A few weeks ago I was sitting in the guardhouse at the prison while one of the chaplains was waiting to be searched by the guards. (BTW, I'm not a chaplain, I'm a volunteer.) Shift change was happening so the chaplain had to wait while the guard took care of those who were leaving. Finishing with them the guard said to the chaplain, "Sorry to make you wait. Thanks for your patience."
Hearing this I quipped, "No worries. Jack's a Christian. His Lord commands him to be patient."
It's funny but most Christians don't seem to think of Jesus like this. That is, Christians say "Jesus is Lord" but they don't really mean it. Jesus isn't commanding things as much as he is offering us good advice, tips on living well.
Basically, I think most Christians think Jesus is sort of like Oprah.
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Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faƫrie
The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux
The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)
Autobiographical Posts
- On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
- Two Brothers and Texas Rangers
- Visiting and Evolving in Monkey Town
- Roller Derby Girls
- A Life With Bibles
- Wearing a Crucifix
- Morning Prayer at San Buenaventura Mission
- The Halo of Overalls
- Less
- The Farmer's Market
- Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink
- The Bureaucrat
- Uncle Richard, Vampire Hunter
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- On Maps and Marital Spats
- Get on a Bike...and Go Slow
- Buying a Bible
- Memento Mori
- We Weren't as Good as the Muppets
- Uncle Richard and the Shark
- Growing Up Catholic
- Ghostbusting (Part 1)
- Ghostbusting (Part 2)
- My Eschatological Dog
- Tex Mex and Depression Era Cuisine
- Aliens at Roswell
On the Principalities and Powers
- Christ and the Powers
- Why I Talk about the Devil So Much
- The Preferential Option for the Poor
- The Political Theology of Les MisƩrables
- Good Enough
- On Anarchism and A**holes
- Christian Anarchism
- A Restless Patriotism
- Wink on Exorcism
- Images of God Against Empire
- A Boredom Revolution
- The Medal of St. Benedict
- Exorcisms are about Economics
- "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
- "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
- Tales of the Demonic
- The Ethic of Death: The Policies and Procedures Manual
- "All That Are Here Are Humans"
- Ears of Stone
- The War Prayer
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Experimental Theology
- Eucharistic Identity
- Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy
- Holiness Among Depraved Christians: Paul's New Form of Moral Flourishing
- Empathic Open Theism
- The Victim Needs No Conversion
- The Hormonal God
- Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
- The Satanic Church
- Mousetrap
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
- Your God is Too Big
From the Prison Bible Study
- The Philosopher
- God's Unconditional Love
- There is a Balm in Gilead
- In Prison With Ann Voskamp
- To Make the Love of God Credible
- Piss Christ in Prison
- Advent: A Prison Story
- Faithful in Little Things
- The Prayer of Jabez
- The Prayer of Willy Brown
- Those Old Time Gospel Songs
- I'll Fly Away
- Singing and Resistence
- Where the Gospel Matters
- Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
- Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
- Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
- John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
- The Word
Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
- Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
- Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom
The Fuller Integration Lectures
Blogging about the Bible
- Unicorns in the Bible
- "Let My People Go!": On Worship, Work and Laziness
- The True Troubler
- Stumbling At Just One Point
- The Faith of Demons
- The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
- The Subversion of the Creator God
- Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
- The Things That Make for Peace
- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
- Redemption and the Goel
- The Psalms as Liberation Theology
- Control Your Vessel
- Circumcised Ears
- Forgive Us Our Trespasses
- Doing Beautiful Things
- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
- Christus Victor in Galatians
- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
- The Triumph of the Cross
- The Threshing Floor of Araunah
- Hold Others Above Yourself
- Blessed are the Tricksters
- Adam's First Wife
- I Am a Worm
- Christus Victor in the Lord's Prayer
- Let Them Both Grow Together
- Repent
- Here I Am
- Becoming the Jubilee
- Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
- Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
- Going Outside the Camp
- Welcoming Children
- The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
- Pseudepigrapha and the Christian Witness
- The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
- The Second Moses
- The New Manna
- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
- Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
- The Passion of White America
- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
- Will Campbell
- Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
- MLK Bedtime Prayer
- Freedom Rider
- Mountiantop
- Freedom Summer
- Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
- Civil Rights Family Trip 2: Atlanta
- Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
- Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
- Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery
Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
- Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
- A Million Boring Little Things
- A Prayer for ISIS
- "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
- The Angel of Freedom
- Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
- Mattering
- This Ritual of Hallowing
- Faith as Honoring
- The Beautiful
- The Sensory Boundary
- The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
- Open Commuion: Warning!
- The Impurity of Love
- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
- Freedom Fellowship
- Wednesday Night Church
- The Hands of Christ
- Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
- Gerald's Gift
- Wiping the Blood Away
- This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
- The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
- Renunciation
- The Reason We Gather
- Anointing With Oil
- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
- Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
- Pawn to King 4
- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
- Heretics and Disagreement
- Atonement: A Primer
- "The Bible says..."
- The "Yes, but..." Church
- Human Experience and the Bible
- Discernment, Part 1
- Discernment, Part 2
- Rabbinic Hedges
- Fuzzy Logic
Interacting with Good Books
- Christian Political Witness
- The Road
- Powers and Submissions
- City of God
- Playing God
- Torture and Eucharist
- How Much is Enough?
- From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
- The Catonsville Nine
- Daring Greatly
- On Job (GutiƩrrez)
- The Selfless Way of Christ
- World Upside Down
- Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
- Christ and Horrors
- The King Jesus Gospel
- Insurrection
- The Bible Made Impossible
- The Deliverance of God
- To Change the World
- Sexuality and the Christian Body
- I Told Me So
- The Teaching of the Twelve
- Evolving in Monkey Town
- Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
- Darwin's Sacred Cause
- Outliers
- A Secular Age
- The God Who Risks
Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
- Ethnocentrism and Politics
- Flies, Attention and Morality
- The Banality of Evil
- The Ovens at Buchenwald
- Violence and Traffic Lights
- Defending Individualism
- Guilt and Atonement
- The Varieties of Love and Hate
- The Wicked
- Moral Foundations
- Primum non nocere
- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
- Tattoos
- The Ethics of :-)
- On Snobbery
- Jokes
- Hypocrisy
- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
- Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
- Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
- Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
- Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
- Doubt and Cognitive Rumination
- A/theism and the Transcendent
- Kingdom A/theism
- The Ontological Argument
- Cheap Praise and Costly Praise
- god
- Wired to Suffer
- A New Apologetics
- Orthodox Alexithymia
- High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
- The Buddhist Phase
- Skilled Christianity
- The Two Families of God
- The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
- Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
- Doubt: A Diagnosis
- Faith and Modernity
- Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
- Salvation
- The Gifts of Doubt
- A Beautiful Life
- Is Santa Claus Real?
- The Feeling of Knowing
- Practicing Christianity
- In Praise of Doubt
- Skepticism and Conviction
- Pragmatic Belief
- N-Order Complaint and Need for Cognition
Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
- Ambivalence about Lent
- On Easter and Astronomy
- Sex Sandals and Advent
- Freud and Valentine's Day
- Existentialism and Halloween
- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
- Batman and the Joker
- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
- Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies
A group of us have decided to read the gospel of Luke together. Last night we read chapter 6. When we got to vs 46 it was for a few a real- OMG! moment. -" why do you call me 'Lord, Lord' and do not do what I say" The reason it was such an OMG moment was that for some it was the first time we realized Jesus was talking about the sayings he'd just been expounding to his disciples. "love your enemies", "do good to those that hate you"-" if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other also" etc etc. Up until that moment most of us had only ever heard vs46 used to force people to accept church dogmas or our former sects salvation doctrine. As I looked around the group I was reminded of a quote I once heard attributed to Shane Clairborne. -" the more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he gets me into"
You get a savior! You get a savior! Everyone gets a savior!
Interesting thought. Inverts my own observations from working at Oprah's magazine that to many of her fans/followers, Oprah is sort of like Jesus. she is exalted in some ways (her extraordinary success, her great empathy and ability to inspire and motivate, etc) and in others she suffers under the gaze of the same consumerist/spiritual culture she represents and exemplifies (her lifelong struggles with her weight--i know, but to her fans this makes her vulnerable and human, it puts flesh on her glory). There's more: oprah sees herself as destiny's child, chosen by God to live a life apart from the rest of us... Anyway, your idea further deepens the mystery of oprah, since the equation now goes both ways--oprah is sort of like jesus (the jesus of TV, of self-actualization) and jesus is sort of like oprah (Live Your Best Life).
I don't know, Richard: those in the Osteen camp might see him so, but I think most American Protestants see him foremost as an insurance policy.
this....is hilarious.
I would argue that most actually view Jesus as the leader of their social club....
You are my favorite blogger, but I don't love it when Christians criticize Oprah. My mom tells me that no one ever talked about incest before Oprah did and once she did a horriffic amount of women in her hometown came forward and sought therapy. I've done work on domestic violence initiatives where I've seen first-hand how dysfunctionally cultures without an "Oprah" regard these tough issues. We couldn't even put a chinese-language advrtisement for abuse help on chinese radio (in Canada!) becasue apparently that "wasn't happening". We owe a lot of where we are as a society to her. I admire everything she has done for women, ethnic minorities, and hurting people. I suspect it's common for Christians to make jabs at her because it should have been the church bringing that kind of healing and outreach to the hurting, where instead, they often cause more damage (patriarchy, shaming divorced people, etc.)
Very well said. And I appreciate being called out in this regard. Oprah has, and continues to do, much good in the world.
For the sake of clarification, I'm using Oprah as a sort of archetype or advice-giving TV sterotype. But using that sterotype, as with all sterotypes, misses a great deal and distorts the person underneath.
I didn't read this post as a criticism of Oprah, so much as a criticism of American-style Christianity. The post (as I took it) was simply portraying Oprah as a prominent and influential person who dispenses advice - a position that is neutral regarding the content or accuracy of such advice or the Oprah herself.
The critical tone is obviously directed at Christians (myself included) who fail to view Jesus as LORD and look at His teachings as true commands - not just advice to be considered.
You're over-thinking us, Oranges4226. qb doesn't like her simply because she is such a relentless self-promoter, kinda like the guy at 1600 Penn. (Their theme song? "It's all about MEEEEEE!")
I recently returned to full-time youth ministry from the corporate world and I have determined that this time around, I want to do things differently. I want to be better. Be more. I am reading more and studying more and wrestling more in prayer. I stumbled across your blog about a month ago while reading Patrick Mead's blog. Thank you so much for continually pushing me out of the boat. You have no idea how much your writings have meant to me over a short period of time. I feel like Jonah - recently vomited onto the beach, after running from God. Nineveh, here I am! (Hopefully without the whining about repentance and worm thing). Jesus is Lord!
I read it the same way oranges did too. I believe it has to do with the
public campaigning against her taken up by a lot of Christians. There
exists a book called Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama and the
Occult,
Casting Crowns included a line in a song that pitted Oprah against
Jesus, and many a pastor publicly refused to
accept her declaration of belief in Jesus, along with her giving "All
Glory to God" on her final show for everything she accomplished, because
she doesn't take a stand against abortion, etc. Much
Christian rhetoric states Jesus and Oprah are opposing forces and you
must choose Jesus or have Oprah suck you in with her philanthropy then
drag your soul to hell. That being said, after reading Richard's reply
and re-reading his post I can see how he wasn't explicitly going for a Jesus versus Oprah dynamic. I think it's the title of the post automatically brings
up the Oprah-is-not-good-enough-for-Jesus-club-and-she-must-be-stopped
discussion for those of us who've listened to it. She has done so much
for our society and for the kingdom and it's disappointing that her
ministry is dismissed or opposed. Wouldn't it be nice if Christians made
the news for furthering Oprah's work and bringing healing to those who've been hurt? rather than for
bashing the woman who altered our entire society to do just that? I think
that's all that oranges was saying.
Thanks for being humble here. Sometimes we step into a world of discourse (e.g., Oprah-bashing) that we don't mean to step into. I, myself, hang around Oprah-idolaters rather than Oprah-bashers, so I read your post in that light. She has done good--but I have reluctantly concluded that salvation does not lie in "raising awareness."
Nope. We make Him mascot of our social club.
Blessings!