Metal Easter
As it’s my tradition at Halloween to listen to a Christian heavy metal song called “All Hallow’s Eve,” so it is at Easter that I commemorate the good news with this, from Barnabas:
The music is bad but at least the lyrics are an abomination:
I killed Jesus Christ
Yes I did it’s true
Oh I killed Jesus Christ
And you were with me too
My personal liturgy isn’t meant to be sacrilegious, though. For me its nostalgic; I really loved that song when I was 14, and anyway I think the Gospel, offensive in any time signature, is truly an amazing story. For God, having decided not to flood the world again, needs to save creation from our own evil — our sin this time not hating the truth but systematizing it — so he makes the smallest action possible. He becomes one of us, one whom we — recognizing his power for an actual justice — need to kill. In that death some of us would see horror and in that horror be baptized.
I don’t think my summary captures the story nearly as well as Cool Hand Luke (and if you want further evidence of our need for grace, just read the comments to this trailer).
Sunday Service
I think we had the same childhood, Adam.
Were you a Petra or Whitecross person?
petra til whitecross came out. whitecross til vengeance came out. gave them all up when i discovered the choir.
petra til whitecross came out. whitecross til vengeance came out. gave them all up when i discovered the choir.
I think we had the same childhood, Adam and Christian. FYI: Bloodgood.
also: scaterd few (whose lead singer showed up on that show Trading Spouses.)
I also happily defected to The Choir.
scaterd few was next level — the one band i could play for my punk rock friends. didn’t know ramald domkus/alan aguirre ended up on reality tv. that’s enough to drive a man away from his faith.
Yeah, I have to go to an Easter lunch with family tomorrow, and I’m really dreading the praying and so forth, but too wimpy not to make waves about it. It drives me crazy that they want me to be grateful for Jesus dying for my sins and so on, but they don’t think about that it was God who set that fucked up price in the first place. If I were say, President, and made up that the country owed me a debt, and then said they could repay that debt by praising me for slaughtering my son (as if that’s currency), people would be executing/institutionalizing me, whatever… but for God it makes total sense somehow and is a sign of mercy? Uh, okay…
cool hand look is my favorite salad dressing movie, when i look at salad dressing in the stoor a flood of sawed off parking meters is all i see
Not just a few Christians agree with your take on this. If you look up some of the recent controversy about a book called “Love Wins,” you’ll see that the idea of sacrificial atonement is being seriously questioned by some. I don’t agree with them (to me, it’s an issue of framing: the kingdom of God operates on different rules from earth. So yes, you’re right: for God it does make total sense), but many do.
Also, in terms of Christian theology, God didn’t just make up the debt. He made a rule, and mankind broke the rule creating (and later perpetuating) the debt. It wasn’t any sort of ex post facto thing.
Oh yeah, I actually read about that book and considered buying it even though I haven’t considered myself a Christian for years. I didn’t know he was questioning atonement, I just heard that he was questioning a literal hell and all that so the fundies were upset.
I was raised Baptist and “saved” like 4 times (I kept feeling like it wasn’t sticking or I had fallen away or whatever, so I would do it again) and baptized of course, and did church choir and church trips and so on. Then I hit puberty and started feeling gay and was in a lot of turmoil about it. My choir director wrangled a tearful confession of it out of me one time and she said “Oh it’s okay, we can help you with your gayness, it’s just like alcoholism.”
But anyway, yeah I know all the theology (or at least the fundamentalist Protestant version of it). I truly do know where that thought is coming from because I used to believe that and see the distinction you’re talking about (oh God gave us free will so it’s our fault not his) but if you just stop and think about it more objectively that distinction doesn’t exist.
God making a rule and us breaking it is essentially the same as God making up a debt, because if God made everything then he also made the list of sins and their price of atonement. He could have just as easily said “all you have to do is ask for forgiveness and I’ll grant it”, he’s GOD. He’s the one who set up the whole “there has to be a sacrifice”. He’d the one who created the concept of punishment in the first place. It’s a closed loop. It’s just like “I believe in God/the need for salvation/whatever because the Bible tells me to, and I believe in the Bible because God wrote it” (or “divinely inspired” it, they say, except they would never, at my church, grant that there’s any chance the inspiration could be wrong… so it’s the same thing as God writing it).
tl;dr: “God didn’t just make up the debt. He made a rule, and mankind broke the rule creating the debt” = “God made the debt” because God made the rule, mankind, and the idea that breaking rules can lead to debts in the first place. He made all of it. He’s an asshole.
Adam,
I was intrigued by the “Sunday Service” tag and then saw your Halloween post with another Christian metal band. So I was wondering, do you have a song for every holiday? That’s kind of awesome. I only think of Christmas music when it comes to holiday songs, I never considered other days having songs really.
Also, just the idea of Christians appropriating metal is so fascinating to me. When I was Christian and devouring Frank Peretti novels and the Left Behind series and listening to DC Talk and all that I remember being so worried about checking every new media to see if it was considered “Christian” or not, but I don’t think I ever thought about metal being Christian because I was so musically naive and thought all metal was bad or something.
(I also used to literally think Stephen King books were evil, like I would feel nervous even being around them, and now I read him and he’s so fucking tame compared to say, Dennis Cooper.)
postitbreakup,
i know you weren’t asking me, but i’m gonna jump in anyway. i was only allowed to listen to christian music when i was a kid, but my parents had this weird respect for books, so, for ex, while i wasn’t (technically) allowed to listen to slayer or public enemy (both of whom i listened to anyway), i was allowed, and even encouraged, to read nietzsche and henry miller and william s burroughs. this is probably part of why i became a writer. on the flipside, by 1990 or so there really was decent, not necessarily derivative, christian music in just about any genre. with metal, i”d say living sacrifice and the crucified were holding their own well before bands like zao crossed over. in rap, i think mars ill and brainwash projects were unfairly neglected by the mainstream. i felt like pointing this out because, even though i’m not at all evangelical as an adult, i’m not opposed to didactic art if it’s done well, and those artists did it well. and then there’s that band the choir i mentioned, who i really would pace in the top 10 rock bands of all time.
everybody else,
while the synoptic gospels clearly have some hints that jesus’s purpose was sacrificial atonement, there are plenty of readings of them that say otherwise. i recommend bruce chilton’s (scholarly, not theological) Rabbi Jesus for a decent breakdown.
Hey, that’s really interesting! And cool of your parents. My parents didn’t directly censor what I read, but probably only because I was so neurotic (well, I’m still neurotic, but back then it was all funneled into Christianity) I did it for myself. I don’t think I’m opposed to didactic art either, although I’m now personally completely opposed to Christianity (and all deistic or supernatural belief systems) so I dunno. I guess I would say that even though I absolutely abhor the belief system, I always admire when artists can produce something under constraints, and the constraints in subject matter/tone that being a Christian band would require can be pretty heavy, so the fact that there are/were metal and rap and any kind of bands who managed to not be derivative, as you say, is a testament to those folks’ creativity and talent. That being said, I’ll probably never listen to Christian music, but I am also open to not saying “hey those musicians are automatically bad because they’re Christian”.
So, just wondering and you don’t have to go there if you don’t want, but when I was at the heights of my belief I felt super guilty if exposed to anything with sex or profanity, much less drugs or “God is dead”. How did you feel reading that stuff, when you were evangelical? Was it kind of a “researching the enemy” type thing?
Oh and also, and sorry about how dumb this question is, but I have always wondered what it would be like being named Christian (if that’s your name) and also being Christian. It’s the only religion that I know of where that happens (I mean, I guess people are named Mohammad but that’d be more like being named Jesus? To my knowledge, I never knew anyone named Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, etc)
try explaining this song to family at any religious gathering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zV78IgXzB0
there’s Tao. but that’s like being named Dasein or something.
ha, no it wasn’t really a researching the enemy thing. my parents were both ministers and they’d been assigned a lot of that stuff in seminary. their particular denomination (presbyterian = scottish calvinism) is pretty liberal as far as letting people think things through for themselves. but i think because so much of the discourse around christianity in america focuses on fundamentalism (which, at least until the last 20 years or so, was outside the mainstream), people misunderstand how dark and difficult christianity can be. you could use johnathan edwards’s sermon “sinners in the hands of an angry god” to write the lyrics for an entire album that would be both theologically sound (by some standards) and totally metal. i think most reasonably bright people who grow up in that environment are kind of neurotic, though not necessarily clinically.
as for being named christian — it kind of sucked for a while, especially because, as the pastors’ firstborn i went around feeling like i had some kind of ethical spotlight on me.
I think that’s right: sin in Creation means a sinful God. Otherwise, sinful humans have a creative power that’s not simply analogically “creative”, as with sex and art, but is in fact the power to create something really new: the “sin” in a sin-ful act. One could say that humans were created – programmed – either to obey or not to obey, but that simply delays the as-it-were crux: disobedience – real disobedience – is ‘creative’ in the divine sense.
In terms of ‘free’ will, if one is really “free” not to sin, and really chooses to disobey, that one is divinely creative.
– and, as you say, a sinful Creator who blames and punishes created entities for ‘creating’ sin is an asshole God.
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More practical, to me, than -ology about made-up supernatural beings (or conditions for the possibility of Being) would be a Kantian anthropology of faith: what person or kind of person would have to exist for some particular god to exist? what does a religious system say about the people in it? what are the human conditions, in general or specifically, for the possibility of some particular ‘faith’?
I think we had the same childhood, Adam and Christian and Kyle, though perhaps I came a few years later with Crux, Spud Gun, and 90 Lb. Wuss.
The mention of Cool Hand Luke at the end of this post, in the context of the overall post, made me think you were linking out to a song by the Christian band Cool Hand Luke.
There is a way to think the thought of a Creator and created entities – the Socratic provocation: there is no real disobedience, sin, or evil.
There is categorical error. For example, ‘I thought it was a bird, but it was really a fish.’ Or, an example from (Plato’s) Socrates: ‘I thought Shaq was tall and I was short, but then I saw the 8′ 6″ person, and the 3’ 9″ person, and now I realize that “tall” and “short” are never absolute terms.’ In a morally similar way, launching a war to gain resources for one’s community/people/self is a categorical misunderstanding of ‘resource’, ‘property’, ‘violence’, and so on, but the malice towards the other community is, at root, not really ‘malicious’.
(I still don’t know – maybe never will decide for ‘sure’ – whether I think Plato means for his provocation in this instance really to lead one this way or that, in the way that I’m sure, from textual evidence, that Plato means for his condemnations of writing, poetry, and democracy to be taken, or to work, ironically.)
‘No person does an evil thing knowingly’ surely hardly has much to do with Christianity, though – it’s a terrible spiritual-knowledge foundation from which to control a community in this world!!
There is a way to think the thought of a Creator and created entities – the Socratic provocation: there is no real disobedience, sin, or evil.
There is categorical error. For example, ‘I thought it was a bird, but it was really a fish.’ Or, an example from (Plato’s) Socrates: ‘I thought Shaq was tall and I was short, but then I saw the 8′ 6″ person, and the 3’ 9″ person, and now I realize that “tall” and “short” are never absolute terms.’ In a morally similar way, launching a war to gain resources for one’s community/people/self is a categorical misunderstanding of ‘resource’, ‘property’, ‘violence’, and so on, but the malice towards the other community is, at root, not really ‘malicious’.
(I still don’t know – maybe never will decide for ‘sure’ – whether I think Plato means for his provocation in this instance really to lead one this way or that, in the way that I’m sure, from textual evidence, that Plato means for his condemnations of writing, poetry, and democracy to be taken, or to work, ironically.)
‘No person does an evil thing knowingly’ surely hardly has much to do with Christianity, though – it’s a terrible spiritual-knowledge foundation from which to control a community in this world!!
There is a way to think the thought of a Creator and created entities – the Socratic provocation: there is no real disobedience, sin, or evil.
There is categorical error. For example, ‘I thought it was a bird, but it was really a fish.’ Or, an example from (Plato’s) Socrates: ‘I thought Shaq was tall and I was short, but then I saw the 8′ 6″ person, and the 3’ 9″ person, and now I realize that “tall” and “short” are never absolute terms.’ In a morally similar way, launching a war to gain resources for one’s community/people/self is a categorical misunderstanding of ‘resource’, ‘property’, ‘violence’, and so on, but the malice towards the other community is, at root, not really ‘malicious’.
(I still don’t know – maybe never will decide for ‘sure’ – whether I think Plato means for his provocation in this instance really to lead one this way or that, in the way that I’m sure, from textual evidence, that Plato means for his condemnations of writing, poetry, and democracy to be taken, or to work, ironically.)
‘No person does an evil thing knowingly’ surely hardly has much to do with Christianity, though – it’s a terrible spiritual-knowledge foundation from which to control a community in this world!!
There is a way to think the thought of a Creator and created entities – the Socratic provocation: there is no real disobedience, sin, or evil.
There is categorical error. For example, ‘I thought it was a bird, but it was really a fish.’ Or, an example from (Plato’s) Socrates: ‘I thought Shaq was tall and I was short, but then I saw the 8′ 6″ person, and the 3’ 9″ person, and now I realize that “tall” and “short” are never absolute terms.’ In a morally similar way, launching a war to gain resources for one’s community/people/self is a categorical misunderstanding of ‘resource’, ‘property’, ‘violence’, and so on, but the malice towards the other community is, at root, not really ‘malicious’.
(I still don’t know – maybe never will decide for ‘sure’ – whether I think Plato means for his provocation in this instance really to lead one this way or that, in the way that I’m sure, from textual evidence, that Plato means for his condemnations of writing, poetry, and democracy to be taken, or to work, ironically.)
‘No person does an evil thing knowingly’ surely hardly has much to do with Christianity, though – it’s a terrible spiritual-knowledge foundation from which to control a community in this world!!
There is a way to think the thought of a Creator and created entities – the Socratic provocation: there is no real disobedience, sin, or evil.
There is categorical error. For example, ‘I thought it was a bird, but it was really a fish.’ Or, an example from (Plato’s) Socrates: ‘I thought Shaq was tall and I was short, but then I saw the 8′ 6″ person, and the 3’ 9″ person, and now I realize that “tall” and “short” are never absolute terms.’ In a morally similar way, launching a war to gain resources for one’s community/people/self is a categorical misunderstanding of ‘resource’, ‘property’, ‘violence’, and so on, but the malice towards the other community is, at root, not really ‘malicious’.
(I still don’t know – maybe never will decide for ‘sure’ – whether I think Plato means for his provocation in this instance really to lead one this way or that, in the way that I’m sure, from textual evidence, that Plato means for his condemnations of writing, poetry, and democracy to be taken, or to work, ironically.)
‘No person does an evil thing knowingly’ surely hardly has much to do with Christianity, though – it’s a terrible spiritual-knowledge foundation from which to control a community in this world!!
I see the logic, but I think it’s a mistaken form of theodicy. Ultimately, Christian theology (well, most of it at least) is less concerned with what rules God made than with how man has dealt with those rules. Of course God *could* have made a fully predestined world (and various Calvinists would argue that God did, believing that God is a rather cruel God — and liking it), but the usual idea is that God didn’t, and therefore man really is fully accountable for actions down here on terra firma.
“No person does an evil thing knowingly.”
This, actually, is a pretty central idea to Catholic doctrine.
I’m serious. I wish there weren’t centuries of history suggesting Catholicism has preferred/still prefers domination to liberation.
Is it more creative to perceive sin and do it or to perceive sin and forgo it? Which is greater freedom?
Where in “Catholic doctrine” can this Socratic assertion be found defended? I don’t mean the name of a theologian or book; I mean a substantial quotation in which a Catholic thinker argues that a really sinful act is committed ‘freely’ but without knowledge that it is sinful, disobedient to God’s will, evil.
(In the case that a person did do an evil thing without knowledge of the difference between good and evil, there would be no question of Judgement, damnation, or Salvation – no disobedience of God’s will had been committed. In what sense, from a Catholic point of view, had that person actually sinned or done anything ‘evil’?)
Why is the term “liberation” mentioned with respect to the threat of eternal damnation? The theology of “liberation” has to do with the Church’s role in a worldly emancipation from political-economically produced suffering, not with shepherding souls towards eternal Salvation.
The ‘creation’ and ‘freedom’ are in the understanding that an act is a ‘sin’.
Once obedience to God’s will stands before an agent as the criterion known to that agent for God’s Judgement of that agent’s action – that is, once an agent is blameworthily capable of disobeying God – , there’s no more or less “freedom” to do or not do the act. This is why a ‘freely’ chosen act, whether to sin or not to sin, entails either a) creation (of evil) by an agent in a world where God is not the source of evil; or b) a God that participates in the evil in the world (for which sinful action the ‘freely’ choosing agent is blamed).
postitbreakup’s theodicy isn’t concerned with the rules themselves, but rather with the fact that ‘dealing with’ them is an imposition, that even to exist in the ruled world is to owe a debt of obedience.
If a person were “fully accountable” for obedience to God’s rules, then that person would account for the rules themselves.
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What can also be said, with respect to ‘accountability’ (and therefore ‘freedom’), is that the rules are contrary to the nature of the agents. – for example: one’s covetousness, to be self-curtailed under obedience to the rules against coveting what is naturally desired.
It’s as though God put before created entities a bowl of chocolate pudding and a bowl of shit and said, “Eat! – but if you eat the one you’re programmed to prefer, I’ll burn you.” — entities both unfree and punished for wanting (as well as for actively choosing, if they opt for the chocolate that they’re not ‘free’ not to prefer).
– I think, presumptuously, that this, too, is what postitbreakup means by “asshole”.
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Best regards for you all,
Looking forward to your visiting.
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