Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Shaken

by Jordan Blaylock in Poetry

Shaken

When everything is falling apart,
Everything is breaking, your heart
Feels like a cheap commodity
Tossed about in and out of shops,
Left feeling tarnished and dirty.

And your faith? Oh, your faith.
When your prayers float out
And you’re not even sure about
How far to heaven they float
Or even if they go anywhere at all.

Life falls apart.
And so do you.
But you build again.
Work through the pain.

And, right now?
Wanting to scream
And split the seam,
It’s okay.

And it’s okay to be shaken.
Faith and all.

 

Photo via Unsplash.

About Jordan Blaylock
Jordan Blaylock is a nurse, working on going into ministry with the UMC, and loves to write. She’s also managing the Unfundamentalist Instagram account.… [Read more…] about Shaken

Why I Left

by Ami Vielehr in Christian Spirituality

In the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, I lay distraught and wrestling in that place between sleep and wake where nightmares haunt, on a twin bed in a cold stone monastery in Hyde Park, NY. A place that was supposed to provide silence and rest became the spiritual tomb of the religion I deeply loved and once held as truth. It seemed that in that one moment it all became lucid … a pinpoint clarity … the knot of supposed truth of all I had once argued for, unraveled. The suppressive, patriarchal confines that I grew up with came crashing down and crumbled onto that tiled floor.

Looking back now, I know it did not begin there in that room on that post-election morning. I was knocked off my Pharisaical horse sometime around my second year in seminary—the blinders ripped from my eyes by professors and pastors who loved The Word too much to let it be abused. The first stirrings of hesitation came when I began to understand the blatant misuse of the text for power mongering and gender oppression—where those who had no problem preaching a God of love while holding the Bible as a vicious weapon to silence any and all who disagreed with their literalist interpretation.

I had spent months, if not years, grappling with the safe, predictable religion of my youth, which said grace was enough—one that preached of purity, acceptance, and love, but was infected with hypocrisy, hate, and exclusion. And I was left to wrestle while an enigmatic and mysterious faith began… [Read more…] about Why I Left

The Execution of God

by in Book Reviews

The Execution of God is a disturbing book—and rightly so: any meaningful discussion of the death penalty should be profoundly unsettling. It should cause us to reassess our values and our ethics. It should press us to reevaluate our actions—or inactions—regarding what continues to be one of the most divisive and troubling issues in modern America. The Execution of God succeeds on all these counts, and its potent message lingers, disturbingly, long after the final page.

In The Execution of God, Baptist pastor, theologian, and activist Jeff Hood provides a deeply personal reflection on the death penalty. He recounts the pervasive acceptance (and even glorification) of capital punishment during his fundamentalist Christian upbringing:
Throughout my upbringing, I heard about the death penalty. My family lived in a state that had the death penalty. We went to a church that was for the death penalty. We didn’t really know anybody opposed to the death penalty. Though it might sound strange, I thought that following Jesus included being for the death penalty. Every so often, an upcoming execution would get attention and everybody would start talking about the case until the person was executed. Occasionally slipping in and out conversation, the death penalty was a way of life.
—The Execution of God, p28

Hood goes on to describe his questioning of that de facto dogma, and his eventual transition to undertaking… [Read more…] about The Execution of God

Hearts Without God

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

A self-fulfilling prophecy is when people blame a circumstance on a vague but seemingly objective evil in the world and use it to justify a narrative when the situation occurs (as was claimed or prophesied).

Example: in America, we don’t have a “gun” problem, we have a “sin” problem. When someone commits mass murder, and happens to use a gun to do so, the issue is never about his weapon of choice and access to it. It’s about his heart. Making the argument about sin, or the poor hearts of people in our country, positions the conversation away from gun control and into a state of learned helplessness where the rest of us are just supposed to accept the outcomes of these atrocities as normative.

And then we all sit back and watch as gun violence and mass shootings wreak havoc. And we watch everyone argue about what they think the problem is and their solutions that the prophets claim will never work. Meanwhile, nothing is done, and the condition persists. And the prophecy is fulfilled time and again while the prophets get to claim that they were right all along—that the evil in the world can’t be solved by laws or regulations, so why bother attempting to change anything? The true problem in America isn’t gun violence, it’s hearts without God, right?

Hearts without God has been the “end times” battle cry of many fundamentalists, and it’s becoming very costly. Not just relating to gun violence in America and the 30 thousand lives that guns claim annually, but even… [Read more…] about Hearts Without God

Accept the Loss of Expect

by Connie Miller in Christian Spirituality

“I feel like I am grieving the loss of something, but I do not know what that is.”
—Me, explaining why I haven’t been to Bible Study lately

Finding out my son is faced with a muscle disease has been the most faith shaking and faith building experience in my life. The phone call from the doctor saying he has a muscle disease and that now we just have to put a name on it sent me into grief. Grief for a loss I did not understand.

“What have I lost?” I would ask myself. He’s here, and we aren’t looking at muscular dystrophy, a fatal muscle disease. So, why am I grieving? I asked for clarity and comfort. I asked for strength. I just kept asking, and one day I received.

I love podcasts, and one of my favorites is the For The Love with Jen Hatmaker Podcast. I was listening to the Chrissy Kelly: How To Survive When Your Dreams Dissolve episode. It was an awakening of the soul—I realized what I had been grieving this whole time!

I had lost expectancy. I could no longer know what was going to happen, as a mom. Plans of sports, school, careers, graduation, marriage, all of the hopes I always took for granted, they are all up in the air.

As a mom, especially if you have twins or more, you learn to expect the unexpected. Some ideas and plans you learn to let go of, but not normalcy. You don’t expect to let go of simple ideals. Yet, when you are facing the unknown, you have to die to the design of normal mom… [Read more…] about Accept the Loss of Expect

Beyond the Letter of the Law

by Bruce H. Joffe in Christian Issues

Chief Justice Roberts, one of the four justices who voted against expanding marriage rights to all people, expressed in his dissent that, while he thought marriage equality might be a good thing for society, he didn’t see any Constitutional right to it.

A few days later, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, writing in Time magazine, rejected the Chief Justice’s assertion, saying that Roberts was wrong, that the Constitution “had everything to do with it.”

I guess it all depends on one’s perspective.

Some on the Supreme Court believe it’s their responsibility to uphold the words of the Constitution al pie de la letra—according to the letter of the law, ensuring that what was written centuries ago doesn’t change with the times.

Others, however, believe that the words written when our Constitution was ratified are meant to be signposts and guidelines; it’s not the words that are important, but their meaning and intent.

So, interpreting an age-old document in the light of changing norms and realities becomes paramount in the Supreme Court’s responsibilities.

For those of us reared in Judeo-Christian traditions, it’s a familiar dilemma, since we must ask ourselves the same questions about what’s written in the Bible.

Do we follow the letter of the law or the spirit of the law?

“Of all the things that grieve us, perhaps what’s been most difficult is seeing some of our friends, family members and folks we’ve sat next to in church giving their hearty… [Read more…] about Beyond the Letter of the Law

Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

I grew up in a Pentecostal fundagelical church where we prided ourselves on taking Scripture seriously. That meant, among other things, a commitment to literal interpretation. From a literal six days of creation to a literal thousand year millennium, we took Scripture in what we believed to be the natural sense. And that meant reading it, ahem, like a newspaper.

Literal interpretation aside, if there was one doctrine that demonstrated our commitment to Scripture, it was biblical inerrancy. We thought of the Bible as a repository of propositions describing God and our relationship with him. And inerrancy promised that every one of those propositions was a fact. Since we imagined doctrine to consist of simple deduction from the Bible, inerrancy thereby provided confidence in the facts of Christian doctrine from creation to new creation.

Our bold and clear doctrine of inerrancy contrasted with the weak and woolly liberal descriptions of biblical authority. More than once I heard my fellow fundagelical Christians joke that trying to get a liberal clear on the inspiration and authority of the Bible was about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a wall.

That’s the way I used to see things. However, today I view matters very differently. Indeed, it now seems to me that if any view of Scripture is liable to the charge of Jell-O nailed to the wall, it is—ironically enough—that of inerrancy itself. Indeed, once we… [Read more…] about Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years

Aren’t people just atheists because they don’t want to obey God?

by Tim Burns in Christian Issues

“A man or woman rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the paucity of evidence. One rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit one’s need for God.”—Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism, page 155

I see three fundamental problems with this argument. The first is the use of generalized language. When Christians make this argument, I almost never hear them saying, “some atheists just reject God because they want an excuse to sin.” If they did say that, I don’t think I would have any major problem with this. After all, every position or stance has its share of people who believe in it for irrational reasons. I’m not familiar with any atheists who only reject God because they want to avoid moral accountability, but I don’t doubt that there are a few out there. So if the claim was just that “some atheists” do this, I wouldn’t be able to disagree.

But that’s not the claim. The accusation is universally applied, without any exceptions being offered. The way I parse the wording in that Ravi Zacharias quote, the tacit implication is that every single atheist in the entire history of the world only rejected God out of moral resistance. Rationally speaking, that’s a fairly untenable position to hold, because it would only take a single example to prove that proposition false. Personally, I know myself to be just such an example.

Not only do I know that I didn’t reject God out of moral resistance,… [Read more…] about Aren’t people just atheists because they don’t want to obey God?

Papier-Mâché Heart

by Jordan Blaylock in Poetry

Papier-Mâché Heart

Weeping as I dip the broken heart again in the bucket of paste
Trying not to let any of it go to waste
You come upon me, noting the blood
And seeing the heartbreak bud.

I look up at You, Papa
I cry out, “I can’t fix this, I can’t do it!”
You take the heart, stopping the final hit
And You breathe life in to it with a deep, “Ahhh.”

You gather me in Your arms
God keeping me safe from further harms
And I finally see why there were one set of footprints
I had never before had any hints.

And in Your strong hand, cradled with me
You carry the finished papier-mâché
Freshly beating and healing.

 

Photo via Unsplash.

About Jordan Blaylock
Jordan Blaylock is a nurse, working on going into ministry with the UMC, and loves to write. She’s also managing the Unfundamentalist Instagram account.… [Read more…] about Papier-Mâché Heart

Thank You President Trump

by Darrell Lackey in Christian History

Even a perfunctory perusal of most media (social or otherwise) and serious commentary (and now even some conservative commentary) reveals an almost total negative take on the current presidency. And, I think an over-all negative view is justified and accurate. However, there is one very positive result of the current state of affairs relative to the current occupant of the White House: it has revealed the deep divide within evangelical Christianity.

Students of modern American religious history are aware that, beginning in the 1940s, several prominent Protestant Christians, such as Carl F. Henry, began to separate themselves in sensibility, emphasis, tone, and even theologically from fundamentalism. From that divergence, we get our modern-day evangelicals. Their rejection of the isolationism and anti-intellectualism of fundamentalism laid the groundwork for modern evangelical Christianity.

Before that divergence could happen, however, it had to be noticed and addressed. One of the ways that happened was through Carl F. Henry’s 1947 book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. With the help of Charles E. Fuller, Harold Ockenga, Billy Graham, and others, Christianity began to diverge and break with the fundamentalism of the past.

The break wasn’t so much in the areas of theology, as these new evangelicals held to many of the same views, especially inerrancy, as fundamentalists. The theological differences mostly concerned the de-emphasis of… [Read more…] about Thank You President Trump