Holy Barbecue Pits!

It's a mystery: why some people never lost faith, felt no religious disillusionment growing up but I did. A cloud of alienation hangs over fellow travelers like me, along with consternation that others are untroubled by the lack of convincing evidence for the Apostle's Creed and the absurdity (in the terms by which we judge the rest of life) of God becoming a man whose sacrifice two thousand years ago gave everlasting life. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs, and no double-blind experiments have replicated this or its ancient rationale: the power of blood sacrifice to purge guilt.

Slaughtered animals were burned for gods or spirits all over traditional European and Asian religions, but nowhere in my Christian experience have there been any sacred barbecue grills, though that's exactly what the Lord's altar in the Temple was. The sacrifice of chickens in Voodoo and Jewish rites is attacked as animal cruelty, even as Purdue's mechanically offed billions are yawned at. In the ancient world, blood sacrifice solemnized contracts, affirmed relationships (the Prodigal Son's fatted calf), expiated guilt, and was the staple of the Jerusalem temple. Human sacrifice pervades the Old Testament--condemned when worshippers of Baal burn their children (Jeremiah 19:5 and elsewhere) but sentimentalized when Jephthah sacrifices his daughter (Judges 11) and a mark of piety in the case of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22). So blood sacrifice to redeem made sense the ancient world, but its basis has evaporated today. In the absence of holy lambs on barbecue pits, it is a temple without a foundation. It's either mythic or nonsensical.

The doctrine of penal substitution (that Christ was punished for our sins) is not only alien to current judicial practice but morally repugnant. Imagine that a man has committed such awful crimes that the judge hands down a penalty not only of death but of years of torture. Such a judge would be overruled. He'd be a moral monster, incapable of forgiveness and in violation of the Constitution. But suppose the criminal is really, really, really bad--a vast void between him and all decency. Let's put a face on him. Let's call him Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed seventeen men and boys, screwed some, ate others, and kept body parts in his freezer. If anybody deserves bad stuff, he's a candidate (though he got only life imprisonment). Now let's say Dahmer repents and a friend volunteers to be killed in exchange for his full pardon. "Greater love has no man." Would any court take the offer seriously? How can this make sense to Christians today? Everybody would condemn a court for executing blameless surrogates in place of the the guilty. And yet I heard this, ten times worse than sacrificing chickens, preached poker-faced from Baptist pulpits. 

This is only one bit of theological nonsense that I saw in my teens, especially as I began reading Freud, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Asian scriptures. I fled the smugness of a church that preached faith as fact, ill-fitting and unsupported though its Calvinist articles were. The resentment ran deep. My church had promised eternal life and absolute truth, and now, by preaching obvious absurdity, had ripped all this away, leaving me cold in outer darkness. The gullible enthusiasm of my home church felt toxic. It was like an allergic reaction. Cheerful born-agains made my skin crawl. I wasn't alone. By junior year in high school, a few agnostic friends also saw the obvious, that theology was piss-poor science. Even as I wobbled back into churches for fellowship and words of the spirit, even as I hungered for these things, it seemed painfully obvious to me that the church theology was a sad if sometimes beautiful deception or mirage.

What mystified me was that that everybody with a healthy brain and a grasp on reality didn't shed religious belief by age seventeen, its rationales were so clearly tainted. Of course, my skeptical friends and I dismissed grownups as intellectually irresponsible. The old weren't, with lovely exceptions, honest collaborators in the grim business of making sense of our new world. They had sold out. But how could youth, viewing the data afresh, affirm old fusty old myths without irony? And yet two close friends (who never talked theology as I recall) went to seminary after college and are retired now from careers as pastors, Methodist and Episcopal. 

Just a few years ago, reading My Neighbor's Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth and Transformation (2012), a collection of short personal essays, I expected parallels to my teenage rejection of literalist theology. What I found were almost entirely other patterns. I found veteran clergy (who presumably had never lost faith) affirming my rejection. A rabbinical professor, for instance, calls it "infantile" to imagine a "God is up there in heaven with a book, keeping score, watching the good and evil that you, preparing to reward or punish you" (p. 64).

More alien to my experience is Jennifer Howe Peace's experience as a Connecticut pastor's daughter who nearly lost her religion for reasons opposite mine. Scripture readings no longer "moved" her, so she concluded that "religion isn't for me, after all"--as if the scriptures were sentimental entertainment. Peace regained faith through a night of group singing when she felt "surges of emotion" until "I cried and cried and cried and cried, no longer concerned that I could think of no good reason to cry" (pp. 26-27). She went on to become a theology professor, but whatever was valid or not in her Connecticut religion seems to have been validated by nothing but a tear-jerking hootenanny, an emotional event void of epistemological content. This perplexes me: the idea that truth or untruth, relevance or irrelevance, could hinge on sobs. I tend toward the kill-joy view that if I'm moved, that shows bias, so maybe I need to back off.

But religion has always moved me, always fascinated me. In my teenage loss of faith, of course, much of the affect was negative, a sinking sense that all meaning was a swirling sea of poetry, music, myth, theatre, and metaphor around a sterile atoll of science, which outraged my childhood conditioning that it ought to be absolutely more. I love poetry, music, myth, theatre, and metaphor and have never ceased to be moved by things religious--hell, even theology, a field so sprawling and dissonant that it's impossible to see any given part of it as authoritative. Come by and I'll show you my diploma (noncredit, but still four years of study) from the Sewanee School of Theology. 

Maybe I have to finally agree that, if I can't see near-certitude beyond a the Dry Tortugas of science and am sustained by the eucharist, I'll forgive myself (and the universe) for a religion consisting of music, myth, theatre, metaphor, and poetry--a religion without certitude, something my old teenage self might dismiss as mere doubt fatigue. Should I "as a little child" see adult years as a sixty-year circumnavigation back to port and respect Dr. Peace and my pastor friends for staying put? Is that the secret behind their Mona Lisa smiles: riding loose in the saddle of theology in a time when even Anglican priests aren't required to affirm the Thirty-Nine Articles?

(The last sentence might end this essay, but after my opening attack on penal substitution, I feel obliged to note that (though I didn't know it in 1960) most Christians reject the Calvinist doctrine. Christos Yannaras, representing the Eastern Orthodox tradition, says it "changed the truth of God by subordinating the freedom of his love to the relentless necessity of an egocentric and savage justice which demanded sadistic satisfaction." And Roman Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson calls it "inseparable from an underlying image of God as an angry, bloodthirsty, violent, and sadistic father." These quotations are from Mark McIntosh's Mysteries of Faith (2000) where he suggests that "Jesus on the cross is God finding us in all our brokenness and isolation and coming to be with us in an irrevocable and liberating way" (pp. 128-129). Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) had characteristically medieval visions of Christ's flowing blood but (from the Julian Center website) "did not perceive God as blaming or judging us, but as enfolding us in love." Everything contrary to peace and compassion was, for her, human, not divine. Of course, God can't be the literal equivalent of Calvin's bloodthirsty human judge, so the doctrine is ultimately an explanatory metaphor in the service of a narrative mystery, but it seems daft to explain by equating God to a human monster, a view I naively rejected sixty years ago.)