oh, Lord ￼

I started writing today by looking at the prompt and writing the title of the essay and then forgetting that the prompt existed. The book or movie that has terrified me the most is clearly the Bible. Remembering that telling a story is not endorsement of someone’s behavior has saved me from a lot of time and trouble in exegesis……. because the point is that the people in the Bible were not saints. The story exists whether the protagonists did the right thing or not.

It is very important to remember that the protagonist is not God, nor even Jesus. The Bible “makes no argument for God,” as Rowan Williams (former archbishop of Canterbury) so elegantly stated. The movement comes from the people who remembered to write everything down. Jesus’s sermons would mean nothing today if the scribes had not been Johnny on the spot.

The thing is not the thing.

The Bible is not technically a book, but a journey over 1500 years. Looking at it systemically, what I see is that it is a giant intelligence operation of enormous proportions. Christianity had to go into the wind after the crucifixion, so I lovingly call the gospel of Acts the gospel of holy shit what happens now?

Resurrection only happens when you have done enough work to see why it matters, and I will never tell you that the ascension is factual. What I will tell you is that any mystical connection is less important than what Jesus actually accomplished while he was alive.