Can we leave out the nuts?

Maybe blogging is about nothing more than pet peeves.

But watertiger over at Dependable Renegade got me started on this rant, and as poorly thought out as it still is, I'll bring it over here to complete.

Of course, the first thing to be said is that every pastor knows these recipes, in one form or another. Probably only the Unitarian Universalists are spared someone in the congregation bringing something like these up as a way to "teach the children" (and why, oh why, do we insist on infantilizing the Gospel stories and all the Bible stories? Don't get me started on "Jonah." I was in seminary before I found out that book wasn't about a whale and God taking care of people who get swallowed by fish.) But that's another matter.

As I mentioned at watertiger's, this recipe lost me at "Fold in the broken nuts." My mind simply wandered off to a field replete with sarcastic replies, and refused to come back. But what really sets my theological teeth on edge is not the attempt to make an object lesson out of clearly abstract concepts: "So far, the ingredients are not very appetizing. Add 1 cup sugar. Explain that the sweetest part of the story is that Jesus died because He loves us. He wants us to know and belong to Him. Read Psalm 34:8 and John 3:16." Equating blood with sugar is quite a stretch, but no more so than equating the Psalms with atonement theology. Still, as I say, if you're going to take this line, you have to make some effort to get the object lesson into the abstraction. As a pastor, I have a lot of sympathy for this effort. Preaching from the gospel stories is ever so much easier than preaching from the letters of Paul. Jesus tells stories. Paul invents theology on the spot. One flows naturally into illustration; the other begs for a lecture series, not a sermon. It ain't easy tryin' to preach.

Which is why, of course, so many preachers fall back on pop psychology trends, business management theories du jour, or anything else that's part of the public disourse without being political or personal (don't want to offend anyone!). It makes so much more sense than the obscure Jewish references in Paul, or explaining to people that the mustard seed grows into a pesky weed, not a towering tree. (Many of the parables are really dark jokes; it's part of their staying power.)

But the issue of soteriology is central to Christianity: indeed, it is the source of Christianity's exclusionary streak, and no gospel is more seemingly exclusionary than John's. So it is the favorite of churches large and small that wish to justify their own demands for salvation, and for the preference for their group. That's just one reason I'm uncomfortable with John's gospel.

(Actually, I admire John, but because of it's clever exploitation of the "signs," or miracles, that Jesus performs. In John, those signs that are aupposed to point toward the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, actually lead away from it. It's too subtle a point to do justice to here, but I admire John's gospel more than I dislike it. As I say, I dislike the way it is used.)

So, back to these cookies. What do they teach? A child's version of The Passion of the Christ, apparently. Certainly a child's version of the resurrection, the most central and most difficult concept in Christianity. When Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected, what happened, exactly? The gospels themselves are unclear. Mark seems to have originally ended without a resurrection, just a hint of one. Matthew has Jesus appear, and leave quickly. Luke has Jesus linger a while, but he's mysterious: he's disguised, and then revealed and vanishes; finally he ascends into heaven. In John, Jesus has hands and feet with scars, but appears magically in locked rooms. There is no body in the tomb, but does Jesus have a body after the resurrection? No one is sure. But does the story center on the brutal death from crucifixion? Or is it about something else?

Certainly most church goers today want to skip from Christmas to Easter with no spiritual discipline of preparation, but in the case of children, that is hardly a fair expectation. Still, is this how we teach them that violence is good, and bloodshed redemptive, and pain is the path to salvation?Those have become identified as Christian themes, but they are all attempts to make sense of the cruelty of the death of Jesus, to find an explanation for everything that happened, and a reason that justifies everything.

Personally, before this runs on to five pages and still no conclusion in sight, I have completely rejected the "atonement" theory, the idea that Jesus had to die in order for God to forgive the sins of mankind. It's a theory of God as sacrificial lamb to God, an idea that never made much sense to me, and that still sounds like cosmic child/self abuse (given the doctrine of the Trinity). Which is why I truly find "recipes" like this appalling. It connects blood and bones and death and pain, with pleasure. One reason the elements of the eucharist are seldom sweetened, I suppose. But the soteriological question is the real issue: what is salvation, and why do we need it?

That one, I will definitely have to come back to.