Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

In Second Timothy (3:16) we read, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” The “all Scripture” being spoken of means the Old Testament, of course, since the New Testament was being written at the time by people who had no idea that their assorted letters and such were going (over a four-hundred-year period) to be edited and then collected into one book—the New Testament—much less appended to the Hebrew Bible.

  How scary is this verse? Well, take every vile verse and myth reeking of barbarity in the Bible (and there are hundreds of such passages) and add this: the “All scripture is . . . ” ending. For instance, take this New Testament “advice” to women: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent” (1Timothy 2:12). Then add, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” End of discussion! Be Silent!

  Or...

  “This is what the Lord Almighty says . . . ‘Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey’” (1 Samuel 15:3). “But Christ has changed all that mean stuff,” the hopeful Evangelical says. Not so fast! “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”

  Or...

  “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel” (1 Peter 2:18). Say again? “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” And by the way, that proslavery teaching is a post-Jesus, “nice God,” New Testament verse.

  When rape is finally (sort of) “condemned” in the Bible, a woman’s rights aren’t even mentioned. “If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife” (Deuteronomy 22:28–29). According to the Bible, the raped woman is forced to marry the rapist and the only person made whole is her “dishonored” father. And part of the man’s “punishment” is that he is never allowed to divorce the women he raped and then had to marry. She, of course, has no say.

  I’ll take lovely, civilized, forgiving, kind, and intelligent women like my mother, sisters, wife, daughter Jessica, daughter-in-law Becky, not to mention my granddaughters, over the idea that the Bible “is all true,” let alone all “God’s Word.” I’ll trust the actual evidence of just how lovely women are as proof of God’s goodness and creative ability rather than what is written about women by women-haters trying to rope God into their nasty arguments.

  I hated being in that room with that Rape Kit. The thought that the next rape victim who would lay there, the next woman whose bruises and cuts and broken bones would be photographed, could be my daughter Jessica or my wife was terrifying. Would the next rape victim be shivering as Genie was for over two hours before a doctor showed up? Would anyone comfort her?

  Sitting in that hospital examination room, and not for the last time, I found myself wondering why my sweet, forgiving, and kind mother was so much nicer than The-God-Of-The-Bible she said she worshipped. He had been ready to command the wanton slaughter of innocent women, rape, and the murder of babies, whereas Mom agonized during a whole lifetime over one tiny unnamed child. She’d passed her empathy and reverence for life to me. When (absurdly or not) I’d been scanning those blood clots for signs of a fetus, it was with a sense of looming tragedy. I’d held Genie’s hand tightly and wondered why anyone would worship a God who doesn’t love women and children.

  Years later I began to think that if there is a God, and if Jesus spoke the truth about how we are to care for others, and if my love for Genie is a gift from the Creator, and if the Light of Love in my life has taught me anything (besides a compulsion to follow my children and grandchildren into the world and protect them), then maybe the best thing a believer in God can do is to declare that a lot of the Bible is hate-filled blasphemy—against God. Maybe the actual God who kicked off the evolutionary process that wound up producing people like my mother, my wife, and my luminous grandchildren doesn’t endorse The God-Of-The-Bible either.

  This possibility undermines most arguments for atheism made by most “professional atheists.” The books written by “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris attack God by attacking religion. But that’s not an argument that even begins to address the question of God (or some other outside power’s meddling in the formation of the Universe, let alone first causes in cosmology). The New Atheists’ arguments make sense only as attacks on religion. There’s plenty to attack. But who says religion as practiced today, let alone as “revealed” in holy books, has anything to do with an actual Creator? As Vincent Bugliosi writes in his remarkable book Divinity of Doubt, “Harris (like Hitchens) seems to believe something that is so wrong it is startling that someone of his intellect wouldn’t see it immediately—that gutting religion (as Harris tries to do by his technique of decimating faith that fosters religion)—does not, ipso facto, topple God.”20

  Mom was always interpreting the Bible and thus correcting Paul, Jesus, Moses, and anyone else who was confused. “It only seems that way, but really” was Mom’s operative opening phrase when it came to straightening out all our “misunderstandings” of passages that “so many people don’t understand properly.” Mom would even whisper corrections of Dad’s theology to me during his sermons when she felt Dad had got some point “slightly wrong.” She’d purse her lips and shake her head when Dad said something that she didn’t wholeheartedly agree with, and I’d know to lean closer to Mom for the whispered theological clarification, beginning with “Daddy should be a bit clearer on this.” Or “Fran should really say that in some cases ...”

  The-God-Of-The-Bible suffered by comparison to my mother. Mom just couldn’t imitate the loopy extremism oozing from her Holy Book. She never threatened eternal torture for those who did no more than cause some believer to “stumble”—that is, to doubt what he or she had been told in the latest Bible study. All in all, Mom was much more civilized than her Messiah, or maybe some of the reporting on what He’s said to have said is a case of wishful revisionist editing by His biographers, who were adept at revising history in their favor.

  Remember, by the time the writers of the New Testament were remembering forty, fifty, sixty years later what Jesus had said, they were also building a self-interested organization based on His life. They were settling disputes and splits among themselves. What better way to strengthen their arguments than to draft The Master—in 20/20 hindsight—into supporting them in various Early Church turf wars and their fights with each other. How better to win theological battles than to “quote” Jesus about the “correct” view of celibacy or how to “deal with” the Jews or how to scare the faithful into remaining faithful or how to encourage them to stay faithful in the face of Roman persecution?

  I hope some of the things Jesus “said”—which have a very different tone from the sublime humane passages that stand the test of both time and the Light of Love in the human heart—are a matter of the Early Church’s leaders’ wishful thinking! I’m rooting for Jesus based on the compassion and wisdom of His words as they escape from the pages of an otherwise tarnished book. But some of what’s been written about Him in the Bible, not to mention some of the out-of-character sayings attributed to Him, are plain goofy.

  Jesus “said” He’d be back soon, very soon, in time so that some who were with Him would not taste death before his return. We’re still waiting. Jesus “told” his disciples: “There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28). “Behold, I come quickly” (Revelation 3:11). It’s been
almost 2,000 years, and many believers, including my mother, are still waiting for that “quick” return. He got that wrong, or the people recording His “infallible” sayings did.

  I’m not the only person who is rooting for Jesus but who also is asking questions about the Bible and challenging the idea that what we know about God is contained therein. Thom Stark begins his book The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It) like this: “In the beginning was the Argument, and the Argument was with God, and the Argument was: God. God was the subject of the Argument, and the Argument was a good one. Who is God? What is God like? What does God require of us?”21

  Stark explains, “The doctrine of biblical inerrancy dictates that the Bible, being inspired by God, is without error in everything that it affirms—historically, scientifically, and theologically.”22 Stark develops a strong argument against this Evangelical/fundamentalist doctrine of inerrancy. Here’s Stark’s conclusion:The scriptures are not infallible. Jesus was not infallible—or, if he was, we have no access to his infallibility. So where is our foundation? Upon what do we build our worldview, our ethics, our politics and our morality? The answer is that there is no foundation. There is no sure ground upon which to build our institutions. And that is a good thing. That is what I call grace.

  An infallible Jesus, just like a set of infallible scriptures, is ultimately just a shortcut through our moral and spiritual development. To have a book or a messenger dropped from heaven, the likes of which is beyond the reach of all human criticism, is a dangerous shortcut. It is no wonder humans have always attempted to create these kinds of foundations. And it is a revelation of God’s character, from my perspective, that cracks have been found in each and every one of those foundations.23

  Maybe (if Stark is right) God feels slandered by the Bronze-Ageto-Roman-era “biography” of Him that, it turns out (judging by the insanity that makes up so much of the Bible), wasn’t an authorized biography, let alone an inspired one. It seems to me that as far as the best parts of Christianity go, traditions of beauty in art, music, and literature and the humanism expressed in the abolition of slavery movement and so forth, what might be called the good results are proof that enlightened believers have been picking and choosing all along when it comes to what they take seriously in the Bible. For instance, many Christians were abolitionists in the fight against slavery. Since the Bible, at best, cancels itself out on this subject, the clearly proslavery bits in juxtaposition to the enlightened do-untoothers bits, the Bible wasn’t the only source of the push for freedom. That enlightenment came from within the hearts of men and women who then cast around for any supporting argument they could find, including some verses taken out of the general context of the proslavery sentiment expressed in the Bible.

  To reject portions of the Bible is not necessarily to reject God or even the essence of Christianity. A great deal of the Bible is contradicted by the Love that predates it and, more importantly, survives in you and me. And that Love edits the Bible for us. Call that editing the Holy Spirit, or call it a more evolved sense of ethics and human rights, but most people know what to follow and what to reject when it comes to how they live. Sacrifice for others, not sacrifice of others, is the message of the “better angels” of spiritual faith.

  Or put it this way: I trust the Love that I see in my grandchildren’s eyes as the true witness of God more than anything written in any book. I also trust my personal experiences of the Love of Jesus more than any words about Jesus.

  The fact that religion has time and again been awful is no more here nor there when it comes to God than the fact that humans have damaged everything we’ve touched is an argument for the liquidation of every human being. Indeed, how could religion be anything but a mess? We invented it! That doesn’t mean that the longing for meaning that drove us to invent religion isn’t a reflection of something real: a Creator Who many of us sense is there but Who is also beyond description.

  I think that the best argument for God’s existence is that humans long for meaning. A corollary is that the word “beauty,” however indefinable, means something real to most people. And then there’s that question about the origin of everything, to which, I think, the only sensible answer is a resoundingly agnostic “We’ll never know.” Meanwhile science truthfully explains our evolution from single-celled organisms. But it doesn’t tell me why I know Bach’s Partita 1 en Si Mineur Double: Presto is more important than a jingle for MacDonald’s. And even if brain chemistry unravels this secret, it will reveal only the how, not the why. But you and I know that when the MacDonald’s Corporation is long forgotten, chances are Bach’s music will have survived. Our longing for God (by whatever name) will also be there as one constant in a future that otherwise may not be recognizable.

  All the actors in Mom (and her God’s) drama were part of the Heavenly Battle between Satan and God, in which it was Mom’s good fortune and tragic misfortune to play the leading role. And yet the supreme irony is that her manner of life—generous and caring, sacrificial, intelligent and well read—contrasted so sharply with what she said she believed. Mom spent hours collecting moss, wildflowers, bark, branches, twigs, grasses, rocks, shells, and reeds. She then would lay them all out on the table behind the kitchen and arrange flowers in ceramic bowls, vases, and platters of the kind used to grow Bonsai trees in. Mom’s arrangements were of a piece with all the Japanese and Chinese prints she collected, mostly reproductions from calendars, along with a few treasured originals her parents had brought with them when they left China. Mom’s Chinese artworks were by masters who had painted on silk and handmade paper. Their art was filled with literary allusion and calligraphy, but the primary image was typically a contemplative landscape.

  Having been born in China, Mom had a lifelong nostalgic attachment to all things Oriental that showed itself in her affinity for art and people even vaguely connected to China, Japan, or, for that matter, Korea. Never mind that these cultures hated one another and made constant war on one another. To Mom they were all wonderful. If Mom were in a cab with a Chinese driver, she’d launch into childhood reminiscences of China. If a Korean showed up at L’Abri, she’d give that visitor special attention.

  My mother’s objects of abstract beauty were superb. Mom’s poetry wasn’t only in her writing, which sometimes took the form of earnest biblical propaganda, but also in her choice of those watercolors and prints serenely depicting fogbound hills and solitary cranes standing in water and in her exquisite arrangements where a piece of driftwood, a handful of luxuriant moss, and a single flower or fern proclaimed a whole inner aesthetic and longing for transcendent meaning. Mom loved plants, their stems, the shapes of their leaves; she cherished the forms nature carved by wind, rain, or carpenter ants out of a piece of wood or stone. Mom offered her spirit to each arrangement; natural textures, graceful lines, and a sensual connection to her inner life spoke clearly about who my mother would have been if she’d been raised by anyone but pietistic missionaries who drastically narrowed her life choices by placing The-God-Of-The-Bible’s heavy “call” on her shoulders.

  Who was Mom as she might have been if part of her brain had not been crippled by her missionary parents’ indoctrination of her, just as the bones in the feet of little girls in China were once deformed by foot-binding? My mother unbound was a minimalist making poems with what she found on the ground. When could I see my mother most clearly? When Mom came back from the woods or garden carrying handfuls of what looked like random odds and ends that other people would have discarded. An hour later Mom would have transformed these scraps into a centerpiece for the dining table that looked as if it had come from some other, more perfect universe.

  I think it was that kind of otherworldly poetry that Mom was looking for and why she paid so much attention to the artists who visited L’Abri. In their free lives, in which they were immersed in creating for creating’s sake, perhaps she saw a life she’d been robbed of. My mother lo
ved art and loved the idea of loving art. She took us to the Montreux classical music festival. She spent long hours making her flower arrangements. She always agreed to read us “just one more chapter” when the book, like Oliver Twist, was good. She lavished art supplies on me and after I became Dad’s sidekick constantly asked me when I’d start painting again. All this added up to a lifetime commitment to artistic expression such as I’ve never seen in anyone else before or since. It was as if my mother tried to make up in her enthusiasm for art the time lost in sacrificing her interests for her “higher call,” as if having given up dancing, she could still be an artist vicariously. Mom wanted to haunt those foggy watercolor mountainsides and contemplate a single cypress silhouetted against a pale sky. I think she also ached for someone in her bed who understood her flower arrangements soul to soul. It was my mother who encouraged me to paint—not to mention reveled in my early successes as a painter by attending my shows. After I fled the Religious Right, I returned to her vision when I began to write novels and later to paint again.

  Edith Schaeffer herself was the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I’ve encountered. She was a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity: She read us real books, swearwords and all; she bought me a Salvador Dali art book that included his hypersexuality and “blasphemy” (as other Evangelicals would have described Dali’s work). Mom also lived by a lovely double standard when it came to “those lost Roman Catholics” (as she described them back in her more fundamentalist days) by taking us to see their art and rhapsodizing about it as if the art happened to be somewhere other than in a Roman Catholic church.

  Mom was just so un-Edith-Schaeffer-like in person! And Mom’s embrace of the contradiction within herself, not to mention her mitigating her faith to accommodate her humanity, was quite an accomplishment for One Lone Brave Woman. It was as if my mother were struggling to humanize the 5,000-year-old tradition that had consumed whole races in endless war and had inspired collective intellectual suicide by countless Jews and Christians who denied their brains so that they wouldn’t put The-God-Of-The-Bible in a bad light by questioning the book that “described” Him.