by Steve | Jul 6, 2021 | In the News, Perspective E-Newsletter
Wesley’s Chapel, Methodist headquarters London, England Photo courtesy of Creative Commons
By Thomas Lambrecht –
On Wednesday, the British Methodist Church became the largest denomination in Great Britain to endorse same-sex marriage. The overwhelming vote follows the acceptance of an initial report in 2019, God in Love Unites Us, followed by two years of discussion across the church’s 30 districts.
According to the BBC , “the Methodist Church is Britain’s fourth largest Christian denomination with about 164,000 members across more than 4,000 churches.” (British Methodism is a totally separate denomination from The United Methodist Church.) Methodists represent only about two tenths of one percent of the British population, whereas United Methodists in the U.S. represent about two percent of the population. In offering same-sex marriage services, Methodism aligns with other relatively small denominations in Britain, such as the Scottish Episcopal Church, the United Reformed Church, and the Quakers.
The two largest denominations, the Church of England (more than 16,000 churches) and the Roman Catholic Church (3,700 churches), do not accept same-sex marriage. Methodism will also be out of step with other British denominations, such as Baptist, Pentecostal, Orthodox, House Churches, and independent congregations.
The Church Times quotes the adopted resolution as saying, “The Conference consents in principle to the marriage of same-sex couples on Methodist premises throughout the Connexion and by Methodist ministers, probationers or members in so far as the law of the relevant jurisdiction permits or requires and subject to compliance with such further requirements, if any, as that law imposes.”
In order to accomplish this goal, the Methodists adopted a new definition of marriage: “The Methodist Church believes that marriage is given by God to be a particular channel of God’s grace, and that it is in accord with God’s purposes when a marriage is a life-long union in body, mind and spirit of two people who freely enter it. Within the Methodist Church, this is understood in two ways: that marriage can only be between a man and a woman; that marriage can be between any two people. The Methodist Church affirms both understandings and makes provision in its Standing Orders for them.”
BBC reports, “Church officials hope the dual definition will persuade conservative churches not to leave and protect ministers from discrimination claims if they refuse to marry gay couples.” The newly elected President of the Conference, the Rev. Sonia Hicks, said in response to the vote, “The debate today and our wider conversation has been conducted with grace and mutual respect. As we move forward together after this historic day for our Church, we must remember to continue to hold each other in prayer, and to support each other respecting our differences.”
The Rev. Sam McBratney, chair of the Dignity and Worth campaign (a pro-LGBTQ advocacy group in the Methodist Church), said, “We reassure those who do not support this move that we want to continue to work and worship with you in the Church we all love.”
Living with Contradiction
In order to live together and “work and worship” together in one continuing church, the British Methodist Church had to adopt an inherently contradictory policy. It now has two definitions of marriage that are simultaneously in effect. The result is that the Methodists have no coherent definition of marriage. It can mean whatever its members want it to mean.
This tactic in attempting to maintain some sort of unity is common across the world among denominations that are changing their standards on marriage. Most see it as an interim step to allow the “conservatives” to eventually change their minds, leave the church, or die off, until the church can unify around the more progressive marriage stance.
However, some traditionalists in Britain will be unable to live with the contradiction. The BBC reports Carolyn Lawrence, a former vice-president of the Methodist Conference, warned there was a “significant minority” of Methodists who were “planning on leaving or resigning their membership” as a result of the vote. “Today is a line in the sand for many people and seen as a significant departure from our doctrine.”
Methodist Evangelicals Together, a renewal organization within the British Methodist Church, advocates for “the original Wesleyan evangelical vision and the biblical and apostolic understanding of marriage as the life-long union of one man and one woman and the only appropriate context for sexual intimacy.” They report, “Sadly, several members, Local Preachers and Ministers, and even entire congregations, have already left the Methodist Church [in Britain] over the direction of travel it has so far adopted. If the proposals are ratified at Conference 2021, there are likely to be many more who will feel conscience-bound to leave.” There has even been some preliminary interest in traditionalist British Methodists possibly becoming part of the Global Methodist Church when it forms after adoption of the Protocol.
Slippery Slope
While the changing definition of marriage made the headlines, the British Methodist also overwhelmingly adopted a resolution “to recognise, accept, and celebrate the love and commitment of unmarried cohabiting couples.” This action is the natural outgrowth of rejecting the clear witness of Scripture regarding the God-given boundaries for human sexuality.
Once one sets aside scriptural teachings about marriage and sexuality and substitutes human reasoning and feelings, there is no limit on what can be found acceptable or even affirmed. Whatever seems right to people will become the governing standard. For example, there is no reason in principle why marriage could not be expanded to include more than two people under this approach.
GCFA Endorses Non-Binary Gender Identity
Meanwhile, in The United Methodist Church, the General Council on Finance and Administration has voted to expand the data collected on annual church membership reports. Where members are classified as either male or female, a third option will be added – “non-binary.” This third category will encompass those who do not identify as either male or female.
According to United Methodist News Service, the change affects only churches in the U.S., as the church does not collect local church statistics for churches outside the U.S. However, GCFA will also request U.S. annual conferences to report the number of non-binary clergy in their annual records.
“The board made the change after hearing from U.S. annual conference treasurers who have responsibility for collecting membership data from local churches,” reports UMNS. “We are having issues reporting people with pastors calling our office and saying: ‘What do I do here?’” said Christine Dodson, North Carolina Conference treasurer and the GCFA board’s vice president. “Quite frankly, I’ve had a pastor tell me, ‘I’m not going to force a person to choose one or the other when they have told me how they identify.’”
Only one board member spoke against the proposal. “I’m appreciative of the recognition of all God’s people, but I am also cautious that we are making a decision that appears to affect less than half our global constituency,” said the Rev. Steve Wood, who is also lead pastor of Mount Pisgah United Methodist Church in Johns Creek, Georgia. “I’m just wondering if we are creating more angst than we are creating benefits, so I have to speak against it.”
GCFA may have thought of this change as merely an administrative accommodation to make pastors’ job easier. However, by making this change, GCFA has implicitly endorsed a theology of gender that appears at odds with the simple and basic scriptural witness: “male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
Admittedly, there is nothing in the Book of Discipline that speaks specifically to issues of gender identity. This topic is so new that it has not been adequately studied or addressed by the church. That is why it seems unwise for GCFA to make such an “administrative” change that represents a theological understanding that has not been thoroughly thought out.
The trajectory of the British Methodist Church and the easy acquiescence of GCFA to a progressive understanding of gender identity shows the potential direction a post-separation United Methodist Church is likely to take. The GCFA decision reflects how the regionalization of the church might work, with decisions made that apply to some parts of the church and not other parts. Those who are uncomfortable with such a direction, recognizing that it reflects a different understanding of scriptural authority and theology, will need to find a new home – hopefully in the Global Methodist Church (in formation).
by Steve | May 28, 2021 | In the News
Photos courtesy of Bob Kaylor.
By Bob Kaylor –
Driving through the countryside of the Normandy region of France feels a bit like entering the world of an animated Walt Disney film. The green fields, bushy hedgerows, lolling cows, and medieval-period stone houses, churches, and barns call to mind many stories that we learn as kids – stories that begin, “Once upon a time…”
A few years ago, I chose this area because the D-Day battlefields have been a place on my bucket list that I have always wanted to visit. We based ourselves in Sainte Mere Eglise, the tiny village where the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions landed in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. An effigy of Private John Steele of the 101st and his shredded parachute still hangs from the church’s bell tower, commemorating where he landed on the roof that night.
During that early morning, this sleepy Norman village quickly became a maelstrom as paratroopers landed in the midst of stunned villagers and scrambling Germans who had been fighting a house fire. The town looks today much like it did in 1944, but with a few more cafes, ice cream shops, and memorabilia stores.
I had arranged an all-day private tour with a local guide, Monica Baan, a Dutch resident of Saint Mere Eglise, who was very knowledgeable and who spent a lot of time interviewing veterans of D-Day, most of whom are gone now. The stories I had read in a myriad of history books suddenly came to life as we walked through the town and then drove to places like Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc, Omaha Beach, and even to Brecourt Manor where Easy Company and Lt. Dick Winters of Band of Brothers fame fought their first engagement. It was stirring to visit those sites and be reminded of the immense task at hand that day for these soldiers, sailors, and airmen.
As someone with a passion for military history, I knew a lot about what took place, but Monica filled in some gaps with stories I had never heard. While driving through the Norman countryside, she stopped by a little church in the village of Angoville-au-Plain, a place so small that it’s barely noticeable in the midst of the bucolic backdrop of farms and fields. “I want to tell you a story you probably have never heard,” she said. We went through the side door of a small 11th century Catholic church into a quiet sanctuary where the story took place.
In the early morning hours of D-Day, thousands of U.S. paratroopers were scattered across Normandy and small crossroad villages like Angoville-au-Plain suddenly became hotly contested territory. As the wounded began to cry for help, two medics from the 101st, Robert Wright and Kenneth Moore, looked to set up an aid station and the village church seemed to be the best available option. They set about gathering the wounded from both sides into the church using a handcart and wheelbarrow they found, often exposing themselves to enemy fire in the process. They used the pews of the church as hospital beds and, incredibly, there are still several of those wooden benches in use that continue to show the stains of blood where those wounded were treated.
A hole in the roof, still stuffed with canvas, and a shattered tile on the floor are remnants of the intense fighting around the church where a mortar round entered the sacred space but failed to detonate. As the battle raged back and forth, American paratroopers were forced to retreat from the village and the medics faced a difficult decision. Their lieutenant wanted to withdraw them, but Wright and Moore insisted on staying to tend to the wounded, even if it meant their capture by the enemy.
Robert Wright described the scene in the church on the evening of D-Day: “By the evening we had 75 of them (wounded personnel and one local infant, in the church). Our own folk had come to tell us that they could not stay any longer. So we were left with the wounded. A German Officer soon arrived and asked if I could tend to his wounded too. We accepted. During the night, the churchyard was the scene of another battle. Two of our casualties died. But among those I could tend, none lost their lives. I tended all sorts of wounds, some were skin deep but others were more serious abdominal cases.”
The battle raged outside for three days, with the village changing hands several times. All the while, Wright and Moore kept tending the wounded from both sides. At one point, several Germans stormed through the door of the church but seeing that the medics were treating wounded from both sides they quietly left and marked the door with a Red Cross. In another instance, a German soldier came seeking treatment but Wright and Moore had established a rule that no weapons would be allowed in the church. They refused to treat the German until he added his weapon to the growing pile outside the church door. He would eventually do so and come under their care.
The windows of the church were all blown out and Wright was hit by a piece of the falling ceiling. He would receive a Purple Heart for it, but it was a medal he only grudgingly accepted. On June 8, a couple of days into the fighting, two Germans who had been in the bell tower of the church since before D-Day finally came down and surrendered to Wright and Moore, who immediately put them to work. The medics tended the wounded for 3 days straight with no break and no sleep, short on supplies and under constant fire, but they saved some 80 lives in the sanctuary of this little church. Many other lives would be birthed in the future families of those whom they saved. The pews that had been built for saving souls became the place where people broken by conflict and pain found salvation of their bodies as well.
As I listened to Monica spin out this true story, it occurred to me that Wright and Moore were doing the ultimate form of pastoral ministry in that holy place. They had been baptized by fire and ordained by duty to continue their work. They were priests officiating over a sacrament of broken bodies and shed blood. Their tireless work revealed a much deeper truth about what the church is about – a hospital for broken people, no matter their “side” or whether they are combatants or innocent civilians. These priestly medics seemed to understand this instinctively to the point at which even their enemies recognized the importance of the mission. They were being the church, not just using one for an aid station.
With this story echoing in my soul, I began to have a deeper awareness of the wounded people I saw around me. I noticed them walking around places like London and Paris, standing in doorways puffing a cigarette, or crammed into a pub looking for some solace or community. I saw it in the hollow eyes of business people walking quickly to a job they might have hated and in the immigrant trying to find his way in a strange new land. Casualties are stacking up in a culture where people have become commodities and pawns in a consumeristic war for their bodies and souls.
What sort of ministry will reach them? It will be the kind of ministry that will risk everything to save the people around us, no matter who they are. I loved the way one pastor put it in his welcome at one church I visited that summer: “If you’re our guest today, we want you to know that this is a place where it’s ok to not be ok. But our hope is that you don’t want to stay in that not-ok place. We love you enough to tell you the capital ‘T’ truth about Jesus Christ.” That’s a welcome for all – an invitation to add our weapons and conflicts to the pile outside and come inside to be made whole.
I spent the first part of my life and ministry as a soldier – a soldier bearing weapons of war and then the sword of the Word of God, which I have wielded in defense of the faith. Those are both honorable occupations, but standing in that little church in Normandy I felt a conviction that what the world needs the church to be right now is more of an aid station, and pastors to be more like medics. The cultural battles might continue to rage around us, but we have a job to do. It’s not to preserve a pristine institution, but to be the kind of place where blood stains on the pews remind us that our work is about saving lives, both bodies and souls.
Robert Wright would return to Normandy in 2002 for the dedication of a monument to what he and Moore did during those three days in June. He died in 2013 and is buried in the little cemetery outside that church in Angoville-au-Plain under a simple marker that reads “R.E.W.” He wanted his final resting place to be near this sanctuary of life that he and his friend created in the midst of horror and death.
I loved that this little church didn’t fix the holes, patch up the floor, or scrub down the pews after the war. The missing pieces of stone on the walls that were taken off by bullets and shrapnel haven’t been paved over. They did replace the windows, but with a tribute to these two medics who became saints. This holy place is now a monument to the kind of church God has called his church to be.
The Rev. Dr. Bob Kaylor is Lead Pastor of Tri-Lakes United Methodist Church in Monument, Colorado. He is a member of the Good News Board of Directors and a council member of the Wesleyan Covenant Association. He blogs at bobkaylor.com and is the co-host of the WCA podcast called Holy Conversations.
by Steve | May 28, 2021 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, May/June MJ 2021
Reverend Rob Renfroe
rrenfroe@goodnewsmag.org
By Reverend Rob Renfroe –
Just one week earlier the two men had come to Jerusalem. On what would later be called Palm Sunday, they entered the city with Jesus. Their hearts swelled as the crowds shouted his name and called him king.
They watched him enter the Temple as if he owned the place. He called the moneychangers thieves and with fire in his eyes and authority in his voice, he chased them out of his Father’s house with a whip.
For three days he taught in the Temple Courts. Huge crowds hung on his every word.The two men could see it – how Scripture would be fulfilled. The Messiah was here. The time was now. The day of deliverance had come.
But then everything went wrong. Thursday night he was arrested. Friday he was crucified. Saturday he was dead in a tomb. Sunday morning, devastated and confused, Cleopas and his friend left Jerusalem, walking along the road that led to a village called Emmaus.
As they walked, One they didn’t recognize joined them. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
Cleopas answered: “About Jesus of Nazareth, and how our chief priests and rulers had him condemned to death and crucified. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”
Maybe you’ve been on an Emmaus Road of your own. You dared to believe in something almost too good to be true. For a moment, it seemed that your world was going to change. Life would get better. Everything would become right. You could see it and how it would happen.
But then Friday came. Your hopes died on a cross of despair and they were buried in a dark tomb.
You look back on your life and you find yourself saying, “But I had hoped for a marriage that was a blessing, not a battle.” “I had hoped to overcome the pain of my past.” “I had hoped for a life that was more than going to work, putting bread on the table, accumulating some stuff, watching the years go by, and wondering why my life never changes.” “I had hoped. God knows I had hoped for so much more.”
Emily Dickinson wrote: “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all.”
But sometimes hope does stop singing, doesn’t it? What do you do then?
If you care about The United Methodist Church and are committed to a faithful future for the people called Methodist, you have probably found yourself thinking, “But I had hoped.”
After nearly fifty years of disagreeing about sexual ethics, I had hoped we would be done by now. But it hasn’t happened.
After some vocal centrist leaders made public statements at General Conference 2016 that it was impossible for us to live together and we needed to separate, I had hoped they would join with traditionalists and support a plan that would put an end to our fighting. But it didn’t happen. Instead, these same leaders got behind a proposal that could never pass and that belied their admission that we could not be one church.
At the special General Conference of 2019 when the majority once again affirmed the traditional position, I had hoped that vote would be the end of our disagreement. After all, that’s why the Conference had been called – once and for all to determine the church’s position and settle the matter. Either centrists and progressives would leave the church or accept the results of the vote. Instead, they took out full-page ads in newspapers across the country condemning traditionalists as hard-hearted, mean-spirited homophobes.
After a diverse group of leaders miraculously brought forth the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation, I had hoped General Conference would adopt the plan in 2020, and by now we would be well on our way to forming a new missional church that is Christ-centered and faithful to the Scriptures. But COVID made a physical meeting impossible, and the Commission on General Conference decided that a virtual meeting could not fairly and fully address the Protocol.
So here we are. Some of us personally, looking at our lives. All of us in terms of the church and its future. Here we are, walking down a road to Emmaus, saying to ourselves, “But I had hoped.”
What do you do when even hope is gone? You learn what Cleopas learned.
You learn that on Friday they can crucify your hopes. You learn that on Saturday your dreams can be buried in a cold, dark tomb. But on Sunday you learn no matter what has happened, Jesus Christ is Lord. You learn, wherever you are and however you feel, whether you know it or not, Jesus is walking with you. You learn that, in a way you didn’t see and couldn’t imagine, Jesus was working for your good all the time. You learn that he is the Lord over the past, the present, and the future. You learn that your job is not to understand the plan but to walk in faith and in faithfulness. He will rise. He will overcome. He will be with you. Walk that way. Live that way.
Why has a separation that is so obviously needed been delayed? Why is the future we have worked for, prayed for, and sacrificed for been so long in coming? As understandable as they are, these are the wrong questions to ask.
The question is always: What is Jesus doing and how can I join him? And the right response is always hope. As Emily Dickinson wrote, the right way forward is to sing the tune, even when we don’t have the words. Our eyes may be blinded for a moment, but Jesus is with us. He will make himself and his plans known. He will achieve his will. If a cross and a tomb couldn’t stop him, neither can a General Conference’s postponement.
Do not be discouraged. Do not give up. Jesus will have the last word. And that word will be good.
Rob Renfroe is a United Methodist clergyperson and the president and publisher of Good News.
by Steve | May 28, 2021 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, May/June MJ 2021
The Rev. Eric Huffman preaching at The Story Church in Houston. Photo courtesy of The Story.
By Eric Huffman –
Finding the drawer full of teeth was the point of no return along my journey into cynicism. I was eight or nine years old when, while ransacking my mom’s bedside table in search of loose change because the ice cream truck was fast approaching, I happened upon a plastic bag with almost a dozen familiar baby teeth. My teeth. The teeth my mom swore the Tooth Fairy so desperately wanted. What was I supposed to believe now – that the Tooth Fairy swiped those teeth from under my pillow and then left them in Mom’s drawer? That’s ridiculous, I reasoned. Why would the Tooth Fairy pay me good money for teeth and then turn around and give them to Mommy?
Something wasn’t adding up. After running through all the possible scenarios in my head – Mommy bought my teeth back from the Tooth Fairy, Mommy stole my teeth from the Tooth Fairy, Mommy is the Tooth Fairy – logic led me to one painfully obvious conclusion. Mommy lied about the Tooth Fairy.
Looking back, I think a switch flipped in my heart that day; from then on, I was paranoid about all things supernatural. I became the preeminent anti-Santa crusader in my fourth-grade class. My school occasionally invited magicians to entertain the student body, but while other kids seemed to enjoy the swindler’s tricks, I overanalyzed every sleight-of-hand until I could debunk them all.
Amplified by adolescence, my cynical edge grew louder and meaner in the 1990s. Most people were shocked when they heard that the guys from Milli Vanilli were lip-syncing the whole time, but not me. I knew something wasn’t right about those guys. And when the obviously guilty Hall of Fame running back got off scot-free after killing his ex-wife and her boyfriend? I called it. When others were scandalized by the proliferation of steroids in our national pastime, I wore my Sammy Sosa jersey with pride. Who cares? Everybody was doing it. And when the president lied about what he did in the Oval Office with the intern in that blue dress? So what? Politicians lie all the time.
Just like my mom, about the Tooth Fairy.
The only reason I’m telling you this is so you’ll understand my about-face in writing a book in defense of the whole Bible. There are so many reasons not to put stock in a three-thousand year-old religious book full of miracles and outdated rules, especially since it’s been translated hundreds of times and we don’t have a single original copy.
I’ve spent my whole life with the Bible. As a kid, I believed it because I was told that’s what the best kids do. In college, I rejected it because I was told that’s what the brightest students do. In my twenties, I used the parts that supported my leftist politics, and I ignored all the rest. Over the years, I have evolved from a snarky, cynical, social justice warrior to believe that the Bible is perfect and true.
I became a Christian when I was thirty-four, a full thirteen years after becoming a pastor. “How does one become a pastor without being a Christian?” I hear you asking. It was pretty simple, really.
I lied.
I grew up in rural northeast Texas, also known as the buckle of the Bible Belt. My dad is a pastor, and so were my grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather before him. My entire life has revolved around my small-town Methodist church, and I was the poster boy for straitlaced, cookie-cutter, red-blooded American Christianity.
Then I went off to college and married the cutest Christian girl I could find, and between my junior and senior years, I accepted the first ministry job that came my way. At twenty-one years of age, and for a salary of $16,000 a year, I became the pastor of Mooringsport Methodist Church in northern Louisiana. No one who knew me was surprised by my life’s trajectory. Goody two-shoes small-town preacher’s kid gets married young and becomes a pastor was precisely the path my friends and family had predicted for me.
But there was one problem. During the year prior, under the guidance of two particularly persuasive professors, I had come to the conclusion that Christianity was – like all other religions – a man-made construct designed to fool gullible peasants into submission by playing on their fears of death and damnation.
For the next thirteen years, I did and said what I had to in order to play the part of a pastor.
But did I truly believe in the foundational promises of God as presented in Scripture? Did I believe that the God of Israel is the one and only true God? Or that Moses actually parted the Red Sea? Or that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus? Or that Jesus physically rose from the dead? Or that anything in the Book of Revelation makes any sense whatsoever?
Nope.
To my skeptical eyes, the Bible looked no different than any other old, religious text. I assumed it was written by religious men for the purpose of maintaining social order. Cynical to the core, I figured, What better way to manipulate the masses than with the promise of eternal paradise as a reward for good behavior and the threat of unrelenting hellfire for those who get out of line?
So why would someone with such disdain for religious conformity enlist to become a clergyman? In a word, politics. As a left-leaning activist with a chip on my shoulder, I found the Bible to be a familiar and formidable weapon in the war against what I perceived to be conservative Christian bigotry. Cherry-picking verses that supported my pro-immigration, LGBTQ+ inclusion, semi-socialist views became my favorite pastime. I suppose it never occurred to me how convenient it was to leave out all the other parts – passages about personal repentance, sexual holiness, and Jesus’s mandate to “make disciples of all nations.” I enjoyed sarcastically reminding cranky, white evangelicals that Jesus said to love your enemies and that they’re supposed to love Iraqis and gays and abortion doctors.
Of course I never stopped to consider my own hypocrisy: conservative Christians were my mortal enemies, but I felt no love for them. If I believed in hell back then, I would’ve told them to go there.
Internally, I was falling apart: depressed, isolated, and struggling with a porn addiction. I knew I couldn’t keep living a lie forever, so I went to law school for a year and a half, until I realized that to become a big-shot lawyer you have to be even more duplicitous than a pastor with no faith. I was stuck until late 2012 when, out of nowhere, an activist friend named Andrea asked me if I had ever been to the Holy Land. When I told her that I had not, she said, “You need to see with your own eyes how the Zionists are abusing the Palestinians; I’m going to find a way to get you over there.” Nine months later, thanks to Andrea and several other friends, I found myself exploring the land that gave rise to the Bible.
In Capernaum, I died. My old, divided life passed away the day I stood near the ancient house on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee where first-generation Christians began to worship in the years following Jesus’s death. My friend who was with me is an archaeology enthusiast, and he taught me how, on the walls of that ancient house-church, archaeologists discovered graffiti that reads, “God Jesus Christ” and “Christ have mercy.” That part didn’t surprise me; I knew Christians had been calling Jesus their “God” ever since the days of Emperor Constantine’s famous Edict of Milan.
But then he said, “Those engravings have been dated to the first half of the first century AD,” and my ontological foundations began to tremble beneath me. One of my favorite weapons to use against evangelical Christians was the argument that Jesus’s divinity was a later amendment to the original biblical narrative. My professors insisted that upgrading Jesus from a failed apocalyptic prophet to the one true God in the flesh was nothing more than politics, the sort of power play commonly found in the history of human religions.
What does it mean, then, that this graffiti was scratched onto those walls at least two hundred sixty-three years before the Edict of Milan, not to mention decades prior to Mark writing the first Gospel? It means that the people who knew Jesus best – his friends, followers, and even his own flesh and blood – worshiped him as their God, and not just while he was alive, but even after he died on the cross.
I knew enough about Jewish scriptures and beliefs to be certain that, for any self-respecting Jew, worshiping a man was off-limits. In the Old Testament, not even Abraham, Moses, or Elijah were worthy of worship. The rule against worshiping mere men sits atop the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3). But the faithful Jews who walked with Jesus, some of whom watched him die, worshiped him and called him God, and many of them died for this heretical, treasonous belief.
That day in Capernaum, I was faced with history’s most consequential question: Was Jesus just a man, or is he truly God? After weighing the evidence and searching my heart, I came to the conclusion that it is more likely than not that Jesus is who he – and his followers – said he was: Emmanuel, God with us.
Making that decision was relatively easy; figuring out what to do about it was the tricky part. If Jesus is God, I knew I would have to revisit the Bible. For thirteen years, every time I opened that book, I expected to find something to disagree with, something to hate. But once I realized that Jesus loved the Bible, that he never criticized or contradicted it, and that he quoted it often, I knew I had more work to do. I couldn’t continue calling Jesus my God while feeling such animosity toward his Word.
Perfect God & Imperfect People. Christians believe the people who wrote the Bible were inspired by God; in fact, we think every word of Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16). That does not mean, however, that we believe the entire Bible fell from heaven as a finished product in the King’s English, gilded pages and all. It means that God inspired all the stories, laws, songs, and prophecies that make up our Scriptures as they were being written, and he still inspires them now as they are being read.
The divine inspiration of Scripture does not preclude the fact that God’s perfect message for the world passed through human filters. You can’t read the Bible without seeing its raw humanity; the sporadic examples of textual discrepancies, the occasional shocking misogyny, and the examples of extreme violence leap off its pages. This undeniable fact terrifies biblically insecure Christians, but we should never see the humanity of Scripture as a threat to its veracity.
The question is not whether the human element sullies the original Word of God; instead, we should be asking, “Does the humanity of Scripture damage its integrity?”
I don’t believe it does. Before I became a Christian, I used what I thought were flaws in the Bible to poke holes in the Truth claims that Christians hold dear. I would question, for example, why the four Gospel writers disagree on the order of events in Jesus’s life. Did Jesus famously turn over the tables in the Temple toward the end of his life, as Matthew and Mark suggest, or was it at the very beginning of his ministry, like John says? Luke says there were two angels in Jesus’s tomb on Easter morning. Matthew and Mark say there was one. And John, the only Gospel writer who was actually at Jesus’s tomb on Easter morning, didn’t mention the presence of any angels at all.
I used to think these obvious discrepancies represented the proverbial nail in the coffin for the Bible. No thinking person could ever accept this internally inconsistent collection of ancient books as authoritative or divinely inspired, right?
It’s just not that simple. Once my life changed in Capernaum, I began to revisit some of my deepest doubts about the Bible, and I felt compelled to start asking better questions. Instead of “Why would a perfect God write such an imperfect book?” I started asking, “If the standard of biblical truth was the absolute absence of discrepancies, why didn’t the early Christians ever ‘clean up’ the scriptures?”
Generations of believers had plenty of opportunities to dispose of the minor discrepancies within the Gospel stories with some careful editing, so why didn’t they take advantage?
Maybe worshiping a perfect book was never the point for Christians because, while the Bible’s inerrancy makes for fiery conversations and controversial books, we know that a holy book – perfect though it may be – can never save a single soul because a book can’t show us how to live. Only a person can do that.
The Bible is the story of the only perfect human. The lack of discrepancies and minor historical flaws isn’t what makes the Bible perfect; the Bible is perfect because of Jesus: God’s perfect gift for this imperfect world.
It’s the Bible’s humanity that speaks to my skeptical heart. Any holy book claiming to be anything other than human-filtered is a fraud from the start. It’s not the human element, but the supposed lack of it, that negates the sacredness of any so-called sacred text.
Anything short of a humanized holy book is mere magic, the stuff of fairy tales we tell restless children until they finally give up and go to sleep, or worse: the stuff of false religions we preach to restless adults until they do.The only Bible worth believing is both God-breathed and human-filtered.
The only God worth trusting is the Son of Man.
The message that matters most is God’s love for all humanity.
Even for you and me.
Eric Huffman is the founder and lead pastor of The Story Church in Houston and host of the Maybe God Podcast. He is the author of Scripture and the Skeptic: Miracles, Myths, and Doubts of Biblical Proportions (Abingdon). This article is an excerpt of Scripture and the Skeptic and is used by permission.
by Steve | May 28, 2021 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, May/June MJ 2021
By Steve Beard –
While sifting through obscure Spanish colonial records, it was discovered a few years ago that the very first St. Patrick’s Day parade was not conducted in Boston, Chicago, nor New York City.
Instead, the Irish feast day was celebrated in modern day St. Augustine, Florida, in 1601.
“They processed through the streets of St. Augustine, and the cannon fired from the fort,” said Prof. J. Michael Francis of the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, who discovered the document. The ancient records named “San Patricio” as “the protector” of the area’s maize fields. “So here you have this Irish saint who becomes the patron protector of a New World crop, corn, in a Spanish garrison settlement,” he said.
This strange twist in the story and celebration of St. Patrick, a fifth century holy man, is really not that surprising. His memory is invoked all around the globe. On March 17, the patron saint of Ireland is celebrated in parades and festivals in surprising places such as Argentina, India, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Turkey, and the West Indies.
Although the celebration was launched by Irish people scattered all around the world to remember their Celtic heritage, now even non-Irish people claim to be “Irish for a day” – even if it is only a fun excuse to eat corned beef and cabbage, wear green, and order a Guinness. The vast majority of those celebrating have no idea who St. Patrick was or what he did. That is a pity.
Historians are constantly attempting to set the record straight. After all, Patrick was not Irish (born in Britain of a Romanized family). He was never canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. Interestingly, there are two St. Patrick’s Cathedrals in Armagh, Ireland – one Catholic and one Protestant. Remarkably, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin is connected to the Church of Ireland, but has both Catholic and Protestant clergy.
The legacy of Ireland’s patron saint blurs a lot of lines – but, he is notably worth celebrating.
Patrick was brutally abducted at the age of 16 by pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland. For six agonizing years in a foreign land, he largely lived in abject solitude attending animals. The Christian faith of his family that he found unappealing as a teenager became his spiritual lifeline to sanity and survival while in captivity.
“Tending flocks was my daily work, and I would pray constantly during the daylight hours,” he writes in his Confession – one of only two brief documents authentically from Patrick’s own hand. “The love of God and the fear of him surrounded me more and more – and faith grew and the Spirit was roused, so that in one day I would say as many as a hundred prayers and after dark nearly as many again even while I remained in the woods or on the mountain. I would wake and pray before daybreak – through snow, frost, rain – nor was there any sluggishness in me (such as I experience nowadays) because then the Spirit within me was ardent.”
Through a divine dream, Patrick was inspired to make his escape. His journey as a fugitive was, according to his testimony, a 200 mile trek to the coast. Further miraculous circumstances allowed him to wrangle himself aboard a ship to escape his imprisonment in Ireland. He finally made it back to the loving embrace of his family.
Years later, however, another mystical dream launched his trajectory into the ministry and, ultimately, back to Ireland. “We appeal to you, holy servant boy,” said the voice in the dream, “to come and walk among us.”
For many years, he trained to become a priest. Eventually, in 432 A.D., Patrick returned to the shores of the land where he once was held captive.
“Believe me, I didn’t go to Ireland willingly that first time [when he was taken as a slave] – I almost died there,” he wrote in his Confession. “But it turned out to be good for me in the end, because God used the time to shape and mold me into something better. He made me into what I am now – someone very different from what I once was, someone who can care for others and work to help them. Before I was a slave, I didn’t even care about myself.”
Noted classics scholar Philip Freeman, the author of St. Patrick of Ireland, points out the distinguished uniqueness of Patrick’s public vulnerability – a trait that was not characteristic of a man of his stature and notoriety. As an elderly and well-known bishop, Patrick begins his Confession with these words: “I am Patrick – a sinner – the most unsophisticated and unworthy among all the faithful of God. Indeed, to many, I am the most despised.”
“The two letters are in fact the earliest surviving documents written in Ireland and provide us with glimpses of a world full of petty kings, pagan gods, quarreling bishops, brutal slavery, beautiful virgins, and ever-threatening violence,” writes Freeman. “But more than anything else, they allow us to look inside the mind and soul of a remarkable man living in a world that was both falling apart and at the dawn of a new age. There are simply no other documents from ancient times that give us such a clear and heartfelt view of a person’s thoughts and feelings. These are, above all else, letters of hope in a trying and uncertain time.”
While there are many beautiful, miraculous, and fantastical stories about St. Patrick, his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus – the other document authentically written by Patrick – exposes his heart and soul. It portrays the character of a man worthy of emulation and celebration. His humility, empathy, and righteous indignation scorches the letter as he takes up the cause of the voiceless captives and powerless victims of slavery – a common practice in the fifth century.
The fiery correspondence addresses the horrific news that a group of newly baptized converts were killed or taken into slavery on their way home by a petty British king named Coroticus, known to be at least nominally a Christian.
“Blood, blood, blood! Your hands drip with the blood of the innocent Christians you have murdered – the very Christians I nourished and brought to God,” Patrick writes. “My newly baptized converts, still in their white robes, the sweet smell of the anointing oil still on their foreheads – you murdered them, cut them down with your swords!”
Violating cultural and ecclesiastical protocols, the letter was sent broadly and caused a stir. Courageously, Patrick launched a public ruckus – outside his governance – over the “hideous, unspeakable crimes” because he believed that God truly loved the Irish – even if church leaders elsewhere did not. Patrick’s vision for the love of God was expansively generous. “I am a stranger and an exile living among barbarians and pagans, because God cares for them,” he writes (emphasis added).
“Was it my idea to feel God’s love for the Irish and to work for their good?” Patrick writes. “These people enslaved me and devastated my father’s household! I am of noble birth – the son of a Roman decurion – but I sold my nobility. I’m not ashamed of it and I don’t regret it because I did it to help others. Now I am a slave of Christ to a foreign people – but this time for the unspeakable glory of eternal life in Christ Jesus our master.”
Having been captive, he does not write about slavery whimsically. He was an outspoken voice opposing slavery at a time when it was simply considered commonplace. Furthermore, he was a fierce advocate for those who were most vulnerable and abused in captivity.
“But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most – and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure,” he writes in his Confession. “The Lord gives grace to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone.”
When Patrick heard about the bloody attack and abductions after the baptism service, he sought to reason with Coroticus: “The very next day I sent a message to you with a priest l had taught from childhood and some other clergy asking that you return the surviving captives with at least some of their goods – but you only laughed.”
In response, Patrick derides Coroticus and his men as “dogs and sorcerers and murderers, and liars and false swearers … who distribute baptized girls for a price, and that for the sake of a miserable temporal kingdom which truly passes away in a moment like a cloud or smoke that is scattered by the wind.”
In order to make his point, he prays: “God, I know these horrible actions break your heart – even those dwelling in Hell would blush in shame.”
With pastoral care, Patrick addresses the memory of those killed after their baptism: “And those of my children who were murdered – I weep for you, I weep for you … I can see you now starting on your journey to that place where there is no more sorrow or death. … You will rule with the apostles, prophets, and martyrs in an eternal kingdom.”
Even in an inferno of justifiable rage, Patrick extends an olive branch of redemption: “Perhaps then, even though late, they will repent of all the evil they have done – these murderers of God’s family – and free the Christians they have enslaved. Perhaps then they will deserve to be redeemed and live with God now and forever.”
“The greatness of Patrick is beyond dispute: the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery,” writes historian Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization. “Nor will any voice as strong as his be heard again till the seventeenth century.”
All around the globe, St. Patrick’s Day is set aside to honor a great man who overcame fear with faith, overcame hate with love, and overcame prejudice with hope. Although he had every reason in the world to resist the dream to return to “walk among” the Irish, Patrick responded to the God-given impulse of his heart – even when it was most difficult. He knew the dangers and challenges and returned anyway.
Patrick offered himself as a living example of what new life could look like for the Irish. “It is possible to be brave – to expect ‘every day … to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved – whatever may come my way’ – and yet be a man of peace and at peace, a man without sword or desire to harm, a man in whom the sharp fear of death has been smoothed away,” writes Cahill of Patrick. “He was ‘not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty.’ Patrick’s peace was no sham: it issued from his person like a fragrance.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Good News. Artwork by Winfield Bevins. Used by permission.
