Ten Theological Fatheads of 2024
What A Year It's Been
Well, shoot, the end of the year has very much snuck up on me. For some reason, I thought I had another week to pull my whole life together and finish off all my resolutions. I can’t quite remember what they were—I’ve mislaid the scrap of paper I wrote them on a year ago. I’m pretty sure I meant to read a hundred books (haha), lose ten pounds (sob), write a couple of books (that’s funny), and generally become a more functional person.
On the other hand, there have been some wonderfully nice things about 2024 that I didn’t anticipate—I went to France to celebrate my parents being married for half a century (what a marvelous amount of delicious cheese), my children went on being a credit to me (going to college, getting engaged, working hard), I endured yet another Christmas Pageant (praise the Lord), I cleaned out some of my kitchen cupboards (instead of just watching reels of other people cleaning), and instead of losing any weight, I became rather strong. After a solid year of killing myself at Planet Fitness, I can run up and down stairs without getting out of breath and am, though I would never volunteer, able to lift heavy boxes and suitcases without feeling too sad about it.
The best thing, though, as you may imagine, is spending so much time on Substack. Having journeyed through the early years of Blogger, into WordPress, and a long wonderful time at Patheos, I am charmed to be over here. I particularly loved this article about how Substack is changing the way people read:
It seemed, after so much promise in the early 2000s, that Facebook’s algorithm had killed the Blogging Star, that we were all going to grind away relentlessly throwing words into the cyber void, hoping something would stick, and then suddenly, out of the dark night, a mighty marvel, Substack opened wide the gates of creativity, news, free-thinking, and fun. The horrible sense of futility blew away like a cloud of smoke.
Also, I don’t know how to say this without sounding melodramatic, I have never made very much money as a writer, and so to be able to contribute to the family’s income by doing something I love makes the dark embers of my hard heart fan into a warm flame. All I can say is Thank You—bigly, hugely—to those who financially support this page. Your generosity meant we were able to pay off the actual literal roof just over my head, a most basic and appreciated blessing.
My writing motto has always been “Let me be your morning cup of coffee,” your enlivening jolt into the day, except that lately, it’s been more like around noon. Perhaps 2025, the year I finally optimize what it means to be a person (cough) will spur me onto better timing.
The other great blessing is that there are so many fun things to write about. My gift to you, as the year staggers to its merciful demise, are ten theological fatheads that I’ve enjoyed writing about this year. For truly truly, 2024 was a year of extremely dumb and useless theological takes. While most of the people on this list are professing Christians, the ones that aren’t are so generally absurd, that I just couldn’t leave them out. May God have mercy on us in 2025, and raise up good thinkers and theologians. Except, then what would I write about? I guess I could take up producing cleaning my house reels, sob.
Ten Fatheads of 2024
At the very bottom of the list, we have Sarah McCammon of NPR's stunning and brave apostasy. McCammon’s book wasn’t remarkable, except that it made a bit of a splash across the news and brought about the wonderful circumstance of my getting to be on Alisa Childer’s show to talk about her. The bit of McCammon’s book that has stuck in my head is this tragic
bit:I’ve relaxed, most of the time, into the understanding that I didn’t have to save Grandpa, and that I don’t have to save anyone. That I, like everyone else, was somehow born naked into this world, knowing nothing, a tiny bundle of flesh and blood and bones pulsating with needs and desires — and that someday if I’m very fortunate, I will be lying in a quiet, sunlit room, in a withering body, holding the hand of my grandchild, gently fading away.
I go on being bewildered by the way so many people who have left the visible Church seem to be content with death. I hate death. I am so grateful that God did something to solve our worst problem. I look so forward to the end when there will be no more death and no more tears. Why would anyone look forward to complacency to being dead at whatever age? One doesn’t need to be anxious about hell, even, to at least wish there was a way out of the tearing apart of the soul and the body. I will never be ok with it, and I don’t think anyone else should either.
Next up we keep with NPR’s and their decision to hire Kathrine Maher as their new CEO. Katherine Maher didn’t pretend to be a Christian, so at least there’s that, but she did invent something so dumb, as a Christian, I can’t help but remark upon it. In the search for better information, Maher thinks we should find something she calls Minimum Viable Truth. Here’s how I quoted her in WORLD:
“Debating the truth of climate change,” she explains, “has prevented us from mitigating the harms to us of rising seas, increasingly deadly waves of heat and cold, and powerful storm systems.” We “need,” she says, “better ways to get shared understandings,” without using “one shared truth as our baseline.” What is this better way? She hopes we will embrace something called “minimum viable truth.”
Oh for heaven’s sake. I haven’t heard anything more about her since this little moment of fatuousness so maybe they have her in an office somewhere, filling out lots of impossible forms and reading dumb articles.
The next person is also not a professing Christian, but surely you won’t fault me for including Mrs. Rachel of YouTube who vaunts herself as an expert in early childhood development. She had Dylan Mulvany come on her show during Pride Month, if you remember, and then got sniffy when a lot of people complained. She just wants all the little kiddies to find their sexual identity for some reason, and having an awful woman-mocking man come on screen seemed to her the best way to do it. Big Huge Fail in an overall disappointing year. Can’t wait for her to fall out of fashion so that no baby ever has to listen to her vapid sing-songy cheerfulness ever again.
I don’t know if Rev Karla is clever enough to be this far up on my list, but she is fresh in my mind because somehow I am on her email list. This is sitting moldering in my inbox:
I know personally that deconstructing can be a challenging and emotional journey, and we are honored to be able to provide support and guidance during this time. As you continue, I want to remind you of ways to connect with me and a community that may be of interest to you. We have a series of upcoming opportunities to connect via Live Conversations, and Program options. I created these resources based on the feedback received from our community, considering everyone has different comfort levels, but most importantly people's desire for community and connection. I would also like to invite you to my private Facebook Group: Rev Karla’s Inner Circle. Inside, our community is able to share their experiences and connect with others on similar journeys.
I don’t know about you, but Rev Karla’s Inner Circle sounds like it might be enough for me to let go of all my animosity toward death. Sweet Hour of My Demise if I ever had to join. The real tragedy, of course, is that she has so many followers and so many people bought her book.
Somehow I couldn’t help but blog about David Platt not once, but twice. He said this on Twitter if you remember:
People just like you and me, men, women, teenagers, kids, the only difference is, nobody's ever told them about who Jesus is and how much he loves them. And I just want you to think with me about why that is. How is it possible that over three billion people, right now, are being born, living, and dying, and going to an eternity apart from God without even hearing about God's love for them in Jesus? And how is it that most Christians are either unaware of this or doing practically little to nothing about it? This just doesn't make sense, does it? With all the resources we have, with the love of Jesus in us, it seems like there's something that's keeping them from being reached with the Gospel. And for the sake of three billion people, it seems like we need to think together about this.
I said I thought he seemed unhinged and also took umbrage. And still do, honestly.
Next up, Dr. Kevin M. Young who, wonderfully, tweeted this picture yesterday
with the caption, “I see no difference.”
And that is why it is always worth checking in on Dr. Kevin when you have a moment. He has what Matt calls “invincible ignorance.” All the wrong things he knows cannot be overcome. No amount of dialogue or debate suffice to break through the thick darkness of Dr. Kevin’s inner knowing.
No list of failures for the year would be complete without Scot McKnight and his little book, The Bible Is Not Enough. Not only was the style of this theological effort stilted and patronizing, it was full of pleasurable little tidbits like this:
Revelation is taking some deserved hits today for its graphic violence, but the criticisms at times are based on a reading as literalistic as the literalists they deride. It takes an imagination, if not more, to comprehend the vision of peace in this book. The scope of its vision is clear enough: for New Jerusalem to be established, the Lamb must defeat the agents of the Dragon and its wild things. The salient features of John’s imagining of a final, lasting peace from the final two chapters of Revelation provide an adequate reprise of the book’s vision for peace.
I just love the idea of a book like Revelation taking some “deserved” hits from anyone alive today, as if the shallow puddle of our shared theological convictions was anything more than a disappointing mirage on a hot Saharan afternoon.
And then, of course, there was the very great failure of Richard Hays, noted Biblical scholar, who threw away whatever legacy he had to write one of the most fatuous books of the year, The Widening of God’s Mercy. He and Christopher, because they changed their minds about what God says in the Bible, projected this novel move onto God, rather than taking any responsibility for wanting to throw it all away to keep up with the times. It’s a bad book, for sure, and therefore in 2025, I have decided to go back and read Professor Hay’s older book, Moral Vision, to see if it was all that great when it came out all those years ago. Glancing at the acknowledgments, Professor Hays mentions his many thanks to my old New Testament professor, Kathy Grieb, the one person who nearly destroyed the Bible for me had God not actually been so merciful.
Next to last I cannot help but mention Sheila Wray Gregoire, who, though I am cheating here because I wrote about her at the end of 2023, kept popping to mind through the long trying days of 2024. She’s blocked me on Twitter so I rely on other people to send me things. Here is a pic of a page of a book:
I just love it when people say, “Now, this is not a theological book” and then go on and say many ill-considered theological things. It’s my favorite.
And finally, we come to the biggest, as usual, disappointment in the Christian world for 2024—Justin Welby. What a legacy he has left. The list of disappointing things he has done and said would take up too many words to count, and all of my children need me to drive them out to some store or other to do more Christmas shopping. All I can say is, may God have mercy on him and all of us who wanted to be both Christian and Anglican and yet have such a hard go of it. Perhaps, in retirement, he will have a chance to confess his sins and make amends for wrecking so many things.
There could have been a lot of honorable mentions—Steve Lawson, the Bishop of London, a heap of politicians who tried to bring God into it, and a lot of other people I’m sure I’ve forgotten but perhaps it’s best to let bygones be bygones. We can but hope that 2025 will be a year of godliness, sense, piety, reason, and sound exegesis. Or perhaps it will be even worse! Make your predictions now.
And have a very Happy New Year if you’re into that sort of thing! See you next year!
Ooof! I am personally thankful you do a lot of the heavy lifting around here—and I mean that in a purely mental sense. I would never intentionally ask you to lift a heavy box 😉
I love the word “fathead.” So comically insulting.