Christian Mythbusters

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Welcome to week two of Pride Month! Each year June is dedicated to celebrating the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or Questioning), Intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA) individuals who make up our society and their long fight for equality, respect, and freedom. 

As I continue last week’s work of breaking the myths surrounding how Christians can (and should) view Pride month, this week I want to talk about a specific community: transgender people. In particular, I want to talk about what the Bible says about transgender people.

First, let me tell you why. Though we have made significant strides as a society and even as Christians when it comes to the welcome of gay and lesbian people, the transgender community still experiences profound discrimination, marginalization, and risk of violence. When my church hosted the first Pride-themed worship service in Grand Haven, I met several trans members of the community who came out to be with us. Many told me it was the first time they had felt safe being in downtown Grand Haven and presenting in their actual gender identity. Some even told me that while literally trembling with anxiety. 

No one should have to live like that. And if Christians read the Bible a bit more carefully on these questions, they would keep creating the death-dealing transphobic culture we have right now. 

I talked a while ago about how the creation story isn’t the binary narrative we often think of, how in between night and day there is dawn and dusk and twilight. I talked about how the same God who made fish for the sea and birds for the air, also created animals that break those norms: penguins that can swim but not fly and dolphins that can soar through the air. And, given the presence of a variety of genders in creation (including animals that can have both genders and animals that can literally transition their biological sex), it’s unsurprising that God creates humanity with that same gender diversity. That’s not something to be scared of, it’s not even a symbol of the fall: it’s a manifestation of a God who delights in diversity, who called a diverse creation good, a God who is neither male nor female but holds all genders within God’s self. As I love to say, God is the original they/them. 

One of the most important parts of the reality of transgender people is the experience of being assigned one sex and name at birth and, as you grow up, feeling like that’s not really who you are. This is actually a recurrent theme in Scripture. Over and over again we encounter people with one name and identity who later are given a new name and identity by God. And so Jacob, the swindler and trickster who steals his brother’s birthright, wrestles with God and comes out with a limp, a new blessing, and a new name: Israel. Simon the fisherman, who runs hot and is always speaking up (not always in the best way) becomes Peter, the rock and the one upon whose confession the whole church is built. And Saul, the well-trained rabbi who persecutes that new sect of Jesus followers who are violating his understanding of Scripture, becomes Paul, the greatest advocate for the inclusion of the Gentiles in the church and the author of much of the New Testament. 

And lest you think this just about names, there are other historical corollaries to the experience of trans people. Eunuchs, for instance, were usually people assigned male at birth who had their reproductive organs changed or removed. The term also referred to those we would now call intersex. 

In the older texts of Scripture, like Deuteronomy 23, eunuchs are forbidden from being a part of the community. However, after the exile (and after God’s people were exposed to eunuchs who functioned quite regularly in Babylonian and Persian society), that began to change. In Isaiah 56, God even promises that eunuchs will have a special place in the new Israel: “I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

And, of course, one of the first conversions early in the Book of Acts is that of the Ethiopian Eunuch who, after hearing the story of Jesus, asks Philip what prevents him from being baptized. He asks that because he likely think that in the same way he was turned away from the temple in Jerusalem, he would be turned away from this new community of Christians. Philip looks at him with love in his eyes and says, “Nothing at all,” and immediately baptizes him: making it clear that at the start of the church that those who had been historically excluded would be included in God’s kingdom.

Psalm 139 says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and that means that trans people are also a wonderful creation of God, that they should be celebrated and lifted up—especially for their courage in claiming their true identity in a far too often hostile world. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Welcome to Pride Month! Each year June is dedicated to celebrating the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or Questioning), Intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA) individuals who make up our society and their long fight for equality, respect, and freedom. 

And though, give the unfortunate language of some Christians, you might think followers of Jesus are opposed to pride month—this priest is here to tell you that’s not accurate. There are literally millions of Christians who are either members of the LGBTQIA community or who are allies, including me. 

To help break the myth of the way Christians view Pride Month, this week I’d like to take my time to tell you the history behind this month and why celebrating it is important for all people—especially those who came to follow Jesus Christ. 

The observance of Pride Month dates back to events over half a century ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, many forces in our country were trying to return the United States to a version of America that they believed existed before World War II. A national paranoia about communism, fueled by figures like Joseph McCarthy, had infected out country, leading to the U.S. Army and other government institutions labelling various groups as un-American and subversive security risks—including gay men and lesbians. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the police, and even the United States Postal Service kept records on known homosexuals, their friends, and the establishments they frequented. States soon followed suit, and eventually even local cities were performing sweeps to rid neighborhoods, parks, bars, and restaurants of gay people. 

Every state in our country criminalized same-sex acts during this time, with penalties ranging from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years in prison—or even life. In 1971, twenty states even had what are known as “sex psychopath” laws which permitted detaining suspected gay or lesbian people for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California, they could be committed to a psychiatric institution for life and in seven states they could be castrated. 

On June 28 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York. Owned by the Mafia, with an agreed-upon payout to the police to leave it alone, the bar catered to many of the most marginalized people in the LGBTQIA community, including drag queens, transgender people, and homeless youth. It was the only bar for gay men in New York where dancing was allowed. 

When a raid occurred, identification cards were checked but generally only trans women and drag queens were the ones arrested. During that raid in 1969, some of those detained refused to go into bathrooms and let the police check their genitalia to confirm their sex. Some of the lesbians reported the police were feeling them up instead of professionally frisking them. 

A crowd began to grow outside ethe door and within minutes over one hundred people were gathered outside of the club. As the police began loading people into patrol wagons, a bystander shouted “Gay power! And someone else started to sing the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” An officer pushed someone in drag who then hit the officer with her purse. The cop then clubbed the suspect over the head, raising the anger and frustration of those in the crowd. A lesbian complained that her handcuffs were too tight and was beaten over the head with a police baton by an officer. She looked at the crowd of bystanders and shouted, “Why don't you guys do something?”

That’s when the riot began. They lasted for six days as people stood up, claimed the streets as their own, and refused to continue to be subject to inhumane abuse and discrimination. A year later, to mark the first anniversary of the riots, Gay Pride marches were staged in New York as well as Los Angeles and Chicago. From there they spread to other cities, and the modern gay rights movement was born. 

In 1999 the U.S. Department of the Interior included several parts of Christopher Street and Greenwich Village as a part of the National Register of Historic Places—the first time this was done for a place meaningful specifically to the LGBTQIA community. At the ceremony, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior John Berry said, “Let it forever be remembered that here—on this spot—men and women stood proud, they stood fast, so that we may be who we are, we may work where we will, live where we choose, and love whom our hearts desire.”

That’s something worth being proud of. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Each summer, I pick a different book each month to read with members of my parish. It’s a great way for me to get through some texts I’ve been meaning to pick up and I enjoy it each year. This year’s first book is The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story by Old Testament scholar Christopher Hays and his father, the world-renowned New Testament Scholar Richard Hays. 

I’m about one hundred pages into it and it is absolutely excellent, a brilliant synthesis of the best of Biblical scholarship, tracing the overarching narrative of the witness of Scripture, making it clear that love and mercy is what lies at the core. If you’re curious, you can join our parish’s discussion of it at 5:30pm on Monday, June 9—details are on our website at http://sjegh.com. 

But what struck me particularly was right at the beginning of the book, before the authors dive deeply into the witness of Scripture. They begin by plumbing the depths of American Christianity and find some darkness at its core. So, today I want to take a swing at the myth that American Christianity is exceptional and suggest that it may even have brokenness at its heart. 

The authors go back in time to Jonathan Edwards, and 18th century preacher and theologian who was active before the Revolutionary war. Edwards was the third president of what became Princeton University and is generally seen as one of the most important and leading theologians in early colonial America.

One of his most famous works was a sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Here is a brief excerpt, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire, he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.”

Historians often use this sermon as an example of the sort of preaching that was common during the First Great Awakening in colonial America.

None of this was new to me, but what they next shared was something I had never known. I’ll quote the authors of the book directly here, “Notably, Edwards preached it in 1741, half a decade after his preaching sparked a rash of suicides and suicidal ideations among his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts.” They go on to note that one of those who died by suicide was even his own uncle. 

What the authors have done is pinpoint with scholarly precision the sickness that is at the heart of American Christianity, a sickness that has been with us since the beginning and has been killing people for nearly 300 years. This sickness is a theology that teaches people that God hates who they are, and then tells them that they are supposed to see this as a form of love.

So, let’s make one very clear categorical theological statement: God does not hate you. God does not hate any part of you. And any preacher who tells you differently is not a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rather, they are a preacher who has been infected with a diseased theology that has plagued Christianity in America from the start. And that sort of preaching kills people. 

No sinner is in the hands of an angry God. Rather, each and every one of us can look at the pierced hands of Christ, the Son of God, and know that it is God’s love for you that is the actual real deepest truth. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

I’ve been gone the past couple weeks enjoying some Eastertide rest, relaxation, and travel, but it’s a delight to be back with you this week for another edition of Christan Mythbusters. I’m particularly excited because I get to tell you about yet ANOTHER way Christians have historically understood what God in Christ did to effect the salvation of all people. And so, let’s continue breaking the myth that Jesus died so you can go to heaven because, as I’ve said a few times now, it’s about so much more than that.

Just to remind you, I started this short series with an acknowledgment that the “satisfaction” theory of the atonement is the one with which most Christians are familiar. This is often described as the idea that Jesus died to satisfy the wrath of an angry God upon our sins. (And, yes, I suggested that’s not really the best way to understand the satisfaction theory, that it’s more about God in Christ choosing to suffer alongside of us, to make right in God’s own being the horrors and injustices humanity has wrought.)

Then, in my last episode I talked about the Christus Victor theory of the atonement, the one that was dominant in the early church and whose central theme is “the idea of the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ – Christus Victor – fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the 'tyrants' under which humanity is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself.”

This week, though, I want to talk about the third of the classic theories of the atonement (aren’t you excited?). This is the one perhaps articulated best by someone named twelfth-century French philosopher, Peter Abelard. Abelard worried that the satisfaction theory made God seem more harsh and judgmental than a truly loving divine being. So, he focused on what became known as the “Moral Example” theory of the atonement. 

Abelard rejected the idea that the death of Christ was a ransom paid either to the devil or even to satisfy the honor and justice of God. Rather, Abelard argued that "Jesus died as the demonstration of God's love", a demonstration which can change the hearts and minds of the sinners, turning back to God.

Eventually, Abelard’s view was condemned by the Council of Sens and he himself was excommunicated, but his perspectives on the atonement have captivated succeeding generations of theologians and philosophers. They gained new steam under philosophers like Immanuel Kant. In my own tradition, the Anglican theologian Hastings Rashdall said that Christ's life was a demonstration of God's love so profound that Christ was willing to die rather than compromise his character. This in turn inspires believers to emulate his character and his intimacy with the Father.”

In the end, no one view of the atonement is probably perfectly adequate. And rather than seeing them as a buffet from which we choose the one we like best, I think we should see them as different facets of the mystery of God’s salvation. Because in a world where there are real victims, there must be real justice that satisfies the wrong that was done. In a world where evil seems so powerful, love must even more powerfully overcome it. And, in the end, if Jesus’ salvation of the world doesn’t change how we live, doesn’t change our hearts and minds… then what good could it be?

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

In my last episode we were in the midst of Holy Week and I talked about all the various ways we can understand the meaning of what Christians believe Christ did on the cross, something called the theory of the atonement. I talked about what’s known as the “satisfaction” theory of the atonement, and suggested that rather than believing that Jesus died to satisfy the wrath of an angry God, we should instead see that theory as God in Christ choosing to suffer alongside of us, to make right in God’s own being the horrors and injustices humanity has wrought.

I also promised that I’d share some other ways Christians can understand what Christ did on the cross. So, this week, I’m going to continue my work breaking the myth that Jesus died so you can go to heaven because, as I said last time, it’s about so much more than that. 

In 1931 a Lutheran bishop and theologian named Gustaf Aulén published a book titled Christus Victor which set out the three historical theories of the atonement. One of those is the “satisfaction” theory that I talked about last week. But neither Aulén (nor many theologians since then) have believed that the “satisfaction” theory is the best explanation (it’s certainly not the only explanation), particularly given the witness of Scripture and the early church.

Instead, Aulén encouraged a recovery of what he called the “classic” view of the atonement, the one that was dominant in the early church. That view is the Christus Victor understanding of the atonement (hence the title of the book). 

He characterized this view as follows: “Its central theme is the idea of the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ – Christus Victor – fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the 'tyrants' under which humanity is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself.”

I love the way this view is articulated in the Paschal Homily, a sermon written in the late fourth century by John Chrysostom. It’s a tradition in Orthodoxy to preach this homily at the Great Vigil of Easter on Saturday night before Sunday each year, and my own parish keeps the tradition as well. 

In the sermon, Chrysostom writes, “Let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it. He destroyed Hades when he descended into it.

He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh… Hell is in an uproar because it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and it discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.”

This theory has been particularly potent among Liberation theologians because it sees salvation as the rescue of humanity from the powers of this world. And given the state of the world today, and the struggles of minorities and marginalized communities, I think the idea of divine rescue is one I can get behind… particularly because it also makes clear that Christ triumphed over death, hatred, and the powers of this world and so those who follow him must walk the same path and undo injustice and the power of evil in our own time until every person is set free. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

For many Christians, we are currently in the midst of Holy Week, a sacred period of time from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday where we walk the way of the cross and meditate on Jesus’ final days before his passion, death, and resurrection.

There are a lot of ways to understand the meaning of this sacred time and what Christians believe about what Jesus did on the cross. The most common is the idea that on the cross Jesus died to pay the debt for our sins so that we could go to heaven. But, once you start digging into Scripture and theology, you discover that this concept is only one small part of the meaning of the death of Christ on the cross.

So, this week on Christian Mythbusters, I’d like to try to break the myth that Jesus died so you can go to heaven, because it’s about so much more than that. 

The fancy theological term for what God in Christ did on the cross is called the theory of atonement. And what I described above is one way of understanding it, something known as the satisfaction theory of atonement. The problem, though, is that Western society has understood this primarily through a legal and juridical lens, which obscures the more ancient understanding of the work of Christ.

Think about it this way, if God is good and has created a good creation, then when there is wrong and injustice, something must be done to make that right. It’s one thing to think Jesus died so God will forgive you for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but isn’t that rather anemic when it comes to the work of the creator of the universe?

Instead, because of something that is broken within us since our earliest existence, humanity has wounded God’s creation, we have wounded one another. And just waving a hand and saying all is forgiven in the legal court doesn’t work… in particular, it isn’t fair when you consider some of the atrocities and horrors humanity has wrought. 

When Jesus died, it wasn’t to satisfy the wrath of an angry God (remember, Jesus is God!), it was to begin to heal what you and I broke through sin and violence and injustice. And it was to begin that healing not by waving a hand and saying we all get a “Get out of jail free, card”, but instead choosing to experience the worst of what we as humans could do. Christ carried all the brokenness of the human condition into the heart of God to begin healing it. 

So, in a few days, when we get to Good Friday, we will see the result of our own complicity in sin and violence in this world, either through our action or our inaction. And we will see that God doesn’t abandon us, but chooses to suffer the results of our sins, chooses to suffer with the marginalized and oppressed and wounded, thereby reconnecting them with the very heart of God.

If it’s just about you and me going to heaven, there is a whole broken world and creation that will be lost. But if it’s about God healing all of humanity and all of creation, then this is about you and I being a foretaste of that healing, of being an amuse-bouche, if you will, of the love of God… and letting that love change us, so that, through God’s power, we begin to make right the things that are broken. 

Stick with me because next week, I’ve got a couple other ways of looking at this I’ll share with you. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

If your household is anything like mine, there is a song that inevitably seems to be playing at some point during the day: Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan. 

Given that her songs often explore themes of same-sex relationships and queer identity, along with her openness about leaving her Christian upbringing, she is not exactly the favorite artist of many Christians in America… which is a shame. Because not only is her music banging, it explores themes that deeply resonate with the heart of Jesus’s teachings.

Well, some of it does.

So, this week, I’d like to break the myth that Chappell Roan is not for Christians and even try to explore what the Gospel according to Pink Pony Club might look like. 

At the heart of the opening of Pink Pony Club is Chappell Roan’s struggle between her inner sense of identity and the repressive nature of her Southern Christian upbringing. She hears about cities like Los Angeles and Santa Monica and the idea that there are places where you can be who you truly are every single day seems almost magical. 

 The Pink Pony Club is emblematic of that place where, in her words, “boys and girls can all be queens every single day.” Even the sexuality of the song, the line about “lovers in the bathroom” is not truly just about unbridled sexuality, but is referring to the way that bathrooms and other public spaces became the only way queer people could connect and find community because it simply was not safe to find sexual relationships anywhere else. 

So, what does all of this have to do with Christianity and the Gospel? Well, one of the several fundamental claims of Jesus was that “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Sin is what binds you, it is related to choices and behaviors that twist and warp your true identity. Sin is inherently isolating because it breaks down love of God and love of neighbor. 

When Christianity builds repressive cultures and systems that keep people from being who God created them to be, it builds systems of sin that hurt, demean, and destroy. It builds places where the only safe love can be found in a secret tryst in a bathroom stall—instead love that is out in the open, bold, proud, committed and free. 

The Pink Pony Club this place where “boys and girls can all be queens every single day” is perhaps what the church actually should be like. In fact, this was what made the church so distasteful to first-century Greco-Roman Society. In early Christian congregations, men and women, slave and free, Jew and Greek, all were equal and had a full place and claim in the life of the church. This was contrary to everything about the highly stratified nature of society at the time.

And if the church could recover that sense of safety and home, a place where queer people could be who God created them to be without shame or fear, then the church would once more be the emblem of freedom that it was for so many marginalized communities in the first century. 

Then people wouldn’t be forced into secretive places to find furtive experiences of love and connection because their love would be honored and celebrated as revealing God’s unbridled love for us. 

And then, I think, we would all dance and our dance would join the constant self-giving dance of love that is the Holy Trinity, a constant giving of love between the three persons of the godhead that is so intense we confess that they are simultaneously three persons and one being of complete love. 

Pink Pony Club… God… the Church… a place where boys and girls can all be queens every single day.

That’s the church I want to build. Perhaps you’ll come and help me. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Welcome to the one hundredth episode of Christian Mythbusters! We have tackled a lot of topics in our time together—everything from gender to sexuality to immigration and divorce and the proper application of concepts like the “Order of Love” in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Thanks for sticking with me.

As I saw this hundredth episode approaching, I’ve been pondering what to talk about. And what I keep coming back to is a small line on the prayer book of my church.

When I began attending The Episcopal Church, I was a campus minister at an evangelical church in West Texas. But early on Sunday mornings I would sneak into the local Episcopal Church and attend their early morning service of Holy Eucharist. 

After the opening words of greeting and prayer, the priest would almost always recite the following: “Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments

hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Over and over again, week after week, I would hear those words spoken at the beginning of worship and they began to work at my heart and my spirit.

So, with them as a starting point, this week I want to break the myth of what really matters in Christianity. Because, truth be told, much of what we hear from Christians doesn’t meet the test that Jesus himself set out.

Those words are known in our church as “The Summary of the Law” and they are a quotation of Jesus from Matthew 22:37–40 in the old King James Version. In these verses, Jesus himself is quoting two different commandments in the Hebrew Bible, one from Deuteronomy 6 and one from Leviticus 19. While they had been linked at times in pre-Christian Judaism, Jesus was the first to link them this precisely and concretely.

“On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus is telling his disciples (and us) what the interpretive key to all of Scripture, all of religion, really is. And the interpretive key is simple: love of God and love of neighbor. Everything hangs on those two loves.

And the two must be held together. Because there are times in Scripture (and in the Church) when the people of God have let their love and zeal for God lead them to do hateful and violent things to their neighbors. And there are times when a focus only on the neighbor has led humanity to lose sight of our connection to the divine reality that is the ground of all being. 

This is what really matters in Christianity: growing in love of God and love of neighbor. And that means being willing to be curious about what you may not actually know about God, what you may have wrong. It means loving not just the neighbor close to you, but the one who drives you bonkers. It means always asking what will advance this love of God and love of neighbor.

And anytime any follower of Jesus says or does something that violates that dual love, that cuts people off from God or that harms their neighbor, that person has missed the plot, they have lost sight of what is at the heart of this whole spiritual journey we are all on. 

Love God. Love your neighbor. It all comes down to that. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Last week I talked about how I don’t think anyone who says they believe in what’s known as the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy truly holds that belief. I shared my experience of a fundamentalist Christian who, when presented with two texts from Scripture that treat the death of a fetus differently than a born child, said that he didn’t care what the Bible said because he knew he was right… clearly not a believer in the literal inerrancy of the text.

And I promised last week that I’d try this week to offer a more robust way of reading Scripture than the one so often presented by the Christians. So this week I’m taking a few more swings of breaking the myth that just because the Bible says it you have to believe it. 

First, just a very basic reading of the Bible makes it clear that you cannot believe every literal word of the Bible to be perfect command for all times and places and perfect history. I mean, from the very beginning that’s impossible. In Genesis one, humanity (male and female) is created on the sixth day of creation after the animals and the rest of creation. However, in Genesis two the man is created first and then the animals and then the woman. If you believe in verbal inerrancy, you are in trouble.

If, however, you believe that the Bible consists of many genres and those genres can sometimes be history, sometimes be myth, sometimes be parable and poetry, then what you are given is two different stories of creation written in two different styles, each to communicate divine truth. The fact that each story is different (and even contradictory) isn’t a problem, in fact it becomes a beautiful way of engaging with the tensions present in creation itself, in our own experience of the world. 

Then you see how in Genesis one the story of creation is told through a beautiful ritual song, one that moves with rhythm and pacing through each day of the world coming together until it reaches a crescendo as humanity is created in the very image of God, male and female, all genders and sexualities flowing out of God’s very being. It’s poetry. And it’s true. 

In Genesis two, then, you are given a beautiful story rich with myth and imagery and parable. God walks through a garden, creating some of humanity… but not all of humanity. God comes to a realization (what a wonderful thing for God to do in this story!) that a person cannot live alone and so creates another person. Then there is a sneaky serpent, and sin, and fall… but a God who continues to love, to forgive, to care for humanity no matter their choices. It’s a beautiful story and it’s true. 

The point of Genesis isn’t about the exact specific and historical timing of the first moments of humanity’s existence and the existence of the world. Even ancient readers clearly didn’t take it that way. The point of these chapters is how we, as created beings relate to God and the world around us. By being attentive to the genre of the literature you are freed from a bizarre modern fascination with literalism and instead can plumb the depths of our reflection on own relationship to the divine.

St. Augustine actually touches on this in book twelve of his Confessions, where he says, “The poverty of human understanding so often makes for an abundance of speech, for seeking says more than finding, asking takes longer than obtaining, and the hand that knocks has more to do than the hand that is open to receive.” As a friend of mine (who actually did that translation of the Confessions that I’m quoting from points out, “We would like for there to be a single, correct reading of the world, a single, correct reading of the Book of Genesis. But there is no such thing; multiple interpretations are not merely possible but even desirable.”

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. 

I’ve had some conversations over the last couple of weeks that have led to this week’s episode, where I’m going to try to break some of the myths about how Christians do (and should) read the Bible.

Last week I was talking with someone who was questioning the more affirming stance that my own Anglican tradition has taken on the role of LGBTQIA plus Christians in the church. I was trying to explain how the Bible verses that this person thought supported their more conservative were in actuality just six verses in the entire Bible, and that none of them are actually talking about faithful same-sex relationship relationships between two people who have no choice over their sexual orientation. 

I explained how no biblical author had any conceptualization about gender or sexual orientation that we now have given the insights of modern science. I suggested that the insights of modern science should play a role in our interpreting ancient text, acknowledging at the original authors, wrote a specific time with this specific perspective that was at times imperfect in its understanding of the world.

Of course, the response was something along the lines of the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it. But then, interestingly, enough, the conversation turned to the question of abortion. I pointed out too specific tax in the Hebrew Bible, one from Exodus 21 and one from Numbers 5, that acknowledge the moral complexity of this question. In fact, the text from Exodus 21 explicitly says that the consequence for the death of a fetus, as is different than the consequence for the death of a fully born child or human would be.

In response, the person I was chatting with told me that they didn’t care what the Bible said, they believed that a fetus was full person.

That rather bizarre end to the conversation underscored a reality to me that I’ve noticed several times over the years. Even people who claim to be fundamentalists and believe in the inerrancy of the scripture, very rarely are. Every single person has some Bible verses that they will want to contextual lies or explain a way differently. And to read the Bible, it doesn’t really help to pretend that just cause the Bible says something you think that’s the only answer to a question. Instead, we all need to dig deeply into the biblical text, the original languages, the original context, to discern what God’s word would be to us today in the current situation.

So, not only would I suggest that no one, in practice, truly believes in what’s known as the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, I would also point out that Christians didn’t even read the Bible that way for 80% of the church’s existence. What most fundamentalists and many evangelicals believe in is what’s known as the doctrine of verbal inerrancy, an idea that just came about in the 19th century, and idea that every single word of the Bible came directly from God and, therefore, can contain no factual errors. 

That's a new way of looking at things.

Churches like mine, that don’t believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, still believe God inspired the Bible. In fact, at every ordination of a priest in my church, that priest solemnly declares that “I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” That is not to say, of course, that all things in Scripture are necessary for salvation. 

I’ll get into that next week, as well as explore what a more robust understanding of Scripture might actually look like. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.