Another one bites the dust

If you are on facebook, you know how things show up on your wall.  Most of the time they aren't very interesting or funny, but occasionally they grab you - probably more often than I would like to admit.  I have plenty of "friends", because of all sorts of diverse interests, and I disagree with many of them about most things.  But it is from some of the ones I disagree with that the most interesting stuff comes from.

Anyway, this morning, a link was posted to a talk by Teresa MacBain on her transition from minister to atheist.  It is a very sad account of how she gradually became an atheist, after having been raised in the legalistic home of a fundamental Baptist pastor, becoming a Methodist pastrix, and eventually coming to reject the very idea of the existence of God.


If you are one of those people that tell yourself, or those who look up to you that the way to keep your faith when you have questions is to just work harder and throw yourself even more into religious activity, you really need to listen to this.  I hope it will help you to think again.

At around the 13:00 mark she begins to explain how she became confused trying to reconcile a very strong sense of "God's calling" to be a minister, despite the fact that she was a female, and the verses that taught clearly otherwise.  She even admits digging out any verses that might support women speaking in Church, and deliberately ignoring the ones that said otherwise.  But this produced doubt.  And since doubt is sin, she had been trained that the way to deal with sin was to throw yourself more into Christian service.

She immersed herself in Wesley for awhile, so she was influenced by his perfectionism, which was probably the last thing she needed to hear about that time.  Eventually she reaches the end of herself and discovers Bart Ehrman, who has nothing new to say - and all of what he does say was answered more than a century ago, and is being capably shot down today.  From there, the influences get progressively worse until she finally succumbed to unbelief.

There's more to the story, and you should hear it for yourself.  But she clearly never really got the gospel.  She never learned how to distinguish law and gospel, or how to read and interpret the Bible with a Christocentric Redemptive/Historical hermeneutic.  All she knew to do with it was what both liberals and fundygelicals all do alike - moralize and try drum up enthusiasm for more works righteousness.

Now she's an outspoken opponent of Christianity. Obviously, I don't endorse her position, but her story should be a lesson well taken by those who think that a repressive legalistic approach is the way to go.  The poor woman was so exhausted by the demands her religion she had imposed on her, so desperate to get off the treadmill, so tired of only getting "If you were right with God you wouldn't have those questions" as an excuse for an answer, she embraced becoming an atheist as her exit.  If she could only have a good reason to stop believing, she could stop working and being torn apart by her works-righteousness religion. 

She had never been taught how to come to grips with the harsh reality of being "simul Iustus, et Peccator" - at once justified and sinner, that she could walk before God in humble repentance continually and take her rest in the alien and imputed righteousness of Christ applied to her account that would have made her fully acceptable in the sight of God.  If only she had looked to the Reformation era confessions, or heard Rod Rosenbladt's lecture on "The Gospel for Those Broken By the Church" or read Horton's "Christless Christianity".  Things might have gone VERY differently.

But instead of hearing good news, she only got more not-so-good advice about what things she needed to do to prove to God that she loved Him, and having to bear the load of knowing they were never enough.  Except for Jesus, nobody's works were ever enough, and like Martin Luther, she came to hate God for just that reason, for demanding what she could never deliver. 

The saddest part is that it was not until she opened herself up to the atheist community that she felt unconditional love and acceptance, the very things that should have been in her life from the beginning, and were just as absent or falsified among the liberal Methodists as they were among the fundamental Baptists.  Love is always absent in any culture of works-righteousness, because those inevitably become cultures of comparison and judgmentalism.  "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another" (John 13:35), our LORD declared.  The only environment in which that can happen is one in which all involved are disabused of their delusions of righteousness and enough aware of the plague of their own hearts, the beams in their own eyes, that they have no interest or inclination in picking at the motes in the eyes of others.

I wonder how many "Christians"-come-Atheists were just wanting off the treadmill, desperate to be somewhere that they would not be constantly scrutinized and meddled with by ecclesiastical Barney Fifes that just had to make them conform to the man-made ideal.  What if somebody had given them the pure love of Christ, been honest with them, and accepted them as fellow-sinners in need of grace and forgiveness?

What are your children and your spouse, and the people you go to Church with getting from you?