vulgar theology

Christians are so proud of their ethics and how spirit-based it can be. How mediocre and what propaganda of the crass multitude! “Did you feel the spirit move?” No, but 240 other people, subject to mass hysteria, did—and they felt exactly what you did: warm fuzzies like the feeling you get after eating grandma’s delicious apple pie. They were confirmed in their course of life and their actions, with the one acknowledgment that they submit themselves to the “voice, the move, the life of the spirit.” Simultaneously they condemn the move of the spirit when it differs from their own understanding of morality.

The move of the spirit is in the least garrulous and explainable. But the spirit’s voice has become so loud these days, that the spirit is comparable to a fair-worker with a megaphone advertising the next fashionable ploy to passersby. ‘Everyone’ hears it in a congregational radius and it is so static that you can create a system of judgment out of its “movement.”

“Don’t listen to secular music! Don’t have sex! Don’t lie! Don’t enjoy yourself in masturbation! Don’t not raise your hands in Church worship! Don’t think that you are not loving your neighbor! Don’t let homosexual persons preach! Don’t vote democratic! Doubt your motives at all times, doubt them so much that you can never actually judge yourself! Don’t spend frivolously! Worry about tomorrow! Trash those who doubt—it’s ok to pronounce that they are hell bound, they know they are anyway!” And myriad other don’ts and do’s. But the spirit moves: there are no do’s and don’ts in its command, its command is to live and love well, whatever that may look like.

These days its now much less a move of the spirit and moreso a christian calculus. As I already said, Christian’s suck at math, so I’m not surprised then at how simplistic their ethical thinking. What I am surprised about is their dishonesty and how easily they believe that middle-school algebra is heavenly impartation.

Let me say it loudly and clearly, anytime you are doing calculus about making decisions you are actually not facing an ethical dilemma or even having to make an ethical decision—you are not open to the spirit. Ethical decisions lie in the fact that you don’t know whether you will be right or wrong when you face them—and that you must make a decision anyway. The move of the spirit doesn’t predispose rights and wrongs: look at Abraham the spirit made him a murderer.

Least of all worries are decisions between right and wrong—harder decisions are made between right and right or wrong and wrong.

Let me let you in on a little secret, I’m not being blatant enough: ethical calculus is actually legal jurisprudence; that is the furthest things from the move of the spirit. Ethical calculus is the law. How heretical the “move of the spirit”  is in the church these days!

I say it’s time we pick up the cross of our  own experiences and follow after Christ. It’s time we stop relying on others to tell us what that cross is made of and where we should go.

I bless you, I say follow Christ! Live! Live with Christ! Christ is alive!