Recovering Evangelicals #149 – Creating a new Christian worldview
A week after Easter 2024, and in response to questions from our listeners, we discuss a whole new perspective on who Jesus was, and what he gave the Jews, and the world, when he died on the cross.
Several members of our private Facebook Discussion Group asked us to explain how we’ve been able to reject so much of our Evangelical faith, and yet still hold a worldview that we can call Christian.
We first compared Evangelicalism to a crystalline figurine: well-crafted and beautiful, but brittle. Great to look at, but absolutely not up to being handled too roughly: if you test its limits by asking questions and entertaining certain “what if ….” scenarios, the crystalline figurine starts to fragment. And it seems that cracks always form in the exact same places for everyone who walks down this “slippery slope”: scientific challenges … Christian exclusivism …. inerrancy/infallibility ….. Penal Substitutionary Atonement and eternal conscious torment in Hell …. these are all the same fault lines that everyone finds.
But Christian faith doesn’t have to take that crystalline form: there are other ways to hold a Christian faith. The concept of “God” doesn’t have to look like what you were taught in Sunday school and youth group, or by your parents. Divine interaction with humans doesn’t have to look like the stories you were told: overly literal readings from ancient Jewish texts. It is possible to completely set aside a traditional Evangelical form of faith and still have a sincere Christian faith.
I gave one example: how my perspective on Easter is now completely different. My new understanding of that critical event no longer needs to be shrouded in the supernatural or superstition. The details given to us in the Gospel accounts themselves can be re-interpreted in a way that is 100% rational historically and scientifically, and yet still delivers a profoundly inspirational punch.
The Easter story is a purely Jewish event. A Jewish story. When you carefully read the story of Jesus in the Gospel accounts, without imposing a modern Western Christian worldview on it, it’s all about a Jewish Messiah coming to liberate a captive nation of Israel. Not a cosmic story of blood-spilling to pay the way into an eternal bliss in heaven (and thus avoid an eternal conscious torment in hell). This is how THEY spoke about it …. how THEY saw it. Including Jesus himself, according to his own words, and the impact that his message had on his listeners. We 21st century Western/Christian people, wearing our modern Evangelical glasses, interpret many of the things that Jesus said in a way completely different from the meaning those words would have had for 1st century Jews.
We talked a bit about how Jesus identified fully with the label “Son of Man,” rather than “the Son of God” (in fact, he shunned that latter label), and how this label referred to a figure in one of the prophet Daniel’s visions, a vision of a human being elevated to a new position in the courts of heaven. That said, though, it seems that even Jesus himself may not have understood the path he was taking: how/why a Jewish Messiah was supposed to capitulate to the Roman Empire and the Jewish leaders. Were these latest developments — the crucifixion especially — really part of the plan?
While he was at it — preaching his Jewish Messiah message — Jesus also taught a universal message of love, liberation, sharing, getting along, seeing others as equal … even if it kills you.
I can FULLY accept all of that as factual, historical, and 100% believable. And yet it’s also inspirational. As the non-believing historian Tom Holland concludes, modern Western society is founded on Christian teachings. Jesus was the inflection point in human history. Good can triumph over evil, even through passive resistance: Ghandi in 1930s in India, Martin Luther King in 1965 in Selma Alabama, and Desmond Tutu in the mid-80s, standing up to apartheid in South Africa, all took a page out of that Jesus story, and made it part of their own. Trying to bring heaven to earth. I can climb on board with that message, try to make it my own guiding principle, all without bringing in any emotional or theological baggage from my Evangelical upbringing.
Even atheists and anti-theists can take that approach to the Jesus story.
But then I show how it’s possible to take those steps a bit further: to run the ramp of reason before taking a leap of faith. I can meditate on that story while remaining open to greater possibilities. I’m still open to the idea of a God …. something much bigger than the Big Daddy that I learned about in my Evangelical world. And to the possibility that that something takes an interest in us, in much the same way that I might show interest in a snail crawling along a gravelly bike path, and compassionately move it off the path so it doesn’t get crushed. So maybe that higher being might have used that Jewish guy spreading a message of love and liberation, to nudge our species a bit further along on our journey up the evolutionary ladder.
Why not? Because that sounds too Evangelical? Or because it sounds more rational to say that we’re completely alone in the universe?
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #82, where we talked in detail specifically about Jesus being the Jewish Messiah, or to our series of other episodes in which we build a whole new Christian worldview.
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