Revisiting the New Testament (plus: how theologian Dr John MacArthur created a Hell Field for me to live in) (January 22, 2022, the severed branch)
Almost two decades after abandoning fundamentalist Christianity, I finally reread the New Testament
Above: Muckross Abbey in Killarney National Park, Ireland (November 2021)
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Eighteen years ago, as a high schooler, I embarked on a journey for the salvation of my soul. I wrote long posts on the Internet about how women shouldn’t wear bikinis or short skirts because this could tempt a man to masturbate. They would then be as guilty of this sin as the man was of committing it. But after nine months of isolated Christian fanaticism, I finally gave in to the temptations of the world, which I lacked the strength to resist. As Jesus tells us, if your hand causes you to sin, you must cut it off, and so I had hacked away all of my friends who claimed to be Christians but went on sinning against the Lord. I told them they would burn in Hell, and I wasn’t going to go there with them. Yet I was sure that my sexuality and lust had already condemned me to the flames. But I lacked the fortitude to resist these longings, even though I was certain they would destine me to eternal punishment in a literal lake of fire.
I ultimately failed in my endeavor to save my soul by avoiding both sins and wicked companions. It had proven impossible to resist my need for companionship. I returned to my friends, telling myself I was still a Christian. And then, under their influence, I was an atheist within three years. Now, nearly two decades later, I have been engaged in a reflective re-reading of the New Testament. A couple questions have found me along the way. Which passages most influenced my extremist behavior? Was there something in the teaching of Jesus that I overlooked, something that could have prevented me from falling so far away from God? Did I not understand the Gospel?
It was St. Paul the Apostle who wrote about the importance of not being “unequally yoked” to non-believers in 2 Corinthians 6. “For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?”* And it was Pastor Dave Wilson at Kensington, a southeast Michigan megachurch, who emailed that passage to me when I asked him if it was okay for me to be dating an atheist. The influence of this email both contributed to the end of my first relationship while also forming the foundation of the next twelve months of my life. I would only be friends with those I deemed to be true Christians. I would avoid those so-called “Christians” who claimed to love Jesus but did not follow his commandments. My social life would center upon the Church, lest I be dragged down into the mud of sin by the atheistic and sexually perverted people around me.
Realizing I had been unequally yoked for nearly the entirety of my life, I was suddenly anxious to purify my mind. So while reading the whole of the New Testament, I also read The Gospel According to Jesus by Dr. John MacArthur, a pastor of Grace Community Church in California. Another passage from the New Testament, this one the words of Jesus rather than St. Paul, helps form the foundation of that work.
Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inside they are ravening wolves. From their fruits you will know them…. Thus every good tree produces good fruits, but the rotten tree produces bad fruits. A good tree cannot bear bad fruits, and a rotten tree produces bad fruits. Every tree that does not bear good fruits is cut down and thrown into the fire. So from their fruits you will know them. Not everyone who says to me Lord Lord will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in Heaven. (Matthew) (italics mine)*
As Dr. MacArthur argues in his book, according to Jesus, the multitude of “Christians” who call Jesus their Lord but do not actually live according to his commandments will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. “If you love me,” Jesus says in John, “you will keep my commandments.” And again: “He who has my commandments and keeps them, this is the one who loves me…. If anyone loves me, he will do as I say.” He will, in other words, “bear fruit.” Jesus further elaborates on this teaching with the parable of the vine in the Gospel of John.
I am the true vine, and my father is the grower. Every branch which bears no fruit he takes off, and every one that does bear fruit he keeps clean so that it may bear more fruit…. I am the vine, you are the branches. The one who stays with me as I with him is the one who bears much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. If one does not stay with me, he is cast out like the branch, and dries up, and they gather these and they throw them in the fire, and they burn…. If you keep my commandments, you will stay in my love.*
From a young age, I had been taught that all I had to do was repent of my sins and ask Jesus into my heart, and then I would be saved from Hell and be given eternal life in Heaven. No one ever told me anything about “good fruit.” I simply had to believe. Thus I had been formulaically “saved” and “reborn” many times. I had answered the calls of pastors and youth ministers by walking down the aisle during church services. I had stood up crying around campfires during summertime Bible camps. But then I understood that it is one thing to say a series of words, and it is another to truly believe them. If I had truly believed them, if I had sincerely repented and been reborn, then I would not have been such a vile sinner.
Dr. MacArthur forced me to ponder the question of whether my faith up to that point had really yielded any of this fruit. It hadn’t. I had habitually used the Lord’s name in vain around my friends. I had sworn and used foul language. By sucking a friend’s dick and relishing its girth, I had given into the perverted temptations with which the Devil inflicted me. I had masturbated and looked lustfully upon the people around me. Thus I had committed adultery with dozens of girls at school, as Jesus says in Matthew: “I tell you that any man who looks at a woman so as to desire her has already committed adultery in his heart.” And every day, by being unequally yoked, I had surrounded myself with people who were so wicked that they thought all of this behavior was completely acceptable.
My brain was flooded with nightmares about the hour when I would finally come to Jesus to be judged. I would tell him I had called him Lord. I would remind him that I stood up around the campfire at Spring Hill, a Midwestern Bible camp, and repented of my sins. I would tell him I had believed. I would beg him to let me into Heaven. “And he will answer to you,” says Jesus in Luke, “‘I do not know where you came from…. Go away from me, all you workers of iniquity.’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
I imagined the great space that would stretch between me and Jesus as he and my parents looked sadly at me while I burned in Hell. I dwelled on the passage in Luke in which a man who is being tormented in Hades can see Abraham in Heaven. He begs for water. “There is a great chasm fixed between us and you,” responds the prophet, “so that those who wish to cross over to you are not able to, nor can they cross from there to us.” He begs Abraham to at least send someone to warn his brothers, still alive, so they might repent and be saved. No, says Abraham. They already have the Scriptures to warn them, but they will not listen to those.
“Lord, Lord,” I would plead with Jesus on my hands and knees, kissing his feet and touching his robe, begging him to let me into Heaven. But he would remember the way I licked that penis, the way I dreamed about those girls, the frequency with which I masturbated as a teenager. “I do not know you,” he would say, “you worker of iniquity.” But I believe, I would insist. Then he would quote to me the words of James 2: “You believe there is one God? You do well to do so. Even the demons believe this, and they shudder.” He would throw me into what I imagined from Revelation to be a literal lake of eternal flames, in which I would burn for billions of years. My parents, overjoyed at finally being in Heaven with God, would soon forget about me. After all, I had once asked my mother if she would kill me like Abraham almost killed his son, should God ask her to do so. “Yes,” she said solemnly. “We have to follow God’s commandments.”
As Jesus says elsewhere in Luke: “If someone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” In my case, it was my friends who were the problem. I would never be able to combat my sexual perversions and live according to God’s commandments if I continued being unequally yoked to these children of Satan. So I withdrew into a teenage monkhood. I spent all my free time reading books by fundamentalist theologians like John MacArthur and RC Sproul and posting my interpretations of the Scriptures to forums on Christianity.com. I composed lengthy diatribes online against women who wore short skirts and low-cut shirts. I pondering the Word of God through daily readings of the New Testament. I wrote essays against masturbation on my Xanga, “The Midnight Crusader.” I was eager to clarify, according to long lists of mostly sexual sins that I derived from the Scriptures, who was and wasn’t truly a Christian. It was as if I never even read Jesus’s repeated entreaties against judging others.
To save my soul, I did what I could to stop masturbating. I found a Christian website, LivingWaters.com, that helped people overcome addiction. Its philosophy was grounded in the words of Jesus from the Gospel of John: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. For one who believes in me, as the Scripture says, streams of living water shall flow from deep within him.” I had not been drinking of the Lord. I had been quenching my thirst through the pursuit of sexual perversions and lust. I had thought this worldly water would satisfy me. And yet, as Jesus also says in John: “Whoever drinks from this water will be thirsty again; but he who drinks from the water I shall give him shall not be thirsty forever more, but the water I shall give him will turn him into a spring of water jetting up into everlasting life.” If I was still thirsty for masturbation, this website suggested, it was because I was not truly drinking from the water Christ gives me. I lacked the “spring of water jetting up into everlasting life,” so I kept crawling back to the pleasures of the flesh. And if I didn’t have Christ’s water inside me, then was I truly saved at all?
I signed up for a forty-day program in which I hoped to overcome this struggle and attain true salvation. Each day, I drank from the waters of Christ by reading biblical passages and submitting reflections to my mentor, a 30-something man who was eager to volunteer to hear confessions like mine. I explained to him how these passages would help me stop thirsting for orgasm. But I was never able to go more than a few days. Every time I gave in, I emailed the man online to tell him I had masturbated again. Eventually, he kicked me out of the program. “Your heart is not truly with God yet,” he wrote to me.
Rereading the Gospels now, almost two decades later, I am left asking myself why it is that I became so obsessed with the sins of sensuality. Other than the passage about adultery of the heart, and another in which he discusses marriage as being between “male and female,” Jesus is nearly completely silent about sexuality. Granted, he vaguely references “fornications” in Matthew, although he also informs the legalistic and self-righteous Pharisees that “harlots” will go to Heaven before they do. Yet I had interpreted all his lectures about true faith and good fruit as necessitating the complete suppression of virtually all my carnal desires outside marriage.
Yes, Jesus is quite clear that those who truly love him will follow his commands, thus yielding good fruit. But his universal commandments are almost always centered on the central theme of love, the most crucial fruit of all. When the Pharisees test him about the Scriptures, they ask him: “Master, in the law, which is the great commandment?”
[Jesus] said: That you shall love the Lord your God in all your heart and all your spirit and all your mind. That is the great commandment, and the first. There is a second, which is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments all the law and the prophets depend.*
This same theme emerges in the Gospel of John. “This is my commandment,” Jesus tells his followers, “that you love each other as I loved you. No one has greater love than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Yet for multitudes of Christians, there has historically been an obsessive fixation on sexuality and fornication, with plenty of hate to enforce the rules.
I think back on the passage in Luke which haunted me so much. I mean the one in which the man is looking out across a great chasm from Hell, pleading with Abraham to give him water. It is not this man’s sexuality which Jesus emphasizes when telling this story. Instead, it is the fact that he is a rich man who every day walked right past a beggar named Lazarus. Once they are both dead, the beggar is in Heaven, and the rich man is in Hell. So it wasn’t that this rich man fornicated with someone. It was that he loved his money more than he loved his neighbor. As Jesus says in Matthew, you cannot serve both God and money, or “mammon.”
I am beginning to suspect that the widespread legalistic perversion of the Gospels into a vehicle for sexual repression finds one of its bases in the writings of the Apostle Paul. The Protestant Reformation rebelled against the corruption of the Catholic Church. This was an institution which Protestants such as Martin Luther and John Calvin claimed had obfuscated the message of the Gospel by veiling it behind idolatry, papal infallibility, and indulgences. Yet perhaps the rot begins not with the degeneracy of the popes and bishops but rather with the ministry of St. Paul in the decades after Jesus died.
Recall that it was St. Paul with whom this discussion began. It was he, not Jesus, who told Christians to not be “unequally yoked” to non-believers lest they be dragged into sin. “For what fellowship hath light with darkness?” And it was this which I took as my example. In another world, I could have just as easily taken Jesus instead of St. Paul as my example. It was Jesus who, baffling the Pharisees, made a great show of dining and partying with the types of people I imagined that I needed to cast out of my life entirely.
But unlike Jesus, St. Paul is quite loud about the wickedness of lust. His obsessive condemnations of sexual immorality - “lechery,” “unchastity,” - are sprinkled throughout the New Testament ( Galatians 5:19; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; Colossians 3:5; Ephesians 5:3). He is consumed by a sexualized detestation for everything related to “the flesh.” As he recounts the corruption of mankind in a letter to the Christians of Rome in Romans 1, he makes clear his position on gayness.
They exchanged the truth of God for falsehood, and they worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is to be praised forevermore. Amen. Because of this God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. For their females changed their natural relations into what is against nature; and so likewise the males, forsaking the natural intercourse with the female, were inflamed with desire for each other, males for males, acting shamefully and receiving the retribution due them for their misguided ways…. though they knew well about the verdict of God, that those who do such things deserve death, nevertheless [they] not only do them but encourage others who do.*
And in his first letter to the Christians of Corinth, St. Paul is eager to remind them just how narrow is the path that leads to Heaven.
Or do you not know that wrongdoers shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither lechers nor idolators nor adulterers nor effeminates nor pederasts nor thieves nor the covetous, none who are drunken or abusive or rapacious, shall inherit the Kingdom of God.*
Add “drunkenness” to the list of sins I kept to assess who was and wasn’t a true Christian. Puzzling for someone who worshiped a man who famously turned water into wine at a wedding (which my Baptist pastor told me was really just non-alcoholic grape juice). Anyway, clearly it is St. Paul, not Jesus, who harbored an impulsive fixation on sexuality. It seems unfortunate that St. Paul’s writings were admitted into the Bible. One is left wondering at a parallel universe where the focus simply remained on Jesus as he is presented in the four major Gospels.
My own religion was rooted in the teachings of St. Paul and Dr. MacArthur, rather than in the teachings of Jesus. And yet the defenders of St. Paul have an easy loophole, as the fundamentalists always do. Christ’s first commandment is not to love your neighbor as yourself (that is the second one), but rather to love the Lord your God with all your heart. And since God, as St. Paul tells us, despises all sexual perversions of his initial male-female design, no one who truly loves God would defile themselves by rebelling against this arrangement. As Jesus himself explains in Matthew, “the creator made them male and female, and said: Because of this, a man will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife.” Thus by definition, homosexuality works against what God intends for human relationships. This is the kind of stuff that now prevents me from holding any belief that Christian morality is the result of divine inspiration rather than the design of highly fallible men. I simply cannot believe that these things are wrong. Nor can I believe that an all-powerful and infinitely good God would carelessly confuse his votaries by allowing this nonsense to corrupt his Word. It was after all thanks to these Scriptures that I took my own engagement in such sins as absolute proof that I didn’t really love God.
So I was outwardly confident about my own salvation, condemning everyone around me as insufficiently Christian. But thanks to my readings of the Scripture, I knew that on the inside I was just as much a sinner as the rest of them. And so I was certain I was going to burn in Hell.
As a teenager, I could only sustain this level of social isolation and sexual repression for so long. Not to mention the sheer terror that would paralyze me whenever I was struck with the apprehension of Hell. Just after my seventeenth birthday, I abruptly abandoned my fanaticism and rejoined my old group of friends, who were pleased to write this whole long episode off as just a phase. I gradually gave into a growing list of fleshly pleasures, eventually even drunkenness and sexual deviance. I let myself be influenced by the “lukewarm” Christians and heathens around me. And then, after three years, I declared myself an atheist.
Strangely, it is only now in my godlessness that I perceive the true simplicity of the Gospel, which St. Paul and St. James and Dr. MacArthur and many others have corrupted over the ages. By focusing so much on whether my actions were indicative of “true faith,” I was doubting the power of Christ’s blood to vindicate me before God. I avoided others because they were sinners, which I took to mean that their faith was weak rather than that they were simply imperfect mortals like me. I fantasized that I would be able to overcome my own sins, upon which I would have the kind of faith that would save my soul. I read two dozen books that year by prominent theologians, I read and reread the Scriptures, I wrote the newsletter for the North Auburn Hills Baptist Church youth group, and I endeavored in this way to reassure myself that I had the kind of faith that saves. But faith is belief without evidence, and here I was requiring proof of my faith from my actions. I was trying to save myself rather than letting Jesus’s sacrifice save me. This is the “fruit” of hate and doubt that springs forth from the teachings of false prophets, perhaps including Dr. MacArthur himself, not to mention the first among them all: St. Paul.
Having now read them again, I see that I missed the real message of the Gospels. That we are all hopeless sinners unable to save ourselves through good works, and it is only through faith in the blood of Christ that we can be saved. He was punished so we wouldn’t have to be. In that sense, there is no real purpose to the endless, Pharisee-like analysis of what does and doesn’t belong on the long list of sins. It misses the whole point. Yet it is a fixation which has completely obsessed Christians for centuries, from St. Paul in the first century to Dr. MacArthur in the twenty-first. They say “faith alone,” but then comes the endless lists of qualifications, many of them sexual or somehow related to gender.
My need for reassurance of my own salvation made me like Thomas in the Gospel of John. He needed to touch the holes in Jesus’s hands before he would really believe in the resurrection, and I needed to go 40 days without masturbating. I should have been like the robber who dies on the cross beside the Lord; he simply believes and nothing more. “Jesus,” the thief says in the Gospel of Luke, “remember me when you enter upon your kingdom.” “Truly I tell you,” responds Jesus, unhesitant in his forgiveness and love, “this day you will be with me in paradise.” But my faith never reached that level. I would have called this criminal a false Christian.
This was all apparently according to God’s design. According to Jesus, no human on their own can attain that sort of unquestioning faith in God. We are far too weak. We are far too sinful to open our hearts to the simplicity of the Gospel unless God intervenes to open our eyes and pull us toward him. “No one can come to me,” Jesus says in John, “unless the father who sent me pulls him…. No one can come to me unless it is given him from the father.” So this all could have actually been God’s purpose to harden my heart so that I would not understand. As Christ says later in John:
Why do you not understand what I say? Because you are not able to listen to my reasoning. The father you come from is the devil and you wish to do your father’s will…. This is why they could not believe, because Isaiah said, once more: ‘[God] has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so that they may not see with their eyes or understand with their hearts and be converted; for me to heal them.’*
It’s as if I saw the Scripture through the eyes of a devil rather than an angel. Or did I see it through the eyes of an analytical adult instead of those of a trusting child? What is it that Jesus says in Mark? “He who does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child may not enter into it.”
If I had from the beginning maintained the childlike faith that Christ seems again to praise in Matthew, unpolluted by endless legalistic analysis of what is and isn’t permitted by the Scriptures, would I still call Jesus my Lord and Savior today? Maybe. But it’s too late for that. Because even though my eyes can now perceive the simple message of the Gospels of faith and faith alone as the path to salvation, and of love as the only commandment that matters, my mind cannot accept the reality of the Lord’s existence. It is simply too obvious to me as I read them that the Scriptures are not the result of any divine inspiration. I am unwilling to repent by acknowledging that human beings are inherently sinful and wicked. Nor can I get around the brutality of the fact that there is no “Hell” in the Old Testament; it is from the loving Jesus that we first hear about people being casually tossed into “everlasting fire.” Yet even so, there is a terrifyingly primal instinct inside me that won’t let me feel surprised when one day I inevitably die and then gaze across the chasm from the flames, seeing Jesus on the other side in Paradise, wishing I had sought forgiveness and believed. It will be impossible on that long night to avoid the eternal torment. But I am a branch who was severed long ago, and I have already been cast into the fire.
*Bible quotations, except the “unequally yoked” passage in 2 Corinthians 6, are taken from the Richmond Lattimore translation of the New Testament. 2 Corinthians 6 is taken from the King James Version. Lattimore translates “unequally yoked” as “mismated.”