The Naked Now is Richard Rohr’s exploration of the mystical side of Christianity. Below are some brilliant quotes. Thanks to my friends John Fancher for compiling these:

Yes, the mind is brilliant, but the more we observe it, the more we realize it is also obsessive and repetitive
……………………….
Yes, the mind can serve the world, but in fact it largely serves itself.
………………………….
…we still think of ourselves as mere humans trying desperately to become spiritual, when the Christian revelation was precisely that you are already spiritual and your difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human.
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(on insisting on one interpretation of scripture): This, even after Jesus so often … taught that the Ultimate Reality…is always LIKE something – clearly a simile or metaphor, inviting further experience and journey, not an idea with definitions that could be checked true or false on a student exam.
……………………………………
…we forget that every time God forgives or shows mercy, God is breaking God’s own rules…Once you’ve known Grace, your tit-for-tat universe is forever undone: God is everywhere and always and scandalously found even in the failure of sin
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The Gospels never recorded Jesus having a single pre-requisite for any of his healings…except desire itself
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God’s love is so ingenious and victorious that I find God is willing to turn the whole world around to get me facing in the right direction
………………
If certitude, predictability and perfect order were so important, Jesus would have come in a time of digital recorders and cameras and he would have at least written his ideas down somewhere – and more clearly! He would have described his task as the establishing of archives instead of a sprawling banquet of rich food and wine…
……………….
If you fight dualistic thinkers directly, you are forced to become dualistic yourself. This is why, classically, Jesus sidesteps the two alternatives by telling a story, keeping silent, or sometimes presenting a third alternative that utterly reframes the false dilemma.
………………………………..
On the kingdom being NOW: How different this is from our later notion of salvation, which pushed the entire issue into the future and largely became a reward and punishment system.
……………………………….
We judgmentally look for the sin, error, or mistake in ourselves or others, not to consider its message for us, but to catch it, hate it, eliminate it, and often to project it elsewhere.
…………………………………………….
Scripture calls this subtle seeing (Wisdom) “she”, which in patriarchal culture is a way of saying “alternative”. Alan Watts says that the loss of paradoxical thinking is the great blindness of our civilization, which is what many of us believe happened when we repressed the feminine side of our lives as the inferior side. It was a loss of all subtlety, discrimination, and capacity for complementarity.
…………………………
Jesus, as the icon of Christ Consciousness, is the very template of total paradox: human yet devine, physical yet spiritual, possessing a male body yet a female soul, killed yet alive…failure yet redeemer, marginalized yet central, singular yet everyone
……………………………………
Unfortunately, faith became a matter of believing impossible or strange things (which was supposed to please God somehow), instead of an entrance way into a very different way of knowing altogether.

Buy on Amazon

_____________

My “step” father who raised me since age of 9 and who served REALLY as my Father/Dad… died on Saturday 10 days ago.

I spent more than 2 months in a California hotel, visiting him this past summer, when he was still happy and walking and living life… tending his vegetable garden, and not taking any chemo.

His cancer was two separate types of terminal lung cancer, one in each lung… so he chose to not do chemo.

My blood father, whom I hadn’t spoken to, by choice – for more than 32 years, died two days later.

I had no idea that he was dying or had cancer also, until about 4 days before.

Strangely, I had been praying for each of them, on alternate days, all day long for about 4 weeks before they died.

So, I was able to reduce my resentment toward my blood father for all the mental cruelty he had put me thru for the 1st half of my life, until age 28, when I mentally “divorced” him.

The praying for him, gave me a sense of compassion and peace, and love for that part of myself represented by him.

I had no idea he needed prayers.

It’s almost as if I “manifested” him coming back into my life, when my uncle made his daughter (my cousin) write to my wife to tell me to call him. My whole family knew I never wanted to speak to him again.

It turns out, he never woke up during those final 4 days, after I called my uncle, but I was able to tell my uncle I forgave his brother, my blood father.

When my step-Dad died Saturday, it was very sad.

When my blood Dad died on Monday, I felt nothing, unless it was relief… but I was glad to have released him and to feel absolutely no resentment.

It’s just weird they would die almost on the same day.

All my life since age 9, I never called my “step”-Dad my Step-Dad. I called him Dad. He Really WAS My Dad, and I loved him dearly.

My real (blood) father, on the other hand, severely crippled my self image for the first 28 years of my life by telling me I was no good, and making it clear that I could NEVER please him, no matter what.

If I had actually gotten the opportunity to tell him I forgave him, he would have said: “What! Forgive me for WHAT?!!”

He was a sad case. An alcoholic all his life.

I’m glad I was able to break the mold on that one, and to transcend him.

I’ve had many father-figures in my life, from Socrates & Jesus, to Shakespeare & Ben Franklin. From Napoleon Hill to my “Step” Dad. From my career role models, to my entrepreneur role models.

I feel really happy that I did that, so when the time came, I actually felt for a day or two…

That I would be able to talk with him, if he ever woke up and could get on the phone.

However, by the time my “step” Dad died, I decided not to give him one last chance to crush me
or lash out at me, and instead, I asked my Uncle to tell him I loved him, and that I said Goodbye.

In the end, I was so proud of myself for not giving him that opportunity, but also for not feeling any resentment toward him, only compassion and kindness.

This was only possible due to the 4 weeks of praying. During that 4 weeks, I healed that part of myself,
that was “him” inside me.

On the other hand…  My “step”-dad, who always always there for me, to the extent he could be working in manufacturing as the sole provider, raised me as the oldest of 7 kids, 5 of which WERE his blood.

What I neglected to say about him at the end, was that I was so gratified to have just pulled up the stakes, and to have spent more than 2 months with him this past summer, when he was happy and healthy, and times were good.

We went to baseball games, county fair, out to lunch & dinner, had family BBQs.

In the end he went very fast, and the way he wanted, surrounded by love, with some of us near, and some of us far, but he KNEW he was loved.

I feel very blessed to have prayed for both of them, at odd moments all thru the days – on alternate days, thru those final 4 weeks.

It’s just strange that both were dying of the same disease, and I didn’t even know it until the very end.

One last thing.

I continue to pray for both of them all day long, whenever I can think of it – from midnight to midnight… in rotation with 2 others.

It goes this way… Pray for –>

1) Blood Father
2) Mother (who died of cancer in 1994)
3) Step Dad
4) My Wife

I switch at midnight, and rotate through again.

These are the four biggest influence on who I am, who I’ve been, and who I’m becoming.

_____________

Share your dad story below….

Eventually (it took about 5-6 long torturous years; I can be both stupid and stubborn) the rose-colored sunglasses started to shatter. Due in part to scrutiny that the Internet provided, which had formerly been impossible.

I decided to use the web as an anvil to see if the Multi-Level Marketing machine could stand up to scrutiny. To make a long story short, I put up a website asking qualified people to explain some things that appeared to be fairly unethical and no good explanations were forthcoming.

Was there a good reason for the tool systems being the way they were, etc, other than the powerful exploiting the gullible?

In a word, no. I saw very quickly that it crumbled under the weight of hard analysis. (To put it mildly.)

A few years later I found myself putting together this here Coffeehouse Theology website with an eerily similar thing in mind. Point/counterpoint, thesis/antithesis. Let’s get all this out on the table and start hammering on it.

I’d been raised Christian, my dad was a minister, and I thought there was a very real possibility that Christianity might crumble the same way Amway did. (Amway imploded in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s – huge fallout. It would take a major recession with millions of desperate people seeking opportunities, before that trend began to reverse.)

Not only that, atheist websites like Infidels were attracting hundreds of thousands of followers. The arguments were very strong.

I was open to the possibility that the whole Christianity thing might be a sham. And if so, I might as well find out sooner rather than later. Maybe churches would someday be filled with only those people left who couldn’t be bothered to get on the Internet.

By the way I had a deep dark fear of feeling the same way about having been a Christian as I’d felt about being a “naive enthusiastic Ambot.” ie they saw me coming a mile away. I was a gullible idiot. What a horrible fear.

Meanwhile I decided to try my best to defend Christianity based on what I did know. I decided to take all comers. Sort of like I am doing here on this blog, but back then it was via email. All the email autoresponder replies came back to me.

So the convos were private, which helped. It made them deeper and less snarky than what you typically find on blogs. I decided that I was willing to “fight to the death” – someone was going to win. Maybe it was going to be me, maybe it was going to be the atheist that I was talking to.

Sooner or later we would find out. If Christianity was a sham I would give it up.

What happened to me was, I became more and more sure of fewer and fewer things.

There are a lot of things that I would never be interested in trying to defend. There are other things that I think really do stand up to logical, historical, philosophical and scientific scrutiny.

One of those things is Christian God –> resurrected Jesus spiritual belief system. The Judeo-Christian account of the origins of the universe; the case for the resurrection of Jesus; for the remarkable reliability (not utter perfection!) of the gospel texts; for various prophesies coming true, for Christian ideas of equality giving birth to our modern notions of human rights. For developing the philosophical roots for modern science; healings from disease; the case for all these things is much stronger than most people would ever suspect.

In fact I’ll go so far as to say that Judaism and Christianity together laid the foundations for modern colleges and universities and a great deal of the Western intellectual tradition.

By the way I just ran across a fascinating article. David Stove was a brilliant, incisive atheist philosopher from Australia. Wrote “Darwinian Fairytales” and “Rationality of Induction.” I bought both of those books several years ago. I wasn’t aware he had a son.

His son RJ Stove writes this riveting account of converting from atheism to Catholicism.

I think RJ’s story is a shining example of what happens when you put atheism on the anvil and start pounding on it, the same way I pounded on Christianity. I found out it shatters like brittle iron. I doubt many people know the real story of David Stove, I sure didn’t. David Stove’s books are outstanding by the way, and very witty.

I don’t expect you to accept any of this just because I say so. But I think if you page through the various articles, the Q&A in the blog comments, the presentations and MP3′s both here and on my sister website – you will find a reasonable, logical articulation of Christianity as a rational belief system.

Blah blah blah.

Vivendum postulant id nam, debitis fierent mea ut, est enim periculis patrioque in. Sea cu mollis maluisset intellegat, ne usu lorem libris interpretaris. Cum velit nominati in, sumo posse numquam ex vix, qui duis liber posidonium ne. Ut mei summo eligendi, eum eu puto prima expetendis. Blah blah blah.

Usu wisi delenit ei. Et usu case partem propriae, cu facilis scribentur est, usu ut hinc erant quodsi. Quo ut exerci legendos, apeirian dissentiet qui te. Qui an antiopam theophrastus. Id pri aperiri dolorem. His ad tale probatus democritum, vix voluptatibus delicatissimi eu, illum scriptorem mei no?

Ut volutpat omittantur duo, vitae torquatos an ius. Oratio doming officiis sit at. Nec putent electram ei, solet quando discere et his, ad sed sint scripta? Ne corrumpit appellantur consectetuer eam, pericula aliquando disputationi mea id, eos ut illum scaevola. Blah blah blah.

Everti nostrud eam ad, tibique oportere et has. Eos atqui delectus appareat an, ei usu graeci lobortis definiebas. Erat eirmod explicari ut qui. Ei idque adversarium sea, malis latine aliquam no quo. Quo rebum dicat tamquam ex, pri utamur aperiam recteque in.

Vix id dicant ancillae, vim cu viris consetetur! Eius utinam dignissim ei nam, mel omnis definitiones cu. At his dicit delenit corrumpit. Quem affert corrumpit cu his, te sit probatus quaerendum. Blah blah blah.

Sea ad posse accommodare. Et vel delenit impedit accusamus. Quodsi disputationi ei quo. Nam eirmod audire aliquip ex, at vim falli dolor contentiones, quem erat voluptua at mel. Per cu commodo laboramus, assum iriure minimum ius an.

Sensibus posidonium contentiones pro eu, cu eam quaerendum theophrastus. Dissentias dissentiunt in vis. Nec et puto sententiae, id atomorum moderatius eam, in has omnis ancillae accommodare. Velit insolens et vel. Saepe dignissim no qui, sed modo movet ut. Blah blah blah!

Nisl theophrastus sea te, per odio paulo id, dolore convenire eu sit. Patrioque percipitur mei ut, illum doctus an vis, eum id mutat salutandi persequeris. Ut tantas convenire incorrupte nam, stet conceptam est ne, mel appetere mediocrem constituam an. Mea in putent timeam, has tibique philosophia ne. Eam summo elitr salutandi ne, odio populo labores eam et, sit mollis feugait ex. Est no possim aliquip. Oratio oporteat quo ea, eum falli maiestatis consetetur ex?

Oratio adversarium eam an, has ne doming appareat, augue numquam vel ad. Civibus inciderint usu no. Modus fugit mei ne, posse nostro pri ei. Sea ea persecuti dissentias, eum in ignota dolores definitionem. Ex mea eros probatus gloriatur, eu eros idque luptatum vis, unum habemus mediocrem ex usu. Ea meis sanctus explicari per.

Blah blah blah.

Ad adversarium intellegebat delicatissimi qui, ius consetetur theophrastus et??? Vim at solet quaeque eloquentiam, eum eu equidem voluptua tractatos, mel id brute deserunt. Melius appareat expetenda no cum, cu est wisi explicari. Audire gubergren cotidieque vel id, eirmod detraxit electram sea ne. Per ne wisi veri. Scripta denique euripidis in sit, duo cu semper tincidunt.

Ei nec vide nonumy, cu movet feugait suscipiantur per. At duo mentitum iudicabit. Ius iudico oporteat pertinacia ad, eam ut sanctus veritus maiorum. Ea omnes quodsi doctus vix, at erant omittam antiopam usu, per te dolorum molestiae.

Eos id modo expetenda patrioque, pri id graecis omnesque, qui partiendo patrioque an. Alienum copiosae mnesarchum vis eu, cum et wisi graece. Vero noluisse reprehendunt eos in. Vix ad theophrastus mediocritatem vituperatoribus, ne has quem pericula theophrastus. An iudico diceret definiebas pri, petentium appellantur in usu!

Blah blah blah.

No vis enim aeterno signiferumque. Ut docendi volumus voluptatibus sed, zril graeco qui ei, etiam recusabo vituperata no mei. Modus utamur suavitate ad nam, sea ea noster aeterno. Minimum offendit in qui.

Id eam maiorum cotidieque repudiandae. Usu ut minim novum recusabo, per ex putent vivendum. Vidisse inermis disputationi nam ut, modus suscipit ius ut. Amet docendi percipitur mea te, modus alterum apeirian est an. Ad quo democritum scriptorem, eu vix tantas reprehendunt, mea ei nisl scaevola imperdiet. Qui ad voluptua conceptam, sed te summo tation oportere. An cum nominavi interpretaris, nam ne solet quando convenire, vivendo epicurei ne usu.

Eam dolore omittam concludaturque cu, utinam nostro aeterno eam ad, ut sea salutatus splendide persequeris. Natum eirmod maluisset eam ex, sed no timeam dissentias complectitur. In illum detraxit menandri eum, copiosae molestiae id vis. Vis illud quaerendum id, insolens elaboraret mei te, in zril iudicabit has. At nibh graecis eum. Blah blah blah.

Sea alia soleat an, ne pro quod meliore adolescens, ad tale vidisse placerat has. An vim ludus definiebas, quo id eripuit postulant dissentias. No habeo equidem vel, tempor facete vel an? At est alii partiendo. Id alienum volutpat per, exerci oblique insolens ei sed. Nisl eros eu eum, elit signiferumque vix at, vide quando iriure eum eu. Eu illud zril mel, cum ei sale elitr, ius vide bonorum laoreet ne.

Epicurei mediocrem pri ne, illud antiopam et his. Ea est modus ullum. Harum mollis iisque pri eu. His dolore definiebas an, no eam modo tation disputationi, te eos liber dolorem!

Qui illud ceteros id, elit erroribus no nec, ei eam urbanitas adolescens disputando. Ea duo nemore recteque, sea at diceret ornatus. Nibh ullum moderatius usu et. Novum option aperiam his ea. Sed reque vitae et, mei nibh labore civibus ne. Blah blah blah.

Velit laoreet fuisset in mea, sit delectus lobortis ut. Et populo copiosae duo, melius gloriatur intellegam eam in, in eos convenire philosophia. No magna primis has, eu verterem sensibus quo, ut per alienum accusamus scribentur. In autem fabellas consetetur pro, vituperata adversarium te vis! Nobis saepe albucius eu eum.

Paulo inciderint ea cum, eu cum modo dictas. Ut vim numquam recusabo quaestio, ne duo melius commune. Regione deleniti no per? Eu duo fierent legendos, veritus petentium ad mea. Aliquip percipit et sed, ut quidam referrentur nec.

Fierent omittam ea mei, in scaevola assentior contentiones qui. Posse porro no per, eos ei utamur corpora, eum in lucilius disputando. Nec id dictas inimicus, iuvaret persecuti te eum. Usu stet ponderum.

Blah blah blah.

Then, in 2010, she left the church. She said:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian … It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

“My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been or might become.”

Many have asked my thoughts about Anne Rice’s departure from the Catholic Church. Let me tell you my own story of struggling with quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious church people.

When I was 12, my mom went “bipolar.” Manic depressive with mild schizophrenia.

Except that for a year and a half, nobody knew that’s what was wrong with her. We just knew she was impossible to live with.

The fights, the arguments and contention would start as soon as I got home from school every day and stretch past bedtime.

Our entire family was bedlam for a year and a half.

Mom would swing from being your best friend to your worst enemy at the slightest provocation. I’d come home from school and find she’d tossed boxes of my stuff in the garbage. She’d say embarrassing things to my friends.

She insisted dad wasn’t really her husband. She said he was a man who looked just like Bob and she was sentenced to live with him until the ‘real’ Bob came back. When he came home from work she would hurl accusations at him. My brother and sister and I would complain bitterly to him about how she was treating us.

It was almost impossible to not get sucked into some kind of conflict every day. Home was the most dangerous place a kid could be.

My dad was taking her to doctors and counselors but nobody seemed to be able to arrive at any conclusion. Meanwhile, people watched us with a judgmental eye.

My dad was an associate pastor at a very large church in Nebraska, 2000+ members. Dad started getting heat from his boss, the senior pastor, Mr. G, who didn’t like the fact that one of the pastors’ wives was “out of line.”

Mr. G quoted the scripture that says a pastor should be in control of his family and told dad if he didn’t straighten out mom’s problem, he might have to leave.

Dad pursued answers and eventually got mom to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed her with a chemical imbalance and bipolar disorder.

That trip to the psychiatrist was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Psychiatrists and psychologists, in Mr. G’s opinion, were the new high priests of a secular order that would dismiss all human ills as curable illnesses. Psychiatrists didn’t have the courage to call evil by its real names – SIN and DISOBEDIENCE. They existed to give people like my mom an alibi. Mr. G declared Mom insubordinate and rebellious.

Literally on the same day the diagnosis came back, Mr. G and Mr. J, the pastors of our church, visited our house to deliver the news. We all sat in the living room as they announced, “We’ve asked your father to resign from his responsibilities. He’s no longer qualified to be a pastor.”

I listened without much comment. I was 13. My older sister, however, was livid. At 18 she’d formed definite opinions about what had transpired. She started sobbing and retorted angrily to Mr. J: “If people knew what YOUR daughter does when she’s out at night, they’d be forcing you to resign too.”

Mr. J said, “We’re not here to talk about me or my family today, Robin. We’re here to talk about you.”

Earlier that day, dad had been brought before the Board of Elders to hear their final verdict. One by one, they agreed with Mr. G: “Bob, you’re not in control of your family. We’re sorry, you have to step down.” Mr. G demoted dad and announced to 2,000 people the following Sunday that dad had “resigned” so he could “attend to problems with Betty and the family.”

The next months were painful indeed. Few knew the real story. Some gathered around us. Most only knew something disgraceful had happened though and kept their distance. We felt like pariahs.

Dad couldn’t hang with his same friends anymore. He wasn’t invited to lunch at work. They shut him out of staff meetings. They hadn’t cut his pay, but he did lose a tax deduction. Less money to go around.

A couple months later I got into a fist fight at school. Came home with two black eyes. Bad report cards and complaints from teachers. All this added to the mounting case against dad.

He would come home from work every night and sit on the couch and sob. Mom told him it was all his fault for being such a cruel tyrant.

Dad followed through with the psychiatrist’s advice to get her on a prescription drug. Literally within a few days, mom transformed from defiant and combative to quiet and cooperative. The bizarre behavior stopped completely. Not only that, she went from being angry and defensive to feeling deep remorse about her erratic behavior.

Soon it became clear that Mr. G torpedoed dad simply because mom had a medical problem – a chemical imbalance – and that mom’s behavior wasn’t “sin” or “rebellion.” It was a well-understood mental illness. She couldn’t help herself.

Dad was hurt and humiliated and felt abandoned. He desperately wanted to bail. A lot of people told him he should quit his job, especially our relatives who understood the scope of the situation.

Dad thought about pulling up stakes, moving elsewhere. He decided to stick it out. To argue his case and vindicate himself.

Few men had the balls to stand up to Mr. G, but dad did. As mom’s condition improved, he said, “Mr. G, you made a wrong judgment and you need to apologize to my wife.”

Furthermore dad made Mr. G write her a letter of reconciliation, because by this time mom had become terrified of Mr. G. He had, after all, the ability to singlehandedly destroy dad’s career.

Nine months after dad had been demoted, he was reinstated.

Two weeks later dad was diagnosed with cancer.

Had dad cut and run, he would’ve been in a newcomer in some new environment, maybe even starting over in a brand new city, surrounded by strangers.

But since he’d stuck it out and vindicated himself, we were surrounded by a faith community that lent us help with dinners and financial support and prayers and encouragement.

Dad had major surgery. He was cancer free for a year and a half, then it came back. Treatments were unsuccessful, and as it became clear that he wasn’t going to make it, Mr. G secretly mailed a letter to everyone else at church. He explained how this summer might be Bob’s last and it would be really nice to raise some money, so Bob can take a trip to the West Coast.

$10,000 came in. In 1986 that was enough to not only take dad to California, a place he’d always longed to visit, but it was enough to get all of us to Alaska and Hawaii too. Dad experienced a 5 week “last hurrah” with his wife and kids that July.

That October, he died. I was 17.

I can’t tell you how many things I’ve wanted to quit, and didn’t, because dad wouldn’t throw in the towel and walk away from a bunch of quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous people.

And say what you want about ‘em, when you’re in the oncology ward with terminal cancer, those are the same people that will probably be with you as you pass from here to the other side.

They will still have their faults and you will have yours, but… blood is thicker than water.

A faith community can become just as close and even closer than your biological family. It’s why they can hurt you so easily.

But there’s no such thing as a real community, or even a real relationship, that isn’t vulnerable. Painfully so sometimes. During our special vacation to California, dad told me that getting rejected and blamed for a mess he had no control of had been worse than dying of cancer was now.

Peter asked Jesus, how many times should I forgive my brother? Seven times?

Jesus said, “Seventy times seven. That’s how many times you should forgive.”

What do you forgive people for, anyway??

For being quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous. For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. Matthew 6:14-15.

After the potluck dinners have ended and people start throwing chairs at each other, it’s so easy to pull the plug and run. So many marriages don’t work out, it’s so easy to just live with someone and see how things turn out.

It IS easier.

It’s easier at first.

But when a series of relationships fail, they rip your heart to shreds just as much whether you were married or not. It just seemed like not ‘committing’ yourself lessened the risk. If your “common law wife” leaves you after 10 years, how is that any less painful than if your legally married wife leaves you? Just because it’s ‘unofficial’ doesn’t make it less perilous.

I’ve had to make multiple passes of forgiveness about Mr. G. A few years later when more fiascoes erupted, I had to let go again.

A few years after that, it occurred to me that my dad might not have even gotten cancer in the first place had he not endured two years in such a toxic, unsupportive, humiliating environment. That’s speculation, but still I had even more forgiveness I had to do.

A year ago I realized I needed to confront yet another layer of unforgiveness within myself. I had made a conscious choice to let go of the past, when I suddenly felt God saying to me, “The Father’s Heart is going to be poured out over Mr. G and his church.”

The day you forgive anther person is the day new blessings get released into their life. The day you forgive another person is the day you stop being a victim of whatever they did to you.

Dear Anne Rice, I greatly esteem your writing and your scholarship. I commend you for your adroit case for the historical Jesus. I appeal to you as a brother and member of the imperfect body of Christ, that to exit and publicly denounce them is to embrace quarreling… hostility… and public disputes.

From an individual view it’s all justified. But isolation makes islands of all of us. When we who were mistreated gather together in opposition to those who did us wrong, we inevitably become like those whom we judge.

A few years ago I visited an old college buddy in Washington DC. He was an exquisitely smart, seminary educated man who’d been a pastor in a Protestant evangelical church. He’d recently converted from Protestant to Eastern Orthodox.

Eastern Orthodox??? Most Americans don’t even know what that is.

I was dying to hear his explanation. “I don’t know what Peter’s going to tell me, but it’s sure gonna be interesting.”

I wasn’t disappointed. We sat up late three nights in a row exploring his decision. I don’t have time for the whole story now, but one of the points he made was this: “Protestants have ’splitting off’ in their very DNA. As soon as they disagree, they leave First Baptist Church to go start Second Baptist Church. Then some of those people split off and form Third Baptist Church and on and on it goes.

“Catholics and Orthodox people don’t automatically do that. They prize unity. I have a bishop over me and he’s like a father to me and my wife. We live in community and in covenant together. He’s responsible to look out for us and we choose to be in a trusting mutual relationship.”

Whether you’re Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox… or if you’re on the outside looking in… I want to encourage you: living the nomad life is less demanding in the short term but lonelier in the long term.

As you make forgiveness a way of life, when you choose to live in community, you earn a kind of compound interest of grace. Months or years do not always reveal the fruit of that. It grows evident over decades. Community is the only place where you truly learn to forgive and learn to love.

The only way we exorcise our demons – both figuratively and literally – is in committed relationships with other people. Those around us are mirrors. They show us our faults, and we theirs. As we bathe those faults in mercy and forgiveness we become the people we aspire to be.

Perry Marshall

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by Joshua Russell

From the black void a voice arose: I will go to hell and back for you, dear child.

Then God created the heavens and the earth, full well knowing the heartache it would cause him to have such beautiful little children (he could gobble them up!) and watch them cower before his gaze, think horrible thoughts, despise him, despise themselves, despise the very sky he painted for them.

And what’s worse, they would feel such incredible fear deep inside. Oh the heartache it would cause him! And no thing would separate them from him other than the ideas in their heads that they were not ready to think when they ate of that tree.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That great and mighty tree would be fashioned into large beams, unbreakable by frail men, into a mighty machine. A torture device. This machine would pump all the terrifying thoughts of what God does to those who can’t manage his impossible standards into the heads of the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. And the machine would be so powerful because it would be so close to the truth.

Yet so far from it.

For thousands of years the machine would be a standard for human torture. And few upon the face of the earth would find refuge from the terrible grinding gears and bone crushing power of the beams. And ooooh. How his heart would ache.

Then from the black void a whisper… “i will go to hell and back for you, dear child.”

And mankind would peer out through cataract eyes to see the beams erected into a new machine. The device so awful.

Created to destroy God Himself.

He used black paint on the sky that day. And even his children would often think it was his anger descending. The black clouds, fierce winds, earth torn open. For that was the one moment in all the infinite expanse of existence, that hell would enter the throne room. That heaven would enter hell. Black was the color of heaven that day.

You have traveled so far.

He said.

And I have let you fight the machine.

He said.

All by yourself you did it. You have searched through the knowledge of good and evil. All by yourself. And you went so far and tried so hard. And I was rooting for you even though I knew you would never make it.

You would never even come close.

I saw you from the black void and I spoke over you then. My whisper is a mighty voice of burning love. So fierce is my burning love it will go to hell and back. Because you need to have a new idea. I did not go there for a vacation. Or to satisfy my machine.

I have no machine.

I went there to show you how much I love you. I saw you from far off and I ran to you. I saw you from the black void before I created you and I ran to you from across the universe. And on the way, I stopped in at hell and broke those f*&^ing beams. I tore them into toothpicks for you to use at my wedding feast! Dear child I love you so much I went to hell and back for you, and what’s more?

I destroyed hell for you.

My death was a picture of the depth of my love for you! Can I do more? Shall I find a greater way to show you? I have already scoured the depths of the universe for the greatest way to prove my love for you.

That is why I rose again.

And I restored, fashioned anew, the imprint of me in you. And from your deepest heart there is the cry, “Abba, Father! I am not a slave, Father! The machine has been broken, father! I could hear the twisting of the beams and the cracking and splintering! And you tore those beams to shreds! You tore those beams to pieces, father! And you have given me the power of heaven.

Your power!

To set free the world. That whatever I touch, your kingdom joins the earth. The very soil I walk on is made new in your name. And everything the machine destroyed, you redeemed. You made it new.”

I am undone and remade by your burning love.

Your burning love.

Your burning love.

Your burning love…

7 Things Yo’ Momma Never

Told You About Church History

(Written Transcript Part 3)

There’s kind of a Catholic view of scripture, which is we have this Bible, but you don’t just pick it up and interpret it in a vacuum. Just like there are genealogies of scriptural documents that radiate outward from the center, there is also a tradition of interpretation that also radiates outward from the center.

Just like you can go back here as early as you can go and find out, “All right, the Septuagint says this, but this other version or other scroll says this, or the Dead Sea scrolls and all that” – just like you do that, you also do that with any question of doctrine or belief about anything.

Well, you know, did Jesus really rise from the dead? What about communion?” and all these different kinds of things, there’s a tradition. Before you go off making up your own thing, you should go find out.

G.K. Chesterton said, “Conservatism is simply giving your dead grandparents a chance to vote too.” It’s not denying people a vote just because they’re dead. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?

What if we give Augustine a vote? What if we give Aquinas a vote? What if we give Luther a vote? What if we give Jonathan Edwards a vote? What if we give Pope so-and-so a vote?

As I began to explore the Catholic church, here’s what I found. What I found was, as far as the average man on the street is concerned, they have a serious quality control problem. You go to the typical Catholic church on a typical day and it’s a fairly mediocre experience. We know the scandals and all that kind of stuff. Most people are like way out at the fringe.

But as you go closer in, you will find that there is extraordinary scholarship, there is extraordinary concern for what the Bible says, for what everything says. They are very meticulous. They have kept records very carefully and have immensely talented thinkers.

You do yourself a disservice if you know nothing about them. If you know nothing about Augustine, if you know nothing about Anselm or Aquinas or some of these guys, you’ve missed out.

Audience: They probably have had the most benevolent organizations in this country serving thousands and thousands of children in foster care, hospitals, humanitarians, and they never base it just for Catholics. Protestants also do too, but Catholics have had huge – like St. Francis of Assisi – and they’re very, very humanitarian movements.

Audience: What about pre-Catholic Churches? What about the early New Testament church and Judaism?

Perry: I don’t totally know where you’re going with that, but let me talk about that.

Audience: What was the question?

Perry: What about the early church and Judaism?

Audience: Like, Melito of Sardis which is the earliest [inaudible]writing known. He wrote it on the passover.

Perry: What’s the date of that?

Audience: It’s 120? 70? It’s real early.[inaudible]

Perry: I don’t know that author, but here’s what I can tell you. The Catholic church is the original mother ship. I’m going to give you the best that I know. I might be wrong, but I’m going to give it as best I know.

In church history, we have 0 AD and 2,000. In 1052 you have a split between the orthodox, which was five churches, and the Catholics, which was two churches. In 1517 you have the Protestant Reformation and then the Protestants go outwards from there.

You might be saying that there was some other thing way back when. I don’t know about it. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. What I can tell you is you can pick up a book like this, and the Catholics can trace back all the way to Polycarp, who was John’s disciple, who Catholic tradition says when Jesus said, “Let the children come to me,” and he put a child on his lap, that the child was Polycarp.

Audience: [inaudible question]

Perry: That might be, and Roman Catholic – yeah, sure. You’re beyond my knowledge if you want to parse somebody at 150 AD and whether they were a Roman Catholic or not. My understanding is there were seven churches, and Rome was one of them, and there’s debate. I don’t know. If it was somebody else’s church history class they could probably answer that a whole lot better.

Audience: [inaudible question]

Perry: That’s a whole debate about the Pope and all that. I don’t really want to get into that, because I’m not in a position to really defend anything. You can trace the Catholic church all the way back to 100 AD with Ignatius, for whatever that’s worth.

Audience: What I hear you saying is that you’re looking at the scholars going all the way back to the days when you would Catholic church as a distinct movement. The real issue that the contemporary Catholic church has roots going all the way back to the original church, which was the universal church, but its roots are right back there to the very beginning. It’s not an issue of Catholicism that you’re talking about. You’re not arguing about any of that. You’re saying that the stewardship of scholarship goes all the way back to the very beginning, whether they were called Catholics or not, because they weren’t called Catholics back then. But that’s not what you’re saying.

Perry: Right. I’m really not wanting to get into the political aspect of it. It’s exactly what you said. It’s the scholarship. They have preserved the history and they’ve done a very good job of it.

Audience: To take the controversy out of it, I think you’d go [inaudible]…..

Perry: Yeah, I think you could definitely say there are a lot of little spurious belief systems that grew up….

Audience: [inaudible question]

Perry: That may be, and I would suggest to you that if you have any confidence in humans to sort things out as history moves along, then there’s reason to be confident that the version of Christianity that we practice today is what Jesus taught.

The thing is, you pick up this book and you read it. Read the stuff that was written in 90 AD. Read the stuff that was written in 120. Read the stuff in 150, 170, 180, 200 – it’s not that different. It’s really not different at all.

You want to get into an argument about Mary and Popes and all that, you can do that. But the first few hundred pages of this book, there’s not a bunch of stuff about that. It’s like how to live the Christian life. These letters to these different churches, they read a lot like Paul’s letters. It’s like be patient, have forbearance, be honest with people, worship Jesus, meet with the brethren every Sunday.

There’s this modern evangelical idea that that Bible you hold in your hands has to be perfect, perfect, perfect, and that you have to know what it says to 12 decimal places of precision. I don’t think the early church really looked at it that way. That’s a very modernistic way of looking at the Bible.

The Catholic church was more comfortable with ambiguity, and Martin Luther was less comfortable with ambiguity, so he got rid of it. But I think he made a mistake in getting rid of it, because there’s some really good stuff there.

I want to point to one of the most important things. Wisdom of Solomon 11:20. By the way, Wisdom of Solomon is a great book to read. It’s really good. If you like Proverbs, Wisdom of Solomon is excellent.

Thou hast ordered all things in weight and number and measure.”

Now I submit to you that is the first scientific statement of the ancient world. You know an earlier one?

Audience: The Persians, the Islamic people had all the mathematics and all this stuff and led the people out of the Dark Ages. There’s a whole different set of cultures that are not parallel with the normal one.

Perry: This is 1000 BC. This is Jewish. This is not Rome.

Audience: [inaudible question]

Perry: The Jews had this long before there was a church. This was 3,000 years ago. I want you to kind of meditate on this. “Thou hast ordered all things in weight and number and measure.” You can weigh, count, and measure everything. If you’re trying to explain why it rained this morning, this is a big hint.

Now here’s a question for you. Science got started in Persia, and then it kind of sputtered out.

Audience: Almost all of the things the west call Persian are actually Islamic inventions.

Perry: Well, science got started in Islam.

Audience: [inaudible]…go back to Babylon and pre-Babylonia: Mesopotamian History.

Perry: Just follow me where I’m trying to with this. If you trace those developments, they go along – let’s say it was 1000 BC, and it goes along and then some civilization crumbles and all you’ve got is their scrolls, and the scientific inquiry stops.

Audience: You’re talking about Western Culture. Western culture had a science base string going on during the dark ages. They had a very limited science going in the Western Culture during that time. Basically the only unrestricted was East.

Perry: But let’s say this is the east. Stuff would get started and it would go along and then it would stop. That’s what I’m saying. Science and Chinese medicine didn’t get started and then go and go and go, and then here we are with all the science that we got from China.

Audience: Yes we do. Its just now making its way back into western culture.

Perry: But they lost it.

Audience: No they didn’t. We ignored it.

Perry: They ignored it! They didn’t have cars. They didn’t have computers.

Audience: They did have computers. [inaudible]

Perry: Where are they?

Audience: Neglected by western culture.

Perry: I’ve been to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan and I didn’t see any computers in there.

Audience: I’ll concede on that one.

Perry:Okay, that’s fine, but where did we get the science we have? Bits and pieces came from the Chinese. Bits and pieces came from the Egyptians. Bits and pieces came from the Romans. Bits and pieces came from the Greeks. There might be bits and pieces from the Mayans.

But when did science actually get going and not stop? In western Europe. Why? Because they had a theology for believing that there was a mega-explanation for how the universe operated, and it wasn’t a little bit of mysticism and a little bit of science, a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

The Greeks believed that if there was a thunderstorm it’s because Zeus was having a snit with Apollo. Their theology couldn’t support a scientific worldview. Jewish theology supported a scientific worldview. It said God made a world that obeys fixed discoverable laws.

So it gets started in China and then it kind of levels out or gets lost or never really gets accepted. It gets started in Egypt and they do amazing things, but then it gets lost.

Audience: So many people were trying to conquer each other. When one would conquer the other, then their whole history and libraries and everything burned or got destroyed.

Perry: Right, and the Jews are the oldest civilization that survived, and the Christians are the second oldest civilization that survived. All the other civilizations crumbled and fell. Rome – gone. Greece – gone. The ancient Chinese dynasties – gone. The Egyptian dynasties – gone.

Audience: Muslims?

Perry: Well, the Muslims did okay. They didn’t do great. No insult to anybody, but Islam is not characterized by high standards of living. I don’t want to get into Islam. That’s like a whole other thing.

Now let’s switch gears a little bit. Alexis de Tocqueville was a French writer. Back in the 1820’s or 1830’s, the French aristocracy was watching the U.S. The U.S. is 50 years old and they are nervous. They’re like, “What is going on over there? We like our castles and we like our aristocracy. We’re not sure about this democracy thing.”

So they got the brightest guy they had, Alexis de Tocqueville, and they sent him to America and he wrote a book called, Democracy in America. If you go take like a freshman American history class, you’ll probably be given the book, Democracy in America by de Tocqueville, and it’s brilliant. It’s well worth reading, very interesting, and he describes the United States.

He describes it very accurately, and here’s what he says:

Nothing struck me with more force than the general equality of condition among the people…A great democratic revolution is going on amongst us…It is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.”

In other words, the idea of equality, and you and me being equal, and you and me being equal, and you and me being equal, is a juggernaut. It’s an unstoppable force.

He says from 1100 AD to 1835: “We shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality.” And then he goes through the list –

• The Crusades and English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions.
• The invention of the gun made the peasant and the king equal on the battlefield.
• The printing press opened the same resources to the minds of all the classes.
• The post office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and the gate of the palace.
• Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven.
• The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.

Is the idea of democracy, or more generally the idea of equality, an unstoppable force? He says –

• Everywhere we look, the same revolution is going on throughout the Christian world. Every event has turned to the advantage of democracy.”
• Whether people consciously fought for its cause, or even if they opposed it, all have been blind instruments in the hands of God.”
• The gradual development of the principle of equality is therefore a Providential fact…it is not necessary that God himself should speak in order that we may discover the unquestionable signs of His will.”

I think he even observed that equality was a manifest destiny in the world, that it was going to happen whether you liked it or not. It was going to roll over everything in its path.

Since de Tocqueville in 1935:

• Democracy has spread to almost all the Western world.
• The invention of the steam engine and the train created a nationwide marketplace for all goods.
• Henry Ford’s ambition was to make automobiles available to everyone.

Audience: I’ve got just one little problem to pick. Democracy was invented in England in about 1000 AD or something and spread this way.

Perry:That’s totally fine. You know Rodney Starks says that Italy had democracy going on in 1000 AD too, so it’s not a new idea. De Tocqueville is not saying that it started in the U.S. It’s the power of it.

Now here’s what’s interesting.

• Mass communications brings the world to every home.

Just yesterday Laura was reading me this article about these poor people in India starting to get TV, and as soon as they start watching TV they’re watching shows in one language with sub-titles in their language, and literacy is going up. Women are not accepting from abuse from men because of the influence of what’s coming through the TV.

• The internet gives equal opportunity for all who own a computer to express their views.
• “Fast food” is for everyone – the CEO stands in line with the homeless person at McDonalds.

I realize there’s problems there

• All technological developments are natural consequences of equality and individualism.

There is no more invariable rule in the history of society: the further electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength.

The Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”

What de Tocqueville does in his book is he goes, “Where did this idea of equality come from?” and he goes back and lands on Galatians 3:28.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

De Tocqueville says before Paul, nobody ever made a statement like that. Where did Paul get the idea?

Audience: [inaudible question]

Perry: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but Jesus also said to the woman, “Why would I give to the dogs….” because she’s a Gentile, right? The wall between Jew and Greek had not been broken yet, because the cross hadn’t happened yet. But Paul says because of the cross, all are equal.

Now you can go earlier in China and find a guy named Mo Ju saying, “Hey, you know, we’re all equal. We’re all under God, and we’re all so small compared to God that our differences between each other are trivial,” and he suggests an idea of equality, but it’s just like the science stuff. It doesn’t become a juggernaut and take off in this unstoppable force.

But when Paul wrote this, and he makes a similar statement in Colossians, this idea began to seep its way into the soil of humanity and grow and become an unstoppable force, like you can’t stop it.

Audience: Are you saying Christianity is the author of democracy?

Perry: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

Audience: Sorry. I totally disagree! You stood up there and said, “Oh those Muslims, we were against the Catholics.”

Perry: What did I say?

Audience:Just in general you have the feeling of – that’s one of the reasons I left the Christian church. I got so tired of the baptized and the holy ones and the believers in Jesus, that this little Hindu mother over here isn’t as loving and kind as the Christian mother over here.

Perry: I didn’t say that.

Audience: I just don’t think you need Jesus Christ and I think democracy is as old as when Judaism came, which probably started in India when they looked out at the stars and believed that the heavens were for everybody, that the moon and the sun shone on the world, on all the peoples of the world. When the pastoral people came over India and they started the caste system, the Jews left because they’d organized ….

Perry: The English exploited the caste system. They did not start it.

Audience: No, I’m talking way before England. I think that original Judaism, and the Kabbalah and the Jewish religion, started in India. Along came the lighter-skinned people from pastoral countries and bounced down through Tibet, came down through India and whatever, and they started the caste system.

They decided that God loved lighter people better than darker people. God loved the richer people better than the poorer people. Read the Old Testament, just the very first several chapters. It came from the notion of examining the heavens and seeing that we were this little place in this vastness that God shone over everyone. I think democracy came from a lot of sources. It’s all just bundled up under Jesus? No.

Perry: If you want to tell me that equality started in India, show me an ancient Indian document that makes a statement that bold. You can email me later or we can talk about it later, but I challenge you to find a statement from the Indians….

Audience: But what about the people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ?

Perry: They have a caste system, don’t they?

Audience: Oh, I think you’re the one with the caste system.

Audience: [inaudible question]

Perry: Let me be careful about what I’m trying to say. I’m not trying to anoint democracy itself with some holy water. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is democracy is built on an idea of equality, and equality came from Galatians.

Audience: So this celebration of democracy came from that?

Perry: Right, so don’t over-interpret what I’m saying. I’m not saying that a two-party system…I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is this idea of equality in various ways that it’s been manifested has borne enormous fruit. It’s created technology. It’s made people equal. It’s given people human rights. It’s incredibly powerful, and nobody said it like that before Paul.

Audience:Look at the human rights they gave to the American Indians. Kill everybody.

Perry: And how do you know that was wrong? How do you know that was wrong?

Audience:Because they’re fellow human beings!

Perry: Yes, because would Jesus have killed the Indians?

Audience:I don’t know.

Audience: [laughing]

Perry:

Audience: You want to talk about equality, God took it from man and woman from the beginning so that right there….

Perry: Individualism is a word coined by de Tocqueville to describe Americans. He saw individualism and equality as being these two forces that pull back and forth. There’s like a force of gravity that makes us all equal, but everybody has this desire to express greatness, and as you express your greatness, inevitably it benefits all the people around you.

Here’s a question that makes people squirm. Can you name five Protestant countries that are characterized by poverty, illiteracy, and human rights abuses? Can you name five?

Audience: Australia. [laughing]

Perry: Can you name five Hindu countries, Muslim countries, atheist countries, Buddhist countries – five countries of any of those other religions that are not characterized by poverty, illiteracy, and human rights abuses?

Audience: >Japan. Jordan. [inaudible]….

Perry: >No disagreement there, and how do we know that oppression was wrong? By what moral standard?

Audience: What about from Plato or basically any greek philosopher?

Perry: How do we know people have human rights? Where do human rights ultimately come from? They come from God. Human rights come from God.

We can go to the Ten Commandments. We can go long before Paul, but I’m just saying in the laboratory of reality in 2010, when you look at the cumulative history of the world, where has the most benefit and productivity come from?

My argument is it’s come from Jesus much more than it’s come from Aristotle or Plato or Buddha or any of those people. I’m not saying those other guys are bad people. I’m just saying. I say, “Name five Protestant countries that have all these humongous problems,” and nobody can think of five – characterized by poverty, illiteracy, and human rights abuses.

Audience: [lots of comments]

Perry: Have you ever been to Brazil? Have you ever been to Africa? Have you ever been to China?

Audience:Have you ever been to east St. Louis?

Perry: Yes. I’m not saying we don’t have any, but you know even in east St. Louis a single mom’s getting fed.

I hope I’m challenging you to think. It’s okay if this makes you mad, that’s fine.

Audience: I think you have a very western-centric view of history that’s a little dated, that’s all.

Perry: Well, that’s fine. Go to some other countries. I’ve been all over the world. I want you to go too, and you see what’s there. You go to China. You go to the Phillipines. You go to Mozambique. You go to South Africa. You go to Brazil. Go to eastern Europe. Go to western Europe. Go to Russia. How good are things there?

Audience: And they’re the product of orthodox Christianity.

Perry: Notice I said Protestant. I didn’t say Catholic. Now laboratory of reality, here’s what I see. I see Protestantism has done very well. Catholicism is generally better off than most of those other cultures, but they’ve got problems, especially Central America and South America. There’s a lot of corruption and a lot of problems. Southern Europe is characterized by a lot of problems.

Now orthodox – there’s cool stuff in orthodox. I’ve got a very good friend who converted from evangelical to orthodox about ten years ago. We sat up three nights in a row and talked all night, absolutely fascinating, but you know the orthodox weren’t able to save Russia from the Communists. It’s comparatively weak.

Catholics put a high priority on unity, which is very valuable. Every time Protestants get in an argument they go start another church – First Baptist, Second Baptist, Third Baptist, this Baptist – just as soon as someone gets miffed, off they go.

Catholics don’t do that, and there’s a lot to admire in that Catholic desire for unity, and I respect it. I also see in the laboratory of reality that you get up to the 1500s and Catholics were not cleaning house. They’re still having problems.

I’ve got my own particular biases. I’m a white male in the United States, yada yada yada, and I admit all those biases. You can believe me or not believe me, but I think competition has been better for the church than complacent brotherhood. Maybe there’s problems with it, but the fact that I could go start a church tomorrow and attract whoever I can attract, and I have to make it good –

Like here at this church, if they don’t make it good for three or four months and it’s really lousy, people are going to start finding something else to do. Viva la competition. That’s the world we live in.

Just one last thing. I talked about my brother-in-law, Allen, who got his Ph.D. in church history, and he had to write a Ph.D. thesis. Not only did he have to do that, but he went to Iowa State, where most of the professors were actually atheists. There’s this kind of weird thing that happens in academia, where somehow or another all the theology departments eventually get populated by atheists.

Anyway, he had to defend this thesis in front of people that really don’t like Christianity at all, is what he had to do, and that’s a good way of working them chops. His thesis was on the interpretation of the Reformation.

There are two interpretations of the Protestant Reformation. The secular interpretation is that Luther finally stuck his knife in the heart of the church, and he finally hit the main ventricle or whatever, and that was the beginning of the end of the church.

As soon as the church started to die, within 50 years we got the whole industrial revolution and the scientific revolution, and Newton came along and Copernicus and Galileo and Boyle and Maxwell and Einstein and steam engines and automobiles and everything.

That all that was the beginning of the end of the church, and that’s why all this was possible, which goes back to that whole dark ages argument. The printing press finally released everybody from the dark ages.

There’s another view, and the other view is it unleashed the church. It put the Bible in the hands of the individual. “Hey, here’s the book. Guess who’s responsible for knowing it? You! Guess who’s responsible for their relationship with God? You, not a priest, not a parish, not a bad quality control system. You.”

I embrace the latter view. I’m glad we had some arguments and debate here. I think if you guys didn’t argue with me you’d have to be sleepwalking. Nobody said this was going to be perfect or infallible, and you’re welcome to disagree, but your job is to think. Your job is to figure stuff out.

Rodney Stark, the guy who wrote The Victory of Reason, said something really interesting, and this is the last point. I said there was going to be disclaimer #2 and I’ll save it for the end. It’s kind of a point and kind of a disclaimer.

There’s a funny thing. Every church has a doctrinal statement, right? “We believe XYZ. You don’t believe that? You’re out. You believe this? Okay, you’re coming with us.”

You don’t find those in the Bible. Nowhere in the Bible do you find, “This is the checklist.” You have to crawl inside the story and read it, and then you have to deliberate and debate and work things out and have the late night college dorm room conversations and all that kind of stuff.

Rodney Stark says, “The Bible doesn’t say slavery is wrong. It says all men are equal. Slave or free, they’re equal.” Then people begin to think about that and they’re like, “Okay, so you’re my slave but you’re actually equal with me.” And eventually people go, “Well, if we’re equal, how come you’re a slave?”

So if there’s neither slave nor free, then why do we have slave and free?

Audience: [inaudible question]

Perry: Yes, slavery in the Old Testament is a totally different deal than Alabama in the 1840’s, believe me. That’s a whole conversation we don’t have time for. Slavery in the Bible was community service, that’s a good way to put it.

It’s like you introduce this idea, and then the seed grows, and you wrestle with it, and you wrestle with it, and you wrestle with it. Stark says, “Theology is ten times a bigger enterprise in Christianity than it is in any other religion,” like the amount of bandwidth that it takes in Christianity is much greater than the bandwidth it takes even in Judaism, not to mention Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam. It’s a much smaller slice of the pie in those other religions.

What Stark says is it’s the process of planting those seeds and working those questions and working those muscles that built the Western intellectual tradition. If the Bible was just a list of rules telling us what to do, we would have never learned to think.

That’s why Disclaimer #2 is that you’re not here to agree with me. I mean I’m going to try as hard as I can to get you to agree with me, because I’ve thought about this really hard, but I can make mistakes. I’m not the Pope.

Audience:[laughing]

Perry: Disclaimer #2 is it’s not about having the exact answer, it’s about the process of working it out. It’s about thinking through it.

I had a professor come to me last year and she says, “You know, I’ve never really figured out what I think about the whole homosexual issue. I really feel like God is telling me, ‘I want you to figure this out now. I want you to wrestle through this. I want you to think it through,’” and she’s like, “Wow, this is hard work.”

Yeah, it’s hard work. It’s good work. This is why we have steam engines and computers and libraries and all that stuff, because people think, and it takes courage to think.

Every time you take whatever you believe and you go, “All right, I’m going to put this on the anvil and I’m going to hammer on it, and what’s going to be left?” it’s a humbling process and it’s a good thing.

I’m really glad that you guys came today. I appreciate you listening to this go on for three hours, and I hope we can do it some time again. Thanks.

(Transcript Part 1) (Transcript Part 2) Transcript Part 3

7 Things Yo’ Momma Never

Told You About Church History

(Written Transcript Part 2)

The Destruction of Jerusalem

It’s mentioned 78 times in the gospels. Here are some instances of that.

Luke 2:38

Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.

Matthew 23:33

You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town.

And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. I tell you truth, all this will come upon this generation.”

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’

And you know what comes next? New chapter.

I don’t know how you can possibly argue that the gospels were written after the temple was destroyed. If you have a theological understanding of the book of Matthew, you know that it was written to Jews. If Matthew was written to Jews after 70 AD, where are the Jews it was written to?

The gospels were written before 70 AD. They don’t mention any events that happened after that.

Q” & Mark Theory

There are some theories about how the gospels were put together. One theory is called Q theory, which is that there was a document which Matthew and Luke copied, and then Mark copied all three. There’s another theory that Mark was first. This theory did not appear until 1786.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the phrase “early church fathers.” I think it’s one of the most important concepts in church history, which is that there were a group of people who were the leading lights in the early church.

Papias, Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, and Augustine – all of these guys say that Matthew was written first, all of them. In order to come up with a theory that Mark or something else was written first, you have to dismiss the most reliable early authors in regards to the early church. What kind of historical scholarship is that?

You go, “Oh, well, they were biased, so we’re not going to listen to them,” but I want to show you what they said. Here’s what Irenaeus said. Irenaeus lived from 130-200.

So Matthew brought out a written gospel among the Jews in their own style when Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel at Rome and founding the church. But after their demise, Mark himself, the disciple and recorder of Peter, has also handed on to us in writing what had been proclaimed by Peter. And Luke, the follower of Paul, set forth in a book the gospel that was proclaimed by him. Later John, the disciple of the Lord and the one who leaned against his chest, also put out a gospel while residing in Ephesus of Asia.”

So a guy writing in 150 or 170, somewhere in there, this is what he said. He said Matthew was first, and then Mark, and then Luke, and then John. Guess what? That’s the order they’re in the Bible. There’s a reason for that.

Clement of Alexandria in roughly 200 AD says –

Mark, the follower of Peter, while Peter was publicly preaching the gospel at Rome in the presence of some of Caesar’s knights and uttering many testimonies of Christ, on their asking him to let them have a written record of the things what had been said, wrote the gospel, which is called the Gospel of Mark, from the things said by Peter; just as Luke is recognized as the pen that wrote the Acts of the Apostles and as the translator of the Letter of Paul to the Hebrews.

Origen’s a really interesting guy. By the way, it’s not hard to go read what these guys wrote. I’ve got a great book here called Faith of the Early Fathers by Jurgens. This particular book goes from 80 AD to 400 AD. Then there’s another book, volume 2, which goes from like 400 AD to 800 AD, then there’s volume 3. It’s all the most important writings of the early church fathers all collected.

One of the things you find if you open this is on page 7 is a letter to the Corinthians from St. Clement of Rome. This is dated somewhere between 80 and 90 AD. When you go to the end of this section, it’s got references to all the Bible verses he quotes.

This is proof that the Bible was already there. Constantine didn’t write it. And you know what, even if we did not have the New Testament at all, we could reconstruct all but 11 verses of the New Testament just from commentaries written before 300 AD. There’s a paper trail.

The paper itself goes all the way back to before the second century, and then we have the evidence within the text. Acts does not describe anything that happened after I think 62 AD or so, and that’s how you come up with a date. This stuff is early.

My father-in-law has a book called Return of the Enola Gay by Paul Tibbets. The Enola Gay is the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Paul Tibbets dropped the bomb in 1945, and in roughly 1990 he wrote an autobiography of what that whole experience was like – getting on the plane, “Good grief, I’m going to drop an atomic bomb,” and the whole thing.

The reason he wrote the book was there were all these people starting to say, “Hey, you know, we were too mean to the Japanese. We should have just talked to them a little longer and we should have had some negotiation,” and he’s like, “I’m telling you, they couldn’t be negotiated with, they couldn’t be reasoned with, we had no choice. We had to do that. I have to write this book.”

He wrote the book and I think it was published in the late 90’s, so he wrote the book almost 50 years after this stuff happened, and he died not too long after that.

Now is anybody reasonably going to doubt that he remembers what happened? I think he can remember what happened. Some of the details might be a little off, but he’s got the story straight.

If Paul Tibbets can remember dropping a bomb on Hiroshima 50 years later, is it at all unreasonable to think that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John can tell you what happened 30-40 years later?

Audience: What are you trying to say actually, that the gospels were written sooner than that and they’re more valid

Yeah, I’m saying the gospels were written before 70 AD. Secular scholars will always try to pull the date – “Oh no, it’s 80, it’s 90, it’s 100” – but their arguments are based on Jesus making a statement about the temple. “Jesus couldn’t have known that.”

That’s the whole premise of secular scholarship. “Jesus couldn’t possibly have known that, because we know there’s no such thing as prophets.” That’s the whole premise of secular scholarship. “He couldn’t have possibly known that,” so they put that in later.

But when you look at how stories are told, you look at the structure, how is the foreshadowing handled by the authors – compare Judas to Jerusalem and you’re like, “These guys didn’t know Jerusalem was destroyed when they wrote this. There’s no way.” So the gospels date between 60 and 70. That’s what I’m saying.

Audience:Why do you suppose the Jews were so hated?

Great question. Why were the Jews so hated? You mean by the Romans? I want to read you a verse from the Apocrypha. I’m going to talk about the Apocrypha.

Audience: The Jews were making Jesus very uncomfortable.

Look, they said, “The blood of his head be on us and our children,” right? He also said, “All of the blood from Abel to every prophet you’ve ever killed, all the judgment for that is going to be poured out on this generation.” Jesus said that.

This is from Wisdom of Solomon, and I’ll talk about the Apocrypha in a little while. This is chapter 2, verse 10, a prophetic statement about Jesus, and I want you to hear what it says. It’s very insightful. This is the voice of Jesus’ persecutors.

Down with the poor and honest man. Let us tread him underfoot. Let us show no mercy to the widow and no reference to the gray hairs of old age, for let might be right. Weakness has proved to be good for nothing.

Let us lay a trap for the just man. He stands in our way, a check to us at every turn. He girds at us lawbreakers. He calls us traitors to our upbringing. He knows God, so he styles himself as the servant of the Lord.

He is a living condemnation of all our ideas. The very sight of him is an affliction to us because his life is not like other people’s and his ways are different.

He rejects us like base coin, avoids us and our ways as if we were filth. He says, “The just die happy,” and boasts that God is his Father. Let us test the truth of his words. Let us see what will happen to him in the end, for if the just man is God’s son, God will stretch out a hand to him and save him from the clutches of his enemies.

Outrage and torment are the means to try him with, to measure his forbearance and learn how long his patience lasts. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for on his own showing he will have a protector.

So they argued, and very wrong they were, blinded by their own malevolence. They did not understand God’s hidden plan. They never expected that holiness of life would have its recompense. They thought that innocence had no reward.

But God created man for immortality and made him the image of His own eternal self. It was the devil’s spite that brought death into the world, and the experience of it is reserved for those who take his side.

This is Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 2, verses 10-24, which is in the Catholic Bible.

What this is saying is they reason, “If this is the son of God, God will save him,” and God’s logic was, “No, I’m not going to save him. I’m going to show you what meekness does.” Meekness is strength under control, what a human being under complete control of the Holy Spirit can do. And of course they didn’t expect a resurrection either. We’ll get to that.

I want to give you some lowest common denominators of the gospels. The next section is stuff that almost all scholars agree on, regardless of their point of view or their religious orientation.

• The gospels differ too much in their details of the resurrection to have been deliberately harmonized.

There is an argument out there that the gospels contradict each other about the empty tomb. Depending on what assumptions you make, you could argue that there’s contradictions, or you can harmonize them by making a few assumptions, but they’re clearly and obviously not deliberately harmonized, which means it is four independent accounts of the resurrection, not one but four.

You could throw out one, but you can’t throw out four, especially when you know that they don’t completely agree. You can argue that the gospels are contradictory, or you can argue that they’re dependent on each other, but you can’t make both arguments at the same time, so pick your poison. Either way, the skeptic has a real problem with his view.

• All four gospels tell the same essential story.
• All four gospels explicitly speak of an empty tomb.
• Nobody ever produced Jesus’ body.

Established Facts

• Paul’s letters are dated 40-55 AD. Acts is dated 65-80 AD.
• Belief in the divinity of Christ is found in the earliest known Christian creeds.

And here’s another thing. People will often say, “Jesus is never mentioned outside of the Bible.” Wrong.

• Classical historical references to Jesus outside the New Testament include: Thallos, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Tacitus, Mara Bar Serapion, Lucian of Samosata, and Celcus.
• Jewish references to Jesus outside the New Testament: Josephus, rabbinic tradition, Toledot Yeshu, and they describe Jesus as a cult leader and a magician.
• All early sources treat Jesus as a real historical person. There’s not one single ancient document that says that Jesus was some kind of myth, not one.

Resurrection of Jesus

Almost all scholars, regardless of their orientation, agree on six things.

1. First century Jews expected a Messiah, but did not expect a dying/rising Messiah.
2. Jesus died and was buried.
3. After this happened, the disciples were discouraged and dejected.
4. Soon after Jesus’ burial, the tomb was claimed to be empty, and some disciples had experiences they took to be encounters with a risen Jesus.
5. These experiences caused them to believe Jesus rose from the dead.
6. They started a massive worldwide movement based on the idea that Jesus rose from the dead.

All scholars agree on this pretty much. Now the question is, what is the best explanation? We have the explanation that Jesus really did rise from the dead, and then you have no other single explanation that has ever gained widespread acceptance.

Oh, Jesus was nourished by the cool air of the tomb, and because of the amazing healing technology that they had at the time from the Egyptians, which we don’t really have any more, they were able to heal him and he rose from the dead.”

Well, Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. There’s a long history of guys who survived crucifixions and went on to do great things.”

Come on! Do you really believe that? Have you ever seen a crucifixion? There is actually a report of a guy who survived a crucifixion. He was already crucified and somebody goes, “Wait a minute! He’s not guilty!”

“He’s not?”

They take him down and he died a week later or something, adding insult to injury, but yes, we do have a record of a guy who survived a crucifixion. He didn’t inspire a worldwide movement and hope in the hearts of people, like, “Boy, Jesus. You really look like you need to get some rest.”

I got this from the world’s #1 atheist website. This is an article written about 15 years ago. Just before this paragraph he says, “Okay, there are people in the world who reject miracles and there are people in the world who accept miracles, and that’s a whole philosophical argument and it’s not settled,” – he’s just being real honest – “so how you see the resurrection depends on which camp you’re in.”

Then he says,

I think it’s rational to both accept and reject the resurrection. I think there are strong historical arguments for the resurrection, like William Lane Craig [and if you want to read about it, read William Lane Craig, he’s great], but I also think there are good reasons to reject such arguments. I realize this may sound like a cop-out to some, but I think it’s quite reasonable, especially when the issue of prior probability is taken into consideration.”

He’s basically admitting that if your worldview allows for miracles, then the resurrection of Jesus is a very logical conclusion based on the facts. If your worldview excludes the possibility of miracles ever happening, then you’ll find a way to explain it away. That’s what he’s saying.

Audience: What do you think?

Perry: I absolutely think Jesus wrote from the dead. Jesus stepped into the world and split time in half: BC and AD. You can’t go to his grave. He’s the most written about, most talked about, most argued about, most controversial person in human history, and it’s the only resurrection story that stuck.

Audience: But what about all the TV shows now or all the notions now? People are seeing dead people everywhere and we’re having TV shows about it and all kinds of things. Now all kinds of people are seeing dead people. They’re even solving problems.

Perry: You mean dead people risen from the dead?

Audience: Yeah, like the guy who goes across the country, I forget what his name is, and tells all the relatives, “Oh, it’s your grandma…”

It’s one thing if people say they’re communicating with the dead. It’s another thing if somebody got crucified and tortured to death and they’re walking around and giving people fish and having conversations and appearing to 500 people and inspiring a worldwide movement where everybody is absolutely convinced that he rose from the dead.

You have to explain how did Christianity just become this tsunami force overnight?

Audience: Why does it matter if he rose from the dead or not?

Perry: Because if he rose from the dead, he was the Son of God and Christianity is true. Christianity rests on the resurrection. If the resurrection didn’t happen, then Christianity is BS, and if the resurrection happened, then Christianity is legit. It all stands or falls on that.

Audience: I’ll tell you why I left seminary. If he rose from the dead or not, [inaudible] but whether you believe he did – I’ve met a lot of people who’ve cared less about anything who did believe he rose from the dead. I guess I’m with, “If you have not love, it profits you nothing.”

Perry: Oh, I’ll agree with that.

Audience: If you can’t live what Jesus did, because there’s so many people putting faith in the resurrection without doing the work of God on earth, and that just gets scary for me.

Perry: Absolutely. James said, “Faith without works is dead.” Yeah, I’m with you.

Now I want to talk about the Apocrypha. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the Apocrypha. How many of you have a level of familiarity with the Apocrypha? How many of you honestly have never read any of it and hardly know a thing about it? Most people.

The Protestant Bible has 66 books and the Catholic Bible has 78. The stuff that the Catholics teach and the Protestants reject is called the Apocrypha. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his objections to the door in Wittenberg and he started this huge movement. He started the Protestant Reformation. We’ll talk about that a little later, but Luther rejected the Apocrypha.

He said, “This does not make the cut. It’s not good enough.” So he got rid of it and Protestantism took off like a rocket, so now most people don’t really know anything about the Apocryphal books.

A few years ago I started reading them, and it was like, “Dang, there’s some really interesting stuff here, really interesting, so why did they get rid of this?”

I’m going to give you a flavor for some of the stuff that’s in the Apocrypha. The ideas about purgatory are in the Apocrypha. They’re in Macabees. I’ve never made a study of the whole purgatory thing. I don’t really have much of an opinion about it. It’s one of the reasons why Luther didn’t like it. He’s like, “This doesn’t make sense to me.”

Also there’s something you have to understand. I think most Catholic scholars would tell you that Catholics do not necessarily consider the Apocrypha to be infallible. As a matter of fact, let me talk about this idea of infallibility, and this is definitely the Planet Perry department and you decide what you think.

The idea of infallibility, the idea that the Bible is perfect or that it is without error – you’ll find a lot of Protestant churches will have a doctrinal statement that says something like, “We believe that the Scriptures are inerrant or infallible in their original documents.” You’ll find a lot of churches that say that.

So here’s a question. Do we have the original documents? No. Do we know that there are some problems in the documents we have? Yes. So the Bible we actually have is fallible, not to mention it was translated from Greek into English or Hebrew into English, and translations are never perfect, so this is not infallible.

Now can we be okay with that? Can you live with that? What happens if you pretend this is infallible, but it’s got some stuff that you’re not quite sure about?

Islam has a very interesting view of infallibility with the Koran. The Koran was written in Arabic, and Muslims believe if you want to believe the Koran you have to read it in Arabic. As a matter of fact, they don’t really go to that much effort making really good translations into English or Spanish or all these other languages because they want you to learn Arabic.

They want you to go to Mecca, they want you to do the pilgrimage, they want you to go to mosque, they want you to say prayers in Arabic, they want you to read the Koran in Arabic – the beauty of the Koran in Arabic is held out as one of the evidences that it is inspired by Allah, and they have a very brittle definition in infallibility.

Now Christianity has never viewed the Bible that way. Nobody’s ever said, “You’re really probably not even a legitimate Christian until you learn Hebrew.” When has anybody ever told you that? The Bible is freely and indiscriminately translated into everything.

I think if you really go back to the church fathers, I think it’s because in the way that Christianity has expressed itself, we believe in the inspiration of the ideas, not so much the inspiration of this particular word on page 874 that was translated into English.

Now my brother who I referred to, when he was in seminary he takes this New Testament Greek class. Now these are tough classes. You’ve got to learn this language, and then they’re going to give you, “Here’s this Greek text and here’s this other one and here’s this other one and here’s this other one. There’s differences between them and you have to figure out what you think the original actually said, based on this one, this one, this one, and this one,” and doing that kind of funnel thing I was talking about.

So they’re in class and the professor is talking about how you piece it all together. One of the students goes, “Professor, what are you saying?” and he’s like, “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean by this?”

“Well, we have to take the documents that we have and figure out what we think the original said.”

And this guy’s worldview is just blown apart, because he’s like, “I thought it was all on an Excel spreadsheet with 12 decimals of precision and it was all figured out!”

If your belief system is that brittle, sooner or later somebody’s going to change one of those entries in the spreadsheet, and it’s going to change this other one, and it’s going to change this other one, and your whole belief system is going to fall apart because you have no sense of, “These things are central and really important and non-negotiable, and then we have these other things.”

You get into wider and wider circles, and you’re less and less willing to die on some hill over some issue.

You all know the Nicene Creed? “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and Jesus his son, only begotten, born of the virgin Mary….”

The Council of Nicea in 300 AD said, “That’s the hill we’ll die on. That’s what we believe. That’s the innermost circle right there.”

You get further and further out, and you get all these denominations, and some denominations sort of do this, and some denominations do this, and some of them do this. But unless you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon, pretty much you hold to this. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, or Episcopal.

I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and I went to this independent Bible church that had Mennonite roots, so they were just a little to the left of ladies wearing white hats on their heads. It was really conservative, and it was a very intellectually-exacting environment.

When my pastor went through Romans, which is the most theologically sophisticated book in the Bible, the first sermon was Romans 1:1, or maybe 1:1 and 1:2, and he references every word.

This word appears in this scripture, this scripture, this scripture,” and you turn to all of them and you read all of them, and you go back and forth through the Bible, and he preaches for 50 minutes on Romans 1:1 and 1:2.

By the time he’s done, you have this whole hyperlinked picture of this refers to this, this refers to this, this refers to this, this refers to this, this refers to this, and next week you come back and he does verses 3, 4, and 5.

It took him five years to get through Romans. That’s my education. That’s what I grew up under. What they basically told me there was Catholics are baaaad.

I was on vacation someplace on the east coast and we’re walking through this town and there’s all these posters and some guy’s handing out flyers like, “The Pope is the anti-christ and the Catholic church is the horror in the book of Revelation. They’re all evil!” and all this Catholic paranoia. “Bad, bad, bad!”

Now I’ve got this theological education and I go to school, and to me Catholics are like little rabbit foo-foo. You go bop them on the head, and we’re so much better than them, and we rock! You know how that is. “We’re better than them!”

My brother-in-law, Allen, Laura’s brother, got his Ph.D. in church history, so he knows all this stuff. If he was giving this lecture, who knows what he’d tell you about. I’m giving you the sort of Perry Renegade Guerrilla version of church history. Allen would give you the official one.

But it was really interesting because we like to talk and we’re always having a philosophical conversation – “What about euthanasia or what about this or what about?” – and every time you’d bring up a subject, he would say, “Oh, well, it was the monks in northern Italy in 750 AD that were the first people to really study that issue really hard, and they wrote all these books.”

Then you bring something else up and he’ll go, “Well, you know there was a monastery in 1346 in Serbia and they studied that, and St. Anselm said blah blah blah.” And what you start to figure out is there’s hardly been an original idea in Christianity in at least 500 years. There’s nothing new under the sun!

Audience:Not only that, but before it ever got to be, the rabbi I had said when they first started transcribing the Bible, he said Jewish vowels depending on where you put the dots to make a word, and then the letter and the dots make the vowels. He said they’d transcribe them and it got dusty in those old caves and they’d go [blow] and he said that that’s spelled somewhere else and then their meaning is…[laughing]

Perry: Right. So people have been wrestling with this stuff for years. There’s this modern idea that because we have this technology and we have all this sophistication, we confuse information and knowledge with wisdom and insight, and they’re two completely different things. So I began to develop an appreciation for the church fathers.

(Transcript Part 1) Transcript Part 2 (Transcript Part 3)

7 Things Yo’ Momma Never

Told You About Church History

(Written Transcript Part 1)

I’m really glad that you’re here, and it’s been brewing for a very long time. There’s a little story behind this whole talk that I want to tell you about; how this whole project was born.

About seven years ago, I put up a website called CoffeeHouseTheology.com. There were a number of motivations for me doing this, but one of them was I needed a punching bag.

I’m a pastor’s kid. Many of you know that pastor’s kids are trouble-prone, dysfunctional, and all that kind of stuff, so I lay claim to all of those characteristics.

I’ve kind of been the “scenic path through life” kind of guy – a little bit of this and a little bit of that – and my younger brother, Bryan, was straight down the party line. He did it exactly the way they told him to. He did not vary.

He gets to be about 30 years old and all the sudden – kaboom! He goes from being the hardcore man of the cloth to nearly atheist in a space of about a year or two. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, seriously. He’s very sharp, and he has more ability than most people to take the dagger and stick it right into the core issue. So Bryan’s asking really intelligent questions, and I’m not necessarily finding good answers to all these questions.

That’s even more significant when you consider that for 10 years I went to Willow Creek Community Church out in the far northwest suburbs. Willow Creek is a seeker-sensitive church. You could be an atheist, you could be a Buddhist, you could be whatever, and you’re welcome to go there. It doesn’t mean they’re atheists, it doesn’t mean they’re Buddhists, but it means they welcome everybody and they’re not afraid to mix it up.

I was actually a pioneer in something they started there called seeker small groups. A seeker small group is like me and maybe an apprentice leader, we’re Christians, and then we get this small group and everybody else at the table is not a Christian. We’re going to have some kind of Bible study or some kind of discussion, and I’m supposed to somehow steer this thing, and it’s crazy.

You say Bible study and people picture a really well-behaved group. They’re sitting there in dresses they made themselves and they’re reading their Bibles and everybody’s being really submissive.

Well, you get a bunch of non-Christians that show up from anywhere at Willow Creek, because they like the jazz or whatever, and it’s careening all the time. And I did that for ten years and I got pretty good at it and I got pretty comfortable.

But then my brother comes along and he’s got a Ph.D. in theology. He’s studied Greek, he’s studied Hebrew, and he’s like, “I don’t buy any of this.” What he would do is he would ask me questions, and when I would try to argue with him he wouldn’t answer, and it really shook me up.

I’m feeling like, “I think there’s good answers to these questions,” so there’s a whole variety of reasons, but what I did is I set up this website called CoffeeHouseTheology.com, and this is what it looks like now.

It used to be a little simpler, but basically this website said, “I’ve got this email series called 7 Great Lies of Organized Religion. You’ll get one message every day. Sign up for it and see what it’s all about,” and people out of curiosity would do this.

If you read it, it’s definitely spun to appeal to the skeptical angry person, not the happy submissive person. The way this worked was anytime a person would reply to an email I would get it, and for the last seven years I’ve had anywhere from 50-100 people a day subscribing to that. Between that website and another one called CosmicFingerprints.com, which is about science stuff, I had 300,000 people subscribe to these emails.

What I decided to do was I will take all comers. I will not back down from any question, and I’m going to see, “Can Christianity stand up to this?” Because you know what? If it can’t I’m going to find out, and that is the background for what I’m going to share with you today.

Christianity absolutely does stand up. It stands up scientifically, historically, philosophically, and every other way. I put a lot of stuff on the anvil and I’ve had a lot of conversations. I bet I’ve had 10,000 conversations with people via email, a small percentage of them going on for a very long time and very intense.

Just to name one example, there was one guy where it turned into a Microsoft Word document that would go back and forth and back and forth, and every time it was a new thread it would be a new font or a new color so everybody could figure out where we were at, and it got to be 100 pages long.

He was an atheist, and finally after eight months he said uncle. He said, “Okay, you know, you’re very smart, you’re very polite, I can’t explain everything, but I’m tired of arguing. You’re not as dumb as I thought you were,” basically.

So this has gone all kinds of different directions, and here we are. It’s “7 Things Yo’ Momma Never Told You About Church History.”

This isn’t your typical chronological church history thing that you would get at a seminary or Bible college or university. You do that and they will answer a whole lot of questions that nobody’s asking. What you’re going to get today is the questions that everybody’s asking. This is what you actually get when you go out there and have conversations with people.

If you’ve ever felt squeamish about defending what you believe, and not just defending but advancing what you believe, that this is the truth, I think this will help you.

I also think it will help you internally, because one thing I know about just about anybody who would show up at something like this is that you have questions too. And you know what, that’s okay. Questions are good and it’s okay to venture into that dangerous dung.

There’s a disclaimer that I want to give to you, and here’s the disclaimer. What you’re getting here today is Planet Perry. It’s not the church necessarily. I’m not going to claim by any means that it’s perfect or infallible. I expect you to show up and think.

If you disagree, that’s fine, but you should have good reasons. You should not accept whatever I tell you just because I told you. You shouldn’t accept anything that way.

What I think is lacking in the church and lacking in our culture is people who are willing to do the hard scary work of thinking, so that’s the disclaimer. This is not perfect, it’s a work in progress, but it’s the best I can give you after basically 15-17 years of duking it out with people and having these kinds of conversations.

Disclaimer #2 I’ll do at the end. Somebody remind me, “What’s disclaimer #2?” and I’ll tell you what it is.

Let’s start with one of the bullets here.

What ancient people really believed about the earth, science, and astronomy

How many of you have ever heard the story, “Christopher Columbus’ men threatened mutiny because they were afraid they would sail over the edge of the earth”? How many of you have heard that? Most people. How many of you think it’s true?

You know what, there is not a shred of truth to that – not a shred. There is a popular idea out there that people 500 years ago thought the earth was flat. People have not believed that for 2,500 years at least.

Why is that rumor out there? What is that all about? In 1828 a guy named Washington Irving wrote a book called, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, and it was this highly-fictional story that had people in it, like priests, who said, “Mr. Columbus, the Bible says the earth is flat and you’re defying scripture and you’re going to sail off the ends of the earth,” and all this kind of stuff.

There became a whole genre of authors in the 1800s who began to portray medieval people as being stupid, and a term was invented, called The Dark Ages. What’s The Dark Ages? Isn’t like somewhere like 800, 1000 or 1200 AD when the world was plunged into superstition and witches were being burned at the stake and they were running around killing people, and the Crusades, and Galileo was almost burned at the stake, and astronomers – you’ve all heard that stuff, right?

There’s a grain of truth to that, because people always resist new ideas and, yes, churches resist new ideas, and there’s all these kinds of dogmas, but for the most part it’s not true.

Well, get on the internet and look up a term “conflict thesis.” The way you find out is you read what people were saying 600 years ago. You can read the theologians, you can read the astronomers. All this stuff is preserved and there was not some big conflict between reason and faith. There was not some big conflict between the church and science. It’s largely a fabrication.

Audience: I don’t agree with you, but….

Look up “conflict thesis.” The conflict thesis says that for hundreds or thousands of years there’s been a war between science and religion. There hasn’t been a war between science and religion until science started becoming atheistic 150 years ago. It really started with Darwin. That’s really when most of the conflict started.

Technologies Invented During the “Dark Ages”*

• The Indians made a cotton gin
• Toilet paper
• Distillation
• Wind powered gristmill
• High purity glass
• Hang glider
• Chemotherapy
• Metal block printing
• Corrective lenses
• Oral anesthesia
• Surgical rod
• Magnifying glass
• Pinhole camera
• Geared mechanical clock
• Flow control regulator
• Programmable analog computer
• Torpedo
• Eyeglasses

All these were invented between 500 and 1300.

There are two views. One view – and this is the conflict thesis view – is that after the fall of Rome, the world was plunged into this sea of ignorance that lasted for 1,000 years, and then when philosophers began to resurrect Greek philosophy and Roman philosophy, the Renaissance began and pulled us out of this dark superstition. Then the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution and all this stuff happened. That’s the conflict thesis.

My thesis says after the fall of Rome there was a steady drip-drip-drip-drip of uphill improvement of science, philosophy, technology, and human rights. Augustine lived in 400 and he wrote about the Fall of Rome, and he’s got a chapter in his book, The City of God, and he says people blame the Christians for the fall of Rome because they turned Romans into these soft, compliant people.

He goes, “No, that’s not really true. The Roman empire caved under the weight of its own ego.” He said, “The thing you need to give Christians credit for is the fact that when Rome fell, all the women and children weren’t slaughtered. They were put in churches where they would be safe, and they were fed by their enemies,” which never happened before that.

Before that, if you have a war, you either sell everybody into slavery or you just kill them all or torture them to death. So there was this steady, steady improvement.

A good book for you to read is,Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark. Actually, any of Rodney Stark’s books are great. He’s a sociologist at the University of Michigan. He documents this exhaustively.

He says the windmill was invented because the church was frowning on slavery in 600 AD, and technology was a result of people saying, “We’ve got to get rid of slavery. There must be some way that God has for us to grind this grain or to farm this land.”

On a similar note, here’s something to think about. Is it just a coincidence that slavery was outlawed in the United States in 1865, and within 20 years technology went kaboom! Is it just a coincidence that that happened? You can decide for yourself.

So Stark chronicles in details early forms of democracy in Italy in 1000 AD in Florence. Later, towards the end of my presentation, I’m going to talk about the idea of equality and how that idea grew from the time of the New Testament to the present.

One of the things I want to spend a lot of time talking about today is next.

How We Got the Christianity We Have Today

When you bring up this topic, a lot of people will say things like, “Well, Christianity was invented by Constantine in 300 AD when they all got together and they voted which books were going to be in the Bible. So Jesus was basically turned into God somewhere in the middle there, and this nice prophet who unfortunately got crucified in Jerusalem somehow got turned into this God-Man kind of guy, and then it was institutionalized and, boy, the world’s been screwed up ever since.” That’s the secular story.

There are so many documents, so much literature, so many scrolls, so much history you can study, that by the time we’re done we will completely lay that notion to rest, because it’s completely not true.

The centerpiece of Christianity in the Bible is in the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Pretty much everybody agrees that Paul’s letters were written first and the Gospels were written after that. This is how they’re normally dated.

Matthew: 70-100

Mark: 60-70

Luke: 70-80

John: 90-100

That’s the kind of the typical secular story that you get.

There are a lot of ways that we arrive at dates like that. Some of it is from manuscripts. The earliest manuscripts that we have of the New Testament date back to typically the middle of the second century, like the actual piece of paper dates to 150 AD.

That is not how scholars date ancient documents. If we use that method, then Homer would be 700 years old or something. We date things based on what’s inside the documents, like what’s included and what’s not included, and based on what other people who were close to the time said.

And here’s another thing. These documents have genealogies. There’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and the New Testament exists in all kinds of languages. If you go to between 200-300 AD, you’re already finding 15-20 different languages that the New Testament has been translated in, so you can start tracing the genealogies.

They all point to documents that we no longer have copies of, and there are differences between them where you see, “Oh, there was a copying error,” and then you see it in this one, this one, and this one. “Oh, here’s this other little copying error over here,” and it’s in this one and this one, and you start working down, and they point to an epicenter.

I want to go through an exercise with you that I think will help you see an argument for the dating of the gospels that’s maybe a little different.

Matthew says when Jesus was standing before Pilate,

When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said, “It is your responsibility.”

All the people answered, “Let his blood be on us and on our children!”

Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.

I want to read to you some Jewish history from 70 AD. This is by Josephus, a Roman historian, very respected. As you can see, this book is rather thick. This is a combination of Josephus’ interpretation of Jewish history and then Roman history during his time, where he reports in great detail what was going on in his day.

In March of AD 70, Passover was held in Jerusalem, so Jerusalem would swell to two to three times its normal population, and everybody is eating and feasting and celebrating Passover.

While Passover was going on, the Roman army surrounded Jerusalem and began a siege, which meant they wouldn’t let anything in or out, and they were starving the city to death. Happy Passover.

Josephus describes what it was like. I’m just going to warn you, this is kind of gruesome, but there’s a reason why I’m giving this to you. There’s a very definite reason why.

Famine now raged in the city and the rebels took all the food they could find in a house-to-house search, while the poor starved to death by the thousands. People gave all their wealth for a little measure of wheat, and hid it to eat hastily and in secret so it would not be taken from them.

Wives would snatch the food from their husbands, children from fathers, and mothers from the very mouths of infants. Many of the rich were put to death by Simon and John, while the sufferings of the people were so fearful they could hardly be told, and no other city endured such miseries.

Not since the world began was there ever a generation more prolific in crime than this bastard scum of the nation who destroyed the city.

Meanwhile, as Titus’ earthworks were progressing, his troops captured any who ventured out to look for food. When caught, they resisted and were then tortured and crucified before the walls as a terrible warning to the people within.

Titus pitied them. Some 500 were captured daily, but dismissing those captured by force was dangerous and guarding some numbers would imprison the guards. Out of rage and hatred the soldiers nailed their prisoners in different postures, and so great was their number that space could not be found for the crosses.

This describes Titus, who was in charge of the Roman army in the temple.

Rushing out, he appealed to his troops to put out the flames, ordering one of his centurions to club anyone disobeying his orders, but respect for their general and fear of punishment were overwhelmed by their raging hatred of the Jews and hope of plunder.

Seeing that all the surroundings were made of gold, they assumed the interior contained immense treasure. When Titus ran out to restrain the troops, one of those who had entered with him thrust a firebrand into the hinges of the gate of the inner temple, and flames shot up in its interior. Ceasar and his generals withdrew, and thus, against his wishes, the sanctuary was burned.

While the temple was inflamed, the victors stole everything they could lay their hands on, and slaughtered all who were caught. No pity was shown to age or rank, old men or children, lady or priest. All were massacred.

As the flames roared up, since the temple stood on a hill, it seemed as if the whole city were ablaze. The noise was deafening with war cries of the legions, howls by rebels surrounding, by fire and sword and shrieks of the people. The ground was hidden by corpses and the soldiers had to climb over heaps of bodies in pursuit of fugitives.

The Jewish brigands forced their way through the Romans into the outer court of the temple and then into the city. Some of the priests at first tore up spikes from the sanctuary and hurled them at the Romans, but afterwards retreating from the flames they withdrew to the wall.

Before the siege, portents had appeared foretelling the impending devastation, but the Jews had disregarded these warnings of God. A star resembling a sword hung over the city, and also a comet, which lasted a year.

Just before the revolt, when the people were coming together for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, a bright light shone around the altar during the night and brightened the sanctuary for half an hour. The people thought this was a good omen, but the sacred scribes told them the contrary.

A cow gave birth to a lamb in the temple court, and the eastern gate of the inner court, which was fastened with iron bars so heavy it took 20 men to move it, flew open on its own during the night.

Another portent was even more alarming. Four years before the war, while the city was enjoying prosperity and peace, a rude peasant named Jesus, son of Ananias, came to the Feast of Tabernacles.

He stood up in the Temple shouting, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the sanctuary, a voice against bridegrooms and brides, a voice against all the people.” Day and night he walked the streets with this cry.

Some of the leaders arrested the fellow and beat him, but he only kept on shouting as before. The magistrates brought him before the Roman governor, who had him whipped to the bone, but he neither begged for mercy nor shed a tear, only crying at each stroke, “Woe to Jerusalem!”

When Albinus the governor asked him who he was, where he came from, why he uttered these cries, he did not reply, but only repeated his dirge, “Woe to Jerusalem!” for seven years and five months.

Continuing through the war, he maintained his cry, until making his rounds on the wall during the siege, he shouted with his piercing voice, “Woe once more to the city, to the people and to the temple.” Then he suddenly added, “And woe to me also,” and was immediately struck dead by a stone hurled from a ballista.

But what most incited the Jews to war was an ambiguous oracle which predicted that someone from their country would become ruler of the world. This they interpreted as someone from their own race, but the oracle actually signified Vespasian, who was proclaimed emperor on Jewish soil.

Then this describes the end of the fall of Jerusalem.

As Titus entered the city, he was astonished at its strength, and especially the towers which the tyrants had abandoned. Indeed, when he saw how high and massive they were and the size of each huge block, he exclaimed, “Surely God was with us in the war, who brought the Jews down from these strongholds, for what can hand or engine do against these towers?”

Josephus reports the total number of prisoners taken during the war was 97,000, and those who died during the siege was 1,100,000. Josephus reports that Jerusalem was utterly decimated. It was burned to the ground. It was unrecognizable.

He said a few years before it had been a beautiful place with gardens and properties and farms and orchards and flowers. It was a beautiful city with a beautiful temple. He said after it was all done you couldn’t even recognize that there had been a city there. It was completely obliterated.

This is the most significant event that happened in that part of the world that century. This is the equivalent of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Bam!

What I want you to think about is if you went to Hiroshima in 1950, in what way would people speak of the previous 20 years? Wouldn’t the atomic bomb sort of overshadow everything that you talked about? Could you even talk about Hiroshima or Nagasaki without mentioning, “Oh yeah, well, before the atomic bomb there was a beautiful Buddhist temple over here,” right?

With that in mind, I want you to look at some stuff. I want you to consider how foreshadowing is handled by the gospel writers.

Foreshadowing in the Gospels: Judas

Matthew 10:14

Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him

Mark 3:19

and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him

Luke 6:16

Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor

John 6:17

(He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the 12, was later to betray him).

John 12:4

But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected.

It’s almost like somebody’s telling a story, and every time somebody says “Judas,” a guy named Anthony goes, “Traitor!” It’s like, “Yes, Anthony, I know. Judas was a traitor. Can I go on with my story now?” It’s like they can’t even mention him without saying this.

How about a different foreshadowing?

Foreshadowing in the Gospels: Death of Peter

John 21:17

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.

It says what He meant. It sounds like He already knows what happened and He’s explaining it to them.

Let’s look at how the temple is discussed in the New Testament.

Foreshadowing: Destruction of the Temple

Matthew mentions the temple 17 times. The only reference to destroying it is in Matthew 27:40.

The people were saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross if you are the Son of God!”

That is the only reference in the book of Matthew to destroying the temple.

Mark mentions the temple 12 times, with two references to destroying it.

Mark 14:58

We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this manmade temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.’”

He’s not even talking about the temple.

Mark 15:29

Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days…”

Luke mentions the temple 21 times, with one reference to destroying it.

Luke 21:5

Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God. But Jesus said, “As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.”

You know what he says next? He says new chapter. He goes on to something else and he never says, “And he was right.”

Judas is like, “Judas, who betrayed him. Judas, who betrayed him. Judas, who betrayed him,” and the temple….it never says. Which was a bigger event in the history of the Jews? Judas betraying Jesus, or 1.1 million people being murdered and a city being destroyed beyond recognition?

John mentions the temple 25 times.

John 2:19

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days.” The Jews replied, “It has taken 46 years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days? But the temple he had spoken of was his body.

They are more interested in Jesus’ body than they are in the city and the temple.

Transcript Part 1 (Transcript Part 2) (Transcript Part 3)

Power Point Presentation in PDF

Written Transcript

In this talk Perry Marshall selects 7 huge “anchor points” – 7 monumental ideas and events that changed civilization. You’ll see with new clarity how the world has been transformed in a positive way:

1. What ancient people really believed about the earth, science and technology (this one’s a big surprise – it’s NOT what you’ve been told!)

2. Robust evidence that the gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – were written before 70 AD – well within the lifetimes of Jesus’ closest friends.

3. Faith and Science in 1000 BC, 1000 AD, and 2000

4. The true story behind those “extra” books the Catholics stuck in the middle of the Bible… and the Most Powerful Bible Verse they never taught you in Sunday School

5. The #1 idea in the American constitution came from the Bible. Trace the history of the world’s most dangerous idea

6. How we got the Bible we read today – a list of urban legends, and the truth of what actually happened

7. The printing press, the protestant reformation and the evolution of technology

MP3 Audio File (2 hours 3 minutes)

Written Transcript

Power Point Presentation in PDF