Gospel or Grift?

One more quote from David W. Congdon’s Varieties of Christian Universalism, this one from Congdon himself:

There are few ideas more distinctively Christian than the assumption that our theologies ought to reinforce our own rightness in practicing this particular religion, whether through apologetic efforts to “prove” the truth of our doctrines or kerygmatic efforts to scare people into conversion by proclaiming the ungodly terrors that await them if they should fail to say a magical prayer or participate in an enchanted ritual.

The moment a theologian comes along and announces this to be a bunch of immoral hogwash, they are lambasted for destroying any rationale for faith. Which is truly a remarkable admission. The implication is that no one would be a Christian if they were not forced into it, either intellectually or emotionally—or, in the case of colonialism, physically. Christians who are invested in the evangelistic spread of their religion would do well to think long and hard about where this anxiety comes from and what it says about the god they claim to believe in. When any theology that does not support the agenda of ever-increasing church growth and missionary expansion is treated as a threat to the faith, it is hard not to conclude that said faith is less of a gospel and more of a grift–a spiritual multi-level marketing scheme.

Food for thought.

Barth: Christians as a living promise to the unbelieving world

I’m re-reading David W. Congdon’s Varieties of Christian Universalism in preparation for doing some talks at church on the topic, and I was struck this time by this fantastic thought from Karl Barth:

He [the Spirit] makes them Christians. He divides them from non-Christians. But He also unites them with non-Christians. He is the promise which is given them, and He sets them in the position of hope. He gives them the power to wait daily for the revelation of what they already are, of what they became on the day of Golgotha.

The Christian identifies with the world insomuch as those in the world are those for whom the promise is yet to be completely fulfilled, but the Christian is also the one who presently has the promise and as such is given “hope.”

I love this idea - that Christians today are the living promise to the unbelieving world of the hope that awaits it. What a beautiful thought.

Asking the hard questions: not a crisis of faith, but rooted in faith

Later this year I’ll be teaching for 3 weeks at our church’s adult forum on the topic of Christian Universalism. In preparation I’m diving back in to some key books that have guided my path, starting with Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God. It’s been a few years since I’ve read this one, but even before I get out of the first chapter I’m reminded why this one spoke to me so powerfully.

When wrestling with Augustine, Luther, and Calvin’s teaching on predestination and how it conflicted with what he had been raised to know of God’s love, he challenges the common “crisis of faith” framing:

In fact, what I have here called “a crisis of faith,” and at the time regarded as such, was not a crisis of faith at all. For it was precisely an unshakable faith in the love of God–a faith that my mother in particular had instilled within me–that made my doubts about Christianity and the Bible possible; and had I known more about the Bible at the time, or had I possessed a less naive view of revelation, I might have been spared these doubts as well.

This rings true to my own experience: that it was not a lack of faith that caused me to strike out in search of a more beautiful expression of God, but rather it was because of that faith that I knew there must be something better than what I was being taught. Hallelujah.

My favorite cover of Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees: The Normals

Hard to believe this video is 25 years old at this point.

When "Christian Parenting" leaves families without the skills for actual relationships

Just had one of those “wait, what did they say?” followed by quickly skipping back, re-listening to the moment a few times, and then transcribing it to put it here.

From the Gravity Commons Podcast episode with authors Kelsey McGinnis and Marissa Burt titled “The False Promises of Good Christian Parenting”, the authors discuss the damage that Christian Parenting books of the 1970s and 1980s have done to Christian parents and children. The focus on immediate, unquestioning compliance, enforced by spankings which were done under the guise of ’love’ not only created lots of confusion about what “love” actually looks like, but (and here’s the part that made me hit pause and rewind) failed to provide parents the tools for actually connecting with their children and those children’s needs.

From about 30 minutes into the podcast:

Kelsey: [This parenting philosophy is] completely opposed to healthy connection; it prevents parents from responding to the child who’s in front of them; instead they rely on these scripts and these ideas and this ideology offered in these books, and you end up with this inability to just relate to the individual child and their individual needs. You’re not supposed to think about their individual needs and quirks first. And it’s just really destructive.

Marissa: It’s destructive in the moment and also long-term. Because this is what parents are practicing day in and day out if they’re following it, which is why in many ways I think it sets families up for estrangement. Because then in adulthood when the illusion of compliance evaporates, there’s no skills. A lot of these resources it’s not just what they told parents to do but what they left them bereft of: an understanding of child development or tools for connection. And in trying to think critically about that requires “peeking behind the curtain” to say “what do we mean by love?” Because a lot of verbal gymnastics are done to say love is hurting the people who are dear to you… A lot of redefinition of terms is happening to say ‘this may feel like punishment to you but we’re going to call it love.’ So when you do that, at a certain point, and you’ve said God’s love is reflected primarily in this moment of cosmic punishment, then it becomes difficult for people to reevaluate because it feels like a complete faith deconstruction.

This resonates with my own experience, and I think with many other kids who grew up homeschooled. What happens when the “illusion of compliance” evaporates, whether that be at age 18, or 25, or 40? If you’ve never had relationship tools that weren’t based on compliance, how do you figure out how to start over and establish actual relationships with people who are now adults and not willing to compliantly agree with you on everything?

In his later years my father lamented multiple times that so many children from conservative Christian homeschooled families grew up and immediately got as far away as they could from their childhood–moving out of state, going low- or no-contact, etc. His observation was that this wasn’t an odd coincidence, but that it was related to those kids’ experience being raised that way. I don’t think he ever connected the dots the way these authors do, but I think he would’ve resonated with them.

[Link] Pushing an Anti-Trans Agenda is Telling On Yourself

I appreciated this post from Todd at anarch.dev yesterday: Pushing an Anti-Trans Agenda is Telling On Yourself. He outlines eight common anti-trans argument patterns and briefly responds to each of them. For flavor:

But what about the children? you think you better understand the needs of a child than professionals and the people who know and love the child…people who are willing to endure a lot hardship together. Petty tyranny strikes again. Also, this reason is usually a cover for one of the other reasons. We can tell because you haven’t done much of anything to address the much more numerous and grave harms to children, but are now fixated on this alleged one.

No lies detected.

Some of my favorite responses were at the end, including to the objections “But sports…”, “It’s not natural”, and “It’s against my religion”. It’s a quick read, and something I think I’ll bookmark to just refer back to from time to time.

For Epiphany: Brian Zahnd's Meditation on the Magi

I really appreciated Brian Zahnd’s meditation on the Magi this morning. Riffing off of T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, Zahnd considers what having one’s eyes opened to Jesus may really cost:

When the Magi made their way home, we’re told they went by “another way.”
Of course they did.
Once you see the King, once you have the Epiphany—
You have to travel through this life by “another way.” (Or betray all you have been granted to see.)
And to an “alien people clutching their gods”—
You will seem at best odd, and at worse…well, something quite bad.
Truth doesn’t come cheap.
The hard journey to a real Epiphany will cost you more than some…
Gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It will cost you the way you look at the world.
Something will have to die. And you may well mourn it.
To really see the birth of Christ for what it is,
Will bring you face to face with death—
Death to what you were once so comfortable with.

Zahnd specifically relates this death to his own journey dying to Christian nationalism and the pursuit of political power. But his final question is gripping regardless of your country or century.

The old magi says, “I should be glad of another death.”
What about you? Are you ready for the Birth of the New?—
If it means the Death of the Old?

My 2025 Reading in Review

If you’d asked me about my year in reading, I would’ve said I didn’t feel like I’d read that many books this year. Then I looked at my total: 93 books, the most in any year since I started logging books in 2007. Per my Bookshelf site, those 93 books comprised a little over 30,000 pages of reading. I guess it was a busy year.

Because I Feel The Need to do Stats

Fiction: 49
Religion / Theology: 22
Science: 8

That leaves a handful in biography, literature, and history. Not too bad a mix.

Books written by authors who aren’t/weren’t white men: 38. Still not a great split but progress in diversity for me compared to previous years.

Some Favorites

In no particular order, the books I gave 5 stars this year… far too many to be a useful selector, so I have bolded the handful that are particular standouts:

  • The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Into The Unknown by Kelsey Johnson
  • Language for God in Patristic Tradition by Mark Sheridan
  • Reading While Black by Esau McCauley
  • Jesus and the Forces of Death by Matthew Thiessen
  • The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut
  • The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili
  • The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
  • Damascus Station by David McCluskey
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  • Where God Happens by Rowan Williams
  • The Framed Women of Ardemore House by Brandy Schillace
  • Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
  • The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind
  • The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey
  • The Not-Yet God by Ilia Delio
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
  • The Transforming Fire of Divine Love by John H. Armstrong
  • Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
  • Beyond Justification by Douglas Campbell
  • The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart
  • Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  • In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  • Royal Gambit by Daniel O’Malley
  • Holy Hurt by Hillary L. McBride
  • Inverted World by Christopher Priest
  • On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg
  • The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell

About those highlights:

Say Nothing is a harrowing account of The Troubles in Ireland. The author doesn’t try to moralize, but just recounts the facts… an approach which makes the violence even more horrifying somehow.

In The Not-Yet God, Ilia Delio brings her most complete structure so far to her work interpreting Teilhard in light of modern quantum theory. Utterly fascinating to me.

Alternate history in astronaut land. Unabashedly loved this one.

This is what speculative science fiction should look like. So good.

Random Observations

My first and last books of the year were the first and last books in K. B. Wagers’ NeoG series.

My attempts to read some “classic” literature were mixed. Middlemarch: so long. In Cold Blood: as good as advertised.

Here’s to some more good books in 2026!

This is not usually how wine gets discussed at the office...

I attended a Town Hall meeting at work today where the president of our business and his staff talked and took questions. As a part of the Q&A, someone stood up in the back and asked this question (I’m paraphrasing here):

“I’m reminded of an old wise saying: ‘do not put new wine in old wineskins, because the wine will expand, the skins will burst, and the wine will be lost.’ With some of these [new work things] being a sort of ’new wine’, are there ‘old wineskins’ we should be aware of and risk that we should mitigate?”

I immediately, of course, recognized the Biblical reference, and appreciated that the questioner didn’t explicitly call it out, but just kept the wisdom of Jesus’ saying. But it was striking to me how few people in the room appeared to recognize it, how it took each of the leaders in the Q&A a second to really parse through it, and then hearing people after the meeting commenting on that question and how deep and profound it was.

I’m not telling this story to complain about Biblical illiteracy; it is what it is in our world today. But I find myself thankful for the coworker who asked the question, and hopeful that the saying will worm its way into a few peoples’ minds today, maybe even to the point where they decide to look it up.

Had Jesus Never Lived…

“Truth is, had Jesus never lived, we could not have invented him.”

A remarkably persuasive thought from Walter Wink in The Human Being.