Rant about Christianity and Exclusivism Presentation
I woke up last Sunday thinking about this guy in my philosophy of religion class. This guy did pastoral studies at Multnomah which counts as a strike one. I don’t generally like people from MBC. There are only TWO people that I like and am friends with, David and Bryan. Everyone else has been either marriage obsessed or an asshole. Last week, this guy gave a presentation on Christianity and Exclusivism. His main thesis was quite ambigious, but what I got out of it was that in order to have relationship with God, or Jesus you could not be pluralist. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. The only way to get to heaven is through relationship with Jesus Christ. It was kinda cute in a “oh your kind of pathetic way” when he stood up there and sited scripture as to why Jesus is the only way. As if it would have ANY relevance to his audience...come on!I AGREE with all of these fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith. Yeah I get it! Yes, I have had it drilled into my fawking head for years now. What I don’t get is the attitudes and marginalization that follows these core beliefs. What I don’t get is not looking at the life of Jesus, scripture, relationally and holistically. Jesus(at least the Jesus that I perceive in the bible and that I commune with) is about relationship. RELATIONship. RELATIONSHIP. His exclusivist propaganda screamed,”Here let me make you neat and clean and how I think you should be.”
I posed the following question to him, not because I think that it is true, but because these are the things that I think about, these are the things that I ponder, and that morning for an hour I prayed about it. The question was this:
“What if, the Muslims, Buddhists, whomever else prays to these different Gods, what if they are communicating with Jesus and do not know that it is Jesus? What if these people are in relationship with the Triune God, but do not know it because they might not know what they call Allah is actually the Christian God?” Like their are so many different attributes of God that we will never be able to grasp, what if they are just worshipping a portion of that? What if all of the polytheistic religions are actually just worshipping aspects of the Whole God? The same God that I worship?
Am I making ANY sense?
Later a girl who knows that I am a Jesus-girl, asked him: “How can all of you Christians have so many different thoughts and opinions?” I began to say,”Well we all believe the same core things....” When he said:
“Well the bible also talks about a deceiver and there are those that fall away from the truth and are being deceived.”
Yeah he was looking right at me when he said it.
Gotta love that crap! I would much rather be thought “deceived” by a Baptist Multnomah graduate than to be disconnected from the person that I am. I have spent WAY too many years trying to meet up to all of the expectations that I believed were important and now only see I was missing the point.
I am more concerned about being right with who God has knit me into than who other christians think I should be. I hate christian culture. I hate it more than anything. Cause it was SO not what Jesus was about.
Jesus was so not into people being excluded from the party. Even though the way this boy may perceive me and the “world” to be, is highly annoying I am called to love him. With the love that encompasses all people, not just the ones that I like. I guess it is just easier at times for me to love messy people than people that are messy and try to hide it with exclusive teachings of who the Son of God is and what he is about.
But I still want to learn to love them...maybe that is why I am going to be living in the suburbs. To learn how to love the people that I dislike.
posted by Kat @ 11:31 PM
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