Myths About Christianity

The following list is from Tektonics and are the myths that I find most salient in my life.  They are also myths that Christians themselves propagate.  Read the article for more of the author (James Patrick Holding [JPH])'s thoughts on each one.

I bet at least one of these will surprise you.  But bear with me, I think each myth is true in that it's false.  ;)

Here's a short table of contents so you can just choose whether you want to Read More or not.  (I highly recommend that you do, though!)

1.  Hell is a place of physical torture.
2.  God is my buddy and Jesus is my friend.
3.  The end times are coming.
14.  The supernatural exists.
Original Sin

"1.  Hell is a place of physical torture."

Waittt... what about fire and brimstone and gnashing of teeth and everything?  What about the horned devil with his pitchfork poking damned souls as they burn in lakes of fire?

Hm.  Well, the fire may draw on the symbol of how the Holy Spirit is often portrayed as water--after all, what would be the absence of water?  Fire.  (Although God is omnipresent, but we'll talk about that below)

The gnashing of teeth "describes a reaction of persons who have been publicly shamed or dishonored" (Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary, 76, emphasis added)."

Hopefully you know that Satan doesn't have pitchforks or really assist in the shaming of people in Hell... he will have his own shame to deal with.
Makes me think of that tumblr meme where it asks, "If Satan punishes the bad people in Hell, then doesn't that make him the good guy?"  haha.

But when people ask how a seemingly loving God could send people to Hell, I think they fundamentally don't understand what Hell is.  JPH says that "Hell is actually more of a state than a place, and it is a state of shame, of exclusion from God's honor and presence, not a place of torture." (bolding mine)  He alludes to the honor/shame culture of collectivist societies like the Ancient Near Eastern people (or actually, the culture of the majority of the people in the world who have ever lived) which we'll talk about more in the next point (or maybe it'll be a post of its own someday). 
But anyway, I think it's less that God "sends" people to Hell, but that people choose Hell for themselves.
If you chose to never want God in this life, then why would you choose to have Him after you die?  You could think of dying as being locked-in to that mindset.  God isn't going to force you to love Him--that's not love, after all.  You weren't made to be some robot of God's.  He will respect your decision, and you'll thus have what you always wanted anyway.

JPH:


(ok, actually the italics are him quoting Glenn Miller) "The 'logic' of hell in the bible is surprisingly simple: You receive back the treatment/effects you gave other agents (including God and yourself) with some kind of multiplier effect. [The bible is full of images of this reciprocity concept: reaping what you sow, being paid back, suffering loss as you had despoiled others, unkindness for unkindness shown, apathy for apathy rendered, 'eye for an eye', proportional judgement, etc]


This is suited as well to what we have said of honor debts and shame as a response. You dishonor God; you receive dishonor in return. Appropriately your required response is to acknowledge your own need -- in effect, giving up your "honor" -- by admitting that you need God's help to pay the debt.


C. S. Lewis wrote a book titled The Great Divorce in which Hell is depicted as a microscopic world that is smaller than a piece of dirt in heaven (though inhabitants do not realize this except by a special "bus trip" to heaven). Within that microscopic world, people constantly get tired of the company of others and move themselves farther and farther out into the "boondocks" away from others. Napoleon is presented as having done this, and two modern travellers who go to his house arrive to find him pacing back and forth muttering over his failures, for which he blames everyone else.


Lewis, we think, was on to something here, even though he did not mention an honor-shame dialectic. The person who isashamed cannot come into the presence of God, but would indeed be driven away from it by the very nature of the dialectic, seeking to get as far away from the presence of the greatest glory and honor as possible. Literally speaking, "Hell" would be a life on the lam -- always trying to get yourself further and further from God's holiness, but because God is omnipresent, and because in Him all things move and have their being, never being able to succeed.


An analogy I once used for Kyle Gerkin may help: God is like a magnet, and the "polarity" of sinners is all wrong."



"2.  God is my buddy and Jesus is my friend"

Think of Alvin (satirically) clapping his hands over his head, eyes closed and head bowed, saying, "I am a friend of God, I am a friend of God."  If you're familiar with that song, hopefully you realize that it isn't a biblical portrayal of our relationship with God.

Frankly, this myth may be a little difficult to swallow.  I know it was--and to an extent, still is--for me.  In our American Christianity, we tend to emphasize so ridiculously much on the fact of being friends with Jesus and being homeboys with him, that it is natural for this to be difficult to take in.
Sure, Jesus may have called his disciples his "friends," (John 15:15) but in their culture, you would almost never have the same personal relationship of friendship that we have now.
JPH:  "People of the time of the Bible did not 'get to know' each other as modern persons in the West do. A 'friend' meant a person who looked out for your practical interests -- not someone you had beer and watched football with."
and 
"Ironically, the view of God as a remote patron is the one that is most conducive to the view concerned Christians like MacArthur wish to see us return to. Perhaps then we would see a greater respect for God and His holiness, and less concern with self-fulfillment, ranging from best-selling books having titles like The Purpose-Driven Life to our most popular songs being titled, 'I Can Only Imagine' (focus on experience, not on fact).


A reader recently noted a point related to this: The myth that 'the purpose of coming to Christ is happiness, joy, all the feel good emotions we love (instead of forgiveness and atonement for sin).' This is tied in with such modern conceptions as use of personal testimony as the primary form of witnessing (when in the first century, it was the evidence for the resurrection and the life of Jesus that lay at the heart of evangelism) and the self-focus that makes people live as though God will not hold us accountable for our deeds."


Once again, it's not about us.  Let's stop being so self-consumed.
"3.  The end times are coming."


I seriously feel like gagging every time I hear about Rapture predictions.  Or really just about the Rapture at all.
If you've happened to somehow had to listen to my eschatological rant, you'll know that I don't think the Rapture will happen.  (It's not supported in the Bible for sure, and you can feel free to offer up verses that you think talk about the Rapture and we can talk from there.)  You may also know that I follow a view called partial preterism (http://www.tektonics.org/eschhub.html).  I don't know much about it, though, and it isn't perfect either (at least, from my limited knowledge of it; maybe it's better than I realize).

To not think that the Rapture actually exists definitely disturbed me when I first read about partial preterism, but after coming to terms with it, I realize that it makes a lot more sense for it to not be true.  Just from the structure of the Bible, God doesn't seem to really be into taking all His chosen people for Himself and leaving everyone else to suffer by themselves.  He is rather more into using us as instruments for enacting healing and change.
Plus, doesn't it seem really shamefully escapist for Christians to just disappear from all the suffering and hardship?  I mean, sure, who wouldn't want that, but do you think that that's really what God would call us to do?

I don't study too much about eschatology because whatever will happen will happen, but perhaps in the future I'll expound on preterism.


"14.  The supernatural exists."

(I like what JPH has to say, so I'll quote him in this one.
Also, I'm getting tired and need to finish my hwk... >_<)


"Uh oh, what am I saying? I'm saying that we've all fallen prey to the post-Enlightenment distinction between the natural and the so-called supernatural. In other words, this is an artifical category, one that has led to such silly ideas as that miracles (acts of God) "violate natural law".


God works in and through the natural world and within its "laws" -- while some miracles are beyond human capacity to duplicate, they hardly require any violation of nature's "laws" (other than perhaps, creation ex nihilo, and even that is not certainly a "violation").

Put it this way: Why is it not a "violation" of the law of gravity when I pick up a box? Why IS it such a violation when God picks up that same box?
The inconsistency was invented of itself, and unfortunately, we continue to let the debate continue on these terms, and this makes our apologetic for things like the Resurrection more difficult than it needs to be."

I think I was confused for a long time about this one. This is not saying that miracles do not happen.  Miracles are acts of God, as JPH states, and God obviously does work.  But the supernatural, that idea that God breaks the laws of physics and everything to accomplish His purposes, is not right.  I mean, of course He could, but why would He ever need to?

Original sin.


This isn't on the list, but from what I've read of JPH, in a nutshell, original sin isn't like what people generally take it to be.  People are not condemned automatically by just being born because of Adam and Eve... rather, Adam's sin just set the definition of what punishment for sin would be:  death.  We don't get any sin imputed to us from birth; it's all our own fault.
JPH uses the example of carjacking.  Historically, when cars were appearing on the market, there was no punishment for carjacking.  After all, cars didn't exist.  But once more criminals did it, the laws against it were established and from there the punishments for carjacking were set (whereas before, prosecutors just lumped together punishments from other crimes)

err... read here for a better explanation and support.
This may also be a difficult one to swallow, since our culture talks about this sooo much, but read the article and see what you think.  Basically, the point is "Adam's sin, and the resultant punishment of spiritual and eventually physical death, was a pattern-connection that was established and set the legal precedent for death to be inflicted as the penalty for all sins."
and
"We are not paying for, and being punished for, Adam's sin, in a way that is unfair to us."