O God, our King, by the resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ on the first day of the week, you conquered sin, put death to flight, and gave us the hope of everlasting life: Redeem all our days by this victory; forgive our sins, banish our fears, make us bold to praise you and to do your will; and steel us to wait for the comsummation of your kingdom on the last great Day; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

-from The Book of Common Prayer

First, before you read this post and certainly before you comment, go back and at least read The Old Limbo Crossroads, to get some background. It’s better if you’re new to this blog to get completely caught up by reading What’s Going On, but the previous Crossroads is really the bare minimum.

Okay, now on to the topic at hand, which is Evangelical Christianity.

I grew up Mormon, but I grew up in East Tennessee, which means that most of my peers were Evangelical Christians of some kind. Most of my close friends were nonreligious or Roman Catholic, but most of the Christianity that I was exposed to in my formative years was evangelical.

In particular, I had one really good evangelical friend whose name was Brock. We had kind of a common understanding that meant we didn’t try to convert each other, but through him I was exposed to a lot of the people that he went to church with. This exposure was often limited, but it was significant: these were people who really believed in Jesus Christ, who lived Christ-centered lives, and who were happy about it. You could see it in their faces, that Jesus Christ had made a difference. It was something that I did not see in my fellow Mormons, and it was something that stuck with me and was not easy to reconcile, even on my mission. I often thought back to these people and wondered how, if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was really Christ’s church on earth, how these non-members could be so obviously and vibrantly Christian.

As I served my mission, my understanding of Jesus Christ developed and it drifted towards a more full understanding of grace, one which I inevitably had to try to reconcile with Mormonism (and I did it by constantly revising the Gospel According To Kullervo). Most of the doubts I had about Mormonism were laced with Evangelical concerns. My personal understanding of Jesus Christ ultimately developed into something very Protestant, with Mormonism’s specific practices and odd doctrinal quirks pretty much tacked on to the side.

Thus, last year when I finally started giving serious voice to my doubts about Mormonism, it was because I increasingly saw Mormonism as something that did not match my understanding of Jesus Christ, the Bible, and what I thought Christianity was all about.

Granted, leaving Mormonism ultimately led me to have to seriously examine, and in the end dig up and re-plant, my belief in Jesus Christ and in God. But I feel at this point that I have come full circle and I am now back in a place where I can state without (much) reservation that I believe in Jesus and I want to follow him.

Anyway, because of all of this, Evangelical Christianity is attractive to me. I have very little interest in theological liberalism (a topic that I will address in a future post), and reading some of the writers in the Emergent conversation (Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Donald Miller) within Evangelical Christianity has done a great deal to resolve many of my major theological concerns, showing me that I actually can be an Evangelical Christian without being a mindless fundamentalist or a rabid Republican. It has all been extremely compelling.

Right now my family is attending Cedar Ridge Community Church, which is a kind of emergent Evangelical nondenominational church, and it’s a really good place. It has a lot going for it. I agree with everything they preach form the pulpit, but in a way that challenges me instead of leaving me complacent. I am excited about their commitment to reaching out and blessing the world in so many ways. It is a church where I have few objections. But the more time goes by, and the more I find myself wanting to seriously follow, serve, and draw closer to, Jesus Christ, the more those objections seem to be a big deal.

Most of my objections have to do with Evangelical Christianity in general as opposed to the church we attend in specific.

The first is a question of authority, or more properly, of authoritative-ness. I guess I believe that all authority is given to Jesus Christ, like it says in the gospels, and that this authority still resides in Jesus, as opposed to being found in a book or in a pedigree of clergy or priesthood. Since Jesus promised us that when we are gathered in his name, he is among us, we have access to his authority when we are acting in his name.

That’s fine and good, and it’s actually kind of a tangent, because it’s not really my problem. My problem is that in the church I attend, there’s a real sense of all being on the journey together, like we’re all trying to be disciples of Jesus Christ in the best way we can, and we’re helping each other do that. That sounds great, but it doesn’t do the trick for me.

While there may be Authority, the kind that actually only Jesus has from the Father, I don’t feel like this set-up is very authoritative. Trustworthy. Reliable. Solid. I don’t feel like this church as an institution has much of any weight behind it whatsoever. It doesn’t feel solid. I’m not saying I think it won’t last- the church has been around for 25 years after all. But what is 25 years in the nearly 2000-year history of Christianity? What institutional experience and wisdom can there even be in an organization that is so new, especially one that is both Evangelical and Emergent, both of which in the context of church history mean some measure of rejection of broad arrays of Christian tradition?

My point is that I don’t feel like Evangelical churches are authoritative. I don’t think the Bible alone makes them authoritative, either, and I also don’t even think belief in Jesus Christ makes them authoritative.

What I’m trying to say is this- I wouldn’t feel confident going to the pastor at Cedar Ridge for personal or spiritual guidance. I feel like he’s just a guy, same as me, trying to figure thigs out. That has a certain appeal, sure, especially from the pulpit (there isn’t technically a pulpit, but that’s beside the point), but at the same time it doesn’t make me feel like he’s a spiritual leader that I could turn to. As far as I know, he hasn’t been to a seminary or anything. It’s kind of a surprise that that matters to me, growing up Mormon with a lay clergy, but as it turns out I think it actually matters a lot.

So with Evangelical Christianity, I have problems with how authoritative I feel the institutions and clergy are. My second problem is more theological. In theory, I believe in Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice, once for all. I believe in salvation by grace through faith. I believe that the price for my sins has already been paid, that I am already forgiven before I even did anything wrong.

My problem is that that sounds great on paper and in conversation, but it seems too abstract in practice. Let’s say I do something wrong, and feel bad about it. What am I supposed to do to be right with God? My theology tells me that inasmuch as I have faith in Jesus Christ, I am already right with God. But that doesn’t seem very real. I feel like I’m left trying to convince myself that I’m already forgiven and that it’s already taken care of and I should just be thankful for what Jesus did for me. But I still feel really bad, and all I can do is try, in vain, to talk myself out of the guilt.

It’s all abstract: I just have to trust that my wrongs were already righted 2,000ish years ago so I have nothing to worry about. But I have a hard time convincing myself of it. Maybe it’s because I really don’t have faith. Maybe it’s because I’m still stuck in a Mormon mindset that demands I earn my salvation. I don’t know. But at the very least, I would like something concrete to do, at least an outward manifestation of reconciliation, so I can have some kind of closure on my sins. I’m not talking about earning forgiveness; I know I can’t do that. I just mean that I want to be able to somehow make concrete the abstract idea of my salvation by the grace of God. And Evangelical Christianity, in my opinion, doesn’t really offer that. It has no real sacraments, no clergy to confess to. It seems like the whole religion is just about deciding you believe, and then being glad about it.

I see it seem work for other people, and in theory I think it sounds great. But in practice it doesn’t seem to have any effect. I don’t feel transformed, healed, or even justified by just “realizing it’s all okay.”

Maybe I’ve missed the point- maybe Christianity is about realizing, for real, that it is okay, that Jesus made it so when you believe in him your sins are gone, and there’s nothing you have to do but acknowledge and accept it, for real. Maybe my insistence on some external performance is holding me back from real conversion, real faith, and the kind of transformational Christianity that I’m hungry for. I acknowledge the possibility. But it doesn’t change anything. And reassurances from other Christians that I’m on the right track are nice and supportive, but they’re not authoritative- they’re just more people like me, in the same boat as I am. What do they know? How are they more trustworthy than I am?

I imagine that the person that I really should trust is Jesus, that he has told me himself that he has atoned for my sins, and that anything else would just be noise. Maybe. But it doesn’t seem to be happening, to really be connecting. Again, I am left feeling like I’m just trying to talk myself out of feeling guilty.

I’ve talked about forgiveness for sins as probably the most important example, but the principles apply to the sum total of religious life. Evangelical Christianity has all of the action happen in the long ago and far away, and thus in the inaccessible abstract.

My third problem with Evangelical Christianity is the form of worship. For the most part, praise bands and Christian pop music do absolutely nothing for me. I want the deep spirituality of liturgy and hymns. I’m not trying to be a worship-consumer or anything, but modern, contemporary worship just doesn’t feel like it has any weight behind it. It is sincere but ephemeral, and seems to be primarily a matter of emotional appeal. Part of leaving Mormonism was the realization that emotions are not the same thing as the Holy Spirit. Emotions are the product of propaganda as often as they are the product of nearness to God.

Evangelical Christianity (particularly, for me at least, the emergent conversation) is firmly rooted in scripture, reason (within the context of faith), and mysticism (i.e. the Holy Spirit), but has abandoned tradition almost entirely. I know the emergent conversation has made overtures at recapturing some tradition, but in my opinion it’s been barely more than a token effort, and comes across as superficial to me.

In fact, sometimes Evangelical Christianity seems altogether tacky and plastic, not anything like an ancient Middle Eastern (or even European) faith tradition, and certainly not anything like the Kingdom of Heaven.

Finally, I have some issues with Community. I feel like Christian community is absolutely critical, as Jesus commanded his disciples to be one even as he is one with the Father. I realize that the emergent conversation has tried to emphasize this, but in practice it seems ot not be happening. How do you have authentic community in a megachurch?

Even at Cedar Ridge, which is certainly no megachurch, it seems to me like the congregation might be too big for authentic community, and although they try really hard (and admirably) to foster community, it seems artificial. It’s like they’re trying to make a plant by mixing the component parts all together in a bowl, instead of planting the seeds, setting up the right conditions, and cultivating it as it grows.

Anyway, I have a strange love-hate relationship with Evangelical Christianity, and I’m hesitant to embrace it more fully than I already have, while at the same time, it has things that I want and need that I don’t know if I really can find anywhere else. And I feel like I must face the real possibility that my hesitation is because of the lingering effects of my Mormon roots, or maybe because I simply haven’t fully been able to understand and appreciate what Jesus Christ is all about.

I had a great discussion with my mother a few days ago (she’s a true believing Mormon) about the difference between faith and testimony in Mormon theology, and I’ve been mulling around some thoughts about it ever since.

“Testimony,” as commonly used by Mormons, is an unfortunate term. It’s an umbrella term, a thought-construct composed of several different distinct but related concepts, but they’re all blurred together into one conglomerate noun in the Mormon vernacular. When the Holy Ghost bears witness of the truth of x, a Mormon calls that your testimony. When you tell others the religious things you believe or “know,” that’s also your testimony. Those two I can handle, but the third main use is the most vague and elusive, and the one least based in (even Mormon) scripture and theology. It’s this idea that a testiony is a thing, a noun, an intangible object that you actually have and need to nurture and work on so it grows.

It’s not the same thing as Faith, which is given some pretty clear and basically consistent definitions in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. Paul (or whoever wrote Hebrews) said “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (NIV). In the Book of Mormon, Alma said faith “is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true,” and Moroni said faith is “things which are hoped for and not seen.” None of those are really the same thing that Mormons are talking about when they talk about their testimony. Testimony is the assurance of the truth of Mormonism via mystical experiences.

Faith is consistently couched in terms like “hope.” Your testimony is the things you know. You might talk about faith in terms of certainty, but you would never describe a testimony using the word “hope.” Sure, the terms are similar, but they’re not identical.

In Mormon theology, such as it is, the requirments for salvation are faith, repentance, baptism, the gift of the holy ghost, and enduring to the end (which includes getting the necessary ordinances and priesthood, and continuing to develop faith, repent of sins, and renew your baptismal covenant by taking the sacrament). Testimony per se is not a requirement for the Celestial Kingdom. There’s not testimony checker at the pearly gates. Nevertheless, Mormons constantly talk about the necessity of having a testimony, as if it is basically the most important thing in Mormonism.

It has no real connected place in Mormon theology, so why is it necessary? All of the critical steps (the principles and ordinances of the gospel) for salvation are obtainable without ever once feeling the Holy Ghost, much less Getting a Testimony.

There’s a weird inconsistency yhere that bothers me. Basically, what it boils down to is that Mormonism in practice focuses almost obsessively on the need for the individual to experience successive, ongoing conversion experiences. No wonder Mormons are able to simply ignore their doubts and criticisms of the church that they hear! They are spending their time and effort constantly converting themselves. Why? I think it’s because without constant conversion-as-reinforcement, Mormonism doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Testimony may not actually be a requirement for salvation in Mormonism, but if you aren’t constantly cultivating mystical confirmations of the Church’s truth, you’re far less likely to stay a member of a Church that is heavy-handed, authoritarian, wildly implausible, and extremely demanding.

I don’t really believe there is such a thing as “having a testimony.” I think that you can experience God through the Holy Spirit, and I think you can yourself bear witness to things you believe are true, but as far as this nebulous thing that you have, I think it’s a mental and cultural construct with no real existence. It’s a doublespeak term tat obscures what’s going on. Faith is something that you have. Testimony is something you hear or give.

Given that opinion, why then does it bother me when people say I must not have ever really had a testimony, seeing as how I left the Church. I mean, if I don;t believe that testimony exists, at least the way they’re talking about it, why do I care if they say I never had one? Again, it comes down to the nebulous doublespeak use of the term. When someone says I never had a testimony, they’re actually questioning whether I ever was really ommitted to the Church, and that pisses me off. I was raised in the Church, and I was a faithful member. I scrupulously tried to keep the commandments. I graduated from early morning seminary. I served an honorable mission and I worked incredibly hard, both physically and spiritually. I read the Book of Mormon again and again, not as a skeptic, but as an earnest believer. I married in the temple, which took great personal sacrifices on my part and on my wife’s part. I always paid a full tithe, and I gave generous fast offerings. I magnified my callings. I prayed daily. When doubts came, I did my best to resolve them. I tried to me a member-missionary, and I even tried my best to do my home teaching. I did everything I was supposed to do to “get a testimony,” and I did it with pure intentions, because I honestly thought it was all the right thing to do.

The Church promises that if you do this stuff, you’ll Get A Testimony. Thus, when people say I must not have had a testimony, they are insinuating that I never did the things that were required to get one, and that impugns my integrity and my earnestness, and that bothers me a lot.

I have to say that I believe that the Church is simply not true, at least it is not true the way it claims to be. It may be a fine place for some people, but it is certainly not God’s one true church, restored in these latter days in preparation for the second coming, led by living prophets, etc. I have no problem with people disagreeing with me, but I do have a problem with people assuming that the only reason I came to the conclusion I did is that I wasn’t really genuinely committed and faithful in the first place. That’s just insulting.

Still thinking of reasons to believe…

Something hit me about a week ago, when watching the Passion of the Christ: people do really, really horrible things to each other.  The sick twisted stuff that people do to each other, the brutality, the dehumanization, the sadism, the torture, it blows the mind.  Why do people do such horrific things?

At the same time, I wonder if that isn’t a kind of evidence for God for me.  This isn’t a logical argument with premises and conclusions- I don’t even really want to go there right now.  It’s an intuitive thing.  Here goes-

Human beings are capable of unique evil.  We do so much that is purely motivated by malice, and we are capable of an kind of evil that you don’t see elsewhere in the natural world.  Some of the nasty crap we do can be explained as evolutionarily functional: war overresources, for example, or male promiscuity.  I’m not talking about that stuff.  I’m talking about genocide and systematic horror that we inflict on each other, the kind of stuff that isn’t really functional, so it doesn’t make sense, or rather, it doesn’t seem to have a natural explanation.

Nature isn’t malicious; it’s indifferent.  It’s not evil; it’s amoral.  But we can do things that are horrible to each other that go far beyond the harsh indifferent cruelty of nature.

And it’s not limited to the Hitlers and Pol Pots of the world, either.  Just think for a second; I’ll bet you can imagine some pretty horrible things that you could do to another person, if you put your mind to it.  Even if we’d never consider doing it, why can we even think of those things?

By contrast, almost all the good we seem to be able to do is either  1) evolutionarily functional (like parents sacrificing for their children, or pretty much anything good you do that has an element of self-interest or group-interest) or 2) only a matter of correcting bad stuff.  If I feed millions of starving people, for example, I’m not creating a positive good so much as I am merely correcting an evil.

It’s easy to think of horrible and nasty things you could to to hurt other people for no reason and no real benefit to you (and therefore not easy to explain by evolution or nature), but it’s hard to even think of positive good (something above and beyond just correcting something bad) that you can do that isn’t naturally explicable and evolutionarily functional.

To me, this makes me think a couple of things.  One, maybe there’s something to the idea that we’re fallen, broken people in a fallen, broken world that needs fixing.  And maybe unnatural evil means that there might be unnatural good.  It’s hard to even imagine what that kind of unnatural, positive good would look like (because of the T in the Tulip, maybe?), but if there can be malicious non-functional evil, why can’t there be pure good, righteousness, sanctification, holiness.  And if it’s not here in our world, then where is it?

Where did evil come from?  It’s not easily explainable from a naturalistic point of view.  Does that mean it comes from outside the naturalist model somewhere?  And if there is evil from outside, why not good?

In my last post, I talked about the argument from evil, and I came up with one possibility that would allow god to exist despite the argument’s relatively solid logic: Immoral God. As Adam (the Ebon Muse) pointed out, such a situation would be pretty horrible. However, there would be nothing we could do about it. An Immoral God would be probably be untrustworthy, so there would be no reason to expect that serving him would result in any kind of reward. Therefore, one could reasonably act in any fashion one chose. Sure, Immoral God may damn you for it, but Immoral God might have damned you anyway.

The moral premise is, in my opinion, the easiest way for God to wriggle out of the Argument’s headlock. Omnipotence and Omniscience have tautological definitions. Morality does not. Adam proposed a fairly conventional definition of morality, the desire to end unnecessary suffering, but such a definition is not necessarily a given. Even then, the fact that the moral premise posits that God is perfectly moral makes it even trickier. Applying a standard of perfection to a quality that is abstract and ill-defined? Not as clear-cut as simply saying “omnipotent.” Not that Adam’s definition is ill, but that a person could certainly advance alternate and equally valid definitions for morality without even wading into the quagmire of moral relativism.

With all of that in mind, I have thought of several possibilities for the kind of God that would survive the scrutiny of the argument from evil:

Immoral God: I talked about this one in my last post.

Amoral God: perhaps God exists, and is omniscient and omnipotent, but for some reason is indifferent to good and evil, suffering and pleasure. Perhaps God has a plan for humanity, and good an evil, important though they seem to us, are merely incidentals. I don’t necessarily know what this would mean. Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective: from where God is sitting, all this stuff we’re fussing over is basically irrelevant, and once we get to where he is, it will be irrelevant to us, too.

Nevertheless-Moral God: perhaps there is a definition of morality that closely overlaps with the “desires to end suffering” that is still very good and holy but nevertheless allows for suffering to exist. I don’t know what this moral definition would be, but I guess it could exist. Then, the only reason that the argument from evil is evidence against God is the fact that the moral premise is close, but nevertheless incorrectly defined. This is, I think, the God that most believers picture when they hear the argument from evil and choose to nevertheless believe in God.

Othermoral God: perhaps God is morally perfect, but the definition for “moral perfection” is really quite different than the definition that the argument from evil takes as a premise. Surely there are many possible othermoralities, but one that immediuately comes to mind is one in which wisdom gained by experience is the highest form of “good.” Thus, suffering and pleasure are two sides to the same coin and must both be experienced in different measures. Yes, some people have an overmeasure of one or the other, but if they are both value-neutral, then that doesn’t matter. Morality is aligned on a wisdom-ignorance axis instead of a good-evil axis. Or something else, I don’t know. I think Hinduism looks more like this, actually. But again, it’s just one possible example of an othermorality. Some othermoralities might run up against the same problems in the argument from evil, though. If God is interested in order versus chaos, for example, and he is omnipotent and omniscient, then why does he not simply impose order?

Tautologically-Moral God: Perhaps god is morally perfect by definition, because his actions set the standards for what is moral and what is not. This is probably unsatisfactory for many people, because it leaves open a wide possibility for capricious and arbotrary behavios on God’s part which can then be labeled moral because God’s actions actually define morality. This may be hard to swallow, given the suffering in the world, but if it happens to be the case, then we’ve got little to say in the matter. I also think that many theists believe in this God, whether they realize it or not. If morality is defined by God’s will, then God can be as arbitrary and capricious as he feels like, and whatever he does will still be moral.

Just some thoughts, really. I suppose the whole thing could stand to be thought through and fleshed out a little better.

Today I read Ebon Musings’ very excellent All Possible Worlds.  It’s an essay explaining the argument from evil, which is an arguyment I typically pooh-pooh.  Normally, the person proposing the argument is not resting on good logic.  They have religious-like faith in the solidity of their assumptions, and they fail to see how any possible refutation could even come close to undermining their argument.  Trying to explain that the assertion that “a morally perfect god would not allow evil” is too simplistic to be a given is often an exercise in watching water flow off a duck’s back.  Too often, the person making the argument is clearly substituting their own sense of idealized morality and expecting that God would unquestioningly abide by it.  Which is silly.

In contrast, Ebon Musings carefully considers a truckload of strong and weak positions against the argument from evil, and he rejects them carefully.  I don’t necessarily think that in the end the whole thing proves the existence or nonexistence of God, but it is hard to argue with the author’s very reasonable conclusion that the evidence seems to be strongly in atheism’s favor.

Incidentally, this is one of the features that I like best about Ebon Musing’s work.  He (she?  I don’t really know, so look how I make sexist assumptions!) isn’t arrogant, and he doesn’t claim that his reasoning proves more than it actually does.  He fully acknowledges the possibility of being wrong.

Anyway, my brother (Racticas) read the article and said that he felt it neglected some possible explanations.  Chiefly, what if there is indeed an omnipotent and omniscient God, but he is a mean son of a bitch.  What if God is evil and capricious, and the exact opposite of “morally perfect?”  Ebon Musings suggests that such a God should be opposed, not worshipped.  But what if such opposition is completely impotent.  This evil god is omnipotent and -scient, after all, so you have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

The conclusion seems to be that in such a case, it would be best to simply grovwl and serve evil god in the hope that he will not kill you horribly and damn you.  Of course, there’s no reason to expect that evil god would deal with you justly; in fact, there’s every reson to expect that evil god will be definitively unjust.  It would be like working for a super-villain.  You never know when he’s going to capriciously kill his own minions.

And how would you know that evil god doesn’t like a good fight, or favor those mortals with the cajones to oppose him?  You don’t; that’s the problem!  You know nothing!  You have no reliable standard on which to base your actions in regard to god, since you have no reason to imagine that im- or amoral god won;t be capricious and arbitrary.

Thus you’re left functionally in the same position as the atheist.  Since there’s no basis on which to decide how to serve or placate god, you may as well simply ignore him.  This might seal your doom, but it might not.  You have no idea, really.

In discussing this with my brother, I said “you know, if there’s no god, or a totally unreliable god, you may as well do whatever suits you best in regards to god.  If you want to be an atheist, whatever.  If you want to worship your stuffed animals or something, whatever.”

On Easter we went to Cedar Ridge Community Church again for the 11:00 service. It was really good. There was a rockin’ version of “Christ The Lord Is Risen Today,” the Charles Wesley classic. The whole service was a celebration, a joyful celebration of the resurrection. It made an impression.

The contrast to the Mormon celebration of Easter was stark. On Mormon Easter, it’s business as usual. The hymns will be easter classics, probably “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and “He Is Risen.” Some of the more old-fashioned women will wear a fancy dress. Jesus and the Atonement, but maybe not the Resurrection, will get mentioned (or at least acknowledged) in each talk. But it won’t be substanitvely different. There might be a special musical number. If you’ve been very, very bad, there will be a Jesus-themed primary program.

But for the most part, it will be virtually indistinguishable from any other typical Sacrament Meeting. Sunday School will follow the usual curriculum, although the teacher might bear extra testimony of Jesus Christ at the end. I’m pretty sure Priesthood Meeting won’t be any different, but I probably wouldn’t pay attention anyway.

Easter certainly won’t disrupt the Mormon pattern. The first Sunday will be fast and testimony meeting, regardless of Easter. The priesthood/relief society curriculum will still follow the usual pattern: every other Sunday is a lesson from the”Teachings of [some modern prophet]” manual. The others will be out of conference talks or the EQ presidency (i.e.,the official monthly “do your home teaching guilt trip”).

Growing up Mormon, Easter was never really anything more than a day we got a basket full of candy in the morning. Sweet! Candy! The religious significance never got more than lip service.

It’s like Mormons are too busy with the rhythms and customs of the Church to really celebrate the most important event in Christianity.  In fact, this year our stake had Stake Conference on Easter.  because they had to call a new stake president.  That’s right; an administrative concern trumped the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Oddly enough, when Christmas falls on a Sunday, they often only have Sacrament meeting, and it is heavily Christmas-themed. Which is funny, since Mormons specifically disbelieve that Christmas was Jesus’s birthday anyway.

So I have issues with Christianity.  Last night, while I was out grocery shopping with my lovely wife, who is a committed Christian, I tried to articulate them as well as I could.  I felt like I was able to get it all out in a satisfactory way, but now I’m not so sure I can remember them all.  I’ll do my best; here they are in no particular order:

1. The Jack Chick problem.  Encountering Fundamentalists and many Evangelicals and other Christian-Right-types and their viewpoints completely turns me off to Christianity in general.  Without going into too much detail, there are some popular and vocal approaches to Jesus out there that I find actually repulsive, not to mention preposterous.  When I read such a viewpoint, for example, it sours me on the whole of Christianity.  I do not want to have anything to do with a movement or a religion that spawns that kind of garbage.

Intellectually, I know that those apporaches to Jesus are not exhaustive, they do not by any means necessarily represent the  bulk of Christianity.  I also know that just because people do ugly things with Christianity, that does not mean that Jesus was wrong or a fake (in fact, there is plenty of scriptural evidence that just saying you’re a Christian doesn’t mean you know Jesus).  But those are intellectual qualifications, and my reaction to ugly Christianity is an emotional one, so the intellectual justifications don’t dispel my reservations.

2. Exclusivity.  By most accounts, Christianity is exclusive.  Jesus is literally God, and he is literally the only way to return to the Father.  All other approaches (whether they be Christian heterodoxy or a completely different religion orspiritual path) are either lies or tragic mistakes.

I am of two minds about this.  On the one hand, I grew up Mormon, so a literal and exclusive approach to religion is a familiar one, sort of my default setting, and not easy to break out of.

On the other hand, it just doesn’t feel right.  For one, the weight of opinion is against Christianity- far more people are and have been something else as opposed to Christians, both now and throughout history.  Now, if Christianity is True, then that theoretically shouldn’t matter.  If there is such a thing as objective truth independent from peoples’ minds, then that objective truth would probably not be subject to majority decisions.  However, it seems a little convenient that the One True Way just happens to be the majority view of the culture I grew up in. Especially when there is no real decisive objective evidence to commend Christianity over any other religion.  Maybe there is an objectively True Way, but who says Jesus is it?  I feel like claims of objective truth should be backed up by some kind of objective evidence, at least to differentiate them from competing claims of absolute truth.

I also have this sense that applying Christinity to the whole world is not just like trying to make a square peg fit a round hole, but it’s like trying to make a multidimensional polyshape peg fit into a round hole.  It seems preposterous.  It imposes a simple worldview on an incredibly complex world.  I have a hard time swallowing it.

3. Personal Exclusivity.  This one is trickier to explain.  I want a religion or a faith system that fits all of me.  I don’t mean that I am unwilling to change- I certainly would go to great lengths to change my behavior for what I believe.  However, like all humans, I am extrordinarily complex.  I feel like a religion should speak to every aspect of human existence in a fitting and compelling way, without oversimplifying that which is in no way simple.  What I am not willing to do is to abandon entire facets of existence that are irrelevant to a belief system.  I will change, but I will not amputate.

I don’t necessarily feel like Christianity “explains it all.”  I don’t feel like it fits me like a puzzle piece.  Of course, I haven’t found anything else that does, either.

4. Not feeling the Jesus.  Finally, I do not feel spiritually compelled to follow Jesus.  I find Christianity intellectuallyand even emotionally appealing, and I even find Christianity reasonable, but to me that is not enough.  I want to feel a spiritual pull, and I don’t feel it.  Furthermore, I do not want to purposely cultivate a spiritual experience in the pursuit of Christianity, because that’s what I did with Mormonism.  Having already decided that Mormonism was true, I then went about specifically seeking a spiritual confirmation of that truth.  They say “once burned, twice shy,” and that is appropriate here.  In the end, I fell away from Mormonism.  The connection that I built was not a lasting one.  Honestly, I don’t want the same thing to happen ever again.  I am not about to head in any direction that I will just abandon in eight months or eight years.  And so far, I have nothing to indicate that a decision on my part to commit to Christ and to Christianity will indeed be a lasting one.

The title is a reference to a sketch from the Seattle sketch comedy show Almost Live.  The particular sketch featured Bill Nye (long before he was nationally popular as “the science guy”), and it was unsurprisingly humoroud.  It was Bill Nye, after all.  The whole show was hilarious, and your life is poorer for not having seen it.

Anyway, that’s only tangentally related to this post.   The thing is, I’m skeptical about Jesus.

I’m not an atheist.  I can’t be.  I know there is some kind of divine reality out there, something transcendent, some source of spirit beyond our day-to-day perception.  There has to be.  But I just have a hard time buying that this spiritual reality is in fact Jesus Christ, who in fact died for my sins, and in fact can save me from hell or sin or death or whatever.  I mean, I like it- I like Christianity and Christian theology.  I think it’s the kind of thing that maybe could be real.  But for Christianity as presented to us now to work at all, it has to be literally true.  And there’s just this part of me that’s too skeptical to belive that it is.

Plus, then ancient Judaism also has to be literally true, and I’m not always sure that I buy the clean connection between Old and New Testaments.  An without that, I certanly don’t believe that Judaism is literally true (in which God gives a bunch of arbitrary comandments to one particular chosen people).

Maybe my problem is just a basic lack of faith, but it’s not as simple as just saying “well, I’ll believe anyway, and see what happens.”  For starters, I’m shy about jumping in the deep end as far as religion goes.  Second, don’t forget my little friend, Mister Mental Block.  Third, I’m afraid that in jumping in and simply living Christianity and telling myself that I believe in Jesus, that I will believe in Jesus but not because Jesus is really real.  Instead, I will believe because I have convinced myself to believe and then allowed myself to get swept up in a spiritual current.  That’s basically what I did with Mormonism.  Furthermore, I’m afraid that I will have a lingering nagging doubt about Jesus (much like I always had a lingering nagging doubt about Mormonism) which will eventiually come back and bite me- ultimately leaving me writhing in agnostic agony the way I am right now.

It’s very possible that I am overthinking it, but if I am, I can’t do otherwise.  I can’t just tell myself to stop thinking, nor would I ever, ever want to.

So I donlt know what to do.  I’m paralyzed spiritually because on the one hand I feel to skeptical about Jesus to really be a Christian, but I’m too afraid to not believe in Jesus (and at the same time, not being a Christian would make me kind of sad, since like I said, I find Christianity very appealing). I don’t know what to do.   for now, I’m mostly just thining about it.  Arguably I should do more studying and praying.  You could even make an argument to me that I do need ot just dive in despite my doubts, that being what faith is all about.  But it’s not as easy as that for me.

This is some stuff I wrote this summer, when I was first trying to figure out how I felt about the Church, and first coming to terms with the fact that my testimony might not be all I had assumed it was. I’ve edited it a little bit for clarity. Don’t necessarily assume that I still agree with all of it, but by and large it still reflects my thinking.

My first problem is with theology. As in, we don’t have any. Ask any two Mormons what we believe about salvation through Jesus Christ and you’ll get different answers. Statements issued by the First Presidency notwithstanding, we are not by any means united in our beliefs about Jesus Christ. The thing is, individually we don’t know what we believe collectively, as a Church, about Jesus. And that’s fishy to me. And I think it’s a problem with lack of theology.

In the name of restoration, we’ve lightly tossed out the work and thought of some brilliant minds who were absolutely dedicated to God and Jesus Christ. Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, whatever. Lots of people. And we say the word “theologian” like it we say “whore.” It doesn’t feel right to me.

Theology is an academic subject that is thousands of years old, and over time it has developed a specialized vocabulary. Specialized vocabularies are important because they let you talk about a subject with precision and say what you really mean so that the hearer understands it. We can’t talk about Jesus Christ and say what we mean in the Church because we don’t have the vocabulary to do so. The vocabulary exists, but we have systematically rejected it from day one (or maybe we systematically rejected it over time, I don’t know- it’s irrelevant to this point). Even better, we actually make light of the theology of the past twenty centuries, and the only time we ever hear an established theological term is when James E. Talmadge is refuting it.

For example,when it comes to justification (the process by which our sins are justified, or made okay), do we believe in infusion or imputation? Infusion means that Christ’s atonement pours a measure of his righteousness into us in order to make up the slack, to cover the distance we need to hit the right level of righteousness or holiness in order to qualify for sanctification or salvation. Imputation means that Christ’s atonement actually switches out his righteousness for ours, and ours suffers and dies with him, while his righteousness substitutes for ours totally, in order to qualify us for sanctification/salvation.

Which do Mormons believe?

Many Mormons would tell you infusion, but they wouldn’t use the word. They’d quote that “after all we can do” scripture. At least two Mormons (me and the guy that wrote Beleiving Christ) believe in imputation, agan although we wouldn’t use the word. Is it important? Maybe not. I’ll tell you this: Protestants believe in imputation and Catholics believe in infusion, and the Protestant/Catholic schism is pretty big. I know it’s not the only dividing issue, but it seems a fundamental one.

But Mormons don’t know which one they believe (or rather, they all think they know which one they believe, but it turns out it isn’t the same one). If we ever talk about it, it winds up a mess of semantics because we’re trying to pick it apart without using a common vocabulary. In the meantime, we haven’t actually developed our own vocabulary for talking about theology, as far as I know.

Why not? That sort of brings me to my second point. No debate. We do not debate in this Church. We do not disagree. Debate and disagreement are inappropriate and discouraged. That means we all sit around pretending we believe the same things (even being smug because “aren’t we lucky that we have revelation to clear up all the confusion we see in other Churches!”) when we don’t! We don’t believe the same things, not when it comes to the most important thing, Jesus Christ!

There’s this idea in the Church that all questions have been answered (at least all of the important ones, maybe not stuff about Kolob and things “not necessary for our salvation”), and we all agree about everything, so let’s strengthen each other. In theory I guess it doesn’t sound bad, but in practice I don’t see it, and instead I see Mormons being some of the shakiest Christians about what they actually believe about Jesus Christ.

In any case it’s frustrating because in a sense I feel like too many questions have been answered, and in doing so they’ve only opened up weirder questions. And we congratulate ourselves on how logical it all is because we have the answers that everyone else lacks, when the fact is that our answers sometimes lead to further conclusions that are, well, weird. I wish I could come up with an example. Usually it’s stuff about the creation or the Fall or God in the eternities. And you can say that those aren’t important to our salvation, fine. So why do we have so many answers about things “not important” but we still not only don’t know about the atonement, but we don’t even know that we don’t know about the atonement.

Anyway, that’s kind of a tangent. My point is that I think we are poorer for the lack of debate. Heated argument may not be the most spiritually uplifting thing, but debate and discussion is how we figure it all out. Why don’t we debate, define our terms, discuss at length, and then pray about it to see which side is right? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Study it out in our minds and then ask God?

The whole method for discovering truth in the Church sidesteps critical thinking, and people will actually tell you that critical thinking is the devil’s tool. They won’t say it in so many words, but they’ll say that intelligence and wisdom are only worth a damn if they lead you to the same conclusions as the teachings of the Church. Aren’t intelligence and wisdom gifts from God? Shouldn’t they go hand in hand with inspiration? Why does inspiration only count if it leads you to the same conclusions as the Church, but otherwise it’s the devil misleading you?

It winds up being like this: “Study it out in your mind but only insofar as you reach the appropriate doctrinal conclusion (because otherwise you’re being misled by the devil), then pray to find out if that conclusion is true, and if you get a ‘yes,’ it was from God and if you get a ‘no’ it was from the devil, or just from your own emotions.” Isn’t that sort of an a priori thing? I mean, that method is guaranteed to lead you to conclude the Church is true. It would lead you to believe anything is true that you applied it to, wouldn’t it? I don’t think that’s a good way to get to the truth at all.