Tony Jones hits the nail on the head...

It's almost as if he's been reading my diary.
Quote: "I think it's a way to live as an intellectually honest person." -Tony Jones
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Why I lean toward Universalism…

I often say that I’m a Christian Agnostic with Universalist leanings. Many would say that these things are somehow opposed… I don’t agree. I think a bit of agnosticism is healthy… it fuels the questions of our faith that help us to better understand God and Christ…

I do, however, have to say that I never dreamed of a day when I would flirt with Universalism… “Everyone saved?” I would balk… “Not possible.” But as the years have gone on, I’m realizing that there are a few things about our faith that can only be explained through a Universalist lens. Such as...


1. What happens to the billions of people who have never, or will never, hear the Gospel? Some say that this is explained in Romans 1:18-21 where it says that “They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God." (NLT)

More simply stated, there are people who believe that those who haven’t heard of Christ should automatically understand the Christian God by viewing nature… Variations of this belief assert that the non-evangelized will be considered righteous by discovering that there is a God and trying to live holy with that revelation in mind. Without Christ, however, these folks would still be under the law and would, therefore, be sent to hell for transgressing the law, unless they keep it perfectly. Of course, this is a faulty argument because no man or woman can keep the Mosaic law perfectly, which ultimately means that those who have never heard the Gospel and don’t experience a divine revelation of Christ on their own will be lost according to this theology.

This is problematic for three reasons: (a) it suggests that Christ isn’t really needed for salvation after all… (b) it places people under the law again, which is an impossible laundry list of rules to keep, and (c) it requires people who have never been exposed to our God to miraculously come to a revelation of him, without discussing what happens to those who don’t.

2. Why would an intelligent God make his “path” so confusing? We tell people that they must accept Jesus in order to be saved… but then the question becomes, which Gospel is the one that actually saves? Is it (a) the mainline evangelical gospel that requires a sinner’s prayer only, (b) the Jesus-only non-Pentecostal gospel that requires baptism in Jesus’ name and repentance, (c) the Jesus-only Pentecostal way that requires baptism in Jesus’ name, speaking in tongues, and “holy” living, or (d) a Catholic faith experience involving works and forgiveness by their saints / clergy system?

As you can tell, new believers are faced with quite a conundrum. “Which way is the way?” And more importantly, “Will I be tossed into a pit of fire for inadvertently choosing the wrong one?” There are oodles of Gospels, and they can all be supported by Christian scripture. For this reason, biblical scholars spend years unraveling the various paths to salvation found in Christendom. Is it realistic to expect every human being to embark on this kind of spiritual journey? Before you say, “Yes,” ask yourself: Is it realistic to expect those with limited resources and limited literacy to all find “the only way?” More importantly, has God really made it this hard? Would a God who “desires that no one would perish” make it this confusing? Could it be that he has made it easier than we really believe?

3. There are some very convincing arguments out there about the meaning of “eternity,” “hell,” and “perish.” For instance, there is a ministry called Tentmaker that says the concept of “hell” would have been foreign to Jesus and his followers. Likewise, the word “perish,” when translated properly, describes the concept of being lost… as in “not yet found by Christ,” but not a state of eternal damnation. I used to openly reject such thoughts, but their claims seem pretty solid when those words are reviewed in context.

So with these three arguments in mind, I often wonder if Christ’s work on the cross could have been designed to reconcile all men, as the Universalists teach. This makes more sense than it does to believe that God would penalize people for what they don’t know, don’t understand, or simply cannot stretch their imaginations far enough to believe. And that’s why I lean toward Universalism… Not a Universalist (yet)… But I have seriously considered joining the fold.


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The Haiti Earthquake: Where is God when tragedy strikes?

The catastrophic earthquake in Haiti has caused people of faith all over the world to ask themselves: “Where is God?” In such times, many Christians with agnostic leanings (including myself) find it hard to peddle conventional wisdom about God: that he protects us, that he cares for us, that he wants humanity to be whole, and that he has created a world in which it’s easy to have faith in him. In these times, many seekers struggle with even his existence.

However, I find comfort in an old account that records God’s presence. It is found in the story of what most of us regard as the most important day in the history of Christianity: the crucifixion.

The Bible records that when Jesus was crucified, he cried out “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani” which means “My God, My God… Why have you forsaken me?” Note, we could discuss why it was that Jesus referred to his equal as “My God,” or how it is that an omniscient being would ask why he was being crucified. We could also ask why, if Jesus knew that he was going to be resurrected into divine power, he felt forsaken… But that’s not the purpose of this blog entry.

The purpose of this short entry is to highlight two things that are evident to me when I read this story:

1. Bad things happen to good people.
2. Even the godliest among us often die unjustly.
3. God’s presence is in the midst, even when we don’t realize he is there.

So while I don’t have the answers, I want to show that Christianity doesn’t teach that God always prevents bad things from happening. We all want a world without pain (and God knows I certainly do)…. Since we don’t have such a world, we have to rely on the goodness of the Holy Spirit inside us to make the world a better place. I can’t speak to why such tragedies happen, but I know it is in these times that we are called to exhibit the kind of unfailing love that the world needs. We have to be Godlike, Christlike, and more empathetically human than ever before--- and we must pray for the strength to carry out our duty.



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ProfessorMTH and Bible Blunders

While YouTube sensation ProfessorMTH and I disagree about the existence of God, I have to say I can't get enough of his Bible Blunders series. Using his own unique brand of tongue-in-cheek humor, some pretty nifty software, and his extremely impressive grasp of scripture and Bible history, ProfessorMTH has developed a series of videos that shed a blinding light on the inconsistencies in our Bible. One such tidbit of thought-provoking (and hilarious) infotainment is Episode 2 of the Bible Blunders series.

In this video, ProfessorMTH points out that Exodus narrative has a very inconsistent account of what went down with the cattle. Yet another reason why we shouldn't be afraid to embrace that our Bible is NOT inerrant...

Be sure to hop over to YouTube to watch a few more of ProfessorMTH's masterpieces.

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Two Creation Stories in the Bible (With Video)

Several months ago, I found a website called Living the Questions (www.livingthequestions.com) that is devoted to people like myself who choose faith in the midst of spiritual uncertainty. Recently, LTQ posted several excerpts of its videos to Youtube, with one of those videos being a brilliant discussion of the two conflicting creation stories found in the book of Genesis.

I have written about our fear of admitting that the Bible is not inerrant, but did not expound on the inconsistencies that appear in the Bible. However, this video captures a fundamental inconsistency in a way that I could never capture in writing. (More analysis after video...)



For those of us who are "living out the questions," the commentators in this video hit on several extremely important things. First, as indicated by Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, such discrepancies are only a problem for those of us who are uncomfortable with the possibility that the Bible may NOT be inerrant. Many Christians feel that the Bible's inerrancy is central to the credibility of the faith and insist that the Genesis narrative is how it all happened. Most won't admit that such errors exist in scripture, even when they are this obvious.

However, reasonable Christians cannot ignore that in chapter 1 of Genesis, Adam is created after the animals and vegetation, but in Genesis 2, Adam is created first. More perplexing is that in Genesis 1, Adam and Eve are created together near the end of the story, while in Genesis 2, Adam existed for some time before Eve was taken from his rib.

I've known about these inconsistencies for some time now, and would submit to the unyielding fundamentalist (as postulated in the video and by various scholars) that the Bible story is more likely to be a metaphorical story of why than it is a literal story of how. That is, the story when read properly explains that God created man to commune with Him, that God intended for us to have relationships with one another, and that we are to take care of the planet because its resources are "good" and precious in God's sight. Such a concession won't undermine the existence of God or the beauty of the creator's love for us, even if it does challenge our existing dogma.

To read more about the two conflicting creation stories found in Genesis, visit ReligiousTolerance.org...
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Christians... What are we afraid of?

I remember the last time I visited a fundamentalist church. I went to the altar for prayer and explained that I had been studying Bible history and needed clarity as some of the things I learned were controversially opposed to traditional evangelical Christianity. The lay minister began to pray: "Dear Heavenly Father... Please protect your child from false beliefs that come from lies and high sounding arguments- and help her to stop reading material that might be toxic to her faith."

It was then that I knew my path was going to be a lonely one. It seemed the lay minister wanted me to be afraid of what I might see in a book at a library somewhere, even if what I found was true. However, I knew God wouldn't want me to be afraid of the truth- even it if was different from the current traditions found in Christendom. I left church that day with a stronger sense of curiosity and a burning question about my Christian brethren: What are we afraid of?

The truth is that if there is a God (and I believe there is one), He is more intelligent than we could ever know or understand. With intelligence comes an inquisitive Spirit. If His Spirit is in us and we are truly created in His image, then we are inquisitive by nature. This could explain why Eve was so enthralled with the tree of knowledge. It would also explain Solomon's request for wisdom when he could have had anything else in the world. It would explain why Christ inquired in the temple with educated men at such a young age and why Job pondered the plan of God so deeply in his moment of tragedy. If God is an omniscient entity who wants His creations to follow Christ, then He must know that a large number of His beings will ponder the whos, whats, whens, wheres, and whys of this tradition.

Yet, rather than embracing the natural tendency to be curious about the mysterious, we quiver in fear that our dogmas may be challenged if we turn over too many stones. We reject the possibility that truth could exist outside our faith bubble and are scared to consider that another tradition may have the answer. We seek to protect ourselves and one another, and we often reject our opportunity to embrace the possibility that God may exist inside the realm of reason.

Our fears are simple. We're afraid of losing our faith in God and very much afraid of finding new ways to understand the world. We're afraid that the God story may be bigger than our creeds have captured, afraid that the wars we've historically waged in the name of God may have been fought in vain, and afraid that our politics may be based on a fallible faith in God. We're afraid that truth may carry a definition we don't recognize. We're afraid of being wrong.

We continue to base our faith on the belief that we have a monopoly on the truth, and reject proven truths that hurt the arguments of our forefathers.

We would do well as a group to reject fear and embrace possibilities. After all, "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind."
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Can someone be a Christian and Agnostic?

I wondered this for years... and many others may as well. If you're anything like me, you believe that there is a God... You may even believe that Christ is somehow divinely related to God, but you may feel so overwhelmed by the logical questions that come with such a belief that you've chosen to suspend judgment and seek truth. That's what I did. One day, I accepted the fact that my questions about God, the Bible, history, and science couldn't be answered through a dogmatic system, and I embraced that there were several things I simply don't know and can't know. Without realizing it, I had embraced a sense of agnosticism along with a whole new spiritual journey. But what does that mean?

At the heart of the word "agnostic" is the root word "gnosis" which means "to know." The prefix "ag-" means "not" or "the absence of." This means that the word "agnostic" means "to not know" or "unknown / unknowable."

Therefore, a Christian Agnostic is someone who believes in God, follows Christ, but acknowledges his or her inability to know or fully understand various things about God. This kind of agnosticism is often spawned after learning something that doesn't coincide with a preconceived religious idea. In my case, it started several years ago with a college course in which I learned about the myth of Mithras and the contradictions that exist in our Bible. I started to wonder if it was possible that God might exist in a context other than the one I'd accepted my entire life. In a series of personal moments of reflection, a life-changing journey ensued.

So, while it may be impossible to believe in God and be an atheist, I believe it is absolutely possible to be a Christian and be agnostic. In fact, it's a fascinating and liberating journey for those who aren't afraid to throw tradition aside in favor of approaching God in context of the history of humanity, the discoveries within science and with an open mind.
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