Posts tagged ‘Rachel Meyer’
Faith and Authority
I find people’s faith stories fascinating. Take, for instance, Rachel Meyer, who, in an article for the Huffington Post, chronicles her struggle of how she might be able to pass down her faith to her son.
She opens her piece by talking about a man she dated when she was in her early 20s. When she asked him whether or not he believed in God, he responded, “I believe in ME.” “I knew in that instant,” she writes, “it would never work between us.” Why? Well, she continues:
I am a person of deep faith: a preacher’s kid, a yoga teacher, and a meditation geek with a master’s degree in systematic theology. I’ve spent my whole life belly-deep in the spiritual world.
Her spiritual world, however, is not what many would expect. She sums up her creedal commitments by rattling off a litany of things she does not believe:
I don’t believe in original sin, or the pathological shame and guilt that comes with it. I don’t believe in hell, or that bodily desire gets us there. I don’t believe that God is gendered, or in the kind of sexist and homophobic theology that shuts out LGBTQIA+ folks. I don’t believe in substitutionary atonement or white supremacy. I don’t believe that nationalism should have anything to do with religion.
For the record, as a confessional Christian, I don’t believe in many of those things, either. I do believe in original sin. But I’m not big on pathological shame. I do believe in hell. But I don’t believe that bodily desire gets us there. I believe that rejecting God’s resurrected Son gets us there. I don’t believe that God is gendered per se, for He is spirit. But I do believe that He became incarnate as a man and invites us to approach Him as our Father. I don’t believe in shutting out LGBTQIA+ people – or anyone else, for that matter – but I do believe we must take seriously the sexual contours outlined in Scripture and consider that perhaps they are there for the sake of our safety and thriving. I most certainly do believe in the substitutionary atonement. And I most certainly loathe white supremacy. It is inimical to the very nature of who the Church is to be – the redeemed “from every nation, tribe, people, and language” (Revelation 7:9). A good portion of the fun of figuring out what you think about nationalism is figuring out how to define it, as this podcast from Arthur Brooks reminds us. But regardless of how you define nationalism and what you think of it, I most certainly believe that I am a member of God’s household before I am a citizen of any nation.
But behind our individual instances of agreement and disagreement lies some bigger questions: How does one decide what to believe? To what authority does one turn to shape one’s beliefs?
There is a canon of beliefs that Rachel Meyer wants to hand down to her son:
I still want my kid to grow up with an appreciation for high-church liturgy, for the holy space of grace that is a cathedral. I want him to know the selfless service of church ladies setting out homemade casseroles and Jell-O salads in the fellowship hall after baptisms and funerals. I want him to learn that Jesus – like Buddha and Muhammad – was a radical prophet who taught us how to live gently, wholeheartedly, out of love above all else, and to let that understanding cultivate a passion for social justice.
Okay. I agree that selflessness is critical – even to the Gospel itself. Gentleness is a member of the Spirit’s fruit. And concerning ourselves with justice in society is beautifully prophetic. But why are selflessness, gentleness, and social justice in while the substitutionary atonement is out? Rachel never quite answers these questions.
In the end, Rachel seems to have cobbled together a faith that is not based on much of anything besides her own affections and aversions. What she likes in faith, she keeps. What she doesn’t like, she trashes.
The humorist Anne Lamott once told the story of a priest friend of hers, Tom, who would say, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Tom is right. To be a person of faith is to be, among other things, a person under divine authority. Only a fool would believe that their own opinions and preferences would always match up with God’s commands and revelation. This is why, for millennia now, Christians have turned to the pages of Scripture to discover God’s commands and character, even when His commands and character unsettle us, puzzle us, or even offend us. We approach the pages of Holy Writ humbly, wondering what we have missed, what we must learn, and how can change.
If your God always agrees with you, then it’s safe to assume that the “god” you believe in is really just a thinly veiled version of you, which means that your god can’t help you, challenge you, stretch you, or save you because he is you. So why bother with him at all?
Perhaps Rachel has more in common with her old love interest than she lets on. “I believe in ME,” he said. It sounds like she could say the same thing, too.
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