When Christians Were Atheists

Prior to 313 C.E., the dominate religious thought was there were many gods who were regional and/or specific to an area. Some god took care of the sea, another the sky and another was for farmers. The advent of Christianity meant that there was a group of people who did not believe in the existence of these gods. As Roberta Bondi says in her book To Pray and To Love: 

They did not acknowledge the existence of the gods who watched over the lives of individuals, cities, and empires with eyes quick to be angered by human disrespect. Christians recognized only one God, while they believed the gods of their pagan neighbors were merely demons masquerading as divinities.

The irony should be obvious: Christians who fear and demonize the current incarnation of "atheist" (or any other religious system we consider as "less than") ought to recall our own past. Or to echo scripture:  

• "You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." (Ex 22:21)
• "You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Deut. 10:19)
• "The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God." (Lv. 19:34)

Parable of man on an island and the UMC

There is a story that Peter Rollins tells in his book Idolatry of God and it goes like this:

There was once a man who had been shipwrecked on an uninhabited deserted island. There he lived alone for ten years before finally being rescued by a passing aircraft. Before leaving the island, one of the rescuers asked if they could see where the man had lived during his time on the island, and so he brought the small group to a clearing where there were three buildings. Pointing to the first he said, "This was my home; I build it when I first moved here all those years ago." "What about the building beside it?" asked the rescuers. "Ho, that is where I would worship every week," he replied. "And that building beside that?" "Don't bring that up," replied the man in an agitated tone. "That is where I used to worship."

While this story is not factually true, this is a True story. Anytime there is a quest to find the "perfect", "pure", "correct" church we will always be disappointed and leave. If we believe the Church we are in is not upholding the ideal that we believe it should be upholding then we will always be building new churches. 

Making Pens and the "Nashville Statement"

I have a friend who makes pens on a lathe. I have another friend who makes pens by hand carving. Both make pens that work. Often times they critique each others pens but they don't talk about their different process they use to make the pens. The one who uses the lathe does not understand why the hand carvers pens use such "boring" wood colors (it is because some woods are softer and easier to hand carve). What is overlooked is that the process drives how the pens will look. 

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

Both style of pens are different, but they work to achieve the goal of writing. Some of the pens more comfortable than others and some are more stylized than others, but every pen puts ink on the page. 

Within Christianity we like to critique each others positions, but we don't critique the processes that we use to get to these positions. One side cannot understand why the another person would take such a position, so we try to change their position. The issue is that unless we change the process by which we come to these decisions, then we will not be able to change the positions. 

Pointing to a position and then arguing for or against it misses the point of talking about the process used to arrive at that position. 

I am tired of talking and listening to positions. I desire to talk and hear about process. Talking about positions are less interesting to me than how you arrived to that position. Because if we know how we arrived at the position, then we have a clue to how to invite each other to move from that position.