So mine has been a long-standing quarrel with the Christian religion, both as I have experienced it and as I have studied it. I am well aware that I’m not alone. Many of you can identify. So did Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. Both Jeremiah and Jesus expressed strong displeasure with the religion of their time. I suspect you sense a resonance within yourself as you read these words. Your issues with the church may not be the same as mine, but you and I, we understand and respect each other because we both recognize that Christianity is somewhat less than completely convincing, at least the Christianity we’ve seen and heard preached. Whatever connection we might have had with the church in the past, there’s not much about it now that interests us.

We’ve differed in the ways we’ve reacted to our dissatisfaction with the church and its God. Some of us have challenged the truth and validity of the Christian faith. Some left, gave up on the whole thing, walked away and never looked back. Others left and have been trying out other ways to satisfy their spiritual needs; they took leave with regret; they’re still longing for something they left behind, but they’re not about to go back looking for it. Maybe it’s just nostalgia but sometimes when they hear someone singing a bit of some Christian song or they walk past a church on Sunday morning, they sense that something of who they are is missing. Usually they dismiss the feeling as the nostalgia that it probably is. Still, they know that something is missing.

And me? I’ve stayed. A lot of us have stayed. We’ve stayed because we’ve found no other place to go. We’ve stayed because, somehow, we still believe that the real thing is here hiding somewhere in the status quo. A bunch of us who are still in the church feel almost just like you do, but uncomfortable as it is, we’ve stuck around. We’ve hung on because we couldn’t see any real option. We are still part of the church because we continue believing that no matter how bad the kitchen smells, it’s the only room that can provide us with nourishment. We stay on and keep looking for ways to change the way the church thinks and operates.
We know that, most often, the church stinks. Like Denise Giardina says, there’s a lot of mean Christians that "don’t love nobody but Jesus." Churches are overloaded with mean Christians who more often than not talk about a mean God, a God who is all in favor of war and capital punishment and beating the devil out of their children. Nevada Barr refers to the sort of Christians who use the Bible Belt to beat the fear of God into their children. And sometimes their wives. Beat the devil out of them and the fear of God into them.

They make it sound like God is all about power and control, thus they become like the God pictured in their minds. Christendom–the world of people who call themselves Christians and organize unions of power structures they call churches–smells, literally, to high heaven. But some of us endure and fight as covert insurgents, change agents, for the revolution that we believe must come. We live by faith, with hope–and hopefully, with love. Our quarrel with Christianity is an insider’s quarrel with our Christian heritage, a lover’s quarrel with the church and its doctrinal heritage.

You may find here things you’ve always either thought or suspected, but that preachers and Sunday School teachers denied. You will find ambiguity, vagueness, even contradiction, but some of us have learned that if we are to be true to the "real world," truth is shot through with ambiguity, vagueness, contradiction, and impenetrable mystery. The Bible and its portrayal of God is true to the world as it really is. Thus there is no clear, simple way for it to tell what is involved in any honest effort to follow the way of Jesus. Some of us have learned to live by faith rather than by precise absolutes and micro-managing rules. We have overcome the neurotic need for absolutes, precision, predictability, certainty, accuracy, simplicity, and literalness. Surprisingly we have found that everything comes into sharper focus when we look at it in its naked reality.

Whatever it is that disturbs us about Christianity, I suspect that if we analyzed our feelings and thoughts, we would find our dissatisfactions are rooted in a dislike for the God that Christians tell us we must either believe in or else go to hell. Most of the time that seems to be all they care about–getting everyone into heaven. This blog quarrels with the conventional picture of God. In its place, it offers, for your consideration, a quite different perspective. Any time we shift our perspective on anything, we see it differently. We need to see God from a new perspective.

Most of our problems began because we had been around people who knew everything about God and wanted us to hear and accept their take on God. We have been unimpressed. These folks have been offensive, often obnoxious. We couldn’t believe that with their ugliness of spirit they had the nerve to claim they were messengers of good news. Little wonder we supposed their God was just as offensive. When Harry Emerson Fosdick was pastor of the Riverside Baptist Church in New York City, somebody occasionally would come to tell him they didn’t believe in God. He always asked them to tell him about this God they didn’t believe in. After they described their objections to God, Fosdick would respond, "I don’t believe in that God either."

If it is possible to talk about a believable and attractive God, what can be known about him? What would he look like? Actually, we can know quite a bit. lf we stick close to the story the Bible tells, we can know much about God, even though we are still dealing with a subject admittedly too heavy for us to ever quite get a handle on. This biblical God clearly can’t be handled or fully comprehended, but we can learn a lot about him. Some of it will surprise us. All of it may cause us to have second thoughts.


When it comes to the God question, the Bible doesn’t give us a clear and simple answer, but that has never kept folks from claiming to have found one. The solutions offered by religious people commonly misrepresent and oversimplify the God that emerges when we do that rare thing–with clear eyes, read the entire book, paying attention to what it actually says. God, as the Bible tells its story–which comprises a whole series of short stories–is complex. He doesn’t always behave the same way. Sometimes he resembles a terrorist, a freedom fighter, a force to establish justice, an artist, a loving father, mother, nurse, protector, a shepherd who keeps his eye on the least, the last, and the lost sheep of the flock. God is complicated.

Although people claim that Christianity is a monotheistic religion–belief in only one God-it is hard to find that idea validated on the pages of the Bible. Here is God the Creator, later to be known as God the Father Almighty. Then, here is God the Son, sent from the Father. We watch what this Son does, hear what is said about him, and realize the Bible believes that he is God. And then we find the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who descends on Jesus from the Father, and whom Jesus will one day send to teach all about himself. Again, when we listen to the witness of these documents, this Holy Spirit is God. Yet when we’ve read this exceedingly long, composite account that tells us something of God’s history, it clearly testifies to a single and supreme God. A person could get lost in the complexity of it all.