The Unclad Soul

Carl Sagan, the great astronomer and author, once said that religion “assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they’ll behave.” He believed that religion sells people short and diminishes their ability to solve their own problems. There is truth in that. I find myself strongly in agreement with him. I grew up in the church. I wanted to be a professional baseball player or a broadcast journalist but I ended up being a Christian minister instead. A lot of it was because my parents instilled in me the notion that service to God was the highest calling available. They were deeply religious and it was difficult to ever get away from the idea that nothing much mattered except a life of devotion to the church. I spent 22 years in active ministry—preaching, teaching, writing, studying, digging into the Bible for answers to life, wrestling with the very conservative beliefs of my denomination, questioning hell and sin and judgment, reading the classical theologians, t...

I saw a decal on the back of an SUV the other day. It read: “Not of this World” and had a Christian cross underneath it. I never have understood this concept. Years ago when I was a minister I used to wrestle with the idea Christians are somehow not supposed to be of this world. What are we supposed to be, aliens? As often happens I think those passages of scripture that mention that phrase are misunderstood. Jesus once said his kingdom was not of this world. But that was clearly a reference to how he dealt with life as opposed to how the Roman Empire handled it. He came from love; they came from fear. His approach was acceptance; theirs was suspicion. His mission was peace; theirs was domination. St. Paul used the phrase in one of his letters. He often spoke out of his harsh background of persecuting Christians. I think sometimes Paul pushed too hard. People who have had unhealthy, scarred, abused, intemperate pasts often use their religious beliefs in the extreme...