Over twenty years ago, I started writing a book (I use this phrase loosely because the book was never published) called “The Bastard God and the Prodigious God” or “The Bastard God” for short. Bastard, of course, is another word for “illegitimate.” At the ripe old ages of 17-22, I slowly became convinced that the God of my childhood was a bastardized, illegitimate, pale imitation of the real God—the God of unconditional love, the God of grace, the God who is the prodigal father. Prodigal means extravagant and the way the parable of the Prodigal son was retold to me in my late teens or early twenties emphasized the prodigal father’s lavish love. My entire God-concept shifted.
I had grown up believing on the one hand that God is love, but that love was mitigated by strict rules, my failure to adhere to those rules, never feeling good enough, never measuring up, living in a state of perpetual guilt that devolved into wretched shame and self-hatred. There were times when I felt God’s love directed toward me. Times when I experienced a sense of forgiveness especially administered through sunrise, sunset, storm clouds and rainbows. And yet, by the time I was seventeen I was screaming at God, “What do you want from me? When is it enough? When have I done enough? When am I enough?” this is a direct quote from that book I was writing, and it probably came straight out of my seventeen-year-old self’s journal.
I was depressed and anxious from ages 18-22, diagnosed probably closer to the age of 19, and put myself in therapy and on medication for around two years, maybe three.
The shift in my God-concept came through a combination of therapy, Bible college lectures, decent Bible study groups (related to Baxter Kruger’s concept of Perichoresis), reading quality books, and through more deeply intimate relationships with people. In therapy I talked about guilt and shame using the Christianese term “condemnation.” I talked about sexual trauma, my relationships with my parents, and essentially religious trauma, without using that label at the time. Meanwhile, at Bible college, I took courses in Theology, New Testament, Old Testament, Christology, and Creative Living. These are the subjects that stand out to me because I had the same Professor for all of them and he had the most radical understanding of grace I have ever encountered. The majority of his own teachings came from his studies of Karl Barth / Barthian theology. This Professor taught me my new favorite verse, “Therefore there is now no condemnation (insert guilt and shame here) for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8:1. He taught me:
“Doesn’t matter what you oughta
You’re still God’s daughter &
It doesn’t matter what you’ve done
You’re still God’s son.”
I collapsed when I heard that during my first week of Bible college. I collapsed emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. This concept was backed up by powerful scriptures like Ephesians chapter 1, in which the human race is blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. We are not meant to feel like utter failures, we are meant to feel unconditionally loved by God.
My God-concept that had me tangled up in knots about not being good enough for anyone, let alone for God, collapsed as well. I realized the God I had believed in as a child was a bastard. Illegitimate. When I used that word in front of friends, they were deeply offended. What if they still believed in that God? I eventually stopped using the word and stopped writing the book.
But my God-concept started to include the idea that God loves and forgives everyone for everything all the time. Salvation, in my mind, became about being saved from guilt, shame, and condemnation. It was no longer about who went to hell. It was about being saved from my sin—from the shame of it, from the pain of it, from the consequences of it, from the death it would bring, and from the suicidal depression it was proliferating inside of me.
I had friends who demonstrated the love of God toward me. My psychologist, for one. The young lady I moved in with who became my best friend. A guy I met through a Bible study group who taught me “The glory of God is [EDJ] fully alive…” quoting Irenaeus. He and I talked about “the bastard God” a lot. When I told him I was struggling with guilt over breaking my vow to God that I would read the Bible and pray every day for the rest of my life, he wrote this in an email:
“Exactly which ‘God’ did you make this vow to? The one you are coming to know, the relational, loving God we see in Jesus … who accepts you with open arms, has always wanted you, is pleased with you His precious beloved daughter, the apple of His eye, whom He loves watching and being with as she learns to first sit, then crawl, then stumble around as she finds her feet, until she is up and running? His joy in being a part of your life not only brings a smile to His face in your successes and failures, your triumphs and mistakes, but brings a tear to His eye, and a leaping of His heart. Or did you make that vow to the distant, silent God who you are barely ever good enough for, and won’t accept you unless you devote your life to suffering and boredom, while believing somehow this will bring you closer to him – who is supposedly love and joy? Which God was it [EDJ]? And if it was the second one you made the vow to, do you really think that the first one would give a stuff if you broke it? When all he has ever wanted is YOU – not what you can do, but you, yourself?”
Over my early adult years, I began to accept not only that God is unconditional love, but that God’s love is directed toward me lavishly, extending grace to the far reaches of my soul, healing shame, self-hatred, and self-recrimination. I needed this God-concept shift so that I could find psychological and emotion healing. Peace. Self-esteem and self-love.
This was the first stage of deconstruction and reconstruction for me. Deconstructing shame and reconstructing God-as-love, God-as-grace, God’s justice and judgment as equal to salvation, forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation.
Think about this for a minute. I stopped believing that God was out to punish the world. I began deconstructing the afterlife concepts of reward and punishment (heaven and hell). I started to believe that God wanted everyone to experience the same kind of love, forgiveness, grace and free-salvation that I was experiencing. That it was not by good works and deeds that we were saved, but grace alone (Ephesians 2:8). I memorized massive chunks of John, 1 John, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians—they became my favorite books of the Bible because they were so heavily grace- and love-based. I stopped believing God needed me to obey the ten commandments or do the “right thing” because this amounted to self-righteousness, failure, and shame. I no longer wanted to be a perfectionistic pharisee. I aimed to be as non-judgmental as I could possibly be. I had a new concept of God’s justice that was aimed toward helping the poor and needy, the oppressed and minorities, rather than focusing its attention on who is the “bad guy” or on punishing people. God’s justice is about tearing down unjust systems and creating more loving, grace-based ways of being and living for everyone.
I want to do justice-work from a place of already having received the just-grace of God in my own life. I don’t do good deeds and good work so that God will save me, or forgive me, or love me. I produce the natural fruit of love-as-justice because I’ve already encountered this love; this justice. I’ve already been saved, healed, forgiven, loved, adopted as a child of God. And so have you.
The Bastard-God, the God who needs you to do penance, to be sorry enough, to try harder, to be more righteous (self-righteous), to work harder and produce more fruit to prove you are a Christian, to prove you are worthy, and loved, and accepted – that’s not a God I believe in anymore. God doesn’t need perfection. God doesn’t need you to try. God doesn’t need anything from you. God loved you and saved you before you were born. It had nothing to do with your good works or bad works. It had nothing to do with your faith or your doubt. It had everything to do with God being love. God single-handedly saved the world. Even the Bible tells us that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Godself (2 Corinthians 5:19). Before the creation of the world, we were made holy and blameless (Ephesians 1:4). That’s our identity! There is no fear in love because fear has to do with punishment. There is no punishment.
This is the starting point. We produce good fruit, good deeds, good work, not because we have to, but because we get to. We are FREE to. We are loved so much that we want to spread the love. We are forgiven so much that we can’t help but forgive. We are saved so completely, that we want others to know there is no fear of punishment for them, either. We want justice when we see people being punished in this life on this earth—we seek to remove the punishing systems that enslave people, and liberate them: liberty and justice for all. We fight for justice not against people—the president or Epstein or whoever else—we fight for justice against systems of oppression, systems that oppose love, systems that are antithetical to grace!
We don’t have enemies. The old gospel—the gospel of the bastard God—was one of “us versus them.” In fact, it was one of us versus God. It told us we were “no good” sinners who needed to be saved by a God who could barely tolerate us, but dressed up that tolerance in quasi so-called “love.” God didn’t send Jesus to the world as punishment. God didn’t allow Jesus to die on the cross as a substitute for our punishment. There is no punishment coming from God for being human. There is only punishment from humans to other humans.
God became human to modify our ideas about fear and punishment and enemies. God came to earth to make a family. To unite with humanity. To become one of us. To join us, not to divide us. To make friends not enemies. To suffer human punishment, not God’s punishment. To say a divine “no” to human violence, by turning the other cheek and not retaliating. To say a divine “no” to having enemies by declaring “Father forgive them” and “love your enemies”—which really means, stop vilifying the “other” and turn your enemies into friends. Understand that there is grace and love and forgiveness for every “other” and every “enemy” and every BIPOC person, every 2SLGBTQIA person, every immigrant, every nation, and even the governing officials at the top of the world.
You have no enemies and there is no punishment.
There is only love.
Love doesn’t punish people. Love changes people.
Love doesn’t need you to change, but love will change you without violating you.
Love breeds more love.
Love looks like justice, not punishment. A total overhaul of the system. An inherent valuing of all human beings, with equity, and inclusion for all, without “othering,” “enemy-ing,” dehumanization, inequality, or exclusion.
To Hell with the bastard illegitimate god that tells us white cishet male has more worth and value than other human beings. To Hell with the versions of Christianity that oppress BIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA+ people. To Hell with racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, other-ing, hating, dehumanizing, disqualifying and exclusionary rhetoric.
“On earth as it is in heaven” to the God of the poor, the God of the weak, the God of the weary, the Black God, the Indigenous God, the Asian God, the feminine God, the transgender God, the pansexual God, the nonbinary God, the non-fascist, non-nationalist, non-American-exceptionalist, UNIVERSALLY ALL-INCLUSIVE God-of-love.
Amen.
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