Giving Up Bad Theology for Lent
Last week this picture was shared on Facebook. It’s from the front of University Christian Church in San Diego, giving the topics of their Sunday worship services in Lent. The overall theme, as you see, is “Giving Up Bad Theology for Lent.” There were dozens of comments on the post, almost all affirmative, and many giving more suggestions for the list.
The numerical shrinking of churches (both in size and number) is an unavoidable topic in church life today. The rise of the “Nones” (those who would respond “none of the above” when asked their religion) and the “spiritual but not religious” is widely discussed but with little depth or understanding. Most often that discussion seems like people timidly looking out of their church windows and wondering, “Where’s everybody going?”
But this church’s daring Lenten series, and the responses to the picture of their banner, confirm my sense that this is the wrong picture. While many in church are befuddled by people abandoning the church, I have found that at least as many wonder, “Why am I still here? Why am I still inside and not out there with them?”
The pandemic lockdown brought that question to the fore for many people. When churches reopened after nearly a year of closure, quite a few asked, “Do I really want to go back?” and then decided they really didn’t.
It’s often said that organizations hire consultants, not to make changes, but to avoid them. The consultant usually finds that those within the organization know very well what has gone wrong. A big, expensive report is prepared and presented to management. A few feeble attempts are made to implement its recommendations but soon it is filed away and forgotten.
Something similar has been going on in the church. The items on the San Diego church’s “bad theology” list have been kicked around for a century, at least. And commenters easily came up with more suggestions. Over the decades, notable theologians have pointed out in detail the many places that the church’s traditional beliefs and practices are incompatible with the modern world.
The past several weeks I have been facilitating a Zoom book discussion group. We are reading Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) by Bible scholar, Bart Ehrman. In the book, Ehrman reveals the New Testament to be a very human, multi-authored, heavily edited, often contradictory, historically questionable, theological hodgepodge. The Bible certainly still has value, Ehrman says, but it can’t be the inerrant, literally true, straight forward source which fundamentalists and others claim it is.
Ehrman repeatedly makes two points. First, nothing he says is radical or new in his field of New Testament scholarship. Second, but most of what he says is unknown to average church members. Then he asks: Why? Why are these things being kept under wraps? Why aren’t pastors teaching these things?
Ehrman is playing the role of the consultant. The organization knows what he says is true, but it doesn’t like what he has to say and wishes he would go away. And many have played Ehrman’s role before him, always with the same results. “Thank you very much. What you say is very important. But this just isn’t the right time to implement your recommendations. We’ll certainly keep them in mind for the future.”
But the future never arrives. As a result, the church’s creeds, doctrines, catechisms, liturgy, prayers, hymns, and preaching continue to espouse ideas that literally make no sense in today’s world.
Now, however, a growing number in the church’s pews also know they don’t make sense. Hence, University Church’s Lent series. But something keeps them coming: the music, the coffee and donuts, the kids’ ministry, a personable minister/priest, the community service programs, etc. In that sense, the church resembles those blown out Easter eggs which have a very pretty shell but nothing of substance inside.
Eventually, however, the shell cracks: the nice minister leaves, a favorite program gets cancelled, a squabble or scandal breaks out, and what held people is gone, so they leave. Some will look for a new church but increasingly many will not. They can find the aesthetic, communal, educational, or social service qualities they enjoyed somewhere else. The religious component? That was the least attractive part. And that, too, can now be found, more sensibly and more meaningfully, in other places.
During Lent and Easter, the church doubles down on many of its least believable and most outrageous notions. God requires the torturous crucifixion of his “only Son” Jesus to appease his wrath and forgive the sins of a disobedient world. Jesus is bodily “raised” and then goes to heaven, preparing the way for the faithful to follow him later.
But from grade school science we know that all physical bodies inevitably decay and disappear. In the universe of the Hubble and Webb telescopes, heaven is unlocatable and, even for the faithful, unimaginable. And the God who orchestrated Jesus’ death? The late Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote, “I wouldn’t love such a God. I’d hate him.” Yet the hymns, readings, prayers, and preaching this time of year will be filled with such incredible images and ideas.
When confronted about this, most non-fundamentalist clergy will talk about image and symbol and metaphor, spring and hope and rebirth. When pressed about the inadequacy of such a response, they may shrug their shoulders and say, “What can I do? It’s tradition. It’s what people expect.” The lectionary says use these readings, the liturgy says recite these prayers, the hymnal says sing these songs. And hopefully most people will understand the wink and the nudge that goes with it all.
“What can I do?” What can the church do? Well, for one, it could start taking seriously all those consultants: the countless theologians and biblical scholars it has trained and paid for who have tried to show a different way ahead.
They have actually done a pretty good job of, among other things, revealing Jesus without the layers of mythology and doctrine that have shrouded him for so long. This is the Jesus of the parables, of the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and of the mystical vision of God’s kingdom around and within us. This is the Jesus who hung around with all the wrong people and said God prioritized love and forgiveness over law keeping. In other words, these scholarly consultants have enabled us, as the late Bible scholar Marcus Borg said, to “meet Jesus again for the first time.”
What befuddles me is that I think this is the Jesus and the God most people, within and outside the church, know, appreciate, and believe in. Centering the church on them ought to be obvious and welcome. Yet they are nearly unrecognizable under the elaborate costumes of ages past which church authority clings to out of nostalgia, fear, laziness, and jealousy.
The only thing that will “save” the church is an enormous letting go. As Jesus says in a popular Lent text from John,
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.
And in another popular John story, Jesus says after the raising of Lazarus, “Unbind him and let him go.” Jesus and God need to be set free from the ancient wrappings that have constricted them, and us, for so long.