Uncle Dave’s “secretary”, came over to me and whispered, “We believe it’s the Lord’s Will.”

At this time I had been in the group long enough to become so indoctrinated/brainwashed that I believed God spoke to the leaders and particularly Uncle Dave on my behalf. To be in His will I should do what they said.

I cried. A lot.

I was counseled by the elders. I was too proud. Why did I think I was too good to marry Ed[?]

I would reason to myself that it wasn’t my pride, it was just that I didn’t love him. But how could I say I didn’t love him when he was one of the brothers?

Marriage-prophecies. Among people who believe that God speaks to us in supernatural ways, they are becoming an increasingly popular way to determine His will with respect to a marital partner. But are they safe, or healthy?

Grace! Grace! Grace and Love for Everyone!!!

          “And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

—                 Luke 14:25-26

 

 

 

 

People have been debating the meaning of these words of Jesus ever since the moment they were first uttered. Kierkegaard even wrote a book that used them as its basis, Fear and Trembling. They belong to that collection of sayings known as “hard sayings” which Luke was so intentional about highlighting in his gospel.

        

Many people, with some justification, have read this statement through the years and taken it to mean, “Jesus demands a loyalty that supersedes loyalty to family.” “The blood of the cross runs thicker than the blood of the earth.” There’s truth in that statement. Those who try and read the Gospels without bias are normally confounded by the cultural agenda of “family values” Evangelicals, who see in the teachings and ethic of Jesus a platform for twenty-first century American family values, because Jesus just wasn’t a “family values” kind of Guy: He encouraged celibacy among His closest disciples and declared that it was they, the people who did the will of His Father, who were truly His mother and sister and brothers.

But this statement goes deeper than that. It goes deeper than merely saying, “Forsake your father and mother to the extent that they keep you from Jesus,” although that’s a great truth, a profound truth. In this passage Jesus, in His beautifully subversive and iconoclastic way, is actually cutting to the heart of two instinctual human tendencies: (1) the tribal tendency, whereby we elevate our “tribe,” our clan, to an irreproachable realm; and (2) the individual propensity to self-righteousness, where we easily see sin in other people, but mysteriously overlook it in ourselves.

Let’s start with the first one.

“Against the Protestant Gnostics”

I think this is a year where I’m called to develop my fantasy story beyond where it went in my last year of college (when I stopped for a long time to reconnect with reality). Ironically, when I started creating this fictional universe, I was unashamedly Gnostic; now, five years later, Gnosticism is the very thing that I’m writing against. I’m talking about the whole horrible, human-hating, body-hating, reality-hating, relationship-hating, pleasure-hating ideology of despair and alienation which has reasserted itself in different disguises throughout my life, first in the form of Calvinism and then later on (when I gave up religion altogether for a season in college) in the form of Jungian psychology.

In one of my last entries I wrote about how I’m considering making my villains essentially Calvinists because for me Calvinism has been the great villain, just Gnosticism under a different name with a Christian veneer. Now I’m reading a book, Against the Protestant Gnostics by Philip J. Lee, which makes the connection explicit. Lee’s contention (and he is himself a Protestant) is that Gnosticism has taken over the American church by hijacking the Calvinist faith of our Puritan forebears. Calvinism in Europe was apparently a God-honoring, life-affirming theology, but Calvinism in America somehow became distorted into terrible forms. American Protestants, while professing to hate Gnosticism (when it comes, for example, in the form of Jungian mysticism), are actually unknowingly its foremost practitioners.

Here are a few select passages, to give you an idea:

So Long Ago the Garden, Part 6: Fully God, Fully Man

One small passage can yield a multitude of readings.

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote an essay entitled, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Many people cite the publication of this dense, four-page story as the birth of the postmodern era. Although like many of Borges’ essays a work of pure fiction, it is a “true story” in the best sense of the word.

It is the story of a man, Pierre Menard, who dreamt up the idea of rewriting the novel Don Quixote, word for word and line for line, exactly as it had been written. Not wanting to be daunted by the scale of the task, he began with chapters nine and thirty-eight of the first volume. Yet, even then, the challenges that faced him were formidable. Writes Borges: “He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue. He multiplied draft upon draft, revised tenaciously, and tore up thousands of manuscript pages.”

The eventual result? Don Quixote, by Pierre Menard.

In irony, in depth, in richness of intention, this new work far outshone the original on which it was based. Borges cites a passage from Book I, Chapter 9 in Cervantes:

 

            . . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor…

 

before dismissing it as a mere rhetorical flourish, an antiquated relic of the vapid and flowery prose of the seventeenth century. Menard’s superiority is evident in every word of his reworking:

 

            . . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

 

Where the original suffers from stilted ornamentation, Menard’s novel excels with its philosophical ingenuity. “History, the mother of truth,” notes Borges: “the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin.”

Fundamentalism offers us a particular reading of the Bible. According to the fundamentalists, of course, it is the only reading. It is a reading that is colored—as in the case of the two Quixotes—by the literalist understanding of where the Bible came from and how it developed. It is a story that we fundies tell one another about God and the authority of Scripture, a story we give the term “verbal inspiration,” though the story makes it clear that we really mean “verbal dictation.”

According to this story, there were sixty-six moments in history when an incredible thing happened. A certain man was tending his sheep, or cooking a meal, or praying in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, when he heard a voice from heaven. This voice spontaneously uttered what we now call Jeremiah: Jeremiah 1, Jeremiah 2, Jeremiah 3… or, Luke 1, Luke 2, Luke 3… or Jonah… or John… or Acts…

Please understand that I’m not exaggerating the rigidity of the fundamentalist position. It is widely believed and contended in the more conservative circles of Christianity that the entire Bible was imposed on the world by an alien voice from on high. The author of the book, Most Christians Don’t Know (What Every Christian Should Know) actually makes the claim that Amos was herding his flocks when he heard a voice like thunder saying, “The words of Amos, who was of the herdsmen of Tekoa…”

I understand what they’re trying to do: they’re trying to protect the integrity of Scripture. Unfortunately, in doing so, they have destroyed the dignity of being human. Sometimes the effect is hilarious, as in the case of Amos; sometimes it can be spiritually and emotionally dangerous.

Put on your “verbal dictation” lenses and read the following passage from Psalm 25:

 

            ^[16] Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me,

for I am desolate, lonely, and afflicted.

^[17] The troubles of my heart are enlarged;

Bring me out of my distresses!

^[18-19] Look on my affliction and my pain,

and forgive all my sins.

Consider my enemies: for they are many,

and they hate me with cruel hatred. . .

^[20] Take my soul into Your keeping, and deliver me;

Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in You.

^[21] Let integrity and uprightness preserve me,

for I wait for You.

 

If you have grown up in a church whose foundational paradigm was the verbal dictation of Scripture, it is not hard to imagine David scrambling for parchment as the divine voice breaks in to give infallible language to the troubled thoughts of his heart. The ultimate effect, if you read enough of the Bible, is of being at a party where one person insists on doing all the talking, and who, when you try to express your frustrations with his endless monologuing, snaps his fingers cheerfully and says, “I know precisely how you feel…” before launching into an extended meditation on precisely how you feel.

David was anxious. David was filled with affliction and pain. God, of course, could not trust David to express those emotions on his own, so He expressed them instead—in the process taking care to include some Timeless, Universal Truths so the whole psalm could be edifying and uplifting and wholesome and bloodless, and the Tuesday night “Tea for Me and Tea for Thee” Bible study could talk about what a wonderful God God is—”Isn’t God good?” “Yes, quite good”—without having to engage those obnoxious, unhappy emotions.

The ultimate effect is peculiarly religious in the old-fashioned, scribes-and-Pharisees sense of the word. For the heart of the message of lunatic doctrines like verbal dictation is that people are evil and not to be trusted; the thoughts of their hearts are corrupt and their emotions altogether vile and the only Being true enough and pure enough to play any role in authoring the Bible is God Himself.

This goes beyond mere heresy. What it is, when you get right down to it, is idolatry. Idolatry of the Bible.

And, like all idolatry, it ultimately kills the very spirit of the thing to which it gives its misplaced adoration.

Do you want to read a dry book? Do you want to read a dull book? Read the verbally-dictated Bible. It allows no dissension. It allows no disagreement. It is a heaven-sent, 2,000-page collection of inarguable truths. People who read the Bible with the frame of mind that it was wholly verbally inspired, eventually stop reading the Bible.

Though it can be hard to see when our lenses have blinded us, the Bible is the record of a conversation between man and God—a conversation which occasionally threatens to become a knock-down argument. There are passages in the Scriptures which if quoted without explanation in a church today would threaten to endanger the membership of the one reading. The author of Ecclesiastes believed death to be the end of all men: there is not one line, not a word about life after death in the entire book. Amos makes the shocking claim that God led the Philistines out of Crete just as He led the Hebrews out of Egypt (Amos 9:7)—an offensive suggestion even today for some on the hard right! Jeremiah protests that he has been “deceived” and “prevailed” upon by God (Jeremiah 20:7; the actual Hebrew is stronger, suggesting rape). There is a mesmerizing passage in Psalm 89 where the psalmist, after recounting God’s covenant with David—”His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before me”—inverts the traditional emotional arc of the psalm by collapsing into despair: “How long, Lord, wilt thou hide thyself? For ever? Shall thy wrath burn like fire? Remember how short my time is: wherefore hast thou made all men in vain?” David at one point begs God to turn away His face, “that I may regain strength, before I go away and am no more” (Ps. 39:18). Job yearns for a sorcerer to cast a spell upon the day of his birth (Job 3:8-9). The book of Job itself amounts to a pointed critique of the commonly-accepted interpretation of much of the rest of the Old Testament!

And the reason we have so much trouble accepting the fact that God would choose to give His Word to us in such a way is because we have a phony view of perfection. Reformed theologians are fond of making the following statement: “The Bible is among books what Christ is among men.” But to listen to some of them talk, it would appear that what they mean is that the Bible is high, lofty, proud, and inhuman, just as Christ was. The problem, we come to find out, is in our view of Christ, the living Word of God. The fact is that Jesus would simply not be accepted by many of the Guardians of our Moral Tradition if they saw Him as He was during the years of His earthly ministry. We’re talking about a God whose first miracle was providing the wine for a party; who was repeatedly accused of being a glutton and a drunkard, and not without reason; who not only suffered prostitutes to wash His feet, but—what is much worse—declared them completely forgiven, not a single word of reprimand being uttered; who was more at home in the houses of sinners than in the dens of religion; whose final agonizing act was the shame of a criminal’s death. A God who was carried in the womb, who had to be cleansed and fed, who was hungry, thirsty, weary, who avoided the crowds when He needed time to pray, who was unable to perform healings if the people lacked faith, who was frequently taken by surprise, who apparently didn’t know the identity of the woman who touched Him until she confessed. A God who hung suspended, naked, bleeding, from a beam of wood. This is our God—a God who veils Himself behind the humble stuff of earth. Religion has never acknowledged this God. Religion spits in the face of this God. Religion killed this God.

But God He remains. And the Bible is His Word. And rather than dreaming up some highfaluting concept of ontological perfection and then projecting that onto the Bible, maybe it would be better if we read the Bible as it actually is, in all of its grittiness and ambiguity and diversity and humanity, till we’re able to reach the place where we can finally acknowledge that this is what perfection looks like: not a universal message, superimposed by an alien voice, but a story that accommodates itself to the myths and beliefs of its time by a God who condescends to visit His people and loves it when they put up a fight. A book that is somehow, at one and the same time, fully God and fully human. Just like Jesus.

Now go back and read those verses again—the verses from Psalm 25:

 

            ^[16] Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me,

for I am desolate, lonely, and afflicted.

^[17] The troubles of my heart are enlarged;

Bring me out of my distresses!

^[18-19] Look on my affliction and my pain,

and forgive all my sins.

Consider my enemies: for they are many,

and they hate me with cruel hatred. . .

^[20] Take my soul into Your keeping, and deliver me;

Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in You.

^[21] Let integrity and uprightness preserve me,

for I wait for You.

 

Sometimes it’s the way you read a passage that makes all the difference.

“Have a Nice Flight Home – It’s a Good Day for Flying”

I devoted a whole week to viewing and reviewing The UFO Files, a four-hour DVD collection of the best UFO specials from Unsolved Mysteries. Well, I didn’t really do a lot of watching; I mostly just listened, because some of the episodes were very scary. That in itself was (if I may say so) a courageous endeavor: even just hearing about UFOs (or hearing them talked about in Robert Stack’s creepy voice) makes it hard to walk home at night. Several of the alleged “alien spacecraft” are obviously military spy planes (Roswell); others are obviously hoaxes (the alien autopsies); but that still leaves a handful that defy all rational explanation.

For example, the infamous Socorro encounter. On April 24, 1964, police officer Lonnie Zamora claims to have run across a mysterious, egg-shaped aircraft—and two little men—while chasing a teenager through the deserts of New Mexico. The two men were apparently taken by surprise; they disappeared into the spacecraft and it flew away in the direction of the town, where it was seen by over a dozen eyewitnesses. There are a number of factors that elevate this incident above the average UFO report. One is the physical evidence of its presence in the area: rectangular markings which penetrated into the sandy earth, burned soil, and fused glass. The other is Lonnie Zamora. Astronomer J. Allen Hynek (Steven Spielberg’s chief consultant for Close Encounters of the Third Kind) stated frankly, “I think this case may be the ‘Rosetta Stone’… There’s never been a strong case with so unimpeachable a witness.” In a private report, Project Blue Book’s director, Major Hector Quintinilla, noted, “There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora’s reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw and frankly, so are we. This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.”

The other two most interesting cases are the disappearance of pilot Frederick Valentich, and the Kecksburg incident of 1965. Mr. Valentich was making a routine flight over Bass Strait off the coast of Australia on October 21, 1978 when he reported being pursued by a strange, green object which he initially thought was an aircraft. It was moving at a high rate of speed and appeared to be toying with him. Confusion turned to panic as the object hovered over the plane. In his final recorded transmission, Valentich reported, “It’s hovering, and it’s not an aircraft.” This was followed by seventeen seconds of silence, during which “metallic, scraping” sounds could be heard, and then all contact was lost.

So either Freddy Valentich faked his own death—his father reports that he was fascinated by UFOs, and he may have used this as a cover story—or he lost his bearings and was flying upside down—in which case, the “object” he believed he was seeing was really the reflection of his own plane. The problem is, two eyewitnesses came forward within a week of his disappearance and reported that they had seen a plane flying over Bass Strait on the night in question, headed for the water and being tailed by an eerie green light. This is a particularly chilling piece of evidence, given that the details of the pilot’s description of the object weren’t revealed until the transcript of the final transmission was released, four years later.

So, who knows? It’s a big, scary world out there.

Equally compelling, though much less mysterious, is the Kecksburg incident. In this case, the object in question was almost certainly Russian satellite Kosmos 96. But that doesn’t make the story (as presented by Unsolved Mysteries) any less haunting. There’s a beautiful narrative progression to the events of that night, with each event producing new questions, new marvels. On December 9, 1965, a giant fireball flew over the United States and Canada. It was witnessed by thousands of people in six states, and it eventually crash-landed in the mountainous woods near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. A small boy who was playing nearby saw the object land; his mother alerted the authorities, who immediately headed out to investigate. As dusk fell, witnesses reported a blue light, flickering on and off from inside the woods. The volunteer fire department was called in to find the object. Half-buried in the side of a hill they discovered a huge, acorn-shaped craft with mysterious hieroglyphics spanning the circumference of a band at its base. The military appeared almost instantly; cameras were confiscated, the whole place was quarantined, and the townsmen were commanded to return to their homes. Some time afterwards, various people reported seeing a flatbed truck leaving the woods with a bell-shaped tarp on its back. However, the military claims that no trace of the “meteor” (as they call it) was ever recovered.

It sounds like the plot of an early Spielberg movie. Notice the abundance of tropes: the object from another world that comes to rest in a small, peaceful town, twilight, the boys and their moms, the ragtag volunteers, the search for the object, the astonishing revelation in the woods, the lying evil army, the disappearance of all evidence.

It would make a great movie, or novel, even if the object in question wasn’t actually a Russian satellite. Russian space expert James Oberg explains why the U. S. government would claim that Kosmos 96 (an acorn-shaped spacecraft) had crashed in Canada thirteen hours earlier when they knew very well that it had not:

‘In the 1960s, U.S. military intelligence agencies interested in enemy technology were eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile and space debris they could find. International law required that debris be returned to the country of origin. But hardware from Kosmos 96, with its special missile-warhead shielding, would have been too valuable to give back.’

 

After all, he concluded, what better camouflage than to let people think the fallen object was not a Soviet probe, but a flying saucer?

 

‘The Russians would never suspect, and the Air Force laboratories could examine the specimen at leisure. And if suspicion lingered, UFO buffs would be counted on to maintain the phony cover story, protecting the real truth.’

 

For that reason, Oberg concluded, the Kecksburg scenario produced ‘delicious irony.’

 

‘A famous UFO case may actually involve a real U.S. government cover-up, but UFO buffs are on the wrong side. Instead of exposing the truth, they may be unwitting pawns in deception.’

So Long Ago the Garden, Part 5: The Essence of a Reality Encountered

How is a story written? A good story—a real story.

I have some experience with the interplay between reality and fiction on account of having written 150 pages of an autobiographical memoir. I’ve been journaling nearly every day since I was ten years old. Saved on my computer are detailed accounts of my entire last year of high school and the five years thereafter—conversations, descriptions, the aroma of relationships cherished, small tender moments that memory might otherwise have drowned in time’s engrossing waters.

Writers will tell you that the best way to describe true events is through fictional stories. A novelist trying to tell a non-fictional story faces a gargantuan task: he or she must reimagine the past in inventive and challenging new ways while being faithful to its substance. The way we do this is by pushing aside the dry, ossified weeds that have grown up over the original experience and threaten to obscure the reality of what happened. Ignore the reality, and ornament will crush you.

You know what it means, for example, to love your wife: it’s an overwhelmingly emotional reality with a long history of relational encounters behind it. But if you want to write an essay about loving your wife, you don’t rely solely on previous essays you’ve written about loving your wife. You don’t lean dependently on all the other books that have been written—however helpful they might be—by other men loving their wives. You don’t sit in your room and debate whether sonnets or sestinas are the most capable means of expressing your affections. This is what you do: you let your soul inhabit the reality of what it means to love your wife. You live in that substance. And the truth will flow out of you volcanically through the eruption of unforced feeling.

So, for example, when Belle & Sebastian sing:

 

I spent the summer wasting

The time was passed so pleasantly

Say cheerio to books now

The only things I’ll read are faces

 

We understand that the writer is conveying the essence of a reality encountered, regardless of whether or not he did in fact spend seven weeks walking alongside the river (as the chorus claims). And into that description—so concisely, so vividly portrayed!—he weaves his own paradigms. In context, the underlying conviction implicit is that there’s healing to be gained in relational encounters that we’ll never find in words alone. Words are but the medium through which the substance is conveyed. Stuart presents us this intriguing and hopeful belief in the context of a story. If he were to dispense with the story and just articulate these views directly, the song would be in danger of collapsing into platitudes and so-called “timeless, universal truths” that turn out to be neither timeless nor universal when ripped from their context—as, for example, if the whole Bible were nothing but proverbs. Truth loses its trueness when divorced from relationship and story. The combination of the three, as here, produces art.

Poets, like prophets, are engaged in the business of exploring and expressing reality.

The writers of the Bible, by and large, were both writers and prophets. (Abraham Heschel compellingly argues in his masterpiece, The Prophets, that the two vocations are connected in ways that most of us have never imagined). They were open to reality on a level which is rare in our Western, Enlightened experience. In that respect they were vastly superior to the songwriters for Belle & Sebastian. Chesterton famously marvels at the three tiers of metaphor, each stacked perfectly atop the others, that Jesus employed in His speech about the lilies in the Sermon on the Mount:

 

            … He seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colours into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels into nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away: “and if God so clothes the grass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven—how much more…” It is like the building of a good Babel tower by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower.

 

Jesus wasn’t just capable of such literary feats because in all of His omniscience and wisdom He possessed the mind of God. He was capable of performing these too-often-overlooked miracles of metaphor because He relentlessly inhabited reality. Indeed, He never left it, even at the bitter end when He seemed to have been forsaken by everyone. To the very last, He was the truest and the deepest of all men.

The same was true, although to a lesser degree, of all the Bible’s writers. And for that reason, what we find woven into the fabric of even the Bible’s most mythical-seeming stories is 100 percent eternal, living substance. These were great men. Weak men, broken men, occasionally foolish men, like us, but men of depth and character. They had oil in their lamps. And they took that oil and they went up to the top of the mountain and they came down with the living fire of God burning in and all around them, and His words on their lips and their hearts. And out of the depth of those encounters they expressed in startling, primal, and iconic language truths about God and His people and the simultaneously horrible and glorious world we inhabit that were forged in eternal fires and hammered on the anvil of a crushing but unstoppable pursuit. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. And the Lord said, “Who told you that you were naked?” His garment was white as snow, and the hair of His head like pure wool. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

 

So Long Ago the Garden, Part 4: A True Story

It’s easy to critique the American church, though. What about solutions? If it’s wrong to read the Bible as a documentary-in-print, then how should it be read?

Perhaps controversially, I’m going to suggest that we borrow a substance from the Catholic Church. (All truth is God’s truth, after all). The Catholic Church teaches that under certain, occasional, very limited conditions, the Pope is infallible. There is a huge lack of understanding of this fundamental doctrine in the Evangelical community, and even among many Catholics. What it absolutely does not mean is that (as an aggrieved ex-Catholic tried to insist to me not long ago) the Pope is an “infallible man.” It doesn’t mean he’s perfect, or that everything he says is true in all circumstances.

What it does mean is that when he stands up as a teacher with respect to a matter of faith and doctrine, and specifically states, “Hey guys, this is an infallible statement, and you can’t reject it without doing serious harm to your soul,” the substance of the statement he’s making at that moment is infallible and free from any taint of doctrinal error. Lest there should be any misunderstanding, let it be noted that the Pope hasn’t said this (or anything like it) since 1950.

Moreover, as Pope Benedict reminded us early in his tenure, “papal infallibility” doesn’t mean the Pope is an oracle. It doesn’t mean that when he stands up to make an infallible declaration, he will automatically say the right thing. In reality, all it means is that he won’t say the wrong thing. The Pope (according to Catholicism) is prevented by the Holy Spirit from speaking in error. If the Pope was taking a test—on a matter of faith and doctrine—and he didn’t know any of the answers, the test would be left blank.

Again, I’m not suggesting that Evangelicals suddenly embrace the doctrine of papal infallibility. I’m saying there’s some excellent truth about the Bible in the substance of the Catholic teaching. The Pope can be wrong; no one denies that. The Pope can be wrong in his facts. The Pope can be wrong about history or math. The Pope can be wrong about unicorns and zebraphants. But when he stands up to speak ex cathedra (from the seat of St. Peter)—well, he may not be right, necessarily, but if he isn’t, he won’t speak at all. The one thing we know for sure that he won’t be is wrong.

In matters of substance, claims the Church, Scripture and Tradition are always right. When the Pope speaks ex cathedra, he can never speak amiss.

And what I’m claiming here is that the Bible is likewise infallible, and that the richest, most rewarding way to read it is as a story which has been given to us not for the purpose of knowing all truth but for understanding the deepest relational realities of God’s heart and our place as individuals and as humans in the ongoing saga to which the Scriptures bear witness.

“Many today,” writes N. T. Wright, “operate with two quite different types of ‘truth’”:

 

“If we asked, ‘Is it true that Jesus died on a cross?’ we normally would mean, “Did it really happen?’ But if we asked, ‘Is the parable of the Prodigal Son true?’ we would quickly dismiss the idea that ‘it really happened’; that is quite simply not the sort of thing parables are. We would insist that, in quite another sense, the parable is indeed ‘true’ in that we discover within the narrative a picture of God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience.

Fred Clark picks up on this theme in another post on young-earth creationism:

The sun rises. The sun sets. A certain man was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves. The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

 

None of the above examples are necessarily true in the strictly “literal” sense that is normally intended by the Guardians of our Moral Tradition when they ask theological questions whose purpose is to classify people into strict binaries of “Bible-believing Christians” (normally Evangelicals) vs. “Everyone else” (atheists, Jews, Catholics, gays, liberals, etc.). One of the great joys of growing up in a fundamentalist church is relentlessly getting to engage in this ritual of determining whether people are “really” Christians or not, depending on the Pharisaical rigidity of their answers to various questions. But the reality that the Guardians are missing is that a story can be “wrong” in fact, without being wrong in substance.

So, for example, it is the official position of the Catholic Church that the opening chapters of Genesis, “although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method . . . do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense . . . [these] chapters, in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the fundamental truths which are necessary for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the history of the human race and the chosen people” (Pius XII, Humanae Generis, 38). Anyone who denies the verity of the most basic elements of the Genesis story (the encyclical goes on to say) has departed from the Christian faith as traditionally taught and practiced.

Again, I’m not proposing that we all become Catholics, but that the Catholic position in this instance is a reliable indicator of orthodoxy’s borders, benevolently shepherding us away from the twin dangers of radical demythologization (“nothing in this story is true!”) on the one hand, and fanatical literalism (“exegetes, burn!”) on the other. The creation story is indeed mythic, not in the sense of being untrue, but in the sense of being a concise and symbolic narrative expressing realities that a documentary-style rendering of the actual events in question could never convey (c. f., Mary Healey, Men & Women are from Eden, pg. 21). In other words, there really was an event, a literal event that occurred in the mist-shrouded morning of time—an event of devastating import for the future of the human race. That is the event that the story in the Garden is describing, but the story employs symbolic language to describe it. In telling this story, states the Church, the biblical writers were assisted by divine inspiration, whereby (as we have just seen) they were “protected from error” in the endeavor of selecting and rewriting the ancient Sumerian myths in which the basic story likely has its origin (Humanae Generis, 38).

True in substance. It really did happen. One man and one woman, our parents, had a calamitous encounter. Whatever it was, whatever it looked like, it was horrible. They were driven from the presence of God. And the world has never been the same.

I vividly remember a preacher declaring from the pulpit at a revival I attended as a child that the story of the rich man and Lazarus was a “true” story (meaning it had actually happened), because “Jesus used a man’s actual name, and Jesus never lied.”

I submit that the story of the rich man and Lazarus is a true story because it incorporates relational paradigms and substantive realities into the framework of an (on some level) imaginative narrative. That’s what a story is; that’s what it does. In that respect, this parable is true. In that respect, the Bible is true, and always will be.

 

So Long Ago the Garden, Part 3: The Creation of an Atheist

In reading Genesis 3 over and over again, I realized that I wasn’t actually reading it as a story, but more like a news report. I’m not saying that the events it portrays didn’t on some level happen; but it became clear that I was missing the actual substance of what the chapter was saying because my overly-literal reading had totally flattened the landscape of the story by reducing it to a series of factual assertions.

Let me say that another way. We’re twenty-first century Westerners. We’ve been marinating for most of our lives in a super-scientific Enlightenment mindset. We want nothing but the Facts. We value material realities over substantive truths. Christians like to say this leads to the embrace of evolution (or to Darwinism, or whatever you want to call it), but the crazy thing is this: it also leads to fundamentalism. People don’t read the Bible to encounter God; they read it to explore trivialities. They want to know exactly where the Garden of Eden is located, and on which of the numerous mountains called “Ararat” does Noah’s Ark rest, and how many gallons of water did Jesus turn into wine and was it really wine or just grape juice (umm, probably wine), and how many kingdoms does the Beast rule over and which mountain does Jesus touch down on when He descends again from heaven and how long is the Great Tribulation, seven years or three and a half years?

I’m not saying there aren’t answers to all of these questions. I’m not saying the answers aren’t occasionally helpful. But I think they miss the point. And there are times when they can even be profoundly destructive.

The blogger Fred Clark tells a story of the time he traveled to the Holy Land with a group of college classmates. It was an illuminating experience for some people, but devastating for others—not least when they arrived at the walls of Jericho, which according to their tour guide had been built 8,000 years ago.

This was simply too much for one of his fellow classmates, who had been raised in a fundamentalist church:

 

            … There my friend stood, in 1990, in Jericho, believing that the universe was 5,994 years old and staring at a man-made wall that was 8,000 years old.

Something had to give.

The most dangerous thing about fundamentalism is not that it sometimes teaches wacky ideas, like that the world is barely 6,000 years old or that dancing is sinful. The most dangerous thing is that it insists that such ideas are all inviolably necessary components of the faith. Each such idea, every aspect of their faith, is regarded as a keystone without which everything else they believe — the existence of a loving God, the assurance of pardon, the possibility of a moral or meaningful life — crumbles into meaninglessness.

When the Bible is read like a news report, all truths become equal, which is another way of saying that all truths become equally meaningless. It matters just as much that Samson simultaneously killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, as it does that Jesus has conquered every single principality and power. It matters just as much that all the cattle in Egypt were slain—twice!—as it does that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead. If it were somehow proven that neither of these two events had actually happened—if we uncovered, say, an old Philistine video which showed Samson only killing five hundred people with the asses’ jawbone—it would invalidate, or at least render suspect, every single word of the Bible. If we even conceive that the Gospel of Luke was written, not as a transcript, but to convey substantive understanding—if the thought should ever cross our minds that perhaps Mary didn’t spontaneously utter the entire Magnificat as written, but that it is, nonetheless, a reflection of eternal realities and the depth of Mary’s heart—then the Word of God is lies and God Himself a liar, incessantly spinning out stories when He should have been giving us the Facts.

This is what people like me have been brought up to think. This is how atheists are formed.

So Long Ago the Garden, Part 2

 

          I think I can point to the moment when I started coming out of fundamentalism. I was watching a Beatles documentary with my grandmother[1].

Just so we’re all clear—one key indication of mental instability is a tendency to take everything literally. This is why we like to say that people who struggle with insanity have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. What we mean is, they don’t understand when a story is being edited or framed in such a way as to inspire a certain reaction in the audience. So for example someone watching The Wizard of Oz might actually think the world is exploding with color at the critical moment when Dorothy arrives in Kansas. “Did you see what just happened?” they will ask you, as though at that moment in the movie it literally, truly did just happen.

There was a time in high school when my grandmother and I watched the same Beatles documentary at least once a month. I must have watched it at least five times before it became wearying, because I realized that the Baby Boomer producers had created this dramatically overly-simplified hagiography in which the Beatles had brought light and sunshine into a boring, war-torn world, while slowly being torn into pieces by their own personal demons. In short, I gradually discerned that I wasn’t watching actual history, but a particular presentation of history from an appallingly naïve point of view.

That was a shock. But then, the very final time I watched it, I was met with a second shock. My grandmother actually thought this was how it had actually happened. And not just in a metaphorical sense. When the Singing Nuns were replaced at the top of the Billboard Pop chart by the song “Love Me Do,” she thought a rainbow actually wrapped itself around the sky and color infiltrated everything. When the hippies moved to San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967, she actually thought there were five men playing hacky sack in a park, immediately followed by George Harrison traveling to India. In other words, it wasn’t just a thirty-minute depiction of a hugely-complicated history; it was actual history.

This is how I’ve always read the Bible.

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[1] Please note: not actually my grandmother