How Could I have Been So Wrong

Peter Rollins author of How (Not) to Speak of God tells a joke to describe the predicament of the church caught in modernity.

“There is an old anecdote in which a mystic and evangelical pastor and a fundamentalist preacher die on the same day and awake to find themselves by the pearly gates. Upon reaching the gates they are promptly greeted by Peter, who informs them that before entering heaven they must be interviewed by Jesus concerning the state of their doctrine.
The first to be called forward is the mystic, who is quietly ushered into a room. Five hours later the mystic reappears with a smile, saying, ‘I thought I had got it all wrong.’
Then Peter signals to the evangelical pastor, who stands up and enters the room. After a full day had passed the pastor reappears with a frown and says to himself, ‘How could I have been so foolish!’
Finally Peter asks the fundamentalist to follow him. The fundamentalist picks up his well-worn Bible and walks into the room. A few days pass with no sign of the preacher, then finally the door swings open and Jesus himself appears, exclaiming, ‘How could I have got it all so wrong!’

Taking into consideration the presupposition that there are many followers of Jesus – more than we might realize, why insist that everyone be as we/you are, at the same place on the journey, having had the same experiences, responding in the same style. This insistence escorts one to become a Christian Pharisee.

Exclusiveness and excluding arise from a desire for purity; a false sense, I might add. Christian Phariseism, as I would characterize it, is a consequence of a distorted passion for theological purity. The corollary follows similar logic as using ethnic cleansing to achieve racial purity.

Does our journey of faith bring us to wholeness through Jesus and his atonement or by acknowledging theological formulas (or non- --formulas.

In cycles, it seems circles are drawn, boundaries established and edits are issued revealing who is and who isn’t a “true” follower/teacher/leader of Jesus. The circle drawers – whoever they are, remind me of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in his chapter entitled "The Grand Inquisitor” envisions Jesus returning to sixteenth century Spain. Jesus is not only unwelcome by church authorities but arrested and imprisoned.

The Grand Inquisitor, representing the voice of this misguided church, interrogates Jesus in his prison cell. He speaks to Christ with superiority referring to theological creeds and moral codes concludes: “We have corrected Your work.”

Though no one might be so bold to speak these words; actions of excluding those who think, dress, associate with the wrong people, question, enjoy and generally disrupt the status quo are either programmed into this corrected work or pushed outside of the circle.