For on a time when a cardinall Bembus did move a question out of the Gospell, the Pope gave him a very contemptuous answer saying: All ages can testifie enough how profitable that fable of Christe hath ben to us and our companie. — John Bale, “The Pageant of the Popes,” 1574

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Christians arguing with other Christians about the “true” nature of Jesus and the church always makes for entertaining reading, but even more so when it comes from an openly gay Catholic whose own intellectualism should undercut his own faith in the first place.

In his new essay for Newsweek, “Christianity in Crisis,” Andrew Sullivan says that we should eschew the influence of politics and power that has crept into religion and get back to the “radical ideas” that spring from what Jesus did and said, including loving both our neighbors and enemies, turning the other cheek, giving away all material possessions and loving God the Father, whom Sullivan calls “the Being behind all things.” Presumably, this being is distinct from Jesus, yet Sullivan admits that he believes in the “divinity and resurrection” of Christ. That’s at least two gods in which Sullivan believes. We can imagine that there are three since most Catholics believe in the Hoy Spirit, which, when assembled, they call the Triune. Since the Holy Spirit is really just God the Father in spirit, I don’t really count that, so let’s just go with the two. So, Sullivan believes in two distinct beings, one that came to earth as a human but who was also divine and eventually was resurrected and another god who was behind everything that is. From any monotheistic viewpoint, this is troubling, but this is what every Jesus-as-divine believer must admit, that they believe in two distinct gods. Or not … depending on which verses one reads. Christians often support the Triune business by quoting the John 10:30 line that reads, “I and the Father are one.” Yet, the verse directly before it claims that, “My Father … is greater than all.”

But who knows. And that’s the point. Biblical scholars now have a clearer understanding of which parts of the gospels may be authentic, and in turn, which quotes attributed to Jesus he might have actually uttered (if he existed at all). One thing we do know: the gospels were written decades after the events took place, and there is not one contemporary source that attests to his existence. Further, the non-contemporary, extra-biblical texts that mention Jesus may point to a figure by that name roaming around the desert, but scant references to a Jesus by Josephus or some other early historian is a far cry from evidence that he was supernatural.

Sullivan knows this. He also knows that Jefferson, whom he rallies to the call in defense of Jesus’ simple truths, was not a Christian in any modern sense and rejected Christ as a divine being. On Jefferson, Sullivan declares of the Jeffersonian Bible:

And what he (Jefferson) grasped in his sacrilegious mutilation of a sacred text was the core simplicity of Jesus’ message of renunciation. He believed that stripped of the doctrines of the Incarnation, Resurrection, and the various miracles, the message of Jesus was the deepest miracle.

While the latter is a clever sentence, Jefferson clearly saw no miracles and was only attempting to get after the rote details of Jesus’ life and the core precepts that he espoused. Jefferson said he was a “real Christian,” but only to the extent that he thought some of Jesus’ words were laudable, and that’s as far as Jefferson was willing to go.

Yet, despite what Sullivan describes as

a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory

he still seems to hold these works in high regard and for reasons that escape comprehension. If he readily admits that the gospels contain embellishments, how is he to trust the parts that he likes? How does he know that those parts — love they neighbor, turn the other cheek, etc. — authentically sprang from the mouth of Jesus and are not creations of equally fallible memories. How does he even know that those high precepts originated with Jesus, or the gospel writers, in the first place, or that most of the key episodes of the New Testament (virgin birth, ascension) were even New Testament constructs.

Indeed, many of the great ideas of Christ predate his uttering them. As for other elements that were likely copied from other religions, here’s a handy guide.

Sullivan conclusion doesn’t get any better. Earlier in his essay, he claims that

The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the  profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they’ve always been?

But the profoundest human questions are quests for knowledge independent of faith or religion. God, in short, is not the author of the questions or the answers. He’s a distraction from them since to assume a god in contemplating these questions makes the calculus even that more convoluted because we must then explain where God came from. The “thirst” that Sullivan no doubts feels in his soul can be rightly explained simply as a thirst for knowledge and truth, and while I have no doubt that Sullivan is a deep thinker, he seems to be also in deep denial. It is hard to tell whether this is out of fear of hellfire or merely out of devotion for the things of faith. If he already admits that the gospels are copies upon copies containing story “told by those with fallible memory” what is stopping him from throwing the whole thing out with the bath water?

Perhaps David Wimberly has it right. Here is part of his comment posted under the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s refutation of Sullivan’s article:

I stopped reading Sullivan some time ago as he continues to position himself as an intellectual but clearly cannot escape the fear from his catholic upbring. I have observed him to simply be a humanist in denial-as in someone guided by human morality-a morality built of our need to coexist.

His flat out refusal to overcome irrational fear of damnation and childish notions of fairy tales and to continually blame the contemporary church for crimes predicted by the reality of what his religion is make him sound more and more shrill in his attempts to square what he thinks is some higher intellect with the absurdity of his faith.

By faith Abraham, even though he was past age–and Sarah herself was barren–was enabled to become a father because he [fn] considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore. All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. — Heb. 11:11-13

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The entire biblical narrative hinges on a promise, that is, the promise from Yahweh to Abram that God would give him and his descendants the land of Canaan “forever,” as quoted in Gen. 13:14-15.

God did not live up to this promise. The lands in and around “Canaan” were in those early epochs and still are contested territories, as evidenced by the constant strife in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Of course, “Canaan” encompassed more than just Israel and the West Bank to include parts of modern-day Jordan and Syria and other areas, so God is still far from living up to his long-past promise to Abram and the tribes of Israel. Christians here will say that in Christ, a new Covenant was formed by which Christ will reconcile Jews and Gentiles and allow everyone who believes to be saved through Jesus. Here is Jeremiah 31:29–31:

In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge. Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah.

OK fine, but one may ask: what about the old covenant? Did God change his mind? Did he decide that he wasn’t quite up to the task of protecting Israel to the point where that nation would be able to inhabit and control the entirety of Canaan? Why did God supposedly make a new covenant when the old one wasn’t fulfilled when Jesus came, and it still has not been fulfilled. Didn’t God describe the covenant with Abram as one that would last “forever?” And further, why is God so concerned with a land grab? What’s so important about land? Wouldn’t the spiritual aspects of religion be more important than just conquering territory?

Further, doesn’t this destroy Yahweh’s credibility in the first place when a) his character alone was not enough to compel Israel to fervently follow him? If you will recall, God and his hand-picked nation had a rather strained relationship through most of the Old Testament, with the following scenario playing out in droll and ludicrous fashion: Israel disobeys and/or falls into idol worship, God gets pissed, Israel repents, brief interlude, Israel falls into idol worship again, God gets pissed, Israel repents, rinse and repeat … you get the picture. And b) wouldn’t an all-knowing God have anticipated the “hiccups” in his own plan and tweaked his schemes so that they would have worked out right the first time? As I have said repeatedly, he knew everything from the start: the fall, subsequent disobedience and the failure of his own covenant. He knew that he either would not or could not meet the terms of his own covenant before he created man in the first place. But he proceeded anyway, if we are to believe the Bible, or else, we must grant that God is not all-knowing. So which is it? Neither option, I’m afraid, bodes well for Christianity.

I conclude with some thoughts from Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography from a Q&A. Here, Miles is using a strictly literary interpretation of scripture, but one that is nonetheless poignant because the tale is scarcely logical from a literary standpoint (That is, it doesn’t even make much sense within a book framework) much less a framework in which we are supposed to believe it is true in reality.

Here is Miles:

The fresh start that God makes with Abraham is a kind of lowering of his sights. Rather than promising fertility and world dominion to the human species as a whole and attempting to maintain a satisfactory relationship with us, he makes those promises with special intensity and specificity to just one clan. The complication that follows, however, is that he must become a warrior on behalf of that clan, something he had not needed to be before taking this step. God’s most extravagant military commitments are made after his people suffer their most devastating military defeat, the defeat by Babylon that destroys Solomon’s temple and carries much of Israel into exile. Read either in the Jewish or the Christian order, the Hebrew scriptures end with this promise unfulfilled. At the time when God chooses to become a Jew himself, five hundred years have passed, and still this promise has not been kept.

This is the question, the divine dilemma, to which, as I read the them, the Gospels are the resolution. Nothing could be more evident than that God has some kind of reservation about returning to massive military action. My suggestion is that he develops late in his life the awareness which he lacks at the start–namely, a realization that if he had left his human creatures as he had originally made them–living as immortals in a world without scarcity, sexual conflict, or toil–he might never have felt so estranged from them. His ultimate task is somehow to restore that condition. But his immediate task is to both reveal and explain to his chosen people that their divine military protector is never going to take the field again. The moment is poignant, even heartbreaking, and yet it carries glory within it as a seed carries a flower.

I said that the biblical account is not even logical from a literary standpoint because the Bible says that God is the same yesterday, today and forever, yet God did change his mind and his entire method for dealing with his own creation, if we assume the entirety of the Old and New testaments. For Miles’ point to stick, however, God must be a being capable of “developing.” But nowhere do I find this in Christian teaching.

To this day, Christian apologists continue to roll out Josephus as Jesus’ great savior from being lost to history completely. In fact, Josephus is the only thread by which they have to hang.

To put it simply, there are no contemporary references to Jesus outside of the Bible. Not one. The only first century account of him came, oddly enough, from Josephus, an observant Jew. Here is the oft-quoted passage from Josephus in context to show how the paragraph in question is most certainly a later edition to the text:

2. But Pilate undertook to bring a current of water to Jerusalem, and did it with the sacred money, and derived the origin of the stream from the distance of two hundred furlongs. However, the Jews (8) were not pleased with what had been done about this water; and many ten thousands of the people got together, and made a clamor against him, and insisted that he should leave off that design. Some of them also used reproaches, and abused the man, as crowds of such people usually do. So he habited a great number of his soldiers in their habit, who carried daggers under their garments, and sent them to a place where they might surround them. So he bid the Jews himself go away; but they boldly casting reproaches upon him, he gave the soldiers that signal which had been beforehand agreed on; who laid upon them much greater blows than Pilate had commanded them, and equally punished those that were tumultuous, and those that were not; nor did they spare them in the least: and since the people were unarmed, and were caught by men prepared for what they were about, there were a great number of them slain by this means, and others of them ran away wounded. And thus an end was put to this sedition.

3. Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, (9) those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; (10) as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

4. About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder, and certain shameful practices happened about the temple of Isis that was at Rome. I will now first take notice of the wicked attempt about the temple of Isis, and will then give an account of the Jewish affairs. … – Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, Chapter 3, Articles 2-4.

Article 3 is obviously the passage that Christians pull out of context and attempt to claim this is evidence for Jesus outside of scripture. First, an observing Jew would not admit that Jesus was the Christ, much less make laudatory comments about him like: there were “ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.”

Second, notice how Article 2 ends and how Article 4 begins. Skipping Article 3, the text reads, “And thus an end was put to this sedition” to “About the same time another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder.” There was no hint in Article 3 that the coming of Christ was a “calamity.” However, the events in Article 2 describe a number of Jews getting killed and wounded by Pilate’s overzealous soldiers, and if were to jump to Article 4, we read about “another sad calamity.” Article 3 represents an abrupt shift in both tone and content from the other two articles. Thus, Josephus’ “Antiquities” as an account of the historical Jesus falls. The gospels themselves, of course, fall on their own right, but since I have noted that repeatedly on this site, a suggestion to use the search feature to the right will do for now.

For further reading, see: The Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Antiquity to the Present by Alice Whealey (Berkeley, Calif.).

Here’s a video that explains more about the lack of external sources, including a fuller explanation of the Josephus text above:

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where [is] Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: [Am] I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now [art] thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. — Genesis 4:9-12

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Before I continue, let me address a comment that was made to the last entry in this series.

George writes that the points presented in the post about the garden

attempts to play both sides of the fence. Most of what you have here is caricature, and not sound argument.

For instance, the whole bit about how “unethical” God is in the situation relies on one of two foundations – that the Creation story pictured in Genesis 2 is historical fact or allegory – neither of which is required or expected of the story once properly deconstructed.

I probably should have made the distinction before beginning this series, but I thought it would have been taken for granted. When making arguments, especially ones about religion, one sometimes has to speak as if something in question actually exists or that the opposing argument is sound. This is done in order to explore the consequences of those realities.

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I meant to mention this days ago, but it must have gotten lost in the cobwebs upstairs.

Campus Crusade for Christ, which has held that name since 1951, is changing the name to Cru starting in 2012 (See video above). According to Steve Sellers, vice president for the U.S. branch of the organization, the new name will help to more effectively reach people for Christ. I fail to see how that would be the case but whatever.
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The day will come, when the mystic generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. — Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823

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I recently completed the second biography of Thomas Jefferson that deals specifically with his religion (I have read three Jefferson biographies in total). It is called “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Charles Sanford and presents a rather exhaustive review of the third president’s personal letters to friends and family and other statements about Jesus, the nature of man, the afterlife and other theological issues.

Even today, Christian apologists, politicians, cable news talking heads, modern deists, agnostics and atheists have tried to adopt Jefferson and other American founders as their own, claiming, or not depending on the worldview, the Founders essentially wanted to establish a nation with God or Jesus as its centerpiece, or at the least, create a nation based upon Christian or Judeo-Christian principles. The simple fact is that, at least publicly, most of the Founders were either Congregationalists, Presbyterians or Episcopalians with varying degrees of religious devotion. Here is a list that details each of their specific affiliations. Except for those, like Jefferson, who wrote a great deal about religion in private correspondence, we can say little about what they really believed in their private lives and in their hearts, just as we can little about what Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and Georgia W. Bush really believe. Their outward expressions of faith or participation in church services or public prayers speaks little to what they actually believe behind closed doors or what they write about to friends and family.

That said, Jefferson passed along, and in abundant detail, clues as to his true feelings on religion. We can be grateful that these letters and other statements on religion survived, since knowing the true religiosity of arguably the greatest historical American figure is of utmost importance if we are to make any broader claims as to the true wishes of the Founders on the topic of religion and the separation of church and state.

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I have felt a bit out of the blogging groove as of late. Even in years past when I have left town for vacation, I still found time for a post or two, as in 2008 when I wrote from Boston about the presidential debate between then-candidates Barack Obama and John McCain or in 2010 when I marveled about how difficult it was for a tourist like myself to get a clear view of the ocean on the coast of Maine.

From Sea to Shining Sea: Robert Leckie

So, let me briefly review what I’ve been up to the last couple weeks. As I hinted, I was on vacation in New England last week. Unlike in 2010 or 2008 (or the time before that), I didn’t bother to actually go into the city this time. My friend lives about 10 minutes north of Boston on the North Shore, so I mostly stayed in that general area, visiting numerous used book stores in Rowley, Manchester-by-the-Sea and Danvers. Among them were  the Used Book Superstore, (This is a chain store, but the one I visited was in Danvers), Broken in Books (Rowley) and my favorite, Manchester by the Book (Manchester-by-the-Sea). In total, I came back to Georgia with seven books, and while I did visit Barnes & Noble once in Peabody, Mass., I resisted the urge to buy any brand new books. Prior to making it to Boston, I stayed over a couple days in Plymouth, where I drove past but did not actually see, what others described as “unimpressive” rock of that town’s fame.

I have also been reading quite a bit. Since the editor of the paper where I work seems fond of calculating the completion percentage of whatever history book through which he’s currently plowing (I believe he’s at 90 percent), I recently tabulated mine. I am about 72 percent done with From Sea to Shining Sea (not to be confused with this one), the former of which is a 600-page romp through the War of 1812, the war with Mexico and America’s westward expansion. It is an elegant and entertaining read and not so erudite that it’s inaccessible to the common reader. I plan to begin “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” next, which will no doubt make the incontrovertible case that while Jefferson made outward shows toward religion, he was privately more likely a deist and did not believe in the various miracles attributed to Christ. According to Charles Sanford:

From the evidence of his life, we may safely conclude that Jefferson remained a member in good standing of his local Episcopal church all his life, in outward form at least. His inward convictions were another matter, however. His great-grandson described Jefferson’s religion as that of a “conservative Unitarian….He did not believe in the miracles, nor the divinity of Christ, nor the doctrine of the atonement, but he was a firm believer in Divine Providence, in the efficacy of prayer, in a future state of rewards and punishments, and in the meeting of friends in another world.”

Jefferson also famously said in a letter to Benjamin Rush:

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every from of tyranny over the mind of man.

In any case, I’m quite anticipating reading the book on Jefferson after I finish my romp through America’s expansionist years.

Otherwise, I have been catching up on my Counter Strike: Source, which I did not get to play at all while on vacation. This is a super high priority, I know, especially for someone who puts so much importance on reading and studying, but since I don’t watch much TV, I’ve got to have an engine by which to channel a little nightly frivolity. Of course, even at that, I am quite competitive and probably take it too seriously. Before going to Boston, for instance, I was quite disappointed with the my so-called “KDR” or kill-death ratio (It was o.95 or something. Quite unacceptable), but happily, the server was reset, and so too were the stats. Now, I’m at about 1.07. While some players’ KDR is above 1.50, anything above 1.0 is respectable in my case. I tend to quit the round or “spectate” if I find myself slipping too far below 1.0 so as not to totally screw up my stats. So much for the mirth.

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Site notes: I just updated the software to version WordPress 3.1.3, and for anyone who uses WordPress plugins, you may want to shy away from Statpress. Although I had been using it for quite some time, it apparently caused some overload issues on one of my web host’s servers. My host, IXwebhosting.com, had to disable my database until I detected and fixed the problem. Luckily, the word “statpress” actually appeared in the error message generated by the server, so the culprit was clear.

Here is a recent article from The New York Times about the Rev. Rob Bell, who is pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., and has taken some heat from fellow Christians about his more, I would have to say, watered down version of the Gospel message.

In an upcoming book titled, “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived,” he said the idea that “a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better” is “misguided and toxic.”

And here is a video that makes a similar case, the message of which is elusive at best:

In the video, Bell asked whether Gandhi is really in hell right now.

He is? And someone knows this for sure?

He goes on to ask other questions about the central tenants of Christianity.

Will only a few select people make it to heaven, and will billions of billions of people burn forever in hell, and if that’s the case, how do you become one of the few? Is it what you believe or what you say or what you do or who you know or something that happens in your heart? … How does one become one of these few?

And then he tackles the nature of God:

The real question (is): What is God like? Because millions and millions of people were taught that the primary message, the center of the gospel of Jesus is that God is going to send you to hell unless you believe in Jesus. … The message that gets taught is that Jesus rescues you from God, but what kind of god is that, that we would need to be rescued from this god. How can that god ever be good? How can that god ever be trusted? And how could that god ever be good news. This is why lots of people want nothing to do with the Christian faith. They see it as an endless list of absurdities and inconsistencies, and they say why would I ever want to be a part of that?

See, what we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like. What you discover in the Bible is so surprising, unexpected and beautiful that whatever we’ve been told or taught, the good news is actually better than that. Better than you could ever imagine. The good news is that love wins.

First, some doctrinal points that need to be cleared up. I think most evangelical Christians would argue that God doesn’t actually send a person to hell himself, that he allows an eternal separation to take place between himself and the unbeliever because that person has rejected his offer and plan of salvation. Thus, even with that, the hellfire and brimstone message of, say, 19th-century pastors gets slightly watered down. Many still believe that there is a literal (or literally spiritual, whatever that means) place called hell that millions will visit upon their deaths because they rejected the gospel message, but nowadays, that eternal torment or punishment basically amounts to a separation from God. Whether that means literal pain or spiritual torment forever or eternal darkness or an eternal loveless state away from the one who supposedly is equal to love itself, doctrine isn’t quite clear. Regardless, I personally would agree with Bell. If God is all-loving and all-powerful, he is perfectly within his purview to remove and rescue people from their dire spiritual situation in which he himself has placed them by creating them. If he is all-powerful, he can within a moment, pluck a person from perdition into light. Presumably, he chooses not to do this. Thus, if he doesn’t explicitly send folks to hell, he certainly does implicitly. I would still argue for the former, given his contradictory attributes of being both all-powerful and all-loving.

Second, what Bell is doing here is quite clear. He’s attempting to appeal to a new generation of people who increasingly can’t at all relate to the traditional message because they find it to be too ghastly and abhorrent (and inconsistent, as Bell admits). Thus, Bell seems to be practicing and preaching some kind of moderate religion in which believers can’t comprehend that an all-loving God would really judge people right into eternal torment. The message anyone with a functioning heart can get behind — even skeptics — is that love wins. So, the hope, I would suppose, is that such a message might appeal to a wider audience and even draw in some folks who were disillusioned with the old message.

But I would argue that moderate religion is even more dishonest than fundamentalism because it seems to ignore John 3:16 (… “whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”) and numerous preachments from elsewhere in the New Testament. Is there any wiggle room here in the word, “should,” to possibly suggest that belief isn’t mandatory and that perishing is not a given for the unbeliever? I’m not so sure.

As ever, neuroscientist Sam Harris is eloquent on the case against moderation:

Reading scripture more closely, one does not find reasons to be a religious moderate; one finds reasons to be a proper religious lunatic—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, etc. Of course, anyone can cherry-pick scripture and find reasons to love his neighbor and to turn the other cheek. But the more fully a person grants credence to these books, the more he will be convinced that infidels, heretics, and apostates deserve to be smashed to atoms in God’s loving machinery of justice.

…

Another problem with religious moderation is that it represents precisely the sort of thinking that will prevent a rational and nondenominational spirituality from ever emerging in our world. Whatever is true about us, spirituality and ethically, must be discoverable now. Consequently, it makes no sense at all to have one’s spiritual life pegged to rumors of ancient miracles. What we need is discourse about ethics and spiritual experience that is as unconstrained by ancient ignorance as the discourse of science already is. Science really does transcend the vagaries of culture: there is no such thing as “Japanese” as opposed to “French” science; we don’t speak of “Hindu biology” and “Jewish chemistry.” Imagine a world in which we could truly have an honest and open-ended conversation about our place in the universe and about the possibilities of deepening our self-understanding, ethical wisdom, and compassion. By living as if some measure of sectarian superstition were essential to human happiness, religious moderates prevent such a conversation from ever taking shape.⁽⁽¹⁾⁾

Following is the conclusion of Mars Hill’s moderate statement of “narrative theology”:

We believe the day is coming when Jesus will return to judge the world, bringing an end to injustice and restoring all things to God’s original intent. God will reclaim this world and rule forever. The earth’s groaning will cease, and God will dwell with us here in a restored creation. On that day we will beat swords into tools for cultivating the earth, the wolf will lie down with the lamb, there will be no more death, and God will wipe away all our tears. Our relationships with God, others, ourselves, and creation will be whole. All will flourish as God intends. This is what we long for. This is what we hope for. And we are giving our lives to living out that future reality now.

Not terribly clear, is it? God’s “original intent” seems to suggest the new heaven and new earth stuff that is supposed to be established following Christ’s return. Presumably this comes after Jesus separates the wheat from the chaff, sending billions to perdition, but we have no mention of such nastiness in the above statement. (Here’s a handy timeline of how it’s supposed to shake down in the end.)

Of course, to even suggest that God had original intents that somehow didn’t go as planned means that A) God is clumsy or B) God isn’t omniscient after all or C) that he isn’t worthy of worship, since he — assuming he’s still omniscient — knowingly set humans up to fail by giving us free will and then planting a carrot in front of our faces in the form of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then allowing (with his head turned the other way, perhaps?) the serpent to creep in and tempt man. Believers retort that God allowed the temptation because God didn’t want slaves or robots. He wanted people who would willingly follow him. But we allow people to love us every day without subjecting them to cruel tests to prove that love. Why is this logic lost on an omniscient god?

The point is that moderate religion picks and chooses which bits of the Bible it advocates. If one is to gloss over or ignore the judgment, the separation of the wheat from the chaff and eternal suffering, he must also be willing to ignore Luke 21:36, Revelation 3:5, Revelation 22:12, 1 Peter 4:17, Ecclesiastes 3:17, John 5:28-29 and many other passages.

Whatever one might call this religion once these passages and others are redacted from the canon, it can’t be called Christianity. Thus, I’m not sure what sort of specific doctrines Bell is purporting, and while I might appreciate a more open-minded look at some basic questions about the nature of God by a religious person as presented in the Bible, Bell’s method is still a rather dubious and nebulous attempt to draw people into the fold with a love-infused message. Admittedly, it has worked. Mars Hill has about 10,000 members.

Many, even myself, wholeheartedly agree that “love wins.” Some just don’t feel the need to summon God to make it so. As it turns out, love wins every day without him.

And to answer the earlier question: yes, under Christian doctrine Gandhi really is in hell.

1. Sam Harris, “Letter to a Christian Nation“ [↩]

Glad they cleared this up for us:

And here is the equally nebulous Athanasian Creed:

…. we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all One, the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father Uncreate, the Son Uncreate, and the Holy Ghost Uncreate. The Father Incomprehensible, the Son Incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost Incomprehensible. The Father Eternal, the Son Eternal, and the Holy Ghost Eternal and yet they are not Three Eternals but One Eternal. As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible. So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not Three Almighties but One Almighty.

So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not Three Gods, but One God. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not Three Lords but One Lord.

Sounds like a lot of specious reasoning and begging the question to me. For all the Church’s accomplishments or good deeds in the world, lucidity would not be among them.

[Of course, I wouldn't bother with the last 1 1/2 minutes of the video because the site owner solicits donations. While I don't disagree with a person's right to donate to a certain charity they believe in, the bit at the end of this video seemed hauntingly like any other pleadings seen on religious channels. In other words, revolting. Thus, the same applies for believers and nonbelievers: if you want to produce free videos on YouTube or elsewhere, by all means, produce away. But do it with your own funds.]

On the assumption that it’s all true, this website points out that some 2.5 million (2,476,633 to be exact) were apparently killed by God in the Bible, which as the site creator points out, is a gross underestimate of the actual total. As the site notes,

It doesn’t include, in many cases, women and children, and it completely leaves out some of God’s more impressive kills. (Like the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the firstborn Egyptian children, etc.)

So what happens if you use estimates when the Bible provides only numbers for adult male victims or no numbers at all?

25 million.

This is the estimate of the number of people God killed directly in the Bible, including women and children.

Here’s a detailed chart accounting for each of them.