I should also say as a disclaimer, that my opinions do not reflect +Chris’s exactly, though my opinions would not be what they are without his! So don’t go hounding the bishop about my heresies 😉.

Also, if you want to read the transcript for this episode, I have attached it as a publicly available PDF, as well as a downloadable file:

"Going to God in His Hour of Need" (Google Drive link)

Jesus Is Tested in the Wilderness

“Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.’ Jesus answered, ‘It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down. For it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you, / and they will lift you up in their hands, / so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, ‘It is also written: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Away from me, Satan! For it is written: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.”’ Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

[Episode transcription]

Maybe I forgot because I grew up in it, but Christianity is very, very strange. My pastor wore a nice collared shirt, and we wore OshKosh polos and sundresses and little slippers and loafers. The worship was melodic, four chord pop-rock songs. We had a nice red carpet in the sanctuary and a potluck once or twice a month. And we just happened to read stories about the creator of the entire universe and His followers, from this very old book called the Bible.

For 45 minutes every week, we listened to stories about an Ancient Near Eastern people group called the Israelites, who lived a long, long time ago; and the Gentiles, who also lived a long, long time ago; and a dozen other tribes, who also lived a long, long time ago. And we also listened to stories of a man named Jesus who was literally God, whose real name was Yeshua, which translates in English as “Joshua,” which was, way back then and still kinda now, a super common name — like John or Jennifer. And every week we’d passively nod along as our pastor told us that the literal God of the universe had a real son, who was also God, whose name like was like John or Jennifer, and that this Human God walked around with people and cooked fish, ate bread, raised dead people to life, and cast out demons then put them into pigs — and we all agreed that this was not the strangest thing we’ve ever heard.

If the Human God, John-Jennifer, wasn’t an already strange claim, how about the time that John-Jennifer’s Dad, Yahweh, wanted to kill a man because the man’s son still has a small piece of flesh around his penis. Exodus 4:24-26: “On the way, at a place where [Moses, Zipporah, and their son] spent the night, the Lord met [Moses] and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, touched [Moses’] feet with it, and said, ‘Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!’ So [God] let [Moses] alone.”

God, G-O-D, the Cosmic O-G, literally wanted to kill a man living in North Africa, because he had failed to remove the foreskin from his son’s penis. God, G-O-D, the one who Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote 1.8 million words about, and whose name is inscribed on every U.S. dollar — was ready to slaughter a man on the basis of his son’s anatomical makeup. I will not be hearing from anyone who thinks Vishnu or Brahma or whichever deity you think is absurdly weird, is any less weird than Yahweh and His son, John-Jennifer.

Unless you think that one story is the sum total of weirdness in the Bible, how about the time that a prophet of God summoned not one, but two female bears to murder some children after they made fun of his haircut. 2 Kings 2:22-24: “[Elisha] went up to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, ‘Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!’ When [Elisha] turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.”

To recap, a man who can perform real miracles and claims to speak for God, was insulted by a few dozen kids, so he curses the boys and they are viciously mauled to death. Y’all! There is no pastel shirt or carpet color or potluck that can make these stories palatable to middle class fancies.

And then there is the Holy Ghost, who the more polite among us prefer to call The Holy Spirit. Your pastor tells you that The Holy Ghost is also God, like Yahweh and John-Jennifer, and is kinda like the Force in Star Wars, but no one really knows what’s going on with Him. Sometimes this Ghost causes people to fall over in a sort of ecstatic spiritual seizure, and sometimes this Ghost is credited with electing Republicans or healing babies from the whooping cough, or stopping and causing rainfall. And still we pose outside of our churches on Easter morning with our families, framed by flowers, and all pretend like Christianity is as normal and commonplace as high school football.

I don’t want to come off as insulting or dismissive or thoughtless — because I think I kinda believe a lot of this. But at this point in my life, I refuse to leave the profound oddity of Christianity and the Bible left unstated. Maybe you know what to do with those stories. But I don’t. And the moment I think I do know what to do with them, I remind myself: You are literally finding devotional significance in a bald-headed, she-bear commanding prophet, and a bloodthirsty God who has it out for foreskin. How can that ever stop being strange — no matter the theological silver lining?

And that’s it. That’s all I have to say, ha. I guess I just want everyone to stop pretending and start recognizing all this for what it is, which is profoundly weird, and somehow true. Most of it, at least, Or only some of it. But that’s for another podcast.

This is my first attempt at a less polished, more stream of conscious podcast. I’m calling it a spiritual diary. The intention of the diary is to sort my thoughts out about my own life, then transcribe, record, and publish those for anyone interested.

The first entry is about my current spiritual state and how it feels like a Copernican revolution. I am rethinking a lot right now, and I feel somewhat anxious about it. I have had these questions before, but never have they felt this serious, this weighty. Like I say, the nausea comes from a suspicion of object and method. Is all this real? Can I know it as real? Those sorts of questions, in a more poetic form.

I appreciate your attention, as always. Thanks for being here.

7 August 2023

[Episode transcription]

Recently, all God-talk has hit my ear in a minor key. The resurrection, the ascension, the hope in the life to come: E-minor, all of it. I don’t know when it began, but I suspect it’s early onset cynicism—a common post-graduate disease that infects the host with a constant suspicion of the absolute and the cheap, of which there is no cure (except maybe kids or marriage or psilocybin, or all the other spiritually ecstatic events that cause the scales to fall from one’s eyes). But I am blind, for now, and my world grows darker still. Maybe this is what all those people felt like when Copernicus told them that despite their most basic intuitions, the world as they perceived it to be, was wrong—false, pigheaded, a total illusion. The sun doesn’t revolve around our planet, despite seeing it do so everyday while feeding the chickens. We are not at the center of all this. We are at the edge. We are not even supporting actors on the vast cosmic stage. I imagine the world grew cold when Copernicus first diagramed the position of the sun. The blood-orange beginning of the day begins to burn off the night’s dew, and you wake with the sun, with a sort of shivering nausea, quietly wondering what else is wrong, pigheaded, a total illusion. 

That’s been church, lately: a waking, shivering nausea, brought on by a suspicion of the absolute. But it’s not only a suspicion of the absolute, like a child searching for her father, knowing, hoping, betting that he’s just around the corner. This is a suspicion of being able to even locate Father, a fear of genuine absence, augmented by epistemic inability. The child slips into the river and is swept away, unable to reach the shore, her cries drowned out by the foaming crush. “Help, help,” a plea for rescue. A plea for presence. A suspicion of both method and object. How do I know that Father is coming back to set all this right? That there exists, tucked somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, a pair of chromosomes belonging to a 1st century man named Jesus? That my wife will be raised from the dead with me? That I can, in some meaningful way, believe all this?

Early onset cynicism, like I said. It feels chronic, and it probably is. But that’s where I am. I’m seeing the sun rise and burn the day’s dew, then set into the ink of night—but I am seeing the sun not as a cruel vulture, circling my plot of earth, seeking to devour my most basic assumptions, but as the axis around which my world orbits. All I know is that I am not the sun. I am not the center. I am in orbit. I am contingent. Something beyond all this is lifting and sustaining and holding my life, my questions. And in this orbit I am graced with the gravity for my suspicions. Perhaps that gravity that gives these questions their weight, indicates some deeper absolute of which I orbit. Maybe that’s all God is, as Tillich says: the ground of my being, the gravity for my doubts.

“Then the soldiers led him into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters), and they called together the whole cohort. And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and after twisting some thorns into a crown they put it on him. And they began saluting him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him. They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus. Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.”

— Mark 15:16-24

Links for further reading:

- When Did We See You Naked?: Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse.

- David Tombs: "#MeToo Jesus: Naming Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse."

- David Tombs, "Confronting the Stigma of Naming Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Violence."

- David Tombs: "Hidden in Plain Sight: Seeing the Stripping of Jesus as Sexual Violence."

Link to original post: https://shawnenright.substack.com/p/was-jesus-a-victim-of-sexual-abuse

*

Show notes:

Here are some axioms about death (inspired by Chris E.W. Green):

* I believe that God won’t let me be less dead than Jesus, but that God will be no less present to me in my death than He was to Jesus in His.

* I believe that those who believe in Jesus will die, but that death will not hold them down. In other words, faith won’t save me from dying, because faith is trusting that in my dying Jesus will call me from my grave into new life.

* I believe that faith is not a wardrobe into Narnia, but an assurance that I belong to Jesus, even in the grave.

* I believe that the Paradise that Jesus promises the thief on the cross, is the Paradise of Jesus being present to the thief in his death — that to be in Paradise is to be asleep in Christ (to be “dead”), awaiting resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).

In the last episode, we talked about how God can no longer be God without you. In this episode we’ll take a look at another axiom: There is no God behind the back of Jesus.

If you enjoy this podcast and would like to support it, consider subscribing to my newsletter (or by subscribing on Spotify) and sharing this episode on social media!

As always, thanks for you attention, and enjoy the show.

***

“God is not one thing in himself and another thing in Jesus Christ—what God is toward us in Jesus he is inherently and eternally in himself. This is the fiducial significance of the central clause in the Nicene Creed, that there is a oneness in Being and agency between Jesus Christ the incarnate Son and God the Father. What God is in eternity, Jesus Christ is in space and time, and what Jesus Christ is in space and time, God is in his eternity. There is an unbroken relation of Being and Action between the Son and the Father, and in Jesus Christ that relation has been embodied in our human existence once and for all.

There is thus no God behind the back of Jesus Christ, but only this God whose face we see in the face of the Lord Jesus. There is no deus absconditus, no dark inscrutable God, no arbitrary Deity of whom we can know nothing but before whom we can only tremble as our guilty conscience paints harsh streaks upon his face. No, there are no dark spots in God of which we need to be afraid; there is nothing in God for which Jesus Christ does not go bail in virtue of the perfect oneness in being and nature between God and himself.

There is only the one God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ in such a way that there is perfect consistency and fidelity between what he reveals of the Father and what the Father is in his unchangeable reality. The constancy of God in time and eternity has to do with the fact that God really is like Jesus, for there is no other God than he who became man in Jesus and he whom God affirms himself to be and always will be in Jesus.”

— Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 243-244)

If you walk away with anything, I hope it is the assurance that Jesus Christ stands before God the Father in your place and on your behalf; and that in your union to Him, all of His riches — including the riches of His faith — are afforded to you.

“We preach and teach the Gospel evangelically, then, in such a way as this: God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualized his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once-and-for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you he has done not only as God but as man. He has acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity, including your personal decisions, and your responses to God’s love, and even your acts of faith. He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so that he acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in Him, who has already believed in God through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus as your Lord and Saviour.

To preach the Gospel of the unconditional grace of God in that unconditional way is to set before people the astonishingly good news of what God has freely provided for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus. To repent and believe in Jesus Christ and commit myself to him on that basis means that I do not need to look over my shoulder all the time to see whether I have really given myself personally to him, whether I really believe and trust him, whether my faith is at all adequate, for in faith it is not upon my faith, my believing or my personal commitment that I rely, but solely upon what Jesus Christ has done for me, in my place and on my behalf, and what he is and always will be as he stands in for me before the face of the Father. That means that I am completely liberated from all ulterior motives in believing or following Jesus Christ, for on the ground of his vicarious human response for me, I am free for spontaneous joyful response and worship and service as I could not otherwise be.”

— The Mediation of Christ, Thomas F. Torrance 1992, pp 94-5.