Sarahbeth Caplin's Blog, page 32

Racial inequality and LGBT rights: these truths will be self-evident?

Slavery as a Theological Crisis by Mark A. Noll is a short, easy-to-read book that demands to be read slowly. Covering 150 years of American history, I recognized so many parallels to evangelical anti-LGBT rhetoric today, it made my head spin. But that’s not all that stood out to me. It’s pretty common for non-Christians to be accused of having relative morality, yet this brief examination of history shows that Christians are just as guilty of this as anyone.

To say that the Bible lacks clarity on anything feels like a confession of heresy. I struggled with writing this thought down in a private journal, let alone saying it out loud in Bible study, and in response to an acquaintance’s Facebook post that asked, “How do we know God’s truth?”

Because I’ve never met a theological question I couldn’t at least take a stab at, I responded with this:

Had this “discussion” happened in person, I might not have been able to disguise my blatant frustration and disappointment with the answer I was given: “You have to transform your way of thinking so God can show his truth to you.”

I’m sorry…what?

To be honest, I knew what I was getting myself into before I commented, and I already knew how it would play out. I know that no Christian, no matter how long they’ve been walking with Jesus, has the answers I’m looking for. I’ve accepted that. But I wasn’t looking to bait anybody; my only objective is to plant a tiny seed of humility. I really just want the assurance that I’m not the only “I don’t know” Christian, and that it’s not a sign of weakened faith.

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know that I find safety in the community of skeptics. Any time someone pulls out the “God clearly says” card, I get itchy. I thought the gospel message itself was pretty clear, until I realized in seminary that not all Bible scholars believe the atonement theory. There are some scholars who even believe Jesus’ sacrifice is universal. There are enough dissenters to traditional evangelical talking points that prove these are not just outlier views. Admittedly, the things that seem pretty obvious to me in the Bible are probably sources of confusion for others, so it’s not my tendency to automatically put disagreeing Christians into the heresy box.

About the only thing clear to me in the Bible is the example of servanthood set by Jesus. I could go on about loving your neighbor, serving the poor, and forgiving your enemies, but I’ll sum up Jesus this way for simplicity’s sake: he’s basically everything Donald Trump isn’t. I’ve only had one “The Bible clearly says!!” moment I can think of recently, and that is regarding all this evangelical support for the Trump campaign. I can say with every fiber of conviction within me that a man who espouses racism and misogyny without shame, who strips refugees and immigrants (you know, like Mary and Joseph were) of their personhood, and openly mocks the disabled is nothing like Jesus Christ, and resembles nothing of the behavior he expected of his disciples.

Lately, my conviction ends about there.

Getting back to the parallels of Christian support for slavery and erasure of LGBT rights, I want to share this passage from Noll:

This reminds me of God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines. I acquired an advanced copy before it was released, and was surprised by the number of reviews it had already on Amazon and Goodreads. The 1-star reviews were all pretty similar: of course an openly gay man would write a book to justify his lifestyle. Stay away from this book, the author intends to deceive!

I have to admit, a book in favor of the abolitionist movement or of gay rights would be a lot more convincing if written by someone assumed to be against both. It’s the reason that men are encouraged to identify as feminists, because everyone expects women to be in favor of themselves. Sometimes you need voices from “the other team” to get people to really listen.

And yet, who understands the needs, desires, and hopes better than the people being hurt by these viewpoints? This is the underlying reason why the #BlackLivesMatter movement exists. Christians, unfortunately, have a tendency to strive for social change by talking around an issue rather than with those who actually live it.

So, because the social atmosphere of the time believes that X is a sin (interracial marriage, gay marriage, working mothers – take your pick), anyone who disagrees must be coming from an entitled, self-seeking place, hoping to “justify their lifestyle.”

We may not perfectly understand the ways of God, but we understand our fellow humans far less.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I firmly believe that half a century from now, the issue of gay rights will be treated the way issues of racial inequality are treated now by the majority of Christians. Churches in the future will say that Christians interpreted the Bible with a cultural bias regarding gay marriage, not through the lens of Truth. I say this not because I want it to happen, but because it’s a time-tested pattern.

If you were an abolitionist Christian in 1865, a significant portion of your society would have condemned you as a heretic, just as they do today in 2016 with regards to gay rights, no matter how much you insist that Jesus Christ is still your Lord and Savior. At the end of the day, I believe that last part is the only thing that really matters. I’m simply not convinced that “correct belief” matters over the condition of the heart.

For all the historical documents we have that provide context into the times, and all the ancient Greek and Hebrew lexicons at our disposal, “Truth” is not always as evident as we claim it to be. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to to know, but let’s just be realistic about how we engage with it. We all are biased, every one of us.

Like this post? Check out Confessions of a Jew-ish Skeptic, now available on Amazon.

Stay in touch via Facebook and Twitter.

 

Filed under: Social Issues, Theology Tagged: #BlackLivesMatter, Christian culture, Christianity, Controversy, evangelicals, Facebook, gay marriage, Homosexuality, LGBT, social justice, Spiritual Abuse

Moishe Rosen, Jews for Jesus, and interfaith identities

It was with great personal interest that I read Jewish-Christian Difference and Modern Jewish Identity by Shalom Goldman: a collection of mini-biographies about seven 20th-century converts from Judaism to Christianity, and vice versa. Of the seven, only one name was familiar to me besides the biblical Ruth: Moishe Rosen, the controversial founder of Jews for Jesus, the largest messianic Jewish organization in the world.

Rosen’s story in particular implicitly asks the reader: what makes someone Jewish, or not Jewish? This question becomes more pertinent as an increasing number of American Jews embrace a secular brand of Judaism, allowing them to take part in a cultural narrative and embrace a lineage without partaking in religious tradition, while other Jews embrace Rosen’s “Jew for Jesus” brand.

Reading this book, and the chapter on Rosen in particular, resulted in mixed emotional reactions. Because I was born to Jewish parents, even unobservant ones, that is enough to make me Jewish by most standards. While I never chose to practice the Jewish religion, Judaism nonetheless became the filter through which I saw the world, even as I began to realize that my understanding of God aligned more with Christian theology.

I was born into a tradition that encourages asking questions and welcomes theological debate. It is Judaism – or Jewish culture, perhaps – that I blame for my unrest when I heard in church that God provides for all our needs. My mind immediately shifted to the millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust: what about their need to be rescued? And, furthermore, what about the needs of people in present day who need food, water, and money with which to pay their bills? It is my Jewish background that is also the source of my discomfort when correct belief is emphasized over action, or what Judaism calls tikkun olam: “mending the world.”

Not surprisingly, I find myself at odds with many of my Christian acquaintances for raising questions and doubts that likely never would have surfaced if I hadn’t said anything. It’s in those moments of unintentionally making others uncomfortable that I almost resent my heritage. After all, I didn’t ask to exist; I didn’t get to choose my place and circumstances of birth. Throughout my young adulthood, I resented being Jewish because of how hard it was to fit in at any church I attended, even though I was just as enamored with the idea of a God Incarnate as everyone else.

It’s taken a long time, but today I accept being Jewish as something about myself that just is. I accept it the same way I accept my curly hair, my right-handedness, my Polish and Russian ancestry. It’s not all I am, but still integral to my identity.

The older I get, the more it becomes clear that religion is as complex as humanity itself, and spiritual identities even more so. I have no issue with checking off the “Christian” box on a Pew Forum, but I have to mark “Ashkenazi Jewish” at the doctor’s office for a complete assessment of my medical history; to be made aware of precautions I must take against certain cancers that people of this gene pool are vulnerable to. I breathed a sigh of relief when I married a gentile, realizing that this greatly decreases our chances of having a child with Tay Sachs, a fatal degenerative disorder that is almost uniquely found among the Ashkenazi faction.

I had hoped to see more of this internal-external dynamic explored in Goldman’s book, which I feel is one of its weaknesses. Goldman’s subjects wrestled with Jewish and Christian theological differences, which are certainly important, but do not show a complete picture. For many converts, conversion is not so much a one-time event, but a daily renewal. We don’t necessarily choose our beliefs, but lineage chooses us, and I wish that Goldman had included chapters about individuals learning to thrive despite constant tension between the two.

Still, anyone interested in religious identity will find this book thought-provoking and worthy of discussion. Read other reviews from the Patheos Book Club.

 

Like this post? Check out Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter , available on Amazon, or consider making a donation to help me continue writing full-time.

Stay in touch via Facebook and Twitter .

Filed under: Theology Tagged: Christian culture, Christianity, Controversy, Jews for Jesus, Judaism, Messianic Judaism

Certainty is the goalpost

“Beware of false teachers” is a biblical warning I’ve heard a lot this election season. “For many are wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

But this is a warning I heard many times before the presidential nominees were chosen. It’s a warning that’s tossed around whenever someone claims to speak for God in a way that defies the norm: “Do not listen to him, he will lead you astray.” People who do this, I’ve been told – those who preach ‘false teachings’ – will be held responsible for all the souls they mislead when they meet God on Judgment Day.

Not surprisingly, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with claiming that my beliefs, my interpretations (based on all the resources at my disposal), my convictions, are all capital-T True. Even if my understanding of ancient Hebrew and Greek was perfect (it’s not), I’m still a human being, tasked with understanding a collection of writings that God himself supposedly dictated.

As far as I’m concerned, if fallible men transcribed the words of a perfect God, and those writings were later copied (and copied and copied and copied) by other fallible men, we’re all looking at Truth through a clouded mirror.

I’m told that the truth is out there to be known; that God himself can be known. But with thousands of Christian denominations in existence, all claiming to possess the truth, who do you trust? How do you trust your own flawed reasoning that this truth is the only Truth, when our hearts are deceitful and God’s ways are “higher than our ways”?

Is gay marriage okay?

Can women preach?

Is hell a literal place?

Was the world actually created in six literal days?

I have no idea.

The limited amount of wisdom I’ve acquired in this journey tells me that agnosticism feels like the only safe stance to take. For me it means I’m not sure if it’s possible to know The Truth (or more than just a sample of it), but I will not stop trying to find it. An alarm sounds off in my head whenever I hear someone say, “The Bible clearly says…” when even a brief look at Christian history says otherwise.

It was my own monopoly on Truth that set me up for the dilemma I face now: not knowing which parts of faith are intentional paradoxes, and which parts are a result of reading my own cultural values into another culture’s values, which were perhaps meant for another people in another place and time.

Again, I have no idea.

I’ve used up many journal pages praying for my faith to return with the same vigor it once had, but what I really miss, if I’m honest, is a feeling: the feeling of certainty. What I should be praying for is more curiosity, more hunger for wisdom. I pray I never lose the verve and passion for reading, studying, and discussing all things theology, all with an expectation of learning new things about God, about people, and being challenged in healthy ways.

As long as that hunger remains, I believe I’m still on track in the direction I wish to go. But if certainty once again becomes the goalpost, I’ll have a list of memorized facts with no real knowledge. What good is that?

 

Filed under: Theology Tagged: agnosticism, Christian culture, Christianity, evangelicals, prayer

When you can’t register shock at the news anymore

Lately I feel guilty about my inability to muster much shock and horror anymore whenever I turn on the news. Many people posted updates last night to say “My heart is breaking” or “I am so horrified,” but I can’t. Maybe it’s because living with depression tints everything with a degree of numbness; maybe because my own cynicism and pessimistic view of the human race makes it easy to believe there will be no end to the creatively brutal ways of killing people.

Whatever the cause, this state of numbness actually makes it easier to keep on taking care of myself in basic ways: getting out of bed, showering, feeding myself. There was a time not too long ago when news of the attack in Nice would have driven me into persistent panic at best, or hiding in a wine bottle at worst…neither of which would enable me to be healthy; to be an agent of change that the world so desperately needs.

Don’t feel bad if you need to turn off the news. Don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with you if you need to censor your newsfeed or avoid certain news outlets to maintain your sanity. Help yourself however you need to so you can help others.

And because it seems needed now more than ever, here’s a sweet sleeping kitty to brighten your day a little.

Filed under: Social Issues, Uncategorized Tagged: depression, grief, self-care, social justice

“Hate the sin, love the sinner” sounded radical once, but it isn’t anymore.

**As with any of my posts on controversial subjects, “I could be wrong” is always an implied caveat.**

My friend Cassidy has been writing a series of reviews based on People to be Loved by Preston Sprinkle: a book that purports to describe a “radical love and acceptance” of gay Christians in a way that has never been done before.

Long story short: there is nothing new regarding mainstream evangelical rhetoric about homosexuality in this book. Same-sex relationships are still sinful. What Sprinkle actually does is rephrase his anti-gay stance in flowery, user-friendly language so he doesn’t come across as bigoted. He described a phone call in which he deliberately dodged answering a woman’s question, “Would your church welcome my lesbian daughter?”

Instead, he writes that he invited her to join him in a series of coffee dates to “get to know each other,” almost as if he intended to soften her up before delivering the bad news: yes, your daughter is welcome, but if she’s in a same-sex relationship, she will be encouraged to repent.

“Hate the sin, love the sinner” sounded radical once, but it isn’t anymore.

Mean what you say, say what you mean

I see nothing to be gained by this approach. Sprinkle may think it’s “radical” to show kindness in the form of buying someone coffee as opposed to shouting “Get behind me, Satan!” But I wouldn’t be surprised if this felt like a bait-and-switch to the coffee recipient. In the context of same-sex relationships being sinful, there is no gentle way to break that sort of news when it’s bound to be personal.

I’ve been in Sprinkle’s shoes before: not as a pastor, but as an acquaintance confronted with the question “Does your ministry welcome gays?” from a fellow classmate. I’d hem and haw and struggle to find some way to essentially say “Yes, but no” without sounding mean. Ideally, I’d want to answer the question in such a way that conveyed a parent’s struggle to tell their adult child he cannot live at home anymore if he refuses to go to rehab to kick his drug habit. You know, “tough love.”

In other words, I was struggling with a way to say, “We hate the sin, but love the sinner” without sounding cliché.

It’s taken several years for me to see, however, that the “consequences” of committed same-sex relationships are really nothing like a drug habit. In Evangelical World, it’s as if there is no difference.

The destructive nature of drugs is tangible, measurable, and can be seen with the naked eye. The only “consequences” of homosexuality that I’ve gleaned from Scripture are symbolic – “against God’s design,” arguably because two people of the same sex cannot produce children (neither can all straight couples), and because with two of the same gender, there is confusion regarding who the “head” of the family is, and whose job it is to submit (a complementarian idea that has been debunked).

While I in no way profess that my understanding of the Bible is perfectly clear on this subject, it does seem to me that the type of relationships gay Christians seek – committed, consensual, for better or worse, richer or poorer – is likely not what is being referred to in Leviticus 18:22 or 1 Corinthians 6:9, the two biggest “clobber verses” that are pulled out for debate.

Two scholars, three opinions

I can speak with a bit more confidence (but only a bit) regarding Leviticus, simply because I have a bias toward Hebrew translations from Jewish scholars – I trust the translation of the Old Testament through a Jewish lens more than I do with Christian ones, and many Jewish experts believe “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman” refers to unlawful sex; perhaps even rape.

In his book Torn, Justin Lee rightly points out that the word “homosexuality” did not exist until about the 18th century, so it couldn’t have been used in the Bible. Additionally, same-sex prostitution was a part of ritual pagan worship, which was common at the time, and condemned by the apostle Paul as behavior unbecoming of Christians – hence why he wrote that this category of offenders “will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”

I write all this to explain that, contrary to mainstream evangelical thought, it is possible to be affirming of same-sex relationships for reasons that are not purely self-seeking. Don’t take my word about the above exegesis being correct, however – it’s an alternative interpretation that I, a seminary dropout, have no way of confirming for complete authenticity. But it does make sense to me. And if Sprinkle really wanted to show “radical love” in his book, perhaps he ought to have included both sides of the issue. If Scripture were easy and simple to comprehend, we wouldn’t have the 40,000 denominations that exist, and have existed, over the last two thousand years.

As I read about the controversies of bakers and florists refusing services to gay couples, and in some cases, gays being fired or denied housing because of their orientation, the more I come to believe that we are living in a pivotal time in American history: a new kind of Jim Crow, if you will.

The minds, they are a’changin’

And speaking of Jim Crow, it must be acknowledged just how many Christians were unapologetically racist, believing integration and interracial marriages were just as sinful as gay marriage is considered today. They cited Scripture and predicted the collapse of society if black people were recognized as equal citizens.

Society is indeed facing the threat of collapse. But it’s coming from those stuck in their bigotry, not from black people. And not from gays.

While it’s not my goal to try and change anyone’s mind, it will do Christians some good to remember our history of disagreements (many of which resulted in burnings at the stake!) and be honest about how many times our ancestors have revised their understanding of Scripture right around the time that their respective cultural tides began to turn.

Today, Christians insist that slaveholders and KKK members interpreted their Bibles through a lens of hate. If I’m still around fifty years from now, I wonder if the majority of American Christians will be saying the same about the “hate homosexuality, love the homosexual” crowd.

Filed under: Social Issues, Theology Tagged: Christian culture, Christianity, Controversy, evangelicals, gay marriage, Homosexuality, Judaism, LGBT, social justice, Spiritual Abuse

When grief and Bible study collide

Two years ago at this time, I had my father-daughter dance five months before my actual wedding. I tried on my dress in the Catan’s Bridal suite, gathered my un-hemmed skirt, and shuffled over to Dad’s wheelchair to ask him to dance with me. Mom played Pachelbel Canon on her iphone while we “danced” as much as his advanced illness would allow, reducing all the employees to tears. But no one cried as much as us.

I have moments like these every now and then – sudden spurts of memory that sometimes coincide with anniversary dates, such as this one. Others come to me at random: when I hear a Billy Joel song on the radio. When I see a young father with a blonde, curly-haired toddler who looks like I did at that age. When I have the occasional dream about him and remember his voice.

It’s during these moments, which sometimes result in a passing sadness, a sore smile, or at worst, intense heartache, that I might retreat from the one place it would be expected for me to go to seek comfort: church. Specifically, my bible study. I’ve been known to withdraw from time to time, not always with advanced notice, because it’s not like I can predict this episodes with accuracy. But when they happen, sometimes it’s just best for me to be alone. Sometimes, being with other Christians is the worst thing for my still painful grief.

There are many reasons for this, and with these reasons I would like to offer some helpful suggestions:

Please be aware that praising God for healing your aunt’s cancer is very painful for me. It’s not that I’m not happy for you. Cancer is something I would never wish even on my worst enemy. But the implication I hear is that your loved one was healed and mine was not because your prayers were more effective, the patient had more faith, or maybe God just liked your relative better than mine. I get that that’s not what you think you’re saying, but that is nonetheless what I hear from you.

It hurts when you gloss over my concerns about hell. Please don’t tell me I just “need more faith.” Please don’t once again remind me that God is just, when everything I’ve heard about this place of eternal punishment sounds anything but just. Please be aware that there are people in your study groups who have non-Christian relatives, and this may be a spiritual issue that is wrestled with for a lifetime with no hope of resolution. This does not make us “bad” Christians. It means we are struggling.

On that note, if I tell you that my father has passed away, please do not immediately ask, “Was he a believer?” My knee-jerk response to this question is, “He had beliefs,” but I know what is meant by it. You’re asking if my father was a Christian, and the answer is no. This question is asked on the assumption that my answer will be “yes,” in which case I assume you mean to comfort me with the knowledge that Dad is in heaven, and I will see him again someday. But even if my father were a Christian, that kind of statement does nothing to help a person’s grief on this side of heaven. It also implies that there’s something wrong with grieving when instead we should be happy that our loved one is now free from the bondage of this world and is partying it up with Jesus.

When I was a member of Campus Crusade for Christ, I was hounded by several well-intentioned (I have to believe this, for the sake of my sanity) people who pressured me to get him “saved” so I wouldn’t be held responsible for his damnation, which could possibly result in my damnation. They reminded me that, because his cancer kept returning with increasing aggressiveness, the clock was ticking and time was running out. The effects of these confrontations haunt me to this day; I still have some residual form of spiritual PTSD from it.

There was a time when any mention of hell would invoke an anxiety attack, and those days are not completely over. I have increased my dosage of anxiety pills just to be able to hear about it without collapsing into hysterics. The implications behind “Was he a believer?” also does not assuage my doubts of whether or not God is good. And God’s goodness is an anchor I desperately need to hold onto right now.

I have good days and I have crappy days when the pain is so big it physically hurts. Not everyone grieves the same – not even people of faith.

Filed under: Religion Tagged: Campus Crusade for Christ, cancer, Christian culture, Christianity, depression, evangelicals, grief, hell, prosperity gospel, self-care, Spiritual Abuse

“I don’t know” is a truth, not a cop-out

This is my weekly conundrum when I meet with my small group for Bible study: do I ask the questions that I really want to ask, at the risk of derailing the discussion and starting a debate? Do I say what I really want to say, at the risk of accusations that I have “bad theology,” or that I lack faith?

It’s my willingness to ask the uncomfortable, and often unanswerable, questions that make me feel more at home among skeptics than with conservative Christians. I took the “Christian” identifier out of my Facebook “religious views” because I know that this term implies certain assumptions about me that just aren’t true. Beyond a shared love of God, I often feel that there’s not much I have in common with the tribe I’m supposed to belong to.

I’ve found that skeptics are more inclined to understand the hurt I’m still dealing with from my seminary fallout and borderline spiritually abusive college ministry. My skeptic friends are more inclined to appreciate my questioning of doctrines that are assumed to be “no brainers” in conservative, evangelical circles. There is no tension with them to be a committed Christ follower or a perpetual doubter, but not both. They understand that it’s possible to be both at the same time.

In Conservative Christendom, I’ve run into scorn for still piecing together a Jewish identity when I’m not “supposed” to seek an identity outside of Jesus. My band of loyal skeptics see no contradiction with my recent purchase of a book on secular Judaism – a concept I once considered heretical, back in my wannabe rabbi days – because one’s familial background can’t help but shape the person you become. Clearly, a spiritual Jewish identity is off the table, but a secular, cultural one beckons me with increasing fervency. It’s how I keep a sense of my father with me.

In Benefit of the Doubt, which I’m reading for the second time, Gregory Boyd writes, “If I am confident that God unconditionally loves me based on what he did for me on Calvary, then wouldn’t I be confident that his love for me does not increase or decrease based on how accurate or inaccurate my other beliefs are?” Those words help ease my fear that “being saved” = “being right.”

Of course, I can’t leave the above thoughts alone without mentioning that the idea of humans being so depraved we essentially murdered God is another concept I struggle with, but it’s not a focus on depravity that gives life to my faith. It’s the knowledge that God suffers with us, and that suffering itself can be redemptive.

Beyond that, there’s not much else I’m certain about. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve been told, “You’re trying to evaluate God by your standards, not his,” and “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” I’d be a rich woman. The thing is, my “human standards” are all I have to work with. I believe that God gave me an inquisitive mind, and that it would be wasteful not to use it.

Therefore, it is one of my few steadfast beliefs that “I don’t know” is a truth, not a cop-out.

One more thing I’m certain about: the unconditional love of a kitty can also be a reflection of God.

 

Like this post? Check out Confessions of a Jew-ish Skeptic, now available on Amazon.

Stay in touch via Facebook and Twitter.

Filed under: Religion Tagged: Christian culture, Christianity, Controversy, evangelicals, Judaism, Seminary, Spiritual Abuse

“God will never forsake you”

Some people use Facebook to keep in touch with their relatives and post baby pictures. My timeline is almost exclusively silly memes, cat pictures, and questions like these:

So I guess that makes me that Facebook friend…whatever that means. I can get away with this only because the people I knew would respond are people who can carry on a religious-themed discussion without fireworks. Inevitably, there was disagreement, but none that made me have to step in as a mediator.

I’ve used variations of these responses myself. But if someone asked me a few years ago, “What does that even mean?” as some of my friends did, I’d have found myself tongue-tied. The word “forsake” means to not forget, sacrifice, or give up on. In that sense, no matter what mess I might find myself in, God is always with me.

Except that doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen to me. After the tragic events of this week – two black men killed by police, and several officers killed at what should have been a peaceful protest in Dallas – I’m revisiting this question once more: what do we mean by “God will not forsake us”? Were the officers at the protest told this by their friends and family members who prayed for their safety while on duty? How many black families repeat this every time their children leave home, knowing how dangerous and unpredictable society can be?

Though they all meant well, I can’t say any of the above answers persuaded me one way or the other. There’s still a great deal of “Christian speak” I struggle to understand beyond just an abstract picture. Day by day, moment by moment, I’m not sure how to tell if I’ve been abandoned or if I’m being protected; if God is indeed with me or has withdrawn himself from me.

I suppose those answers vary person by person.

Truthfully, there have been moments in my life when I felt “a presence,” though I can’t elaborate much more on what I mean by that, because 1) those moments were quite some time ago, and 2) this sort of conviction is a personal one. But if we use “God will not forsake us” to convey that God will always protect us physically, we might need to reevaluate. Plenty of innocent people succumb to tragedy with faith perfectly intact.

How would I know if God is with me? I don’t. I can’t.

The world beyond my apartment is chaotic, but the more I learn to accept that faith is not a security blanket designed to bounce bullets off of me (and ricochet toward someone else?) the more easily I can accept that the world operates by both natural law and free will. I’d have surely lost my faith by now if it were built on a trust that tragedy can’t touch me.

Violence like what happened this week is bad enough – I find it more worthwhile to fight against the racism embedded in American society than anxiously ponder why God apparently forsook the innocent people whose lives were ended so cruelly.

Like this post? Check out Confessions of a Jew-ish Skeptic, now available on Amazon.

Stay in touch via Facebook and Twitter.

Filed under: Religion Tagged: Christian culture, Christianity, evangelicals, Facebook, grief, prayer, social justice

Self care, unemployment, and what I’ve been reading

This summer, Josh and I made the biggest and scariest step in adulting: we bought a house (one step less scary than having a baby, in my opinion). So now the pressure is on to start saving money: a difficult task for a book hoarder like me. Luckily, I don’t mind rereading old favorites.

Reading and freelance writing are pretty much taking over my summer. As is typical with a new release, the buzz for Confessions of a Jew-ish Skeptic has slowed, though it did pretty well for a solid month and a half: #25 in Judaism, #26 in Ecumenism on Amazon. It even ranked #6 in Judaism a month before release, which has never happened with one of my books before (then again, I’ve never had a book available for pre-order until this one). So really, I don’t have much to complain about in the way of book sales. I’ve out-bested my original goal to just have people other than my mom read my work, and that’s no small feat.

Still, most writers supplement their writing with a day job, since book sales alone don’t pay bills (unless you’re JK Rowling) and that search hasn’t been going too well. I won’t be looking for a full-time job until next year, after I graduate with my master’s, but even seasonal work at coffee shops is hard to find. Also complicating matters is my anxiety, which has gotten progressively worse since my father died, almost to the point where I couldn’t leave my apartment without having panic attacks. Not surprisingly, I’ve had difficulty holding jobs because of this. Now that school is out and I finally have the time, I’m shopping around for doctors who specialize in mental illness, and the ideal prescription cocktail with minimal side effects: something I’ve put off because I didn’t want said side effects to disrupt my schoolwork.

Fortunately for me, I have a husband who earns enough money to support us both, and is okay with me using this summer as a period of much-needed self-care. While it’s not earning me any money, it is granting me sanity, which is pretty damn priceless. It’s my hope that by this time next year, I will be able to manage my symptoms enough to hold a stable job – hopefully something in the field of publishing.

With all this extra time, I’ve read a lot of new books, and I’m almost at the end of the to-read pile, which is another source of panic by itself.

An indie friend of mine absolutely raves about Unteachable by Leah Raeder, a novel that took the indie world by storm a few years ago and has recently re-released with a major publishing house. Now that it’s finally available at the library, I checked it out. The writing itself is pretty good. The storyline, however, did not live up to my expectations. Maybe I expected too much out of a teacher-student romance. I was hoping the book would explore, even subtly, the ethical dynamics of the power imbalance at play, even if the student was eighteen and the relationship perfectly legal. Instead, it was sex scene after sex scene after sex scene – well-written sex scenes, I’ll say that, but there was way more sex than development of a relationship that was intended to be Real Love. Maise and Evan hardly did or talked about anything but sex, so much that I couldn’t figure out what else made them click in the first place. Disappointing. But it kept me intrigued until the end, so that’s something.

Jesus > Religion: Why he is so much better than trying harder, doing more, and being good enough by Jefferson Bethke. I won this at a Christmas party last year, and finally got around to reading it. Admittedly, my guard went up when I read a review on the back cover from Mike Huckabee, but I didn’t let that keep me from reading it.

Sadly, I didn’t find anything original here. The “it’s a relationship, not a religion” trope has been done before, many times, but my biggest complaint about this book is how Bethke brings up the violence of the Old Testament when describing the occasional doubts about God’s goodness…and never mentions it again. No deconstruction, no wrestling with the text. This is not uncommon with books that are a hit within evangelical circles, I’ve noticed, and that bothers me. Considering that violence is a starting point for the path to atheism for many, it ought to be handled with a bit more depth than just one paragraph could allow.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Tearjerker, this one, but then again, I read it from the perspective of a still-grieving daughter. Knowing Kalanithi already passed away before the book was published did color the reading experience a bit, because the words I read were, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, his last: his carefully-chosen legacy. The contrast of going from established neurosurgeon to cancer patient in his own hospital was jarring, but well done.

Despite having – let’s be honest – a privileged life (he earned degrees from quite a few Ivy League universities), Kalanithi writes about finding more meaning in his marriage, his journey toward parenthood, and the limited amount of time he had with his infant daughter. It seemed like something my father would have written, which is what started the waterworks for me. By far the best part of this book was the epilogue written by his now-widowed wife, Lucy. If she doesn’t plan on writing books herself, she should.

Hope everyone had a good and safe Independence Day. My apartment complex did not allow fireworks, which spared my girls the trauma of thinking that the world is ending. They both turn two in a matter of weeks. Where has the time gone?

Filed under: Other stuff, Religion, Writing & Publishing Tagged: Author Sarahbeth Caplin, cancer, cats, Christian culture, Christianity, depression, evangelicals, grief, Indie Author Life, self-care, self-publishing, Writing

Grace and eternal conscious torment

I’m blogging at Off the Page today with my fourth column on the ever-pleasant subject of hell as eternal conscious torment. Enjoy!

One week before my father died of cancer, I received an email from a family friend— we’ll call her G—wanting to know if he had been “saved” yet; the implication being there wasn’t much time left before it would be too late. By that point, Dad had succumbed to a comatose-like state, with occasional hallucinations and unintelligible ramblings. In other words, though technically still alive, he had already left us—and if this “friend” knew him at all, she’d have known he was never comfortable talking about religion.

That email sent me down a rabbit hole of anxiety, which I’m still wandering through, nearly two years later. Having been involved in evangelical church groups for years, I knew G probably had good intentions. In her view, the most loving thing a Christian could do was warn nonbelievers about their eternal fate, but her timing could not have been worse. As far as I know, my father died as the agnostic I always knew him to be.

Considering my entire family is Jewish, you would think the doctrine of hell would have kept me from becoming a Christian altogether. Indeed, it is one of the most exclusive, horrifying, and offensive aspects of the Christian faith from an outsider’s perspective, yet I never allowed myself to think about it. I was instead drawn to the person of Jesus, the radical Jewish teacher who flipped tables and pissed off the righteous gatekeepers of religiosity. He was a feisty mensch, like me. By my sophomore year of college, I had made the decision to count myself among his followers.

Read the rest here.

Filed under: Religion Tagged: cancer, Christian culture, Christianity, evangelicals, grief, hell, Judaism, Spiritual Abuse