Unaccountable leadership.

Decades ago, just before I started attending a particular church, it went through a split. It was situated near a large gated community, and some of the folks who lived beyond the gates wanted only fellow gated-community members in the church. They wanted to hold church functions inside the gates; they didn’t want to accommodate people who lived outside them—which’d include me and my neighbors. Bluntly, it was a class-warfare thing: They didn’t want “poors” in their church.

So there was a fight amongst the members, the classist leaders were voted off the board, and they and their pastor left to start their own church—which met at his house, within the gated community. Met until the homeowners’ association shut ’em down for running an unauthorized “club.” Ironic consequences can be so fun.

I arrived right before the new pastor arrived. The new board members were running the church at the time, and invited me to lunch (at the community country club, in fact; seriously, a lot of ’em lived there) and warned me what I was getting into. “But you’re all good now, right?” I asked, and… well, sorta. Some of ’em were still grieving. They lost friends over this.

Sounds like the church handled everything correctly, right? The pastor was classist, contrary to the gospel; Jesus’s brother James straight-up calls it sin. Jm 2.1-13 The people of the church challenged him, challenged the other leaders who supported him, held a vote, and won the vote. All’s well that ends well, right?

Now what if they hadn’t won the vote?

Hey, sometimes it happens. What if the classists won, and people who didn’t live in the gated community were barred from ever joining that church? ’Cause here’s the biggest problem with democratically-run churches: Sometimes they vote wrong. I’ve been a member of churches which voted wrong. God was on our side, but the votes weren’t. Vox populi simply isn’t always vox Dei.

Sometimes churches aren’t even democratically-run; sometimes the pastor runs the church like a feudal duke, and the church board is just a bunch of yes-men. I’ve been a member of such churches too. In one of ’em, behind the scenes, the pastor was critically mismanaging the finances, and cuckolding his wife. How’d the church handle things? By sweeping the scandal under the rug and letting the pastor “retire”–at which point he simply did what I call “pulling a Mark Driscoll”: He waited a bit for the furor to die down, then quietly started running another church. A church which had no clue he was unfit to lead.

There are a lot of churches where this sort of thing happens. The wrong people get made pastor or board member. Sometimes they have serious character defects, and sometimes they’re just simply not up to the task of leading others. They think the Holy Spirit anointed them, and he never did; they psyched themselves into believing it, and got endorsed by people who confused personal likability with anointing. Or they don’t wanna lead for the right reasons—love for others, love for Jesus, love for his gospel. Instead they wanna be influencers. They want a megachurch and a book deal, and can’t figure out why Mammon Jesus gives these things to some pastors and not them.

In their wake, they leave a lot of broken Christians who trusted them to steer them right, and instead were crashed into rocks over and over again, and don’t wanna go to church anymore. Can’t say I blame them.

When Baal was silent.

1 Kings 18.25-29.

Often when I’ve heard preachers talk about the Baalist prophets, they tend to claim these prophets were frauds. That these prophets didn’t even believe in Baal; it was a con through and through. They only pretended to hear Baal so they could get acclaim, money, political power, and sex.

Archaeology doesn’t support this idea. Ancient religions relied on augury—on trying to find “signs” in the universe which might be messages from the gods.

Some Christians actually try to do this too: “Hey, my Burger King purchase after taxes came to $7.77! It’s a sign from God!” Okay clever guy, what’s this sign mean? Well they’ll think of something. Usually something they desire, something they were hoping they could get God’s approval on, and they’re gonna take that $7.77 to mean they got it. Whereas if the total came to $6.66, they’d either think they didn’t have God’s approval, and let go of that thing they wanted… but if they coveted it badly enough, they’d just presume the $6.66 was a warning or curse about some other thing, and keep on coveting.

That’s the thing about augury and “signs”: Unless God otherwise told us they mean something (like when a virgin happened to birth a son) they actually mean nothing. We’re just reading our own wishes and desires into ’em. And deceiving ourselves.

And that’s what Baalists did. They did believe in Baal; they were raised to. So they looked for signs of Baal’s will, and what do you know… they found some. This raven flew thataway; these entrails looked like the letter Mem; the rooster crowed after sunrise; they’d eat a brick of hashish and think their freaky visions and ideas came from Baal. They were entirely sure these things meant something. Pure superstition, but plenty of people throughout history have believed in superstition. Including all the Christians who, unprompted by God, look everywhere for signs.

Whereas we don’t need augury or superstition with the LORD: He talks to people. We can hear him when we listen. Those of us with the Holy Spirit indwelling us—the prophets in the Old Testament, the Christians in the New—can especially hear him when we listen.

And when Elijah challenged the Baalist prophets to a contest, he was entirely aware of this. He knew the Baalists weren’t gonna get any response from their god: Baal’s not real. It’s why Elijah felt perfectly free to mock their god, with no fear whatsoever that their god might take petty revenge—he ain’t no god. The Deuteronomistic Historian makes this clear with his comments, “No sound. No one answered.”

1 Kings 18.25-29 KWL

25Elijah told Baal’s prophets, “Choose one calf for yourselves.²

Prep it first, for you² are many.

Call on your² god’s name,

and don’t set fire to it.”

26They took the calf given to them,

prepared it,

and called on Baal’s name from morning to noon,

saying, “Baal, answer us!”

No sound.

No one answered.

They did a limping dance

before the altar they prepared.

27When it became noon,

Elijah was mocking them,

saying, “Call with a loud voice.

For he’s a god, isn’t he?

Maybe he’s meditating.

Maybe he’s pooping.

Maybe he’s far away.

Perhaps he’s sleeping! Wake him!”

28They were calling in a loud voice,

and ritually cut gashes in themselves

with swords and spears

till blood poured out of them.

29When it became afternoon,

they were prophesying till evening offering time.

No sound.

No one answered.

No one was listening.

Notice when they were exhausted and loopy from blood loss, the Baalist prophets started “prophesying.” Some bibles say “raving,” ’cause they don’t want to credit the Baalists with actual prophecy—if their god was silent, what on earth would they have to prophesy? But if you’re a superstitious pagan, you’d of course be declaring this was a sign, and that was a sign, and this meant Baal wanted one thing, and that meant Baal wanted another thing. It’s a pathetic substitute for actual prophecy, but plenty of people are perfectly happy with it… as any Tarot card reader will tell you.

Space aliens.

Rarely, but every once in a while, someone’ll ask me whether I believe in aliens. By which they don’t mean strangers from other countries; they mean extraterrestrials. Space aliens. Little green men… or tall skinny gray ones with big eyes; whatever they’d rather imagine more.

My usual answer is, “I do—and so do you. Is God from Earth?” This usually surprises them, and the obvious response is no, he’s not.

Probably no heavenly being originated on Earth. But we don’t actually know; the scriptures don’t tell us a thing about the creation of angels, nor lowercase-G “gods,” nor spirits, nor evil spirits. Revelation tells us about Satan’s fall, but—despite the Lucifer myth, and how Christians claim it’s totally in the bible—it actually doesn’t tell us how Satan was created. Only that it was an accuser, and now it’s a full-on enemy.

But people presume God must’ve created some heavenly beings before he created us. When he says, “Let us make humans in our image,” Ge 1.26 NRSVue he was talking to someone. The other beings round his throne, perhaps; the living creatures and 24 elders and anyone else who was present. And maybe that’s true. But again, we don’t know. Bible doesn’t say.

Now there’s a popular teaching which claims when God said “us” and “our,” this was the persons of the trinity talking to one another—the Father telling the Son and Holy Spirit what the game plan was. Since the scriptures do say the Son was doing all the creating, Jn 1.3 this popular teaching would be wrong; it’s the Son telling the Father and Holy Spirit what he was gonna do next. This is why I keep telling people to read those bibles, and try harder not to overlook important points like this.

But I digress. Back to heavenly extraterrestrials: Yeah, they exist.

Still, when people ask me whether there are space aliens, they’re not talking about heavenly beings. They wanna know whether I believe in beings from other planets like the ones we see in fiction. Benevolent ones like Superman or E.T.; hostile ones like in the Alien and Predator movies. The simple, obvious answer is that, same as them, I don’t know whether there are denizens of other worlds out there in space. No one does.

As an historian, I can certainly tell you humanity has always kinda suspected there was. As soon as the ancients figured out how vast space was, and how far away our nearby planets were, they started imagining life out there. Many mythologies believed the underworld was in fact a whole other world. Norse mythology obviously—they had multiple other planets as part of their belief system, and fantasy novels have borrowed heavily from that mythology. Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings novels and movies isn’t Earth. J.R.R. Tolkien gave it a whole different creation story.

Medieval Christians were entirely sure our nearby planets were inhabited. Why else would God make other worlds, as large or bigger than Earth, and not put beings on ’em? Seems like a mighty big waste of space. In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, our neighbor planets are most definitely inhabited. Dante figured the planets are in “the heavens,” therefore they’re part of heaven, and populated with saints and angels.

These medieval ideas clearly influenced Latter-day Saint beliefs, with Brigham Young himself once saying he believed there was life on the moon, Mars, and even the sun. But Mormons don’t talk about that; they believe if they follow God as they should, perhaps in heaven they might merit godhood, and become God over one of those other planets, just like our heavenly Father became God over Earth. Yep, that’s an official LDS teaching; they don’t believe God has always existed, but was created by his heavenly Father and Mother—like Zeus, but without the patricide. It’s one of the big, big differences between the LDS and orthodox Christianity.

Well anyway. We find life all over Earth; sometimes in places we couldn’t imagine finding life. It’s easy to imagine we’d find it all over space, too. When we first started sending out the space probes, we totally thought we would. We didn’t. Too bad. Though it sounds a lot more cool that Mars is entirely populated by robots.

But as for further out in space, on the planets orbiting other worlds; the ones the Mormons hope to rule someday—we call ’em “exoplanets”—maybe, just maybe, God put life out there. Why not? But we’re never gonna know until we can figure out how to see them better, travel there, or establish communications. So for now, we simply have no idea.

Jesus prays for his followers to be with him.

John 17.24-26.

The last bit of Jesus’s John 17 prayer concludes with Jesus asking his Father for his students, his followers, to be with him where he is. Historically Christians have interpreted this a few different ways, and I believe some of those ways are valid:

• That we be on the same page as Jesus—theologically, mentally, spiritually, devotionally.
• That we continually follow Jesus. Where he goes, we go.
• That we continually obey Jesus. What he says, we do.
• That he has various missions he’s assigned us, so we oughta be doing them.
• That we’re gonna be in heaven (properly, paradise) after we die, and Jesus will be present there for us.
• That we’re gonna return with Jesus at his second coming, and rule the world with him.

I should add they’re simultaneously valid. You’re gonna find some Christians who only wanna focus on being with Jesus in the here-and-now, and other Christians who only wanna focus on being with Jesus in the afterlife and resurrection. If we deny this passage isn’t about being with Jesus in the entirety of our Christian life, it means we’re trying to avoid him in one part of it or another. Nope; that won’t do. Jesus wants his followers to be with him both now and later. That’s what he was praying for.

Time to quote him:

John 17.24-26 KWL

24“Father, about these whom you¹ gave me:

I want them to be with me,

where I am,

so they might see my glory

which you¹ gave me

because you¹ loved me

before building the world.

25Righteous Father, the world also didn’t know me,

and I did know you,¹

and these students have come to know

that you¹ sent me.

26I made your¹ name known to them,

and I will make it known,

so the love with which you¹ love me

might be in them

and I in them.”

There are those commentators who think this prayer of Jesus was only for his followers at the time—for the Twelve and his other first-century students. But when Jesus says in verse 26 he will make the Father’s name known—future tense—he clearly means he’s gonna make it known to people beyond the students he had at the time. He’s gonna make the Father known to the 3,000 added later that year at Pentecost, Ac 2.41 to the thousands more added after that, Ac 4.4 to later generations of Christians throughout the Roman Empire, Ethiopia, the Holy Roman Empire and western Europe, the Russian Empire and eastern Europe, the Americas, China, Korea, the Pacific, the global south, and to the people Jesus still personally appears to in visions to lead ’em to salvation.

The axe at the root of the tree.

Matthew 3.10, Luke 3.9.

This is one of those verses where Matthew and Luke match word-for-word. I mentioned in my previous John the baptist article they’re likely both quoting the same source, which scholars call Q. It comes right after that passage about how God can raise children of Abraham from rocks.

Matthew 3.10 KWL = Luke 3.9 KWL

“The axe lies at the root of the tree right now.

Thus every tree not producing good fruit

is cut down

and is thrown into fire.”

If you’re wondering what John meant by “the tree,” it should be obvious this is a metaphor for judgment. If it’s not so obvious, maybe it’s because you’re not familiar with the appropriate Old Testament passages. John’s audience was, but people nowadays don’t read, much less read their bibles, so it’s understandable.

Bible quote time! The Jeremiah bit is directed to Judah; Jr 11.15 the Ezekiel bit is warning the Egyptians about what the LORD did to Assyria, Ek 31.2-3 and the Daniel bit is when the prophet interprets Nabû-kudurri-uṣur’s dream. Da 4.18

Jeremiah 11.16 NET

“I, the LORD, once called you a thriving olive tree,

one that produced beautiful fruit.

But I will set you on fire,

fire that will blaze with a mighty roar.

Then all your branches will be good for nothing.”

Ezekiel 31.10-12 NET

10 “ ‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Because it was tall in stature, and its top reached into the clouds, and it was proud of its height, 11I gave it over to the leader of the nations. He has judged it thoroughly, as its sinfulness deserves. I have thrown it out. 12Foreigners from the most terrifying nations have cut it down and left it to lie there on the mountains. In all the valleys its branches have fallen, and its boughs lie broken in the ravines of the land. All the peoples of the land have departed from its shade and left it.”

Daniel 4.23 NET

“As for the king seeing a holy sentinel coming down from heaven and saying, ‘Chop down the tree and destroy it, but leave its taproot in the ground, with a band of iron and bronze around it, surrounded by the grass of the field. Let it become damp with the dew of the sky, and let it live with the wild animals, until seven periods of time go by for him’…”

In that last one, Nabû was foretold he’d go insane for seven years. Y’notice his tree was chopped down, but this didn’t mean Nabû would die; just be removed from power because he was barking mad. Because getting your tree cut down didn’t automatically mean death.

But the fire part? Yeah, that means death. Or Gehenna. You aren’t coming back from that fire.

“Artificial intelligence,” and why I won’t use it to write.

If you wanna get technical, and sometimes I want to do exactly that, artificial intelligence is software which has intelligence, same as a human has. Well, potentially has; there are a lot of dim bulbs out there. But by intelligence we mean the ability to acquire knowledge and skills on our own, and creatively synthesize this knowledge.

Does the software popularly called “A.I.” nowadays have actual artificial intelligence? Nah; it’s not there yet. In reality it’s a large language model—it’s a massive database of written material. The programmers feed it trillions of webpages and millions of books. So when you ask it a question, it digs through that database and spits up an answer which most resembles the right one.

But as you’re well aware, sometimes it’s not the right one. You know the phrase, “Garbage in, garbage out”? If you feed it bad data—fr’instance, somebody ironically posting bad information for fun (also known as “sh--posting”) on Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, or other messaging websites, the large language model doesn’t know that’s false information. Kinda like when you tell a little kid fairies take their lost teeth. So when you ask the LLM whether it’s okay to put a little arsenic in your guests’ tea, sometimes it’ll tell you, “That’s a great idea! They’ll love it!” Programmers try to catch these errors, but don’t always.

Still, these LLMs have impressed people so much, y’notice people are starting to use ’em all the time. And companies are trying to install them in everything. My workplace put ’em in our work apps. “They’re artificially intelligent now,” I was told, so I tried it out, and meh; it works about the same.

Google has been trying to install them in everything. I first noticed it in Gmail. It kept offering to finish my sentences for me. But not as I wanted, and after it imposed itself too many times, I went into the settings and switched it off. Then Google did the same thing with Google Docs—which is where I sometimes write these pieces, and take notes in church. It likewise kept offering to finish my sentences. Switched that off too. I don’t mind it checking my grammar, but if I wanted a collaborator I’d ask.

“So you haven’t used A.I. for brainstorming or prompts or outlines?” Nope. I wanna do all that the old-fashioned way. With my brain. Writing is a skill that’s taken me the past 53 years to develop. I don’t want any part of it to atrophy just because I can now use A.I. as a crutch.

Post-Evangelicals.

Decades ago (yep, it’s decades now) I was a regular follower and commenter at Michael Spencer’s blog Internet Monk. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it has an archive site now. It was my first real exposure to what Michael called “post-Evangelicals.”

Lemme back up and remind you “Evangelical” has multiple definitions. There’s the Evangelical movement, which is about making an individual decision for Jesus, plus his atonement for our individual sins, the bible’s authority, and evangelism. There’s cultural Evangelicalism, which is really just mainstream Christian culture in the United States. There’s political Evangelicalism, which is about coopting Evangelicals to get votes. And there are people who insist these aren’t three different things, but one and the same. Michael was among them.

Michael was a schoolteacher at a Baptist boarding school in Kentucky, who went through a period of deconstruction. I’m not sure how much of it was triggered by his wife’s decision to become Roman Catholic. It upset him, but he tried to make peace with it; she’s still following the same Jesus after all. It certainly obligated him to reexamine his own beliefs. He came to the conclusion he was most definitely Christian, but couldn’t approve of cultural Evangelicalism. So what did that make him? Well, not Evangelical. Post-Evangelical. Whatever that meant; Michael was still figuring it out.

Michael died in 2010, and Chaplain Mike Mercer ran the blog for another decade before retiring it in 2020.

So, post-Evangelicalism. For Michael, it meant dismissing popular Evangelical culture and politics, because it’s too often pure Christianism. (Michael called it “churchianity.”) It meant getting back to the basics, and the basics are of course what Christ Jesus teaches. Michael sought what he called “a Jesus-shaped spirituality”—like me, he figured Jesus is his religion. So if it helps you follow Jesus, keep it; if it doesn’t, don’t. And Michael figured Evangelicalism doesn’t.

Podcaster Blake Chastain coined the term “exvangelical” to describe ’em. It’s certainly more clever than “post-Evangelical.” But both terms are a rather wide catch-all for people who decided enough was enough, and stepped away from American Evangelicalism. And sometimes Christ Jesus too.