Tag Archives: Brennan Manning

On being a bad feminist who tolerates all kinds of nonsense, but also having no patience for bad depictions of God’s love

Posted on May 20, 2020 by | 4 comments

bad feminist

Before I confess to being a bad feminist, I do watch feminist-approved shows as well. I’m a big Handmaid’s Tale fan, I watched Unorthodox early on in quarantine, and I’ve been watching Mrs. America on Wednesdays since that began.

But I can’t help how effective a ridiculous Hallmark movie can be at helping me unwind after a busy shift at work. I watch Hallmark Christmas movies year round.

And why wouldn’t I watch a show that repeatedly, time after time, manages to produce “the most dramatic season ever”? My husband will not watch The Bachelor with me. He is a better person than I am. In my experience, The Bachelor is people-watching at it’s most fascinating, a train-wreck that I just can’t look away from.

Has my feminist card been revoked yet?

It would seem, with my terrible taste in entertainment, that I would enjoy the Christian equivalent in written romance. Right? I thought so. But I thought wrong.

Last week, I woke up one day with my introvert battery completely toasted. So I picked up a novel, Francine River’s immensely popular Redeeming Love that had been handed down to me a few years ago; I neglected my housework and children (honestly, they’re old enough to feed and bathe themselves so I’m almost obsolete) and spent the entire day reading.

Aside from successfully recharging my introvert battery, I didn’t finish this book feeling good. It gnawed at me for the next several days. I kept mulling over and over how terrible the book actually was. As much as I can overlook in secular garbage TV, I could not forgive Francine Rivers for Redeeming Love.

I finally figured it out. Redeeming Love is supposed to be a metaphor for God’s love for us, by telling a “love” story about Christian patriarchy, presenting abusive coercion and control as godly male headship.

God’s love is so much better than the love described in Redeeming Love.  

I won’t summarize the plot, as I found that Samantha Fields did an excellent review series already, analyzing River’s disappointing writing chapter by chapter. I encourage you to read her reviews, especially if you have already read Redeeming Love. 

I will simply say, the main characters, Michael and Angel’s relationship dynamic resembles Power & Control rather than Equality, and it makes me so upset that Christians confuse abusive behavior with “spiritual headship”:


I was reminded this past week of another book, A God I’d Like to Meet: Separating the Love of God from Harmful Traditional Beliefs, by Bob Edwards. In his first chapter, Edwards introduces himself and why he’s writing this book:

I’ve been a Social Worker and Psychotherapist for nearly twenty years now. During this time, I’ve provided individual, family and group counseling for thousands of people. Many of them have told me that they have difficulty believing in God. Most of them have experienced horrific forms of abuse: physical, sexual, psychological, emotional and spiritual. Many of them were told, at one time or another–often by well-meaning Christians, that the terrible things done to them or to their loved ones were either allowed or caused by the “Sovereign Will of God.”

I understand the human tendency to want to come to grips with or understand life’s tragedies. This particular explanation for horror and suffering, however, evokes a crisis of faith for many. If God is good, why would he cause or allow such terrible things to happen to good people? One common answer to this question only serves to compound the problem. Some are told that God isn’t really allowing “bad” things to happen to “good” people, because deep down we are all truly “bad,” by nature.

Another common answer to the question of evil is also problematic. We’re told that God predetermines that people will do bad things to one another so that his good purposes can be accomplished on earth. At best, this second explanation is a classic case of thinking that the end justifies the means. As mentioned earlier, some of those “means” can be truly horrific (e.g. rape, child-abuse, ethnic cleansing). (pgs. 6-8)

This is exactly how Angel’s horrifying childhood abuse and trauma is treated in Redeeming Love, and Rivers over and over again describes Angel’s trauma-informed behavior as weakness, selfishness, and pride.

Bob Edwards’ book explains how Christian theologians, specifically Calvinists, have been influenced by ancient Greet philosophy, which has warped the way they view God. You probably could not find a Christian who would disagree with the statement that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), but how many Christians live as though they are a bug under the thumb of God?

Dualism, a hierarchy of spirit over body, denial of the free will of humanity and the doctrine of self-mortification; these are some of the philosophical principals that eventually led to formulation of the Gnostic heresy. Shockingly, they are also some of the alleged “principle matters of Christian philosophy” through which John Calvin encouraged all believers to make sense of the Bible. He derived them from Augustine, and Augustine derived them from the “books of the Platonists.” Rather than being a benchmark for Christian orthodoxy, St. Augustine’s theology appears more like a “union of Christian and pagan doctrines.”  (Edwards, pgs. 108-109)

Seen through the lenses of Platonic philosophy, the God of the Bible can appear to be an all-controlling entity that frowns on emotion and insists that men must exercise control over women. The implications of this theological perspective are significant. Evil, including human sin, is portrayed as “the will of God.” Salvation is irresistibly extended to a select few, while the majority of the human race is abandoned to inevitable damnation. Human emotion is confused with sin and must be “put to death.” Women, viewed as stimulating sinful feelings, must be strictly controlled by men. (pgs. 96-97).

This controlling, abusive, and sexist portrait of God reviles rather than attracts people to him. I would encourage you, if you’ve been taught a Calvinist theology, to examine your understanding of God.

All my life, I have known that God is love, and I have loved God deeply. Unlike Angel, I experienced very little trauma or abuse as a child. But I absorbed this Calvinistic portrait of God anyway, through doctrine. When I was thirty, I was going through a very painful time with a church split, parents divorcing, and husband unemployed, and in my brokenness, I was grasping to understand the problem of evil and the suffering of this world. I happened upon Brennan Manning’s sermons on YouTube, and wept as I learned of God’s UNCONDITIONAL, no-strings attached love for me.

I learned that I am Beloved, just as I am, and not as I should be, because nobody is as they should be. It sparked a faith shift that gave me the courage to unpack everything I had grown up believing about God and the Bible, and then to start reconstructing a faith that is informed by Jesus’ love, sacrifice, and grace.

Brennan Manning

As Manning says, “You will trust God to the degree that you know you are loved by him.” Knowing I was loved unconditionally gave me the freedom to ask God the “big questions,” to walk away from traditions that were harmful, and to embrace Egalitarian theology that placed women in their rightful place alongside their brothers in the Kingdom.

It is my constant prayer that Calvinists will come to know the unconditional, incomparable love of God, who sees each one of us in our brokenness and mess and calls us “Beloved.”

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The Ragamuffin Gospel: Chapter 1 – Something is Radically Wrong

Posted on April 15, 2015 by | 2 comments

As I promised on our Facebook page, we will blog ragamuffin gospelalong with our small group discussions of Brennan Manning’s book, “The Ragamuffin Gospel,” Amazon’s number one best-seller under the category of Christian Discipleship.  Now is the perfect time to pick up a copy – it is on sale!  Last April, I blogged about listening to Brennan Manning’s sermons during Lent and how I was impacted by his message of God’s unconditional love.  You can read that post here.  Our group is meeting the first and third Fridays of the month, slowly discussing “The Ragamuffin Gospel” chapter by chapter.  So April 3rd we talked about chapter 1, “Something is Radically Wrong.”

This chapter in a nutshell is talking about American Christianity’s tendency to talk grace but walk works.  We preach a Gospel of grace – “the total sufficiency of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on Calvary” (pg. 15) – but our lives tell a different story.  We have “twisted the gospel of grace into religious bondage and distorted the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper” (pg. 16).  We are all striving, striving, striving for approval from God and from our faith communities, emphasizing personal effort over grace.  There are different classes of Christians, where some are given special status because of their works and charisma while others are ignored altogether for their ordinariness.  We hide our darker side from each other and live in a constant state of “existential guilt…[and] Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency.  Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut” (pg. 17).

GUILTragamuffin guilt 1

This was the word that we danced around the most in our conversation, and I have been keenly aware of its presence in conversations with others over the past week.  Guilt is a huge issue for men and women alike, but from a woman’s perspective, I see how guilt has become a perpetual state of being for many of us.  Yet our feeling of guilt–that we are not doing enough as Christians, as parents, as spouses, as family members, as employees, as citizens of the world–is a blatant rejection of the gospel of grace.  The solution is to admit our “shadow side” and accept that there is nothing we can earn by works.  All is a gift.  We must find our identity in our acceptance and love from God and not in how we perform.  Manning expresses this beautifully in this quote from page 25:

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes.  I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty.  I am trusting and suspicious.  I am honest and I still play games.  Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark.  In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.  As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.”

The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes.  It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches.  For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift.  All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God.  While there is much we may have earned–our degree, our salary, our home and garden, a Miller Lite, and a good night’s sleep–all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love.  We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh.  We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.  This and so much more is sheer gift; it is not reward for our faithfulness, our generous disposition, or our heroic life of prayer.  Even our fidelity is a gift.  “If we but turn to God,” said St. Augustine, “that itself is a gift of God.”  My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

ragamuffin guilt 2

Let me leave this post with a few more quotes:

“Justification by grace through faith” is the theologian’s learned phrase for what Chesterton once called “the furious love of God.”  He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change.  He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us.  He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners.  False gods–the gods of human manufacturing–despise sinners, but the Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do” (pg. 20).

The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there.  No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle (pg. 23).

As a sinner who has been redeemed, I can acknowledge that I am often unloving, irritable, angry, and resentful with those closest to me.  When I go to church I can leave my white hat at home and admit I have failed.  God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am.  Because of this I don’t need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him.  I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness (pg. 23).

Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted (pg. 28).

Often I have been asked, “Brennan, how is it possible that you became an alcoholic after you got saved?”  It is possible because I got battered and bruised by loneliness and failure; because I got discouraged, uncertain, guilt-ridden, and took my eyes off Jesus.  Because the Christ-encounter did not transfigure me into an angel.  Because  justification by grace through faith means I have been set in right relationship with God, not made the equivalent of a patient etherized on a table” (pgs. 30-31).

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Imago Dei Resources

Posted on September 13, 2014 by | 1 comment

This past weekend, Becky and I (and our fabulous co-horts, Lisa Wells and Amy St. John) were privileged to lead our church’s women’s retreat.  The vision for the retreat came to Becky last year and through much prayer and many, many hours of planning, coordinating, etc., she saw her vision come to fruition in a beautiful way.

Becky chose the topic of living imago dei (as image bearers of God), and early in the summer in one of our leaders meetings, I was chosen to teach a session Saturday morning and preach Sunday morning.  So I started the absorption phase of teaching and wanted to share the resources with you that were helpful to me this summer as I prepared.  I’ll share my Saturday morning in another post soon.  There is a link to purchase these books on Amazon if you click on the pictures.

made for more

The first book I came across was “Made for More: An Invitation to Live in God’s Image” by Hannah Anderson, which happened to turn up on my Facebook newsfeed the day before I was heading off on vacation, so I purchased it on my Kindle.  It was providential, because I actually had time to read it!  In this interview, Hannah explains that she wrote the book because she observed the struggle that many Christian women were having “to find fulfillment in their roles and family structures alone,” and the sheer majority of women’s Bible studies are framed entirely around gender so that essentially, we are being taught “that sanctification means becoming a certain type of woman, not being conformed to Christ’s image.”  The book explores how living imago dei means finding our supreme source of identity and existence “from Him and through Him and to Him” (Acts 17).  Hannah includes an excellent study guide in the indexes that could be used for group study or individuals.  I highly recommend this book.

designed for dignity

When I finished “Made for More,” Becky loaned Richard Pratt’s “Designed for Dignity” to me with the promise that it would be one of those rare, life-changing books.  Pratt is Professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary, but he writes deep theological truths “with great humility, simplicity, and honesty” (Steve Brown quote on the back of the book).  The book is essentially about realizing your full potential to live out God’s image by living with dignity, and by bringing glory to God.  Each chapter develops a different aspect of living with dignity, as the Bible reveals what it is to be human, and there is a concluding paragraph with study questions for each chapter, enhancing personal or group study.  Unlike Hannah Anderson’s book, this one was not geared specifically to women and it was helpful to frame the dialogue on living imago dei apart from gender.  Another high recommendation.

mans search for meaning

I came across this book on the used bookstore porch and picked it up for a whopping 25 cents.  I vaguely remember hearing a reference to Frankl’s writing in a Tim Keller sermon, so I was curious.  The first half of this short book describes Frankl’s horrifying experiences as a Jewish prisoner in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau (two profoundly moving stops my brother and I made during our backpacking tour in 2002).  As a doctor of psychiatry, Frankl was able to study the mental condition of his fellow prisoners, as well as his own stages of shock, distress, numbness, etc.  He observed that man could live with dignity despite his circumstances if he had a meaning to cling to, and post-war, he developed a new school of psychiatry called logotherapy, which the American Journal of Psychiatry called “the most significant thinking since Freud and Adler.”  On the back of book, it reads “A profound revelation born out of Dr. Frankl’s years as a prisoner in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, logotherapy is a modern and positive approach to the mentally or spiritually disturbed personality.  Stressing man’s freedom to transcend suffering and find a meaning to his life regardless of his circumstances, it is a theory which, since its conception, has exercised a tremendous influence upon the entire field of psychiatry and psychology.”

I couldn’t put “Man’s Search for Meaning” down!  Frankl’s description of suffering in concentration camps was so riveting, and the shorter second part describing logotherapy was equally fascinating.  Towards the end, Frankl says, “As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life.  The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed.  The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in orther words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love….Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life:  even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing, change himself.  He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.”

In addition to those books, I also found the following sermons and articles helpful in thinking through living imago dei.  This sermon, “Healing Our Image of God and Ourselves,” by Brennan Manning, was probably more influential than any other resource I turned to, as it crystalized the message of living in the image of God with the emphasis on God’s love for us:

And also Henri Nouwen’s beautiful sermon series on The Life of the Beloved (please pardon the long intro and breaks in between his 8 short sermons):

Finally, “Ex Good Christian Women” is a fantastic article by Pastor Kathy Escobar that discusses how women are hurt and enslaved by the cultural constraints on what it means to be a “good Christian woman.”  Her descriptions of “good Christian women” and “ex-good Christian women” struck a nerve with the retreat ladies.

I’ll share how these resources came together into a talk on living imago dei soon. 🙂

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