Misrepresenting Jesus
An Introduction and an Update
Hello readers. Shortly after writing my last post, I started a new medication to treat migraines which for a couple weeks made me really sleepy and lacking in ambition. But I have not given up on my mission to speak out against Christian Nationalism. On February 17, my parents and I saw God and Country in the theater. I don’t generally like going to movie theaters because they crank up the volume unnecessarily loud, and you cannot pause the movie to go and get a drink or to comment on a scene. But Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise, an excellent book on the American church’s complicity with slavery and racism whose blog I also follow, urged people to see God and Country in theaters because if the movie does well in theaters, it is more likely to be picked up by a streaming platform, thus helping to better raise awareness about this dangerous political movement to the broader public who does not follow the news as closely as we do. Unfortunately, there were only two other women in the theater with us, and when Mom went to see it again with a friend, they had the theater to themselves. I hope it drew a larger crowd at other theaters.
It was an excellent movie that I would highly recommend seeing if you haven’t already. I especially appreciated how the movie didn’t just address this movement’s threat to Democracy, but its threat to the reputation of Christianity itself in secular society, an important element that I believe Christian scholars have an obligation to address. To that end, the quote that stood out to me the most from this movie was spoken by a black man who represented Repairer’s of the Breach. (His name flashed on the screen for the sighted people, but I didn’t catch it.) He remarked that a hallmark of Christian Nationalism is that it is very loud regarding issues Jesus says very little about—abortion, same-sex marriage—and silent on issues Jesus spoke a lot about, like compassion for the poor.
During my blogging hiatus, I also read The Kingdom The Power and the Glory, written by Tim Alberta, a reporter for The Atlantic, as well as a committed Christian whose father was a pastor. In 2019, shortly after the launch of American Carnage, a book Tim Alberta wrote that was critical of Donald Trump and his alliance with Evangelicals, his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. When he returned home for the funeral, he and his wife were shocked by horrible things that were said to him about this work by church elders he had known most of his life, on the occasion of his father’s funeral. This, along with the last conversation with his father that now haunted him, inspired him to turn away from political reporting and embark on this project, which he viewed as a project of eternal significance, an investigation of his Evangelical tradition and its abandonment of the Gospel for imperial citizenship and earthly power. Each chapter began with a quote from Jesus, and then the chapter would illustrate how people in the Christian Nationalism movement would twist Jesus’s words out of context, or misinterpret them. We have all at some point in our lives been hurt by someone who misinterprets something we said, or twists something we said out of context, but as much as these human misunderstandings upset us, how much more must it upset Jesus to have his words twisted, or exploited for temporal, worldly power?
While I work my remote call center job, I love to listen to Family Radio. For the first half of my typical shift, this station plays beautiful hymns, and then the second half is devoted to biblical teaching from several different pastors. I reveal this information not to sound holier than thou. I am not against people listening to secular music while they work, and I have done so myself. But while I am extremely grateful for this job with a company committed to the employment of blind people, where I have a level of support I don’t think I would find anywhere else, like any job in this fallen world, it causes me to grumble sometimes. It can get tedious, and sometimes takes me out of my comfort zone. I found that this station sooths me in a way that secular stations could not. The beautiful music for the first half of my shift is calming and has soothed my anxiety on a few occasions, and the Bible teaching of the second half is intellectually stimulating, alleviating some of the tedium. If a sermon is interrupted by a call, all of the programs are available as podcasts which I can give my undivided attention after work, but there is often three or four minutes of downtime between calls, long enough to hear most of the sermon and get the gist of it.
One of these programs is Grace to You, the ministry of John MacArthur. Now, I must include a disclaimer here. I don’t fully condone all the teachings of John MacArthur. He is a complementarian—a view which espouses that there are significant differences between men and women—to the extreme. Of course, there are biological differences between men and women. Only women can give birth to babies or nurse babies, and because men produce testosterone, my dad has the physical strength to do certain chores that Mom and I do not have. But some of MacArthur’s teachings imply that women are less intelligent, less capable of living morally, which make me want to scream at him through the radio sometimes. In Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes about how as president of Masters Seminary, John MacArthur failed to comply with the Violence Against Women Act, which I speculate is probably because he doesn’t believe women should be in college, the purpose of which is to prepare people for careers outside the home, to begin with. Their place is in the home. Of course, God’s ways are higher than our ways, and so it is true that when we have a visceral negative reaction to a pastor’s teaching, we need to pray and reflect on whether the teaching really disagrees with Scripture, or merely our culture. But still, I think, based on other sermons and commentaries I have read over the years, some of the implications for the role of women drawn from Paul’s writings are specific to the culture and circumstances of particular churches, and at some point, I am going to take him to task. But people are complex, and his teaching on other matters is spot-on. In a recent sermon discussing how Christians need to prioritize eternal life over this world, he said something that made me cheer. He had recently spoken to a prominent man in Washington who told him, “Everything that Christians do to put pressure to put their agenda through is counterproductive to the gospel because the people here see them as just another political pressure group with a temporal earthly agenda. They succumb to pressure because of money, but when the money and pressure run out, they revert to the way they used to be, only now they have a deep resentment for these people who pressured them to conduct themselves in a manner contrary to their own convictions.”
In 2005, Bart Ehrman, a former Evangelical who became an agnostic, wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus. The book argues that the Bible cannot be trusted because we do not have the original manuscript, and scribes tasked with copying the Bible before the printing press sometimes intentionally made additions or changes to the Bible. For the record, of the 400,000 variants in the Bible manuscripts, the vast majority are insignificant discrepancies in spelling, grammar, punctuation and word order that do not affect the meaning of the passages. Less than 1 percent—around 400 words—are actually significant. Scholars are transparent about these discrepancies in footnotes and even these variants do not change the overarching cohesiveness of the Bible. But Jesus had compassion for people with doubts, questions. What really angered Jesus were hypocrites, and those who caused his children to stumble (Matthew 18:6). Almost all of my posts here have incorporated Scripture that is misrepresented or ignored by Christian Nationalism, and while I don’t fear the upcoming election because God is in control, I think it is time to start an ongoing series which I am titling “Misrepresenting Jesus” in which I will focus on a particular passage of Scripture and try to remind us all, myself as much as anyone what Jesus was really trying to say, and how we must resist the loud voices of shepherds with evil intentions, and trust only in the words of the Good Shepherd.
That Reminds me of a Song: I realize this post was more of an update than a substantive reflection, but I thought you might enjoy a particularly soothing hymn played on Family Radio. I first heard This Is My Father’s World performed by Fernando Ortega, and it is beautiful in its own right. But I recently heard another version, performed by Michael O’Brien that is especially beautiful because he is accompanied by Timmy O’Brien—I bet that is his brother—and their lyrics, combined with the harmony thrills my heart. I hope you all enjoy the beauty of this song as well, and if I am not able to get another post together before Easter, I wish you a blessed Holy Week and Easter. Remember, He is risen, and because of this, we have nothing to fear from the political nonsense going on right now!