Cultural Christianity

[Author's note: This post is a reprint of an article I wrote some years ago for a Student Ministry website.]

“Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.” – a desperate father

Thomas.  The Apostle Thomas.  Doubting Thomas.  I don’t think that there’s anyone else in the Bible who’s gotten such an undeserved bum rap from the Church through the ages.

For my own self, I find it easier to identify with Thomas and Peter than with James or John.  Men whose foibles and flaws are displayed for all of history to witness, for all of us to see and analyze through the ages.  For all of us to pass judgment on.

Look, here’s the deal: we’ve been living comfortably with the Resurrection for close to two thousand years now, and by golly, we’ve just gotten too used to the idea.  We look at Peter when he denied knowing Christ and think I’d have stood up for Him.  We see Thomas, standing firm in his unbelief at the news of their risen Master and think I’d have believed them.  After seeing Jesus do all the things that He did, I’d believe that He’d come back.  We’re all more than confident these days that Jesus could come bodily back from the dead; we don’t want to trust Him with our finances, our jobs, our children, our relationships, or many other aspects of our day to day lives, but by golly, He is risen!

Let’s look at it from Thomas’s perspective for just a moment.  He’s just spent the better part of three years following this guy around.  A fella who’s proven himself more powerful than disease, wiser than the most learned religious authorities, and who seems to regard physics only circumstantially.  He becomes more than a man to them, he becomes: Him.

I’ve grown up capitalizing my pronouns in regards to the Godhead.  I know of some Christians who don’t understand why, who don’t get it, some with some pretty good reasons as to why it’s not really necessary, but I keep doing it.  Why?  I suppose that to me it’s one more confession to the world about who Christ is.  It’s a subtle way that I can claim in this age of skepticism that Jesus is in fact . . . well, actually, I’m getting ahead of myself here.  We’re talking about Thomas.  I promise I’ll finish this thought, though, just bear with me.

In one of the made-for-TV movies about Jesus that came out a few years ago, Thomas was portrayed as a skeptical man, a man whose mouth was always set somewhere between mild anger and annoyance.  He was unconvinced about following this Jesus guy until Jesus healed a man in front of him.  Of course, even then, he seemed to be hanging around just to finally be able to say “Aha!” when something finally, inevitably went wrong.  In reality, we know very little about most of the Apostles from the actual Scriptures.  Tradition and some semi-reliable apocryphal sources hold more information, but the Inspired Word of God is sparing with its information.  But we do see one thing, one little thing, that I believe gives us a valuable insight into Thomas’s character, and it’s well before the Resurrection.

When Jesus was told that His friend Lazarus was sick He stayed where He was for two days, then told His apostles that they were going back to Judea.  They pointed out to Him, quite prudently as far as they were concerned, I’m sure, that the last time they’d been there, the Jews tried to stone Jesus.  Just a little thing.  Yeah, sure, Big Guy, you can turn water to wine and make blind men see, but c’mon, you’ve got bad P.R. in Judea.

All of them except for one.  “Then Thomas, who is called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with Him.’”  (John 11:16 NKJV)

I tend to think that Thomas was a pragmatist.  That somewhere along the line of following Jesus he came to the conclusion that this guy was the One that they’d been waiting for.  Not that he was the only one who had come to this conclusion (Luke 9:20), but nevertheless, he had come to believe it.  And then, a wrench was thrown into the works: Jesus was dead.

So how would a pragmatic man deal with this sort of thing? I think Thomas came more or less to the conclusion that he’d simply backed the wrong guy.  I mean, healing people and is a neat trick, and it’d probably be easy enough to apply the technique to one’s self, but you probably need to be alive to do it.  And so now what?

Hope is a funny thing.  All of us can carry it about in our hearts if we so choose.  It carries us through the hard times and it always bounces back from injury. Always.  It just comes down to this: are we going to pick it back up and put it in our hearts again?  If we do, it can just be ripped out again.  Thomas, still smarting from his recent injury, hears the words of his friends that the Master is alive and reacts, well, pragmatically.

The man was dead; Thomas, like many of the others, knew that.  They’d seen him die, they’d seen the body.  They’d buried him.  Hope if you want to, but I won’t believe it unless I know that it’s really Him.

There’s really a lot that the Bible doesn’t tell us, but as far as we know the other Apostles never told Jesus what Thomas’s criteria were for his belief, yet nevertheless  “Then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.’”  (John 20:27 NKJV)

At church last night we talked about this passage as I told some friends of what I was planning to write about for this article.  They both disagreed with me about what happened next, and I guess we won’t know until we can meet Thomas and ask him for ourselves, but I like to think that Thomas never did put his hand in the wounds.  That the the Man he saw standing before him, telling Thomas things that by all rights He shouldn’t know, was enough when you came right down to it.  But what we do know is what Thomas did next, and it was something that none of the other Apostles had ever done before.  And it was quite pragmatic, really.

“And Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” (John 20:28 NKJV)

Sure, people had respected Jesus; Peter had even acknowledged that He’d been sent by God, but no one, no one, save for Jesus Himself (John 8:58), had ever actually said that Jesus was God before.  That was blasphemy.  Unless, of course, it was true.

We serve a living Savior!  Thanks be to God for that, for a dead miracle man does no more good, but a risen Messiah has conquered death—and since He’s promised to take us with Him, what other response could we have?  There can then be only one proper answer when they say to us “He is risen!”

He is risen, indeed!

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it’s because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that’s the most revolutionary insight of all. - Erica Jong

So I give my new blog this pretentious name and promise blogtrocities in the name of faith, and what do we have so far: an intro, snark, and a recipe. Well my dear readers, all three of you, I have a bit to say on a topic theological and will now share my disjointed thoughts with you.

This topic came up recently in a forum for student ministers that I post on fairly regularly. The subject was on the fairly new policy of some schools to allow co-ed dorm rooms. I’m a pretty easy going guy, I think, and while I wouldn’t want my (theoretical) children to live in a room with a member of the opposite sex, I’m not dead-set against this rule as some are.

As a person who works in student ministry, particularly in the high school and junior high school ages, I don’t much care for it when people refer to teenagers as “kids”. Sometime after World War I, we decided, as a society, to give young people a sort of extended grace period in their transitions from youth to adulthood. Like all changes, there were some trade-offs in this, some good, some less so, but as a whole, I believe that it’s better for young people to have more time to figure out what it is that they’re supposed to do with their lives while we as a society have the capacity to allow them to do so. What this essentially means is that teenagers are not adults (as they essentially used to be little more than a century ago), nor are they children (as many still seem to insist that they are). So what are they? Something in between, and thusly should they be treated. The problem is this: so long as we tell teenagers to act like adults, but expect them to act like children, we’re going to be fighting an uphill battle. Ask any psychiatrist, drill sergeant, or leader of people and they will tell you that people have a tendency to become what those most influential in their lives expect them to become. So that’s my stance on the issue, okay? We all clear on that? Good, because the next thought should come to you very naturally: if high schoolers aren’t kids, then college students sure as hell aren’t. And frankly, it’s high time that we stopped treating them as such.

If you asked me if I thought that Christianity, as Jesus taught it, was good and true, I’d answer “yes” without hesitation. If you asked me If I thought whether what the average Western culture Christian church practiced was good and true, there’d be a lot more hesitation, and the “yes” would likely be some time in coming. Don’t get me wrong, the Christian church has done quite a bit for the benefit of society (the abolishment of slavery in Western cultures, the social elevation of women from property to citizens, and appropriately for this essay, the concept of higher education among those things), but here in America at least, we still have a very Puritanical view of sex. (Much more so that the Puritans, in fact, but that’s another rant.) And modern Western Evangelicals in particular have an almost jihad-like fervor to force these views on the general population, whether the general population wants/needs them or not.

While I believe that the Gospel is good and true, as I said before, one of the major factors that I see in the teachings of Christ is that you must come to Him yourself, and more to the point, Jesus taught that no amount of legal adherence could save a soul. No, the work of Christ is about wiling submission, and if a person does not decide themselves to acknowledge the deity of Christ, then no amount of rule following is going to make them change their mind. When the voters of Michigan decided a few years ago to legally define marriage as a union between “one man and one woman” there was not a surge of homosexual individuals who said “well, shoot, now I can’t marry my lover; I guess I’d better become a Christian”. People are not convinced to look into Christianity by being forced to follow our rules, they are drawn to Christ when they see those of us who claim to follow Him demonstrate His love and compassion for the hurting.

In the midst of all of these arguments, somebody pipes up with the comment that even if no sexual relationship is going on between the students, this is still the “appearance of evil”. For those of you not fluent in Christianese, the bit of doctrine alluded to comes from a single verse: 1 Thessalonians 5:22 which says, conveniently, “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” There. That’s nice, isn’t it? One small problem, it’s only the King James Version that uses the word “appearance” in the passage in question.

The King James Version of the Bible is pleasant to read aloud, but in terms of textual accuracy, translational reliability, and simple cultural relatability, it’s a mess. I checked several other translations (notably the NIV, the NKJV, and the NASB), and the result is the same: the passage tells the reader to simply abstain from evil itself, not its appearance.

As usual, I am predicting that I’ll need to clarify here what I’m not saying here. I am not saying that it’s a good idea for Christians to simply not care about how we are perceived by society, but if we are concerned about not appearing evil, then being involved in a sexual relationship is pretty far down on the average person’s list of what evil looks like. If we wish to avoid the appearance of evil, then I have a suggestion: the next time you’re thinking of how to deal with a particular issue, don’t think of it as an issue, but think instead about dealing with a single individual.

Individuals have a way of mucking up our pre-conceived notions. If instead of saying that X is bad, we ask ourselves “How would Jesus deal with a person involved in X”, or even better, “How would Jesus want me to deal with a person involved in X?” The answers that we would arrive at would often fly in the face of the way that we actually behave. Jesus advocated and demonstrated compassion and mercy in dealing with sinners and the people whom He had the least patience with were the religious muckity mucks who were full of themselves and thought they had it all together.

If we wish to know Him and make Him better known (and in the process, appear less evil, even appear good), then we must do the same.