If you have followed me long enough, you have probably noticed two things. First, I emphasize love and grace in a way that really annoys some types of religious people. Second, I have developed the same “Matthew 23 style” of antagonistic chutzpah against religious legalism. This is because, ever since I was a child, I have seen the lives of many people destroyed by religious legalism, including my own.
With me, it started early on. As a child, my self-proclaimed Calvinist-Fundamentalist father (converted from Judaism), who was a pastor of a Reformed Brethren Messianic congregation, abused me both physically and emotionally, often in God’s name, quoting Proverbs verses he believed were meant to approve and encourage violence against children.
There is a saying in Judaism that “There is no bad child. There is a child who is hurting,” as hurting children often hurt others. But I was never a bad kid because I mostly kept my feelings inside. However, I also never fit in. I was always too curious, too opinionated, too suspicious, and too nonconformist. I constantly challenged preconceived ideas, especially religious ones, that did not sit well with my logic.
Once, as a child, my nonconformity at the dinner table even caused my father to stab me in the hand with a knife. It only hit my nail, so I didn’t bleed, but it was a very traumatic experience. When I became a teenager, I got very depressed and gained a lot of weight. My father would often make fun of my weight in front of family and friends, which encouraged them to do the same.
I’m not here to shame my father (who still doesn’t get it…), but I bring this up because I want to talk about love. You see, since my father never truly understood love, neither did I.
As you can imagine, this greatly affected my character in ways I’m still learning to unfold and heal from. My relationships were also severed, and so was my religious worldview. I always felt I needed God’s grace because I was taught to believe I was unworthy and meaningless. I was indoctrinated with Calvinistic doctrines, such as “Total Depravity,” that swept both the Evangelical and the Messianic worlds. My faith was fear-based, not love-based. Quickly, I turned into my father’s image, thinking my Father in heaven must be the same – a fundamentalist legalist.
Probably considering being pious and puritan-like to be godly, I would often scorn those who were, in my religious eyes, “lukewarm” or “liberal.” I blindly followed and imitated what I saw my father, most of my Messianic pastors, and most of the Christians I served with in ministry do.
But deep inside, I could never reconcile why the most conservative religious Christians I worshiped and served with were the ones causing so much discord and pain in their flock’s lives. In my 20 years serving full-time in Messianic churches and ministries, I became witness to endless cases of spiritual, emotional, and even physical abuse, ostracism, levels of gossip that put Latin telenovelas to shame, domestic physical and verbal violence, disharmony, hatred between many Messianic leaders, emotional and spiritual manipulation, and undealt-with hidden sexual harassment—among other failures—by people who claimed to be “God’s leaders.”
One day, about five or so years ago, something finally clicked. I started telling my friends in ministry and believing family members that I felt we were a cult. I guess I couldn’t, once again, keep my mouth shut. Once again, I was too curious, too opinionated, too suspicious, and too nonconformist. As you can probably guess, this greatly affected my friendships, ministry, and even my marriage. But now, I was no longer a child anymore; in fact, I more or less became the face of Christianity in Israel.
With 25 million YouTube video views in Israel alone (back when I served with ONE FOR ISRAEL), a country of only 9.5 million people, it meant people would very often (and still do) recognize me on the street. Some of them, the Orthodox Jews, hated me, threatening my life and damaging my property, while most others—the secular Jews—always showed their appreciation. They really enjoyed learning about Yeshua and how He fought religious legalism, which they, too, couldn’t stand.
Anyway, I was about to be done with my doctorate when things finally clicked for me from a theological perspective. You see, most theology students go to seminaries to become pastors. This, however, was never my desire. My motive was to gain knowledge – to understand what they believed about God and why. For me, truth-seeking is a life journey, and these degrees were only meant to accelerate my process.
I got my bachelor’s, two master’s, and a doctorate, all from very conservative seminaries. One in Israel (Calvinist-Baptist), Liberty (Baptist), and DTS (Calvinist). Ironically, it was my DTS theology professor who, much like me, was too curious, too opinionated, too suspicious, and too nonconformist. He was the first conservative I ever heard to publicly challenge the Calvinists’ view of Penal Substitution Theology, a doctrine that never fully made sense to me (why would God abuse Jesus and kick Him out of the Trinity? Or, why would a “loving God” have to endlessly torture most of humankind in fire, including my Jewish family members who died in the Holocaust rejecting an antisemitic version of Jesus?).
The fact that the person challenging this and other conservative Evangelical doctrines was not some “lukewarm liberal” but a professor in a conservative institution really made the difference for me. He even received the honor of being voted the best professor at DTS three years in a row (so the year I graduated, they took him off the list so others could be voted best instead, lol). I had many professors in the past. But he was sharp-minded, unapologetic, and able to keep up with me without being offended when I challenged him, a quality I found to be very rare. As I was about to finish my doctorate, my deconstruction (deconstruction of religious doctrines, not of faith in Yeshua…) was at its peak. I felt mostly lonely and between a rock and a hard place. From that point on, everything went downhill for me… until it finally overwhelmed me, and I was spitted out.
Jumping back to the present time, I spent a few months relearning love. Not the “I love you enough to punish you” kind of love, nor the teenage marshmallow-like emotional love. But God’s love.
I now believe that love is the most underrated, undervalued theological doctrine of our time, especially in hyper-conservative circles like the ones I used to be involved in.
So, I released a new, short book called “The Theology of Love,” which I believe can and will be a blessing to many of you, especially those who came out from conservative denominations and are still struggling with God and His love in our broken world.
