Tag Archives: The gospel

Dolly Parton: that rare and gentle thing

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(A brief interlude before we get to the greatest of Christianity’s Greatest Failures.)

I loved Dolly Parton. Since first hearing Jolene back in the early 1970s, and despite my aversion to country music (my dad’s kind of music), I felt sure this was a songwriter of some considerable talent. The ‘maxi-single’ of ‘Jolene’ released here in the UK had ‘Coat Of Many Colors’ and ‘Love Is Like a Butterfly’ on the B side: two other absolute gems. I went on to buy many of her albums and compilations, right up to the most recent.

When I first saw her on TV, I was very taken with Dolly’s appearance – that amazing flamboyance – as well as her wit and warmth. As a latent young, closeted gay man, her ample bosoms didn’t impress me much but it was impossible to ignore how beautiful she was. I watched her being interviewed whenever I could and was always impressed by her wisdom, energy and compassion. Occasionally she would talk about her faith and what it meant to her. Never did she seek to impose it on others, not even in the songs that referred to it. I was eventually fortunate enough to see her live, during her Blue Grass era, and experienced her dazzling stage presence and her performance of so many of iconic songs.

I mention all this because after her death last week the ghouls were out: evangelical Christians who declared she wasn’t a real Christian because something she said didn’t line up with their doctrine or because her support for LGBT+ people demonstrated how unsaved she really was. Didn’t she know that the Bible condemns such people and their flaunting of sinful lifestyles? How could she not know that she couldn’t be saved by good works or by mouthing platitudes that sounded Christian but really weren’t? Why did she support those mired in all manner of sin instead of pointing out how their sin would take them to the bowels of hell if they didn’t turn to Jesus? How could she not recognise biblical truth and preach an uncompromised gospel? And on and on.

Because, dear brood of vipers, she lived her faith. She was compassionate, non-judgemental, caring and giving. She redistributed much of her wealth, just as Jesus commanded. She was very much what he and the early cultists decreed a Christian should be. She didn’t get tangled up with doctrinal disputes but had a sense of what really mattered. Nor did she mention Jesus merely to promote her brand as some suggest, but because her faith was real to her. She was as genuine within as her outward appearance was artificial (‘it costs a lot of money to look this cheap’.) She was the opposite of the Christians who are now condemning her for what they claim was her ‘false faith’; they are whited sepulchres, heartless and pitiless within.

We need more Dolly Partons in the world, though I doubt we’ll see her like ever again. We would be far better off with fewer self-righteous bigots, of the kind who are now condemning her to hell.

PS. What was it you were saying, Don, about Christians being one big happy family, all saved by Jesus regardless of superficial differences? It sure doesn’t look that way to anyone with eyes to see.

There’s good news and there’s good news…

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Mark, Matthew and Luke all tells us that Jesus preached the gospel when he was alive (Mark 1.14-15; Matthew 4.23, 9.35 & 10.5-7; Luke 20.1). So what was this gospel? What was Jesus’ ‘good news’? He had yet to die so it couldn’t possibly have been ‘you can be saved through my death and resurrection’ because this magic formula had yet to be arrived at by those who came later. Nor could it have been ‘accept my substitutionary atonement whereby I take the punishment you deserve in order to restore your relationship with God,’ for much the same reason. Nor could it have been, ‘you must accept me as your personal your saviour if you want to gain everlasting life in Heaven,’ because he didn’t regard himself in this way and he didn’t, according to the synoptic gospels, offer an eternity in Heaven. No, Jesus’ good news could not have been any of these because they are all later developments, mumbo-jumbo invented about him by others, not things he said himself .

Actually we needn’t speculate on what the good news was that Jesus preached because the gospels tell us: God was going to intervene in history very soon, rescuing his people from Gentile rule and setting up his Kingdom, in which he, Jesus, would be judge and king (Matt 24.27-34 & 25.31; Luke 1.33; 21.25-28). People, he said, referring only to Jewish people, should prepare themselves for this coming Kingdom by mending their ways (Matthew 10.5-6).

How soon would all this happen? In the lifetime of his hearers according to Mark 9.1, Matthew 16.28 and Luke 9.27, maybe even within a few weeks or months. When sending out the disciples to spread his good news he promised them, ‘you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of man comes (to usher in the new Kingdom)’ (Matthew 10.23). We can only assume that the disciples are back by now – in fact they return a few verses later – yet the Son of man still hasn’t materialised among the clouds in full view of ‘the tribes’ of the Earth (Matthew 24.30).

As the Bible records, Jesus was wrong in every respect; God did not set up his new Kingdom within the lifetime of those Jesus spoke to; the Son of man did not appear; the Romans were not overthrown; Jesus was not appointed judge and king of the world. The sarcastic inscription on his cross, ‘King of the Jews’, was the closest he came to having his self-aggrandising prophecy realised.

Is this the Jesus that Christians worshipped subsequently and still worship today? It ought to be as he’s the one revealed in the first three gospels. But the Jesus believers carry around in their heads is not this man. The ‘Jesus’ worshipped by Christians is primarily a construct of Paul’s – his ‘Christ’ – and their own collective imaginations. The mythical ‘Christ’ that Paul ‘did not receive from any man’, has replaced and almost obliterated Yeshua and his mistaken beliefs about the coming Kingdom (though Paul held on to the idea that it was indeed imminent; see 1 Thessalonians 4.15-17).

Admittedly ‘the Christ’ has had a far better shelf-life than Yeshua could ever have had on his own; the continual resurrection of the idea in the minds of believers – and only there – has ensured the perpetuation of the myth. When all is said and done, however, the Christ is nothing more than an imaginative recreation of a failed zealot with an altogether different gospel.* Yeshua’s good news of the Kingdom died shortly after he did and like him has stayed dead, its echoes preserved by Mark, Matthew and Luke and ignored by Christians everywhere.

* I’m aware there is a body of thought that gives primacy to the mythical god-man, ‘the Christ’, with the Jesus stories being seen as a later ‘in-fill’ designed to provide him with a plausible back-story. I’m not convined of this for several reasons, which I’ll explore at a later date.