By Their Fruit You Will Recognize Them

Jesus in the Gospels warns us that wrong religious teachings can be recognized by the evils they bring. He says:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” (MT 7:15-20)

Christianity is based in a very long book called the Bible. The entire Christian Bible, composed of ancient Jewish and early Christian writings, is considered by Christians somewhat magically to be the Inspired Word of God. Given the way the books of the Bible were assembled by the early Church, this seems to me to be a dubious claim. Who are we to be putting words into God’s mouth? I once asked a fundamentalist friend how he could be so sure that a canon put together by a committee in the equivalent of smoke-filled rooms was absolutely all inspired by God. He told me confidently that God had worked through all the participants in those synods. No doubt! His answer reminded me of what had been said by a priest of a religion whose certain belief was that the world rides on the back of a turtle. When asked what the turtle was standing on, the priest had said confidently, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

In the same way, the Christian Bible is said to be God’s Word all the way down. And this seems to me to be the fatal flaw of modern Christianity.

I have read the whole Bible from cover to cover perhaps a dozen times. For decades I would read two or three pages every night, beginning with Genesis and going through to Revelation. Then I would go back to Matthew and read the New Testament through a second time before I began again with Genesis. It is this exercise of having actually read the Bible repeatedly that makes me confident that the entire Bible could not possibly be the Inspired Word of a loving and internally consistent God. Or even of a sane and rational God.

The fact that the Christian Bible doesn’t hold together as a coherent unit is a problem that Christianity could have addressed by declaring as a fundamental tenet that the Gospel words of Jesus are primary. Where there is a conflict – and there are many! – the teachings of Jesus should control. But perhaps because the Inspired Word of God cannot be seen to have inconsistencies, and because the teachings of Jesus are post-legal and require a lifelong personal commitment, Christians have solved what should have been a big problem by making the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels no more than suggestions about how we should live. To Christians, Jesus is not their Teacher, but instead Jesus is the Lamb of God, sacrificed to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins.

This distortion at the root of the Christian tree has stunted its growth in peculiar ways:

No one who actually reads the Gospels can believe that Jesus meant his teachings to be mere suggestions. By treating them that way, Christians betray the life’s work of the Teacher upon whom the religion is supposed to be based.
The core Christian doctrine of sacrificial redemption paints a terrible picture of what God is. Would you enjoy watching the murder of your own child? Of course not! What on earth kind of a monstrous Father could require the brutal murder of His beloved Son?


The Old Testament Books are full of a wrathful and often petty Jehovah God. Calling the Old Testament the Inspired Word of God teaches Christians to fear the genuine God. Since fear is the opposite of love, this emphasis makes it difficult for Christians to develop the loving relationship with God that is essential to a life of spiritual growth. Christianity distances its followers from the infinite and perfect love of God. For a religion to do that is inexcusable.


The Old Testament contains a host of cultural commands that Christians do not follow. From not wearing clothing blended of two kinds of fibers and not eating pork and separating meat from milk right through to the rules about how men can wear their hair and beards and harsh punishments for what we see as trivial infractions, a lot of the Old Testament is not followed by Christians. And indeed, it should not be followed now. These were rigid cultural rules for a harsher time thousands of years gone by. But by calling the Old Testament the Inspired Word of God and then not following parts of it, Christians are disrespecting their Deity. If it’s okay to disrespect God by ignoring parts of the Divinely-Inspired Old Testament, then what is to keep us from disrespecting God in other ways?


Catholics and Fundamentalist Christians take some of the Bible’s cultural rules as God’s Inerrant Word. For example, Fundamentalist Christians insist that creation has to have happened over only six days, that homosexuality is a grievous sin, that sexual contact outside marriage always is sinful, and that women must submit to men. Catholics historically have not allowed divorce or the use of birth control, and they have required priests to be celibate males and women to cover their heads in church. In being so adamant about enforcing these lesser and arguably outmoded cultural rules, Christians are ignoring the warnings of Jesus against enforcing unloving religious rules and also against self-righteously judging others.

I would argue that the religion that was founded in the name of Jesus bears so little relationship to what he taught that it is time either to change it radically or to begin to call it something else.

The greatest proof that Christians are wrong in building their religion around the whole Christian Bible is that – as our beloved Teacher warns us – Christianity today bears some terrible fruit:

Rather than spreading the teachings of Jesus about love and forgiveness, Christians battle only for cultural views. From the fight against homosexuality to the insistence that only the death of Jesus on the cross can get us into heaven, Christians share their religion’s misshapen fruit. In doing this, they give Jesus a terrible name before a world that badly needs his Gospel teachings.


Rather than demonstrating Jesus’s perfect love and forgiveness in their own lives, the most devout Christians try to live their lives by Old Testament rules. The Duggars of the longstanding TLC TV reality show, “19 Kids and Counting,” live by Biblical commands that require them to have as many children as possible because “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” (Psalm 127:3-5) Other elements of the Duggars’ lifestyle, so peculiar to modern-day people, are similarly based in Biblical cultural rules. Their living this way does not advance God’s truth. Instead, it teaches modern people that Jesus must be outmoded, too.


Rather than focusing upon spreading awareness of the perfect love of God, the strictest Christians instead teach only their own culture-based beliefs. When it was lately revealed that the oldest Duggar son had years ago sexually molested his own sisters, there was another misshapen fruit of Christianity plain for us to see. But because their religion is not based in the teachings of Jesus, the Duggars exhibit no awareness of this core problem. Indeed, the news about Josh Duggar brought to light the fact that other fundamentalist Christians have been caught molesting children and in other ways behaving despicably by modern standards. More disgusting fruit of the very sort that Jesus in the Gospels suggests that we watch for so we can avoid false prophets. In burying the eternal Teachings of Jesus inside teachings and behavior that modern people find repugnant, Christianity continues to deny to the world the most essential set of truths that God has ever given to us.

I am sorry to be so blunt. I still fondly remember all the comforts of that old-time religion that for most of my life was good enough for me. But I have come to understand that for us to be comfortable in a religion that we believe gives us personal salvation while we ignore the Gospel words of Jesus that the afterlife evidence now show us are true, we betray God. And we cheat our fellow man. Until Christianity reforms itself and begins to follow Jesus – and only Jesus! – we continue to delay the heaven on earth that is possible only when we live by God’s truth.

Lovingly, patiently, Jesus still calls to us. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations… teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (MT 28:19)

 

photo credit: Turtle Batsto Wharton Forest NJ 4927 via photopin (license)

photo credit: Nick in exsilio via photopin cc (smite)

photo credit: Cross Duck via photopin cc (prophets)

photo credit: angelofsweetbitter2009 via photopin cc (Jesus)

The post By Their Fruit You Will Recognize Them appeared first on Roberta Grimes.