Suppose for a moment that the Christianity we were raised with can be understood as resembling an onion. Lately A and I have been talking about how if one makes the effort to stay a constant learner in life, one is always encountering the next layer of the onion, as it were. Our onion of faith, I believe, is meant to grow as we grow; our capacity, understanding and sphere of acceptance enlarges. We can look back upon all the layers we have passed through, but we cannot look into a layer which has not yet grown upon us with any genuine understanding of it.
A has always had a large capacity of acceptance for other views than his own within Christianity. As he has actively been studying theology the past few years, that capacity has enlarged more and more. We’ve both long been aware that the conservative evangelical “package deal” we were sold as new believers in Jesus Christ is no longer acceptable to us as thinking citizens of the 21st century. In fact, we’ve come closer and closer to the view that Christ Himself is the “package deal”, and pretty much everything else is negotiable.
This view, though perfectly orthodox and held widely by educated Christians, does set us in direct opposition to those fundamentalists who hold that the Bible is a “flat book” requiring literal interpretation; that God as represented in the OT is not a “missionary God” meeting a violent and primitive society in a form they would understand and moving them along from it, but remains a wrathful Jehovah; that Jesus is not, as he himself states, the best representation of the Father that we have, but that we have to “integrate” OT genocide into our understanding of the character of a loving God; that the NT is not truly a new and different Covenant superseding the old, obsolete one, but that selected bits of the OT are somehow still binding on people and cultures separated from it by thousands of years, miles, and cultural advancements.
Having passed through many of those layers of belief ourselves over the years, or at least encountered them first-hand, we can look into and understand their layer of the onion, but we can’t expect them to be able to understand the one we now live from, which is outside of their capacity. In one sense, this brings a personal calm and a peace in that we really don’t need to argue with or defend our views to those who are incapable of relating to them. On the other hand, I’m aware this language sounds condescending and holier-than-thou, rather than a simple statement of fact. How to get past this?
To illustrate: I think most people are aware of the problem that fundamentalist Christians face when they have home-schooled their children in a way that insulates them from mainstream society-- and then the child wishes to get a degree. Yes, there are fundamentalist colleges and Universities in the United States, but seldom elsewhere, and those degrees are often not accredited in the “real world”. Say Sally wants to become a missionary doctor; she will have to attend a “worldly” University to do so. The great fear among fundamentalists is that Sally will open herself up to “the godlessness of science”, be confronted with “strange doctrines” and thereby “lose her faith” (i.e., no longer accept the type of onion she grew up in as the only authentic one). And it is true that this often, naturally enough, happens.
Let’s employ our imaginations for a moment.
Imagine that Sally has grown up surrounded by small, firm, yellow onions. She was always told “We are onions; this is what defines an onion; this is what an onion believes and how it looks; don’t let anyone deceive you!” When Sally goes to a Christian University, she encounters some of the small yellow onions she is accustomed to, but she’s also confronted with much larger, and some oddly-shaped, onions. Some are yellow, but some are white, and some are even (gasp!) purply red!
If Sally attends a secular University, she will immediately join the local Christian Club (under whatever name it goes). But here, and in her “worldly” life ahead as a doctor, she will eventually encounter not only all sizes and colors of what she recognizes as onions, but several types of shallots! And leeks, and scallions! And even a few disreputable-looking bulbs of garlic!! (Let’s not even mention the chives.) All of these vegetables claim to be onions too. What is a fundamentalist to do?!
If Sally is healthy, she will grow a few new layers. In doing this she must distance herself from the layers she has outgrown, but they are still a part of her journey. One cannot “un-know” something once known, and each layer has redeemable good in it. Sally will always be able to look back into them and understand their viewpoint, in a way that those who still live from those layers will never be able to understand the layer she is living from now. Why? Not because they are stupid and wrong, but simply because it is outside their sphere of experience, acceptance and understanding.
That’s why argumentation and logic really don’t work when interacting with fundamentalists (of any stripe). Small yellow onions do not even recognize a leek as being one of the family of onions; how can they ever learn anything from a godless leek? And why did Sally listen to one? In their opinion, Sally has abandoned the true faith and gone beyond what an onion is allowed to think or be. All Sally can do is live from her layer back toward the other layers lovingly, and hope that her example is attractive enough to draw some of them forward into a bigger, juicier, more eye-wateringly expansive life.
Way back in my Bible College days, one professor (who was actually quite fundamentalist in many of his views) often told us, “All truth is God’s truth.” We don’t have to be afraid of new advances in science, or new sociological stages, or the fact that quite disreputable people, or people of other religions than our own, sometimes “get it right”. All truth is God’s truth. I don’t have to defend God against anything true, for he is the Author of all truth. If my faith is built on things that cannot stand in the light of truths outside its sphere, then it’s about time I left it behind and find a bigger sphere to live from.
Jesus promised us life, and that more abundantly. I suspect that, if we will allow it, the onion just keeps getting bigger. We don’t lose the layers that we built upon, but we no longer live from there, either. And we can joyfully embrace all Alliums, without having to agree with them in every point. Do we identify as onions? Do we have Jesus Christ at the core of our onion stem? Then we are all in the onion bag together and can learn from each other.
