I’ve been tagged by David Keen with a rather good, if provocative meme.
List 5 doctrines that are taught within the Christian church that you believe to be deeply de-Christian.
There’s clearly some flexibility on the word “doctrine” here, to include some actual practices with ideological or theological implications. I shall try also to broaden my scope across the Church, and not confine it only to those parts I know best. I suspect we shall, as this meme develops, see some repetition.
1. The Immaculate Conception. This is the single most misguided development of Roman teaching. It takes a strong Augustinian line on grace, that God was always working to prepare Mary so that she could freely give her predestined “yes” to God, and distorts it into a heresy that removes Jesus from ordinary humanity. It gives the mother of God a lead-lined womb that insulates her son from the radioactive contamination of human sin, and removes him from us ordinary mortals, for it is no longer our humanity which he takes.
2. God hates sin. He may love you, but he hates sin even more, and unless you do exactly what he says (and only if you’re one of the lucky elect ones) you will burn for ever in eternal torment. God loves you, but he really, really hates sin. The concentration of the Church on God’s hatred of sin, and Augustine’s ghastly massa damnata theory of humanity, usually ends up implicitly denying the love of God, or at least demoting it to one of his less obvious characteristics.
3. Adjectivizing “Christian”. There are a few places where Christian may be a useful adjective: Christian Church (although nobody agrees which one that is), Christian Bible (although Christians disagree on its content) and Christian doctrine (although some Christians doctrine isn’t). Beyond those rather contested uses, it is a ghastly adjective: Christian art, Christian music, Christian books and bookshops, and so on. Sticking the adjective Christian in front of something does not make it good. In fact, it often signals the trite and trashy, and the triumph of tribalism over taste.
4. Social Trinitarianism. Well, not per se, but the way in which it increasingly gets talked about as a model for the Church’s communion. I am amazed at the number of people who in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have suddenly developed detailed descriptions of the internal relationships of the Trinity, and insist that all we have to do is model the home life of our dear old God. We do not know this stuff. Some speculation may be prayerfully and theologically helpful. But blunt assertions about how the inner-Trinitarian life of the Godhead works are arrogant rubbish that totally destroys the mystery of God.
5. Justification by “faith”. Not the Pauline version, and not even the Lutheran version which is, of course, a complete misreading of Paul, and has at its worst fed not only anti-nomianism but a far more destructive anti-Semitism. No – the Pauline version is obviously right, and the Lutheran has helped a lot of people some of the time. What I have in mind here is the modern evangelical version exemplified by those who think Tom Wright is of the devil, or worse, catholic. In this version you are justified by having the right doctrine of justification. Being justified by the doctrine of justification by faith is a ghastly distortion that divides one Christian from another, and so is the precise opposite of the way Paul used his original doctrine to try to unite people across the Greek-Judahite divide.
Wow, it feels good to get that of my chest. And I did it all without a mention of Red-Letter Bibles (one of David’s per peeves). Then again, I have already railed against that abomination here and here, for example.
Anyway, it must be someone else’s turn. I tag Justin Lewis-Anthony, Maggi Dawn, Mike Whitenton, Scott Bailey and David Ker.
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This is getting interesting! My two penn’orth:
– if the immaculate conception really was a key doctrine, it would be taught in the Bible. It isn’t.
– If Mary herself has to be free from sin in order to bear Jesus, then I can’t see how she escapes that unless her mum, in turn, is free from sin – that then requires a whole lineage back to Sarah herself.
– if Mary is free from sin before the birth of the Saviour, what do we need the Saviour for?
The official answer to the last question, David, comes from Doctor Who: “people think of time as a linear thing, but it’s really more of a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey sort of thing”. So Mary’s only freed from sin because Jesus has already been born, lived, died and risen again for her in the future. The pope just got there a few decades ahead of HG Wells.
wibbly-wobbly – lovely! Entangled with Christ – a whole new theory of quantum theology. My response to this fascinating dialogue is here. I think I conclude that each of us is to be a mother of God, a bearer of Christ, perpetually virgin.
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