Why orthodox theology?

Some weeks ago I was asked, “Okay, so why’s it so important to be orthodox? Why can’t we just believe whatever we want about God?”

Same reason we can’t just believe whatever we want about electricity.

I mean, if you wanted to, you could believe electricity is just fairy glitter moving through copper wires, and because fairies are always so friendly and benign in children’s cartoons (even though in European mythology, they’re really not) they’d never, ever hurt you. So, you figure, it’s okay to take your tablet with you into the bathtub. And it’s okay to leave it plugged into the charging cable while you do it. And… oh, gee, you’ve died.

Electricity isn’t the best analogy, because God is way more forgiving than electricity mixed with water. Run afoul of electricity and you’re dead. Run afoul of God, and he’ll become human and die for your sins.

Skeptics will immediately agree with me electricity isn’t the best analogy… but for different reasons. See, to their minds electricity falls within the realm of reality. God, not so much. To them, God’s a theory—and not a scientific theory, like relativity or evolution or Pythagoras’s formula. God conceptually exists: There is some sort of supreme being or higher power or creator in the universe, and maybe they believe she’s self-aware and intelligent, instead of just the sum of everything like pantheists believe. She’s out there, somewhere. But, they figure, she’s unknowable.

And to their minds, theology isn’t about the study of God, based on revelation. It’s all guesswork. If God’s unknowable, and doesn’t bother to make herself known, nobody legitimately knows anything about her. So… we make guesses. We guess God is good. (I mean, if she were bad, she’d be terrifying, and only cult leaders would want her to terrify their subjects, so we’re definitely gonna reject that idea.) We guess God is benevolent, ’cause benevolence is good. We guess God loves everybody, ’cause love is good. Well almost everybody; we often guess she doesn’t love evildoers, and will probably send the very worst of them to hell. But she loves most everybody.

Yes, I’ve been referring to this concept of God as “she.” Hey, if all your beliefs about God are guesswork, sometimes you’ll guess a different pronoun. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve heard pagans call God “she.” Women create life, right?—so they guess “she.” (Well, unless they’re men. People love to assign God our own pronouns. Little self-projection on our part.)

Since all their God-thoughts are pure guesswork, they admit there’s a chance they might be wrong. These chances get smaller and smaller as these become long-held, dearly beloved beliefs. Or when their favorite spiritual authors teach the very same things, and confirm for them they’re probably right. But because the God they imagine is a benevolent God, they also imagine if they get her wrong… well a benevolent God has to be a forgiving God, right? Has to be. If they were God, they would be… or at least they would be with themselves. So if they get God wrong, it’s understandable; she hasn’t said anything, so they had to guess as best they could, and she gets that, and forgives that. They’ll get into heaven regardless.

So whenever a Christian like me has an objection to one of their beliefs—“No, that’s not who God is”—they wanna know why my guess is better than theirs. And when I tell them I’m not guessing; this is what Christianity teaches, they wanna know why Christianity’s guess is better than theirs. Because again, they think it’s all guesswork, and Christianity’s depiction of a real, immanent, interactive, living God… is also guesswork. Or fantasy.

You can see why someone who thinks like this, doesn’t think orthodoxy matters. God’ll forgive all our wrong beliefs, right? God’ll let everybody into heaven, right?—so long that we’re good and benevolent like we imagine God is, and not evil, and put more good into the universe than bad. So why must I object to their happy thoughts with orthodox Christianity, when in the end it doesn’t really matter?

Because if it really didn’t matter, their belief God is unknowable, and has never revealed anything for us to believe, would be true. But it’s not. God has told us about himself. He did step down from heaven to explain himself. He became human. He became Jesus. Jesus tells us about God. We’re not guessing. We know, because Jesus told us.

Glorifying Jesus.

John 17.1-5.

After the Last Supper, Jesus taught his students a number of things, and capped off his teachings with a prayer we find in John 17. Some Christians call it his “high priestly prayer,” since Jesus is Christianity’s head priest; others just call it “the prayer of Jesus.” Whatever you care to call it, it expresses his will—and since he always pursued his Father’s will, it expresses his Father’s will too.

It wasn’t really meant for us to pray as well, like the Lord’s Prayer. But there’s no reason we can’t pray portions of it, or borrow ideas from it. This is all stuff Jesus wants, after all.

John 17.1-5 KWL

1Jesus speaks these things,

and lifting his eyes to heaven, says,

“Father, the hour came.

Glorify your¹ son

so {your¹} son can glorify you.¹

2Just as you¹ give him authority over all flesh,

so he might give everyone whom you¹ gave him

life in the age to come.

3This is life in the age to come:

They can know you,¹ the only true God,

and the one you send, Christ Jesus.

4I glorify you¹ on the earth,

completing the work you¹ gave me so I may do.

5Now glorify me, Father, by yourself¹

with the glory I had before the world came to be,

with you.¹”

This is the part of the prayer many bibles title, “Jesus prays for himself,” because he asks his Father to glorify him—the verb δοξάζω/doxádzo meaning “magnify, extol, hold in honor, hold a high opinion of, esteem.” The Father had said more than once he does hold a high opinion of his Son, but Jesus wants him to make it obvious because Jesus’s purpose on earth is to explain the Father to us, Jn 1.18 and the more Jesus is honored, Jesus’s exposition of his Father is likewise honored. And you notice how many a pagan, who’s had it up to here with Christians and our churches, nonetheless like and respect Jesus. They may not know him or what he teaches; they might’ve been filled to the brim with Historical Jesus rubbish. But they do glorify him, somewhat—and that’s the route by which the Holy Spirit can get through to them and lead them to Jesus, and Jesus can lead them towards actually knowing his Father.

And this, Jesus says, is life in the age to come. They’ll know the Father, and Christ Jesus whom he sent. And live with them forever; the age to come never ends, which is why so many bibles automatically translate αἰώνιον/eónion, “age [to come],” as “eternal.” Life in the age to come is eternal life. Wanna live forever? Get to know Jesus.

When Lazarus dies.

John 11.1-8, 11-16.

Most of Jesus’s miracle stories are short, but the story of raising his friend Lazarus of Bethany takes up most of John 11. Mostly because this is a whole new experience for Jesus’s students. He’d raised the dead before, but these were people who had just died. One could argue, like Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, those people were mostly dead, not fully dead; Jesus got to them just in time to resuscitate them. Whereas in Lazarus’s case, dude had been dead four days. Wrapped in suffocating strips of linen. Left in a sepulcher to rot. He was super dead. Jesus raised him anyway.

But the story starts with Lazarus alive:

John 11.1-8 KWL

1Someone is unwell—Lazarus of Bethany,

from the village of Mary, and Martha her sister.

2Mary is she who anointed the Master with ointment,

who wiped his feet with her hair.

Her brother Lazarus is unwell.

3So Lazarus’s sisters send for Jesus,

saying, “Master, look!

He whom you¹ love is unwell.”

4Hearing, Jesus says, “This illness doesn’t end in death,

but in God’s glory,

so God’s son might be glorified by it.”

5Jesus loves Martha,

her sister, and Lazarus.

6So when he hears Lazarus is unwell,

he then stays two more days in the place he is.

7Afterwards, Jesus then tells his students,

“We should go to Judea again.”

8The students tell Jesus, “Rabbi,

the Judeans are now looking for you¹ to lynch you,

and you’re¹ going there again?”

The Greek text has λιθάσαι/litháse, “throw stones [at you],” but because stoning was illegal under Roman law, the students aren’t talking about the Judean leadership having Jesus executed by stoning; they’re worried about a Judean mob murdering him. So, “lynch.”

Jesus responds with the Twelve Hours Story, which tends to go over Christians’ heads entirely. So much so, we seldom list it among Jesus’s parables, and seldom teach on it. It deserves its own article, so I’ll discuss it elsewhere. But right after the story:

John 11.11-16 KWL

11Jesus says these things,

and after them he tells his students,

“Lazarus our friend slept.

But I go so I might awaken him.”

12So the students tell Jesus, “Master,

if he slept, he will recover.”

13Jesus had spoken about Lazarus’s death,

and the students had thought

he speaks about sleep and slumber.

14So then Jesus tells them bluntly,

“Lazarus died.

15I rejoice for you,²

for you² can believe because I am not there.

But we should go to him.”

16So Thomas, called Didymus, told his fellow students,

“We should go, so we can die with him.”

Little pessimistic of Thomas, who’s likely still thinking about that lynch mob. But yeah, off they go to Judea, and by the time they get there Lazarus has been dead four days already. Jn 11.17

God doesn’t have a dark side.

1 John 1.5-7.

The thing about gnostics is they’ve always prioritized weirdness over Jesus. After all if these were commonsense teachings we could learn from the bible, be guided into by the Holy Spirit, or figure out on our own, we wouldn’t need to pay the gnostics a fistfull of money for their secrets. We wouldn’t need to buy their videos, attend their seminars, or pay tuition to their unaccredited universities.

Well, some of the gnostic ideas have leaked into Christendom. Some of them were affecting the first-century church. Hence the apostle John’s first letter, correcting his church. Something we still gotta read, because loads of these ideas are still around—either held over from the first century, or new gnostics came up with them independently. Still misinforming Christians.

Some of ’em are outright heresy. Others aren’t technically heresy… because heresy is defined by the creeds, and for whatever reason the creeds didn’t get to that particular error. Often because the ancient Christians figured, “Well of course that’s wrong; haven’t you read a bible?” But, then as now, people don’t read. (So read your bible!) Their favorite teachers did all the reading for them, and they blindly followed these teachers without double-checking any of their proof texts. It’s how gnostics have always got away with it.

And one of the more popular errors, still commonly believed, is about God having a dark side.

It’s based on determinism—the belief God is so sovereign, he controls absolutely everything in the cosmos. God’s the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle of Athens, the first cause of everything, and nothing in the universe happens without his permission. Really, determinists insist, if he isn’t wielding total control of everything, we can’t legitimately call him almighty.

But if God’s in charge, what about sin? Why is evil, chaos, and death part of our universe when God’s pulling every single string of our cosmic puppet show?

If you’re not a determinist—and I’m not, and neither is St. John—there’s a really simple answer: He’s not pulling every single string of the show. He’s not so inept a creator that he built the universe, yet constantly has to fiddle with it lest it go awry. Imagine a clockmaker who, instead of building a clockwork that effectively keeps time, always moves the arms himself. It’d make him the worst clockmaker. Likewise a micromanagerial creator would be an incompetent creator, not a masterful one.

So when creation goes wrong, God’s not at fault. He made it profoundly good, Ge 1.31 but he granted his creation free will. It can legitimately make its own decisions—and choose to do either what God told it to, or its own thing. That’s the cause of evil, chaos, and death. Not God.

Determinists insist no, God’d never cede control of his domain like that. (Certainly they never would, were they God.) And since he doesn’t stop or mitigate the evil (again, not like they would, were they God) he must’ve determined this evil, chaos, and death oughta happen. He wants it to. It’s not the fallout from our bad choices; it’s part of the plan. A plan full of evil, chaos, and death—so much so it’s really an evil plan—but it’ll all turn out in the long run. It’s just in the short run, God sovereignly decrees evil, chaos, and death.

You’ve seen this in sitcoms and superhero movies, like The Incredibles: Somebody wants to look like a hero, so he creates a disaster, fully intending to “solve” the problem himself so everybody can laud him as a hero. This is exactly the same way determinists describe God. He’s gonna solve all the evil in the world, and as a result receive all the glory. But wait… didn’t he create the problem in the first place?

And y’notice in the sitcoms and superhero movies, the mastermind gets exposed as creating the crisis in the first place. And universally denounced as a fraud. ’Cause he totally is. Yet for some reason, determinists think it’s way different with God: Even though God’s totally behind the evil, he’s not evil. He can’t be; he says he’s not!

Eventually their blasphemous explanations get a little too incredible for even them to believe. Which is why so many determinists quit Christianity or turn atheist. And y’know, if God really were the way determinists claim, I can’t blame people for rejecting him: That’s not a good God!

But I would counter that’s not God. The true God doesn’t have a dark side. Doesn’t have a secret evil plan. Far be it from him to even imagine a secret evil plan. And yes, he’s still sovereign and almighty; just not deterministic.

The second creation story.

Genesis 2.4-17.

Back in college I took a Pentateuch class—πεντάτευχος/pentátefkhos being Greek for “five cases,” i.e. the five boxes in which the five “books of Moses,” the Torah, were kept. It was a fun class; our professor got us up to speed on what current bible scholars, both conservative and liberal, taught about the Torah. And occasionally he’d drop facts on us which we’d never noticed before. Like how Genesis has two creation stories: The six days of creation, Ge 1.1 – 2.3 and how Adam and Eve came to be—then be banished from paradise. Ge 2.4 – 3.24

Yep. First he had us read the first story, then stop; then pointed out how the first story never refers to God as the LORD—but this next story does, throughout. And is more of an answer to the question, “Why didn’t God, who’s such a good, wise, benevolent Father, make the earth a suffering-free, death-free paradise for us?” Well… it turns out he did. But we completely f---ed it up.

The six days of creation are a rebuttal to ancient middle eastern myths about creation. This second story has a whole different point. Same as the first story, it’s not a scientific explanation for creation; it’s not about how God did it, but that he did it, and why. We can figure out how with research and experiments—and by avoiding the Creation Museum, which only wants your loyalty to their anti-evolutionary theories, and of course your money.

Because the second story refers to יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים/YHWH Elohím, “the LORD God” throughout, and not just Elohím, “God,” like the first story, many biblical scholars figure it was obviously composed by a different author than the guy who wrote the first story. Probably. But one guy assembled all those stories into Genesis, so that’d be the author of Genesis—who wrote the book after there were kings in Israel. Ge 36.31 So, not till the 12th century BC… so definitely not Moses ben Amram, who lived in the 15th century. But I usually call the author “Moe” anyway.

And here’s where Moe tells the second creation story.

Genesis 2.4-17 KWL

4These are the stories of the skies and the land

in the day of their creation.

The god YHWH made land and skies,

5and every domestic plant before it was in the land,

and every domestic herb before it sprouted.

For the god YHWH didn’t yet bring rain to the land,

and no human to work the soil.

6Instead a water vapor came up from the land,

and gave a drink to all the surface of the soil.

7The god YHWH shaped the human

out of dust from the soil.

He breathed into the human’s nostrils a breath of life,

and the human was now a living soul.

8The god YHWH planted a garden in Eden,

in the east,

and there he put the human

which he shaped.

9The god YHWH sprouted from the soil

every pleasant-looking tree, good for food.

And the tree of life in the middle of the garden—

and the tree of knowing good and bad.

10A river flowed out of Eden to give the garden a drink.

It divided from there to be four heads.

11One is named Pišón.

It surrounds all the land of Havilá, which has gold.

12The land’s gold is good.

Fragrant resin and onyx stones are also there.

13The second river is named Gikhón.

It surrounds all the land of Cuš.

14The third river is named Khiddeqél.

It flows in front of Assyria.

The fourth river is Perát.

15The god YHWH took the human

and rested him in the garden of Eden,

to work it and watch it.

16The god YHWH ordered the human,

saying, “Eat, eat of every tree in the garden!

17Don’t eat from the tree of knowing good and bad.

For the day you eat from it, you die, die.”

Needlessly long and wild prayers.

As I’ve written previously, ain’t nothing wrong with praying short prayers. Y’might remember the Lord’s Prayer is a short prayer. I remind Christians of this and they respond, “Oh! Yeah, that’s true.” Somehow it never occurred to them. Obviously Jesus had no problem keeping it brief, and has no problem with us keeping it brief. His example shows us it’s okay.

Problem is, we don’t follow Jesus’s example. We follow those of other Christians who blather on, and on, and on.

The usual justification I’ve heard, is these long prayers are following Jesus’s example. Remember when he’d go off and pray for hours?—seriously, hours. One evening he sent his students off ahead of him, climbed a hill to pray, Mt 14.22-23 and by the time he caught up with them (walking across the water, but still), it was “the fourth watch of the night,” Mt 14.25 KJV meaning between 3 and 6 a.m. Even if we generously figure Jesus stopped praying and started walking two hours before the fourth watch began (so, about 1-ish), this means he prayed from sundown till 1 a.m. Easily six or seven hours.

Okay, there’s nothing wrong with aspiring to be able to pray that long. But it needs to come naturally, like it does to Jesus. Can you talk six or seven hours with your best friend, or a beloved family member? Well some of us can. Others of us simply don’t talk that much, to anyone. Yet so many Christians have this unrealistic idea we’ve gotta engage God in prayer marathons every single time.

And okay, we can’t pray (especially aloud) for six hours. But we figure we can do six minutes. Sounds reasonable, right? Except most of us really aren’t able to talk for six minutes; we have two minutes’ worth of material. Two minutes altogether, of praise, thanksgiving, and requests. Followed by four minutes of repetitive, meaningless fluff to stretch the prayer out for a bit. Two minutes of authenticity, four minutes of hypocrisy.

Yes, hypocrisy. Who are we trying to impress? God? He didn’t ask us for long prayers. Others? Ourselves? Well, yeah.

Jesus’s 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳 commission.

Mark 16.15-18.

In the Long Ending of Mark, Jesus gives his followers some instructions. Sometimes Christians refer to these instructions as the great commission. Often they capitalize it—the Great Commission—but they really don’t have to. But it’s not actually Jesus’s great commission. It’s certainly a commission; it’s something he expects all his followers to do. (Yes, us present-day Christians included.) But the great commission is given in Matthew after his resurrection. This is Jesus’s lesser commission. Lesser in that it’s from the Long Ending; it wasn’t written by Mark himself; Jesus may have said it, or something quite like it; it at least accurately expresses his sentiments. But it comes from tradition instead of a unimpeachable apostolic eyewitness account, so it’s always gonna have that against it. Hence “lesser.” And no, I’m not gonna capitalize it either.

The lesser commission goes like yea:

Mark 16.15-18 KWL

15Jesus tells them, “Go into the world

and proclaim the gospel everywhere to every creature.

16Those who believe and are baptized will be saved.

Those who don’t believe will be judged.

17Miracles will accompany the believers:

In my name, people will throw out demons.

People will speak in new tongues.

18People will pick up snakes in their hands,

and if anyone drinks poison, it won’t injure them.

People will lay hands on the sick,

and they will be well.”

Various Christians are fond of saying πορευθέντες/porefthéntes “Go,” as stated in both this and the great commission, Mt 28.19 isn’t properly a command. It’s not an imperative verb; it’s a participle. One could also translate it, “While going into the world,” or “As you go into the world.” Thing is, the verb which follows, κηρύξατε/kirýdzate, “preach ye!” is a command, and it turns all the participles in the sentence into commands. Preach—and go. It’s not about passively doing your thing, and while you’re at it, sharing Jesus. Go find people to share Jesus with.

The lesser commission shares that in common with the great commission: Go share. The great commission instructs us to teach every people-group what Jesus teaches, and baptize ’em in the trinity’s name. The lesser commission instructs us to proclaim the gospel to every creature. Lots of overlap; so much so people will mix the commissions up and say the great commission is about preaching the gospel. No; that’s the lesser commission. Do that too. But the great commission is about sharing Jesus’s teachings. Which includes the gospel—

Mark 1.15 KJV

And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

—but Jesus teaches a lot of other great things, like the Sermon on the Mount, and the great commission tells us we oughta share that too. Preach the gospel! But definitely not just the gospel.