Christianity is weird. Really weird. In middle-class western churches we seem to have forgotten that in the name of respectability.
That isn’t actually why, of course, though it’s an easy accusation to throw. In the evangelical world we’ve shuffled away the weirdness because it’s not easy to explain. We’re keen to get a hearing ‘for the gospel’ so we try to make everything as simple as possible. We’re also, often at least, the kind of Biblicists that are wary of anything that smacks of tradition (except when it suits us) and often exegetical minimalists that want to rule out a lot of the history of interpretation of the Bible as flights of fancy (some of it is, of course).
I think this is misguided, partly because we sell our theological birthright for the proverbial stew—there are riches we ignore and are often ignorant of—and partly because those coming into churches for the first time do not expect it to be simple and explicable.
I vividly remember when a friend at University who had been exploring Christianity a bit asked if he could come to church with me on Sunday. I, attending at the time a Newfrontiers church that engaged in full-on body ministry during worship—tongues, prophecies, the lot—had been told by many other Christians that it was a weird church. I clearly had absorbed that in some way and tried to gently prepare him that it might be a bit strange. After he’d been I asked him how he found it: he had some reflections but did comment that he didn’t understand why I’d prepared him like that, ‘it’s all weird, Tim’ he said, or words to that effect. If God is real and loves him and was killed and walked out of a grave then all bets are off. He expected church to be weird, what he found weird wasn’t the ‘weird’ bits as he had no religious background at all. All churches were weird to him.
He is these days following the Lord with his family.
But his words stuck with me and have become something of a philosophical outlook over time. I call it, ‘make Christianity weird again.’ Especially as I’ve begun to explore Christian history, read the Fathers, and start down a journey of charismatic retrieval, I would like us to stop being embarrassed about the weird bits of the faith. We think God became a man and walked out the back of death, it’s all weird.
The biggest opposition to this is usually Christians, who are the ones who find the Bible’s earthy reality strange. They need gently teaching otherwise. In our preaching we should deliberately turn up the contrast.
Here are a few scattered examples:
The thrice holy God of gods is terrifying. We should recover some sense of the fear of the Lord. It is good that we understand that we are invited to call Yahweh, Father, but we’ve lost the frisson of surprise in overfamiliarity. He’s not a cuddly daddy, he’s the Lord of Hosts! And he loves you and is for you and wants you and is interested in the challenges and difficulties of your life.
To spin that out a little, he’s the God of the gods. I hear much too often in preaching that the gods that Israel’s neighbours worshipped weren’t real. I can see how you get there reading the prophets invective about idol worship (e.g. Isaiah 44), but we mistake that this is about the practice of assuming that idols are where heaven meets earth or that the gods live in them. The Bible is consistent that Ba’al, Asherah, Molech, Dagon and the rest are real, and that Yahweh is their God. These ‘gods’—which is a catch-all term in Hebrew (Elohim) that variously refers to the Lord, spiritual powers, what we call angels, and the dead—are profoundly real. They are not to be worshipped, that’s why the Bible is so keen that you don’t worship false gods, not because it’s not true but because they aren’t God. We would probably call them demons. They’re still active. They want you to die.
To continue in that vein, angels and demons are real, even if those terms are perhaps a little reductive to the rich, enchanted cosmos that the Bible spins for us. Charismatic churches are at least a little aware of the need to deal with people who are affected by demonic activity in one way or another. We tend to leave talking about demonic activity in communities, structures, ideologies or nations to the lunatic fringe. We shouldn’t. As James Wood has pointed out, channelling Jacques Ellul I think, our political theology would be richer for talking more about demons. We don’t talk about angels at all. We are right that people who focus overly on these forces are doing it wrong, we should be talking about Jesus. That tends to mean we never speak at all. The spiritual realm and its forces are real.
We then don’t notice these things when they occur in the Bible. Those I read the Bible with are probably sick of me pointing out the dragons when they occur, but I do it to deliberately turn up the contrast. The Bible is strange to modern sensibilities, and dragons are real and you need to slay them.
We don’t catch the structural ‘shapes’ or patterns of the Bible’s story, the way that every story echoes the gospel, a lot of the time. We don’t see the ‘down and up again’ or ‘there and back again’ or the tree, the table, and the sea. This points to a larger problem, we read the Bible in flat, modernist ways because we haven’t been taught to do otherwise.
In a similar way, we manage to talk about Jesus’ victory in the resurrection as though it provides evidence of the truth of his claims and the atoning nature of the cross. Which is true, of course, but among the least interesting things you can say about the turning point of history when the graves spat out their dead and the Lord of Life arose to claim his crown.
We don’t notice and speak about the sacraments when they emerge in the narrative, which they do all the time. It would be reductionist, I think, to say that every meal in the Old Testament is the Lord’s Supper, or that every step into water is a Baptism. It would be naïve to say that they don’t have something to say about the sacraments, though.
I could go on, but this is a typical blog post length by now. It is of course true that many churches do speak about some of these things. Some of them are even team make Christianity weird again, may their tribe increase. I think we need to remember that church is not (primarily) for outsiders, or even insiders (though much more so), it’s for God. Which is a really weird thing to say, so stop trying to domesticate the faith. It’s weirder and wilder than you could possibly know.
Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash
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