Hello, once again,
Introduction
It’s getting harder to write these posts because there are so many things I want to say that to include everything would be a never-ending quest. I want to hit the highlights of my theological development, but there are so many twists and turns in my own mind that it’s truly hard to put words to these things. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ll do my best.
I told you that after high school I chose to attend a fundamentalist Baptist college. That’s the truth. Why? Is the natural next question. It’s one for which I both do and don’t have a good answer.
Fear and Hellfire
One primary reason is that I wanted to attend a Christian school because I was worried what would happen if I didn’t. Another reason is that I was truly unsure what I wanted to do with my life. I signed up for a secondary English education degree, but I already knew that it wasn’t really what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I was a bit aimless, looking for direction, looking for answers to the questions that were beginning to come up about my faith. So I chose a place where I thought the answers would be easy to find, a place where my faith wouldn’t be significantly challenged.
I was both right and wrong about that last point. You see, this experience did answer some of my questions, but it raised significantly more, nuanced questions. It also had a different effect than was probably intended. It kind of helped crystallise some of the criticisms I had of fundamentalist theology and push me further to the fringes. I wasn’t out quite yet, but it helped me get there.
The second reason was much more practical. I was scared. I’ve mentioned before that I had undiagnosed depression and anxiety at this time. I didn’t sleep well, and any time something raised questions or doubts about my faith, it caused me tremendous anxiety, because if one facet of my faith turned out to be untrue, then the whole thing must necessarily collapse. I realize now that this was a ridiculous thing to think, but herein lies one of my harshest criticisms of fundamentalism: we are taught that our theology is the correct theology, and that any other way of thinking is incorrect. We are never given any kind of alternate framework that encourages doubts or questioning. So, in reality, my whole theology would have collapsed if even one thing turned out to be untrue. But above all, I was scared of going to hell, for not having a “correct” theology.
Don’t worry; I’m better now.
Doctrine and Doubt
The theological education at my college was exactly what you’d expect. Mostly it was laying out fundamentalist Baptist doctrines and giving Bible verses as support for these doctrines. When looked at through this lens, it was obvious. We were correct, and every other theological system was wrong.
This did have an affect on me. I was drawn in for a time. I would even have called myself a Calvinist, as a result of the teaching there. I’m sorry if that doesn’t mean anything to you; I’ll explain in a later post. I came to believe that the Bible must be inerrant.
But at the same time, I knew something was missing.
You see, when you read the Bible, you constantly see verses about God’s care for the poor and the outcast. You constantly see a longing for justice and peace. I was already a pacifist at this moment, because I didn’t think you could take the teachings of Jesus seriously and come to any other conclusion.
A Gospel of Two Halves
But when the professors were asked about outreach to the homeless and the poor, the response was always the same: “We don’t really do that, because any time we give aid there has to be some kind of gospel presentation.” In their eyes, people’s immortal souls were more important than any needs that they have in the present time. But I was beginning to have questions about this. I began to think of the gospel as two halves of a whole. One half of the gospel really did have to do with one’s spiritual well-being. At the time, I would have called it salvation.
But there’s a whole other side to the gospel that is (in my opinion intentionally) overlooked because of our emphasis on saving souls. If your faith doesn’t make a difference in this world, in this life, then how can you possibly hope to give people a hope in the next one?
Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
And to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Through my time in fundamentalism, I heard countless sermons and lectures where these verses and others like them are spiritualised, construed to be talking about those who are poor in spirit or spiritually oppressed. Let me be clear: I absolutely believe in spiritual warfare and the fact that people can be spiritually oppressed and spiritually poor.
However, I don’t think this is the primary meaning of these verses, especially when taken in whole context of the Bible. The truth is, the Israelite’s mistreatment of the poor and widows is a constant reason given by the prophets for the coming judgment of their nation. In my way of thinking, spiritual poverty and physical poverty often go hand-in-hand. People are neither completely physical or completely spiritual. Just like how I think of the gospel, I think that both sides of human nature are equally important to God.
And so I went searching.
Anabaptists Attraction
I began looking for other Christians with whom I could agree, who really took seriously both the spiritual and physical needs of creation. As I searched I noticed that most churches tended to either one direction or the other: either they emphasized and focused on meeting people’s physical needs, leaving the spiritual as an afterthought, or they emphasized meeting people’s spiritual needs, oftentimes neglecting the physical entirely.
And then I discovered the Anabaptists.
This is not going to be a long historical lesson about Anabaptism or its theology. Simply put, what I found among the Anabaptists was something that I had been looking for for a long time. In the Anabaptists was a group of people who took seriously both people’s personal relationship with God and the words of Jesus, when he said to love your enemies and love your neighbor as yourself.
I promised myself that I would find an Anabaptists church one day. But first, I needed to finish college. There were a lot of steps between learning about the Anabaptists and finally finding myself in an Anabaptist church.
But that’s a story for another time.
Coffee & Theology 