The problem with writing about Christianity honestly is that you're bound to piss someone off. Either you don't sound pious enough and say the right words in the right way—for most people, belief is basically saying the right words in the right way—or you don't tear down the whole religious edifice, which leaves the atheists and agnostics surly. Anyhow, I'm going to write honestly about Christianity in this post because I'm about to walk a dark road of my past, and I need to focus on the light I still believe in.
These days people have a word for picking their faith apart: They call it "deconstruction," which implies that something new is being constructed on the ruins of the old. I'm not sure how the deconstruction of one's faith coincides with Derrida's deconstruction of a text except, perhaps, for this analogy: Deconstructing a text is like flipping over a beautiful tapestry and studying the loose ends, the ill-stitched seams between images, and the uncertainty of the author who weaves the story. In a similar way, people who deconstruct their faith have flipped the tapestry over to find a messier image than the one that had been hanging on the wall. It's a terrible experience, and I don't recommend it unless you are genetically optimistic. Perhaps this post will offer some hope for those who are examining the backside of faith.
To begin, I think insisting on the historical inerrancy of the Bible breeds sterile conjecture at best and despair at worst. The Bible is a presentation of past events in the form of stories, and by virtue of the consciousness of the storyteller, each story is already an interpretation of those events. (We sometimes forget the difference between pre-history and history is that pre-history is unwritten and known to us through artifacts, and history is written and known to us through stories.) This notion of story as interpretation permits and encourages continuing interpretations as readers discern new meanings according to the needs of their time. As everyone knows, our own aeon is in desperate need of meaning, and if Christians obviate meaning by insisting that people believe "facts" they find unbelievable, Christians deprive "unbelievers," and by extension the rest of us, of a universal and necessary meaning.
Faith is not gritting your teeth and claiming to believe something you deep-down think is false. Not all faith is bad faith. Insistence on the Bible as history ultimately delegitimizes Christianity and so deprives humankind of a meaning that could save us from ourselves. So the doctrine of historical biblical inerrancy needs to go.
The doctrine of Hell needs to go with it. I'm not sure if people believe in eternal conscious torment because they like to believe the Bible is inerrant, or if they believe the Bible is inerrant because they like to believe in eternal conscious torment. Along with Thomas Aquinas, some people might like the idea of looking down on the suffering of the damned in order to become more grateful for their own redemption. That is about as awful an idea as I ever heard of. Let's get rid of Hell once and for all and relieve a good portion of humanity of a superstitious fear for their loved ones and themselves. The doctrine as most people believe it wasn't taught by Christ anyhow. It's a bad doctrine.
Now for the positive. Jesus understood that the human impulse to dominate everything will inevitably lead to our universal destruction. That's why he said the last shall be first, and the least of these will be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, and unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Also, "turn the other cheek" and "forgive others seven times seventy" and "love God first and your neighbor as yourself." Loving God means loving love, and love doesn't dominate. If we miss that, we've missed the whole point, and eventually, we will destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust, which should be Hell enough for anyone.
It's pretty simple really.
That simple message was so threatening to Empire and State Religion, both of which are ultimate expressions of domination, that the leaders colluded to kill Jesus, and they dominated him in the most horrific way: They pinned him to a cross with nails. They mocked him. They stripped him. This is what Empires and State Religions do to people who challenge their claim to dominate. They say, "I'll show you!" When religion is fused with political power, the people with power start building crosses. Rome crucified thousands of people. Thousands. Rome taught the bad news of domination.
The good news is that Jesus was resurrected, which means that Empires and State Religions, i.e., the powers and principalities of domination, do not have the last word. Jesus didn't return to punish his enemies. He returned to establish a Church that would carry his message of non-domination into the world. Every year the Church celebrates Easter because Easter gives us hope that we still have a chance to get it right. Personally, I don't care if people are turned away from domination through poetry or speaking in tongues or psilocybin or the Holy Eucharist: Humankind must internalize what Jesus taught, namely, that the kingdom of God is a paradoxical kingdom without domination, or we'll destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust. A lot of people who believe the story is literally true miss that meaning altogether. We call that a grim irony.
A grimmer irony is taking place in Gaza as I write. To understand the reciprocal nature of violence read Violence and the Sacred by René Girard. I don't know what we can do about it. Short of the entire world embracing Jesus as the final, once-and-for-all scapegoat, we'll keep on replicating victims until we destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust. I wonder if Christians will ever embrace Jesus as the final once-and-for-all scapegoat?
One more point: In the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations drafted the Declaration of Human Rights. Article One begins, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Fundamentalists don't like this humanist declaration because it doesn't appeal to a sacred text for its authority. They say it's just an assertion with nothing divine to support it. But I don't think that's the right way to approach the matter. Instead, we should begin by recognizing that a Divine Being who upholds the principle that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" is superior to a Divine Being who doesn't. That is, we define the Divine Being by the principle, not the principle by the Divine Being. We get a better God that way.
Do we really want a God who plays favorites for no other reason than his inscrutable will? Some will say, "No, but that's the God we have in the Old Testament." That seems prima facie true, but in the writings of the prophets, the Old Testament becomes more and more inclusive until it culminates in the New Testament where God gathers everybody, Gentiles and Jews, into His family. In a tragic reversal, the newly adopted Christians turned the previously God-chosen Jews into the God-damned Jews. Christians said the Jews were (and still are) guilty of deicide. Consequently, they say, Jews aren't "born free and equal in dignity and rights"; how could they be with the blood of the crucifixion on their heads? We know too well the bitter fruit of this perverse reversal. Domination wasn't undone. The outsiders became the insiders who turned the old insiders into outsiders. That's history for you. Read Girard.
It's time for all people to realize the good news of the Gospel includes everyone. The death of Jesus reconciles all things to God. The final judgment will bring about a universal restoration. That's the only eschatology worthy of a God who adheres to the principle that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." If God turns out to be otherwise, we're just rolling dice and hoping they don't come up snake eyes.
Read Richard Rohr.
Will there be justice in the world to come? We desperately hope so. But we mustn't through bad faith try to persuade ourselves that eternal conscious torment is just. Better to have Hitler redeemed after a zillion years than the Jews damned forever because they don't believe Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity. The truth is, most people suffer enough on earth to punish them sufficiently for their sins. I'll tell you what hell is. "Hell" happens when we increase people's suffering through domination. (And by the way, indifference is just a passive version of domination. An absence of compassion always implies a completed competition: "I won, you lost. Ha.") "Heaven" happens when we bring a casserole to our suffering neighbor and encourage her or him as best we can. We can only hope that other people will bring heaven to us in our suffering.
I believe that's why the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter. But no one cares what I, an old man sick with cancer and weak lungs, thinks. None of these thoughts is original with me. Other folks have been saying them for a long time. Nevertheless, these are the things I hold must be true. Now I can write about the dark road that led me to this mere glimmer of light.