Guest Post: God as an Old White Dude on Jeopardy

Amy Mitchell is a homeschooling mom blogging about church, culture, and spirituality at http://unchainedfaith.com/  In her spare time, she dabbles in cheesy fiction, which you can read at http://lovewhineandcheese.wordpress.com/

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I’ve called myself a Christian for more than twenty years.  For the better part of that, the image in my head when I thought of God looked very much like this:

[image description: a cartoon from Gary Larson's Far Side comic. God and a man are on the game show Jeopardy. God is a large, white man with a flowing beard and long white hair. God's score is 1065. The man's score is 0. The caption reads: "Yes, that's right! The answer is Wisconsin! Another 50 points for God! And ... uh-oh, looks like Norman, our current champion, hasn't even scored yet!"]

Regarding this cartoon, Gary Larson wrote,

“First, I made God look the way I think most of us are pretty sure he looks.  Secondly, I made sure he was really winning hands down.  Even if Norman had only ten points it would have meant that he beat God to the buzzer at least once, and someone would have gotten mad.”*

God didn’t start out looking that way to me.  When I was around eight years old, I began to develop a concept of God.  Somehow, I had decided that God must be more than some nebulous cloud or an energy force—God must be a Someone.  I remember sitting in my mother’s sewing room, the whir of the machine and my mother’s soft humming in the background while I stretched out on the floor reading.  I looked up from my book long enough to ask, “What’s God like?”

My mother gave some wholly unsatisfying answer about God being everywhere and in everything.  Even at that age I thought that was stupid.  I decided she must be wrong, but I filed it away for later contemplation.

By the time I was fourteen, I was attending a Presbyterian church.  Somewhere around then, God became the image above.  I’m sure this must be at least in some way due to the language used to describe God: He, Father, Lord.  I also had a sense of God as Cosmic Know-It-All, and that He was reading my every thought (often disapprovingly).

It didn’t help matters that in college, I met many people for whom that picture of God was deeply meaningful.  My roommate had never had a father in her life—she had been adopted by a single woman.  She used to refer to God as “Daddy,” and for her, the idea that God was, in some way, a replacement for the earthly father she lacked was important.  I, on the other hand, couldn’t relate to that at all, no matter how hard I tried.

For a long time, I thought of God as Someone who cared very deeply about whether or not I was committing particular sins.  He was interested in things like how much money I gave to church and what I was doing with my genitals, but He couldn’t be bothered with whether or not I was carrying out the commands for peace, justice, and love.  Partly because of that and partly because I tend toward an intellectual view of spirituality anyway, I could talk about God, but I felt very little connection.

It took involvement with a much more conservative evangelical church to jar me out of complacency.

The strange thing about it was that if I believed even half of what I heard at that church, I would have come away with an image of God that was far less grandfatherly than what Gary Larson had in mind.  Week after week, the message was, “God loves you, but he has Expectations for how you live your life—and you’re failing.”  It was a more extreme version of what I’d always heard in church.  There was the usual droning about sex and who puts what were and when and the constant finger-wagging about tithing and supporting the church’s financial needs.  On top of that, however, was an overlay about who I am as a woman and what my role should be in and out of the church.

“God is male. Jesus is male. We don’t know about the Holy Spirit, but probably male.  The Church is female.  Therefore, in a perfect parallel, God made men first and women to submit to them.”

Officially, of course, the church claimed that God wasn’t male or female.  But every last bit of the theology pertaining to women indicated otherwise.  For the first time, I began to see what was wrong with the picture of God I carried around with me.  I thought, If God is really an old, white man, then everything I hear about the limitations on women must be correct.  Since those things are not true, God can’t possibly be male.  I had already given up on a good bit of the conservative evangelical theology, so it wasn’t hard to let go of my image of God.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of guidance at church in sorting this out.  The world is wide, though, and I began to read.  I read books that didn’t include gendered pronouns for God.  I read books in which God was not staring down at me from Heaven, arms crossed and a scowl on His face, disapproving of my actions.  I “met” people online who had vastly different ideas about God than the ones I’d held for so long.

I stopped being sure there was such a thing as God.  It felt like a dark, dank cave, cold and lonely.  It was in that space that I begged God to be real again.

The very first spark of believing again came in a strange form.  I was at our local science museum with my kids, and we watched this multimedia presentation there.  In it, the museum’s paleontologist said that our region was once under a tropical sea—the evidence of which is our vast rock salt reserves.  It may not sound beautiful to you, but it absolutely amazed me.  My first thought was, How would that even be possible if not for the power of God?

We all find beauty, meaning, grace, and love in different ways.  For my daughter, it’s in the natural world and our furry, feathery, and scaly friends.  For my son it’s in music, movement, and the relationships he forms with others.  For me, it’s in the wonder of creation—all of it, from whatever started the Universe to the geological history of this planet, from the outer reaches of the galaxy to the possibility that We Are Not Alone.  Like my children, I also find holiness (and perhaps an imprint of God) in nature, art, and people.

Today, I’m not sure what my image of God is, but I know I sense God’s essence in so many things, and I believe that’s enough for now.

*Larson, Gary.  The Prehistory of the Far Side. Universal Press, 1989.

Guest Post: When God Is Man, But You Are a Woman

(My apologies for this post being a couple days late this week. There was a scheduling hiccup on my end. But this post is definitely worth the wait.)

Danielle L. Vermeer is a social impact consultant by day and blogger on the intersections of marriage, faith, and feminism by night. A Christian feminist and longtime advocate in the anti-trafficking sector, she is passionate about amplifying the voices of women and girls and sharing stories of hope and healing. She and her husband are on a journey of two becoming one and live in the Chicago suburbs with their adorable baby-dog. Connect with her at www.fromtwotoone.com or on Twitter at @fromtwotoone.

They told me that God must be a man because men are more powerful.

I was six-years-old in the middle of playing basketball in my driveway with my next door neighbors – two boys a year older than I – when they confidently asserted their theological conclusion. Frizzy-haired, lanky, and stubborn as an ox, I retorted that God isn’t a man because God isn’t a person. God is God. They scoffed at me for not knowing what I was talking about and then we proceeded to go on with our game.

They told me that God must be a man because Jesus came to Earth as a man.

Growing up in the Catholic Church, I was taught that only men could be pope and bishops and priests and deacons and even altar servers.* Contrary to the evangelical debates on women in church leadership, the Catholic Church basically taught us that since Jesus was a man, only men could represent Him on earth in the sacraments and other important functions of religious life.

They told me that God must be a man because God calls Himself Father and Jesus calls Himself Son.

In the Catholic Church, we made the sign of the cross in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in the name of the Mother, and the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit. In some evangelical churches I attended, contemplating the (traditionally/stereotypically) feminine characteristics of the Divine was akin to heresy. God was Father. Jesus was Son. Period. No questions asked. Since the parts of Scripture that characterized God and Jesus in more feminine terms were exceptions to the rule, the rule was upheld in a remarkably literal fashion.

They told me that God must be a man because as husband is to wife, Jesus is to His Bride the Church.

When I splintered off from the Catholic Church during my preteen and teen years, the evangelical churches and camps I attended stressed the complementary relationship between men and women. They derived much of their theology from Genesis in which God created mankind in His image, male and female He created them. And since the male was created first and the female sinned first, they contrived that the man was to be the leader and protector of the more easily-deceived woman.

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From my girlhood to my womanhood, I got the impression from both the secular world and my church traditions that all people were created equal, but men were just a bit more equal. Because if men are associated with power, salvation (Jesus), authority (God), and leadership (Church), then where does that leave me as a woman?

When they said that God must be a man because men are more powerful, they were implying that women were less powerful and inherently more vulnerable. While female people around the world are more vulnerable to abuses of power precisely because they are female, this is not a system ordained by God. Patriarchy is the not the result of men being made in the image of God, but rather of men wanting to be gods in power and authority.

When they said that God must be a man because Jesus came in male form, they were implying that the female form was not worthy of the Incarnate God. They were, of course, forgetting that Jesus incubated and was birthed through the body of a female, that God’s choice of a young, unmarried woman to bring forth the Messiah was not only a slap in the face of patriarchal norms about women, but also completely defiant of human logic.

When they said that God must be a man because God calls Himself father and Jesus calls Himself Son, they are ignoring the intensely patriarchal context of the time in which protection and inheritance passed exclusively through men. But they also are downplaying how Jesus consistently subverted the prevailing norms of the day when relating to those considered less than – women, the disabled, foreigners, children – basically anyone who who do not fit into their narrow definition of person.

When they said that God must be a man because of those verses in Genesis and Ephesians, they are literalizing metaphors – communicating truth through symbolism – that ultimately are profound mysteries to us. Paul even says so explicitly after the analogy of husbands and wives being like Christ and the Church. And as for Genesis, the Hebrew word for “female” – in some cases meaning to be perforated, punctured, bored through, or screwed – is an anatomical description from a contextualized era in which women were not considered fully human, not an ontological truth about women’s role in all places and in all times to be (passive) receivers of “something bigger than ourselves.” Elevating literal interpretations of the intended figurative translation results in false theology that says women are held accountable for their submission to their husbands while men are held accountable for their submission to God.

That’s not who I know God to be.

God is not powerful or authoritative or protective or a leader because He is like a man. God is the Father who passes on inheritance of eternal life through the Son Jesus. God is also the Mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wings.

God is all of these things and more because God is above and beyond and encompassing gender of all kinds.

Growing up, I essentially learned that if God is male, then the male is God. But as I’ve grown in wisdom and stature as a Christian and a feminist, I’ve come to rest on a profound truth: that I am made in the image of God both irrespective of and precisely because I am made female.

Guest Post: The Ever Changing Faces of God

Dani is an obsessive geek, skeptical feminist, graphic designer and struggling writer over at crooked neighbor, crooked heart.
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Trigger warning: self harm, sexual assault

"I did it to myself. Mea culpa, mea culpa."

I would rock back and forth, muttering those words to myself, scratching my arms and legs until they almost bled, eyes squeezed shut to keep out the images I'd just emblazoned into my mind.

You're a girl, I scolded myself. Girls aren't supposed to want sex. You're nothing but a filthy whore. You're robbing your husband; you'll have nothing to give him. You're disgusting and vile and worthless. Only evil women have desires like this.

You see, believing that my highest calling was to be a wife and mother, it occurred to me that I was ill-prepared for the physical intimacy that marriage entails. Since I was told that frequent good sex was something I owed my husband, and since sex is generally a taboo subject in conservative Christianity, I did what I thought was the most reasonable thing for me to do. I decided to learn about sex from the privacy of the internet so I would be prepared when I got married.

What started as an educational exercise, however, turned into something I thought was a fight for my eternal soul.

I begged God to take away my desires. I begged, pleaded, screamed, wracked my body with temporary scars and shaking sobs. And yet they remained. I hated myself. I thought this must be my thorn in the flesh, and in some moments I even hated God for making me this way if there was no release.

And God was someone who would first make me a sexual being, then condemn me for it. He gave me desires and needs without the means to fulfill them or the decency to end my suffering.

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"Your...hair...smells...good," he breathed into my ear. I'd stopped struggling — he was surprisingly strong for someone wheelchair-bound. My breast throbbed with pain as his grip tightened, my back twisted oddly as I was being pulled halfway painfully into his lap. His guardian and our professor sat across the room, talking, oblivious.

It took a long time for them to notice. Even then, my teacher did nothing — my attacker’s guardian was my salvation. As he was being pried off of my body finger by finger, he stretched to kiss me. "I don't want this to be my first kiss!" my brain screamed as I tried to twist away. He managed to plant a kiss on my jaw anyway. It occurred to me that perhaps this was God's punishment for my sexual desire — that my sexual desire made me a sexual object to be consumed against my will.

The next class, my teacher caught up with me. "So, he has wandering hands, huh? He apparently has a way with the ladies."

I was horrified. Shaken. Enraged. Confused. Terrified.

He saw...and did nothing.

And I couldn’t shake the image of God as that teacher, watching silently from across the room, doing nothing.

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I had just begun dating my husband, and I was quickly becoming terrified at his level of commitment to me. I tried to push him away as hard as I possibly could with the only thing I knew would surely be repugnant enough to open his eyes. I launched attack after attack, explaining how unlovable I was, how dirty I was, how worthless I was.

He batted it all aside with kindness. He spoke life and truth into my wilderness of self-hatred. He didn't see me as a project. He didn't see me as a collection of moral failures. He didn't even see me as an object for his pleasure. He saw me as a person, full of inherent worth. He saw me. And he loved me.

It took a long time to accept his love. But when I did, all I could think was, "This...this must be what Jesus is like. This is what people mean when they talk about a God of love. I haven't seen it before. This is grace, this is peace, this is hope, this is love. I understand now."

He was the first person for whom love did not include shaming or controlling me.

And God started to become someone I could love, trust, and believe in.

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That is...until we had sex.

"Your relationship is ungodly," my friends told me. "If he was the one God wanted for you, he wouldn't have tempted you to sin like this. The fact that you gave in to it shows you're not ready for a relationship, let alone marriage."

And I was confused, so confused. Would God really want to take away the one person who most convinced me of His goodness, simply because we made love? People kept telling me how sex before marriage could never be about love — it could only be about sinful lust and defying the work and word of God. But my experience was completely the opposite. Having sex with him had been the most loving, healing thing I had experienced in my life. And yet it was evil?

And God was someone for whom good and evil could be arbitrarily defined, no matter the consequences to His followers.

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"You do have some polycystic ovaries."

My breath caught in my chest and I stared at her, not quite ready to understand what she was saying. "You mean...you mean I have PCOS?" I somehow managed to keep my voice steady.

She didn't quite meet my gaze. "Yes. We'll continue with your birth control, and when you're ready to talk about having kids, come in and we'll see if you can."

I felt dizzy. My mind flitted back to a sermon that a trusted mentor once gave about Hannah and Elkanah. He posited that Hannah should have been content with Elkanah's love and not continued to ask God for children. That when women were barren in the Bible, it was God that had closed their wombs and they should unquestioningly accept God's judgment in their lives.

And God’s judgment seemed clear. He was holding all of my sins against me, and I was found lacking.

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After years of squelching doubts and emotions and fears, I finally began talking.

I began to tentatively share my questions, my problems, my fears with a small but growing group of people. They told me about a God who really doesn't hold past sins over our heads to beat us with. They told me about a God who understands fear, anger, pain, and doesn't shame or punish for those feelings but instead listens, loves, cherishes, and comforts. They told me about a God who isn't abusive, who isn't capricious, who isn't cruel. I hardly dared to believe them.

But there it was, that seed of hope.

And God became someone I really felt I could wrestle with, because He might really want to engage my heart and mind, no matter what that meant. Even if it meant waiting until I was ready.

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"My friend called me, wanted me to come over to see him at his house. I hung up the phone, and walked to the front door, and stopped. God wouldn't let me leave."

My head was pounding with a migraine that made lights blindingly bright, sounds unbearably loud, and made my stomach lurch. The preacher’s voice droned on, each rise and fall of his tone piercing my head. I held onto my husband for dear life, my only physical stronghold in an environment that made me taste fear.

"The Holy Spirit finally released me, and I walked over to my friend’s house to find people sitting on the front porch, crying. He just shot himself." My stomach lurched again, and I felt my husband stiffen beside me. "He'd been sitting in his room by the window with his gun, waiting for me. God worked salvation in my life that day. If I'd arrived any earlier, he could have shot me."

By the time the closing prayer had been uttered, I was being steered to our car — I was shaking uncontrollably from pain and rage, afraid I would be sick or pass out.

But as we drove away from the church building, my head eased, then stopped hurting altogether. My stomach calmed. Lights became normal, sounds became bearable.

And it hit me like a ton of bricks, how emotionally and physically toxic that environment was.

I looked at my husband and said, "I think this is our last Sunday."

His jaw was set grimly. "I wholeheartedly agree."

And for one day, I was convinced that God was not the monster that this man was preaching. I didn't know what He was exactly, but I knew more than I knew anything that He was not someone who would sacrifice life like that.

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Now? I struggle daily with my view of God. I suppose it's only natural, considering the many faces He has had in my life. I'm still sorting through them all. Some days, I don't even think He has a face. Some days, I don't think He exists — or exists in a form that isn't pure evil. 

But the struggling is worth it. Because it's finally allowed. I've seen goodness and kindness in people that makes God seem so near. I've seen interpretations of Scripture that seem like they can override the way I was taught to read and understand the Bible. I catch glimpses of a God who isn't a narcissistic sociopathic monster, and those glimpses are enough to keep me searching.

And so now, God is a mystery. But I am resting in that mystery, in the in-between of the faith of my childhood and the faith of my adulthood, waiting.

And I think He's okay with that.

Why Marriage as a Metaphor is a Failure

On Wednesday last week, I wrote that: “We, the church, are the Imago Dei. We, the people, are his banner carriers. And when one of us falls, someone else will carry the banner while others help the fallen.”

I’ve already explained a bit of what I mean when I talk about the image of God as that of community rather than individual corporeality. To me, the individualistic tendency to say that “I,” as an individual, created being, are “made in the image of God” unnecessarily truncates and separates us from a necessary understanding of what it means be made in the image of God. The verse from which we get the saying “made in the image of God,” indeed, is a corporate reality – “male and female, he created them.”

It is important, when we discuss the image of God, to always place it within the corporate reality. Unfortunately, language is an insufficient reality to provide us with the metaphors that we need to understand this properly. Metaphors for the Trinity fall short and easily find their ways into heresies, so images of God tend to fall short as well.

I think the closest thing we get to a proper understanding of the image of God is Paul’s instructions about the Body of Christ (sidenote: it’s interesting to me that even in trying to move away from the image of God as a corporeal singularity, we use our corporeal reality as reference points).

Paul says:

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.  And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

I propose that these verses – moreso than the ‘your body is a temple’ or even the metaphors of marriages – are the lens through which we must look at both the role of the universal Church and of God’s actions within the world.* Many complementarians, as we’ve discussed, tend to use marriage as the primary metaphor for the relationship between the Church and Christ, asserting that the symbolism of a submissive wife and a leading husband are the key to understanding God.

That, to me, is an unnecessary limitation of metaphor and a truncation of the glorious diversity and beauty of the Body of Christ in which we participate. A wife, in of herself, cannot represent the Church. She is simply not enough as an individual (and the husband also is not nearly enough as an individual). We require all the various support systems and people playing their parts – as God has gifted them – to understand the fullness and richness that is the Body of Christ. By looking to marriage as a primary metaphor, we miss so much.

And yet, that is what we purposefully do when we talk, as John Piper does, about marriage as a primary metaphor for the relationship between God and his people. It makes the church homogenous – a singular person responding to another singular person. It misses all the diversity and grace and passion that the Church as a Body of diverse human beings is.

Look at it this way. CS Lewis talked about the diversity of persons that develop within friendships. Different friends bring different parts of ourselves out. When I hangout on G+ with friends on Sunday nights, I am a different person than I am with my coworkers on a Monday. This is not two-facedness or phoniness, as authenticity as a cultural value demands, but merely a function of how varying relationships work.

By using marriage as a metaphor, we necessarily flatten that diversity. We cannot talk of marriage as a primary metaphor because a wife is not just a wife. A wife (hopefully) has friends who support her in different ways than her husband does, and hopefully a husband likewise. Each of those people come together to make the wife who she is, and likewise for the husband.

I am, in many ways, an amalgamation of the influences my varying friendships and relationships through my life have had on me. I would not be myself without the community within which I exist, and I realize this most necessarily when I am trying to survive alone.

This is what the community of Christ and the image of God looks like – it is people bringing out the best in each other, in all our brokenness, working toward a common goal. It is people picking each other up, encouraging progress toward who we truly are. A faith lived alone is necessarily a faith lacking, just as a marriage attempted to live within a vacuum will be a necessarily lacking marriage. Rather than looking at the image of God as an individual persona – through looking to marriage as a primary metaphor – we must encourage each other to see the image of God in each and every relationship, replicating the relationships of love that exist within the Trinity.

This is what it means to be the Body of Christ – the push and pull and messiness of necessary, every day relationship, iron sharpening iron. The group of friends laughing at the table in the college cafeteria are, to me, a better metaphor for the image of God and the relationship of God to humanity than any marriage metaphor could possibly be.

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*Please excuse the inexact philosophical language – for the time being, I’m functioning from the assumption that God is both inside and outside our stream of time, which may or may not be a ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. It’s too much of a rabbit hole to explicate here.

Guest Post: The God Who Speaks English

Today's guest post comes from perfectnumber628. Perfectnumber628 grew up evangelical Christian in the northern US, and is now trying to move to China. She blogs at http://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/ about Christianity, feminism, Chinese, and everything else.

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I thought God was white.

Of course I didn’t actually think God was white. If someone would have asked me, “is God white?” I would have laughed and said of course not. God doesn’t have any race, because God’s not a person, obviously.

But I still subconsciously thought God was white. And American. And a lot like me.

I grew up in a white, Protestant, suburban church in the northern US. It’s a great church, but the lack of diversity seems to have given me a very skewed view of who God is. I subconsciously assumed God was like my pastors and Sunday school teachers- white, American, native speakers of English.

But everything changed when I went to China on a mission trip.

I encountered a culture totally different than anything I had ever experienced- and a God who was already alive and active in that culture. I encountered a language I couldn’t understand- and a God who was worshiped in that language by my Chinese brothers and sisters. I encountered cultural differences and misunderstandings- and a God who understood everything that I couldn’t.

But more than that, I felt like I had discovered a whole new world. China was so different that it was hard for me to even believe that both China and the US could exist at the same time. So amazing, so fascinating, that I felt I had no choice but to dedicate my life to learning the language and culture, and hopefully someday I’d go live there. (And “learning the language and culture” is exactly what I’ve been doing in the years since then.)

But how could God understand what I was feeling?

In China, I’d seen another side of God, but I still had this subconscious assumption that God was like the people at my church. People who thought it was brave of me to go on a mission trip to somewhere so weird and different. People who reacted with surprise when I told them I planned to move to China. People who, after I had learned Chinese, were astonished that it was possible for someone like me to learn Chinese. People who thought that obviously I was supposed to live in the US, and the only reason to move to China was if God forced me to go there as a missionary. People who thought the US was obviously the best country.

(And actually, for some of those descriptions, I’m not really talking about “people from my church”- I’m talking about ME.)

I thought God was a white American man, with headquarters in the US and a plan to send people out from there to the less awesome parts of the world, because apparently God’s required to love those people too, even though they’re not American. I thought God’s first language was English and he learned the other ones in school. I thought God visited all the other countries and had a good time, but spent most of his time in the US. (And like I said, all of these horrible, racist, blatantly wrong ideas were totally subconscious. I totally didn’t know I thought of God that way- until going to China changed my life.)

The truth is, my God is the God of the whole world. But subconsciously I still fear that it’s not true. I fear that God doesn’t understand- because it seems like nobody understands. Because I don’t even understand. I just know I need to go to China.

My God is the God of the whole world, with absolutely no special preference toward the white American English-speaking subculture that I come from. According to Christianity, this has to be true- but I still struggle with it. I still struggle with this image of a God stuck in a white American church.

But that fake God won’t stop me. Soon, I’m moving to China, and I expect to find God already there.

Harry Potter, Humanity, and Empathy

I believe in stories. This isn’t a bold or new statement by any means, but it’s important for me to unpack here, in this space. Narrative is, I believe, the key to unlocking our images of God and the Gospel. If we understand life, church, and relationship as narratives and metanarratives and conflicting stories of events, we step closer to honoring the individual dignity of each person. Self-narratives, theology narratives, Gospel narratives, life narratives, policy narratives – all are vitally important to understanding the depth and breadth and pluralistic nature of humanity. We honor people by understanding their stories first.

But we also interpret and understand ourselves through the stories we read. That’s why Jesus told parables instead of polemics. Why we tell the Bible in chunks of story rather than polemics and apologetics. Why apologetics, as a practice, is still just a practice and real conversion, you find, happens in stories and narratives and in the messy bits between discussions.

CS Lewis, many will say, had been argued into faith, proving the purpose of apologetics – but even he would tell you that it is not the strength of an argument but the action of the Holy Spirit, pointing him to the idea – to the narrative – of Christianity as capital-T True. He wasn’t argued into it; he was seized by the narrative.

Much of my own personal story in understanding the Image and Community of God revolves around stories and narratives. It was the reading of the Left Behind series that signaled the beginning of a fervor for being “the right Christian,” for throwing myself not only into church life and somewhat charismatic and legalistic understandings of the Gospel, but into the right wing politics that were part and parcel of that understanding of God.

And it was “secular” narrative that was, in many ways, instrumental in dragging me back out of that. One narrative in particular (one of many, all of which have had varying degrees of impact on my spiritual life) stands out as important to examine in terms of understanding the possibilities of redemption that the Image of God carries. That narrative happens to be the Harry Potter series.

When I mentioned this on twitter yesterday, I got a number of replies happy that Harry Potter was being incorporated into this series. So I hope it’s safe to assume that many of you know the basic plot and characters of the series and I’ll spare you the summary (spoilers for book seven here, but if you’re worried about being spoiled on Harry Potter…really?).

At the beginning of The Deathly Hallows, there’s a scene that is deceptively simple. The Dursleys are being forced to leave their home – for their own protection – and Harry will likely never see them again. This is, in many ways, a relief – Harry has been tormented by them for nearly his entire life. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had been outright abusive toward him, and Dudley, their biological son, had followed suit – he’d been spoiled from childhood and had been conditioned by his parents’ vitriol toward Harry.

In the first book, we first see Dudley on his birthday, trying – quite stupidly – to do the math on whether or not he got as many birthday presents as the year previous – 36 versus 37. He whines until his father promises to buy him two more presents while they are out in order to even up the difference. He is the center of his little universe.

This is of course in contrast to what we’re told Harry gets for his birthday – old socks, maybe a coin, if they remember at all. Harry’s home life is not good – indeed, it is downright abusive, which is why his escape to Hogwarts, and a home that accepts and loves him (eventually) is so important. He finds a new family, a new way of living, a new community that reflects grace, and love, and hope. It is everything he never had.

Rowling could have left the narrative of the Dursleys there. She could have let them remain the evil step-parents, the flat, fairy tale like caricature. But instead, she does her best to give them their humanity back piece by piece – showing us how hurt and jealous Petunia is of her sister, showing where the hatred of magic has come from. Petunia, after all, lost her sister to the world long before Voldemort took Lily’s life.

Rowling could have left the narrative with the Dursleys forever outside the community, forever flat "haters of magic."

But she didn't. In book seven, Rowling shows grace and the possibility of redemption within the Dursleys, through the person of Dudley. Dudley’s move is small, imperfect, and in many ways not even close to enough. As the Dursleys prepare to leave their home and their life – the home they have lived in for probably over 20 years and their "normal" life – they have every reason to continue to resent the magical world. And Harry points this out, saying to another wizard (in the presence of the Dursleys) that they think he’s a waste of space.

“I don’t think you’re a waste of space.”

Dudley quietly whispers, almost unsure of what he’s saying himself. But he says it. Petunia – more hardened in her hatred of Harry – embraces Dudley’s minute expression of feeling with tears and love, celebrating Dudley’s humanness but not Harry’s.

And yet, Harry, recognizing the complexity of the interaction, explains to the other witch, “Coming from Dudley, that’s like ‘I love you.’” He understands the gesture, even though he recognizes that it is not nor never will be enough to make up for the abuse of 17 years. He has empathy.

This does not mean that they are reconciled, or that Harry has even forgiven the family for what they have done to him, but that he recognizes the humanity of the Dursleys, despite having absolutely no reason to do so.* He knows they are human and that their humanity – as Muggles, as people naturally outside of his community – is worth trying to understand. He shows infinite grace in that tiny moment, grace that manifests itself later in the novel when he helps Snape in his dying moments and in his pleas for Voldemort to recognize his own humanity (“But before you try to kill me, I’d advise you think about what you’ve done…Think, and try for some remorse, Riddle…”).

This moment of empathy has meant a lot to me over the years. To me, empathy does not mean that you wash away all sins, or that you forget what a person did and be reconciled to them, but that you understand their story. It means that you see them as human - like Harry's hope for Voldemort, that Voldemort see himself as a human being, as well. (Keep in mind, too, when Voldemort refuses this opportunity, Harry does not let his empathy keep him from doing the right thing by defeating Voldemort - one can still be just while one is empathetic, something that the modern evangelical church misses when it pleas for people to "forgive" their abusers).

There’s still a lot to unpack about the image of God and community, which I’ll be doing throughout the year (we’ll get into some more academic theology, eg, Stanley Grenz, soon), but for now, I want to sit with the narrative, with the story that recognizing the humanity of others is what is important, that community is brought forth when we give others a chance to be human just as we ourselves are human.

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*I want to be absolutely, fundamentally clear here: Harry gives no indication of forgiving the Dursleys, or even being willing to be reconciled to them – as far as we know, he never sees the Dursleys again after this. And Harry’s actions here are not a prescription for those who have survived abuse – rather they are a narrative of dignity, even in our enemies. Recognizing humanity does not mean we reconcile or even stop being angry at those who hurt, but that we do not base our anger at them on refusing to see them as human.

Guest Post: Poisoning the Well

Today's guest post comes from one of my favorite people, Grace. Grace is a former evangelical Christian, recovering academic, spouse to a pink-haired musician, and mama to a wise-cracking 4-year old. She's the founder of the religion and gender blog Are Women Human?, and a writer and commentator on media and culture from a black, Nigerian American, queer feminist perspective. Say hi to her on Twitter at @graceishuman. _____________

My spiritual history looks like a classic evangelical cautionary tale. I was raised in “bible-believing” churches that were extremely conservative, politically and theologically. By the time I graduated from college (a “secular” school far enough, at least, from home,) I was a political moderate and emergent-ish Christian, pretty close to universalist on the question of salvation.

A year later, my husband and I were attending mass and on our way to officially joining the Catholic Church. After a few years as devout and liberal Catholics, we both went through a period of intense spiritual doubt, triggered by becoming parents, and realized - though not quite at the same time - that we no longer believed in God at all.

To some, our story is confirmation of all they fear about “liberal theology”: that it is, as Erasmus Darwin once said of Unitarianism, a “feather-bed to catch a falling Christian.” We didn’t head down the slippery slope to apostasy so much as tumble to the bottom at breakneck speed.

From where I stand, though, this path was created not by my exposure to different Christian traditions and other faiths. It was created by the rigid, exclusionary faith I was raised with - one that left little room for growth, adaptation to new information about the world, or questioning. Underlying all this was the image of a God who demanded “love” in the form of fear and complete obedience, and whose “justice” meant harsh punishments for minor, arbitrary sins.

In retrospect, my spiritual wanderings were an attempt to make sense of the inherent contradictions in what I’d been taught about God. The more I learned about myself and others, about the world, the less I could reconcile fundamentalist claims of divine love and justice with the actions and consequences claimed in their God’s name.

I guess things began to get shaky when I started attending public school, in 9^th grade. I can already hear the knowing comments - public schools are cesspits of iniquity and lefty brainwashing, after all. But the challenge wasn’t liberal indoctrination; I was quite set in my beliefs. No, the problem was that I made friends who weren’t Christians, or the right kind of Christians, for the first time, and they were nice people. Many of them seemed to embody real kindness and love better than I or most “bible believers” I knew.

How to reconcile this with the dogma that they were all condemned to eternal torture because they believed the “wrong” thing? I couldn’t. Instead, I found comfort in a theology of salvation cobbled together from Lewis and L’Engle. A loving and just God would want salvation, not hell, for as many people as possible. He would honor a good life, lived in good faith, Christian or not.

Each successive step outside my Christian bubble chipped away at the image of God as judgmental patriarch. My very first night at college, I met someone who was openly lesbian for the first time. Much to my confusion, she was also a devout Christian. Another puzzle. I met all sorts of people I’d been taught were “worldly,” incapable of true good, enemies of the family, haters of God: Muslims, liberals, feminists, atheists…It didn’t take long to realize I had been egregiously lied to about who these people were. And it made me wonder all the more if I’d been lied to about who God was, too.

My faith looked very different by the time I finished college. I no longer believed in demons - folks who grew up Pentecostal know what a big deal this is. I was iffy on the Devil.  I was pretty sure God condemned very few people to hell. The Hitlers and Stalins of the world, sure. But everyone who wasn’t a “true” Christian? No. More than that, I was certain that love in action and treating others as I wanted to be treated were at the heart of the Gospel. And a God who wanted people to live according to this Gospel would be more concerned with whether people showed love to others than with, say, who they slept with.

In a sense, Catholicism allowed me to keep my faith for a time. It seemed to resolve the contradictions between worshipping a Christian God and my growing convictions about social justice. Whatever else one says about the Catholic Church, they have a robust, diverse social justice tradition that allows liberals and progressives to continue to call the church their spiritual home even as they disagree strongly with some of its leadership.

I ultimately left the Church, not because of any particular issue with it - though I certainly had serious disagreements on LGBT issues, and on gender justice more broadly. Rather, the birth of our daughter brought up, for both my husband and me, memories of our religious upbringing in conservative churches. We both remembered being terrified of God, terrified of hell, just terrified in general. We didn’t want that for our child. But somehow the idea of raising her to believe in a truly loving and just personal God didn’t make sense. I could no longer sustain the belief that such a God existed.

I’m not talking about scientific probabilities, though I think the odds that a personal God exists are vanishingly low. What I mean is that the God I wanted to believe in, a loving, kind God who was slow to judgment, was still haunted by the God I was taught to believe in. I couldn’t shake off the message drilled into my head as a child, that people abandon “difficult” and “challenging” faith in a divine judge because they want a God who signs off on whatever they do.

I knew, intellectually, that this wasn’t true. Neither my one-time faith as a liberal Christian nor my current agnosticism came out of a search for a philosophy that would allow me to indulge my whims. I was in search of a God who was truly love, not just the assertion of it. But the longer I tried to hold on to belief in God as Love, the more it felt like a cop out. Like I’d made for myself the kind of God I wanted.

The God I was raised to believe in was an abuser wrapped in the trappings of divinity. I couldn’t believe in him. But I couldn’t believe in a God who was anything else, either.  The faith handed down to me was a house of cards that threatened to blow over if any single tenet was less than entirely true, and its cornerstone was a poisonous image of God.

I don’t wish I hadn’t been raised Christian. This might surprise some people to hear. I wish I’d been raised with a more expansive, less fearful faith. The cramped, narrow Christianity I was raised with ended up killing my faith in God. That’s the danger in what you teach your kids about who God is: they just might believe you.

Guest Post: Taking Jesus At His Word

Today's Guest Post in the Account and Countenance Series comes from Ryan, who blogs at Jesus and Venus and can be found on Twitter at @glassblowerscat. _________

My mother has always prayed strangely specific prayers. And I do mean specific. For example, when reselling an item on ebay that she found at a thrift store: “Lord, I would really like to sell this dress for $20 more than I paid for it.” She also prays about everything; no problem or question is too small for God. She prays for cashiers she meets at the grocery store or Goodwill. I’m pretty sure she’s still praying for one of my ex-girlfriends. She’s always done this, as far back as I can remember.

Her theology has plenty of room for that. She thoroughly believes Jesus when he says, “So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.” She takes this as evidence that God cares about even our tiny problems and concerns and wants to give us what we ask for, and she makes extremely specific requests of him so that when those requests are fulfilled she’ll know it had to be God at work.

Theoreticaly, I agree with her. I can’t deny that God told us to ask him for things; it’s right there in the Bible—ask, seek, knock, bread not stones, fish not snakes, etc. Somehow Mom’s habit of granular, specific prayers never stuck to me, though. Mostly, I blame church.

I grew up in what I imagine to be a fairly typical conservative evangelical congregation. We believed in salvation by grace, through faith; none of your works-based salvation heresy for us, thank you. But we were also wary of “cheap grace.” You didn’t get to run around sinning all the time just because you were saved and had forgiveness for your sins. Unfortunately, you can measure the absence of sin much more objectively than the presence of grace, so everyone in the church lived by a long list of unwritten rules cobbled together from the non-ceremonial Old Testament laws, the parts of the New Testament that didn’t mention taking care of the poor, and movies set in the 1940s and ’50s. As a result, while I believed in grace with my head, I believed in the New Law with my guts.

Augmenting this imbalance, as I got older I began having frequent conversations with my father about the Bible and theology. I’ve always loved these long debates, which continue to this day, but both of us skew analytical and theoretical rather than practical and applicable, and Dad also struggles to truly believe that God wants to be intimately involved in guiding our day-to-day lives. Combining that with a Calvinist theological base meant that I had to grow ever more systematic in reconciling direct statements about prayer and God as a giving father—statements my mother takes at face value—with a more comprehensive view of God’s sovereignty.

“Sovereignty” took center stage in my theology more and more as I entered Christian college (pretty Calvinist) and began attending a new church in my college town (very Calvinist). While not a Bible or Theology major, all students had to take a few Bible courses, and I numbered quite a few of the seminary-bound among my friends. Late-night conversations about theology and hermeneutics presented an attractive alternative to actual work, and being surrounded by Christians kept spiritual questions uppermost in my mental space. As I graduated and accepted a full-time job at my very Calvinist church, I realized that I had realigned all my other concepts of God to fit the constraints of sovereignty.

Oddly enough, working for three years alongside a group of five-pointers showed me how dissatisfying and one-sided systematic Calvinism can be.* Calvinist theology is essentially a series of logical constructs predicated on that one notion of sovereignty, and the more you believe in sovereignty, the more you must believe God is always playing a long game. Everything happens because he wants it to happen—even the bad things—so when something bad happens to me, or something I want to happen doesn’t, I must assume my happiness just does not fit into the plan somehow. It doesn’t make sense to believe God can orchestrate a millenia-long narrative of sin, redemption, and glorification spanning every culture and language that also somehow includes making sure I get that writing gig I wanted.

So, despite my mother’s longstanding practice of taking Jesus’ word for it that God wants to give her the things she asks for, and even though I ditched Calvinism years ago, the God of my imagining—not of my theology—has little interest in my affairs. When he does pay attention to my life, he probably just sees me doing something he doesn’t like, even though I keep that New Law list in my mental back pocket at all times. And if I do manage not to actively displease him, still none of my problems or goals could possibly puzzle into his sovereign plan without disrupting a thousand other events he almost certainly thinks are more important. If not for my mother’s continual anecdotal evidence of his concern for our well-being and even happiness, I’d probably never even pray—and when I did, I would believe even less in the efficacy of my prayers.

By the way, a few months ago, when the renters I had lined up for my house dropped out a few days before the mortgage was due, a pair of new renters manifested themselves rather fortuitously through a chain of events over which I had no control or influence. When the dust had settled, my mother told me she had been praying that I would find renters under circumstances only attributable to divine intervention, and that this would increase my faith in God.

And you know what? It did.

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*For me, at least. I don’t begrudge anyone their Calvinism if they find it compelling and spiritually meaningful.  ↩

God in Three Persons: Blessed Trinity

Two weeks ago, I left you with a story that was hard for me to write, especially since altogether, it looked pretty bad and despairing. But I needed to tell that story in order to tell this one: how I’ve readjusted my image of God. I was a theology/philosophy major in college, which my best friend and I jokingly called the “phil-the” major (filthy, get it?). And while it gave me the tools I need for Biblical study, I was still struggling with using theology to create rules about what is right and what is not. Since I’d been raised in a fairly legalistic mindset, hearing more about sin than about love, it was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that love also meant eternal punishment, as much of the way we sell theology from the pulpit. This God seemed distant, judgmental, and never responded to any of my prayers.

But, in my sophomore year of college, I had a bit of a revelation. I’d been involved in Campus Crusade for Christ since the beginning of my college years, and attended a big conference over the winter break each year. One of the sermons given at this conference had a line that stuck with me – the preacher was talking about seeing a homeless man on the street. The preacher passed the guy by, until preacher’s father pulled him aside and said, “Son, that man is your brother.”

Despite all the talk and care I’d given to caring for “my brothers in Christ” by watching how I dressed, how I acted, and keeping my purity intact and quiet, I’d never thought to apply brotherly theology to the social justice realm. The idea that poor people weren’t lazy good for nothings but instead people who shared in the grace and Body of Christ was something that, I’m ashamed to say, had never occurred to me.

I had Othered them so completely that I’d failed to acknowledge their basic humanity.

It would take a few years for that to really, truly sink in – a semester at Oxford helped, but it wasn’t until I was in Waco, TX, living in an apartment with bars on my windows that I truly began to understand what the Image of God is.

Saying that we, as individual corporeal beings, are the image of a Triune God is nonsense to me. We are not three persons in one being and God is not corporeal except as Jesus - that’s very much talked about as God shedding portions of his power in order to become human, not that humans are literally already God’s image (cf. Philippians 2 and the concept of kenosis, which is worth researching).

In order to be in the image of a Triune God, it had to mean something more than this individualistic, highly American, “faith is a private journey” talk I’d been getting most of my life and we sin individually and take individual steps.

You see, we American evangelical Christians are good at using the call to community when it suits us. We tell women they must care for their brothers’ lusting, and that brothers must protect their sisters’ purity by not violating another man’s future wife. We call on brotherhood and community when someone asks potentially divisive questions, and use the “community” of Christ as a shaming tool.

But what we don’t do is recognize that community is the image of God itself. God is three persons in one, working in perfect harmony together. God is, by Their very nature, a communal individual. Servant communing with King, with bonds of love making them equals. Son, God, and Holy Spirit, tied together with bonds of love, not rules.

That is what the image of God means. That revelation is what changed my life. The oppressed are not merely brothers, but people without whom the image of God is incomplete.

American evangelicalism has done a lot to obfuscate and destroy the necessity of the Trinitarian nature of God. The first time I heard of the Holy Spirit, I was 18 years old, in my Christian Thought class in college. “God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity” was a line with no meaning to me – and I came from a mainline, Baptist church in the heart of America.

We’ve reaped great damage by rending the Trinity from its necessary parts and individualizing it. “I just need Jesus” is nonsense, though the life of Jesus is an important filter. We no longer understand what it means to be made in God’s image and instead persecute, shame, and guilt our brothers and sisters instead of following the principle the Trinity follows – which is love. Love. Always love.

I’ll be covering this more in depth as the series continues, but this hopeful, loving, gracious image of God is what keeps me going and keeps me believing. It is, I believe, a way grounded in orthodoxy and yet heterodox to the way much of the American Christian church operates. And it is worth discussion.

Guest Post: God in Reeboks

Through the Account and Countenance Series, I'll be featuring (via guest posts) the stories of various people and the images of God their churches left with them. Today's post comes from Sarah Moon. Sarah is a Women's and Gender Studies student and she blogs at Sarah Over The Moon. ___________

[Trigger warning: domestic violence, verbal abuse]

I’ve heard Christians say before that Jesus was just “God with sandals.” If this is true, then Jesus, for me in 2006, was an 18 year old, 6’4” football player who could bench press about 250. The Jesus of the Bible didn’t exactly line up with the God I had been raised to worship in my fundamentalist churches. Don (not his real name), on the other hand, did.

Don loved me, and he loved me like God did.

In God’s eyes, I was a worthless sinner. Any good I might do was nothing more than filthy rags to God. God’s spokesmen (Baptist church pastors, of course) were constantly reminding me of this. If I were truly humble, I’d realize the wickedness of my own heart and stop trusting myself, my emotions, my thoughts. I’d stop trying to be independent and I’d put my future in God’s loving hands.

But that God was so great, He loved me despite my worthlessness. As long as I stayed close to Him, I could have value—not in who I was, but in who He was.

Don thought the same of me. Much like God, Don saw all my sin as alike, so my tiny sins like taking a shower when Don asked me not to, or accidently drawing the attention of other men to myself were enough to make him want to spew me out of his mouth. He told me so, constantly. He told me what a whore I was, how stupid I was, how worthless, how helpless…

But Don was great. He loved me anyway. He reminded me of how grateful I should be for that—how I should never question his goodness because I deserved far worse. But if I stayed with him, I could have value.

Both had ultimate control over my life. If God (through his spokesmen) told me to do or not to do something, I didn’t get to ask why. My money, my property, my time and even my life belonged to Him. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

Don too. He took the little bit of money that I made teaching piano lessons because I was his property and therefore it was his money too. He threw my makeup bag out of his car window when I told him I didn’t want to stop wearing the eyeliner that he thought made me look “too sexy.” He kept me on the phone for hours, even when I begged him to let me go so I could do my homework. I was his property and anything I had was his, too.

The wrath of one could send horrible diseases, car wrecks, natural disasters, and school shootings. The wrath of the other just a storm of angry words and hand-shaped bruises in places where clothes would always cover them.

One told me “Love me, or I’ll send you to be tortured for all of eternity.” The other told me “Love me, or I’ll blackmail you, yell at you, hurt you, kill you.”

This was my God and Don was just God in Reeboks.

Don was abusive. It took me several months to break up with him and several more years to fully admit the extent of the abuse.

Why was it so hard for me to admit that such an obvious case of domestic terrorism was abuse and not love?

Maybe it’s because admitting that Don was abusive and unloving meant admitting that the God I worshipped was abusive too.

I look around me, years later, and I see a Church that is terrified to look its theology in the face. I see a Church that is somehow okay with having two drastically different definitions of love—one for humans and one for God. I see a Church that holds God to a different standard than they hold human beings.

I see a Church that thinks it can do this and still speak out against abuse and to me, it will never make sense. I can no longer listen to a pastor call abusers evil and then turn around and sing a hymn to the wrathful, jealous God who can save even a helpless, hopeless, worthless wretch like me.

These dueling definitions of love have to end. God doesn’t get God’s own definition. God doesn’t get to do whatever God wants and call it love.

Reading All About Love by bell hooks has helped me expose the lie of a God (or a human) that can be both loving and abusive. In this book, hooks states that “love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of [love].” Hooks goes on to say that many of us are afraid to embrace a definition of love that does not allow abusive behavior, because confronting lovelessness is too painful.

Is that why the Church is afraid to examine the ways that our theologies let God get away with abuse? Have we so entwined love and abuse that we cannot imagine the implications of separating them? Are we afraid that holding God to the same standard of love that we would hold a human partner to will kill our faith?

Coming to a place where I admitted that the God I worshiped wasn’t a loving God was painful. Maybe even more painful than coming to a place where I admitted to myself that Don never loved me, either.

But in admitting the absence of love I’ve learned (and am still learning) to recognize true love wherever it exists.

If the Church wants to know a God who is love, the Church cannot continue to worship a God who abuses. An image of God that looks just like the Dons of the world can never teach us to love, can never be love.

Let us echo the words of bell hooks over, and over, and over as we seek the God of love.

“Love and abuse cannot coexist.”