It’s interesting—the unintended consequences that occur when a piece of one’s religious foundation is laid in the wrong way. It causes all manner of predicaments and there’s really no way to correct for them all unless you strip down to the foundation and set things aright. Many people can attest to this truism as it plays out in our physical world. When the foundation for a house is faulty, the house itself pays the price for it. When a mathematical solution is attempted by use of the wrong formula, the answer pays the price. When the wrong kind of fuel is used in a car, it ruins the motor’s function.
Well, this principle holds true in religion, too. When you get the foundational ideas wrong, you should expect to have trouble making the rest of your religion add up properly.
Once upon a time, God created humankind and promised an eternal afterlife for those among them who were righteous. Again and again he stressed to them that they should live righteously and repent of their sins. He assured them repeatedly that they would be judged in this fashion:
2 Corinthians 5:10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
He even stressed to them that not even the angels were exempt from judgment for their bad behavior, and that the humans wouldn’t be, either:
2 Peter 2:4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into tartarus and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; 6 if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked 8 (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); 9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, 10 and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.
A great many such passages were written to warn and encourage the believers to “overcome” and to “endure to the end”, lest their faith should be in vain and their eternal destiny lost.
But then came the modern church business and the rush to get tithe payers in the door. It was necessary to modify the doctrinal foundation such as to make for a “bigger tent” into which more people would be attracted. Now the promise of eternal life isn’t just for the faithful who would endure righteously to the end; it is extended to anybody who would join the church and say he believed in Jesus. The focus of what is called “salvation” shifted from living a successful life as a servant and student of Yahweh and Yeshua to merely accomplishing some small number of initiatory steps, such as, for instance, reciting “The Sinner’s Prayer” and/or being baptized. Those who would do so are assured that their “salvation” has been secured, more or less. The doctrine of once-saved-always-saved-but-keeping-coming-to-church was invented to keep them coming with those tithes.
Arguments about the specifics of doctrine kept arising and endangered the church business, so the churches began to attack reason and logic and evidence-based thinking as an unspiritual activity that is to be avoided in deference to what was called “faith”—not the original faith of the Bible, mind you, for that was a matter of reliance on and obedience to God and Jesus. No, this new kind of faith called for them to hold fast, not to the actual words of God and Jesus, but to what they were being told that the Bible means. It was necessary to give them ways to deal with the cognitive dissonance that would result from the conflict between their new traditions and the original texts, so another interesting thing evolved in the churches: Things that had been explained by Jesus and his apostles were re-explained as still being mysterious and a great deal of effort was put into mystifying the religion. “God moves in a mysterious way” became a favorite, and the idea that one can somehow magically “know” things apart from having actual knowledge of them—this would prove essential. This is how a member can “know” that his eternal life is secured, even though the Bible warns him that his particular pattern of sins are a certain impediment to his invitation into the Holy City. He “knows” it because he has trained himself to “feel it in his heart”. What he has imagined in his own mind, he attributes to the very presence and affirmation of God therein.
In this system, “belief” is everything. Once a person claims to believe in Jesus, the rest of the details are more or less dispensable. So whether the rush is to get them to the altar or the baptistry, the goal of that rush is to get them to say “I believe”.
But there’s a huge problem with this: One can say “I believe” in a second, without ever answering the question as to what they believe in. Sure, the big prize in view is to confess that they believe “in Jesus”, but there’s more to this than meets the eye. The Bible has 1,000+ pages of information, and there’s no way a person can quickly survey all that information in order to decide whether he believes it all—and certainly not to decide whether he is willing and able to obey it all. Even so, they’re expected to state a belief in the Bible—a belief that they are in no position to declare responsibly. But this is not seen to be a problem.
In actuality, however, it’s a huge problem. In the rush to belief (and “membership”) many are taught to make such claims prematurely, and then they find themselves in several predicaments. Among them are these:
- They defend the Bible against critics without even understanding the books in it themselves.
- They are expected to repeat the assertion that their church is “Bible based” when they don’t even know—and could not possibly know—the degree to which this is true or untrue.
- They are expected to give an all-or-nothing endorsement of the Bible even though there may well be things in it that they would not agree with if they knew about them.
- They have signed off on hundreds of things—and not only have they not read them, but they don’t have any training in how to make good sense of them. They lack good hermeneutical sense, yet they are considered adequate to the task of endorsing the Bible.
- They have no idea about the process of translation and the differences between Bible versions. They have no concept of biases among the translators and the churches that sponsored them.
All these issues, however, are considered to be inconsequential because the really important goal has been accomplished: endorsement of and membership in the local church business.
This is why churches boil down the 1,000+ pages into a few bullet points of “What We Believe”: it makes it simpler for the initiate to sign off on.
And what do you get from this business scheme? You get millions and millions of “members” who are not qualified to understand the very Bible they endorse. Yet you teach them an air of adamancy and dogmatism about those few bullet points of doctrine, and you call their acceptance of it “faithfulness”, rewarding them with praise every time they do it. This teaches them to be incurious and irresponsible about their beliefs as they keep those tithe dollars coming.
You also get a considerable deemphasizing of matters of morality, as questions of morality tend to split groups and diminish membership. And this means you’ll find more and more church organizations where corruption takes hold among the leadership, for the members are desensitized to it and are ill-equipped to do much about it. Where the original Christians were instructed thus: Ephesians 5:11 Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them, the modern believer has been trained to keep his focus on the first two words of Matthew 7:
Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. 6 “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.
Never mind that Jesus expected his followers to be able to judge between a speck and a log, what is holy and what is unholy, who is a pig, etc., this modern church generation has got it whittled down to just the first two words, “Judge not.” This is their new gospel. And to this, it was necessary for them to redefine “grace” from something that caused the original Christians to work hard and to so “no” to ungodliness into something that continually exempts them from such works!
Even the churches that claim not to do this are doing it consistently. They let their leaders get away with habitual ungodliness. They disregard passages of scripture that are problematic for their preferred version of the religion. They will run off anyone who asks too many questions and raises too many objections, for it rocks their boat too much and endangers the continual success of the business venture. But of course, this is all done in the name of Jesus, and not in the name of business.
This all puts the sincere believer in quite a predicament—catching him between the facts of the Bible and the cold realities of the church business in which he has found himself entangled. If his curiosity over the texts prevails—and if his sense of obedience to God trumps his sense of obedience to the church—he will neither be welcome in time, nor wish to remain. He will discover that the church is not what it was advertised to be. And then he will have to struggle over what should be done about that. Most will simply move on to some other church, where they will be less likely to rock the boat again, even though it will need rocking.
A few, however, will come to understand in time that the Bible presents a vast network of facts that must be carefully considered and analyzed in order to understand just what happened and what was taught. In time, they will understand that what actually happened in Bible times bears little resemblance to what is practiced today in the churches. They will see that the modern church business is like most other businesses—-giving in to the typical temptations of over-promising and under-delivering, of skimping on quality to save on overhead while exaggerating the benefits of its products and services.
I do not know of a single church that is not guilty of this. Not one. And there’s a reason it is like it is—but nobody wants to know the reason. No, they’d rather make up reasons than to find out the real answer. That is the predicament that comes with the rush to belief. Here is what church members are trained to do:
- Suspend judgment and discernment
- Mystify what can be understood
- Claim to “know” what is not known
- Excuse bad behavior where God does not
- Declare belief before checking out the facts
- Be suspicious of fact, reason, and logic
- Give too much weight to the assertions of church leaders
As it happens, these qualities make for terrible students of the Bible.
