Category Archives: Others’ stuff

The Chosen

Reviews, Others' stuff, Insights
This entry is part 32 of 32 in the series About the Bible - Inerrancy, Infallibility, Inspiration and Revelation

Every so often – actually, no; it’s really quite rare, but let’s say occasionally – a really superb and thought-provoking TV or movie series comes along that really makes its watchers think about just Who Jesus was, and what He taught. The better programmes also examine the effect that Jesus had on those who met Him; those whom He healed, and why His enemies hated Him so much.

A great example of this was the series Messiah, which was first aired a few years ago. While not explicitly about Jesus, it was still brilliant and was highly instructive in so many ways. A multifaceted feast of fascinating stories, if you will[1].

Well, only last week, I discovered quite by accident[2] a superb, well I might say ‘new’ series, but actually it had its humble beginnings in 2017 and became more popular in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s called The Chosen and it stars Jonathan Roumie as Jesus. And it’s absolutely brilliant.

Rather than do a 633 Squadron on you, where you have to wait until the end for the best bit[3], I will let you know, here and now, how you can get hold of this superb content for yourself and for anyone else you think might be blessed by it.

The first and main place to look is on the main website. The link is here, and the episodes can be streamed directly from that site free of charge. There’s really little else I need to do to help you on this, except maybe to let you know that there is a phone app too (search for it on your phone’s app store under The Chosen; the correct app has an icon showing a turquoise fish and two grey fishes) in which you can stream all the episodes, there’s a physical DVD set you can buy (I got mine on eBay) and there’s also a gift shop for both the UK and the USA.

And the entire series; the episodes themselves – they are all free of charge. Yowser.

So then, to whet your appetite for this brilliant project, here is my review, such as it is.

One of the things I noticed quite early on when reading about Jesus in the Bible, and reading other stories in the Bible too, is that they are not really written like ‘proper’ stories[4] Mainly, the texts are written as wisdom, stories, histories, personal letters and prophecy – which in terms of Hebrew prophecy, it’s written as poetry. The thing that is missing in most of not all of the Bible texts – and that makes them very different from ‘stories’ as we know them today – is that of description. There are no passages that say anything like, ‘Jesus came out of His tent and stretched with a huge smile on His face’, or ‘The group sat on the shores of Lake Galilee; the tops of distant mountains were glowing in the late evening light’. There’s very little descriptive text at all, some few exceptions being things like where someone ‘went away rejoicing’ (Acts 8:39); or the rich young ruler who ‘went away sad’ (Matt 19:22). Or even for Jesus, where you’re given a tiny glimpse into His heart when He was ‘full of joy in the Holy Spirit’ (Luke 10:21). 

In some ways, that’s understandable, because most of the Biblical texts are not written to be read and ‘enjoyed’ in such a way as the reader is actually placed mentally into the situations depicted, as they are in modern novels. How many times have you read a really good book and, when you ‘come up’ from being ‘in’ the book, you might have experienced a momentary disorientation as you come back in the ‘real world’? Well there’s none of that in the Bible. It’s not a compendium that is intended for ‘escapism'[5] Even Jesus Himself is not properly-described; not really, anyway[6]. Although He was described as wearing brilliantly-shining garments during the Transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8, Mark 9:2-13, Luke 9:28-36), even then, this was only in the company of His best friends, and only on the one recorded occasion at any rate – and you can guarantee that He ‘masked’ the glowing stuff before they came down off the mountain! Certainly, if Jesus really had routinely worn brilliantly white shining garments as a matter of course, He definitely wouldn’t have gone around those sporting high-vis threads in public. Nor would He have got away with having a ‘sharp, double-edged sword coming out of His mouth’ (Rev 1:16); the Romans would have arrested Him immediately for sure 🤣. So, we don’t even know what Jesus actually looked like; not from the Bible, anyway. But the real lack of it is that, although Christianity says that Jesus was both God and Human, in some ways the human side of His character is not really all that well-portrayed in the Bible. It never says that He laughs, apart from (you would imagine, anyway) that bit where He was ‘full of joy in the Holy Spirit’. He never hugs anyone; He eats and drinks but the ‘partying’ side of His character, which was so frowned-upon by the Religious elite of His day, can only be inferred from their reaction to it, for example in Luke 7:13, where Jesus’s reply to them is, “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking; and you say, “Behold, a gluttonous man, and a drunkard, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners!”  He wouldn’t have had to say that to them unless they were complaining about His behaviour, either openly or secretly in their hearts[7].

For this reason, depictions in audio and visual media, such as plays, movies, screenplays, podcasts and radio programs are really useful because they can bring the stories to life like mere reading – of a categorically non-descriptive text like the Bible – can never do. These media are of course a feature of modern society; they didn’t have things like that in the past, at least not before the invention of moving pictures and then cinema.

And so, when a really good Jesus series comes out, it’s time to – once again – see how different scriptwriters and such interpret His life, His teachings and His actions. 

The Chosen is such a series. I do not make this comparison lightly – for this next thing changed my life – but a quarter of a century ago, the New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson created the stunning, authentic and beyond-epic movie rendition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings‘. Never before, in my experience, had anyone created such a masterpiece in terms of bringing to life a book that I love so much. Granted, for a Tolkien nerd like me, I was just a little bit nonplussed by some of the plot differences, but the visualisations of the places, characters and story that I knew and loved so well were depicted so much better than I ever imagined anyone could ever do, and yet they were exactly as I imagined them – over the fifty years since I first read the books. Words can’t describe.

In the same way, The Chosen depicts the places, the characters, the miracles, the background – in short, everything in the Gospels – in just the way I’d imagined it all, and then some. There are at present five or six seasons[8], each consisting of eight episodes. In The Chosen, Jesus indeed parties with people; He joins in celebrations like at the wedding in Cana (John 2:1-11); He doesn’t just sit in a corner looking miserable and disapproving, like the Religious would like to think He would have done. No, He’d have joined in. He’d have laughed, danced, drunk wine, hugged people, and even smiled. And He does so – a lot! – in The Chosen. This series is absolutely brilliant. I was going to say that I can’t describe it, but I feel I owe it to you, my dear reader, to attempt to do so!

One of the most striking things is the age of Jesus’s disciples. Jesus looks to be in His early-to-mid 30s or so, and, similarly, His disciples look to be in their late twenties or early thirties. If you do a Google Images search on Jesus’s disciples, you’ll get loads of pictures of hoary old men with long grey beards and turbans. But they wouldn’t have been like that at all. They’d have been young lads, and they are depicted as such in The Chosen. The series also ‘reads between the lines’ a little, in that there’s lots of dialogue between the characters that reflects the wonder of what they are witnessing. Like where Simon Peter says to Mary of Magdala, “Can you believe we are here to see this?”. The freshness and wonder of what Jesus was doing is really brilliantly expressed.

The characters are not fair-skinned, blue-eyed people, as portrayed in much Western artwork and movies depicting Bible stories. Think of the blue-eyed and very white British actor Robert Powell, who played Jesus in the 1978 movie, Jesus of Nazareth, and you’ll understand what I mean:

Robert Powell as Jesus

No, the Israeli characters are played by darker-skinned actors, and they also speak with a rather ersatz[9] ‘Middle Eastern’ accent. Except for the Roman characters, who speak with either an English or mildly American accent. Also really well done is the cosmopolitan nature of first-century Israel. Being at the ‘crossroads’ of many trade routes and central to the land-bridge between Africa, Europe and Asia, ancient Israel was a hotbed of differing cultures, peoples and races. This is why the story of the people who witnessed the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost tells this:

“Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. And when this sound [The disciples speaking ‘in tongues’] rang out, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking his own language. Astounded and amazed, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it then that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism; Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!’ Astounded and perplexed, they asked one another, ‘What does this mean?’ “

(Acts 2:5-12)

And  The Chosen reflects this eclectic mix of peoples really very well; the story-immersion resulting from the authenticity really is remarkable.

There’s lots of really great characterisations, such as the earnest and honest seeking of Nicodemus (brilliantly played by veteran actor Erick Avari), the impulsive, fiery and indeed ‘laddish’ Simon Peter, played by the Israeli actor Shahar Isaac, and Paras Patel‘s superb rendition of the fussy, pernickety, and quite probably Autistic, Matthew the tax collector.

Many nice touches are included too. Simon’s wife[10] ‘Eden’ is a lovely, down-to-earth and honest lady who absolutely adores him, and their on-screen chemistry is a delight to see. The excellent portrayal of decent, conscientious and honest Pharisees like Shmuel, as opposed to the High Priest, Caiaphas, who seems to be in it (in the episodes I have seen so far, anyway) just for the prestige and power. Then there’s the Roman Praetor, Quintus, who is ambitious, scheming and cunning, but who has the redeeming quality of recognising Matthew’s ability to think unconventionally (which is why I think he’s supposed to be Autistic)[11] – even if that recognition is only to be used to further his own ambitions[12]. Compare Quintus with the gritty, practical and down-to-Earth Roman Centurion Gaius who nevertheless recognises Jesus for Who He is. He’s the guy whose servant is ‘remotely’ healed by Jesus as per Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10. And Elizabeth Tabish‘s Mary of Magdala is simply superb.

There are also some great theological lessons in there too, which are presented in excellent ‘backstory’ scenes – in that they are not of themselves in the Bible, but are placed in the episodes to flesh out the story. A great example is this little excerpt where the Pharisee Nicodemus is tutoring his student Shmuel on God not being a static idea:

I could go on. But it’s far better for me to simply shut up and let you go and look at this, yes, phenomenon, for yourself. There are many clips from The Chosen on YouTube. And I would say that, without exception, every single one has, in its comments section, many testimonies of how The Chosen has brought to life the Gospel stories like nothing that people have ever seen. Granted, there’s a lot of clickbait out there too. But the overwhelming message of those testimonies is that God has touched people’s lives through this series like few recent things have. Jesus has become more real to people who just want more of Him in their lives. People’s faith; people’s personal walk with Jesus, has been transformed by this series.

Of course, there’s also been naysayers who complain that it is not exactly faithful to the Scriptures. People whose hearts are hardened to the amazing thing that this content really is. These people, like the legalists in Matthew 12:22-32, miss out on what Jesus is doing because they are so convinced that they are more right than He is. They miss the things that God is doing because they have their heads so far into their own preconceptions, and what they think the Messianic prophecies will look like when they actually happen. They therefore have neither the eyes to see, nor the ears to hear. Well, it’s their loss, and I have no sympathy for them – except that their precinceptions have likely come partly from others’ influence. God will hopefully give those people too the ears to hear, someday.

But, for myself, even though I already know Jesus personally, and have experienced Him in ways that maybe others haven’t, this series has strengthened even my faith. It’s lit up the Gospels like nothing else. It’s also taught me things about my own thinking that I won’t mention here – the Secret of the Lord and all that.

But I am absolutely sure that, if you watch these series, your faith will be strengthened too.

Peace and Grace to you!

 

Header Picture depicts actor Jonathan Roumie as Jesus of Nazareth

 

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 And please accept apologies for the partial and fully unintentional alliteration!
⇧2 At least, by accident from a human perspective; I am absolutely sure that this was one of those God-appointments. I feel as if I was totally set up… 😉
⇧3 Yes, the 633 Squadron syndrome is my cynical term for making people wait until the end for the best bit. It comes from the epic 1964 movie, 633 Squadron, in which the film builds up, through a series of stories, subplots and other adventures, to the climactic battle at the end. The ‘original’ Star Wars  movie – later called Star Wars Episode IV – A New Hope – was also structured like this, and was in fact inspired by 633 Squadron, as openly acknowledged by George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars universe. Both films are excellent, of course, and I only use the term fondly!

The reason the term is cynical is because I see it as a very common tactic used by sports organisers, where they have a lot of build-up before the event itself; by rock concert organisers where they have supporting acts before the main act (which is of course actually good for the supporting act) and especially at churches. This might be for a communion service, where they make you wait until the end before you get your bread and wine. Or, especially, at a baptismal service where you have to sit through all the other stuff and people talking at you before you get to the fun bit at the end. It also happens on clickbait websites where they make you click through pages and pages of preamble before letting you read the news article or whatever that you really came for – if indeed you do actually get to it at all. I very quickly escape from those sites once I realise what’s happening. In short, it’s where they make you sit and wait – rather like being in a school detention – rather than getting around to the bit that everyone has really come to see. And that’s why I have put this as a footnote, so that it gives you the option of not reading it should you so wish!

⇧4 Specifically in the context of this essay, the Gospels, which are really the parts we’re concerned with here as The Chosen is a rendition of the Gospels. The Gospels are written more as a collection of anecdotes and are written as history; Jesus said this, Jesus did that. They are presented more as factual than entertainment.
⇧5 Which probably lends more credence to its authenticity, in fact, because there’s no mechanism in there for suspension of disbelief or immersive description, which in a fiction or propaganda document would be plentiful. There’d be lots of narrative content such as adverbs and adjectives – descriptive words – to draw the reader in. But there’s none of that; not really.
⇧6 Except, notably, at the beginning of the book of Revelation (Rev 1:13-16). The description there, of course, is in an apocalyptic vision and as such the writer is trying to describe the indescribable, and all that while in the apocalyptic mode – which means that it is written in a sort of code. Much of Revelation was – and is – never intended to be taken literally, and it would be a mistake to do so.
⇧7 Knowing the terminally self-righteous mindset, though, they would doubtless have been openly criticising His ‘sinfulness’ because that’s what self-righteous people did back then, and still do nowadays too.
⇧8 I think Season 6, the final season, is currently being filmed at the time of my writing this
⇧9 Although, for some of the actors, they actually are of Middle Eastern origin, and their accents are therefore likely genuine!
⇧10 As far as we know, from church tradition, Simon Peter was the only one of Jesus’s disciples who was married. We know that he was married, or at least possibly widowed, from the Gospel story told in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, in Mt 8:14-15, Mk 1:29-31 and Lk 4:38-39. In addition, 1Cor 9:5 mentions that other Apostles were also married, but it doesn’t say which ones. The reference in 1Cor9:5 refers to ‘Cephas’; this is Simon Peter.
⇧11 [Edit]: Turns out I was right. The chartacter of Matthew, as portrayed in The Chosen, is indeed supposed to he Autistic. Here’s what The Chosen’s Director, Dallas Jenkins, writes about him:

“Dallas Jenkins, the creator and director of the show that has captivated millions, decided to depict the Biblical character of Matthew as a person on the autism spectrum.

“When we were first choosing Matthew to be a featured character, we noticed, ‘Okay, he is a numbers guy because he’s a tax man. He’s a facts guy because the first chapter of his book is a genealogy divided into three sections of 14 names apiece, so he’s very precise,” Jenkins explains to WW.

Jenkins continues, “He chose a profession that made him an outcast. I’m very familiar with the autism community. It’s in my family. I’ve done a lot of volunteer work there, so looking at that I go, ‘Boy, these are traits of Asperger’s or someone the autism spectrum. Wouldn’t that be interesting, very human and relatable to have a character who is like that? Is it factual? I don’t know. It’s plausible, and I think one of the top things that we’ve seen people relate to most with the show is the character of Matthew.”

And Matthew is played to perfection by non-Autistic actor Paras Patel; this role really showcases the guy’s acting ability and has in fact led him into becoming an advocate for the Autism community.

Quotation is from this article on Woman’s World.com

⇧12 I love that quality in Quintus; how he recognises the special ability – call it a ‘superpower’ if you like – that Matthew has of being able to think like that. I too have that superpower and my boss in my last job knew about it, and invited me to participate in certain work meetings specifically because he knew I would bring a unique perspective to things because of that superpower. What a guy.

Attack of the Love Buts

Insights, Others' stuff
This entry is part 17 of 18 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism

I’ve written quite a lot on the kind of people – I call them the ‘grey people’ – who try to make the Good News into Bad News; people who deny the fantastic, complete and brilliant salvation[1] that Jesus brought. You tell them why you are full of joy, and they promptly tell you why you shouldn’t be full of joy[2]. We’ve all met these people! And, to me at least, these people – and their negative attitudes – are very much a part of the Problems of Evangelicalism, and thus the article is part of my eponymous series[3].

Well, some six years ago now, the brilliant Keith Giles wrote an article closely related to that subject, and I share it here in its entirety with his kind and indeed enthusiastic permission. Although the article is six years old, it is still fully relevant and timely, as I’m sure you will agree!

Attack of the Love Buts

Try this experiment.

Step 1: Post “God is Love” on Facebook or Twitter.

Step 2: Wait 10 minutes.

Step 3: Read dozens of posts from Christians who are eager to remind you that God is love, BUT God is also a God of wrath.

This is my life. Almost every single week. I get responses from Christians – always Christians – who cannot allow a post like “God is love and all who live in love live in God, and God in them” rest on its own without adding the asterisk about God’s wrath.

Just last week I posted: “For those who say we focus on Love too much, please remember: God IS Love”.

The first comment was from a friend of mine, Leyna Nguyen, who is not a Christian. Her response was: “There are people who say this?!”

And around 5 comments below hers, the wave of wrath started to crash. 115 comments later, the post led us to statements like this one: “God loves and never stops but He also hates. Hate is not the opposite of love and God has shown He does both continuously.”

[sigh]

My friend Glenn Warner calls these people “Love Buts”, because when you remind them that God is love, they must respond by saying, “Yes, God is love, BUT…”

Why is this? Why are some Christians so insistent upon contradicting all the numerous verses in the New Testament that practically gush with the extravagant love of God?

I mean, this is just a small sample of the verses I’m thinking of when it comes to the love of God:

“For God so LOVED the world…” [John 3:16]

“The LOVE of God is higher, wider, longer and deeper than anyone can imagine”[Eph. 3:14-21]

“Nothing will ever separate us from the LOVE of God” [Rom. 8:31-39]
“The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through LOVE” [Gal. 5:6]

“LOVE is patient. LOVE is kind. LOVE keeps no record of wrongs.” [1 Cor. 13]

“God is LOVE.” [1 John 4:7-21]

Etc.

Do you know what you will never read following any of these pontifications on the amazing, unending, extravagant love of God?

You will never once read anything about the wrath of God to “balance” out this teaching.

You also never once read any statements about how you and I are unworthy of God’s love, or how we can’t earn or deserve God’s love.

Never. Not even once.

Instead, what we read is page after page, verse after verse of the fantastic, endless, transformative LOVE of God that is poured out on us night and day like a never-ending waterfall.

So, like it or not, we are loved.

What I don’t understand is why some Christians are so eager to shut down this love train. Why do they seem so afraid of a God whose character is love? Why are they threatened by a God who IS love?

Worse: Why are some Christians MORE afraid of a God of love than they are of a God of Wrath?

That’s what I legitimately do not comprehend.

Perhaps this is “Big Brother” syndrome? Like when the Prodigal Son returns home and the Father forgives him so completely and quickly and throws the party for him, it’s the older brother who can’t handle it. He hates the idea of this extravagant love being shared with his brother the “sinner” who deserves to sleep outside with the servants.

Maybe that’s the reason why some Christians today want to pencil into the margins of their Bibles a long list of wrathful God examples to balance out the overly-loving verses about a God who reconciles, forgives, embraces, restores, and loves His children no matter what they do.

What’s strange to me is that their New Testament scriptures don’t reflect their bias towards wrath, so they literally have to reach all the way back to the Old Testament – before Jesus came to us with the Gospel [and grace and truth] –  to find the pictures of a God they like better. Then they cut and paste that angry God’s face over the face of Jesus so they can sleep better at night; rest assured that they are loved and those other “sinners” are going to get what’s coming to them in the end.

But, I can’t buy that. I have to take the New Testament and the “Good News” of Jesus for what it is – Good News!

We are LOVED by a God who IS Love! We were created by this God of Love – in God’s image – so this means we are LOVED! Created by Love, in the image of LOVE, to BE Loved.

This is who we are.

Love is who God is.

Love is what God does.

Loved is who we will always be.

There is no “Love But…” verse in the New Testament. There is only love. Endless, boundless, unending, unrelenting, exceptional, amazing, fantastic, glorious love that we can only experience to believe and receive.

Hopefully one day those who call themselves followers of Jesus will relax and get comfortable with the idea of a God who really is love, inside and out. No “ifs”, “ands” or “buts” allowed.

Until then, I’ll just keep posting about the God who loves us more than life itself.

Won’t you join me?

 – Keith Giles, shared with his kind permission

Link to original article is here.

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 Salvation here referring to it in its broadest and most complete sense of the complete restoration of relationship with God; the wholeness, peace, healing and freedom that Jesus brought. Not the ‘being saved from Hell’ stuff, because I don’t believe in that theology, but even if Hell exists, then He’s saved us from that too.
⇧2 Jesus spoke of these people in Matthew 7:6, where He suggested that people “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces”. And that is exactly what they do. I will let you ponder the meaning and ramifications of such actions performed even by fellow believers!
⇧3 As usual, the idea of ‘the church is, at the same time, both the best, and the worst, witness for Christ’ is true more in the second case (the worst witness) than the first case. These people are a proper pain; funsuckers, emotional vampires and definitely not people you would want to have ‘encourage’ you. They feature quite heavily in the Biblical book of Job 😉

Snacktime

Quotations, Insights, Others' stuff

A short collection of bite-sized quotations for your delectation. Bon appetit!

Anyone who gossips to you will also gossip about you. This is something I learned very early on in life. People have such empty lives if they have to fill it with drivel like that.
– Me

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

If your intent was love, even if the [well-intentioned] action was not perceived as loving by your neighbor, your intention of love and goodwill is more powerful than the perceived failure. There is no wrongdoing in trying to do the right thing and falling short out of innocence or ignorance.
– Julie Ferewarda

“I’ve been searching, Eleanor. After all these years, believe me, I know the truth when I see it. Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light-years. All those worlds. I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away. It’s much better than bottling Him up in one small world. I never liked the idea of Earth as God’s green footstool. It was too reassuring, like a children’s story . . . like a tranquilizer. But your universe has room enough, and time enough, for the kind of God I believe in”.
– Carl Sagan, Contact (pp. 362-363). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

“…what do we do for what is considered “sin”?” [in other people – should we call it out?] – the answer to this begins, as the original post says, right in our own hearts. We have enough of our own problems to worry about without going out to judge others’…that’s simply not our job. As a dear friend of mine once told me, “If you have a problem with me, call me. If you don’t have my number, you don’t know me well enough to have a problem with me”. I think that’s real wisdom, and of course it works both ways. People who don’t know me well enough should not be judging me, and in return, I won’t judge others that I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t judge anyone. 1Cor 2:15 says that “…the spiritual man judges all things [note: things not people!] but he himself is subject to no human judgment”. So if no-one has the right to judge me, a man of the Spirit, then I too will judge no-one else; if I do, I may be inadvertently judging another person with the Spirit. Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do what is right? (Gen 18:25) I’ll leave that to Him; it’s really not my job, nor is it anyone else’s.
– Me

“…the conviction that truth doesn’t melt when it gets warm.”
– Rhonda

[The religious spirit] glories in (what he thinks is) a magnificent parting shot, whereas in actuality it is a damp squib in the face of vastly superior firepower.
– Me

Hurt people hurt people.
Healed people heal people.
Karma’s a bitch.
Karma’s an angel.
– Jeff

“If [human religion] is making a big noise in your life by putting pressure on you, telling you that you are under law, giving you conditions to meet, placing boundaries around your life, expecting you to meet certain requirements, any requirements, tying you into terms and conditions, controlling any aspect of your lifestyle via rules, commanding you to follow him, teaching you that your identity is determined by your level of conformity to his latest dictates, demanding unswerving loyalty to whatever he tells you to believe…..

“…..then you are unlikely to hear the still, small, ever so gentle voice”.
 – John Spinks

Tidbits

Quotations, Insights, Others' stuff

Another collection of bite-sized pieces of interest, wisdom and/or just sheer beautiful prose, from various places.

Dig in!

When his [legendary composer John Williams’s] longtime collaborator, the movie director Steven Spielberg, showed him Schindler’s List, the composer felt it would be too challenging to score. He said to Spielberg, ‘You need a better composer than I am for this film.’ Spielberg responded, ‘I know. But they’re all dead!’
– TV documentary on composer John Williams

[In response to a YouTube movie saying that ‘God is going to send great blessing soon!’] You don’t look all that happy that there’s a great blessing coming….. so hey let me share something with you: Today is the day of salvation! (2Cor 6:2) Today is the day that God has given you in which to enjoy all the fullness and blessing that He pours out on you every day; His mercies are new every morning! Why wait until tomorrow which, yes, will also be blessings, but not live for today’s blessings? Tomorrow will look after itself (Matt 6:34)!
– Me,

[Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism] explained why totalitarians […] promote the incompetent: Totalitarianism in power invariably replaced all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. Arendt also explained, in advance, the [totalitarian in question]’s extraordinary hostility to research, the extraordinary speed with which it is destroying [his country]’s scientific base: The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life.
– Paul Krugman

Imagination is a deadly weapon; it pays to keep it sharp.
– Anon

It seemed he was there to teach, but not to learn…
– Me

Can we get it wrong if we follow the Spirit? Of course. And you don’t have to look very hard to see a few thousand years of people getting it wrong by following the Book, either.
– Keith Giles

…as everyone knows, appeasement only works until the bully decides it doesn’t
– Me

When some people talk about the gospel, you’d think that John 3:16 said: “God so hated the world that he killed his only Son.” Sometimes people say: “That picture is important—wrath and sin and hell and all the rest of it, and it’s because God loves us.” But simply adding the word “love” onto the end of that story can actually be even worse. It is like what abusers do when they say, “I love you so much”—it’s hideous.
– N.T. (‘Tom’) Wright

Tragically, they are often unaware of their own ignorance, with no one to correct them. While spreading misconceptions about fictional characters like Superman, Captain Spock, or Frodo Baggins is one thing, disseminating false ideas about God and doing so in His name carries far greater consequences. The fact some of these ideas are being preached from pulpits backed by a suit and tie, a bible college certificate, and theatrical lighting and amplification only further ratify and facilitate the spread of false doctrines. At the same time, it may explain why there are roughly 45,000 different Christian groups and denominations worldwide today.
– Eitan Bar, The “Gospel” of Divine Abuse: Redeeming the Gospel from Gruesome Popular Preaching of an Abusive and Violent God pp. 69-70. SHAMUS. Kindle Edition.

Regrettably, we live in a time where worship songs and social media exert greater influence on Christian theology and faith culture than the Bible itself.
– Eitan Bar  ibid,  97

That which cannot be earned by moral perfection, cannot be unearned by moral imperfection
– Dr. Michael Heiser

They fly wild, and they fly like a stroke of luck incarnate
– Katherine Rundell, ‘A Carnival of Animals: The Swift’, BBC Radio 4, 8th October, 2025.

Painted into a Corner

Insights, Others' stuff
This entry is part 31 of 32 in the series About the Bible - Inerrancy, Infallibility, Inspiration and Revelation

Here’s the brilliant Brian Zahnd with an interesting thought experiment:

“Let’s play a little game. I’ll ask a few questions and you answer them. Okay?
First question: Did God tell Abraham to kill his son?

You say yes? But hastily add that God didn’t actually require Abraham to go through with it—it was just a test of faith. All right.

Next question: Did God command Joshua, King Saul, and the Israelites to kill children as part of the ethnic cleansing of Canaan?

Is that a hesitant yes I hear, like walking in untied shoes?

My next question is simple and straightforward: Does God change?

I sense your confident answer of no to this question. And you are quite correct. A cornerstone of Christian theology has always been that God is immutable—that is, God doesn’t mutate from one kind of being into another kind of being. The immutability of God is the solid ground upon which our faith stands.

Next question (brace yourself): Since God doesn’t change, and since you’ve already acknowledged that in times past God has sanctioned the killing of children as part of a genocidal program of conquest, is it then possible that God would require *you* to kill children?

You say you don’t like this game? I understand. I don’t really like it either. But bear with me a little more; we’re almost done.

Last question: If God told you to kill children, would you do so?

I know, I know! Calm down. Of course, you answer without hesitation that under no circumstances would you participate in the genocidal slaughter of children. (At least I hope that’s how you answer!)

Yet in answering with an unequivocal no to the question of whether you would kill children, are you claiming a moral superiority to the God depicted in parts of the Old Testament? After all, the Bible says God commanded the Israelites to exterminate the inhabitants of the land during their conquest of Canaan, including children… right? Yet (hopefully) you find the very suggestion of participating in genocide morally repugnant. So what’s going on here? Is genocide something God used to command but now God has reformed his ways? We already agreed that God doesn’t change, God doesn’t mutate. So if God used to sanction genocide, and God doesn’t change… well, you see the problem.

You’ve been painted into a corner.

So where do we go from here? Our options are limited. We really only have three possible courses.

1. We can question the morality of God. Perhaps God is, at times, monstrous.

2. We can question the immutability of God. Maybe God does change over time.

3. We can question how we read Scripture. Could it be that we need to learn to read the Bible in a different way?”

— Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God

The Christians Making Atheists

Insights, Others' stuff
This entry is part 13 of 18 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism

“There is no better, nor no worse, witness for Jesus than the Church” – Anon

This was said to me by a friend a long time ago[1], and I kind-of agree with him – well, at least on the second part of the quote; not quite so much the first![2] And of course this was before the major excesses of American Evangelical Christianity tacitly, or even openly, supporting the inhuman actions and policies of the current (2025) President of the United States, and the Evangelical-led sweeping destruction of democracy through the Evangelical-inspired ‘Project 2025’. I don’t do politics on here, but I do do faith-related matters, and the actions of these people do not in any way reflect the faith that I follow, nor indeed do they reflect the teachings of its Founder. End of story; no further comment required.

Fortunately, at the moment, it’s nowhere near as bad as this in my country; we tend to be a lot more open-minded and cosmopolitan in our outlook. But if the Religious people in Evangelicalism have their way, that could of course change.

If you are an Evangelical in the UK, or any other country for that matter, do not let your leadership lull you into the idea that Jesus is, or Christianity ‘should be’, on the ‘side’ of any political movement. Jesus is above all that, and His people are too if they would but realise it. Remember the Jerusalem priests at the ‘trial’ of Jesus – who really should have known better – shouting out to Pontius Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar!” (Jn 19:15) Don’t, please don’t, be like them. As a Christian, I have no King but Jesus.

So, let’s hear from the brilliant John Pavlovitz, speaking from back in 2017. Things have only got worse since then:

The Christians Making Atheists

John Pavlovitz

Growing-up in the Church, I was taught that the worst thing one could be was a non-believer; that nothing was as tragic as a doomed soul that condemned itself by rejecting God. The religion of my childhood drew a sharp, clear line between the saved and the damned. All that mattered was making sure someone found themselves on the better side of this line—and the Atheists and Humanists didn’t have a shot.

In light of this supposed truth, the heart of the faith (I was told), was to live in a way that reflected the character and love of Jesus so vividly, so beautifully, that others were compelled to follow after him; that a Christian’s living testimony might be the catalyst for someone’s conversion. The Bible called it “making disciples” and it was the heart of our tradition. As the venerable hymn declared, we Jesus people were to be known by our love.

What a difference a couple of decades make.

Just ask around. People outside the Church will tell you: love is no longer our calling card. It is now condemnation, bigotry, judgment and hypocrisy. In fact, the Christianity prevalent in so much of America right now isn’t just failing to draw others to Christ, it is actively repelling them from him. By operating in a way that is in full opposition to the life and ministry of Jesus—it is understandably producing people fully opposed to the faith that bears his name.

 

In record numbers, the Conservative American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least it is making former Christians; people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude, that based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly—that God is of little use. In fact, this God may be toxic.

And that’s the greatest irony of it all: that the very Evangelicals who’ve spent that last 50 years in this country demonizing those who reject Jesus—are now the single most compelling reason for them to do so. They are giving people who suspect that all Christians are self-righteous, hateful hypocrites, all the evidence they need. The Church is confirming the outside world’s most dire suspicions about itself.

These people aren’t stupid. They realize that bigotry, even when it is wrapped in religion or justified by the Bible or spoken from a pulpit is still bigotry. They can smell the putrid stench of phony religion from a mile away—and this version of the Church, frankly reeks of it. People are steering clear in droves, choosing to find meaning and community and something that resembles love outside its gatherings.

With every persecution of the LGBTQ community, with every unprovoked attack on Muslims, with every planet-wrecking decision, with every regressive civil rights move—the flight from Christianity continues. Meanwhile the celebrity preachers and professional Christians publicly beat their breasts about the multitudes walking away from God, oblivious to the fact that they are the impetus for the exodus.

And one day soon, these same religious folks will look around, lamenting the empty buildings and the irrelevance of the Church and a world that has no use for it, and they’ll wonder how this happened. They’ll blame a corrupt culture, or the liberal media, or a rejection of Biblical values, or the devil himself—but it will be none of those things.

No, the reason the Church soon will be teetering on the verge of extinction and irrelevance, will be because those entrusted to perpetuate the love of Jesus in the world, lost the plot so horribly, and gave the world no other option but to look elsewhere for goodness and purpose and truth.

 

Soon these Evangelicals will ask why so much of America has rejected Jesus, and we will remind them of these days, and assure them that they have not rejected Jesus at all—they just found no evidence of him in their Church or in them.

Original post can be found here

“Soon these Evangelicals will ask why so much of America has rejected Jesus, and we will remind them of these days, and assure them that they have not rejected Jesus at all—they just found no evidence of him in their Church or in them” – and this is exactly what is happening now.

People are leaving American Christianity in droves, and this is one of the main reasons why – although there are of course many.

Note, though, that this does not mean that people are leaving Jesus, nor abandoning their faith in Him; not all of them, at any rate. Like most forms of genuine ‘deconstruction’, they have simply left behind the parts of their faith that they have seen to be unproductive, counterproductive, or just plain wrong, and carried on with those parts that still work for them. This is healthy and I wish it was more widespread! I really don’t think that people can honestly hold to such deadly anti-Christian beliefs and still walk closely with Jesus, if I’m honest. Your thoughts may vary, of course; but still, like me, you need to listen to Jesus and hear what He’s saying to you personally.

Grace and Peace to you.

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Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 He was quoting an un-named source, hence ‘Anon’.
⇧2 Of course, as I have said before even in this series, there are still many good, sincere and genuine Jesus followers in the Church which largely redeem it from the horrors perpetrated by those who are Christians in name only.

Some Thoughts on Deconstruction, by Don Francisco

Insights, Others' stuff
This entry is part 12 of 18 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism

One of my favourite quotes from the famous[1] Christian artist, Don Francisco, is this:

“If all you know of God is from books, you are walking in deep darkness…”

In the context of this series, on the Problems of Evangelicalism, it is particularly apt 🤣 So I though I’d elaborate or, more accurately, let Don elaborate!

Here, then, is the full piece, written a good few years ago now[2], in which he wrote that important little quote. I will add no more; Don’s essay needs no commentary![3]

I’ve had several supernatural revelations in my seventy-plus years. They first showed me, and then re-confirmed, the reality of Jesus/God and His love; they have become the foundations of my life.

Making an all-too-common error, however, I interpreted those undeniable experiences with God according to modern evangelical dogma, having no other context. It didn’t take long for those interpretations to mix with the revelations themselves, and together they hardened into intellectual barriers… I began to confuse defending those composite walls with defending the revelations themselves– which needed no defense. It took years for me to realize this had occurred…

Religious dogma would assert that such a realization is actually a spiritual attack that requires resistance – and the building of a higher, more extensive, and more impenetrable mental wall. Experience is deemed invalid (being identified with “the sinful flesh”), and doctrine is elevated to the place of prime importance.

Recently, I found myself surveying the damage after the wrecking ball of reason had swung full-force into those dogmatic walls. To continue the metaphor: All that I knew experientially of God was now buried under tons of intellectual rubble. (This is a place people find themselves after escaping from religious cults– doubting everything they’ve believed, not just the cults’ lies and half-truths.)

Removing the rubble and reclaiming my violated experiences was the task before me– all the more difficult because I still lacked a context: Evangelical doctrine was the only one I’d ever known for interpreting those revelations, and I needed a fresh perspective. I eventually found one that works for me; I realize it’s sort of cobbled together…

My interpretive wall had been built of the following common evangelical principles. (The list is not exhaustive, but nearly so…)

1) At the Fall in the Garden of Eden, the human race became evil at its core, and every child born since contains and is predisposed to express that evil. All of us were born separated from God by this misdeed of our ancestors.

2) God could not associate with humanity after the Fall because of His holiness and righteous anger toward our sins and sinful nature. His anger had to be satisfied, and our nature needed to be changed.

3) In the evangelical view, the Old Testament describes how God made a covenant with the nation of Israel via Moses; Israel continually failed to keep their part of the bargain, incurring God’s wrath and judgment. It’s presented as a model of God’s dealings with humanity outside of Jesus…

4) God sent His only, beloved, and perfect Son to become the human known as Jesus on earth so that He could die to pay the debt for our sins and to change our inner nature– if we ask him. When we do, we are included in the New Covenant, living forever in harmony with God.

5) Three days after His crucifixion and death, Jesus rose bodily from the dead, ascending back to God some time later. Pentecost occurred, followed by centuries of arguments about what it means…

6) Everyone who does not believe in Jesus’ deity and resurrection, repenting of their sins and asking Him to be their Lord and Savior, will be consigned by God to an eternal fiery torment.

7) All believers therefore have a duty to convince non-believers of the above, so that they, too, will receive natures acceptable to God and no longer be destined for hell-fire.

8) The Bible is the Word of God, a God-breathed, inerrant and infallible guide to understanding all these things. It is the sole authority in spiritual matters.

I can no longer believe that most of these things are true. Here are my beliefs today; you should work out your own, but feel free to cherry-pick from mine…

1) The Genesis story of the Fall was not intended by its writer(s) as a factual account of the first man and woman. It’s a metaphor meant to describe humanity when we decide that we know how to live without God. We are not born evil, but in the image of God– we’re like him. Some of us choose evil, but most just blunder through life on our own…

2) God never stopped associating with us– because of our ‘sins’ or for any other reason. Jesus, for one, proved it, preferring the company of practically anyone over that of religious leaders. (The Israelites’ idea of an angry god who needed appeasement by blood had been assimilated from neighboring cultures; to their credit, they usually used animal rather than human sacrifices.)

3) The Old Covenant scriptures are a human record of a nation groping after God but ultimately failing to understand Him. Some of the OT (Old Testament – Ed) writers heard Him better than others, but it’s a mixed bag. Trying to build a theology from the OT won’t work.

4) Jesus did come because of God’s great love for us; he didn’t come to die as payment for our sins. He came to show us what God is really like because we had it all wrong: He’s not angry– He is Love, a love that understands and forgives, even when we murder Him; His love is also independent of our response to it. The Spirit of God is real, has always been present and has never turned from anyone. He would dearly love for you to welcome him into your life; he’s always felt that way… Jesus also came to show us what it looks like to be truly and fully human…

5) I believe Jesus rose bodily from the dead, proving his deity, his love for us, and God’s eternal identification with the human race. When He said, “It is finished” on the cross, He meant it: There is nothing left for us to do but live in the reality of His accomplishment. (The Spirit of God helps us to do that, but the assertion in Acts that he had not yet been “given” makes little sense to me; he is, and always has been omnipresent. Perhaps humanity’s previous lack of comprehension kept him out…) My own initial experience of being filled with him occurred without any “laying on of hands”. What is described as Jesus’ “ascension” was simply a dimensional relocation…

6) For various reasons, the idea of eternal conscious torment for unbelievers has been inserted into Jesus’ teachings and other places in the NT (New Testament – Ed). Assigning anyone to such a place is completely incompatible with Jesus’/God’s character– even the OT writers didn’t threaten people with it… and there really is no such thing as “hell” in the NT.

7) Most of humanity’s hurtful, destructive, and evil actions are motivated by fear. By telling others of God’s love in Jesus– and demonstrating it by how we live– we can introduce them to Him and to reality– a universe governed by love. We can show them that God has always loved them, never condemned them, and not to fear death: It’s not the end, and there is no hell to be avoided by kissing up to an angry god.

8) Idolizing the Bible is foundational to the cult of evangelicalism; human interpretations of a book are thereby elevated to a place of authority above even the audible voice of God Himself. For me, what God says to me in my heart is always held above everything written or spoken by another human.

The Bible exists to lead us to Jesus: He is the Word of God. Hear Him.

This last point (#8), of necessity, affects all the others. If all you know of God is from
books, you are walking in deep darkness…

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Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 But now retired!
⇧2 And I have actually shared it before, here – interestingly as part of my series on spiritual growth – but I feel it needs restating in the current context!
⇧3 I will also add that I find it interesting how so many people who have walked with Jesus for so long, and are honest and free enough to realise and express it, come to the same or very similar conclusions. I found myself nodding with Don on just about every point on re-reading this, and this from my own independent thinking, study and conclusions.

Be Careful What You Pray For…

Insights, Others' stuff
…you just might get it!

Several times in my writings, I have expressed the idea that the ‘Revival’, that has been prayed for/prophesied about since at least the 1980’s, is actually happening now, and has been for the last couple of decades at least.

It seems to be a characteristic of religious people that they don’t recognise the great things that God is doing until much later; if indeed they ever do. Even though the religious of Jesus’s time were expecting a Messiah, they didn’t recognise Him when He arrived in the Person Of Jesus, because He wasn’t at all what they expected He would be like, and didn’t do the things they thought He would: He didn’t drive out the Romans; He didn’t take up the Throne of David (John 6:14-15); and so on.

He also did things that their Scriptures of their time supposedly forbade under their interpretation, and that Jesus did all kinds of things that were considered forbidden under the religious society’s rules. He associated with ‘tax collectors and sinners’. Jesus’s creative interpretation of the Scriptures meant that His disciples rubbed and ate corn ears on the Sabbath. Jesus healed people on the Sabbath. He called God His ‘Father’, which drove them nuts.

This phenomenon of the religious being the last to ‘get it’ leads to Jesus saying things like, ‘Father, I thank You that you have not revealed this to the wise, but instead to little children’ (Mt 11:25). It explains passages like those parables in which Jesus shows that those who should have known better (i.e. those who supposedly had a religious mindset) got it horrifically wrong. An example would be the Parable of the Tenants, as described in all three of the Synoptic Gospels: Matt 21:33-46; Mark 12:1-12; and Luke 20:9-19.

Ultimately, it even explains how the religious experts of the day – the Scribes, Pharisees and Teachers of the Law [of God] eventually set Jesus up for an illegal kangaroo ‘trial’ and also incited the people in Jerusalem to demand Jesus’s execution. They simply didn’t see Who He was. ‘Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing’ has many layers of meaning, of which this is one: that they were crucifying their long-awaited Messiah because they didn’t realise Who they had there, present right in their midst.

I would say that it’s often – in fact in my experience it’s usually – the case that God’s answers to prayers and expectations don’t look anything like what we were praying for, and therefore look nothing like what we expected.

Since the 1990s, I remember people in my church at the time praying for revival. I remember them praying for the ‘next new thing’, citing of course the Scripture passage in Isaiah 43:19, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland”[1]

Usually, this was accompanied by the idea that God’s people were not ‘doing enough’; were not ‘worthy enough’; were somehow ‘bad’ in their dealings with Him. So they also trotted out the other verse in 2 Chron 7:14 – “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2Chron 7:14 (KJV)). Well, we can’t have something for nothing, can we, and the thing that is usually required, say the Religious, is a good healthy dose of self-recrimination and a ‘need for repentance’, lol. Because ‘we’ are all ‘wicked’ – also lol.

Well, for at least the last 25-30 years, God has been working quietly in the hearts and minds of people who truly seek Him, in all faiths and in all denominations. It’s happening quietly, and where it’s happening, those who are the Gatekeepers of Heaven are running scared, because all they can do is to vilify the ‘movement’ (although in reality it’s nowhere near as well-organised as a real ‘movement’, nor should it be) and try to scare people off from it.

Key to that current work of God is the phenomenon called ‘deconstruction’[2], a term that of course has already been misunderstood, misinterpreted and of course pirated by Christian groups all over the place. It’s even become a term used in everyday church parlance; to me, that’s never a good sign.

So here’s my dear friend, Lisa-Anne Valentine Wooldridge, with her take on how to view ‘deconstruction’. Lisa-Anne is, in my opinion, a modern-day prophet who very often sees right to the heart of a problem and gives God’s take on it; I have seen her do this time and again.

Enjoy:

I would like to gently suggest that the process of deconstruction is not something to be feared, whether it be something you find yourself in the midst of or something that is happening to those around you.

For many years, some have prayed for revival. If you peer deeply enough into the mysteries of God, you will see that deconstruction is His answer.

Think of the church as an extra fancy Caesar salad where all kinds of extra ingredients have been added, to the point it’s barely recognizable to the creator of Caesar salad. Deconstruction is merely the process of sorting the salad out, rinsing off the residue of the “wrong” ingredients, and then, hopefully over time, rebuilding the salad to actually be Caesar salad and not a “franken-salad” with weird things like bananas and gummy bears. Trust the process. Trust the One who leads us into all Truth. Trust the One who promised to grow the Body up to match the Head.

If you can’t wrap your head around Church Salad, think of it this way. Deconstruction is a much needed spa treatment for Christians, even if the salt scrub stings a little sometimes, and the heat and pressure of the hot stones is a little bit intense, and even if you think you’ll never be clean again after a total mudbath. When you exit deconstruction (and yes, there is an end to it) you will be free from a lot of the toxins and harmful effects of religion that you’ve carried with you over the years. You’ll then be able to live the simple, honest life of someone unencumbered by hollow religion but full of the confidence and joy that comes from unfettered Union with a God who is even better than anyone ever told you.

I have experienced Deconstruction, down to the very Foundation, and while it may look and feel scary, I can assure you there is no need to be afraid. You can count on this: “I will never leave you nor forsake you….” He’s as good as His word. I’ve watched and helped thousands of others going through this process over the last decade or so. Only a very few walk away from God altogether, and my belief is that they don’t walk alone, no matter how it seems.

Love carries us all. LOVE carries us all.

– Lisa-Anne Valentine Wooldridge
Shared with her kind permission

Excellent, thanks Lisa-Anne 🙂

I would like to suggest that, just as how with individual people, God brings us through stages of belief, so too in faith communities as a whole God is also bringing them through similar stages of belief. The ways in which people’s faiths are being expressed and practised are changing.

For Christianity, in the 70’s and 80’s there was a real resurgence in the practice of the actual, tangible presence of God, so far advanced from the dry and dusty liturgy-only services that were the norm before that time. People were finding a reality in God’s Presence that they just weren’t finding in the ‘old wineskins’ of dead and dusty religion. Now, decades later, the next stages of faith are maturing: people are emerging from their ‘dark nights of the soul’ and into the light of deeper faith, Stage 5 of ‘Fowler’s Stages of Faith’, the ‘Conjunctive Faith‘ stage.[3] And this is happening via Deconstruction.

This is the answer that they’ve been praying for! And, tragically, just like the Religious of Jesus’s time, they are missing it, ignoring it, and even reviling it as a deception of the enemy. Remember that Jesus defined the only ‘unforgivable sin‘[4] as being when people attribute the works of the Spirit to the enemy. And in denigrating deconstruction and, in some cases, attributing it to ‘satan’ or, at best, as a ‘work of the flesh’, they are, once again, missing the point.

You watch: just wait and see; in 20 years’ time, the phenomenon will be accepted into Church (and other religions’) structure and acceptable practice. People will wonder what all the fuss is about. There will be churches who have learned to expect deconstruction, and to carry and support their membership in their individual journey, should they need it (not all do by any means), and all without judging or condemning them for ‘backsliding’.

And, of course, it will have been pirated, imitated and counterfeited. Make no mistake: deconstruction is not a choice; it’s not something you wake up one morning and decide to just do. It’s not something you can effectively pretend, although there will be Christians who will claim that they have been through it, but actually they haven’t[5]. Nor is it something that leads once again back to a legalism of rules from the Bible, in the bait-and-switch move so well-beloved of Evangelical Christianity. It’s something that God leads a person into, each of us in a different way. Attitudes are lost, found, revised and owned by us personally. The character of Christ shines through effortlessly. We walk in Grace, unencumbered by the expectations of humans.

But it has to be real. Only genuine deconstruction leads us away from legalism and into the glorious freedom of the Children of God in Christ[6].

Grace and Peace to you.

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Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 Oh, the irony – that God has indeed been doing a New Thing for the past couple of decades and, to answer His question in that Scripture: No; they do not perceive it!
⇧2 In my case, my deconstruction took the form of a fifteen-year ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, which I describe here, and fill out the concept here.
⇧3 This Stage has different designations in different descriptive models of the Stages of Faith, but Fowler’s are the ones I am most familiar with
⇧4 Please do visit the link to my original article so that you understand what this means; there is no ‘sin’ for which people cannot be forgiven.
⇧5 I am not saying here, even for one moment, that anyone’s deconstruction will not be completely unique to them, nor am I suggesting that anyone else should ‘police’ the ‘genuineness’ of deconstruction. Those who actually have gone through it will be able to see it in those others who have anyway; there will be a kinship of spirit that will be readily apparent. It’s not something that can really be faked by those trying to appear ‘spiritual’.
⇧6 Unless, of course, a person didn’t need to deconstruct in the first place; I know a very few people in that fortunate position. They had nothing to unlearn; they just came straight in at the ‘Grace’ doorway.

The Great Evil of the Evangelical Gospel

Insights, Others' stuff
This entry is part 9 of 18 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism

“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

Hmmm….

 

I read an article the other day where the author – an Evangelical Christian pastor – was describing his interactions with a couple of men, formerly of Evangelical congregations, who had become ‘…repelled by Christianity’. The article then went on to describe his (so far unsuccessful) efforts to get them to come back in to the ‘fold’, as it were. While his essay recognised several good points regarding what needs to change in Evangelical Christianity, one sentence popped out at me as being totally key in the perception of Evangelical Christianity, in addition to all the other things he was saying, and which he had completely failed to notice as such. The sentence was,

“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

And that, right there, is the very heart of the problem. In my opinion, the ‘gospel’, as the writer sees it, is indeed the problem. It’s both: it’s ‘We’ and it’s ‘The gospel’.

First, I will present the essay as written (with just one emphasis inserted by me), and then I will present my rebuttal on the ‘gospel is not the problem’ idea. There is actually some good stuff here, despite the guy failing to recognise the key issue[1].

Two long conversations in two days with two different men, one identical story: Grew up in traditional churches. Highly involved. Now completely repelled by Christianity. Why? Because of the terrible, appalling attitudes held and atrocities done by its leaders.

Heartbreaking.

I said all the obvious things. Apologised. Tried to point them away from religion towards Jesus. Apologised again. Mostly listened. But to be honest I don’t blame them. They were probably safer outside the church. I blame us.

Both men are still open spiritually, cautiously interested in my faith, deeply caring individuals. Both told me ‘I do my best. I’m a good person’. But both of them are also far too hurt to be open to any form of church.

I feel sad. Ashamed – as a Christian and especially as a leader. But I also feel discouraged. Here we are doing our best to reach the one lost sheep, whilst others are repelling the 99. Our back door is bigger and busier by far than our front door.

The Scottish comedian Billy Connolly fondly recalls growing up in the crowded Catholic tenements of Glasgow. Families were enormous and the children would play all day in and out of each other’s homes. At night, he jokes, each dad would make sure that the right number of children was put to bed in each house, without worrying about whose they actually were.

It’s a bit like that in the church. We continually seek to welcome strangers into our home, whilst our own children go missing, and then comfort ourselves that the numbers are roughly the same. We aspire to be good witnesses to the world, whilst neglecting and alienating the members of our own family.

The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem. [Emphasis mine – Ed] This is not a failure of Christian apologetics (both of the men I met are open intellectually); it’s a failure of Christians to apologise (their hurt hearts are firmly and understandably closed).

This is why we *must* do more than just preach the gospel and try to be nice. We must also urgently, practically nurture communities of healing and gospel life. We need systemic change in the institutional church. And of course we must hold leaders to account whilst raising up women and men whose integrity matches their ability. For every pioneer evangelist outside the front door amongst the unchurched, we probably need ten prodigal mothers and fathers on the back porch quietly loving and listening to those who have been (or are about to be) ‘dechurched’. What’s the point of winning new people when we are losing – repelling – the ones we’ve already got?

Religious sentimentality and a fetishistic obsession with the familiar is obscuring the concrete reality of our situation. There is hard graft, dirty and difficult work to be done: first, burying the dead religious rituals despised by Jesus (it won’t be popular), and then actively building the living, loving community he actually came to establish. We must apply ourselves to work and pray with all our strength to renew old churches and to plant new churches. Both together. One without the other will not work. And we must dismantle the toxic distinction between priesthood and laity. Oh and we are also going to have to apologise. A lot.

And then personally we must also be prepared to go on many long journeys with prodigals like the two men I met these past two days. We must listen to them respectfully and befriend them unconditionally. One whiff of bible-bashing and they will run a mile. But give it a few more chats over a few more months and there may well come a night, after a few beers no doubt, when one or other of these men will turn to me and finally say ‘OK, talk to me about the Jesus stuff. How can you really believe all that ****? Tell me more.’

Our back door is bigger than our front door and it has a long and winding driveway.

Kyrie eleison

So, there we have, along with the beautifully honest points about what corrective changes need to be made in churches, the understandable desire of a pastor to bring back what he sees as his ‘lost sheep’. You can feel the compassion and concern that he has for them, and it is certainly genuine.

Sadly, though, it has to be said: it is obvious that his ultimate objective is to bring them back to believing the same things that he and his congregation do. You can even see the ulterior motives there in his closing sentences, despite using the word ‘unconditional’, and also in his unfortunate and revealing use of the word ‘prodigal’. Heck, he even admits that they are probably safer outside of church! And while he indeed says ” ‘We’ are wrong”, there’s actually much more to it than that.

Recently, I have been working with ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs), helping to bring them back into what could be seen as a ‘normal’ life, free of the habits engendered by a lifetime of being steeped in a toxic religious atmosphere. While the JWs do indeed have a whole pile of, shall we say, ‘problematic’, and indeed harmful, doctrines, I’m afraid Evangelicalism is little different except in specifics. The JWs have many ideas of reality that dictate the way in which they approach life and faith, and in this regard Evangelicalism is of course the same. After all, any person’s faith background, if it is held sincerely[2], will always dictate – to a greater or lesser extent – the way in which the person lives their lives. And it appears that the key to either voluntary or enforced adherence to one’s faith practices, in many if not most congregations, is that of fear. Fear of others’ opinions, fear of sanctions, fear of leadership, fear of exposure and/or public ridicule or shaming, fear of death, fear of afterlife punishment, and the list goes on. It’s all about fear.

When things like this become apparent to a former adherent to a particular faith tradition, possibly like the two men in the piece above; where they see the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, as it were, it becomes the prime reason why those people would never want to return to that particular ‘flock'[3]. If the gospel is one of fear – whatever form that fear may take – why would you want to subject yourself to that sort of thing? Especially when the pastor can’t see, and indeed doesn’t know and/or understand, what it was that drives people away in the first place[4]. And you can’t ‘unsee’ what you’ve seen; indeed, it would be dishonest, and ultimately pointless, to do so.

And there’s more.

Let’s come back to the main assertion:

“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

You see, I’d actually say that the ‘gospel’, as Evangelical Christianity calls and defines it, is indeed the problem[5]. Emphatically, it’s not that Evangelicalism itself is evil, and nor are the people in it.[6]. A lot of good comes from Evangelicalism; I believe that the love that many have for Jesus is genuine and they do lots of good things in society (some of which, yes, has strings attached) and above all their love for Jesus is expressed in some really good, inspired and indeed anointed worship music.

So, why is their ‘gospel’ a ‘Great Evil’, as the title of this piece claims?

The simple answer, which I will of course complicate by explaining and describing it, is that their gospel misrepresents God, presenting Him in the most terrible light possible, so much so that no-one in their right mind would want to associate themselves with such a monster god. And that’s even before you get into how this god has supposedly put – equally horrific – things in place in order to ‘put things right’.

When you really look deeply into Evangelical doctrine – and believe me, I have done just that! – you will find that the summary below is what is held as the true nature of spiritual reality[7] by Evangelical Christians. I’m sure they would try to qualify, explain away and and ‘Ah, but…’ the whole thing; I’m sure that I, as an Evangelical many years ago, would have done the same thing. But, right at its very heart, this is Evangelicalism[8]. Here, then, is what you have to believe, at the heart of it, if you’re going to call yourself an Evangelical Christian. Hold tight; here we go!

Evangelicalism’s god is an angry, capricious and bullying god[9] that acts more like humans than humans do.

He’s easily offended, he holds grudges, and the only thing he accepts to appease him (and as everyone knows, appeasement only works until the bully decides it doesn’t) is to kill his own son to satisfy his ‘holiness’, his ‘justice’ and also his honour.

People are given the ‘choice’ to ‘love’ this god, or burn forever in a furnace – ‘Hell’ – of that god’s own designing and maintaining[10], while those he’s supposed to have trained to love others either look on in glee – a standard doctrine in 19th century Evangelicalism, which, I am disappointed to be able to say, has persisted to this day in many circles – or are somehow ‘trained’ to forget about their loved ones burning; this being the other doctrine that explains how people can live a blessed life in Heaven while the excluded roast and scream[11].

And, because ‘narrow is the way’ (Mt 7:13-14), this inescapably means that many more people will go to that furnace than will not, probably including their (Evangelicals’) children, which they still keep popping out despite knowing that most people will end up in the furnace, statistically including their children. It seems they’re prepared to take that risk with the eternal futures of the people they will (hopefully) love more than anyone or anything else in this life.

And, remember, all this happens – Hell and so on – because this god is a god of love, they tell us.

The English word ‘Gospel’ – the translation of the Greek word ‘ευαγγελιον’ (euaggelion) – means ‘Good News’. This is where we get the terms ‘Evangelical’ and ‘evangelist’ from, of course[12].

The gospel[13] espoused by Evangelical Christianity, though, can under no circumstances be decribed as ‘good news’. It is in fact far, far worse news than anything in history, putting even the genocide of the Holocaust to shame. It pains me to even have to explain this, but in fact according to the Evangelical gospel, every single one of the Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust went straight to Hell, because they didn’t come to a belief in Jesus before they died. By any definition, except apparently any coming from Evangelicalism, this concept represents such a diabolical evil that the only way to reconcile it with a loving god is…. well, there isn’t one. The only way that an Evangelical Christian, one who really believes that, anyway, can so reconcile it is for them to live with a cognitive dissonance. That a god of love can cause and perpetuate such suffering is only capable of being handled by the human mind by means of having a cognitive dissonance. And that goes with the glibness of their claim that most people, whom their god loves, remember, will burn in Hell for all eternity, and their ability to believe that without going completely insane.

No, this is NOT good news by any standard, and it is the reason why I refer to it as ‘The Great Evil of Evangelicalism’. Because that’s what it is.

Furthermore, the Hell doctrine is an integral part of Evangelicalism; it is fully intertwined with the way the religion works; it is ‘non-resectable’, to use a surgical term – it cannot be removed without doing irreparable damage to the entire structure. If you remove this doctrine, you break the whole thing, and it won’t be Evangelicalism anymore. This is why it’s so deadly. If you’re an honest Evangelical, you have to admit that you believe that this doctrine is true and, indeed, that what it describes will really happen to real people.

One of the reasons why Jesus came was in order to show God as being, well, in a word, ‘Nice’. Someone who loves us just as we are; someone Who has our best interests at heart. Someone Who heals, forgives and restores the broken. He did this in order to set right the image of god that people of His time had; that of being, shall we say, ‘Not nice’!

And yet, over the centuries, successive generations of Christian theologians have twisted that image back to the pre-Jesus concept of a horrible god. Nowhere and no-when has this been more apparent than over the last 150 years or so, since Evangelicalism (and its precursors) began.

This, then, is the evil of Evangelicalism[14]. Despite the clear example of Jesus, the depiction of God is one of Him being cruel, vengeful, sadistic – and, rather than continue the list, let’s just sum it up with one word: Unapproachable. Who would want the company of a god like that, in the unlikely event that he’d even allow us near him? And so, ordinary, decent people are rightly repelled by that depiction. The very people who need Jesus the most are repelled by Evangelicalism’s depiction of Him, and are thereby denied all the benefits and blessing of direct faith in, and personal knowledge of, Jesus.

Since Evangelicalism is founded on such a diabolically evil dissonance, and one where words and definitions are routinely and irreparably twisted, it would be far better if not only those two brothers being counselled by our pastor friend, but also everyone else with a gentle loving heart, should avoid Evangelicalism entirely.

Such gentle hearts only get corrupted by the constant exposure to the evil that is the Evangelical gospel, which really is the polar opposite of everything that Jesus was, that He showed, and that He taught. I say this from personal experience; that’s what happened to me and it took me fifteen years to detox from it. Try holding the Evangelical gospel up next to the loving teachings of Jesus, and you will see that it only holds water if any of the things He is recorded as saying are twisted out of their real meanings and contexts.

I am so glad that those guys got out, and I sincerely hope that they will eventually recover. I’m not assuming that the points I make in this essay are the reasons why those two guys came out of Evangelicalism – indeed, the reasons are given as being the atrocities committed by leadership. But you can bet that there were other reasons too, and these will have much in common with both what I have written here, and what other ‘exvangelicals’ too have experienced.

So, regarding going ‘back in’ to Evangelicalism, well, you don’t recover from poisoning by drinking more poison. Yes, Jesus is amazing; again, I speak from personal experience. But, in Evangelicalism, even Jesus has been twisted and, in fact, silenced by the Bibliolatry[15] of Evangelicalism.

You see, if Jesus[16] tells a believer something that is ‘against’ the ‘clear teaching’ of the Bible – as interpreted by Evangelicalism, of course – then it is Jesus that is wrong, not the Bible. Moreover, Evangelicalism has stained and sullied the Bible over the years, and to such an extent, that now even the purest-hearted believer finds it hard to read it because of all the disgusting twisted interpretations they’ve been fed down the years that keep coming back to mind unbidden.

No, let those escaped men deconstruct in whatever way they need. Leave them alone. Don’t try to recapture them and draw them back into the cage they have escaped from. That would be pure evil – which like all the worst evil, comes from people who think they have the best motives.

Here is an excellent and very much on-point quotation from Rob Bell – a pastor who has of course been rejected by Evangelicalism because of his teachings against belief in Hell:

“Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the Gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly Father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die?

“That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can. And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.

“And so there are conferences about how churches can be more “relevant” and “missional” and “welcoming,” and there are vast resources, many, many books and films, for those who want to “reach out” and “connect” and “build relationships” with people who aren’t part of the church. And that can be helpful. But at the heart of it, we have to ask: Just what kind of God is behind all this?

“Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”

– Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

And so the two men, in the original essay, came out of Evangelicalism. But, of course, for Evangelicals, that’s no escape! There is no escape from a god who would pursue a person right to the ends of the earth to make sure that they end up in that fiery furnace![17] They would say that simply running away or ignoring [their perception of] the truth won’t save you. There is no escape!

But it’s not that. It’s that these people are so honest that they believe that God isn’t like Evangelicalism says he is, so why would they want to be part of a community where that is believed and acted upon? They simply don’t believe that any more, so to them it doesn’t matter that this ‘truth’ might pursue them, for it is no longer relevant. So why would they ever want to return to something that they have essentially grown out of? Their path of spiritual growth has led them away from Evangelicalism, and to go back would be to nullify that growth. They have grown past that, in the same way that a butterfly has grown past being a caterpillar, and what butterfly ever benefitted from taking flying lessons from caterpillars?

And so, it’s not just that “…others are repelling the 99” as the author says; it is also, most emphatically, their gospel itself.

I am aware that many of my readers believe fully in the atoning death of Jesus, and in the deflection of God’s wrath away from us and onto Jesus. Of Jesus being the sacrificial Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world. I’m not trying to take that away from those people; far from it. Take a look at this article for more on what Jesus did on the Cross and why it all applies no matter what the precise details are of your belief system. Remember also that there are almost as many ways of looking at the Cross as there are denominations. Be encouraged; be secure: Jesus is still Lord, and Jesus still died for our sins, no matter how that actually works in practice.

The actual Gospel is sooooo much better than Evangelicalism gives credit for. However it works, Jesus has obtained forgiveness of sin and victory over death! This is not heresy; this is the glorious truth of it all!

So what is the Gospel, then? Many people outside of Christianity say, ‘If God is so good and so powerful, why can’t He just forgive people anyway?’

And, that, I believe, that is the Good News – the Gospel – that those ‘outside’ so intuitively realise: that God does indeed forgive, and has indeed forgiven, everything that everyone has ever done wrong, every ‘sin’ both actual and only perceived. This is indeed the case; because for Him they were never a problem. “As far as the East is from the West, so far does He remove our transgressions [sins] from us” (Psalm 103:12-14). There are so many ramifications that lead on from that one basic truth, but that in essence is what we’re looking at.

I might go into more detail on this later in the series, but, for now, I think I’ve blathered on enough!

Grace and Peace to you all

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Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 Remember here that I’m not saying that Evangelicalism is evil. I am saying that its gospel is evil, though, for reasons I explain in the essay itself. And the people aren’t evil, either.
⇧2 Or if it is enforced/forcibly imposed, as happens with Jehovah’s Witnesses, with other cults, and of course in some corners of Evangelicalism.
⇧3 I appreciate that the quoted article says that it was the abuse from leadership that the men were repelled by, and not specifically by Church doctrines. That said, however, once bad leadership is exposed for what it is – the Wizard’s curtain is pulled back, so to speak – then all or most of the stuff they told you suddenly loses its credibility. Their hypocrisy does not speak well of the things they said they believed, and that they doubtless told the men that they had to believe too. ‘What else did they tell you that was lies?’, is the question someone will rightly ask when bad leadership is exposed like this.
⇧4 Some pastors and other church leaders, of course, are actually abusive, whether intentionally or not. In these cases, they know full well how to manipulate people, especially their fears, and ensure compliance by using all kinds of abusive bullying tactics. And, generally, they don’t see the things that drive people away as being problems to be solved – and to be realistic, they probably don’t care. If people that they are unable to control leave, then that’s better for their power structure. People who refuse to succumb to their abuse aren’t welcome anyway. For more information and comprehensive help on church abuse, check out the book ‘Broken Trust; by F. Remy Diederich, referenced in my article here.
⇧5 In a nutshell, and so that it’s clear what I’m talking about here, the Evangelical gospel is this: Humankind ‘fell’ when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Amongst other things, this means that all humanity inherit Adam’s ‘Fall’ and have offended god’s justice. Therefore, they will all go to Hell when they die because they are guilty. But wait! Jesus came and died on the Cross, thus acting as a lightning rod for God’s offended anger, meaning that humans who believe in Him now go to Heaven instead of Hell. Everyone else still goes to Hell anyway. This is the ‘gospel’ according to Evangelicalism. Don’t shoot the messenger; that’s really what they believe!
⇧6 Most of them aren’t, anyway.
⇧7 ‘Spiritual reality’ meaning things like what God is like and how He associates with humanity
⇧8 They’d likely use the fallacious argument of ‘God’s ways are higher than our ways’ somewhere in their list of excuses! See this article for a proper analysis of what that passage (Isaiah 55:8-9) really means.
⇧9 Small ‘g’ for this god, as this is not the Creator of the Universe. The god that Evangelicalism describes does not deserve the honorific of the capitalisation of ‘God’ nor of ‘He’, so I do not do it.
⇧10 ‘Love me or burn forever’. How is that a choice?? How is that love??
⇧11 Evangelicalism, though, does not usually mention as part of its ‘good news’ that those unfortunates will be roasting at the same time as the Evangelicals will be livin’ it up in Heaven. It does not explain, usually because the question is not asked, how those in Heaven will be able to cope with the idea of their loved ones suffering forever in fire. These two ‘explanations’ I have given here usually have to be prised out of the ‘thinking’ of those Evangelicals who have actually ‘thought’ about it and have come up with some sort of reasoning, however pathetic and inadequate their answers – these two concepts – may be. Yet another example of how the doctrine of Hell’s inadequacies have to be propped up by Evangelical ‘apologetics’.
⇧12 And in some Christian circles, the Gospel is still referred to as the ‘Evangel’
⇧13 Again, lack of initial capitalisation as this isn’t what I would call any kind of ‘Gospel’
⇧14 And the ‘evil(s)’, plural, are the resulting attitudes and behaviours that spring from it.
⇧15 Bibliolatry is the term used for the worship of the Bible; setting the Bible up in place of God the Holy Spirit
⇧16 Jesus is alive and lives in the hearts of those who love Him. And because He is alive, He actually speaks to them. Weird, but true.
⇧17 As opposed to a Shepherd who would leave the ninety-nine sheep to go and search for the one lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7)

Foody Morsels

Quotations, Insights, Others' stuff, Humour

Another collection of bite-sized quotations from various sources. Enjoy!

Yes, it’s true fascism doesn’t take a vacation[1], but that’s because fascism despises joy. It is antithetical to peace. Its goal is to gradually squeeze and suffocate the lightness out of people so that they stop dreaming, stop planning, stop dancing. Its authors are inherently miserable people whose sole joy consists of replicating themselves by reproducing despondency.
– John Pavlovitz

To Pharisees condemning the ministry of inclusion: “You are just the jealous older brother (from the Prodigal story). You have worked hard to earn the Father’s favour, only to be told that you had His favour all along. And now you want to deny it to the Prodigals out there. Well, shame on you”.
– Me

“God doesn’t look at the world through the lens of judgment. He looks through the empty tomb Jesus stepped out of. And when He rose, He raised the world into a new status: Forgiven, Loved, and Included. This is the human race. To everybody in the human race… to anybody here that’s not a born-again Christian…. He raised you to this status: You are forgiven, you are loved, and you are included”.
– Creflo Dollar

[As a comment on a YouTube video] This song [Oceans] is at its best when people are allowed to live out the words without judgment from others. When you walk out into depths where only Jesus can hold you up, others may fear for you and criticise you – but there is no fear in Love. If it’s your time to emerge from the chrysalis, the caterpillars will not understand the beautiful butterfly you have become. If you know, you know.
– Me

JUST IN CASE YOU HAD ANY DOUBTS.. The Father does not need your decision, choice or belief to justify you, make you righteous, forgive you, love you unconditionally or accept you into the family….

That is the gospel !!
– Don Keathley

IN JESUS DWELLS THE fullness of the Godhead bodily and you are complete in Him. Col 2:9-10…… SO YOU CAN quit your begging for more of Him, more power, more anointing, more of the Holy Spirit. It is time to tune in to the Spirit of Truth and fully awaken to who you have always been and what you have always fully possessed.
– Don Keathley

My reply to the above was:

So in the Garden, when the serpent told the woman that if she ate the fruit, she would be like God, it was offering her what she already had. Is that, then, a parallel with what religion offers: it promises to give us what we already have?
– Me

“I still believe that at any time the no-talent police will come and arrest me”.
– Mike Myers

“How do I know I’m standing on the right side of history? There is a simple answer. The wrong side of history will tell you to be afraid. The right side of history will expect you to be brave.”
– JB Pritzker, Illinois Governor

For the purposes of righteousness, the Law is useless
– Me

Religion made it all about fear. Grace makes it all about freedom. Say goodbye to legalistic rules and enjoy the fruit of a loving relationship. That is the grace walk experience.
– Steve McVey

God isn’t disillusioned with us because he never had any illusions to begin with. He knows us and loves completely.
– Graham Cooke

The Gospel of Jesus Christ allows you to walk out of Prison. Religion causes prisoners to merely change cells.
– Rex Gaskey

Their sharp and steely eyes [of people steeped in a lifetime of religious legalism] are likely on the lookout for others’ ‘sin’, too. That’s the final destination of the atrophication of those with a religious spirit.
– Me

Often, we see only
What we want to see,
Get only
What we expect to get,
And accept only
What we’ve been taught to accept . . .
When we read the Bible.
– Mo Thomas

Threatening an atheist with hell, is like threatening a nudist with a wedgie…
– Derrick Day

There is a real dignified beauty about secret giving. No wonder Jesus was so in favour of it.
–  Me

[Social media] all reward engagement, not accuracy
– Robin Jackson

All Evangelical Christians know that the Bible was simply dropped from the sky by God. There were a lot of fatalities in mediaeval times from falling Bibles, primarily because they were so heavy. Apparently the same was true of the Pyramids:

– Me

Literature does the most wonderful thing: it takes the lost ‘now’ and places it right in front of you
– Anon (Quoted from a BBC Radio 4 Book Club advert)

They [Christians wanting to justify their behaviour] make it up as they go along. Romans 13:1-2 [that says that a Christian should obey the lawful authorities] is fine as long as they agree with those they are under. As soon as they don’t, it’s Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than people”. They get to choose which Bible verse they want to ignore based on their own leanings. Of course, this also proves that the Bible contradicts itself, much to the annoyance of Inerrantists!
– Me

I agree with F.F. Bruce that “eternal conscious torment” [i.e. ‘Hell’ – Ed] is inconsistent with the revealed nature of God in Jesus.
– Richard Murray

 

 

 

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 Whether political or religious; the effect is the same on those who are subjected to it – Ed