Dear My Twin - 11

 Dear My Twin, 

I was going to write about something entirely different today, because I feel like I've explained enough of what led me to tear everything down, that I could start showing you how and why I built things back up. 

And then somebody posted a meme on social media, and I simply MUST address it. 

Here is the meme:


I hate this line of thinking. I hate it so much. 

I used to be slightly more comfortable with it, but at this point, it just makes me FURIOUS. 

Despite the "proof verse" from Isaiah 43:7, this is just a gross line of thinking. 

Proof texting is taking a verse from the Bible, and using it to justify an entire theological point, or support an interpretation (usually claimed as the "literal" translation). You recite the verse, and BOOM, you proved your point, no more need for critical thinking. 

It is an incredibly self-serving, and ignorant way to read and interpret the Bible. You cherry pick for the verses that say what you want to say, and then ignore huge swaths of the Bible. 

Ironically, most people who do this claim they hold the Bible in high regard, and take Bible interpretation seriously. I'm like, "No, you don't. You take your point of VIEW seriously, and use the Bible like a spiritual hitman to enforce your ignorant selfishness!"

I do be SALTY this morning. 

Quick example: women preaching/being ordained. 

There are basically TWO, maybe three verses that are consistently used to say that women can not ever be preachers. I'm not going to bother to quote them; we all know what they are; if you don't, the quickest of google searches will turn up WAY to many sources. 

But those few verses ignore a LARGE collection of scripture that SHOWS women leading, teaching, and being in authority over men, and directly quotes women (and all scripture is God-breathed and authoritative!): Deborah's song in Judges, Miriam's song in Exodus,  Mary's Magnificat in Luke. Junia, an apostle. This was the one that got me; people were SO intent on women not being able to lead; they changed scripture, and made her name masculine, instead of grappling with their interpretation of a few other verses!

ANYWAY. Now that I went on a WILD TANGENT about proof texting and women being in leadership OVER humans with penises, BACK TO "BEING CREATED TO GLORIFY GOD."

If a parent, had kids, and went around telling people, "Yes, I conceived these children, and am raising them, to show the world what a great person I am, and to glorify myself," we would NOT think of that person as a loving parent, or even a decent human being. 

And the children would certainly would not grow up to be healthy and well-balanced adults. They'd be warped and traumatized by the lack of love. 

I know this from personal experience.

(And also the scads of learning I do about trauma and abuse.)

But EVEN THOUGH so much Scripture points to how kind God is, what a loving parent They are, how God knows how to give GOOD gifts, we toss it all away for this grotesque, worm-theology view that "Y'know what, I, as a person, don't matter, I, as a person, have no other purpose, other than to be a cosmic yes-man for a self-serving narcissist with an ego the size of eternity."

Sigh. 

And it's such a simplistic interpretation too. "I was made to glorify God - I better get on that!"

God is glorious. It's just a fact about God. An aspect of God's existence, as it were. 

Like how God is love. 

Therefore, everything that God does, is glorious, and glorifies Them. 

The act of creation, was glorious. 
Creating humans, glorious. 

We don't need to diminish ourselves to glorify God, or pretend we don't matter. I mean, we matter enough to God that "He sent His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him would not perish ..."

(I also absolutely abhor it when people quote John the Baptist "I must decrease so He must increase." THAT WAS A ONE-OFF, PEOPLE!!! NOT AN APPLY FOR ALL TIME!!!!!" ... I'm fine.)

By existing as fully ourselves, fully human, in all our messiness, and being the IMAGE OF GOD, we glorify God. 

It's not about running around and doing more works, and pretending we are garbage. 

It's leaning into the glorious knowledge that we live. We breathe. We create. We laugh. We love. We weep. 

It is our human existence that testifies to the glorious creativity and love of God. Just by being. 

We can knock of this shit about "We were made to glorify God, so y'all better get on that, ya trash heaps!"




PS: You may have noticed I'm going back and forth between referring to God with They pronouns and He pronouns. I'll talk about that later. ^_^


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dear My Twin - 02

 Dear My Twin,    After the the weird evangelical dichotomy of a "loving" God who does terribly abusive things, the horrible, abusive misogyny is what drove me to question things.  The misogyny in the church is ... it's overwhelming. At the extreme ends, women are not only barred from any  type of leadership position, their married lives make them less than human, simultaneously removing all power from them by order of "submission," diminishing the Imagi Deo in them by defining them as "help meet" alone, removing them as co-heirs, inheritors, children of God, humans made in the image of God, and while they are powerless in marriage to even speak up (as that would be disrespecting their husband's position as the mini-Christ in the home), they are simultaneously blamed for everything that goes wrong in the marriage, even in extreme abuse, sexual, physical and marital affairs. She either wasn't being submissive enough, or not giving enough sex.  W...
Read more

Dear My Twin - 05

 Dear My Twin,  One of the big parts that lead my deconstruction was beginning to study abuse. When I realized Shannon had been gaslighting, manipulating and abusing me, I was shocked. I thought I had learned about abuse, and could recognize it. Little did I know I had been in the middle of intense abuse for a couple years at that point.  My response, of course, was to start learning about abuse. Ha! That's always my go to. "COME! LET US ... LEARN!"  Little did I know that learning about abuse, what it looked like, who did it, how it changed the brain, how it forged enmeshed and trapped relationships, was going to circle me right back to the evangelical church.  That was even more shocking than the way Shannon had been treating me.  This is a hard one to explain and detangle. I'm sure where to begin, because there's SO MUCH information spinning in my head. How do I make it clear, concise, and understandable?  I guess I'll start with the book, "A Church...
Read more

Dear My Twin - 07

 Dear My Twin, The heart of abuse, is control. And the methods of abuse, build up a co-dependent relationship between abuser and victim, in very specific ways. It is a complex, and on-going series of reward and punishment behaviors that undermines the victim's ability to think independently, experience their own emotions, believe their own experiences, and entwines them completely around the abuser for any sense of self, and survival in the world. Abuse follows specific patterns, to produce specific outcomes. As I studied abuse, to figure out what had happened to me, and my relationship with Shannon, I was horrified as the same abusive patterns I was learning became clearly reveled in the practices and theology of the Church I grew up in.  N.B.: Not all abusers are deliberate and calculated in their abuse. Many ARE, but many are also just repeating the patterns they learned from their families of origin, patterns that effectively got their physical, emotional, and relational n...
Read more