bearing_witness | Freedom by faith (Reply)

I was thinking that for this occasion I could re-post the post I wrote a while back about the kind of Christians represented by Fred Phelps – the kind who use a religion of love to excuse acting in hateful ways towards their neighbours. Then I changed my mind. But if you fancy seeing that post, it's here:

http://alexbeecroftblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/liberal-christians-r-us/

I changed my mind because Zeborah's post about Peter made me think about my own Christian journey, and I wanted to talk about a more root and branch difference between fundamentalist, literal Christianity and the more liberal and mystical Christianity that I espouse.

My Christian journey goes like this: until age 19 I was the kind of atheist who thought that only stupid people believed in religion. For reasons that are unclear to me, at age 20 I experimented with worshiping the Norse gods, and regarded Christianity as this heartless leviathan of grey rules that sucked the life and creativity out of people and was only interested in controlling people's behaviour and making them all behave like little zombies.

At the age of 21 I was reading Anglo-Saxon poetry in my room at uni, alone. The poem was by Ceolwulf, King of Northumbria and monk of Lindisfarne, and it was a dramatic recounting of the Last Judgement. As I read it, the walls of my room seemed to dissolve. I felt the presence of infinity, eternity, and God there with me. He was huge and heavy and so powerful, I felt squeezed by how real and massive and vital he was. He looked at me and he said "why are you hurting me?"

I said (with my eyes squeezed shut and my head in my hands) "I'm not! I'm not!" And then it occurred to me how much I had hated Christianity and badmouthed God and Jesus throughout my life. It had never occurred to me that, if the creator of the universe existed, he would care enough about me that I could hurt him.

So my faith began out of a personal encounter with God and a wish to stop being mean to him. But it also began with a profound ignorance of what Christianity was all about. I'd been raised in an atheist household, I knew nothing about the religion to which I had just been converted.

I set out to learn. I read up on the Bible and commentaries, attended an evangelical church, and was confirmed at an ecumenical church by an Anglican, a Methodist and a United Reformed bishop all together.

I had experiences of the presence of God a few times in the next decade or so, but they were mostly just feelings of being held safe in a sphere of encouragement and love. They didn't change the direction of my life the way the first had.

But it seemed I was not free from some of my misconceptions about what God was like. For years I felt I had to earn his love. I had to behave and think in certain ways in order to be free of sin. If I sinned, he would disown me. I found myself imagining that he had set me tasks that I found impossible to do—give all your money away at once. Apologize to that Crown Court Judge because you thought something insulting about him, even though in order to do so you will have to explain to him what you thought.—I couldn't do them. I felt guilty and sinful and unworthy and certain that God would turn away from me and I would be damned.

I managed to keep this all in check for a long time by cycles of repentance and forgiveness. But then I had a bit of a revelation—I discovered slash.

At first this was pure joy. "Oh, thank God! There are other women in the world like me. I'm normal!"

But I was trained as a philosopher. That means that, slowly but surely, I think about logical implications of things. And when I thought about the fact that since the age of 11 my sexual fantasy life consisted exclusively of imagining that I was a man making love to another man, it began to occur to me that I might really be damned for good this time.

You see, Jesus says in Mat 5:29 "But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

In other words, sins of the imagination are sins too, even if you never act on them. Even if it is physically impossible for you to act on them.

There was only one conclusion—I would have to stop my mental fantasy life. Stop it altogether. Never have another sexual thought. And if I didn't do this, I would be damned, because it said in the Bible that homosexuality was a sin, and though I had no idea why it should be a sin, I had been educated to think that the question was closed and it just was.

I gave it the best try I possibly could. I was sick with fear and despair, my every waking moment consumed with the thought that I was damned. I prayed and prayed for God to change my sexuality, change me, make me compliant with what I thought was his will. And yet the result of this terror was that I read slash obsessively, like an addict, and then hated myself for it. I couldn't stop.

This was the second time that God intervened in my life in a massive, life-changing way. I now believe that this crisis was in fact due to God himself, teaching me something. He had to show me what happened when you tried to obey his laws as set out in the Bible, before he could show me why those laws needed to be replaced with something that human beings could actually live with.

Instead of making my sex drive work along more conventional m/f lines, God showed me two different things. One was that homosexuality was not a sin after all. I wrote about that revelation here:

http://community.livejournal.com/slashphilosophy/20631.html

The other was that the model of Christianity I was working under was not as he intended.

To me, despite coming into the religion in such an odd way, Christianity had been all about rules. I looked at the Bible as a rulebook, tried to discover which things were sins, and then tried not to commit them. I hoped that in this way I could earn my place in God's good graces. He would love me and I would eventually go to Heaven. It was all a matter of keeping to the laws and earning brownie points – and if I did all of that then God would have to be pleased with me, and let me into his club. If not, he would stop loving me and I would go to hell.

Discovering that I could not stop sinning put a spanner in all of this. If Christianity was about following the rules, then I was damned. Furthermore, this is the same for everyone. Can you, hand on heart, promise God that you will stop being angry? Yet anger is a sin. Can you promise that you will never think ill of anyone again? Seriously? No, you can't. If we examine ourselves we know that we cannot live up to God's standards. The standards are superhuman and we are not.

Fortunately, Christianity already knows this. The biggest secret of Christianity, it seems to me, is that the Law is already gone. The legalistic, literalistic "earn your own salvation" thing has been tested to destruction and already abandoned. Abandoned, in fact, as early as the writings of Peter and Paul.

Zeborah has already talked about Peter's revelation that the old laws were gone. (God had to tell him in no uncertain terms.)

Paul says (Galatians 3:10-14)

¹⁰All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law."^[c] ¹¹Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because, "The righteous will live by faith."^[d] ¹²The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, "The man who does these things will live by them."^[e] ¹³Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree."^[f] ¹⁴He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit."

Or in other words "you cannot earn salvation by following all the rules in the Bible. Fortunately, Christ knew this, so he came to earth and gave you salvation as a free gift. If you keep trying to earn it, you're throwing that gift back in his face. Just believe he has the power to free you from everything and anything, and that's enough."

There's a better analysis of this passage here

http://www.lwbc.co.uk/Wesley/righteousness_by_faith.htm

Now I don't believe that this means that Christians therefore ought to go forth and murder people and do whatever they like, because only faith matters. To me that faith is faith in a person. And that person is the person who created the universe, who has proved at the cost of hideous suffering that he will accept me just as I am, sin and all. Who has invited me to be his child. And who has told me that it's possible for me to hurt him, if I choose.

I don't want to sin, because I don't want to hurt him. I don't want to sin because sin hurts almost everyone, me included. Sin in its essence is behaviour that harms people, including the one who does it. So salvation by faith doesn't mean "a licence to go out and hurt yourself and others." It means freedom from the fear that sin will separate you from God. Freedom to accept yourself as someone who is already loved, 100% as you are. Freedom from laws and rules. Freedom to make up your own mind about what is the right thing to do in any situation.

With the law gone, we're no longer stuck in boxes of trying to make 21^st century problems solvable with -4^th Century rules. We're free to ask the eternal living God for guidance and make up our own minds according to what he says and what we ourselves believe does least harm—what promotes most good. God sent us to bring light to the darkness, hope to the hopeless, to feed his sheep, to heal the sick and set the prisoners free. To do good in the best way we can in whatever changing circumstance we find ourselves.

To love one another and to love him. This is, as he said himself, the only rule we need.