Thesis 19: Shrinking God and The Kingdom

You’ve heard the rote response: “God is bigger.” Too bad very few churchgoing folk actually act and speak as though he really is: we make all of our pressing issues far bigger than God. We do that. Why?

Lots of reasons (fear, insecurity, false dichotomies, etc.), but perhaps the biggest is that Church needs to make issues bigger than God in order to perpetuate the myths and practices that make it what it is, thereby preserving its status as God-replacement here on earth. What Church of today believes, acts, and says is largely self serving, and a far cry from what Jesus established and God intended Church to be.

A key illustration of this can be made when we look at the construction and maintenance of what most Christ-followers know as The Holy Bible. Here’s a crash course on the current Bible’s history: a bunch of powerful, white European dudes decided a long time ago to pick what books should and shouldn’t be included in scripture, and we’ve maintained that selection to this day with few significant additions or adjustments.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on the early biblical church as well as extra-biblical scholarship on the first few hundred years of Christ-following (NOT “Christianity,” because that term wasn’t really used until many decades after Christ’s departure), and that has brought me to the councils and diets and assemblies that decided what our Bible would be.

In short, our Bible exists in its current form because those power-hungry Church leaders decided what were the inspired books based 1) on the limited scholarship of the day, and 2) what passages and books best aligned with their goals for Church. What didn’t fit their narrative didn’t get included, and indeed, many of the existing scriptures were added to and amended with human aims purely to get in line with the current orthodoxy. In other words, the Bible in its current form is a human product, shaped by human hands.

Since then, however, there have been scores of new manuscript discoveries made and abundant scholarship done on Church and the current Bible and those new texts. A reasonable, rational approach would be to study the new material and information and, lacking direct affirmation from above, make decisions to exclude or include it in the Bible. Find a balance, as it were, between faith-tinted Bible Study and knowledge-oriented Study of the Bible.

There are thousands of discoveries we could highlight, but here are a few I’d encourage you to Google and read about:

• We’ve borrowed uncountable ancient myths and practices from ancient civilizations and claimed them as Christian;

• Jesus’ god-state vs humanity including his marriage and mythical bodily resurrection;

• Archaeological evidence that confirms AND disproves human-added pieces of history within the Bible; and

• Church is ignoring basically entire new gospels and additions/corrections of the existing ones that have emerged since the Nag Hammadi discoveries in the 20th century.

In large part, a rational survey and re-assessment of the Bible hasn’t happened. Hundreds of years of discovery and learning have been ignored, brushed aside, and even condemned by Church authorities who refuse to see things anew, particularly from extra-biblical perspectives. We have new gospels and myths, expanded versions of existing texts, and tons of archeological evidence that adds to our understanding of church and faith and Jesus and who we are. Our Christian universe has gotten a lot bigger; the Bible has not.

There’s a lot of entrenched Church “stuff” that the new information impacts, of course, that would require change: as we know, Church hates change more than Satan. But more than that, this refusal to acknowledge that those invested, power-hungry, fallible, and at times hateful Church fathers should/must have their work transformed says that we don’t trust God to be God. By not trusting that the knowledge and understanding we’ve been given can better our faith and lives, we’re narrowing God’s kingdom, not expanding it.

And as a result we’re making God smaller, too.

Keywords: Thesis 19: Shrinking God and the Kingdom; Faith; Deconstruction; Religion; Christian; Christianity; Church; Sin; Corruption; Scandal; Bible; Abuse; God; Jesus; Stewardship