A little over five years ago, I wrote the piece ‘What the Bible says’, in which I describe the [what I feel is an] unhealthy reliance on the Bible by many, if not most, Evangelical Christians.

As part of my series on ‘The Problems of Evangelicalism‘, I was going to write a piece on just that subject, but that would have been superfluous given that I have already done so – and my views, and the truths the article describes, have not changed in the meantime.

However, I have had more ideas on the subject, and so, rather than just reblogging it, I have incorporated those ideas into the original essay, thereby producing what is an updated, revised and enhanced version. I have not differentiated these new comments in any way; they now form part of the new essay.

The particular ‘Problem with Evangelicalism’ described in the essay, then, is that of Evangelicalism having an overemphasis on the Bible instead of on Jesus, and the problems that this causes.

Here we go:

One of my online friends posted the other day this interesting little nugget:

And I have to say I fully agree with him.

So many times nowadays, I actually feel like saying to people, like, look mate, I actually don’t care ‘what the Bible says’, because a) what Jesus says is more important, b) it’s not a Rulebook anyway, and c) who’s to say what the Bible really ‘says’? 40,000+ denominations tells me that no-one really knows exactly ‘what the Bible says’ anyway!

It also got me thinking along other lines too.

You see, I’m also noticing that, in our efforts to show Fundamentalists that actually our ideas are ‘Biblical’ (in that, like most things, you can find justification for them in the Bible), we are finding that the Bible is once again becoming the set of Rules by which we who have discovered Grace are trying to make our points to the legalists. And that has to be counterproductive. Even the Rulebook itself says that if it is law, then it is no longer Grace (Rom 11:6). To coin an analogy from Sun-Tzu, we are therefore picking the wrong terrain for our battles, and falling back into the trap of fighting on the ground of their choice.

You see, it is nowadays apparent that no longer do people sit and talk about Jesus; we sit and talk about the Bible instead. It’s as if the Bible is what we now have in common, rather than being one in Christ. The focus is the Bible. And so the focus is all wrong.

I mean, really, when a believer is firmly established in his faith, in a lot of ways the Bible can actually take more of a back seat, although this will of course vary from person to person. The Bible is no longer our primary source of ‘things from God’ or ‘knowledge of God’; instead, that Source is Jesus.  In fact, it should ideally have been Him all along. This is why it is important to cultivate, in the new believer as well as the old, a total reliance on Jesus rather than shifting the focus to the Bible.

And so I don’t pretend that I hold the Bible in the same esteem that others do. I mean, if anything, I hold it in even higher esteem than many Fundamentalists do because I give it the respect it deserves but without dishonouring it by elevating it to a position it was never meant to occupy.

But I have noticed that when beginning a conversation with other believers, there’s almost this ‘dance’ where everyone tacitly agrees to agree that the Bible is where it’s all at, and they (tacitly or overtly) agree to have their discussions using that as an axiom. Well, I’m being very careful about that nowadays.

I still find that I almost don’t want to mention (and so I don’t!) that the Bible is no longer as important now I am on to the solid food of following Jesus. This is because, as I explain below, this almost loses my credibility with those with whom I am having the discussion. Indeed, if I do mention the Bible’s lowered importance in one of those conversations, I find that the conversation suddenly changes to being about the primacy of the Bible rather than being about the original point of discussion, whatever that was. Which tells me that actually the point was either a) not important anyway, or b) just another way of getting the conversation around to the Bible again. It does seem with these people to be ‘all or nothing’ (I suppose that’s black-and-white culty thinking) in that if there’s the slightest whiff that I don’t hold the Bible as highly as they do, then they think I don’t believe any of it. Again, that’s a serious flaw not only in their logic (which they don’t use anyway) but also in their conclusion.

Sure, I still love reading my Bible, at least when I can tune out the grey, dusty voices of the Legalists, who have tainted the Scriptures with their deadly interpretations. (There’s that point again: interpretation!) But, for me, the Bible is no longer the primary source of my knowledge of God. In fact, it’s even broader than that. In my current stage in my faith walk, I no longer need or depend on others’ ideas, nor affirmation of my own ideas by others. Sure, I read interesting ideas which I feel free to hold or to discard as I see fit. Sometimes I post things by other people because they express what I wanted to say so much better than I could have done.

But nowadays I find that I hear, and listen to, Jesus Himself, and I learn so much directly from Him.

This sort of thing gives the Legalists apoplexy, because they can’t stand it that some of us have a Relationship with Jesus outside of the Bible. ‘Dangerous’, they call it. A ‘slippery slope‘.  Well if they want to stay in their ruts, that’s fine with me. But out here in the deep ocean, where there is no bottom and I rely entirely on God to keep me afloat, out here is where the real faith is. They sing about it in their song ‘Oceans‘, and I still find that song profound because it reflects my own experience.

But in reality, and ironically, those who should be boldest – those who claim to have a solidity of faith undergirded both by the Bible and by their claim of a relationship with Jesus – they are the ones who are the most afraid to venture out ‘where no-one has gone before’, into the deep waters of bottomless faith.

Keith Giles puts it like this:

“Do you know anyone that constantly claims, “That’s not Biblical” to everything they don’t agree with?

“Yeah, just ignore them.

“Some say we cannot trust the Holy Spirit to guide us, and that’s why we need a Book. But I have never gone to the Book when I have needed wisdom or guidance. I have always gone to my knees, and listened.

“The idea that we can trust a Book more than the Holy Spirit is actually an idea that is refuted by the same Book.

“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.

“Our capacity to “get it wrong” is unlimited. But, I would argue, we have a much better chance of getting it right if we learn to discern the voice of the indwelling Holy Spirit which leads us into all Truth and provides wisdom and insight directly from God’s heart to our own.

” ‘If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask of the Lord who gives generously to all.’ – James 1:5 [Notice it doesn’t say, ‘Let him search in the Book…’]

“What God did a few thousand years ago is comforting, but I am concerned that many of us may be missing what new and exciting thing God may want to do in our life TODAY if we keep holding on to those stories of what God did back then.

“Don’t fear to trust the Holy Spirit and to listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd.”

– Keith Giles

Brilliant. I couldn’t have put it better.

Someone once asked me what part the Bible played in my life nowadays. Here’s my reply:

“It used to play a big part. But now I have moved on to solid food. I have stopped trying to ‘prove’ things from the Scripture for others; I have stopped trying to convince grey people that the Bible is multi-interpretable, and I have stopped trying to show arguments from a Scriptural point of view for the benefit of those who still treat it as a Rulebook.

“I have had it with people using a 4,000yr old (in places) book to make Jesus irrelevant in today’s world, because they have to stick to the Rules laid down essentially by Moses the Prat. I no longer hold to their viewpoints, so there is no point in pretending that I still do, even to show them things from their own Rulebook.

“I now listen only to the One Whom I trust above all others, and occasionally I will pick up ideas or prompts from people who also hear His voice. Here is the problem that is the root of all Fundie Christian problems: that God is no longer trusted enough to be allowed to speak to His people. The idea that God will never contradict Scripture is not only contradicted in Scripture itself, but it is also a non-Scriptural idea held up, incorrectly, as a ‘Biblical ‘principle’.

“I am sick of judgemental people who place their own judgements above those of God. So, there we are. Bible firmly in its place”

Lately, though, I have realised that, in a very real way, everyone who reads the Bible places their own judgments above the words in the Bible. That’s what is called ‘interpretation’; that’s the way things actually should be. The problem with Evangelical and other Fundamentalist belief systems is that those interpretations are then claimed to be the one-and-only way in which a given passage should be interpreted, because those interpretations are subject to pre-existing group dogma; they’re ‘pre-defined’, if you will. And so their claim that the Bible provides objective truth to prevent the believer straying off into error is incorrect, because what they think of as the objective truth of Scripture is always going to be subject to the subjective interpretation of a text by an individual, a leader or a group (again, usually the leadership) and so it’s actually not objective truth at all. It’s just truth as understood by a particular group. And just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t make it true.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, the problem with ‘demoting’ the Bible in ‘discussions’ with grey people is that what I say is always going to be reduced in value because I apparently don’t hold the Bible in the same esteem as they do. But since there has already been a sort-of breakdown in communication in that we are interpreting the same Bible in different ways, then that very difference of opinion reduces my credibility in their eyes anyway. Which isn’t really my problem, of course, and each of us has to follow the Spirit both in our lives and in hearing what God is saying to us, either through the Bible or through other channels.

But I do hold the Bible in high esteem, of course, and when I speak of ‘putting it in its place’ I mean that it should be restored to its rightful place. In other words, it is a book – a very special book, but a book nonetheless – which is full of insight, wisdom, amazing stories, and also some not-so-good stuff too. Its primary function is to point us to Jesus. Sure, that’s not its only function, but it’s the Bible’s primary function (Jn 5:39). If we fail to let the Bible point us to Jesus, then it has failed in its primary task. No, the ‘rightful’ place of the Bible is to be very firmly removed from the throne of people’s lives – where many believers have placed it – and to allow Jesus back onto that throne. The Trinity is ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’; these days it seems that many modern believers have replaced this with ‘Father, Son and Holy Bible’. In other words, the problem is with the people, not the Bible; they are using it incorrectly and elevating it to a position it was never intended to occupy. At Jesus’s ‘trial’, in John 19:15 Pilate asked, ‘Shall I crucify your king?’ And the priests replied, ‘We have no king but Caesar!’. They were rejecting the Kingship of Jesus in favour of a worldly system of kingship, that of Rome. In the same way, by putting the Bible above Jesus, modern-day Bibliolatrists^[1] are effectively saying, ‘We have no king but the Bible!’

I would say that my ‘relationship’ with the Bible has come full circle. I began reading the Bible when I was about seven years old. Didn’t get very far. My secondary school was a Public School^[2] which was set up in 1812 for the education of the sons of Methodist ministers, so I was educated in a Christian background and Scripture was a part of daily study.

At the age of 18, on July 12th, 1980, I began my actual walk with Jesus, responding to an ‘altar call’ at a tent crusade (actually God propelled me to the front!), and it was just what I needed. My life changed from that point onwards and I was increasingly conscious of Jesus at my side, and saw His influence in my life on a daily basis. Over the following years, I got to know the Bible inside-out, walked with Jesus, and also with others; although the emphasis was on both Bible and Jesus, gradually, as with all these things, the Real Thing is supplanted by the written accounts of it. That said, though, I did not lose sight of my first Love, Jesus Himself. I had had such an experience of God, as a young Christian, that no amount of Pharisaical layering of rules and other baggage on top of that Relationship could ever snuff it out entirely. And so when I entered my ‘dark night of the soul‘ in 1999, its main function was to allow me to rid myself of all the baggage and to walk free.

Once that process was complete to Father’s satisfaction, the subsequent encounter I had with God was new, powerful, real and unexpected^[3], but still rooted in my already existing Relationship with Him. It was just like I’d never been away. And one of the fruits of that long period of change was that I no longer relied as much on the Bible. One of the things that God had pruned away, so to speak, in that time, was the emphasis on Scripture and He replaced it with a far more emphatic emphasis on Jesus and my Relationship with Him.

Interestingly, my knowledge and memory of Bible verses was still intact. I can still recite whole sections of Scripture should I need to do so. But the Bible very much takes a back seat as I simply walk freely in the Spirit.

There are some people I know who never read the Bible, but are in a strong Relationship with Jesus. For them, the Bible just turns them off, and detracts from the Person of Jesus.

Fundies might say, well, how can you know Jesus apart from the Bible?

Well that’s a very silly question when you think about it. Most of what I know about, say, my friend in my aircraft owners’ group, I know because I have sat and talked with him, flown with him, talked to his wife, and all that. I’ve known him for years. He’s my friend. He has never had a book written about him (although his late dad had an autobiography, but that’s a different story!). It’s the same with Jesus. Jesus exists outside of the Bible; yes we can learn more about Him from the Bible, and read of others’ experiences with Him from the Bible, but you can only really get to know Him by actually meeting Him and spending time with Him.

What Fundagelicalism^[4] has purveyed for many decades now is a cheap bait-and-switch imitation. Come to Jesus! And here’s how: read the Book! Bait = Jesus. Switch = Book. It’s funny too but Jesus actually turns this around and helps people to get to know Him despite the best efforts of the Fundies who, really, don’t trust the Spirit at all, and want to do all His speaking for Him, usually by quoting Bible verses.

In other words, the emphasis has shifted from the real to the hypothetical, and from the Living to the written. “And … you refuse to come to Me to have Life” (Jn 5:39).

It’s sad that those of us rediscovering the primacy of Jesus are labelled as heretics, by the very ones whose concept of Jesus is based mainly in book knowledge, and experiential knowledge is counted as being from ‘deceiving spirits’. And conversations with such of these Grey People always degenerate into, again, that ridiculous dance around the authority of the Bible and its extent in determining how well we can know God. It’s posturing, and it’s pathetic. Tell me: Who is best placed to talk about what they know of Jesus: those who read about Him or those who actually know Him personally, not just from a book? Is the former not much more than a case of the ‘blind leading the blind’?

This emphasis on the Bible is exemplified in conversations with Evangelicals, where most of the time there is a tacit assumption that the authority/inerrancy/infallibility/etc. of the Bible is unquestioned and already accepted. But the assumption that those who are at a different place in their walk will accept that premise is not going to produce a good conversation, and it will always degenerate again into discussions about the Bible. You see the problem? Any time we want to talk about God, or Jesus, or the Spirit, we end up talking about what ‘the Bible says’ about Them rather than what is our personal experience of Them. This of, course, may be because those arguing with people who have a real Relationship with Jesus don’t have one themselves, and so they really don’t know the One about Whom they are talking. But that’s never my judgment call to make.

And so, this dependence on the Bible means that God isn’t allowed to speak to His people, in any way He wants to, any more. He’s only allowed to use the Bible and what it says in there.

Well, try telling Him that! He’s bypassing all that by just doing what He wants all over the world, irrespective of what people’s Bibles tell them He should be doing.

All around the world, people are finding new freedom in Christ; in Christ, not the Bible. In fact, modern ‘understanding’ of the Bible has been thoroughly polluted by nasty and erroneous doctrines and ideas from Evangelicalism, which have been espoused for so long that they are now accepted as ‘normal’. I mention a few of these doctrines in this post. As I hinted above, I now find it hard to read the Bible profitably because of all the years and layers of dusty, dry legalism and bad exegesis (interpretation of Scripture) caused by many long years under the thrall of those doctrines. Like it would be for a former member of a cult, the old interpretations and taught meanings – based on ideas of humans (Mt 15:9; Mk 7:7) – are what come to the fore as I read certain passages, and as such these verses have been poisoned for me. I feel quite badly done by about that, actually, like I have been robbed of all the fruit and glory of those passages. I am, however, fortunate in listening to teachers like Don Keathley and Francois du Toit, whose love of the Scriptures is not only infectious but also their teaching is wholesome, and you can tell.

My final point about Evangelicalism’s unhealthy elevation of the Bible is that there’s almost an irony in all this, too.

Allow me to explain. People who look in at Christianity from the outside see the attitudes of, well at least Fundamentalists, but also Evangelicals too, regarding the Bible. They see their dependence on it, and their adherence to millennia-old rules and laws that clearly have no business being incorporated into modern-day laws. They see the obvious problems with their stubborn disbelief in evolution, insistence on modern-day adoption of cultural norms from ancient times like the subjugation of women and persecution of people of ‘different’ sexualities^[5].

Let’s be honest: Christianity would be a lot more believable if they’d only drop their stubborn holding on to the obviously wrong things in the Bible. People ‘out there’ aren’t stupid. They know those beliefs in ‘The Bible is always right!'^[6] are obviously wrong. Anyone with any common sense can see this.

But, of course, Biblical inerrantists are blind to this; instead, they see it as a virtue to hold these attitudes and views in the face of what they see as ‘opposition’. But believing in the Bible at the expense of disregarding modern scientific findings and other modern cultural advancements is purely risible, and punctures the credibility of all who believe in the Bible in that way.

And so, they actualy drive away intelligent, thinking, honest people who would otherwise make very good believers, simply because they cannot believe what Evangelicalism says that they must believe about the Bible in order to be counted as ‘Christians’.

And therefore, once again, Evangelicalism repels people from Jesus instead of attracting them; it turns them away at the gate, turns them away from a lifetime of following the One Who loves them above all else, turns them away from that Love on the basis of their own obviously erroneous doctrine about the Bible. And that’s reprehensible.

But I want to finish this essay on a positive note. My aim is always the encouragement of my readers!

I must say I do get the impression that, for those who have the hearts to receive it, the Grace message of Jesus is the thing they have been looking for all their lives. Some of us were sidetracked into rule-keeping. Some of us were snatched away as soon as we heard the message and met Jesus for the first time. And to be fair, some of us in fact needed to enter through the path of legalism, because only by seeing its hopelessness could we even begin to look for something more.

But once our eyes were opened to Grace, oh! the wonder! Oh, the freedom! For some of us, detoxification was needed. For others, straight in to Grace with no messing about. But however we got here, God has His hand on us, and He will never let us go! So, while the Bible, when interpreted by the Spirit of Truth, is useful, remember it is not God; it never has been and it never will be. No matter what your reverence for it, and I am sure that reverence is not misplaced, make sure that the Spirit – Whom God has poured into our hearts – is always the One Who has the last word. Then you will be hearing directly from God Himself.

Grace and Peace to you.

Almost exactly ten years ago, I was in a worship meeting where there was high worship in the Spirit; those who have experienced this will know exactly what I mean^[1]. In this particular instance, the Presence of God was manifested not only in His tangible and ‘felt’ presence, but also in the sparkling in the room and the way the air actually felt ‘thicker’. This is a level of worship which is rarely attained except where God chooses so to manifest His Presence in that way. It’s nothing that we do for that to happen; it’s just what God does sometimes. In this kind of worship, there is healing, there is release for the captives, and there are public and private words from God for people either singly or congregationally. You don’t emerge from such worship the same as you were when you went in 😀 

Anyway, during that meeting, Jesus shared some wisdom with me that I then felt I really couldn’t keep to myself, and so I shared the fruit of this, well, ‘inspiration’, I suppose you could call it, on my blog. This was what gave rise to the piece ‘Graven Image‘, and I reproduce it here, with a bit of additional commentary^[2] at the end. I feel it is particularly relevant for my series, ‘The Problems of Evangelicalism’, and may shed a little light on the complex reasons why such problems exist. Here we go:

Graven Image

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Ex 20:4 KJV)

In this, the second of the ‘Ten Commandments’ given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, God forbade the Israelites to make for themselves any idols, or ‘false gods’, or indeed even an image (statue or whatever) of God Himself. Unlike the other nations in the area at that time, they were not to use idols to worship, but instead they had to worship the One God Himself.

It’s easy to see why. If you think about it, if the people gave any worship – or ‘worth-ship’ – or value – to what was essentially just a wooden, metal or stone statue, before long they would believe that the statue itself was God and that God is like the statue.  Apart from giving the statue the worship and attention that is God’s alone by right, they would also create in their minds and hearts and expectations a completely unrealistic picture of what God is really like. Clearly, you can’t represent God in all His love, power, majesty and splendour in a 30ft tall ‘graven image’, no matter how well decorated it is! There are many other reasons too, but this is the main one for the purposes of this post.

Fast-forward many centuries from Mt. Sinai to the time of Jesus. The religious authorities followed a strict system of rules, regulations and observances that not only they, but everyone else, had to follow. For various complex reasons, which I will go into in a later post, God was seen as a harsh, vengeful and implacable autocrat, and people were only acceptable to God by a) following an increasingly rigid and detailed set of rules and b) participating in blood sacrifices (involving the killing of animals). Departure from these rules would result, not in the threat of ‘hell’ as our religious people threaten with these days, but in a system of various punishments ranging from exclusion from the assembly (like being excommunicated) right up to the death penalty which would be administered by the barbaric practice of stoning. And, remember, all this would be done ‘in the name of’ the god they worshipped.

So effectively the religious authorities of the time had made a ‘graven image’. They had built themselves an image of God in their minds and in their writings, and they thought that God was like that image. This image of God they had made was of course, like all graven images, completely incorrect; even in the Old Testament, God describes Himself as a God of Love, which their graven image did not reflect. They had set up, in the place of the Loving Father, a man-made, stone-faced image of a ‘nasty god’ which bore no resemblance to the loving Creator of the Universe. Ask any person even nowadays what they think of God, and the chances are that they think of him as an angry old man up in Heaven just looking for people to get radgy with. This is the legacy of the graven image that these people worshipped – and, sadly, that many people still worship today.

But then Jesus came onto the scene. Jesus, the Man Who is God. Jesus, the Man Who came to show us what God is really like. Showing right from the start how much He wanted people to enjoy life – His first miracle was the one where He turned water into wine; and not just any old wine, but strong wine! – and how much He wanted people to be free of the horrible things that happen like sickness and death, by performing His healing miracles. The significance of Jesus’s miracles was not simply to show us who He is, nor just to help those whom He healed (although these were of course important in themselves), but to show us the nature of God’s Kingdom, and thereby the nature of the King Himself.

If you like, Jesus was – and is – God’s ‘graven image’ of Himself, made by Him and honoured by Him. Here at last is the Image of God, not made of wood, stone or metal, but as a Man, as a human. Col 1:15 says, “He is the image of the unseen God, the firstborn of all creation”. Here is the Absolute, the Ultimate. Here is Jesus. He’s the One Who shatters the graven image made so popular by religious people, the image of the ‘nasty god’, and replaces it with the Real Thing. And, guess what? He still does the same today.

This, then,  is why the ‘graven image’ was forbidden. Because anything less than the Real Thing – Jesus – falls woefully short of the mark!

The picture of the Easter Island statues at the top of this post was not just to illustrate the idea of a stern, frowning ‘graven image’. I also wanted to poke some fun at the idea of a static, set-in-stone concept of God, with this cartoon.

(For those who don’t remember the Pez sweet dispenser, click the image below to be taken to the Wikipedia article on it):

So there we go. Yes, I could have removed the humourous bit from the end, because some might feel it detracts from the ‘seriousness’ of the piece, but to be fair, a) It’s not really all that serious and was not presented in such a way as to be so; and b) Too many people these days feel that humour detracts and distracts from serious things; such people are usually miserable so-and-so’s and I will have no part of their shenanigans! So the humour stays!^[3]

Anyway, my comments will, I think, be few^[4], except to put the piece in the context of the series it’s a part of, The Problems with Evangelicalism. 

The honest truth is that most, and likely all, of us carry around in our head and heart our own ‘Graven Image’; our concept of what God is like. Depending on the personality, the upbringing, the education, the life experiences, as well as the personal encounters a person may have had with God, and above all, that person’s faith/religious background, that Graven Image is going to look different for each Christian. And the effect of this is that that concept will influence to a greater or lesser extent how each Christian treats others; how much they reflect Jesus – Who was indeed God’s ‘Graven Image’, but this time the real thing – and that will affect that Christian’s ‘witness’. How much Jesus is ‘transmitted’ through a Christian’s actions and attitudes is one of the main factors that influence others’ belief – or otherwise – in the existence and nature of God. And that Graven Image will have been strongly influenced by what others, usually in our formative years, taught us about God. A brilliant example would be Sonny Ray’s story, as related in one of the earier articles in this series.

For me, I remember, both at school as a teenager, and as a congregant listening to ‘children’s ministry’ in churches, just how much of it was Old Testament (OT)-based. I remember there being an especial emphasis on the Ten Commandments, and of course David and Goliath^[5] as told in 1 Samuel chapter 17.

The Ten Commandments teaching is introduced early into a child’s indoctrination so as to make them immediately subject to the Mosaic Law^[6]. Unfortunately, this makes people ‘educated’ in this manner far more resistant to the Grace message because they have been taught from a very early age that following God is all about a set of Rules, and no exceptions.

Yes, we were taught about Jesus’s life, ministry, death and Resurrection. For the adults, in church, there was talk of ‘repentance’ and forgiveness and all that. And of course the worship was spectacular. Sometimes, the Presence of God was tangible and overwhelming, but not all of the time.

Somehow, though, the way in which that vengeful OT god is related to the God of Grace of the New Testament (NT) God, as revealed by Jesus, and the way in which it was connected to ‘salvation’, was never actually explicitly made^[7]. Sure, they acknowledged that that god was a god of justice, holiness, vengefulness, and judgment, and yes (occasionally) of Love, but there was a disconnect between that god and the NT view of God. It was never explained adequately, nor was any attempt ever made to do so that I know of. Certainly not in my hearing, anyway. I suspect that this lack of connection was (and is) partially because no-one really knew how to reconcile the ‘angry god’ of the OT with the God revealed by Jesus, and so the problem was just brushed under the rug^[8]. Part of this is due to the failure to appreciate the Bible as ‘progressive revelation’; that is, the concept that those who wrote the OT did not know as much about God as did those who wrote the later books/letters in the NT. Certainly, the OT writers never imagined that Someone like Jesus would come along to show us what God is really like (John 1:18).

Therefore, the revelation of God was ‘progressive’ in terms of the thinking that human understanding of God, and beliefs about Him, had ‘progressed’ since the times of the OT. And the same is true today. Therefore, any Bible interpretation that puts as much emphasis, weight or even ‘credibility’ to OT passages as it does to NT passages, and also fails to take into account the experiences, knowledge and fruits of modern-day believers, is doomed to failure. In a very real sense, this reading of the Bible under the assumption that it is infallible and inerrant, and that everything that it says is non-contradictory and that the whole thing is factually true, is the underlying cause of such contradictory beliefs about God. And these contradictions can only really be handled either by acknowledging that the Bible is neither inerrant nor infallible and reading it as such, or by allowing oneself to slip into cognitive dissonance.

This kind of ‘flat-reading’ thinking – where all the parts of the Bible are seen as carrying equal weight, and therefore worthy of equal emphasis – is what gives rise to common Evangelical clichés like ‘God is Love, but He’s also holy/just/righteous’ and similar^[9]. Where the clear and textually absolute statements of, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8) and the parallel text “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5) is relegated to subjection to all the other verses that describe God in a much more threatening manner. What they fail to notice is that all the other terms such as ‘holy’, ‘just’ and ‘righteous’ are adjectives – descriptive words^[10] – whereas ‘Love’ is a noun. Therefore, if God is Love, then those other attributes – holiness, righteousness and justice – absolutely must be shaped and coloured by the underlying nature of God, which is Love. Of course, even the definition of Love isn’t always all that clear, and even what we do have has been twisted by Evangelicals, and other Fundies, to mean, well, whatever they want it to mean. You will no doubt have noticed that ‘Love’ is used as an excuse for all manner of unpleasantness and abuse in churches, simply by using the word ‘Love’ as an excuse for such behaviour. For Christians, really, if they’re going to follow their Rulebook sincerely, then surely the definitive description of Love is found in the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a and should be used by them to define what Love means and looks like. For completeness’ sake, here’s what it says:

So for me, then, if what someone claims to be Love does not fit with that definition, then it’s not Love.

Which brings us back to the Graven Image.

Does the Graven Image, that each of us holds inside, match with Jesus; the One Who exemplified the Love in 1 Corinthians 13? If not, then be prepared for Jesus to gently help you to modify it in your own heart. Be encouraged! Remember that none of us has an entirely correct view of what God is like, nor will we do so until we see Him face to face (which is also in 1 Corinthians 13, at verse 12!): “Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”. – 1 Cor 13:12. So, don’t feel bad about having your own ‘Graven Image’: first of all, how else are you supposed to hold any concept of God; secondly, if it makes you look to Jesus more, then that’s never going to be a bad thing; thirdly, remember we are under Grace, and not Law (Rom 6:14), so the Ten Commandments (of which, as we have seen, the ‘Graven Image’ commandment is one) are already fulfilled in Jesus and we are no longer subject to them, not that, as Gentiles^[11], we were ever really supposed to be ‘under’ it in any case; fourthly, it’s up to Jesus to make you more like Him anyway – it really isn’t your problem. Your task is simply to rest in His Grace and enjoy His Presence, and let Him do the changing as and when He deems it to be the right time! Trust Him; He knows what He’s doing! Philippians 1:6 (KJV) says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ”, leading to Jude 1:24(KJV) where it says, “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy…” [Emphasis mine]

Faultless. That is an absolute term^[12]. Hold on to it. Believe it. Rejoice in it!

Grace and Peace to you all

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In this series so far, I have written about the religious and spiritual abuses that go on within the Evangelical branch of the Christian faith. And I have written about the biggest evil, where God is presented in a literally dreadful light in the doctrine of Hell.

Well, there is another evil in Evangelicalism, which is not universal by any means, but is at least tacit in a lot of Evangelicals’ thinking, if not all. And it’s the idea that you can only have a Relationship with God through the Bible.

Oh, I know that a common Evangelical Christianese catchphrase is that ‘it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship’. Trying to claim, of course, that it’s a relationship with God. And many people in Evangelicalism do indeed have a direct and first-hand Relationship^[1] with God. I know this because I had one, when I was in Evangelicalism, and I rejoice that I still walk with God in that Relationship right now^[2]. But there are also those who steal this concept of ‘relationship’, making their religion sound attractive by advertising it as being able to actually know God personally, as they have heard that others claim, and then they twist this concept into the idea that the Bible must be, and is, the only way in which humans can have a relationship with God, and vice versa. This is the classic bait-and-switch of Evangelicalism: Join us! We know how to access God, ok welcome aboard, now here’s a Bible^[3]; read it and you’ll know God in that way^[4].

I mean, for mere humans to decide unilaterally that God – the Creator of everything^[5] is restricted to just the thousand or so pages of a book, when it comes to Him speaking and walking with humans, is simply preposterous. And those ideas are, almost by definition, espoused and promoted by those people in Evangelicalism that do not themselves have a real, living Relationship with God. It’s ‘by definition’ because, if they did so have that Relationship, then they would know that the Relationship is not bound – and simply cannot be bound – just by the pages of the Bible, and they’d also know that, again by definition, the Relationship transcends the Bible.

The reason this is an evil is twofold.

First, it tells those who have a relationship with God only through the Bible alone – an ‘indirect’ relationship, one might call it – that this is all there is. Yes, you may hunger for more, but sorry mate, the Bible is all you get. Whatever you want from God, it’s all in there and you can forget about meeting Him in any other way.

Second, and leading on from that, it also implies – either tacitly or, as in the article quoted in the main piece below – that anything beyond the Bible is from the Enemy, the ‘devil’. That’s what they think; you’ll see this in the main piece. This means that anyone who believes that the Bible is the best you can get, in terms of relationship with God, and that anything else comes from the evil one, is essentially discouraged from seeking God for themselves. It means, although this is not generally realised, that things that most believers would heartily agree bring you closer to God – like a walk out in Nature, a glorious sunset, a deep loving friendship, a good single malt whisky^[6], or even any piece of music that moves you to your heart in some indescribable way^[7] – whatever, if it’s not the Bible, it’s banned. Of course, not even the Religious actually practice that sort of prohibition (well, maybe the whisky and the music they do 🤣), but still the logical conclusion is the same. Anyway, I digress. These points mean that these Religious people – the blind leading the blind (Mt 15:14, Lk 6:39) – who believe that the Bible is the only means of getting to know God, are not only lying to their victims^[8] – that there is nothing better than the Bible^[9], but they also establish in the minds of their victims the fear-based, and what is essentially superstitious, prohibition/deterrence on seeking God further, thereby denying their victims the fullness of a true Relationship with God through Jesus^[10].

And that, my friends, is evil. There’s simply no other word for it.

Here’s the main piece, then, first published in April, 2017:

A Relationship With a Book??

This post, after my two recent posts (here and here), completes what is almost a mini-series on the dogged insistence of some believers on following Scripture to the letter and even placing it above Jesus, and thus misusing it completely.

The other day, I read a terrible piece criticising the book (and the new movie) The Shack. The book and movie have brought a lot of people into wide-open freedom already, and I have no doubt that many more will be touched by its message. Personally, I love the book and I can’t wait to see the movie (which comes out in June here in the UK). But it should come as no surprise that ‘religious’ people find that sort of thing difficult – the idea of people finding complete freedom – and so the article was critical, dogmatic and judgemental. The article is here if you want to try to stomach it. I don’t recommend reading it unless you have a bucket handy, it’s so negative.

But the thing that I found most disturbing was that the author of that article wrote this (and I hate to contaminate my blog with this sort of thing):

“In The Shack, Mack (the main character) finds true relationship with God in contrast to those who have traditional Christian beliefs based on the Bible. This subtle message qualifies as a wind of doctrine as mentioned in Ephesians 4.

I have to say that I actually feel physically sick from reading this, even if only for the purposes of debunking it. (And I don’t have a bucket to hand…) He’s saying that the only true ‘relationship’ one can have with Jesus is only and entirely through the Bible.

And this is what I am most concerned about. Sure, some people may well have experienced only that ‘Bible relationship’ with Jesus, but for him to say that anyone who has a personal relationship with Him, which transcends that of the Bible, to say that that person is wrong, is plain disrespectful and ignorant. In fact, ‘Ignorant’, in its true sense – lacking knowledge – is exactly what it is. These people know not that of which they speak.

I know what it’s like; when God speaks through the Bible, you do indeed ‘hear’ His voice inside you. I do understand that for any believer reading the Bible, there is indeed a sweetness when God is speaking through the Bible in that way. I fully agree with that. I have experienced that. And that sweetness is sweet indeed. It’s the witness of our spirit and the Holy Spirit within us.

But to name that sweetness as the ‘ceiling of sweetness’, as it were, that it doesn’t get any better than that, only means to me that that writer has never experienced anything better than that himself. I’m not saying that my spiritual walk is superior in any way, just that there is more, much more, than that fellow has yet plumbed. It is suggesting that they have only experienced God through the Bible; that they have never experienced the powerful reality of God actually walking and talking with them in their daily lives; they have never experienced anything other than just reading about Him in their Bibles and the sweetness that brings. I have. I can testify to that personally, and my regular readers will be aware of just how much He has brought me through over the last few months in the strength and love of that relationship, since the loss of my beloved wife, Fiona, to cancer last October. The Presence of God is an almost constant, bubbling-up wellspring of joy, power and freedom deep within. (Jesus spoke about this in John 4:14 and John 7:38).

Of course, that writer has it all covered, by asserting that the “…relationship [is] with someone other than the true God”, thus passively-aggressively hinting that it’s the Enemy with whom I fellowship^[12]. Well, there’s a simple test, isn’t there? By their fruits you shall know them. (Mt 7:16) If my life shows the fruits of the Spirit, then it’s a life lived by the Spirit of God, and not by any other shady spirit, thank you very much. And they’re a cheeky so-and-so for trying to intimate that I’m not ‘in Christ’ 😉 Which I am, and I know it for sure. It can happen that people realise that God speaks through the Bible, and the sound of that Voice they make synonymous with the Bible rather than God. I liken it to an iPod. With an iPod, what comes through is the music but the iPod is not the artist that did the music. Similarly, the Bible is (one of the) means by which God speaks, but it is not God and some people make the mistake of deifying the Bible for that reason.

Does this not demonstrate a classic example of people like those Jesus was talking to in John 5:39-40?:

“You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And here I am, standing right before you, and you aren’t willing to receive from me the life you say you want” (Jn 5:39-40 Message).

And so, I want to share with you today a little analogy I wrote some time ago, illustrating this relationship with Scripture against a Relationship with Jesus Himself. Here it is.

It’s like a sad middle-aged man still living with his parents, even though he’s met the girl of his dreams. The Bible leads us to Christ; once we have the relationship with Christ, it should ideally become the main relationship, not completely superseding the Bible relationship – which still exists – but still it is the main relationship. The sad man moves out of his parents’ house and marries the girl. He still has a warm, loving (and somewhat relieved!) relationship with his parents, but now his main focus is his wife. And so it is with Jesus. He is now the main focus and the Bible has done one of its main jobs which is to direct us to Him.

I understand that trusting a living person rather than a book is far harder; with a book you know where you stand; it’s all written down (but even then it’s open to misinterpretation!). The thing is that you stand, and you stand, and you continue to stand. There is no moving forward as God is not allowed to say anything that is not either ‘in’ the Book, or at least closely related to it, in that you hear evangelicals all the time saying that the Spirit will not go against anything that is in the Bible. That is neither Scriptural nor true. He will definitely go against things like hamstringing donkeys and battering children, killing all the inhabitants of a city – and even against the stuff in Job where the ‘friends’ are supposedly proclaiming God’s word but in fact they are doing nothing of the sort. Jesus said’ “There is so much more I want to tell you, but you can’t bear it now” (Jn 16:12) and this sort of thing – the Relationship with the Real and Living Person of Jesus – is precisely (but not exclusively) what He was talking about.

Far be it from me to denigrate someone else’s experience of God – for that is indeed what they get through reading their Bibles, as we have already seen. If someone wants to have a relationship with God through the tight limitations of a Book, that’s all well and good, and good luck to him – although if he stops there, with the Bible, then he’s missing out on so much more. But to criticise the true and real relationship of another believer in Christ by essentially saying that that relationship isn’t allowed, because that relationship not only exceeds but indeed transcends the words in the Bible – that’s just not on.

And to condemn someone else’s real and living relationship with Jesus and claim it is Satanic (which is what they are passively aggressively claiming) just because it doesn’t jive with their interpretation of Scripture – now that is reprehensible.

So, I would say for these people: it’s time for them to trust Jesus, both with their own lives, and with others’ too – which are in any case none of their business (Jn 21:22). It’s time to stop criticising and judging others’ relationship with the Lord. Jesus is more than capable of looking after His Church; His people, and drawing near to each of them as He sees fit.

It’s strange, really. My header picture was originally intended to show somewhat cynically that a relationship with a Book is no replacement for a Relationship with a Person, specifically the Person of Jesus by His Holy Spirit. But, you know, the primary function of the Bible is to lead us to Jesus; in some ways, then, we can indeed meet Him in its pages, thus enabling us figuratively to ‘hug’ Him like the picture shows. But the thing is that Jesus exists outside the Book, far more so than He does inside the Book. And that’s the message I’m trying to get across. You can’t limit the Creator of the universe to a book, no matter how special that book might be. There is far, far more to knowing God than simply what we find in the Bible. The Bible is, in fact only our starting point – it introduces us to Jesus, it introduces us to the loving Heavenly Father, and it instructs us in God’s ways. But it must be read with Jesus in mind – remember the Scripture’s primary purpose is to lead us to Christ!

I will finish with these short thoughts:

1) You can read all you like about God but unless you actually encounter Him you’re wasting your time.

2) It’s like reading about board games instead of playing them, or reading about a movie but not actually seeing it yourself. Or, and this is closer to the point, reading a book about someone, then claiming you know them and have a relationship with them, even though you’ve never actually met them.

3) As Don Francisco says, ‘If all you know about God is from books, then you are living in deep darkness’.

Grace and Peace to you all.

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Following on from the last post in this series, where I described the Hell doctrine as being the ‘Great Evil’ of the Evangelical gospel, I thought I would add more detail by reblogging this piece.

Back in 2018, I published this pivotal essay about Hell, and about just how terrible the doctrine really is – and indeed how terrible reality would be if indeed it were true. Here is the essay once again in all its terrible, dreadful, painful detail; I apologise that reading this may cost you some of your peace, and I would not blame you if you cried off reading it for that reason. That’s why I’m warning you. But if you can stomach it, it will be at least an education and, unless the reader’s heart is already set on believing in this doctrine come-what-may, it might even shed light on why the doctrine is completely antithetical to the teaching, life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.

I haven’t added anything to the essay or taken anything away, nor have I edited or modified it except for tidying up the footnotes into properly-referenced notes rather than simply using asterisks. The words I wrote in 2018 are just as relevant, and just as valid, today, as much as they were back then, because the logic is the same. Even the premises and assumptions on which I have based my arguments are still the same. Church ideas change veeeerrrry slowly.

Be warned: this is a very dark essay, mitigated only by the fact that I am describing what I consider to be wholly incorrect doctrines.

Today I’m going to look at the terrifying and indeed relentless ‘logic’ of the Evangelical doctrine of Hell, and the fate of everyone who ever lived^[1]. But first I need to make some points clear.

Firstly, please remember that I am writing this from the point of view of Evangelical doctrine, as I used to believe it, 20 years ago, and which is still believed by most Christians of that persuasion today. I do know what I am talking about, because I was schooled in this horrific doctrine.

Secondly, I now reject the doctrine utterly, as completely false. Humans do not suffer endless torment in this Hell place once they die. I consider it to be a man-made invention, inspired by mediaeval interpretations of Scripture towards a public even more ignorant than they are now (ignorant in its proper sense of ‘not knowing’), mediaeval literature such as Dante’s Inferno, Islamic theology from the Koran, Greek mythology and many Pagan ideas as well as Babylonian mythology too. If the Christian Scriptures are interpreted through such ‘filters’, then it is no wonder that such a terrible concoction, as the Hell doctrine actually is, exists. That, and its promotion from the desire of crooked people from time immemorial who desire control over others. But that doesn’t mean it’s true; far from it.

Most gentle Christians, if asked about this doctrine, will usually say that they do believe in Hell, but that they have not really thought about it all that much. They are just believing – loosely – what they have been taught.

In this article, therefore, I am writing almost entirely about the ‘nasty’ churches and harsh Christians who aggressively and overtly espouse doctrines that damage the idea of a God of Love; I am not talking about the majority of decent churches who simply live their Christian lives for Jesus, doing good in a quiet way (1Thess 4:11)

To digress for a minute, I would bring up the subject of ‘cherry-picking’. That is, selecting Scripture verses or other evidence that supports your own point of view, while ignoring or otherwise disregarding other evidence that contradicts that point of view. This is nothing new, of course, and many Bible characters, including Jesus, did it regularly. This is actually because of the style of debate that Rabbinic scholars used, and unless one is familiar with that, it can be quite bewildering and confusing.

There are those in the Church who, for whatever reasons, like to major on the ‘bad news’. I am working on an essay on this idea at the moment, and I will publish it in due course. And so, I have noticed recently that the bad-news mongers only cherry-pick the bad verses, while at the same time accusing people like Universalists (those who believe everyone will be ‘saved’), for example, of only cherry-picking the ‘good’ verses.

It seems to me that these kinds of Christians, who, incredibly, consider themselves ‘joyful’; the bad-news mongers who nevertheless believe they are purveying a ‘loving God’ and ‘good news’, would rather assume that everything about their god is bad. He sends people to Hell. He punishes people for their sins. He’s wrathful. He likes people dashing babies against rocks because it says so in the Psalms (Ps 137:9, in fact, if you’ve never realised that Scripture exists). It seems that for a religion that purports to be joyful, it’s actually not. They have a facade of ‘good’, and many if not most churches do indeed do a lot of good in the world, but actually their ‘good news’ underlying everything is actually very, very bad news indeed. In fact it is actually the worst news there could possibly be. The most horrible nightmare you ever had does not compare with this stuff.

Let’s take a look.

Jesus said in Matthew 7:13-14 that ‘narrow is the way, and few are those that find it’. I know from personal experience that most Evangelicals infer from this that those who do not find that ‘way’ are toast in eternal punishment, because the verse also says that the ‘broad’ way leads to destruction. This is always interpreted by Evangelical Christians as meaning that this ‘destruction’ is in the eternal, everlasting torment of Hell. There is, however, actually no direct link between this passage and the classic ‘Hell’ passages, for example Luke 16:19-31; the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This conceptual link between the ‘broad road’ and its ‘destruction’, and that this ‘destruction’ happens in Hell, is actually an assumption made by humans when trying to support the doctrine of Hell.

Maybe you don’t believe this is standard Evangelical doctrine? May I suggest you take a look at the interpretation of the ‘Narrow Way’ passage’s entry on GotQuestions.org, a website explaining standard Evangelical doctrine. It even says there that ‘We are not to be concerned with the number who will or will not enter’ – how callous is that? Grr…. Also take a look at the gross assumptions layered over the Rich Man and Lazarus story – another ‘classic’ Hell passage as mentioned above – in the ‘explanation’ of that parable on GotQuestions. It says there that, “Jesus teaches here that heaven and hell are both real, literal places”, and actually the whole, horrific doctrine is laid out there as true, non-debatable and horrible in its harshness, although I must allow that at least they have come clean and said what they actually believe, honestly, in black-and-white.

Let’s summarise, then, by saying that the Evangelical belief is that a) Hell consists of real, conscious, everlasting torment after death for all those who do not believe in Jesus (death is of course seen as the final deadline for finding that belief); and alongside that, b) Very few people will find the way (Jesus) Who rescues them from that unimaginable fate. Let’s also add c) In order to ‘find’ Jesus, people must adhere to the Evangelical methods of doing so – saying the ‘sinner’s prayer’, for example, being baptised, obedience to leadership, tithing, belief in Scripture as inspired, inerrant, infallible and to be taken literally. That’ll do for now.

But let’s go back to Matthew 7:13-14. Let’s look at it again:

From this verse – few are those that find it – it follows that actually few people will be ‘saved’ – they will ‘find’ the narrow way that leads to life – and the corollary to this is that most will therefore go to Hell. My very conservative estimate would be that, if that doctrine is true as stated, about 99.9% of people will end up there, according to Evangelical doctrine and given the number of people ‘reached by the Gospel’, by the time they die, with the ‘correct’ Gospel message^[2].

I would therefore pose this question: What kind of parent would bring a child into the world, knowing that there is a better than even chance that that child will eventually burn forever in Hell? Who would dream of bringing a child into that sort of situation? Why would you want to do such a thing? It would be sheer folly of the highest order and an abdication of responsible parenthood even before they become parents. It would be absolutely stupid to have children if you know that they will more than likely, statistically speaking, be amongst those who will burn forever. Who would want to do that? In order to try to justify the concept of children going to Hell, in many cases even before they are even conscious, they make up totally unbiblical ideas like the ‘age of responsibility’ and claptrap like that. This is an utterly man-made construct; it’s not Biblical at all, and furthermore, Jesus TOLD us that few will be those who find the way. Therefore, age of responsibility notwithstanding, most of your children will go to Hell according to those Evangelical doctrines.

Some would say Oh well, God is just, He’ll work something out. He’ll do the Right Thing. But if god is constrained by the rules that the Evangelicals say he is, there is no escape there either. There are no exceptions at all: children; the mentally ill; aborted fetuses. No. Evangelical doctrine holds that god is constrained by his ‘justice’; his rules of punishing sin, being unable to bear anything that is not holy, and his rules of justice which state that all sin must be punished or at least borne by someone, even an innocent victim. But even if that victim did his best – and Evangelicals believe that Jesus, that innocent victim, indeed ‘did it all’ – even then, most people will burn. Jesus effectively said so in Matthew 7:13, and there’s no getting away from it. Of course, it’s always ‘someone else’ that’s going to burn, not those who believe they are the ‘Elect’. But still, if there are people who, by accident of health, geography, family background or for any other of a host of reasons cannot say or understand the ‘sinner’s prayer’, then they are going to burn. No exceptions. And so that means that the sacrifice of Jesus was 99.9% worthless, or at least it will be worthless for 99.9% of people.

The ‘good news’, then, is that a very few people will find the ‘way’, and the rest will burn forever in unimaginable agony. Linked with my earlier paragraph, the ‘bad-news monger’ will say ‘Yes, god is loving, ah but, he’s also holy and wrathful and righteous and all sorts of other stuff’. They prefer the ‘bad’ verses over the ‘good’ verses.

The doctrine of Hell is the single most repulsive doctrine in all of Christendom. If it were true, the Bible would be full of warnings and references to it – but it’s not. Would it not be fair of God to make it absolutely crystal clear? But that there Bible is in fact not clear on many things, and it’s especially not clear on this.

Just to reiterate: the gospel that contains a Hell doctrine is NOT a gospel – it is not good news. It is the worst news that there could possibly be.

Let’s make it personal, shall we?: most of the people you know, love and/or have ever met will be toasting in Hell for all eternity.

There is no escape; there is no recourse other than to a 0.1% effective (at best) Saviour, if indeed 99.9% of all people who ever existed will end up in Hell. These are not good odds, I would say. I would also say that this Jesus, as depicted in this doctrine, is not all that effective a Saviour, is He? How can that be called ‘Good News’??

If you believe in the Narrow Way doctrine, and you believe in Hell for those (most people) who will not find that Narrow Way, then these terrible, terrible things are what you must believe.

All the Church socials, all the outreach, all the best coffee in the world and all your social projects designed to reach the poor or the Lost; they are all a waste of time and are simply papering over this most terrible news: that actually, no matter what you do or how hard you try, most of the people who ever lived – including most of your family, friends, colleagues and loved ones – will be tormented forever. These points are relentless, irrefutable, despair-inducing, inescapable and hopeless. There is no hope in this gospel.

This is the relentless, uncompromising logic of the Evangelical doctrine of Hell. This entire logical sequence is what you must believe, if you believe in the Hell doctrine.

Think about it.

I am sorry to finish this essay on such a low note, but this is intentional because I wanted to show that this darkness and despair is what the Hell doctrine actually represents. For more on this subject, and a little more light in the tunnel, please visit my Hell Resource Page which is somewhat more positive. The one gleam of light I can offer right here is that I believe that these doctrines are completely untrue. Remember I have written this all from the point of view of an hypothetical Evangelical who actually believes it’s all true.

Header image shows the gate of the concentration camp at Auschwitz I – Birkenau, Poland; the atrocities committed here pale into insignificance compared with the horrors of Hell as espoused in Evangelical doctrine.

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This is the second precursor essay to my series on the problems of evangelicalism, included now in the series so as to keep it all together. Initially published on 13th May, 2025, this one’s a long one!

A long Essay on Spiritual Abuse and Religious Trauma

TRIGGER WARNING:

This is a personal story involving religious abuse, and contains descriptions of religious abuse, religious trauma, and the techniques used by religious abusers. It may even come across as a bit of a rant, but I think it needs to be said in any case. It’s not for the faint-hearted. You have been warned! 😀

There are certain Christians who abuse other Christians in various ways. These people can so easily wreck and sometimes even destroy others’ faith by their words, by the damage those words cause, by their actions, and by their example.

I quote Oppenheimer above in order to emphasise that this kind of behaviour brings death. It is spiritual abuse, which brings spiritual trauma and kills a person’s spirit within them. Spiritual death^[1]. And so, these kinds of Religious people are guilty of bringing that spiritual death to other people – sometimes unwittingly, sometimes as a fit of pique, and sometimes deliberately and maliciously. Sadly, I have seen all three 🙁 Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that they reflect the character of ‘someone’ who is not Father God… indeed, they reflect more the character of the Accuser, who cometh not but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy (Jn 10:10 (KJV))- steal your assurance, kill your joy, and destroy your peace.

But, as always, by their fruits you will know them (Mt 7:16). If their words and actions cause suffering and the ‘steal, kill and destroy’ antics expressed above, you can be sure that that spirit is not from God. And while I realise that faith is a gift from God (Eph 2:8-9), the phenomenon I am describing in this piece is where someone’s God-given faith is so badly desecrated, mauled and smashed by religious abuse – often from a person that the victim should have been able to trust, which is partially why it’s ‘abuse’ – that the person finds it is no longer possible to practise, express, exercise or enact their faith due to the damage that has been done to it. It is rendered lifeless by the abuse endured, partially because the abused person no longer feels safe to express that faith, at least not in the context they live, whether religious or social – or both. That’s why I refer to spiritual abuse as being ‘The Destroyer of Faith’.

In many of my posts, I have railed against Religious people^[2] who seem to think it’s their job to police other people’s moral life. Many groups also have people amongst their number who feel free to assume that everyone is subject to their criticism and has to not only listen, but also agree and do something about any points raised, whether or not it’s someone they know and whether or not they have their permission. Certainly, if there is no actual relationship there, then they shouldn’t be doing that.

As a case in point, as my dear friend Derrick Day once said, “If you have a problem with me, call me. If you don’t have my number, then you don’t know me well enough to have a problem with me!”.

Now, granted, you may well offend or injure a complete stranger, in public or in private, and they would be well within their rights to complain to you. ‘Oi! You just trod on my foot!’ or something. And you would hopefully apologise, and that would (again, hopefully) be the end of it. But it’s superficial; there is nothing deep about it, nor is any other action required other than to apologise and maybe pay their medical bills if you injured them. There was no intentionality in it, either malicious or benign; it’s just neutral. I don’t need to expand on this; all of my readers will be familiar with this sort of thing.

However, there are some people, usually Religious people (and some political activists) who demand more. In short, they want blood. They want to know why you did something, what your motivations are, whether or not you are sufficiently contrite (sufficiently, that is, to their satisfaction) and most of all how you are going to make significant lifestyle changes to prevent further occurrences of your wrongdoing. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic, but anyone who has ever received a bollocking from a self-righteous Religious type will know exactly what I’m on about. The bottom line here is that any response to such a complaint is entirely your business, and no-one else’s.

Ten years ago, something like that happened to me. In fact, I wrote some of my first posts on this blog in response to that episode. One such example is the beautiful February 2015 article ‘Confrontation‘, which lays out the sort of approach that a believer, at least, would be advised and indeed expected to adopt, when confronting someone with something that has offended them. Certainly, it must be done in a spirit of restoration and reconciliation, not one of condemnation. No Christian should ever do anything that would cause someone to doubt that God loves them, by whatever means, but especially by lading guilt and condemnation, which can take literally years to throw off, and in some cases the person never recovers^[3]. Three articles that may help when it comes to people correcting/judging are here (the ‘Confrontation’ piece referenced above), here and here.

Unfortunately, certain Christians seem to excel at that kind of condemnation, especially when it is inflicted on fellow believers. Maybe that works so well because they know that Christians are especially vulnerable to conscience problems, particularly those who are ‘sin-conscious’ and/or ‘sin-fixated’. Such condemnatory people cause tremendous damage and hurt^[4]. While for Jesus it’s true that ‘a bruised reed He will not break; a smoking wick He will not snuff out’ (Isaiah 42:3), many of His followers do not have that same gentleness. As a friend of mine said on Facebook the other day, “Christians are the only ones who go out of their way to make sure that hurting people know they aren’t loved by God”.

Aye, I had to admit to him that, sadly, I’ve seen that first hand. In my case it didn’t work, because I know the truth about myself and about how God sees me, but they did try their best. Ten years ago now, it was.

So, here’s the story, with a bit of background too:

In August, 1999, I began my ‘dark night of the soul‘, where I stopped doing Christian things entirely. The short version of this is that I was being stripped of all the junk that had been hindering my faith for so long; religious requirements that had layered over my simple faith, and other things too. And it lasted for fifteen years. On on Sunday 2nd Feb, 2014, God said to me, ‘Ok lad, it’s time to go back’, so I duly went along with Fiona – and I got thoroughly zapped. Here’s what I posted on Facebook that afternoon: “What a morning. First time voluntarily in a church for fifteen years, and getting thoroughly zapped by God: weeping, laughing, complete acceptance, forgiveness. Wow, wow, wow! Going again tonight hehe”. That divine encounter was simply profound. I had never felt anything like that before, and I later said that I likened it to ‘being born again, again’! Since then, I have known that I would never, ever want to go back to the legalistic, religion-centred faith that I had previously had; it was like becoming a butterfly, having emerged from my fifteen-year chrysalis. My chains had indeed fallen off, and my heart was free!

To continue with the butterfly analogy, the problem with being a butterfly is that, while the butterfly can still speak caterpillar, the caterpillar cannot speak butterfly. It’s like you have a different language. The word ‘Grace’ now actually means something, rather than just something you say at the end of each meeting while holding hands and trying to avoid each other’s eyes, or a short prayer at a meal. Forgiveness is real, ongoing and at the same time permanent. You know that God ‘remember[s] your sin no more’ (Heb 8:12, which quotes Jer 31:34). You know that nothing can snatch you from His hand, nor can you jump! 😉 So that by the time of the story I will tell below, my faith was real, vibrant and living, and my assurance complete, my sonship sure and my attitude to ‘sin’ was one of complete freedom to just leave it behind. My joy, despite Fiona’s illness and prognosis, was full and real; indeed, nothing but real joy would have survived the terrible agonies we were going through as a family due to the illness. And my whole frame of reference had shifted, from one of partial reliance on complying with Law, to one wholly, solely and completely dependent on Grace. That’s why I now speak ‘butterfly’!

In December, 2014, in the face of Fiona’s terminal cancer diagnosis, we renewed our marriage vows in a beautiful service in our local Anglican Church, where we were members at the time^[5]. The wedding was awesome and many friends old and new came along to bless us, including even some from our former life in West Yorkshire. You know how with some people you have a ‘life bond’; a friendship where even if you haven’t seen each other for like 20 years or more, somehow you just pick up where you left off and things are just as they were before. Well, friends like that.

One of those friends, Sally^[6], told us that she was organising a worship conference in February 2015, where Christians from all over the country could get together to learn more about worship. And she invited us to go. The conference was to be a residential one at a Christian centre somewhere well up-country, quite a way from our home in South Devon. But we decided we wanted to go, so we could get a handle on the latest knowledge about practical Charismatic/Evangelical style worship. So off we went, and me just a year into my new life walking in butterfly freedom 😉 There was me, Fiona, our daughter Ellie, and my best friend at the time, a very practical and down-to-Earth man called Edd; we considered ourselves to be each other’s ‘wingmen’. We attended (what they referred to as) seminars, and took part in a sort of ‘open mic’ evening; we joined in and generally enjoyed it. We didn’t really learn an awful lot, to be honest^[7], and the food was pretty dire^[8]. We learned, a lot of, quite frankly, not very useful words denoting different aspects of (I think I recall correctly) worship practices of the ancient Israelites, and similar stuff, but to be honest it was pretty pithy and not much of it was of use. On the plus side, we met some amazing people and made some wonderful new friends, with whom we are still in touch nowadays, and we still continue to bless each other. While in some of the seminars, I heard things I didn’t really agree with, I generally went along with it because I know that not everyone believes the same thing, even at an Evangelical retreat. But there was one point – it was so insignificant that I can’t even remember what it was! – where I put up my hand and asked a question. The speaker, a lady whom we’ll call ‘Joanna’, was a bit nonplussed by it, she tried to answer it, and later I spoke to her privately, to make sure that she knew there was nothing personal involved; it was a genuine question. Little did I know that I had become a marked man! Obviously, for Joanna and her fellow speakers, the word ‘conference’ was nothing of the sort; it didn’t involve any two-way at all; we were expected to just sit there and listen. I am a trained Adult Education Tutor (I used to teach basic computing in evening classes at a local college) and I know that people have different learning styles; evidently Joanna didn’t know that. Probably not a teacher, or probably so full of herself that… well I need say no more! But the next day, I raised my hand to ask another question, and the speaker (not Joanna), even though she saw my hand up, quickly averted her eyes and ignored me. It seemed to me that she’d been briefed to watch out for that guy with the Yorkshire accent, because therein lies trouble! 😉 And then, in a later seminar, it was Joanna’s turn to speak again and she said that (and I quote) ‘God can’t do anything without faith as a prerequisite’. Well, that was something I couldn’t really accept, and although I didn’t put my hand up (because I knew I would be ignored), I did put a small post on Facebook that evening:

“I’ve just heard the phrase, ‘God Can’t’. And that at a worship conference, no less. Well, I’m here to say God Can!”

That was it. That was all I put^[9].

The next morning, I ran Edd to the local railway station early on, because he had to get back to Devon for some football coaching he was doing that day. I returned in time for breakfast – rubbery sausages, some sort of hard-fried egg with a pale yolk (we have free-range chickens, so we are somewhat spoiled!), Sainsburys Savers beans and the Tesco in-house version of Coco Pops. As I was eating my final bowl of (air quotes) “coco pops”, Sally and Joanna approached the table with facial expressions like those disapproving expressions that used to be worn by Cissie and Ada in the Les Dawson Show. The photo here, of Cissie and Ada^[10], does not do Joanna and Sally’s faces justice because they both had tight lips like they’d been sucking lemons, and their heads both held in an identical tilt to the left 😂.

Well, they must have indeed been disapproving expressions, because despite being Autistic and generally unable to read any sort of body language, even I noticed, and Ellie called out ‘This looks like an intervention!’ Displaying no humour whatsoever at Ellie’s brilliant comment, as is usual for the Religious when they are ‘on a mission’, they agreed that it was an ‘intervention’. They wanted to take me to task about my Facebook comment of the previous evening. Well, for me, breakfast is a sacred time, for eating not arguing, so I told them I hadn’t finished my breakfast and I was going to do so first. So they sat and watched (something I can’t stand, being Autistic) while I finished off every last orangey-brown drop of cheapo-chocolate flavoured milk from the “coco pops”. Remember this was at a fully-occupied breakfast table with about another four people there in addition to myself and my family – of course, Edd was on a train back to Devon so I didn’t have my wingman there to watch my ‘six’. Anyway, before they started in on me, I made it clear that I am my own man and that I do not recognise any authority over me, including theirs, and they agreed with that on the surface, probably just to get their own way. But in the presence of all these people, in full violation of any Biblical principle about confronting people (Mt 18:15-20) – they made up their own rules as they went along – they proceeded to lambast me verbally about my post, concluding that it was ‘all over the World Wide Web'^[11], this being concluded by Joanna’s contemptuous chucking of Sally’s phone (which she had been brandishing) on to the table. Accompanied not only by the obligatory sniff, but also by a demand that I take down the comment. Sally had shown Joanna on her phone what she’d seen on my Facebook feed, and Joanna had gone straight on the warpath. They’d clearly jumped straight to their own conclusions and given it no thought before coming to administer me a bollocking! In addition, she also told me that I had done ‘nothing but contradict her since [I’d] been there’, which is a bit of an exaggeration as I’d only asked one question, and made sure afterwards that we were ‘all good’. Hardly the actions of a disruptive person. And this all being done to a chap who has had only a year to come to to terms with having his faith restored in quite a surprising way, in the presence of my daughter who was just beginning to flourish as a young Christian girl, and my lovely Fiona who had a terminal cancer diagnosis. All these factors; those two women knew about them all. How callous is that? How selfish? I refused to take the comment down, mainly out of principle, because I detest the suppression of free speech just because someone doesn’t like what is written. Fiona was stricken and explained that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and that most likely I would eventually see their point of view and take the comment down. But they were having none of it. Joanna even said, literally through gritted teeth, that if I was Autistic then they could pray for me!^[12] I mean, I would probably have got turned into a toad or something! Honestly, words cannot express the depths of the disgust that this episode engendered in me. Needless to say, we returned home that day, missing out on the rest of that last day of the conference – not that we’d have learned much, I’m convinced. Just as the first seminar was being set up – Sally was going to be teaching on that one, so I am sort of sorry I missed it – Fiona went in to see her and to give her a hug; she must have known that this was the last time they would ever see each other and Fiona wasn’t the sort of person who would leave something like that up in the air. But we left. My peace damaged, my mind in a turmoil, my ladies gutted on my behalf. But once the dust had settled, I learned a lot from it as I will describe below. To be honest, I don’t think, now, that Sally intended for Joanna to go off on one like that; I think she was just hurt and shared it with Joanna to share her burden. And Joanna decided to take her already – existing dislike for me (for being trouble enough to listen carefully to what she was teaching and actually ask a question!) into a public shaming event. Shame it tarnished her own reputation more; those around the table got to see just how toxic she was. The old phrase ‘that says a lot more about them than it does about you’ was particularly apropos there! Anyway, I did actually take the post down, within a day in fact, because my attitude was that if it was hurting someone, then it shouldn’t be there, and I messaged Joanna to let her know, at which point she promptly blocked me with no reply. Petty and ungrateful, much. A relevant point here is that while a person may well feel free to take someone to task about something they don’t like, the response to the criticism is always in the hands of the one being criticised. Someone may well feel free to criticise my actions, but they don’t get to dictate my actions. This is a principle that all members of medium- to high-control groups could do with knowing.

But back to the story. It might not seem like much, but for an Autistic person to be publicly humiliated like that – indeed for anyone to have that happen to them! – it’s pretty bad. For someone who is an innocent, clean, joy-filled and free Christian believer acting in good faith – it wasn’t even a bad comment! – to be attacked like that. For a new believer to have to see something that ugly. For a dying lady to have to see the husband she adores being treated like that. That – is disgraceful. And sadly it’s not untypical of religious people to do things like that.

The next few paragraphs may seem a bit random or confused; a bit ‘all over the place’, but please see it as a mosaic of different impressions and realisations, also some expressions of reality, from the fall-out from that event. I have left them like this in order to simulate, in some small measure, the disjointed thinking and shock and damage effect of what it’s like when something like this happens.

I didn’t actually hold anything against the women in the story, and I still don’t. I forgave them, as you can see from the article I wrote only a few days later. I have not published the details of what happened until now; I have certainly not named-and-shamed. I have thought in depth about when – or even whether – to publish this article, or even to write it. Indeed, I am writing it only a few days before it will be published. I have waited on this for ten years. So, it is obvious that it is not coming from a place of either unforgiveness nor bitterness. I am still good friends with Sally^[13]. I’m not saying that Joanna is the Destroyer of Faith, nor am I saying that she is a Destroyer of Faith. What I am saying, though, is that her actions are an example of the sort of behaviour that is the Destroyer of Faith.

I wanted to publish the story because I know that this is not an isolated incident. It may well be for Joanna, of course (although I doubt it; usually people who do this kind of thing already have a habit of it), but still, people need to know that this sort of thing goes on in churches, especially those where the ‘authority’ of leadership – even if they are ‘only’ conference speakers – is held as a licence to abuse people. Joanna’s husband is in the leadership team of Sally and Joanna’s church, so she’s probably seen as some sort of ‘untouchable’. The Evangelical idea of ‘do not touch the Lord’s anointed’ is rife in churches like theirs – although their pastor is one of the kindest, gentlest men I have ever met (he’s not Joanna’s husband). I wonder if he knows that stuff like this goes on among his flock?

I understand that my post was received as hurtful, for which I apologised at the time, and I almost – but not quite – understand why. It was their ‘baby’; they had put a lot of work into the conference (although sadly the other organisers hadn’t put much money into the food budget 🤣 ) and they were offended by my post. That said, my post was more of a general comment anyway, it was not targeted against anyone (I don’t do things like that) and it was posted in all innocence.  It wasn’t even about the conference; it was about something that someone said. And if it was that hurtful, why did Sally have to share the hurt even further, except to cause trouble? Why didn’t she come to me, one-on-one? No-one could tell from the post where I was, nor whose worship conference I was at. Part of being Autistic is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for the Autistic person to see things from others’ points of view, especially when it’s all so convoluted, inferred and second-guessed. This is partly why I stay away from people in general, and occurrences like this only serve to reinforce that attitude as being the correct one in my case.

Leading on from the thing about the conference being their ‘baby’, yes – I get that. But I think that linking my comment about faith with the quality (or otherwise) of the conference was really taking themselves a bit too too seriously. This is a classic example of offence being taken rather than given, as I have shared in other posts. When someone is told that offence was not intended, but they still insist on receiving that offence, then that’s a sure sign that the problem is with them, not with the comment or its creator.

As an illustration of how this incident improved the way I approach life, I wrote, in this article, the following, very observant, comment, which references the events in this story:

“Interestingly, about a year ago I was once again subjected to an (uninvited) barrage of accusations/doctrinal correction/call it what you will, from a ‘non-free Christian’, and it made me realise, while in the process of categorically rejecting that person’s diatribe, just how far I have come in my freedom. I never want to go back to that life. My ‘detoxification’^[14], as it were, has released me into entirely new freedoms to love people of different views without judging them or trying to change them. And that, to me, is real freedom!”

And now a thought about how some Christians seem to think that they hold some sort of power over others. These Christians could be either leadership, their relatives (‘Elders’ wives’, as it were) or others who feel they have something to say and that they are too important to leave it unsaid. Remember that I stated clearly (after I’d eaten my “coco pops”!) that I did not consider myself ‘under’ Joanna’s authority in any way, which, of course, she then proceeded to ignore. At least from her side, anyway; it didn’t affect the way in which I received the criticism. I still rejected it, and her authority along with it.

Anyway, these kinds of abusive people mis-use the faith position of the victim in order to facilitate their attack. In other words, they know that a fellow believer is likely to have sufficient conscience and gentle heart to listen to criticism, whether that’s in the interest of maintaining harmonious relationships, wanting to ‘keep short accounts with God'^[15]or any other good and noble reason^[16], and this makes the victim open and pliable for what comes next. Their defences are down; why would they want to raise their defences against a fellow member of the Church family? Until it hits them, of course, but by that time the damage is done.

High-control church leadership invariably go on about people making themselves ‘vulnerable’, citing it as being a ‘softening of the heart’ so that Jesus can change it. There was even a Graham Kendrick song some decades ago, called ‘soften my heart’ which espoused that principle. While the sentiments behind a favourable response to this softening idea is seen as admirable, and indeed it can help some people to become more compassionate, it has two problems. Firstly, such a softening should and must only occur under the prompting and direction of the Holy Spirit, and not from a human, whether or not it’s set to music 😉 And it’s usually an unconscious thing; I find that all of a sudden I have reacted to a need in a way I wouldn’t have done before, and I never noticed that my attitudes had changed. That’s how the Spirit works. Secondly, it opens up the believer to abuse; specifically, abuse aimed at the vulnerability of that softened heart. Abusive leaders take full advantage of that, and this was what happened in Joanna’s case with me. And that’s partially why it hurt so much. Although in my case, the main thing was what it did to Fiona; the poor girl was devastated. As was Ellie. ‘Dad, you’ve come so far, and she goes and does that to you’. And she was right. I would also add that these abusive leaders don’t necessarily consciously realise that it’s the ‘softened heart’ they are targeting; they just know that it works. Or at least it does with people who submit to them, at any rate. I cope with the ‘softened heart’ concept in my own way. My heart is indeed soft; I have deep compassion for, well, everyone, including all life, really – animals, plants and so on. But I also have an armoured box, which granted does remain open most of the time, but it stands always ready to snap shut on the approach of nasty people. That’s how I defend; your method may vary.

And it really is time for these destructive people to learn how to respect boundaries. Even for those visiting ‘evangelists’ on my doorstep a couple of weeks ago; they had crossed a boundary. They had knocked on my door despite the clear presence of signs on the door (and right next to the doorbell, too!) that said ‘No Cold Callers’. I wrote to the church a few days later (of course, I am still awaiting a response at the time of writing!)^[17] and said this:

“No-one is going to change their mind about not wanting to be disturbed just because it’s religious people doing the disturbing, nor are they likely to want to attend your church if this is how badly people’s boundaries are respected”.

The question of boundaries is indeed an important one. For example, and at the risk of seeming to behave like them!, only in a church will someone ask you a question about sexual matters. They love it. They will even feel free to ask a couple if they are sleeping together! In our pre-marriage ‘counselling’ sessions, Fiona and I were asked straight up if we had ‘misbehaved’ together. I kid you not. No doubt the Elders got some sort of cheap thrills out of it; Fiona was always absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. But the fact remains that they crossed a boundary in asking us that. Christians do so love to talk about sexual matters, all in ‘love’ of course, and ‘strictly as a matter of spiritual healthiness’. I do think it gives them a cheap little frisson of forbidden sexual thrill. But in what world is it ever acceptable to ask someone a question like that? And even more, to expect an honest answer, which in some groups could earn you instant punishment as a reward for your openness? No way!

The take-home message for that is this: I can see absolutely no reason at all to ‘open oneself up’ to the potential of abuse by lowering one’s defences and making oneself vulnerable. ^[18]. I share this recommendation so as to protect you, my gentle reader, from making the same mistake. There is absolutely no need to make yourself vulnerable to anyone outside your family.

Let’s put that another way: Churches are not family, no matter how much they claim to be. Blood is definitely thicker than water. When I left my church in Leeds, only a very few people from that church maintained contact with us; those who really loved us. Mark and Alison (who greatly helped us in our move south, although I won’t say how because it would embarrass them), Richard and Elizabeth, Chris and Dawn. That’s about it. Not the Church Elders; you know, the men who used to conclude their Elders’ Meetings with a Chinese takeaway paid for with church funds, when I and my family were living on the breadline and tithing to the hilt. The Elders who told me that I couldn’t buy the church synthesiser to go to Devon with me, because how would they find someone who would know how to buy another?^[19] Please don’t interpet this prose as a complaining diatribe, nor as bitterness. Like I said, I’m well past all that. But maybe see it as a warning that you simply cannot trust church leadership anywhere near as much as they would tell you that you can. As they’d be the first to tell you (after saying ‘Do not touch the Lord’s Anointed!, of course!’), they are only human. But it further reinforces my belief that the only reason why they put up with me in that church was because I was just so damn good at leading worship 😀 They weren’t bothered about me as a person.

This is encapsulated perfectly in the following quote from the Irish writer-poet, Dylan Morrison:

“Religious and spiritual movements both tend to come and go, with only Divine Presence remaining constant.
“May I respectfully make a suggestion, one born out of personal experience.
“Don’t pour your whole identity into a movement, no matter what the brand.
“Why not?
“Well, it all usually ends up in tears, disillusionment and deep confusion.
Best to open up one’s heart to the One without change, I reckon”.

– Dylan Morrison

Now, that says it all.

Another factor is the Religious spirit. I go into some detail about that in this article, but for now let’s just say that, as I have already mentioned, some Christians take themselves far too seriously, and that is often (though by no means always!) due to the Religious spirit^[20] Here are a few quotations where the lightness and levity of being a free believer are contrasted with the load of being under the religious yoke:

“The Religious of Jesus’ day complained that He was a glutton and a drunkard. Sounds like He was enjoying life pretty much to the full, while at the same time preaching how much God loved people. To me, what they found offensive was that someone could take life so lightly while at the same time taking God so seriously. Religion can’t cope with that”. – Me

“…pride [in this case, pride engendered as part of the effects of the Religious spirit – Ed] cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Maybe people should more often than not just [accept what the Bible says] and shake the dust off and leave when their message is not being received? According to the Bible, saying nothing is actually a good thing and shows maturity and wisdom. But alas… They probably won’t, because such is the religious spirit^[21]. It always has to be right and always has to get the last word, or it will eat them up inside. Their comments will never seem to be about correcting for love’s sake, but will more than likely seem to be about correcting because nobody is as right as they are.” – Tim

“In general, I’ve found that people who are very legalistic try very hard to recruit others to their ranks. My opinion is that the more insecure one is in what one believes, the more that person will need the validation of others, which is often gained by getting others to join them and by refusing to even hear any other views. I suspect they’re also jealous of those who’ve found freedom by not having to beat themselves over the head daily with guilt and shame and “laws”. Jesus made it clear he didn’t / doesn’t appreciate spiritual enforcers, those who think they’ve got such a grip on righteousness that they are hammers, and everyone who doesn’t agree with them exactly is a nail that needs to be hammered.” – Jack B

And yet, Jesus wants even those with the Religious spirit to loosen up and actually enjoy life with Him. Of course He does. Listen to this:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” – Mt 11:28-30 (Message)

And He meant it, too. For so many Christians, their faith walk is one under the heavy load of religious burdens. My life changed when I shed those burdens and walked free.

“The enemy of the Truth does his best work through the religious folks. He keeps them sin conscious while convincing them that they are Christ conscious. They are the first to throw stones, point out specks and elevate the Bible to the level of an idol. But thanks be unto God that He will bring them too into a realization of Himself through Christ in due course of time. For now ya just gotta love them. They can’t help their blindness.” – C Andrew May

I sincerely hope that this happens, especially to Joanna. Wouldn’t that be great? 😀

Another point is that who would want to go to a church, any church, where it is expected that you open yourself up to this sort of thing? It’s actually the main reason why I’m writing this essay – in order to warn people of what can happen if someone overcommits or overexposes themselves in this sort of environment. Ok, so I am putting people off going. I’d rather that than have them come to harm, and in any case the churches have brought it on themselves.

No, if you want to go to  a church, go to a simple, quiet little CofE church or something, sing the hymns, feel the presence of God (after all, that’s the whole point!) and leave after the service, or after coffee if you’re feeling brave. Don’t let them rope you into anything. And don’t feel you have to put anything in the collection plate, if they have one. You don’t have to tell anyone your ‘doctrinal position’ on matters like Hell, salvation or LGBTQ+ issues. If you feel judged at any point, get out and don’t go back. And never, ever ‘hang on in there’ for just a little bit longer hoping that things will improve, because they just won’t. It might also be an idea if you don’t get drawn in to a political discussion! If you have special talents, abilities or Autistic superpowers, don’t tell anyone. If you’re gay, definitely don’t tell anyone. If anyone asks you about anything sexual (and believe it or not, they might!), find the pastor and report them to him/her. And then leave. Yes, if you go alone, people might ask if you’re married. If you go with a member of the ‘opposite sex’ (and yes I’m aware that this is a ‘problematic’ concept nowadays!), keep your relationship status secret. Keep ’em guessing!  If you go with a member of the same sex, don’t entertain any questions about anything to do with your sexuality. And then report them to the pastor. Yes, there are sick Christians who do indeed ask questions on matters like that…how can that ever be considered normal?? But they do. And then they gossip about you.

Despite all this, I would say – and not even grudgingly! – that Christianity in general does produce an awful lot of good stuff. There’s social initiatives, there’s soup kitchens, there’s programmes to help the poor, there’s all the good things that Christianity has done down the ages like initiating national education, abolishing the slave trade, establishing hospitals, and many more things. There’s some really good worship music, that I still find a real blessing (I have a Christ for the Nations playlist playing as I type this, despite them being a highly legalistic organisation^[22]) I get all that. And to be fair, I actually think that Christianity does more good than it does harm, for all its faults. But what I’m doing here is to give my readers a general feel for the sorts of nastiness that can befall someone who gets involved in any medium- to high-control, culty, church where certain of its members seem to think it’s ok to interfere in other members’ lives, and to castigate complete strangers just because they feel like it. And I hope I am also helping their potential victims to gain a real and healthy wariness when considering membership of such a group. The thing is, they will inculcate you gradually, so that you don’t notice what they’re doing. One little thing you don’t like here, but don’t call it out, leads to another one there, down the line, where you don’t call that out either and, little by little, they’ve got you. And, sooner or later, I guarantee that someone will be nasty to you; you can absolutely count on it. I think that my shock on being confronted by Joanna was so great because I hadn’t seen it for a long time; she assumed I’d still be susceptible to that kind of thing (because Sally had told her some of my former background, back before I discovered Grace) and she came in with that assumption. And of course it no longer washed with me, whereas maybe it would have done before. Actually, even then, I would likely have kicked back. I was never that badly inculcated. But it made me remember just how bad it is in Evangelical churches for this sort of thing, and reminded me of the freedom I really have by not being part of one. The Anglican church I was part of at the time didn’t have that sort of thing going on (dunno why!) and was only nominally Evangelical anyway (maybe that’s why!)

If you’re already a believer and thinking of joining such a church, or any church for that matter, be sensitive to what God is calling you do do, if anything, and don’t go beyond that. If, during the after-service coffee, someone wants to rope you into something, go and find someone else to talk to. Watch especially for the old lady in the tweed skirt; it’s her job to get complete strangers to bake cakes for after next week’s service 🤣 I kid you not; the first time we went into our ‘new’ Evangelical church in August 1995, there she was, and that was what she did!

Someone wrote a comment to me recently, saying, “Ain’t no hate like Christian love!”, and in a sense, he’s right. While I have a dear friend in Northern Ireland who is currently experiencing the real love of God expressed through a church congregation, it is a sad fact that such congregations are few and far between. Much more common are groups where the love of Christ has gone cold, and all that is left is the cold, shrivelled neutron star (what’s left of a powerful supergiant star, once its fuel runs out) of a church cinder that has had its day, it’s just going on to try and recapture memories of its past glories, and it’s about time it closed. It’s interesting that folks in such remnant congregations generally have only sin-policing and dislike of ‘worldly’ systems as their common/uniting factors, rather than uniting in love and letting that love leak out into their community. In a sense, they are closed systems with no new life. Maybe that’s why their fuel has run out.

For further help, let me say that there are many books out there on recovering from spiritual and religious abuse, some better than others. Search for them on Amazon or wherever, and read the reviews too. Some of the reviewers of a given book may say that although they found the book helpful, there were bits they didn’t like. As always, with anything like this, when you read a book, feel free to eat the meat and spit out the bones. Keep what is useful; discard what is not.

While this attack and the whole incident did shock me, and it rattled me, and gave me what we used to call ‘a bit of a clattering’, it did not kill my faith. Fortunately for me, my roots in Jesus are so deep that this did not damage my faith in the slightest; in fact it made it even stronger because it is in adversity that our faith is tested – not tested by God, Who doesn’t need to test it (He knows all about it already), but tested by the circumstances so that we can see for real how our faith stands in adverse circumstances. However, I did find that the unjust and irrational nature of the attack did offend my Autistic sense of justice; injustice really rankles with me, and I have tremendous difficulty coping with irrationality, particularly from humans. But my faith is based on actual, historical events that happened in my own life which have given me foundational security in my faith. Two of those events (there are more) are given here and here; I even have the dates and times for them, they had such a profound effect. Furthermore, because I am a ‘butterfly'(see above!), the best (or I suppose you could say ‘worst’) efforts of the caterpillars do not reach me on a faith level anymore, because I live my faith at a level they cannot even imagine. I don’t want that to sound boastful – although in some ways I’m not bothered if it does! – but this is the truth. My faith now works at a level that is so far beyond what it was like before my ‘rebirth’, that it bears little resemblance to it. In a way, my former faith was in two dimensions; my new life is in three dimensions. It is as different from my former life as a cube is to a square – the same basic shape, but with real substance. Or, in keeping with the theme of my blog, it’s like being able to fly, and work in three dimensions, as opposed to the two dimensions to which a mere ground-dweller is restricted. Such is the effect of Grace on a believer’s life. I would moderate that with the following two caveats, though:

“Once you say ‘higher level’ (regarding one’s level of spirituality), you appeal to the ego, and all the wrong instincts in people.”

-Fr. Richard Rohr

“When you begin to refer to where you’re at on your journey as a “deeper place,” “higher level,” “another dimension,” or some other such thing, you create a space where pride, arrogance, and superiority can thrive in the name of spirituality. No, we’re journeying, and on this journey, mountains are laid low, and valleys exalted. Every place is an equal place for the sincere, it’s just that we are never all in the same place at the same time, and tend to assume wherever we’re at is the place to be.

“The place to be is wherever you are”.

-Jeff Turner

I still fully agree with those two quotes. But how else can I express it, that which has become a reality to me? Except just to say that I am aware of no pride or superiority in my thinking; it’s just the way things are. I am stating facts, not putting myself on a pedestal. I suppose that at the end of the day, I am just expressing why the comments of the ‘caterpillars’ do not affect the life of the ‘butterfly’, and why they did not in this case (and they certainly can’t make me into a caterpillar again!) It’s that they don’t understand; indeed they cannot understand. Until you have seen Grace, you can’t understand it. But once you have seen it, you can see nothing else, it is that life-changing.

For those whose faith does get badly damaged, though, there is still good that can come of it. As you will have seen when reading this essay (assuming you haven’t fallen asleep, that is), you can learn so much, just as I have done. And setbacks in your faith walk can be made into strengths as you discard old beliefs and ‘faith positions’, and learn modified ones. This is a part of the ‘Stages of Faith‘, which few Christians know about, but which is what growth in Christ actually looks like. Take a look at my series on spiritual growth; while Christians do tell their congregants that growing into Christ is important, and indeed is one of the objectives of the Christian faith, most of them do not know what this actually looks like, much less do they teach it in any detail. And even by reading this piece, you have put your experiences into a wider context, which will definitely help you from this point onwards. Let Jesus lead you into Grace; read this blog and search for all the teaching on Grace. If you want to find it in the Bible, begin with Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and take it from there.

I hope this has been helpful.

Grace and Peace to you all.

Sorry there’s so many footnotes – more in fact than in any other piece I have written. It’s just that in this post, there are so many side issues that needed to be explained, but without breaking the flow of the main piece. Still, I suppose that’s what footnotes are for… 😉

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Thinking of my series on the problems of Evangelicalism, I have decided that two ‘precursor’ essays, which I published before the series, and which are referenced at the end of my opening piece on the series, are so totally relevant that I need to incorporate them into the series itself. So, here’s the first, originally published on 1st May, 2025.

To members of religious organisations who decide to ignore my ‘No Cold Callers’ signs: Try thinking ouside your box for once.

You ‘think’ that the signs are there to protect *me*, and therefore you ignored them today.

But they’re not; they’re there to protect *you*. Ignore them at your peril, and you will get the full 16-inch broadside again, like you got today.

You really have no idea what you’re messing with!

That was a post I put on Facebook, the day after a couple of ‘evangelists’ from my local Evangelical Church came around to my house uninvited and proceeded to knock on my door, despite there being clear signage asking people not to do so.

I’m going to talk today about why this action of theirs was not only wrong, but also that there are a number of learning points that those two men could maybe consider thinking about.

After our conversation, I gave them the business card for my blog, so who knows; maybe they’re reading this right now. Hello again, gentlemen!

Well then, in Matthew 16:3, Jesus suggests to the Pharisees that maybe they should try reading the signs of the times. And that’s fair enough.

These days, however, it seems that some Christians can’t even read signs that are written down, and displayed clearly and prominently.

Allow me to explain. There are disabled people living in my house. I have people that can’t answer the door due to mobility issues, and people that can’t help but take their time getting to the door because of age-related mobility issues (it takes them longer to get down the stairs, for example) and also people who have neurodivergent issues which means that it is stressful for them to answer the door to complete strangers who will of course be pushing an agenda.

And so we have a couple of defences. We have a Ring doorbell, which enables occupants in the house to screen callers, and to talk to them remotely. I’ve even done it from the local library once, ‘Sorry, I’m not in, please can you leave the package behind the wheelie bin?’ and so on.

But we also have signs on the door telling people that cold callers should not knock/ring. These signs are legally binding, because they state clearly that unsolicited callers are not welcome and that to ring/knock constitutes an offence under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, 2008. And to be fair, sometimes it works. We hear the proximity alert (someone is approaching your door) but they don’t ring the bell, and instead walk away. So far, so good. And we always report the unrepentant to the police; those callers who ignore the signs when they are tradespeople or sales people and then claim that they always ignore such signs. Their punishment is deserved.

However, it has been my experience that the worst offenders for ringing the doorbell when they shouldn’t are people from religious groups. While I have actually seen Jehovah’s Witnesses see the signs, turn around, and walk back up my driveway, to their credit, unfortunately the last time some of them came, they actually rang the bell! And I gave them a theological run for their money and they left wishing they’d never called – not that I was nasty to them, of course, but I told them lots of things they didn’t like me saying. And to be even more fair, religious groups are actually exempt from the door knocking regulations – although I always tell them that ignoring the sign is not a ‘good witness’ for their religion. What does it say about the kind of people they have in their group when they ignore a perfectly reasonable request to not knock? There’s simply no excuse.

So anyway, these two guys turned up a couple of days ago, and I knew they were from my local Evangelical church because they tried to present me with a leaflet and I turned it down, but not before I’d seen the pictures on the leaflet, so I knew their colours.

The following Facebook post sums up the interaction succinctly:

They had opened with a response to my immediate query about how their church copes with LGBTQ people – my Litmus Test. Of course, although they immediately responded by talking about the love of Jesus, they very quickly went into the bait-and-switch of quoting the Bible. Standard operating procedure for evangelists; they hold up the bait of the idea of the loving Jesus, which is a really attractive concept, and then they switch to the Bible and its rules – in this case, they were of course quoting some of the ‘clobber passages'^[1]. So Jesus is ok as long as the Bible can be brought in somewhere. It is my new hypothesis that the Bible leads people to Jesus (John 5:39-40), but then the purpose of Christian evangelists is to lead people back to the Bible. I mean, you can’t have Jesus talking to people unsupervised, now can you? Remember, everything Jesus says to a believer has to be held up against the Bible, by other believers, to see if it is valid. This is because the Bible is the third person of the Trinity, of course^[2]. </sarcasm off>  😉

The other bait-and-switch, of course, is the Grace-to-legalism switch. I could go on about this, but the idea is basically ‘Come as you are, God will love you anyway’ and then switch to ‘Ok, now we’ve got you, here are the list of rules you have to obey in order to ‘stay saved’. They lay over the top of the pure Jesus experience layers and layers of requirements until the new believer is buried in the mire of religion, and the poor neophyte loses that initial joy because of it. This is what churches do; it’s very, very rare to find a church where the individual’s relationship with Jesus is held as the primary source of their faith; no, it has to be the Bible. Again. Because, again, they don’t trust God to be capable of speaking to a believer Himself^[3].

Anyway, here is a list of, shall we say, ‘suggestions’ that I have come up with for people doing door-to-door visitation. Not that I would encourage such presumption in others’ behaviour, of course (I would not encourage door-to-door ministry for many reasons), but since I am Autistic (something else they never knew about; just treat everyone the same, why don’t you, guys) I have of course obsessively analysed the interaction in depth and found many of the flaws in their method. And for those who may unwittingly fall victim to these intruders on your property, I hope that my actually writing out these ‘Top Tips’ will give you things to look out for, and that you can pull them up for. Don’t get me wrong, I know they’re doing it from a sincere heart and with a genuine desire to ‘save’ people, and their courage in doing so is admirable. But as usual their cloistered, out of touch situation of being in a tight church community blinds them to how their ‘ministry’ looks from the outside. Which is not a good thing.

And at the risk of confusing Christians (it has been my constant experience that most Christians can only cope with one talking point at a time), I will list the points below.

Ok, here we go:

• Don’t be pre-judgmental and assume that everyone you meet will be someone who knows nothing about God and His ways. You don’t know who you might be talking to. In my case, you were talking to an acknowledged genius with an acutely sharp mind, and with in-depth Bible college qualifications, and who has been walking with Jesus for the best part of 45 years.  Hardly someone who is unfamiliar at least with Jesus, and even the Bible too.
• Related to the above, don’t presume that others are ignorant about the things of God. Even if they’re not someone like me, they too will likely have some sort of spiritual walk, even if it is ‘merely’ being good to other people.
• Very importantly, don’t ignore signs like mine on the door. It displays your unconcern for others’ feelings and needs if you do ignore the signs, and, furthermore, you may be surprised to learn that others will likely not consider your message as important as you think it is – and certainly not after you have ignored their notices. No, just don’t do it. Period^[4].
• If you have a religious spirit, you’d best stay at home, mate. Such a spirit is more obvious to your audience than you realise; in fact you probably don’t even realise it yourself since your slide into that spirit was so gradual. And it is by far the most off-putting thing in all of Christianity for people to experience someone with a religious spirit. How can you tell if that’s you? To be honest you yourself likely can’t, but a big clue is found in the fact that you are doing this activity in the first place. At the end of the day, you are going out to tell others how wrong they are, and how you have the answers. Don’t try to pretend otherwise, or to try to mask it by feigning concern about your neighbours’ welfare, like it says on your church website. That behaviour is presumptuous, arrogant and artificial, and this too will be detected by your victims. Certainly, talking a lot about ‘sin’ is a dead giveaway for the religious spirit, especially when you start to list your pet peeve ‘sins’. And see below, too, about how this reveals your heart. Also, being prepared to adopt underhand tactics such as those discussed below, are a sign of the religious spirit. You may also find that you have lost your joy somewhere along the line, and your faith now consists of a grey, lifeless adherence to what you see as God’s Law. This is why Paul says that “the written Law brings death” (2Cor 3:6) – but be encouraged! because he immediately follows that assertion in typical Hebrew fashion by saying “but the Spirit gives life”. Linked with that loss of joy, you will likely also have lost your sense of humour, partially because you have to be selective about what you allow yourself to find as funny, and also because laughter needs some sort of joy to fuel it – and your joy tanks are dry. Finally, the religious spirit always has to have the last word. He 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. If what he had to say was that good, he’d have used it during the general discussion, rather than as a shot at someone’s back when there is little chance of a rejoinder. This is the religious spirit; that’s what it looks like.
• Listen more than you talk. Your audience needs to feel valued and listened to, and you need to tailor your replies to their words. This is what’s called ‘basic conversational skills’ and, having been walled up in a closed community of like-minded people, you’ve probably never had the chance to learn it properly.
• Remember: you started it^[5]. You turned up at their house unannounced, uninvited and unexpected. If people say things you don’t like, remember you put yourself in the situation voluntarily and in fact you didn’t ask the householder if it was voluntary on their part. None of this ‘is this a convenient time?’ or anything, because you assume again that what you have to say is so much more important than anything they would possibly rather be doing in their own house. Remember you weren’t asked to come and visit and you’re there on the homeowner’s sufferance. Respect that and don’t assume any sort of entitlement.
• In my case, you failed to recognise my Autism. Granted, I mask it very well. But the take-home message here is that you should always be aware that everyone is different and, therefore, their responses will stem from vastly different thought processes, backgrounds and motivations, none of which you can assume you are right about. Something they never teach at churches is that one size definitely does not fit all. But of course you will not believe that, since as far as you people believe, there is only one way to ‘get saved’, and that’s by your way. You assume that when Jesus spoke of a ‘narrow way’, a) you understand what He meant, and b) you have found that ‘narrow way’. Of course you have; how lucky that was for you.^[6]
• Please stop doing the old ‘Bait and switch’ – switching Grace for Law and Jesus for Bible. You bait with Jesus, and you end up giving them the Bible. You claim to preach Grace, but as with most churches that claim they are ‘into’ Grace, in reality it’s nothing of the sort. You just impose a set of rules for people to follow (Matthew 23:4), and that’s called ‘Law’ in anyone’s book. What you are doing by using this method is no different from the tricks used by pushy and disreputable salespeople. You claim to be ‘in the world, but not of it’. Why not prove it. then, by not adopting ‘worldly’ tricks like this one.
• Related to the point above, even though you begin by saying you preach Jesus, in actual fact you really preach the Bible. Your rulebook says in John 5:39-40 that the Bible leads people to Jesus. And yet it seems to the victim that your task is actually to lead them all the way back to the Bible again. You’re not on your own, of course; most Evangelical churches do this exact same thing; this is to me a sure sign of the, yes, apostasy in today’s Evangelical church. Stick to Jesus. Relate your testimony of all the good He’s done in your life. Describe how your relationship with Him works, and how much it blesses you. If you can’t do that, then I would suggest that you don’t really have a relationship with Jesus Himself, but instead you have one with the Bible. If that’s the case, then you should not be going out lying to people by claiming that you do indeed have that Relationship with Jesus Himself. As Don Francisco once said, “If all you know of God is from books, you are walking in deep darkness”.
• Remember that you will meet all kinds of people, including fellow Christians who are further on in the faith than you are. Accept that, and be prepared to listen and learn. If you remain teachable, then you will find that you will learn something from most if not all of your conversations, even with ‘unbelievers’. Do not disregard the wisdom of the world; it too can come out with some real gems, as you’d see if you looked at some of the posts in my ‘quotations’ series^[7]. And you likely have forgotten this Scripture, but again your own Rulebook says in 1 Corinthians 2:15 that ‘The spiritual man judges all things [note, not people – Ed] but he himself is not subject to human judgment. And therefore you shall not judge any fellow believer that you meet on the doorsteps. If you do this, then that believer may well give you nuggets from God that you were not expecting, you will not want to hear, and which may well change your life for the better. Of course, your hardened heart will protect you from this to some extent, but, well, you have been warned! For one of the visitors the other day (and yes, it was the guy with the religious spirit!), his parting shot was “You need to spend more time in the Word!” Spend more time in the word, you say! How on earth do you think that I managed to quote all that Scripture, from memory complete with chapter and verse, to you if I wasn’t completely steeped in the Scriptures? Look, your own Rulebook says in Colossians 3:16, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly…’ and, for the last nearly 45 years, that is exactly what I have done. The fruit of that is shown by my extensive knowledge of the Scriptures and by my extensive scholarship in the Bible and its concepts^[8]. You were simply closed to what the Spirit was saying to you, as well as being so focused on your own thoughts that you were unable even to discern what was going on around you. I was fully conscious of the huge anointing on me as I spoke to you, and you were seemingly impervious to it. I am sad to say that it seems you have a long way to go before you get a hold of the freedom that Jesus actually offers you – but who knows? He may just reveal it all to you in a flash, just like He did for me all those years ago. He may well surprise you, and I sincerely hope He does. Your life will never be the same again.
• Looking at the above bullet point from a slightly different angle, remember that when Christians meet, they are supposed to bless each other. And that was what I tried to do, by explaining the wonder of Grace to you.
  But all you did was to try to argue your way out of God’s Grace, to almost try to explain why it didn’t apply to you, and also try to drag me down with you.
  Why would you want to do that; to deny yourselves such blessing, and also try to destroy mine as well? I mean, why? Now, I fully understand that you will meet with hostility on your ‘rounds’. But you don’t need to assume that fellow Christians will be equally hostile. Even once I had declared myself as a Christian, you remained hostile; in fact you actually got worse. As if you were annoyed that someone calling himself a Christian could possibly believe something different from you. So rather than share blessings, you simply turned nasty. All you’re doing with this attitude is to miss out on so much more blessing, and on learning more about Jesus from someone who has a different point of view, but which nonetheless will likely complement yours nicely. And so, you didn’t share blessing; you shared disquiet and discord. When you go out, it’s supposed to be ‘peace on this house’. But you didn’t share any peace at all.
• Related to the above, I noticed that once I ‘came out’ as a Christian, you immediately switched attitude. In short, you assumed that because I am a fellow believer, you were suddenly entitled to make unwanted input into my life. What gives you the right or permission to do that? Do you think that because we have the same Father, you can suddenly tell me what to do or think, or judge my attitudes more harshly than just the general ‘oh he’s an unbeliever’ judgments you would reserve for those who do not profess belief? Why should I suddenly be subjected to a new set of standards, coupled with your belief that I should abide by them? I saw your anger when I declared my support for same-sex relationships, after you knew that I am a Christian. I mean what?? And then your parting shot of saying ‘You should get into the Word more’. How dare you! Would you have used that on a non-believer? No, because you wanted to present a ‘nice’ front to people who might want to make the mistake of coming to your church^[9]. But of course once you know I’m a believer, that all changes; you know that I know what churches are like, so there’s no need to pretend any more. If I’d never owned up, you’d have kept your ‘speaking to an unbeliever attitude’! Honestly, you guys make me sick. God knew all along about my attitudes, but He didn’t see fit to inform you of them, and therefore they’re not all that important to Him in the context. Why should anything be any different because all of a sudden you know things that God has known all along? It’s because you have an exaggerated sense of self-importance; you think that God can’t manage dealing with His children in His own way; you have to do it on his behalf. And that’s a pathetic attitude.
• Don’t use proof-texting. It is disrespectful both to your victim and to the Bible itself, for so many reasons. Check out my blog post here, including the comments section where I give bonus content, for more details on this.
• I presume that your church is one of those who believe that the Bible is not only inspired, but also infallible and inerrant, as partially evidenced by the line on your website that declares that declining belief in the Bible is largely due to the teaching of evolution in schools and other establishments. Well, in regards to inerrancy, and also related to the bullet point above, a point which is which is universally missed by Biblical inerrantists is this. If you insist on providing ‘proof texts’ which contradict any text quoted by your victim, this is actually declaring that you do not believe in inerrancy. Inerrancy means that the Bible is never wrong. Inerrancy also infers (and this is backed up by inerrantists who claim, when challenged) that the Bible does not contradict itself, despite you using those verses to do so. Well, any honest reading will immediately show this assertion to be incorrect (in Proverbs 26:4-5 for just one example of many). But my point is this: simply by quoting a Scripture verse that contradicts another Scripture verse just given by your victim, you are showing that the Bible does indeed contradict itself. And, while you may be blind to this, your victims will not be, especially those who are well-versed in the Scriptures. The problem is actually not so much with the Bible, but more with what you are expecting it to do. If you expect it to give you unified cast-iron rules, methods, opinions and doctrines, then you will be sorely disappointed. This is because, while the Bible is undoubtedly inspired, it was still written by many people in different cultures and time periods, and who had each had their own encounter with God in their own, unique way. While their lessons and experiences are priceless even to us today, you should not expect the Bible to present a unified front, at least not on the surface level of the words written. It was never intended for that, and if you simply throw out the concept of inerrancy, then that will solve the problem. It is simply not the case that the Bible loses its authority just because it is seen for what it is, and what it is not. Yes, there are contradictions, but these can still be used to edify and build up those who read them. To come back to the Proverbs 26:4,5 example above, if it is read as Hebrew parallelism rather than just as a plain pair of inerrant but yet still contradictory statements, then it is far more useful. Applying a similar idea to the rest of the Bible, inerrancy becomes redundant and the Bible is far more understandable because of it – even to the layman.
• Stop focusing on ‘sin’. Your Rulebook says in Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things”. That’s good advice, and will take your eyes off ‘sin’, at least until you realise how much you miss thinking about ‘sin’, that is. And then, sadly and in all likelihood, you’ll likely return to it like a dog to its vomit (Prov 26:11) 😉
• Finally, be aware that if you start suggesting things as examples of things that you consider ‘sinful’, you will likely inadvertently be exposing your own heart, its predilections and its hidden ‘sin wishes’. People are more perceptive about dead giveaways like this than you give them credit for. So if your idea of a ‘temptation’ is, as one of you suggested yesterday, ‘a blonde in a miniskirt wearing a low-cut top'^[10], then you need to know that you are betraying your fantasy to the world at large. I wonder if your wife knows about this particular leaning….^[11]

So, there we go. If you’re going to come around and visit me again, you’ll need more than just your Bibles, boys. Unless you want to hear about Grace, in which case I’m all yours. 😀

Grace and Peace to all my readers.

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