Like most Westerners, I was born under the shadow of doctrines like original sin, through which it’s communicated to us that we carry around guilt like a genetic flaw. God’s perfect morality and impeccable ethical-ness, then, becomes our enemy. It’s an attribute of God that makes it impossible for him to have any attitude toward us but anger, wrath, and holy hatred, as our inherited guilt activates his sense of justice, and puts him at odds with us.
Because I took my Christianity very seriously, this idea haunted me like a vengeful specter. I could never get away from the feeling that I was unworthy of divine love, and lived in constant crippling fear of death, because hell awaited the guilty, of whom I saw myself as being chief. The only way, in this inherited view, to find peace with God was to trust in Jesus as being a sacrifice that satisfied in God what I never could, and because of the immensity and intensity of the fear and guilt I was shouldering, this idea, as absurd as it actually is in light of who Jesus proclaimed Abba to be, was very, very attractive.
So, eventually, I was able to exorcise the vengeful specter of original sin and an angry God by believing Jesus had satisfied this God’s anger as it concerned my guilt, and for years I preached and taught this as being the Gospel.
However, as time passed, I came to see that the problem never really had anything to do with an inherited guilt passed on to me by my naked, garden-expelled, primordial parents. God was never angry at humanity as a whole for the sins of the figures of Adam and Eve, and Jesus did not die to satisfy the debt that they incurred and passed on to the rest of us. This was nothing more than an anachronism, read into the Gospel story by Christians who had had centuries to think on and develop the doctrine of original sin as well as a violent atonement that fixed the problem.
However, while the original problem I perceived was never actually a problem, it still was a problem to me, because I was born into a religious worldview that had made it one. So, regardless of the fact that this problem was actually a non-problem, it was still a problem in my mind that was only undone by an unnecessary theology and doctrine of salvation, that existed only to remedy an imagined problem. Even though that particular understanding of salvation was not ever a true or necessary thing from God’s perspective, it was, in a sense, necessary for me so that I could overcome the man made problem of original sin.
So, in my experience, an imagined, and ultimately unnecessary understanding of sin was cured by an equally imagined, and unnecessary concept of salvation. Both were human ideas, and one was dreamed up in order to solve the other.
While I no longer hold to either of those views, because I was born into the former, it was almost necessary that I pass through the latter in order to be able to overcome it. I was born into that view without my consent, and was held captive by it until something was able to get me thinking differently. In my case, it was a problematic solution to a nonexistent problem that did the job.
This is the strange way that I think God sometimes allows bad theology to cure bad theology. I would never have been able to understand God as I do now, that is, in the way that I presently believe Jesus revealed him, had I not first had my false understanding of sin cured by an equally false understanding of salvation. Once the latter had cured the former, I could be liberated from the latter as well.
I know this all sounds a little bit complicated, but it’s how things worked in my life. I needed the bad to cure the bad, and on the other side of experiencing that cure, false though it was, I was able to recognize both as ultimately unnecessary.
I bring this up only to say that I must constantly remind myself that I did not come to hold my present beliefs overnight, but had to pass through a lot of stuff first. Some of the very things that helped to heal me up and get me into a healthier frame of my mind are things I’ve now even come to see as being unhealthy, but necessary to my own healing process. I must remind myself of this because some are still in that process (and I’m sure I am too) and I cannot allow myself to deprive them of the grace I was and am continually given as it concerns my faith journey. People have to be allowed to have their own journeys, which means that I will rarely ever be in agreement with everyone, because, while we’re all walking the same road, we’re all at very different places on that road.
I (we) must allow people the freedom to experience freedom the same way we did, which was/is in installments and small fragments. Eventually, we’ll end up at the same place, but until we get there, we’ll always think where we are is the best place.
Just some thoughts (mostly for me) to consider.
~ Jeff Turner