It is almost unbearable. In any major city — and even some small towns — you will inevitably encounter someone on a street corner pitching their version of Christianity. It’s manipulative. It’s angry. And it plays to our fears. It seems that the louder they are, the scarier their version of Christianity is. The loudest have megaphones and great, big signs with scary (even hateful) messages on them. Does it seem to you that Christianity is a religion based on fear?
We tell our children over and over to be nice to the other children on the playground. We teach them not to hurt others. We teach them to express their frustration in constructive ways, but never to take it out on another in anger. And the stakes are high, right? If they don’t follow these teachings, they might become the bully. Why do we hold our children to a higher standard than God?
What would it look like for people to actually start living as though their God could never dominate? What would it look like for people to start living as though their God’s power was in weakness? What if weakness is what it is all about? We would rid ourselves of a lot of hurt.
Christianity has been presented as the final “item” that will fulfill humans in a more eternal, everlasting way. Yet, we are seeing the myth of fulfillment in the ways people are leaving churches in higher numbers than ever before. The story of God that a majority of Christians are telling is simply perpetuating the cycle of idolatry that Rollins describes in this book: recognition of lack, pursuit of fulfilling idol, momentary satisfaction, recognition of lack, etc, etc.
We hear preachers from more evangelical and conservative traditions talk a lot about Original Sin, essentially saying that there is nothing we can do about it, but we just inherited these fatal flaws. And without their solution to sin, we die in eternal conscious torment in hell and live unfulfilled lives. Does that really happen? Probably not. But their message has poisoned the water as we read these Genesis texts. So we need to reclaim them, as we have done this week.