Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Other Sheep Africa Leader Protects the Marginalized in Kenya


This article from Michgan’s MLive.com profiles the courageous work of Rev. John Makokha and his wife Anne Baraza at Other Sheep Afrika-Kenya, an independent offshoot of Other Sheep, the international ministry that advocates for GLBT Christians in the developing world. The former United Methodist minister currently serves at Riruta Hope Community Church, where his wife is a leader in the Riruta United Women Empowerment Programme.

Rev. Makokha recently completed a multi-state fundraising tour for Children of Africa Hope Mission, a charity that cares for AIDS orphans and homeless children in the slums of Nairobi. I had the pleasure of meeting him last fall at Rehoboth Temple Christ Conscious Church, a gay-affirming Pentecostal church in Harlem.

From the MLive article:

The Rev. John Makokha explains with obvious pride in his voice that his United Methodist church that’s nestled in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, is a house of worship that embraces open hearts, open minds and open doors.

That’s a watchword widely supported in Methodist circles in the U.S.

But the catchphrase comes with a price for Makokha who, along with his wife, Anne Baraza, have dedicated their ministry to reaching out to gay and lesbian people in the East African nation where people can still be imprisoned or stoned to death for being homosexual.

For that reason, and several others, pastoring the church and his Children of Hope school has made it a tough row to hoe for him, Makokha said last Sunday at an adult education forum held at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Grand Rapids.

Homophobia is the culturally accepted norm in Kenya, but it’s a standard tinged with irony, Makokha said. Gay political and church leaders stay lodged deep in the closet but are famous for publicly proclaiming gays, lesbians and bisexual people should be put to death.

And Makokha’s bishop has cut off funding to his church and his school for neighborhood children, many of them AIDS orphans.

“They say we are promoting sin,” said Makokha, 43, senior pastor of Riruta United Methodist Church, who is on a fundraising/public awareness campaign in the U.S. through June 15.

But Makokha, who also is director of the gay and lesbian advocacy ministry, Other Sheep Africa, says that mentality neuters the gospel.

“Jesus came for us sinners, whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, white, black, green, or whatever,” he said, a grin spreading across his face.

“In my church, we work for inclusive compassion. When Jesus came to this world, he came for all of us.”

Other Sheep Africa helps women whose husbands died of AIDS by securing micro loans so they can operate their own businesses making handmade necklaces and bracelets. It also teaches classes on human sexuality and human rights.

Sealed as Christ’s Own Forever


Today, June 3, 2011, is the 10th calendar anniversary of my baptism into the Episcopal Church. The liturgical anniversary will be next weekend at Pentecost.

Baptism for me wasn’t then, and isn’t now, about being saved from Hell. At least not in the afterlife. Jesus did rescue me, in this life, from an abusive codependent relationship and the shame, perfectionism, and emotional chaos of mind that came out of that. His unconditional forgiving love allowed me to cling to hope and self-respect when my abilities fell far short of my goals.

What baptism primarily meant to me, in 2001, was coming home. Home to the artistic tradition where I’d always experienced my strongest encounters with transcendence. Home to a community of elders, living and dead, who had faced the same existential dilemmas and could give me companionship and guidance to move forward. In the same way that radical queer politics would do a decade later, the Protestant paradigm of sin and redemption began to cure me of the delusion that it was my personal responsibility to avoid failure and humiliation, at all costs. My “problem” was the human condition, and the followers of Jesus showed the way to not be defeated by it.

In Christianity, I saw a place where my countercultural values of chastity and emotional self-mastery would no longer be dismissed as the hang-ups of a socially immature young woman. Behind me stood a whole community that resisted compartmentalization of sex and spirit, and affirmed that the most intimate parts of ourselves were sacred and deserved to be handled with care.

This was the hymn I chose for my baptism service at the Church of the Ascension in NYC. (Love you guys!) It seemed like a special sign that it was today’s song for morning prayer at The Daily Office.

Now, in 2011, what does membership in the Christian church mean to me? Sometimes I feel that I’m in my Christian adolescence, as instinctively resistant to religious authority figures as I once was welcoming and trusting of their guidance. This questioning spirit even extends to God. I hold many orthodox beliefs at arm’s length now, looking at them from the reverse side, from the perspective of one who’s been made an outcast by the church or finds Christians personally so triggering that he can’t safely open up to the question of the doctrines’ truth. But it’s Jesus who has opened my heart to this perspective, Jesus who gives me the courage to “stand in the place of shame” (as gay Catholic theologian James Alison says) with the people who can’t rest in the assurance that they are God’s chosen.

I don’t know if it’s healthy anymore for me to think of the church as a substitute family, unless it’s a family of adults, not children who have no input into the parents’ rules. What happens at that crossroads where doctrinal disagreement threatens the community’s core mission, and separation is necessary for integrity? If we expect unconditional inclusion, like children in their parents’ house, we will feel terribly rejected–but perhaps we were expecting the wrong things.

I am an adult Christian, if I’m willing to be one. In an incorrigibly dysfunctional family, your choices are to stay and shut up, or walk away. Our faith communities can and do model a better way of processing our differences. Ten years later, I still feel just as blessed to play my part in that struggle to discern God’s will–though I sure do wish, sometimes, that it was more like sleeping in Mother Church’s lap.

Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces. Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written:

“‘I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.’

Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it. (Matthew 11:7-12)

Memorial Day Song: “Grant Peace, O Lord”


This hymn was written by Welsh clergyman Charles Henrywood. See more of his contemporary lyrics for classic tunes at New Hymns in Old Clothes. Sing along at Mission St. Clare (The Daily Office).

Grant peace, O Lord, across our strife-torn world,
Where war divides and greed and dogma drive.
Help us to learn the lessons from the past,
That all are human and all pay the price.
All life is dear and should be treated so;
Joined, not divided, is the way to go.

Protect, dear Lord, all who, on our behalf,
Now take the steps that place them in harm’s way.
May they find courage for each task they face
By knowing they are in our thoughts always.
Then, duty done and missions at an end,
Return them safe to family and friends.

Grant rest, O Lord, to those no longer with us;
Who died protecting us and this their land.
Bring healing, Lord, to those who, through their service,
Bear conflict’s scars on body or in mind.
With those who mourn support and comfort share.
Give strength to those who for hurt loved-ones care.

And some there be who no memorial have;
Who perished are as though they’d never been.
For our tomorrows their today they gave,
And simply asked that in our hearts they’d live.
We heed their call and pledge ourselves again,
At dusk and dawn – we will remember them!

****
Mr. Henrywood says, “I’ve always believed that Remembrance should not be limited to the dead—important though that is. Neither should it be a vehicle for glorifying war. If we loved one another as commanded war would be just history. We don’t but that shouldn’t stop us asking for help to do so.” Read more about the inspiration for this hymn here.

Christian Hope Is Impossible


After reading my last post about Jesus’ triumph over death, my neighbor Sara Langseth shared with me an email she’d written to some friends, with whom she was discussing radical environmentalism and the future (if any) of our planet. Sara has been reading a book by Derrick Jensen, who argues that our industrial culture is turning natural resources into poisonous waste at such a rate that our individual green-lifestyle choices aren’t going to fix it.

Unsettled by Jensen’s call to bring down this culture through violent resistance, but unconvinced that personal virtue is enough, Sara finds herself musing about original sin:

Even my numb brain wonders whether Jensen’s eager endorsement of blowing up dams is any more of an answer. I wonder, really, whether the only thing left to do is say that I — we — are being broken to bits by our own powers, our own principalities, and that the very first thing we have to do is feel this, in any small way we can. Feel it and know that there is no personal morality here. That this isn’t about whether a “green” activist will smile and give me the thumbs-up
> because I compost my apple cores and ride my bike around. Again, if I were able to understand Christian theology, I’d say I was talking about original sin….

…This is why I am a Christian, even with all the absurd BS that being “Christian” means to all of us: because it’s not about my personal morality. To everyone who argues that “the world is a better place” because of some small thing I might do to make it die more slowly — my point was that this is NOT the point. My point is that we may well be absolutely screwed, absolutely doomed, and that I can not separate my culpability from yours. I feel like sometimes I have to sit with this and let the horror of this penetrate my bones. I have to hang on my own cross and ask, “Eli, eli lema sabacthani?” Otherwise I’m going to be hopelessly goggle-eyed and ridden with denial.

“Eli lema sabthani?” – “My God, why have you forsaken me?” – is what Mark and Matthew record Jesus saying on the cross before he dies.

(Luke and John make him much more confident about the whole thing.) The Mark and Matthew version is pretty rich: Jesus’ death is a real death here. He loses everything — the Son of God is utterly alone — God has lost God.

(It’s a rich quote for other reasons, but I’m going to stop with that before I get wordy and pedantic.)

I don’t think the point of Christianity is to quickly bypass horror and death with syrupy promises of resurrection. The pious picture of the Christian saint giving a sappy smile as the lion comes to eat him is utterly, utterly wrong. My point is that Christian hope comes from somewhere in the middle of the contact point between the lion’s teeth and the saint’s jugular. It’s a hope that shows up when hope is impossible. It’s a hope that makes no sense.

I do not understand this hope, and I do not know why I believe in this hope — or even IF I actually believe in this hope at all. But it’s the only straw I’ve got, the only thing I can hold onto that doesn’t break to bits at the moment I grasp it. And it’s the only straw I can grab that makes me turn around and believe that the world is real, and makes me want to love it.

I am not going to go blow up a dam.

My own temptation to despair is usually ethical rather than environmental–the cruelty and indifference of human beings towards their own. The common root of the two dilemmas may well be the same failure of our imagination to see other sentient beings as ends in themselves. Impossible hope is the only honest hope, sometimes–the only one that isn’t complicit in this failure, but rather allows us to keep our eyes open to the pain, not minimizing it as “good religious people” who are supposed to “think positive”.

The Real Resurrection: Freedom from Fear


As we all know, the much-predicted Rapture didn’t happen yesterday. Or it did happen but we were all so bad we were left behind. Or the Kingdom of God has actually already come, but no one was excluded, so we didn’t notice.

This last possibility sounds to me closest to the teachings of Jesus. Wasn’t he always saying that the Kingdom of God is within us? And, as N.T. Wright notes in his many writings on the Resurrection, this miracle was taken by the first Christians not only as proof of personal immortality, but more importantly as a sign that Christ was the Messiah and the new age had begun.

Now, it may not look that way, because suffering and injustice haven’t disappeared yet. What has changed, in light of the Resurrection, is how we may confidently respond to them. This article from religion professor Eric Reitan’s blog explains why. It’s worth reading in full, but “fair use” requires that I only quote a portion, so don’t stop here.

…Taken in relation to the cross, the empty tomb has further meanings. It declares that what is conceived from a terrestrial standpoint as ultimate and total defeat, as final humiliation, is none of these things from the divine standpoint (and hence from the most complete, enveloping, and hence truest standpoint). Crucifixion, after all, was not merely a means of killing that involved intense physical suffering before death. It was also a graphic means of intimidation and a tool of public degradation. Human beings were treated worse than things—not merely as something to be used, but as objects of contempt. The purpose of crucifixion was to express towards a human being the very antithesis of respect.

To have the power to crucify another human being was to have the power to take away their lives in a manner that first stripped them of everything that gives life any value. And it was, at the same time, an act of triumphantly crowing over one’s victim—displaying for all the world to see just how helpless, just how disgraced, one could make another human being (before ultimately turning them into a thing in truth, that is, a corpse).

The empty tomb symbolically represents what such efforts at mortification achieve from God’s ultimate standpoint. We might express it as follows: “Look into the tomb and you begin to see what you’ve accomplished by such exercises of power. The tomb is not merely empty. It has been emptied. In the place of a corpse there is new life, eternal and incorruptible.” The empty tomb erases the pretentions of coercive power to define human worth. It declares that the use of force to degrade and destroy is less than impotent. It has become the means whereby the intended victim has been exalted, whereby the target for destruction has been made indestructible.
…

Like many of us, I’m not nearly close enough to living that way. Yesterday, thousands of people were happily anticipating the end times. Without sharing the superstitious aspects of their faith, or their comfort with the notion that some people will be forever excluded from God’s presence, I would like to have more of their settled hope for a future where God defeats death and makes all things right.

There’s no easy way to that goal. No shortcut but to live as if it were true, as Jesus told us to do. That includes forgiving people who have “degraded and destroyed” precious things in my life, because otherwise I am still granting them power that belongs to Jesus alone: the power to say who I am.

Christ(a): Are Gender Differences Spiritually Fundamental?


The other day, a wide-ranging conversation with a Christian friend touched down briefly on the subject of Biblical arguments for and against women in ministry. She herself is fully supportive of women clergy, but has long attended a church that would not hire a woman pastor, and whose elders are all male. In what she no doubt intended as an uncontroversial observation, my friend said, “Of course, female as well as male imagery is used for God in the Bible, but Jesus himself was clearly male,” and I, only half in jest, volleyed back, “Or so he appeared.”

Kittredge Cherry’s Jesus in Love Blog has widened my horizons with respect to female and genderqueer reinterpretations of Christian imagery. Add that to my growing friendship with our local transgender community, and you can see where I came up with the notion that maybe, just maybe, one could picture an intersex Jesus who merely presented as male! I’m not saying that I believe this as a historical fact, but I’m exploring its usefulness as a devotional aid, a poetic gloss to make the “facts” more accessible to a non-patriarchal reading, a teasing detail that supplements and enriches the gospels without directly contradicting the eyewitness reports.

This imaginative experiment was definitely a bridge too far for my friend! She struggled to articulate why she found “Christa” images such a troubling departure from authentic doctrine. The best wording we could find, after a fascinating and all-too-brief discussion, was that the female Jesus “disrespects the specificity of the Incarnation”.

In other words, she was concerned that “Christa” dismisses the unique Lordship of Jesus Christ, implying that “Christ” is a mere role that anyone could play. A woman on a cross with a crown of thorns is not the real Jesus, the historical personage traditionally worshipped by the church, but only an actor with props.

I do see how messing with traditional depictions of Jesus can inch us closer to a liberal watering-down of the Incarnation as merely one among many possible manifestations of the “Christ-nature in us”. I don’t want to go there any more than my friend does. But still, I pushed back a little bit.

How, I asked, is a female Jesus more heretical than the black Jesus in the devotional art created by African Christian communities–or, for that matter, more heretical than the European transformation of their Semitic messiah into Warner Sallman’s blond beauty queen?

We were stumped. My friend realized she was more comfortable with Jesus crossing racial lines than gender ones, but we both needed more time to consider whether this distinction made sense.

Let me note here that “Christa” isn’t my preferred way to picture Jesus. Having grown up in an all-female household, I need the balance supplied by the masculine or gender-transcending side of God. I also find that contemporary goddess spirituality can emphasize the unindividuated, nurturing, sentimental aspects of womanhood in a way that I find cloying. Kali the Dark Mother is more my kinda gal.

However…I would insist on the legitimacy of “Christa” because I believe the spirit of the New Testament is against hard-wired inequalities. The Christian tradition has shed many of the particulars of the man called Jesus: his artistic icons and his clerical representatives don’t have to be Jewish, Middle Eastern, younger than 33, or working-class. Let’s pass over, for now, the assumption that Jesus had a heterosexual orientation, for which there’s no evidence in Scripture either way.

Is gender alone more fundamental than our shared humanity, the one aspect of human nature that even Christ could not take on? Is what made Jesus different from women more important than what he had in common with us? That’s a prescription for permanent second-class citizenship in the kingdom of heaven. Definitely not what the gospels are about.

Maybe the sexism is easier to spot outside the emotionally fraught context of sacred imagery. A quick tour through popular culture shows us that the female role is the one imaginative leap that little boys must never, ever be allowed to make. Your three-year-old son can pretend to be a little
soldier, a dinosaur, or a monkey, but God forbid he tries
on a tutu. When a kid dresses up as a washing machine for Halloween, we don’t worry that he’s going to start eating detergent and dirty socks, but we become strict and panicked literalists about children’s imaginative reinterpretation of props that adults have gender-tagged.

Personally, I think this sends the message that girls aren’t human. A boy in a tutu is like dressing up as a turd. A turd can’t help looking like a turd, in fact it should, so we can avoid stepping in it, but why would you want to be one? What’s wrong with you?

Check out the discussion on this parenting blog. Even the parents who don’t personally have a problem with their kid’s explorations admit that they’ve told him to keep this side of himself private because of school bullies. Now, I agree with teaching your children that it’s not dishonorable to be discreet in unsafe environments. But it troubles me that these parents aren’t sharing their critique of the bullies’ prejudices with their child, an omission that can shame a child about his non-masculine play.

If Jesus were a little boy, would Mary let him paint his toenails pink?

Northampton Pride 2011: Party or Politics


Last Saturday, Northampton hosted its 30th annual GLBT Pride march. Political diversity and even dissent were noticeable themes this year, in my opinion a good sign that our GLBT community feels safe enough to forgo a united front–and even to prioritize other issues besides their own rights.

What a change from 20 years ago, when, as old-time residents told me, the local paper consistently misprinted the date of Pride, the city put up endless bureaucratic obstacles in the way of them getting a permit, and some closeted gays had to march with bags over their heads. One activist remembered being chased by a schoolbus full of Christians shouting homophobic slurs. It was a welcome relief this year to see numerous faith-based groups–Jewish, Christian, and Muslim–carrying parade banners.

These folks, naturally, were my favorite:

Though the matching T-shirts were tempting, this year our family marched behind our City Council candidate, Arnie Levinson. Arnie stands for transparent government and protecting our natural resources from short-sighted real estate development. He was also active in organizing our Neighborhood Watch after a spate of arson fires that killed two neighbors in 2009.


(Left to right: Arnie, Karen’s boyfriend Rich, moi, my stepsister Karen, and my other mom Roberta.)

Uniquely this year, Pride drew some protesters from the Left: Queer Insurgency, spearheaded by transgender elder, activist and archivist Bet Power, sought to return Pride to its radical origins. QI contended that the public face of the gay community had become too commercialized and bourgeois. A narrow focus on inclusion in mainstream institutions like marriage and the military sidelines the issues that are a higher priority for GLBT people on society’s margins, such as employment discrimination, hate crimes, and the intersection of multiple oppressions (e.g. disability and racial inequality).

I stopped to compliment this young man on his fabulous jacket, and got an education in the difficult choices that we must make when a regime that seems to support GLBT equality also violates another group’s human rights.


(L-R: Alex Cachinero-Gorman and Ty Power.)

Asked to explain “pinkwashing”, Alex said Israel bills itself as gay-friendly in order to deflect criticism from progressive gays and allies about the country’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.  However, he rejected the false choice between human rights for one group versus another. There are also gay Palestinians and Arabs in Israel who are still oppressed by the regime because of their ethnicity; the GLBT-friendly policies don’t do much for them. Better, he said, to give the Palestinians self-determination and allow them to come up with their own solutions, rather than being dependent on the Israeli government as the only protector of GLBT rights.

As an ethnic Jew who grew up on stories about refugees being turned away from American shores during the Holocaust, I have a knee-jerk emotional reaction to comparisons between Zionism and South African apartheid. Unlike the Dutch and English colonizers, who were already top dog in their home countries and just went to Africa to exploit its riches, Jews in the 1940s had reason to believe they needed a homeland for their tribe because they weren’t safe anywhere else in the so-called civilized world.

But folks like Alex have made me realize I need to be more objective, and get educated about what’s really happening to the Palestinians. Some links he sent me, which I plan to explore, include Palestinian Queers for BDS and Thoughts on Palestine (a Hampshire College study group). (BDS stands for “boycott, divestment, and sanctions”.)

The Palestinian/queer dilemma is an interesting problem of priorities. Currently, the world’s Arab and Muslim regimes are mostly unsafe places for sexual minorities. Would Middle Eastern gays at least temporarily fare worse if there were no Jewish state? Is that a risk worth taking? Whose oppression comes first? (Not that all these anti-pinkwashing groups are calling for Israel’s eradication, but if you argue that Zionism equals racism, the logical next step seems to be that it’s illegitimate for the country to try to maintain a Jewish identity, even if the human rights abuses ceased.)

Around the same time as Noho Pride, the question of competing oppressions was also at the heart of the recent controversy over Sojourners’ refusal to run this ad from Believe Out Loud, a GLBT Christian advocacy group. Sojourners is a well-known progressive Christian organization that reaches across denominational lines to advocate for economic justice and an end to war. The ad, released in conjunction with Mother’s Day, depicts two lesbian moms and their anxious little boy walking slowly down the aisle of a church as parishioners eye them with suspicion, hostility, and curiosity. Just as the tension becomes painful, the minister smiles and says “Welcome … everyone.“

Sojourners founder Jim Wallis defended the move by saying that Sojo supports civil rights for gays, but taking an overt political stand could alienate some members of their constituency, who were not all of one mind about what the Bible says about homosexuality. It’s a question of priorities:

But these debates have not been at the core of our calling, which is much more focused on matters of poverty, racial justice, stewardship of the creation, and the defense of life and peace. These have been our core mission concerns, and we try to unite diverse Christian constituencies around them, while encouraging deep dialogue on other matters which often divide. Essential to our mission is the calling together of broad groups of Christians, who might disagree on issues of sexuality, to still work together on how to reduce poverty, end wars, and mobilize around other issues of social justice.

Given the time Sojourners is now spending on critical issues like the imperative of a moral budget, the urgent need to end the war in Afghanistan, and the leadership we are offering on commitments like immigration reform, we chose not to become involved in the controversy that such a major ad campaign could entail, and the time it could require of us. Instead, we have taken this opportunity to affirm our commitment to civil rights for gay and lesbian people, and to the call of churches to be loving and welcoming to all people, and promote good and healthy dialogue.

Sorry, Jim. I’m not buying it. Watch the ad again. I don’t see anything about “sexuality”. I see a family like mine, being shunned in a house of worship simply because they look different, until the minister reminds the crowd how Christians are supposed to treat one another. It’s basically an anti-bullying message for churches.

Why is it incumbent on progressives to compromise here, in order to include people in our anti-poverty coalition who would be offended by the most minimal acknowledgment that queer families exist? Can we really not accomplish our objectives without them? Better to take a stand and leave those conservatives looking like the mean-spirited ones, because they’d rather stop feeding the hungry than treat lesbian moms with respect.

Some Different Angles on Mother’s Day


Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love notes that today, Mother’s Day (in the U.S.), is also the feast day of one of my favorite saints, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, whose writings celebrated the maternal love of Christ. Here’s a quote from her Revelations of Divine Love:

“A mother can give her child milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most courteously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament, which is the precious food of life itself…The mother can lay the child tenderly to her breast, but our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly lead us to his blessed breast through his sweet open side…”

Mother’s Day brings up complex emotions for me, because it reminds me that my long journey through infertility and adoption has not yet come to a resolution. That’s why I greatly appreciated this article on Care2: “Today, Think of the Birth Mothers“. It’s a reminder that the opportunities for adoption in this country will not improve until we start respecting the loving sacrifices made by women who place their children for adoption. For adoptive parents, this includes honoring our agreements about openness (continuing contact between child and birthfamily). For the rest of society, it means ceasing to stigmatize women with unplanned pregnancies, and busting the myths about why a woman might make an adoption plan.

To end on a positive note, here’s a picture of me and my non-biological mom Roberta after yesterday’s Northampton Pride march. (T-shirt courtesy of TruthWinsOut.org. Thanks John!)

Christ Is Risen Indeed!


Alleluia! Happy Easter, everyone! Enjoy these signs of springtime rebirth from the Smith College Bulb Show, and praise God for His great love and creativity.

Our hymn for today, which we sang at the Easter service at St. John’s, celebrates the women who first brought the gospel to the world. Lyrics and music are copyright by Linda Wilberger Egan. Hear an audio clip and read the sheet music at RiteSeries Online.

The first one ever, oh, ever to know
of the birth of Jesus was the Maid Mary,
was Mary the Maid of Galilee,
and blessed is she, is she who believes.
Oh, blessed is she who believes in the Lord,
oh, blessed is she who believes.
She was Mary the Maid of Galilee,
and blessed is she, is she who believes.

The first one ever, oh, ever to know
of Messiah, Jesus, when he said, “I am he,”
was the Samaritan woman who drew from the well,
and blessed is she, is she who perceives.
Oh, blessed is she who perceives the Lord,
oh, blessed is she who perceives.
‘Twas the Samaritan woman who drew from the well,
and blessed is she, is she who perceives.

The first ones ever, oh, ever to know
of the rising of Jesus, his glory to be,
were Mary, Joanna, and Magdalene,
and blessed are they, are they who see.
Oh, blessed are they who see the Lord,
oh blessed are they who see.
They were Mary, Joanna, and Magdalene,
and blessed are they, are they who see.

The Acid Bath of Atonement


“Till on that cross as Jesus died/The wrath of God was satisfied…”

These lines from “In Christ Alone“, one of my favorite contemporary Christian songs, sum up the penal substitution theory of the Atonement — what the average person thinks of when you say “Christ died for your sins”. It’s a powerful but troubling formula that connects God’s love with violence.

Liberal Christians sometimes condemn this theory as “divine child abuse”. I feel sympathy for that point of view. And yet, as Experimental Theology’s Richard Beck observes in a recent post about his prison Bible study group, perhaps “doubt is the luxury of the privileged”. Traditional atonement theory seems to resonate most with people who are in extremis. Yes, this story about God is grotesque, terrifying, mysterious — and so are their lives. Richard writes:

The metaphors of penal substitutionary atonement speak to the issue of human guilt. No other suite of metaphors so powerfully addresses this facet of the human experience before a Holy God. Thus, I do think it would be rash to completely do away with penal substitutionary thinking. It performs a task that no other view of atonement can perform.

The problem with the penal substitutionary metaphors is that they are so very strong. Too strong to be deployed on a regular basis. And that is the real problem. It’s not so much that penal substitutionary thinking is wrong, it is rather that it is wrongfully deployed. Penal substitutionary atonement is at its best when deployed rarely and only in the most extreme circumstances. It can’t be everyday fare. The trouble is that it IS everyday fare in many churches. Penal substitutionary atonement is like a very strong acid. It has to be handled with care. And if you handle it as much as we do in our churches, often and carelessly, you end up with chemical burns. Thus many Christians are pulling away from churches in pain.

So when is the proper time to deploy penal substitutionary atonement? Like I said, penal substitutionary thinking is at its best when it speaks to profound human guilt. Specifically, some of us have committed such awful sins that our self-loathing, guilt, and shame destroy the soul. We cannot forgive ourselves. Only a very strong concoction can wash us clean. Penal substitutionary atonement is that chemical bath. It’s strong acid–You deserve death and hell for the life you’ve lived–making it the only thing powerful enough to wash away a guilt that has poisoned the taproot of a human existence. Nothing more mild (e.g., the moral influence views I so love) can speak to this issue.

So, it seems to me, there is a proper time to pull the beaker of penal substitutionary atonement off the theological shelf.

But here’s the trouble. Most of us live bland bourgeoisie lives with bland bourgeoisie sins. Few of us have lived catastrophically immoral lives. Thankfully so. But this creates a bit of a disjoint when a preacher throws penal substitutionary atonement at us. It just doesn’t resonate. The strong acid just burns us. The notion that God demands our death for these slight infractions AND that God will condemn us to an eternal torment of excruciating pain makes God seem, well, rather crazed.

This feeling gets worse when penal substitutionary atonement is thrown at children. In these contexts the deployment of penal substitutionary metaphors can seem obscene and psychologically abusive. Again, the issue for us is the incommensurability between the offenses of the children (not playing nice on the playground) and the penal substitutionary view (for these infractions God will punish you forever in hell). Continuing my chemical metaphor, kids shouldn’t play with acid.

The point I’m trying to make is that penal substitutionary atonement isn’t bad per se. The problem is that penal substitutionary atonement is a victim of its own strength. It has suffered not by being a bad idea, but by being handled too often and too carelessly. Some people do live in such a hell of guilt that only the vision of God’s death sentence, something they feel deep in their bones to be justified and proper, can reach the depth of their self-hatred. So we shouldn’t throw penal substitutionary atonement out the door. We just need to understand its proper function and place.

Christians just need to go to chemistry class.

To expand on Richard’s point, when I first converted, my core issues were guilt and shame. The story of the “cleansing blood” freed me from the crippling compulsion to be perfect. That’s a familiar conversion story for a lot of people. The problem comes when churches try to return people to that place of self-loathing, as if it were the only way to rekindle the emotions of gratitude and love that led us to Jesus. We’re not allowed to actually start living in grace, to see ourselves and our neighbors truly through the eyes of God as the good creations we were meant to be.

At the same time, sin is an ever-present condition. We will feel guilty again, maybe for good reason. Don’t be too proud, too liberal, too smart to rejoice that “it’s still the blood“.

Have a blessed Good Friday.