Don’t Downplay Worship for Justice

There’s a saying that makes its rounds every 10 years or so in nominal Christian circles, and it goes something like this:

“Jesus did not ask to be worshiped. He does not want our worship, he wants social justice.”

This is completely untrue, and it derives from classically liberal Christianity in the early 20th century. Before we get to that, however, let’s establish that God does care about justice, and Jesus does want to be worshiped. This nonsensical idea that we have to devalue one thing to elevate another is foolish and dangerous. We do not need to minimize God’s worship to elevate God’s justice. We should be wary of minimizing any aspect of God’s character to favor another. Common social reform philosophies do this all the time—they require that we identify and tear down a villain social group to elevate another, oppressed social group. In this context, the pious worshiper is the villain.

This has been happening since philosophies concerned with social reform began, and Christianity was naturally thrown into the mix. Let’s talk about how that all started.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christianity went through some wild cultural gauntlets. People were focused on two things almost exclusively: (1) How our beliefs and values fit within science and reason, and (2) how we can better push humanity toward utopia. Within this world of science, reason, and progress, Christianity was in danger of becoming a fairy tale folk religion, aiding in personal peace but serving no real contribution to humanity’s modern needs. A few eloquent theologians stepped up to the plate and tried to curb the issue. Classically liberal theologians like Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack felt compelled to force Christianity to keep up with modernity, the world of modernism. Enlightenment philosophy and the scientific method were the filters through which everything must be viewed, and we have Immanuel Kant to thank for that. Kant decided that Christianity should only be valued for the moral foundations it contributes to society. So to help Christianity “compete” with modernity, liberal theologians funneled faith through the hose of Kantian ethics and morals. The theologian who made this idea famous in our North American Churches was Walter Rauschenbusch. He authored the famous work, A Theology for the Social Gospel. Essentially, Rauschenbusch reduced Christianity to a few simple religious statements and socialist-political and economic programs. Theology has nothing to contribute to personal faith, eternity, or macro-universal belief: It must be sequestered into the corner of moral judgments and values.

Despite Rauschenbusch’s blatant disregard for proper methods of interpreting ancient literature, we should be grateful for his contribution to Christianity in that it sparked a revival for the Church taking initiative in matters of social justice. After abolishing institutional slavery, Christianity once again fell into a mold where it was criticized for ignoring social plights, and over the last hundred years, Christianity continued to grapple with its place in social causes and politics. As corporate giants grew and individuals were swallowed up in the river of socialist dynamics, Christians wanted to apply their faith in a context that met these needs, and they are noble for desiring to do so.

But there is nothing wrong with churches valuing worship services and investing in opportunities to praise God corporately; doing so does not diminish a church’s impact on social justice. If a church is neglecting the needs of the community, the issue goes deeper than their approach to worship. Typically, when churches invest heavily in worship and exaltation of God within their congregations, they are known for feeding the poor, clothing the destitute, and housing orphans and widows. It’s as if close proximity to God results in acting out the will of God in justice and healing. Those who value intimacy and communion with God will share the same values and desires that are in God’s heart. If God wants justice for the oppressed and the poor, then worshiping Him and spending time in His presence will transform your heart to want justice for the oppressed and the poor. It is completely false and out of context to portray Jesus as a divine figure who diminished worship practices and religious experiences while attempting to reform society and bring justice. So let’s take a closer look at a few moments when worship is explicitly offered to Jesus in the New Testament.

As soon as the Magi who traveled from the East saw Jesus, they “fell down and worshiped him” (Matthew 2:11). They also offered him some seriously expensive gifts. The author of Matthew is highlighting the significance that magi from a distant, pagan land are recognizing Jesus as one who should receive worship.

When Jesus enters Jerusalem before his crucifixion, the crowd lays palm branches in his path and shouts, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” (Matthew 21:9). This is a declaration among Jews that transformed the original meaning of the word (save us, please!) to a promise that God is coming to deliver His people as He did in the Exodus (Salvation is coming!) It directly identifies Jesus as the One God Who has come to save His people.

After Jesus walks on water in front of his disciples, they worship him, saying, “Truly you are the son of God” (Matthew 14:33). Jesus does nothing to correct them.

When Jesus reveals himself to his female disciples after he rose from the tomb, they “clasped his feet and worshiped him” (Matthew 28:9). Jesus tells them not to be afraid. He doesn’t tell them to stop worshiping him.

When Thomas sees the holes in Jesus’ hands and believes, he says, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Jesus doesn’t correct him.

In 1 Corinthians 8:5-6, roughly 20 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the apostle Paul writes,

Although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through who are all things and through whom we exist.

In this scripture, Paul adapts an ancient Jewish expression of faith called the Shema (Deut. 4:6-9; 11:13-21). You see, devout Jews were explicitly monotheistic, meaning they worshiped only one god in a polytheistic world (where multiple gods were worshiped in various ways). The fact that first-century Christians (who were largely converted Jews) added a binitarian shape to their monotheistic worship of God alone by associating Jesus as their “Lord” is impossible to fathom unless they had no problem accepting Jesus as one who should be worshiped alongside God their Heavenly Father. That the early church chose to go against custom and promote the worship of Jesus speaks volumes.

The very reason Jesus was crucified by the Sanhedrin was for declaring to be God. He was questioned by the Pharisees (Matt 22) His disciples (Luke 6) and Pontius Pilate (Luke 22:66-71) and accepted association as God each time, solidifying his condemnation. If Jesus did not want to be worshipped, he did a terrible job disassociating himself from it. If anything, the position demands that we at least call Jesus incompetent for missing the significance of this issue in his teaching.

Jesus consistently regarded himself as God among monotheistic Jews who devoutly worshiped God (YHWH). The Jewish faith had an immensely high view of institutional worship that separated them from every pagan tradition. That Jesus never instructs his followers to reject these customs of worship is profound.

I’m barely scratching the surface of the evidence here: Jesus expected worship, received worship, and is pleased by our worship. Jesus overturned social norms and institutionally established values, sure, but every time he did it, he revealed a divine hierarchy where the kingdom of light is overturning the kingdom of darkness. It is beyond the context of the gospel narratives to assume Jesus’ miracles were more about social justice than they were about light defeating darkness. The kingdoms of evil were being overpowered by the kingdom of God (Luke 11), and the more people flocked to Jesus in worship and acceptance of his godhood, the more they accepted the values and principles of the kingdom of God itself, which seeks to establish justice, mercy, healing, and wholeness. I am all for social justice, as every sincere follower of Jesus is. But I will never downplay worshiping God for the sake of elevating the principles of God’s kingdom. I will never deny God what is due Him for the sake of spreading some of His principles. God demands worship and He demands justice.

Give Him both.

Why I’m (Still) A Christian

I spoke with an old friend of mine. Someone I had not spoken to in several years. I talked about how my family and I transitioned into a full-time RV lifestyle this past year, and he talked about his developing career in marketing and business ventures. I asked where he was living and where he goes to church these days, to which he hesitantly replies “I’m not going to church anymore.” Throughout the conversation, he explained how he has decided he is not considering himself a part of the christian faith at this time. He pulled apart his former beliefs and did not find anything worth keeping. After a few days it occurred to me: If he had just given me the name of a church, I would not have thought anything of it—I just assumed his faith had remained steadfast in the first place. It did not occur to me that I could have asked, “Are you still following Jesus? What has your faith been through? How has it stood the test of time and experience?”

In the last decade I’ve read dozens of stories of Christians who decided they could not continue to call themselves christians while walking the current path they’ve chosen. The only solution was to pull up their religious roots and call it quits. The popular term for a while was “deconstruction,” where you attempt to remove all bias (virtually impossible) and investigate the claims of your faith by holding them up to intense scrutiny and examination. In the last couple of years this term has become synonymous with quitting christianity, even though the term supposedly applies to much broader areas of philosophy and other lingual systems. Perhaps it’s my cynicism, but on my social platforms, people who challenge their faith and walk away come off as intellectual, while people who continue to embrace their faith appear ignorant and unwilling to examine it. After reading so many stories of people who have walked away from some form of Christian faith, I started to wonder, so who made it? Who has challenged their faith, torn it apart, and continued forward still following Jesus? I want to read those stories too. I want to know who has found something worth keeping, rather than assuming every follower of Jesus blindly believes the same thing they always believed because they are spoon fed church jargon, or they’ve challenged their faith and decided to leave it behind.

So I’ll start with my own story. 

In my early twenties, I chose to challenge every assumption and belief I held concerning christianity, and read everything I could that was contrary to orthodoxy. It would take forever to recount everything I processed during that time, so I’ll share three specific challenges I dealt with concerning orthodox christianity and it’s counter-arguments, and how I continued to claim Christianty is true afterward.

Christianity was fabricated and mythicized by the early church

One of the first arguments I came across that I never heard growing up in church was the claim that the bible is mostly fictitious stories made up by people who wanted power for themselves by promulgating popular legends about Jesus. At first I found this hard to reconcile with, and it caused me to have serious doubts about Christianity as a whole. How can anyone prove that the historicity of the accounts of Jesus and the early church were real? Am I supposed to rely on blind faith to accept biblical claims? Show me the evidence! 

The first real answers came when I read about The First Quest for the Historical Jesus, which is usually traced back to the writings of a guy named Herman Reimarus. Reimarus claimed that Jesus was a real person who never intended to establish a new religion, but thought of himself as a human messiah who would overturn the social paradigms of Rome and establish a new earthly, political kingdom (This is obviously completely contrary to the entire message within the gospels). Reimarus then claims that Jesus’s hopes were dashed when Rome crucified him, but Jesus’s disciples stole his body and rode the momentum of his movement to build a religious system that eventually became Christianty. These kinds of claims are jarring when you grow up never hearing such things, which is exactly what my scenario was. Reimarus’ writings sounded brilliant at first, and I felt like a fool for never considering that Jesus might be a figure mostly invented by people who crave power. This phase of my doubt was shortly lived, however, for a plethora of reasons.

The accounts of Jesus and the first century church are loaded with failure, doubt, contradiction and confusion. The entire gospel of Mark (which is one of the most reliable and earliest accounts of the stories of Jesus) portrays the disciples as faithless failures who never seem to pick up on Jesus’s greater message and constantly let him down. Why would the church intentionally downplay the performance of the disciples if the goal is to create followers of the disciples within the church? This would make things harder, not easier for the biblical writers, and likely the early church would have eventually removed these passages to garner more followers. But they didn’t. They continued to elevate Jesus in their writings even at their own expense. In other gospels like Matthew, Jesus shares many teachings that are difficult to understand even within the first century’s context, and there were plenty of struggles the early church did have issues with that never find answers in the gospels. If the stories were fabricated, why not create scenarios that answer heated debates and strife within the early church, like food laws, or the Gentile mission, or the purpose of water baptism, or church-state affairs? C.S. Lewis suggested that if the Bible is fiction, it is terrible fiction, and thus is more than likely wholeheartedly believed by those who wrote about it. Reimarus’s work has been mostly discredited by scholars now, but the ideas he put forth live on for many who simply haven’t studied the bible or the history surrounding it.

There probably was not a historical Jesus

This one was challenging for me, because when I decided to question whether or not Jesus ever really existed, I turned where most people turn… the internet. I was bombarded with poorly researched “history” that never cited real sources about how there is no historical mention of the Hebrew named Jesus in official Roman records, and that the entire story of God becoming a human was borrowed from pagan myths that existed centuries before Jesus. At first glance, this rocked me a little bit. I never learned any of that before. But after six months of digging deeper and reading scholarly books and historical records, I found out none of those things are true. 

Firstly, there are records of a historical Jesus in Roman texts. We have more proof Jesus existed than the Roman poet Virgil (which no one questions, because less is at stake if he isn’t). Some have tried to explain the historical Jesus as a real figure, but someone completely different from the Jesus of the Bible, like a cynic philosopher or social revolutionary (Like Reimarus mentioned above). These attempts also fail serious scrutiny. I learned this easily by reading the account of The Jesus Seminar and the 1st and 2nd Quest for the Historical Jesus (also mentioned above), which you can do too if you’re willing to run down that hole. The books that shaped my beliefs most on this are called Jesus and Judaism by E.P. Sanders and Who Was Jesus by N.T. Wright. 

Second, It is impossible to reconstruct a historical Jesus figure who did not claim to be God and who did not work miracles and perform exorcisms. Many have attempted this, and they failed. Even first century opponents of Jesus’s movement like Celsus and the Jewish historian Josephus admit to Jesus being known for supernatural power and claims of divinity, making it ridiculous to claim the church fabricated that identity onto Jesus over time. Celcus went so far as to suggest Jesus was trained in Magic by Egyptians. Clearly enough people were exposed to his supernatural activity that it becomes ridiculous to suggest he was not a real person.

You cannot prove God exists

David Hume’s famous argument, “What Caused God?” made a big ripple in my life for about 5 solid minutes.

The cosmological argument, which claims everything that exists needs a cause, or a God to start the process, was rejected by Hume as a simple matter of passing the buck, You say everything must have started from something or it can’t exist. Well, what started God?  

Oh man. Shaky. This one messed with me. Hume was brilliant. Until it occurred it me (maybe supernaturally brought to my mind by God, just to make my atheist friends squirm a little), Christianity never claims every single event has a cause. Christianity does not claim God has to come from somewhere because everything has to come from somewhere—this is a scientific analyzation tool that in no way answers questions that exist outside of the laws of scientific inquiry. The Cause and Effect model examines the physical universe only. Judeo-Christianity has claimed for thousands of years that God is not bound by His own universe or its laws. An intelligent thinker named Thomas Aquinas used the cosmological argument simply as a way to reference the idea that the seen and felt universe always operates with a system of laws of cause and effect. Challengers in his day made claims that material forces were randomly caused with no origin or purpose by other material forces. Scientific methods proved over time that this never actually happens in the material universe. Effects always need causes. Aquinas claimed that something bigger than “material” stuff, something outside of physics, has to cause physics. Thus God is the greater Causer.

Hume’s response: “Well, what caused the Causer then?” This is a nonsense question, because no one is claiming that God has to follow the laws everything else must follow. Atheists are the ones claiming only the physical universe exists. The cosmological argument claims that more than a physical universe must exist, because the effects of a physical universe must have been caused by something, so what material thing created all of your other material things? You have to start somewhere. God, the great Causer, does not need a cause to start him, because He is not limited by physicality. Only if you claim that the material world is all that exists do you need to answer the question, “Well, what caused the material universe then?”

Atheism often suggests that only something physically material can begat the physical universe. Christianity suggests that only something metaphysical can begat the physical universe. These two methods do not have to abide by the same rules and principles of science to answer their respective questions. Atheism was exciting to me for about the same amount of time Michael Scott loved that chair model in The Office. If Christianity was false, I was not going to find an alternative in atheism. 

In the end

I believe there is a major difference between seeking truth and seeking an excuse to be rid of a belief model you don’t want. I won’t imply that everyone who “deconstructs” their faith and decides to abandon it does so because they don’t care about truth. That’s an unfair position that insults the intelligence of many wonderful people who simply will not agree with some of Christianity’s claims. But I won’t pretend there aren’t some who deconstruct their faith because they are jaded by Christianity and welcome any reason to leave it behind. I did not approach things this way. I remember the day I prayed and asked God to rip apart all of my preconceived notions of truth and show me what is real. I did not want to blindly follow anything, but I also did not want a reason to abandon Christianity either. I just wanted Jesus, plain and simple, if He was real. In my experience, God has proven Himself to me time and time again. I cannot find good reason to doubt His existence or historical mentions, and I have had enough personal experiences in my life where doubt becomes too difficult. I have seen prayers answered, miracles performed (yes, real, supernatural things) people manifested with demonic activity (yep, that one too), and a myriad of other experiences that become hard to deny. But that’s my experience, and it does little help for someone else who might be struggling with whether or not Christianity is worth it. If that’s you reading this, I pray you get all the answers you’re looking for. I wanted to share my experience because I feel too few people who have traveled through doubt and come out still believing, too few of us ever really talk about it. We should all talk about it a little more.