Dear John

Dear John,

Whether your surname is Calvin, Piper, or something else, you’ve come to stand for hurt, abuse, and oppression. Your ideas, whether you meant for them to or not, have been used to cause more harm than good. You’ve taken things way too far in the wrong direction. You’ve decided that you know best for everyone. There shouldn’t be any questions. No room for dissent. We shouldn’t retire and we shouldn’t take a day off. We’ve got a world to save, after all. If that’s really how you feel, then, I’d like to call it quits.

It’s not me, it’s you. No, really. Somebody’s got to hold you responsible for this nonsense. It’s not your job to save the world. Never was. Never will be. It’s not your job to tell me how to live my life either. And it’s certainly not your job to question every. single. idea. or inspiration that I come up with. Gaslighting women is not a feature of godly manhood. I don’t know where you got the idea that you were running the show or smarter than everyone else, but it certainly wasn’t the Holy Scriptures.

Speaking of the Holy Scriptures, have you read them? In their entirety? Without the lens of your corrupted, biased agenda? Your words and actions indicate that perhaps you have not. Systematic theology has robbed you of the ability to let the words and the authors and the stories stand on their own. You can’t read any text of Scripture without milking it for proof of your pre-existing ideas and notions. You’ve missed so much. You’re so blind. I wonder if your willful insistence on seeing things that aren’t there can ever be cured.

Even if you can’t be, I hope that I’ll be cured one day. My only shot stems from the fact that I was not raised in your abominable culture or belief system. I had a foundation that you couldn’t touch laid by the Lord himself and his faithful servants. You’d like to be counted among them, but from where I sit, you never will be. Not with that attitude. Not with righteous venom spewing from your lips, sowing seeds of doubt in the hearts of all genuine believers who don’t fit your mold. 

Who do you think you’re protecting? Certainly not God Almighty? Really? Did he ask for your sword?

The thing that you don’t get is that God doesn’t need your protection. God does not need you to defend or prove him to the world. He’s quite capable of doing that himself. He asked for your sword on behalf of the hungry, the orphan, and the widow. But, at least in the United States,  you’ve turned that against them with your politics and pandering to demigods. Hit too close to home? Good. I’m done pulling punches.

The church is robbed of her beauty, mystery, and goodness when your voice is the loudest. She cannot hear the voice of her God when you’re casting doubt on every utterance that comes from his mouth. She cannot care for the least of these when you question their worthiness to receive help. She cannot meet the confused and outcast where they are when you insist that they get their act together and agree with your ideological and theological premises to be welcome amongst you. 

She cannot shout the rallying cry of freedom when you shackle her with chains of oppression and gag half her members for the audacity of being female.

Frankly, I’m disgusted by you. I’m grieved by your indifference and your lust for power. I’m confused by your disdain for those who are different from you and your all-but-hatred for me and my sisters. I’m wounded by your fear.

What are you so afraid of?

It all comes down to this, for me. It seems that you’re afraid of any number of things and so you grasp for control. Control of ideas. Control of circumstances. Control of theology. Control of the lives of those you lead. Control of outcomes. It’s all an illusion. You can’t control any of that, but you tell yourself that you can and that, if you do, everything will be okay. Whatever you’re afraid of won’t happen. What do you think will happen if you’re not in control? Will the body of Christ be a little more diverse, a little more welcoming, and a little less oppressive? Perhaps we’ll be wrong about some things, but who's to say that your way is more right? I’d wager we’re already wrong about some things, so why not just be a little kinder?

Because you’re afraid.

Because somewhere along the way, you told yourself that if you were wrong about God, then you would go to hell. You believed that it was your ideas or your theology that saved you. Did you forget about the thief on the cross? Do you really think that he had his Christology or soteriology straight? Did he even know the meaning of those words? Or did he recognize the King of Glory when he saw him and asked to be welcomed in? And what did the King of Glory say? “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

Your ideas don’t save you. Your right actions don’t save you. Your allegiance does and I wish that you would understand that. I wish you’d let yourself let the agendas go and be who you were made to be: free. You weren’t meant to carry the weight of correcting everyone’s theology and keeping women from doing anything but reproducing. You weren’t meant to be the king of the world- it already has one and he suffers no rivals.

Alas, I fear that you’ll never learn your lesson. I tried to teach you for over ten years. I tried to help you see. But because I wasn’t a white man and because I threatened and challenged your neat little ideological framework, you didn’t care to hear. You cast me out and, had it been but a few hundred years earlier, you would have burned me at the stake. I have no doubts about this final point: you would have killed me like you killed all the prophets before me. You think that you hold the keys to the kingdom, but you’re trapped in a hell of your own making.

So, goodbye for good. And I mean that in every sense possible: both the finality of the statement and the hope that there is something better out there. Let me know if you’re ever ready to listen. As Queen Taylor says, “We are never, ever getting back together,” but I would like to teach you a better way, if you’ll hear it.

Sincerely,

Em