Aren’t we all God’s children?

Posted on March 23, 2009
Filed under Culture, Interfaith, Reconciliation | by David Leave a Comment

I was listening to a very “conservative Christian” radio commentator the other day. She was rejoicing in the signs of springtime appearing around us, reflecting on the idea that everything must die in the winter in order for there to be the resurrection of life in the Spring. Did she know that she was expressing an essentially Pagan belief that we have adopted to help us understand the Jesus story?

Jesus used it as a metaphor: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” -John 12:20-33

Reflecting on the fact that Kara is going to lead our worship service on Sunday has me thinking about what it is that causes some within the Christian tradition to freak out in a particularly florid way when it comes to Pagan worship. (And Pastor Don has just reminded me that, in light of the recently celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, it’s the Pagans who really ought to be horrified by Christians.)

Part of it is, I think, a simple lack of information about what “Pagan” means. I have met a surprising number of people who confuse it with Satanism. “Satan” is a specific being who figures in the Abrahamic religions, and has nothing at all to do with the Earth-based religions which predate them by millenia. The confusion has been abetted over the centuries by the Roman Catholic Church claiming that tribal peoples engaging in their traditional religious practices were worshipping “the devil.” This practice of hostile differentiation has continued to this day by some fundamentalist Protestant churches, even as the Christian tradition as a whole has absorbed and become shaped by the Pagan traditions of the cultures out of which the early church grew.

Cultivating a theology of ignorance and hostility toward others doesn’t only have a negative effect on those “others,” either. Here’s a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor that’s been creating something of a flap: The coming evangelical collapse by Michael Spencer.

Spencer’s premise is that evangelicalism is dying. Although much of what he says will resonate with people who identify strongly with the idea of a secular war on Christians (“Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity..“), what may not sit so well is the way he describes the source of the crisis: Christianity has been dumbed down and associated with a partisan political identity, theologically what Andrew Sullivan names “a blend of self-help, biblical literalism and Republican politics.” The evangelical movement and Christian education, Spencer says, have produced a generation of young people who may have strong emotions about the so-called “culture war,” but know next to nothing about scripture and its scholarship, can’t articulate the Gospel in any meaningful way, and can’t intellectually counter secular arguments challenging their beliefs:

Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

…We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

In another provocative essay by the same author, Why do they hate us?, he addresses many of the reasons that it is sometimes embarrassing to admit to being a Christian – or at least requires a an appended exposition on how one is “not that kind of Christian.” At some point in there, he speaks of how “difficult it is to evangelize Buddhists.”

I’m going to ask an even more inflammatory question: What do we even mean by evangelicalism? That seems to be the root of the problem. Speaking of how “difficult it is to evangelize Buddhists” – what is the goal, exactly? To annihilate Buddhism? To get the target to abandon his faith and to say “I was wrong about what I believed, I now believe that the only way to reach God is the adoption of your Christian doctrine”?

If it’s true that when Jesus said “I am the Way, no one comes to the Father but through me,” he was saying “It is only by this way of living I have taught you that you can reach God and have eternal life,” then where is the contradiction with other kinds of worship or other traditions’ understandings of the sacred? The contradiction that matters would be with ways of living that do not embody loving my neighbor as I love myself.

Here’s a radical idea: When engaging in evangelism, why not first consider the way the person lives and treats other people? Is he kind and compassionate? Does he live in a way that allows him to be fully human (love himself as God loves him)? Does he love his neighbor as he loves himself? Does he seek to live in such a way that the world will be better because he was in it?

If the answer is “yes,” then is there anything else that needs to happen? Seriously, what do we think Jesus would do with regard to this person? He would already be the person who would respond to the call “take up your cross, and follow me.”

When we say at St. James that we are an open and affirming community that transcends distinctions between people including those based on religion, those are not just empty words. We worship in the Christian tradition, while remembering something important: Jesus was not a Christian.

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