"Your Jesus is not from the Bible"

This week's "Comments on Comments" responds to someone accusing me of eschewing the "Jesus of the Bible" for one of my own making.

“Comments on Comments” is a Friday series here on Perspective Shift.

It’s an opportunity for me to comment on comments that people leave on my various social media channels. Sometimes absurd, sometimes offensive, and sometimes maybe even interesting!

I don’t respond too often to comments online both because it rarely yields a positive result, and because the limitations of the format make it challenging to respond with substance.

So on Fridays I’ll select some of the comments people have left me, share them with you, and offer a more robust engagement.

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TYPICAL CRITICISMS TOWARD PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANS

It’s not uncommon out here in progressive Christian world—especially those of us who’ve left or shifted away from evangelical Christianity—to be accused of things such as:

• Creating a God in our own image

• Rejecting the Bible in favor of fitting in with the culture

• Picking and choosing which Bible verses we want to pay attention to (and which to ignore)

I get comments of these varieties on my social media channels all the time and it’s always one part hilarious and one part infuriating. Hilarious because, well, let’s be honest, just about every human ever is guilty in some way shape or form of “creating a god in our own image.” And certainly every single Christian engages in cherry picking which verses of the Bible get the most attention, which ones are seen as primary, which ones are held as “applicable to today” and so on (in other words, we all “pick and choose”). And it’s hilarious because I’ve never once met a progressive Christian who set out with a goal of “fitting in with the culture” and, as a result, chose to abandon their long held religious convictions.

Comments like these are also a tad infuriating because they are often hurled at people such as myself with zero regard for who we are or where we’ve come from. Pure ignorance fuels comments like this. Most post- or ex- evangelicals I know have all achieved their “post” or “ex” status as a result of taking their faith more seriously, reading the Bible more intentionally, and pursuing an understanding of Jesus with more integrity.

Anyway, a while back I did a series of videos on Instagram and TikTok wherein I responded to the many allegations that I am things such as: False Prophet, Heretic, Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, and so on.

In this video I respond to accusations that I’m not really a Christian. In short, I suggest that people are right when they say that, but only because what they mean is that I’m not a Christian in the way that they are (which is usually fundamentalist and/or evangelical).

Yeah. No duh. I’m not that kind of Christian.

Anyway, here was one person’s comment on my video: