Third Millennium Church

Authentic Christian Ethics

As we found in the last article, the ethics of the current church is based upon lies, hypocrisy, and interpreting the bible to support a preconceived set of beliefs. This has led to a church where those who are false are lifted up as examples to those who are honest about their faults and mistakes. This must end. It is the opposite of what Jesus envisioned for his people. It is a world in which Judas is the hero and Peter hangs himself.

In order to correct these errors, we must carefully choose the character of our new ethics. We want our ethics to be based on authenticity and grace. To be authentic is to be exactly who you are all the time. The authentic person does not lie about her lifestyle, her actions, or her beliefs. A biblical example of an authentic person is Peter, who, though he was often loud and abrasive, was at least always real. Peter was no player. Authenticity is important to ethics, because our model is not "try to be perfect and crucify those who aren't" but rather "try not to fuck up and offer grace to those who do". If a person makes a mistake, it is authenticity that allows her friends and family who love her to see the mistake, so that they can help her avoid it in the future. All of this is done within the web of relationships that make up the church. There is no need for a Pastor here.

Grace is the wonderful gift upon which all of Christianity should be based. It is the core of Jesus' message. Jesus would not serve well as a deacon at most Evangelical churches. He is continually hanging out with prostitutes, forgiving adulterers, hell, even thieves. Jesus was a disgrace to the concept that God demands perfection and the Church exists to enforce perfection in its members. Grace is about letting someone get away with doing wrong without punishment. It is what Jesus gives us; it is what we must give others.

Certainly there are some times in which the actions of a person are so egregious that we must punish them in some way. This is the job of the courts. Murder, rape, theft, assault, and such are the purview of society to punish. In our normal lives (apparently unless you are me, see previous article) we should never have to deal with a murderer. These are the "Essentials", things which are so harmful to other people that the society takes a stand against them. Most western democracies handle these just fine. The church doesn't need to become involved, except perhaps in reaching out to those in prison with comfort. Atheists know that murder is wrong, so there's no real need to try to make a case for it. Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself, and these are cases in which the damage to our neighbor is severe.

But most of the ways in which we fail are not prosecutable, and this is the area we call the non-essentials. Here we might think of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth. These are the areas in which we fail in life, but they are not so hurtful to others that we need to put people in prison. Further, they are quite vague. What is gluttony to one person is not gluttony to another. This is why there can be no hard and fast rule concerning the non-essentials, as there can be with murder. These are the sins that often appear in our lives, and the ones that can do the most damage to our souls.

Our new ethics is relational and situational. A behavior is wrong for us when it damages other people. This is based on Jesus' great commandment to love God and our neighbor as ourselves. Any action we take that hurts other people is a sin. Furthermore, as authentic people we have made choices about our lives. Any action that violates these personal ethics is a sin. For example, perhaps I have an alchoholic father and so have chosen not to drink alchohol. This is my personal choice. If I drink having made that choice, it is a sin for me. It violated a standard I set for myself. This is not to say, however, that other people can set such a personal standard for me. We want to help people be true to who they have chosen to be. These sins do not occur in a vacuum, but in the give and take of who we are becoming. Something may be a sin for us at one time in our lives and not at a later time. Hopefully we will grow, and our choices for ourselves will become better.

We no longer have Jesus walking among us, and we do not want a Priest over us, so how can we find grace and forgiveness when we sin? We all live within the web of relationships that we share. The job of the new church is to ensure that among these relationships we have some that are close enough and safe enough that we can confess our sins in their confines. In other words, you need someone you can talk to when you make a mistake.

The other person needs to determine whether your mistake is a symptom of a deeper problem or just a stupid mistake. They must take into account your past, the context of the sin, and the consequences. If there are any kind of spiritual "elders" in the new church, they would be people whom one can consult to help determine this. This is all done within the context of a relationship based upon love and mutual respect, which is what all church relationships should be. This is not to be another power trip.

Bringing others into the situation might be necessary for a serious problem, what people often call an "intervention". Normally, however, you and your friend can usually work this out. The key is what Jesus said to every sinner he met, "Go, your sins are forgiven, and sin no more." This is grace in action. The sinner has been authentic and honest in confessing a sin to a friend, and the friend has offered grace and forgiveness. Of course, it is God who forgives, but he does it through the instrument of our relationships.

Two things can stop the flow here. First, a person can be inauthentic, often because they have serious emotional problems. If someone lies about their behavior, then no one can help them. There is nothing we can do about this. If a Christian chooses to lie about her life, she will probably fool us all. That is why we do not exalt "perfection", since it takes away one of the benefits of lying about our lives. We cannot change another person, so as long as she continues lying, there is no way we can help her. It's sad, but not everyone opened up and was honest with Jesus when he was here.

Second, a person who hears a confession can use it as a power trip by trying to control someone. Jesus did not try to control people. He let many people walk away from him without hearing the truth. This is another reason authenticity is so important. If I sin and confess it to someone, I know I'll receive forgiveness and grace. As an authentic person, I'll let others know about my sin (not in a broadcast or anything, but naturally, as it comes up). Since there is no "secret" there is nothing the person who first heard my confession can use to control me. Still, how that person handles my sin might determine whether I go to her in the future.

The job of the new church, therefore, is to foster an environment in which these relationships can flourish. We can teach each other how to be authentic, non-judgmental, and loving. We can learn the areas in which we might make a mistake, and how to judge whether a given sin is a sign of something more serious, or just a stupid choice. The church as a group of believers can also keep an eye on the process to ensure that no one is manipulated or controlled. Likewise, the church can encourage authenticity as a lifestyle.

As to what constitutes a sin, that is for the community to decide. Everyone just makes the bible say what they want it to say anyway. Apart from the Essentials that we've already mentioned, ethics will vary from group to group. Yes, there is the danger that a group of Christians might decide to allow behaviors that we ourselves would not condone. But that happens now anyway. There are Evangelical churches steeped in envy, pride, and hatred. We cannot control what other people do, we can only offer to guide. As far as Jesus was concerned there were only two rules: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. God can handle his people screwing up. The greater danger is that the new church will become just a different set of rules. I won't let that happen.

It may become apparent that such a web of relationships does not need a building, and budgets, and a pastor. And you'd be right. The dismantling of the current church's grip on power and control over its people is the next topic for discussion.

Why We Need a New Ethics

The ethics of the Evangelical church has failed to provide Christians with a consistent and considered way to live a good life. There are three main problems with the way that Evangelical ethics are structured, each of which is the application of a certain type of falsehood. We think that because current church ethics are based upon these lies, they direct people into leading lives that are more damaged than many lives lived outside of the church. These lies both cause damage to people and cause them to damage other people.

The first lie is that Evangelical ethics are biblical, that is, they are derived solely from a plain reading of the bible. "I just do what the bible says" is the way the average congregant might put it. As we saw in the discussion of why we need a new hermeneutics, the plain reading of the bible results in multiple contradictions, especially in the area of ethics. As a quick example, Psalm 139 is supposed to teach that souls are created at conception, and thus abortion is murder. However, Psalm 137, using the same "plain reading", teaches that God rejoices when his people smash the heads of their enemy's babies against a wall. One Psalm is considered a metaphor and one is considered actual fact. Why? Because Evangelicals already want abortion to be a sin for other reasons, and so search the bible looking for any evidence they can cobble together to make it so. In the same way, they've already decided that infanticide is a sin, so even wherever the bible encourages it, it must be "metaphorical" in some way. Clearly, the bible when taken "plainly" is contradictory. Why is it good to smash some babies heads but not others?

The first lie is that Evangelical ethics is biblical, when really it is an existing package of beliefs that are then corroborated by sifting through the bible looking for passages that can be interpreted to support them. Places where the bible is contradictory are explained away, usually using arguments about provenance and language to make it seem like the interpreters know what they are talking about. Since most people in church don't know Greek or Hebrew nor the principles of exegesis, it's pretty easy to snow them. The result? Whatever the powers that be want to be sins turn out to be sins in the bible! Isn't that amazing? Whatever sins they prefer to participate in are equally easily justified. Want to drink alcohol? No problem, we can make it OK in moderation. Want to not drink alcohol? No problem, we can use the same texts to make it a sin.

The second lie is that a person's salvation is by grace alone. Most Evangelical churches make a big point of the free gift of salvation, untainted by the "works righteousness" of other branches of Christianity. However, Evangelical churches are just as invested in works righteousness as any other sect of Christianity. The others are at least honest about it. It is true that the initial offer of salvation made by many pastors and churches is free, but then the peer pressure begins. You're not going to listen to secular music, are you? You're not going to keep going out at night drinking, are you? You're not going to keep smoking, are you?

If this were in the context of a loving community that honestly valued and cared for one another, it might be seen as just helping someone along the path to Christ. But for many the imposition of so many rules quickly becomes a hammer meant to beat the person down into conformity. Many Christians will say that a person can be a Christian and be different from them, but they don't really mean it. If they meant it, they would accept different forms of Christianity. Instead, most Christians believe down deep that their sect is right and everyone else is wrong and that the "true believers" think the same way that they do. And, as we saw with the first lie, even though they claim they are just "doing what the bible says" they really aren't. They are doing what they want to do, making up ethics that suits their purposes, and justifying them by interpreting the bible to fit their behavior.

The third lie is caused by the second. Because it doesn't take long to realize that if you want to stick around in a church and serve in any meaningful capacity, you have to buy into the party line. Or at least appear like you do. What matters isn't what you really think about drinking alcohol or abortion or Christian rock music, what matters is what the church thinks you believe. It's clear in many churches that you either fall in line or leave, and many people don't want to leave. So the Evangelical church teaches people to be fake. I know many examples of this: the bishop of a church that thinks alcohol is a sin who liked to drink brandy, the teacher of college-age at a church who liked to get high and sleep around, the female minister who had an affair with the wife of the pastor and then tried to kill him (honest to God). How do these people keep their jobs? Well, of course no one in the church knows that the teacher likes to smoke pot. She just got very good at lying. No one knows that the bishop likes to drink; he only does it in private and never mentions it. I only know because of someone who worked in the hotel that he used to stay in for conferences that provided complimentary brandy. His was always gone the next morning.

These three lies have combined to create an Evangelical church which is ethically rotten, hypocritical, and morally wicked. Honest people are strung up for admitting sins, while the liars continue to gain power and prestige. Anyone who honestly questions why the church holds a certain position is a tool of the Devil, but anyone who buys the party line in public, but does as she pleases in private is one of the elect. It's all backwards and it's all wrong.

Jesus had dealings with people who were like our present-day Evangelicals. They were called the Pharisees and he said the only mean and hateful things he ever said to anyone to them. Jesus' problem with them was that although they directed people into their fold, they drew them further from God than they were before. Does that sound familiar? A church that draws people in the name of God and then turns them into mean, narrow, bigoted, hateful, vengeful parodies of what it is to be the people of God.

And what did Jesus say to them? "If you were blind your sins would be forgiven you. But because you say 'I see', your sin remains."

The ethics of the church needs to be completely overhauled. The way that we can do that and avoid the pitfalls of the current church is the subject of another article.

Spot On - The Red Pill

So far, we've concentrated on issues of biblical interpretation, driven in part by my evaluation of philosophers such as Kuhn, Quine, and, of course, Wittgenstein. Their theories about the nature and function of language have been key to my critique of the current Evangelical church in America. Before we move on to examine the 3M Church in theology, practice, and ethics I want to isolate what I think is the pivotal mistake that the current church has made. I think it will be important to focus on this error, so we avoid the temptation to start laundry lists of grievances, or perhaps our own 95 theses. There is one fundamental mistake which, if corrected, will lead to the correction of the other symptoms. Thus, we do not need to concentrate overly much on the symptoms themselves.

And here it is: Christianity has never been a "religion of the book" as many have said. "Sola Scriptura" is the great blasphemy that has caused the failure of the Evangelical church. Judaism and Christianity are religions of community. The various books served only to preserve the thoughts and inspirations of the community about God. They are thus the secondary instrument of God's communication, not the primary instrument.

If you're like me, you've been taught (whether in church or in seminary) that Christianity is a bible-based faith. That without the bible we would be lost. That the bible is the only way that God communicates to his people. You've probably had this inculcated in you since sunday school, if you were into that kind of thing. But if you study church history one thing becomes clear: this has not always been the case. It is the creation of a group of European christians who were rebelling against the Catholic church. It is a man-made, artificial, precept. It is not the natural state of the church. You may need to pause here, perhaps take a brisk walk or contemplate a sunset, because what I am claiming goes against the very core of the teaching in most churches in this country.

If you can swallow this red pill then I have good news for you, as you feel your feet dangling over the abyss, the ladder of Sola Scriptura kicked out from under you. God is real and alive and imminent. He breathes next to your ear. He's not in the bible; he's right there with you. He paints the forest canopy a thousand greens for you. He glows in the eyes of the one you love. And yet this imminent God is the transcendent Creator of this giant manifold of superstrings (or whatever theory of physics you currently hold). Quarks dance at his whim and galaxies spin for his delight.

In the beginning there was no bible. The early Christians occasionally got a letter from James or Paul, but for the most part they communed with God person to person. Mediators were never God's plan, whether priests or books. In the Old Testament, the priests come about against God's will. You really need to read all of Exodus 19 and 20 to get this, but I'll just quote a couple pieces. First, God always intended to speak to every person directly:

Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites." (Ex 19.3-6)

But they were afraid and demanded a mediator, Moses.

When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die." Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning." The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was. (Ex 20.18-21)

From this point on God's people vacillated between desiring to see God face to face and wanting to hide behind a mediator. This is why Jesus was so important; he was God as mediator. For a while this solved our problem and the early church lived in full communion with God. But, as Galadriel says, the hearts of men are easily corrupted. Power, money, control--these things distracted the church from its true purpose. Shortly after Constantine took up the cross the New Testament canon was forever fixed and the power of the bishops in Rome entrenched. The Protestant Reformation swapped the mediator of tradition for the mediator of the bible, but with few exceptions we remained prisoners of men.

And so it is no wonder that the church fails in so many ways to be a place of love, help, and safety. Instead, we ignore our own sins while crushing down "sinners" with our big black bibles. We are mean, arrogant, judgmental, and self-centered. We have become the Pharisees, the enemies of God.

But there is another way. There is a better way. We must rebuild the church from scratch on a new foundation. Love. Freedom. Diversity. We must be a community who loves God more than the bible.

Can I do this? No. I'm just a guy who knows a little about God and a little about men, and has watched dozens of friends crash against the wall the church has built around itself, lost to drugs or despair or self-hatred. Who has seen honest ministers crushed by those in power with their slick smiles and pretty lies and their SUVs. They are whitewashed tombs, full of dead men's bones and all corruption. And they run the church. It is time for us to take it back.

I cannot do this, but we can. We can build a new church. We can smash the mediators who would separate us from God. We can tear down the buildings and the money and the good old boy networks. We can rip apart the legalism that binds many into prisons of false conscience. We can bring life back to the church.

This is the revolution.

Value Interpretation of the Bible

In the previous article I described the problems inherent in the traditional Evangelical methods of biblical interpretation. Foremost among them is a basic error concerning the primacy of authorial intent. The authorial intent of a text can be obscured by many factors: a plurality of authors and redactors, a lack of knowledge of the provenance or background, and subtle cultural and language differences especially when dealing with connotation and figures of speech. These factors cause even the most honest and hard-working interpreter to invariably find holes in her understanding of the text, holes which she naturally fills with her own meaning, not the author's. How many of us truly grasp the horror of helping a Samaritan? Of calling the Pharisees "unwashed tombs"? Of John saying to a Gnostic audience that "the Logos became Flesh"? What of the thousand other subtleties that the textual corpus or archeology have yet to unearth?

I believe the bible is an incarnational book the way Jesus is an incarnational person. In other words, as Jesus was God in human flesh, so the bible is God's word in human literature. Jesus was not the perfect human; he had pimples and burned his mouth on grilled fish and was open to every frailty that we face, even anger in the face of the death of his friend Lazarus. So, too, is the bible not perfect. Not only does it have spelling errors and other artifacts of being a text, but the message of the bible is not perfectly transmitted. There is no "face value" reading of the bible possible, and it is not due only to our inability to properly find every piece of linguistic and cultural trivia of the people who wrote it. It is, by nature, imperfect, just as Jesus in his humanness was, by nature, imperfect.

Why would God give us an imperfect book? Why would God make an imperfect world? Why are there volcanoes and tornadoes, when God could have made a world without them? Why does our DNA have thousands of useless gene sequences? Why does our free will also allow us to do evil? Because perfection is not that interesting after all. A perfect universe might be a field of evenly spaced hydrogen atoms. Boring! A world without weather is a world without sunsets and snow and the sparkling of ice on tree branches after freezing rain. Imperfection and diversity are God's tools. Perfection is for heaven, when we are united with God. This universe is built on entropy.

But even though the bible is imperfect it is still capable of containing God's word, just as Jesus in his imperfect human body was capable of teaching and ultimately dying for the sins of the world. Did Jesus use the perfect words for every sermon? No. Did every person who heard him understand unflinchingly the truth that he represented? No. They killed him, remember? But those who did hear him and understand him grasped a bit of the truth about God. Likewise, the bible, for those who have ears to hear, can give us a bit of the truth about God. But to think that every word was scribed by God is to try to divine meaning from the way Jesus styled his hair, or wore his sandals.

Value Interpretation finds meaning in the bible through the values of our community. It is just what every community has done with the bible through the ages. First Century Jews interpreted the bible differently than Medieval Catholics, who interpreted differently than Eighteenth Century Deists, who are again different from modern Evangelicals. Each community interpreted the bible for itself, because each community valued different things. It has always been so. We are merely being explicit and honest. The bible was not meant to be read in a vacuum of scholarship and theology, but as part of a living community of believers. The community of believers has at its disposal the Holy Spirit, who leads and guides the values of the community. So Value Interpretation is a two-way street: we read the bible through our shared values and the bible and the Holy Spirit help shape our values.

Think about church history. How much of what the early church practiced would we consider heresy? How much that we practice would they consider heresy? Quite a bit on both sides. Take one example: gladiatorial combat in Rome continued for over a century after Constantine converted to Christianity. Why? Did they not realize that watching men kill each other for sport was wrong? That throwing people to the lions was wrong? The bible is pretty clear about how we are to treat each other and "throw them to the lions in a spectacle for your amusement" seems right out. Their values informed their bible reading and the bible and the Holy Spirit informed their values. Over time, they discovered God's word in the bible for their community. But it didn't happen right away. It was a process. Or consider slavery in this country. Again, it took a while for the Christian community to see it as wrong, even though the bible when read "plainly" has no problem with slavery. What happened? The bible is not the last word, it is only one witness for God among many. We have the Holy Spirit, and we have our own minds. It doesn't take much to put together love for your brothers with the Golden Rule to see that slavery is wrong. But it did take time, and it did take throwing out the plain meaning of the text.

So this will be our new hermeneutics: we read the bible through the lens of the values of our community. We allow the bible and the Holy Spirit to shape the values of our community. This openness requires that we go further than the bible in some instances, or to outright deny the bible in others. What is important is the wholeness of God's word to us, not just the letters on a page. I'll give you an example of how Paul did this in 1 Cor 10, and how we need to reinterpret Paul's interpretation for our community. There, Paul is concerned with people eating food that has been sacrificed to idols, not because there is anything evil with the practice (he makes clear that there isn't) but because of what others might think. Since one of Paul's values is "getting along with the pagans" given the dangerous situation in the church at the time, he advises to go ahead and eat such meat, unless someone mentions it was sacrificed to idols. This instruction values accommodation at the cost of authenticity. But our community values authenticity. Thus, we do not agree with Paul that the proper thing to do is to eat the meat unless someone says something. If meat sacrificed to idols is a freedom or us, then it doesn't matter what other people think, we can eat it. Thus, using our value of authenticity, we might say that the proper action is to eat the meat sacrificed to idols and explain to anyone who thinks we're worshiping demons that we're really not. Paul didn't have that option, because if the Christians ruffled too many feathers in his community, they ended up in the coliseum. We don't have that fear, and so our response can be different. Thus, the same text in the bible provides two different responses for two different situations.

Now you might say, but you've just read what you wanted into that passage. Exactly! That's what everyone does anyway. Jesus said, "Turn the other cheek". How many American Christians obey that? None. Why not? It's a metaphor. But the "plain reading" of the text is that it is a simple command. Why does everyone interpret it to be a metaphor? Because they want it to be a metaphor. Because their community does not value non-retaliation. Americans value independence and toughness. So the Evangelicals have interpreted the bible in the light of such values. There have been Christian communities through the ages who have interpreted Jesus' words literally.  Neither group has the "proper" interpretation, because the interpretation depends upon the community.

Another objection you might have is that this method of interpretation could make anything valid; a sort of loose-leaf bible where we keep what we want and toss the rest. Well, first, every church does keep what they want and toss the rest. I don't hear many people arguing for stoning violators of the sabbath, even though that's right in the ten commandments. We don't eat kosher, as the apostles ordered us to in Acts 15. We all have a loose-leaf bible. Second, I do believe that there are essentials and non-essentials. Essentials are what make Christianity unique, the essential theology (belief in Jesus as God's Son, God is good, etc.) and the core ethics (do not murder, do not steal, the golden rule, etc.). Other essays will illustrate these essentials. Everything else is a freedom. Any community that tries to interpret the bible to violate the essentials is not a Christian community. They can say they are, but people say a lot of things.

Value Interpretation allows us to discern God's word in the dynamic interplay of God's people, the Holy Spirit, and the bible. It means that there are different churches for different communities. It means that the values of churches may vary widely. This is why Jesus said we were to love one another. You do not need to love someone who agrees with you! You do however need love in order to accept someone who disagrees with you. The bible is designed to mean different things to different groups of people. There never was "one true faith" and there never will be. Even in the most fervent Evangelical church, you can find twisted interpretations of scripture, evil practices, and bad faith. We all do it. Thankfully, God's grace is broad enough that all of us twisted sinners are forgiven. This is why Jesus was so upset with the Pharisees. No one has a hold of the whole truth, so the worst sin is to say that you have it. "If you had been blind, your sin would be forgiven. But because you say 'I see' your sin remains." As we interpret the bible to find God's word for us, let us remember that we only see dimly now, but soon we shall see him face to face.