Misfit Faith: Confessions of a Drunk Ex-Pastor - Couverture rigide

Stellman, Jason J.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0804140626 ISBN 13 : 9780804140621

Editeur : Convergent Books, 2017

Synopsis

"Provides a vision for a broader, more hospitable Christianity."–Publishers Weekly. The co-host of the popular podcast, Drunk Ex-Pastors, offers an earnest and irreverent look at what it means to be a Christian in an upside down world.
 
“Perhaps failing at faith is an ironic success, since disaster is where grace happens.”  – Jason Stellman

Jason Stellman has always felt like a misfit. A Protestant pastor with a sharp wit, a restlessly inquisitive mind, and a love of pop culture and rock and roll, he has long sensed that something was missing when it came to his relationship with God. In time, he felt drawn to the Catholic Church, so he stepped down from his ministry and embraced Catholicism, only to still feel misplaced and homeless.
 
His feelings, thoughts, and troubles echo the disillusionment and confusion of many people who struggle relating to ancient faiths in a postmodern world.
 
In a book that mixes memoir with theological insights and taut storytelling, Stellman gives an edgy, honest, heart-on-his-sleeve account of what it means to be a mixed-up Christian outsider in the twenty-first century (and why this is a can be good thing). Misfit Faith is an invitation to all the religious vagabonds and exiles with nowhere to really call home, those wanderers who increasingly feel like mere fans of spirituality rather than committed members of the team.
 
If you’ve ever questioned your faith, felt like a spiritual malcontent, or sought solace for your existential angst at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon, then Stellman just may be the best drinking buddy you’ve never met.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

JASON STELLMAN, cohost of the podcast Drunk Ex-Pastors, is a Southern California native and transplant to Seattle who wishes he still lived in Europe. He served as a missionary with Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa in Uganda ('91-'92) and in Hungary ('94-2000). Ordained In the Presbyterian Church in America, he was called to plant Exile Presbyterian Church in the Seattle area where he served from 2004-2012. In September 2012, he was received into the Catholic Church. He drinks and questions his faith regularly.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

1

Daddy Issues (Or, Does God Deserve That “World’s Best Father” Mug?)

“I Believe in God, the Father Almighty . . .”

When I was a missionary with Calvary Chapel in Europe, I was introduced to the work of the singer-songwriter Rich Mullins. I was initially dismissive of him because of how much I think Christian music sucks. I mean, there’s only so much soft rock “Jesus Is My Boyfriend” drivel a guy can take, and I was at the point where if I heard one more song about how Jesus wants to take me into a garden and whisper sweet nothings into my ear with his hot breath while running his hand over the small of my back, I was going to light myself on fire. But the other missionaries (most of whom shared my disdain for religious rock) assured me that Mullins was different, and when I popped in the cassette tape of A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band, I realized they were right. There was something very human and earthy about his style and his words, a grittiness to which I was unaccustomed, especially when juxtaposed with the glammy and overproduced Christian music that was popular at the time.

One of the songs on that album was called “Creed,” and in it Mullins simply sang one of the oldest expressions of the Christian faith, the Apostles’ Creed, the first line of which reads, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” He then added a chorus, part of which said (in reference to the Creed), “I did not make it, no, it is making me.” That particular line initially struck me as odd until I remembered the words of Paul in Romans 6, where the apostle referred to the gospel as “that form of doctrine to which you were delivered” (verse 17, NKJV). The idea is that the truth of God is not something over which man sits as judge or maker but rather something that makes and judges him. Faith is constantly sculpting us, is what I’m getting at.

As I made my own transition out of a rather high-strung and sure-of-myself Protestantism into a more unclenched, misfit Catholicism, I realized that what was “making” Rich Mullins, and what had made so many other saints down through the ages, was the truth contained in that first line of the Creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” As elementary as it sounds, it was the fatherhood of God that began to play the most significant role in my own spiritual transformation, a transformation that left very few nerves untouched and very few stones unturned. What I’d like to do in this chapter is explore God’s fatherhood, seeking to show how a better grasp of this reality can transform our view of God and our view of ourselves as his children.

“This My Son Was Dead, and Is Alive Again!”

The concept of “the fatherhood of God” may be unfamiliar to many of you, so let me explain it as best I can. Since around the fourth century, the Church has taught that God is three-in-one, that he exists in three distinct but coequal Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (And please don’t try to actually understand this. It’s weird, mysterious, and not really the kind of thing we can wrap our brains around.) This is why Jesus, when teaching about his Father, often resorted to stories and parables, and without a doubt, his parable of the prodigal son is one of the most illustrative portrayals of this idea in all of Scripture. In case you’re not familiar, or your memory’s a bit rusty, I’ll sum it up:

The younger of two brothers decides that he wants his share of his father’s inheritance immediately rather than waiting for his father to get around to actually dying. (Old people take forever to do anything, am I right?) The father agrees, and the younger son heads to a far-off land--whatever antiquity’s version of Vegas was--in order to party, sleep with, umm, “women of ill repute,” and engage in whatever other salacious activity money can buy. (Use your imagination. Actually, don’t.) Not unpredictably, the son reaches the end of his rope once his inheritance is exhausted: he is living in squalor and tending swine, even finding himself so hungry that he would gladly have filled his belly with the scraps he was feeding his pigs. The prodigal finally comes to his senses and decides to humble himself and return to his father, even rehearsing a confession speech about his own unworthiness to be considered a son and willingness to be hired on as a servant. But before he can even reach his door, his father sees him afar off and runs to meet him. And despite the protestations of his older and better-behaved son, the father embraces the prodigal, kisses him, and before the younger son can deliver his mea culpa, his father commands that he be adorned as an honored member of the family and that a lavish feast be prepared to celebrate his return.

Now, speaking for myself, I can imagine a much more likely response to this son from his father upon hearing his son’s initial request: “What’s that? You want to skip the remainder of my life as well as the funeral and get straight to the reading of the will? And you want this so you can run off and dishonor yourself and me with a bunch of hookers and blow? Nice try, but howsabout instead I just write you out of my will altogether, you little punk?” But this father reacted very differently to his son’s disloyalty, which is what is so obviously striking about the story. In spite of such willful disregard, the father responded to his son’s selfish request and eventual return with utter grace, understanding, and familial love. In a word, he responded like a father.

What Is God, Really?

For most of my Christian life, ideas like “the Trinity” and “the fatherhood of God” were things I had little practical use for. They were concepts I kept in my back pocket in case some Mormons (who deny them) came knocking at my door: “Listen up: You guys are totally in a cult. Read these verses about how God is three-in-one and get back to me. And quit it with the whole polygamy thing. Geez.” While God being a “Father” could become useful for apologetical purposes, it didn’t make much difference in day-to-day life, is what I’m saying.

More often than not when I would present the gospel, I would root it in a God who was a creator and judge but not so much a Father. I’d say something like “The God who created all things, and who also made you, will one day be your judge when you stand before him on the last day,” and so on. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, the Bible is clear that God acts as both creator and judge. But the question I began to ponder was, “Is being a creator, or being a judge, actually what makes God God? Are these traits necessary? Do they define him?” The answer is obviously no. We know this because before Genesis 1:1 happened, God was still God. He didn’t somehow need to create anything in order to fully be who he is. This idea that God did not create out of some inherent need on his part flies in the face of the way the gospel is often presented: God is displayed as having been bored and in need of companionship before he created man, and therefore his creative efforts were to assuage his divine loneliness. In short, God had a man-shaped hole in his heart that only we could fill.

But if God would still be God if he never created anything, and if his godhood would not be diminished in the slightest if he never judged anyone, then what exactly, at the end of the day, is he? What is it that makes God God? The answer is simple (albeit hopelessly complex): God is three-in-one, he is a Father who has a Son, from both of whom proceeds the Holy Spirit. Three divine Persons, but one God. Because of this, there was never a “time” when God lacked companionship--the Father exists in a divine community with the Son and Spirit, and therefore there has ever been fellowship, communion, and love between the Persons of the Trinity from all eternity past. In other words, God, by definition, is never alone. And if he is never alone, he can never be lonely. Unlike those earthly fathers who wish they were still unattached and single, God the Father is like Clark Griswold in the National Lampoon’s Vacation films: He’s the consummate family man.

 

Family Matters and Deadbeat Baby-Daddies

Okay, so if what makes God God is not that he is a creator or a judge but a Father, the next question is, “What do fathers do? What makes them fathers?” The answer is obvious: What makes a father a father is that he has children, he produces offspring by imparting his essence and nature to them, reproducing his image in his sons and daughters.

How does this relate to God the Father? Well, to put it super simply, God is a Father because he has a Son.1 How does this affect us? This is where things get interesting. If what makes God God is his being a Father, and if as a Father his role is to reproduce his image in his offspring, and if this paternal and familial relationship extends beyond heaven to earth, then this means that we, together with Jesus, are “children of God” and “partakers of the divine nature” (Rom. 8:14– 17; 2 Pet. 1:4).

Now, you may just be rolling your eyes at how obvious and elementary this all is, and if so, I would ask you to kindly put your eyes back where they belong and stick with me. Salvation involves so much more than the standard deal of being forgiven of your sins and going to heaven when you die. In fact, once I started to think about my own relationship with God in familial terms, it made mere forgiveness seem kind of paltry.

The expression of Christianity that I left behind certainly professed belief in the fatherhood of God. But as I hinted at above, God-as-Father wasn’t nearly as central as he should have been, at least not for me. Nowhere was this shortcoming more glaringly seen than in the way I used to think about my own standing with God, especially in relation to my sins (of which there were plenty). According to my old mind-set, God was a strict lawgiver whose commands expressed the utter holiness of his character. Any violation of those commands, then, was a sin against the unbending justice of God’s law, and as such, it demanded eternal punishment. Stop and consider that idea for just a moment. According to Christianity as understood through my prior lenses, any breach--as the dogma goes, no matter how slight or even accidental--causes infinite guilt in the one committing the infraction. Yikes. Just from writing that, I peed myself a little.

Let’s tease out the ramifications of this God-as-lawgiver model a bit, shall we? The story starts in the womb, where you, through no actual fault of your own (obviously), are legally charged with the guilt of Adam’s original sin. So there you are, a grain-of-rice-size zygote, repugnant and morally odious in the sight of God due to the imputation to your account of the guilt of someone else’s sin whom you’ve never even met (because you’re, like, a fetus). I know, right? That’s some pretty messed‑up stuff right there, seemingly flying in the face of fairness, calling into question every idea we have as humans about justice and how to treat people. But I’m not making any of this up, I swear. You can trace these ideas back to the sixteenth century!

Moving right along through life, once you grow old enough to become morally culpable for your choices, you begin to heap up actual sins, in addition to the guilt of Adam’s sin, to increase your guilt and the threat of impending doom on judgment day. Every sin is a mortal sin (meaning any misstep is deserving of eternal hellfire, even if it was the only step you ever missed), and everything you do is to some degree mortally sinful. If God’s law demands we honor him in every one of our actions with an honor befitting his infinite honorability, then it follows that every instance in which we fail to render him spotless and perfect honor is an insulting and noxiously putrid stench in his nostrils, worthy of infinite punishment. After a life in which you were guilty of Adam’s sin from the moment of conception and then spent your days on earth increasing your guilt even by the good things you tried to do (since they weren’t good enough), you then die and stand before this God-as-lawgiver-and-judge. He judges you according to your works, and you guessed it, it turns out that you just suck. Since every sin you committed, and every good deed you did that wasn’t good enough (for example, all of them), is worthy of eternal suffering in the pit of hell, you are then sentenced to burn forever in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone. Depressed yet? I don’t blame you.

All this bad news, of course, is the context in which my Protestant good news came. Since lawgiver-God pretty much abhors the real you, your only hope is to accept the Calvinist gospel, according to which we sinners can be “considered” righteous (even though we’re not) by trusting in Jesus and accepting his obedience as though it were our own and thereby escaping hell on judgment day. At the center of this whole scheme is law, the need to keep it perfectly, and the eternal torture exacted upon those who don’t. God is the lawgiver, Christ is the law-keeper, and Christians are the pardoned lawbreakers. If this were all set in the context of a 1980s TV show, the trailer would be something like this: “He was picked on as a kid and mocked as an adolescent, but God is a cop now: He’s got a badge and a gun, and he’s out for revenge!”

 

1. In the words of the Creed referred to above, a Catholic professes at every Mass that he believes in Jesus Christ, “the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages . . . begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.” Now, it would be easy to get bogged down in theological detail here, but I would prefer to avoid that. (You’re welcome.) Suffice it to say that when the Creed says that Christ is not “made” but “begotten,” it intends to convey that the Son was not created by God the way we were. No, he is (in the words of theologians way smarter than I) “eternally begotten,” meaning that he has ever and always existed, but that existence has ever and always been as a Son whom the Father generates. 

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Convergent Books
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0804140626
• ISBN 13: 9780804140621
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 176
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible