Today I saw the church,

Laying on a stone table,

The vices of this world carved into her naked flesh,

Her blood was spilt upon this sinner’s alter,

Her arms were weak from luxurious living,

Eaten by disease and corruption.

Mourn, Christian! Weep and bitterly too!

Do you not see,

Do you not understand?

Do you see the Bride beaten and bloodied?

You, who would call her weak and ineffective.

She is you, Christian! The bride and the friend are one!

The body is the people, and the people are the body.

Why do you rage against her?

Why do you malign her with slurs and names?

Weep over her tortured body,

Laying before you.

Do not turn your head.

Stare into the face of pain and sorrow,

Of death and disease.

You are her. She is who you are.

Her wounds are your wounds.

Her pain, your pain.

Do not walk away from her.

Do not leave her in the gutter where her Beloved found her.

The dark rages against her,

“Change and the kingdoms of the earth will be yours!

I will lay before you men and women,

Children and the ancient,

If you will but turn away from the love of your youth.”

She is weak now, Christian.

See how she gasps.

Watch her breasts rise and fall, her face contorted with pain.

Do you understand now, Christian?

Do you see?

Do you understand?

She is dying.

Like her Beloved, the sins of this world were beaten into her body.

The hour is coming and has already come,

When the Bride of Christ will perish before the mighty onslaught of the dark.

The blackness will consume her and she will follow the path of her Lover into Hell.

And there she will stay, Knowing the pain and torment He felt.

Weep for her! Mourn the death that is to come!

This is the way the Church dies,

This is the way the Church dies,

This is the way the Church dies,

Not with a war, but His Coming,

When she will live again.

      From an essay written by Matthew Fox entitled, "On Being a Postdenominational Priest in a Postdenominational Era" from the book, "The Emergering Christian Way":

     Before I begin, I want to make a rather important clarification. I am not arguing with this author or anyone who agrees with him. That is not my point in writing this. My point is to talk to Christians, and only Christians. I am not looking for a fight. If you are reading this and you at some time find a point of disagreement, by all means, post your comments. I will probably respond and expect responses from you. Feel free to flame. My feelings won't be hurt.

      "The Emerging Christian Way" is a collection of essays written by emerging theologians and philosophers. Many have doctorates of theology and philosophy and have written profusely. Many, like Fox, have been or are currently, at the time of the book's writing, involved in the church in some position or another.

     Honestly, I have no idea where we got this book. I looked at my bookshelf one day and saw this book sitting on the shelf. It's possible I had to read it when I took my course in Christian Thought or Senior Seminar. My professor was very much against the emergent, sometimes called, I believe, 'postconservative' movement.

      Be that as it may, I picked it up and have barely put it down. Pen in hand, I pick my way through the various essays on emergent thought; thoughts such as "...the Christian life (is) a relationship with God as known through Jesus Christ..." (p. 18) or "...the opening verses of John's, the Logos, which was in the beginning both present with God and belonging to the essence of God was the 'true Light' which gives light to every human being who 'comes into the world.'" (p. 54)

     Skimming the surface, these passages seem rather familar. Christians often talk of the Christian life as a relationship between us and God through Jesus. And we would definitely nod our heads at the thought that the Logos was with God. However, a deeper examination of these passages shows what the above quotation by Fox looks like in practice.

     Take the 'Christian life' passage from above. Written by Marcus Borg in the essay, "An Emerging Christian Way," this particular passage speaks about a "transformation-centered paradigm" that "...is not very much about believing a set of claims to be true, but about a path, a way of transformation that leads people to God and to participation in the passion of God." (p. 18)

     This exposes one of the most basic misconceptions of the modern era; religion is a community of people who believe the same set of "...relative... man-made... socially-constructed realities..." (p. 108) There is no truth within these religions, just a group of men and women who happen to enjoy these particular sets of beliefs. Religion, then, is regarded a simply a taste or a fancy, something to be enjoyed and when you find something you dislike, drop it and find something else you're happy with. Oddly enough, this is also the current culture's misunderstanding of marriage, but that's another post.

     We Christians, however, do not regard religion as just one of many truths, but rather religion is all of us on this planet scurrying to understand the Truth. We are all searching for it and religion is our taking a stab at it. Under this definition of religion, as a search for absolute, ultimate, objective reality, even atheism is a religion.

     This definition does not mean that there are many possible truths. There is one Truth, whether that truth is "there is a cosmic entitiy guiding the history and development of our world so that eventually we can all rejoin it as the Source of all things,"  "there is a God who desires sacrifice and requires that everyone must convert or die," or "a God who sent His own Son to earth to live, allow Himself to die, only to be raised again and ascend into Heaven" we are all searching for it, and only one is closer to the Truth. Indeed, if all of them were true, we would expect more agreement on particulars as well as the whole, since they would all be an expression of ultimate reality.

     Borg seems to assert the equality of all religions as valid sources of truth by his statement "God as known through Jesus Christ." What this means is this; Christ understood God from a particular vantage point, a unique view, but his (I use lower case to distinguish the idea of the historical Jesus [he] with the real, actual Jesus of history, the Biblical Jesus [He]) view was just one of many equally valid points of view.

      I could write an entire post just about this, but for the sake of some semblance of brevity, I will leave that for another time.

     The other passage quoted above is a re-imagining of John 1, one of my personally favorite passages:

       This is one of my favorite passages, not just because verse one is the only verse I can quote in halting Greek, but also because of two other things; firstly, it is a passionate description of Jesus (...The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.) and, secondly, it gives us a peek at the relationship between Christ and God before the world was made (He was with God in the beginning and the entire universe, everything we see, was made through Him). What an intimate and undeserved glimpse into history before there was time!

     However, Tom Harpur, who wrote this essay entitled "New Creeds", prefers to understand this passage in the Gospel as something else than what John intended. Note the progression; the Logos is "...belonging to the essence of God..." which "... gives its light to every human being..." The next paragraph on the same page describes the "true Light" as "...the divine light (which is) bequeathed to every human being at birth..." This definition radically misunderstands the point of the first five verses of John, that the Logos was a person, who "...all things were... made... and without... was not any thing made that was made..." The Logos is a person, not a divine light which is given to everyone who ever lived. It was a unique individual who, as is obvious from the use of the third-person pronoun, 'he.' The Logos was not "...belonging to the same essence of God..." was rather was God.

     This passage in Greek is thus; εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον και θεος ην ο λογος and I really hope Xanga supports Greek scripts. Now, in English spelling the verse is 'en arche en ho logos kai ho logos en pros tov theon kai theos en ho logos.' Literally, "in beginning was the word (logos) and the word was with God and God was the word." That last phrase "and God was the word" denotes an ontological equality. The Word and God are the same, but obviously and mysteriously separate since the same being cannot be with itself and John reiterates that in verse 2.

     From both of these examples we see what Fox meant by "take what is worth saving from the burning building of Western ecclesial history and forge a simpler, more radical spiritual effort." Essentially, he is calling for a stripping of the words, practices, and traditions of the modern church in order that we might make a fresh religion, full of the same looking things but with meanings a far distance from their origin. That is why he says, when speaking of traditions, he proclaims, "they can be mined for their wisom; then let go of." (p. 110)

     That is one of the largest and most powerful threats to conservative (not politically Conservative only) evangelical Christianity. The men and women of the Emergent way sound like us and its therefore hard to distinguish between the two camps; those that believe in a literal, factual, unerring Bible and those that believe the Bible is merely one sacred book of many.

     But, we must distinguish between the two. We must not let the bride of Christ be raped and then tossed away into an alley, gasping and alone. That is not the way we should treat the bride of Christ. The men of Christianity are the bridegrooms of Christ and we must protect her from these pillagers. Christian women are the bridesmaids and are there to hold the bride's hand through the tumultous times until the bridegroom comes. And at that time we will diminish as they increase. Let us not disappoint the Groom. Let's keep our lamps full and lit. Let us not ignore the Master's invitation to the marriage feast. Let us be on our guard.

Politically provocative talk show host Bill Maher skewers the current state of organized religion in this documentary that derives its title from a blend of the words "religion" and "ridiculous." Making stops in Jerusalem, the Vatican and other holy destinations, Maher travels the world to talk to believers from a variety of faiths to find out why they're so sure their religion is right -- and why they're so certain others are wrong.

My point in writing this is to use the education I received at school and, Lord willing, disseminate that information to others in a clear and relevant way. “Religulous” attempts to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of religion, but as a Christian, my heart burns to show that Christianity is, at the very least, a legitimate worldview, neither irrational nor illogical. At the most, Christianity is the one way to God. It is true. It is whole. It is beautiful and awe inspiring. It is powerful and its God is terrible and unequaled in the heavens or earth. That is my mind. I am unabashedly Christian; unapologetically, unrelentingly Christian. And my ultimate desire for this piece of writing is to glorify that awesome, terrible, beautiful, good God.

 Intro

 The Evolution of Humanity - Maher's opens up the film standing in Meggido and explaining that Revelations says this is the place where Jesus will come before God destroys the world. But, he says, Revelations was written at a time when only God could destroy the earth. Now man has that ability with nuclear warfare and environmental pollution because “…before man figured out how to be rational or peaceful, it figured out nuclear weapons and how to pollute on a catastrophic scale.” In other words, before the Great Scientific Age we live in now, those who lived Pre-1900’s were irrational and warlike. Science and education have brought about a golden age of peace and knowledge that has liberated those who adopt its tenants of skepticism and humanism.

This seems like a type of ideological Darwinism. The more humanity grows in knowledge the more peaceful it will become. It’s a utopian kind of idea. Eventually, science will grant us the peace we seek. We have yet, of course, to see this idea proven right. Nazi doctors advanced our medical knowledge, yet did so by horrendously torturing and killing their patients.

Knowledge and science have little to no bearing upon ethics. Morality has never been strengthened by scientific discovery. Peace cannot be brought by education. Idiots and geniuses both can both be monsters, often times the geniuses are the worst kind.

 A Gentle Roasting

He starts the film by explaining that his stand-up routine back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s was a gentle roasting of religion. The jokes shown on the film were actually pretty funny, but what he’s doing is setting the tone for the whole film. He wants people to understand that he does not hate religion; he just likes poking fun at it like an older brother would to a younger brother.

Most of the reviews I have read about this movie contradict this. He attacks the followers of religions and ridicules their beliefs. We will see if this is the case or not.

 Asking the Wrong People

In Raleigh, North Carolina he goes to a trucker’s church. The building is a cheap structure, barely wide enough for four rows of chairs. He poses a series of questions to these truckers, such as, why are the Virgin Birth and Original Sin not found in the Bible.

                I think it was unfair, first of all, to talk to a group of individuals who have had no formal training in theology or any degree in Bible. That does not mean that I think truckers are idiots. Two of my uncles are truckers and would surely beat that idea out of me. What I mean is that you would not go to a factory worker and ask him, “How can you be sure that egg crate is not going to drop through the floor given the fact that an atom is over 99% space?” A factory worker has no education in physics and cannot know that answer, unless he has a particular interest in that area. He merely knows through experience and relies on that experience to live.

These truckers are the same. They do not know the answer to particular questions, such as “What were the criteria for the canonicity of Scripture set forth by the council at Carthage?” or “Why do we have some stories in the Synoptic Gospels that are not present in the others?” These truckers do not need to know these things in order to live like Christ. They accept by faith that this is the way things are. They do not need to know how the Bible came to be in order to live it out.

Secondly, the names of the concepts, Virgin Birth and Original Sin, are not found in the Bible, that is true. These names are merely what we call them in order to streamline discussion and ease learning. Darwin never called his ideas Darwinism, yet when one says that in any circle, those listening understand what one is saying.

That said, these two concepts are found in the Bible. Original Sin obviously comes from when Adam and Eve first sinned. We call it “Original” because it was the first. The Virgin Birth obviously gets its name from the fact that Mary, who was a virgin, gave birth to Jesus. This fact is supported by Mary’s own lips when the angel visited her, claiming that she’d bear a son, “"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:35) These are not addressed by name in the Bible, but the concept is clearly present.

The Journalistic Gospels

He levels an attack against the agreement of the Gospels with each other,  “I’m surprised that things that are very important to the story, like the Virgin Birth, isn’t in all four of them.” He calls the authors of the Gospels “biographers,” immediately catapulting the existence of the Gospels into the realm of a chronological account of the series of events in a person’s life. Later he likens the Gospel authors as reporters and emphatically states, “What kind of editor looks at the facts and goes, uhh, ‘Yeah, but take out the thing about the Virgin Birth. That’s not interesting’?”

                The Gospel writers were not biographers, journalists nor editors. The Gospels are not biographies. The authors were telling stories about Jesus to explain to others who he was and what he was about. The authors left out details that were not part of their reasons for writing. John’s Gospel concentrated on Christ’s divinity while Matthew focused on his humanity. Mark records Jesus’ ministry, while Luke wrote in order to instruct Theophilus about the things he has “…been taught.” (Luke 1:4) The writer’s had criteria’s and used each other for source material. One author need not say what another did, unless he had a reason.

                The same is true of even journalistic endeavors. A journalist, who’s doing the human side of a military attack on a town, would interview those wounded, scared, or otherwise affected by the action. A journalist wishing to describe the sheer enormity of the devastation would report on the buildings destroyed and those in the hospitals. One doing a report on the politics behind the assault may not even be present in the city, but rather talking to the leaders of both sides. Yet all three of these journalists would be discussing the same story, but from different angles and leaving things out which the other would include. Even the editors themselves would find the politics “uninteresting” if the story was about the people.

                Maher’s criterion for the accuracy of the Gospels is unrealistic in the real world. He applies that criteria, it seems to me, in order to make the Gospels fallacious. His worldview does not allow the Gospels to be correct.

Money

The Rich Jesus - For the first time in this movie, Maher’s and I are on the same side. He is dialoguing, as much as Maher’s allows people to talk, with a minister who wears fine jewelry and lizard shoes and says that Jesus was rich, wore fine linen, and did not preach against being rich. The man states, “But now, things like houses and cars and clothes and money, they come as a result of seeking God first.”

I am pretty sure this preacher is of the Prosperity Gospel strain and it’s refreshing to see someone critiquing this rather arrogant and God-demeaning theology. This needs to be done. Christians are not promised financial security. They are promised security from Satan and Hell. Financial security comes from not being wasteful and being sober-minded, but not because God promised us money.

I am, though, concerned that the point of this interview was to paint all ministers with the same brush of greed. Yes, there are some ministers who will sheer their flocks for their fleece, but not all and, I would venture, not a majority. I am sick that of the ministers who do, for it gives all ministers a bad name.

Homosexuality

Inevitably, the subject matter turned to homosexuality. I say ‘inevitably’ because if there’s something Christianity is known for it is its stance against homosexuality. He meets a Franciscan monk who says what the “…Bible meant to say...” was that if you are born a homosexual you are to stay that way. No Scriptural basis, no arguments. The clips starts, the statement is made, the clip ends.

He then visits a place called Exchange Ministries and meets with a man who was once homosexual. Any fragment of a notion that Maher’s is trying to elicit respectful dialogue with those he disagrees with dies when he says, “…you’re, I guess we would say, ‘ex-gay.’ You used to be gay, and then you married someone who used to be a lesbian and you have three children and I guess the jury is out on them,” with a very smug tone edging his voice. The man, so the editing would suggest, merely stares speechlessly at him and Maher’s continues and sums up the ministry by stating that it’s a place where people can come to reform.  The man replies that it is and, very often, those who come often go back to what they came out of. “Because they’re gay!” Maher’s chuckles. “I believe that it is sin,” the man replies. Maher’s draws an antipodes line, “Excuse me, but don’t you have it, no pun intended, ass-backwards?” making an obvious reference to anal sex, which is a position generally attributed to homosexual men.

Until this point, I could almost imagine sitting down and having a straightforward and, hopefully, fun dialogue with this man if I were to ever meet him. However, after making fun of a man who believes so strongly that the temptations he undoubtedly deals with everyday are wrong, Maher’s true purpose in this film comes out; not intellectual dialogue, but holding these sincere people up to ridicule. He is not out to discover answers, as he first stated in the film. He is ridiculing those with a faith he does not possess.

Other Religions

He then visits with other religions, such as Mormonism, Judaism, and Le Gracia Y El Apostolado, which is run by a man who believes that he is Jesus as Man in the Second Coming. He also visits the Church of Canthianism, which is a church centered on religious experiences induced by, you got it, marijuana. He also goes after Islams for, of course, their violent tendencies. He treats everyone with the same ridicule and vitriol he treated Christianity with. He pokes fun, interrupts when someone is trying to answer a question, and attempts to keep control of the conversation by these methods.

End Times

“Religion must die for mankind to live,” so he states in the middle of Megiddo.  “The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state, not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken...” He claims that doubt is humble, it is the only way to live life. He equates rationalism with being not religious. “Grow up, or die,” he commands as the film draws to a close.

However, what Maher is trying to seed is not doubt, but a irrational skepticism fueled by his adversity towards religion. He makes little to no philosophical or theological arguments, and those that might be such are never given a chance to respond. He is not positing doubt, he is positing a worldview in which religion is absurd because it is. No other reason. People are crazy for believing in God or a god because only crazy people would believe there is God or a god.

 Conclusion

 At the beginning of the film, Bill Maher claims to want to understand why people believe in what they cannot see, but by the end of the movie you understand that from the beginning he merely wished to cast his brand of skeptical doubt upon all religions. Not to understand, but to defame. He does not singularly attack Christianity, but takes an ecumenical approach, lambasting all religions, eventually coming to the conclusion that religious belief is a neurological malfunction, a sickness of the brain. At the start of the film, he says 16% of Americans claim to be completely non-religious.  The battlecry of the film is “Rise up, those who are too scared to admit they are atheists or agnostics and rally against the homicidal and self-destructive idea that there’s a higher power!” He assumes that the number of atheists and agnostics is so low because of fear.

In the end, this documentary is a humanistic diatribe against those crazy enough to believe in a religion. And the only reason they are crazy is because they believe and only a crazy person would believe. People do not hear God because there is no God. Religious people are irrational because being religious is irrational. And that is the main argument of the film; a circular argument which allows no dialogue between believers of a faith and non-believers. It’s a bigoted diatribe against religion. No honest-to-goodness dialogues. No straightforward asking of questions and expecting responses. His only motivation for this film is to deride peoples of faith.

I think Christians should watch this movie for two reasons. The first being that Christians should not be scared or shy away from these kinds of films which seek to destroy their faith. These films are faith-testers, existing for the singular purpose of making God’s people stronger. However, do not watch these films with an air of superiority. Watch them humbly, hurting for those who are still so lost in the lies they were born into. Pray, if God moves you to, but do not fear.

Secondly, watch these films because these are the arguments you will run into in your daily lives. For those who work with non-believers this is especially important. Non-believers will use the material of these films to shroud themselves, protected by your supposedly irrational questions and answers. Use these films as a soldier would use the battle plans of the enemy to their advantage. Start forming answers, research, seek out the wisdom of pastors, teachers, mentors. Start building arguments and know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why you believe the things you do. Doing this will not kill your faith, it will strengthen it.