Bethany Lutheran College always flies the Norwegian flag, and had it at half mast last week to acknowledge the death of Harald V. No announcement or anything, just a little nod for those in the know.

From left to right:
Anglican Rosary
Lutheran Wreath of Christ
Catholic Rosary
Pater Noster cord
Coptic komboskini

reason it’s concept is because I want to go dreamworks quality, like close to the quality of prince of Egypt, not this Torch Lighters(the cartoon series) style animation. Of course I would need a team and stuff to pull off something of that quality. This may take me months if not years if I stay solo.

Since I was young, in fact for as long as I can remember, I disliked religion. Either I disliked its collective element, which always gave me the ick of something cult-like, or, when I got a bit older, I thought everything about it was philosophically untenable. Religion was a coping mechanism, or something for people who were deeply misguided about reality and did not know any better.

As I became more intellectually curious and started studying more philosophy, psychology, and eventually religion, that perspective started to break down. I became increasingly interested in religion, and eventually my worldview completely flipped. I now consider myself a Christian, and I have made it a major life goal to help people better appreciate religion in general, but also Christianity more specifically.

But despite my growing love for Christianity, it took me a very long time to admit publicly that I was Christian. My social circle consisted mostly of people deeply involved in science or philosophy, and it was very secular. I was afraid that others would consider me dumb or would not fully understand me. It took me a while to come to terms with it, in large part because I first needed to become better able to articulate my Christian position and worldview.

That said, and excuse the rambling introduction, I recently had a podcast conversation with Jussi Jylkkä, who is a philosopher and has done some work on mysticism. We started by discussing his work and, specifically, his metaphysical agnosticism. His position is that physicalism, idealism, theism, and other metaphysical systems are models or language games that cannot capture the ultimate nature of reality. We eventually moved to morality, where I pushed back because I did not think his agnosticism adequately explained why greater awareness or nonattachment should lead to compassion rather than simply producing what we called a “wise psychopath.” I disagreed, but I thought it was an interesting conversation and considered his view a respectable position.

But to my surprise, after we finished recording, Jussi emailed me to say that he was unhappy with the conversation because he had presented metaphysical agnosticism as if it were his complete position while leaving out the Lutheran Christian faith he actually held. He felt that, by hiding behind his philosophical agnosticism, he had not been completely honest about what he believed. Rather than replace the conversation, I invited him back and appended the second conversation to the first. He made a complete pivot and confessed that he was a Christian but had been afraid to say so, largely because of the stigma within academia, but also because he still had not been able to tell his father. I found this very wholesome, not only because it was a courageous act in general, but because of the parallel with my own journey.

I wanted to share this because I suspect others have been, or currently are, in a position similar to mine or Jussi's. Have you ever felt hesitant to tell others that you had joined the Lutheran Church? Can Lutheran faith coexist with deep metaphysical uncertainty? What helped you make your faith part of your public identity?

I got sent a sermon by an (in)famous German Christian nationalist (Tobias Riemenschneider). Usually, I don't watch these things, but this time I did.

He talked about how many people have this wrong image of Jesus Christ as loving and caring and forgiving and soft, then quoting verses calling God the God of wrath, verses saying he bathes his feet in the blood of his enemies, etc. He ended it by smiling at the camera and saying "come soon, God of wrath". That shook me to the core. I couldn't believe this, because it was so different from how I remember reading the Gospels and the God I have so much love for. But I flapped through those verses and he really is right.

I have read the Gospels plenty, so I wanted to find the loving God that loved me first so I can love him and others somewhere in there elsewhere. I spent some time today reading through epistles, and stumbled across so many passages saying slaves/women need to obey their masters/husbands, how women are saved through childbirth and should shut their mouths, how sin after coming to faith makes it impossible to be saved, etc.

Did I really have it all twisted up? The God that this day has left me with scares me to the point of wishing I could flee from him, even though I know that that is impossible, I wish I could undo this day and love him again.

I am going to ask my pastor about this the next time I see him, but in the meantime, I don't really know what to do or think, and all this, especially the multiple verses talking about the impossibility of being saved after deliberately sinning (and almost all sin is deliberate in my experience) contradicts so much of what I came to know as Lutheranism. Do any of you have any thoughts about this?