Christian Mythbusters

Fr. Jared C. Cramer
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Each week Father Jared Cramer, the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, MI, offers a brief 3-5 minute episode where he tried to unpack, debunk, and reconsider some of the ways we often think about Christianity and the church.

  1. 4d ago

    What About Fighting Monsters

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. For the last two weeks, I've been talking about the Gospel according to Jelly Roll. First, that there's no asterisk after the word "neighbor." And second, that while we are fighting monsters, we must be careful not to become monsters ourselves. Not long ago I was visiting a member of the parish, and a friend of hers mentioned he'd been listening to these episodes. Then he asked me a great question about what I was saying. He asked, “But what about when they're real monsters that you’re fighting?” I told him to hold on, because that was where I’d go next. It’s an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. Because far too often, when the church has come face to face with something truly monstrous, it has stepped back and abdicated its role as the body of Christ in the world. The theologian William Cavanaugh tells one of those stories in his masterful book, Torture and Eucharist. It's about Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, where torture worked like a kind of liturgy of the state. It made people disappear and broke apart every community that might resist. For too long, the church cared for souls while leaving the bodies to the generals. But eventually it woke up. It defended the families of the disappeared, and the bishops declared torturers cut off from communion. Cavanaugh's point is that the Eucharist itself is the answer to torture. The state disappears bodies. The church gathers them back into the Body of Christ. We see the same failure, initially, in the church's response to Hitler. Most German Christians went along, and even the Confessing Church too often stayed silent as its Jewish neighbors were rounded up. We rightly remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the exception. But what I find most honest about Bonhoeffer is that he never pretended resistance was simple. When he joined the conspirators against Hitler, he didn't claim to be righteous. He wrote about the guilt we take on when we act responsibly in a broken world, and he threw himself on the mercy of God. He fought a monster while wrestling with how not to become one. So how do we walk this path? I think one of the most powerful witnesses comes from my own Anglican tradition: Desmond Tutu, who became the Archbishop of Cape Town. For decades he stood against apartheid, a system that was truly monstrous. He called it evil without flinching. He called on the world to impose sanctions. He buried the young people the police had killed and preached at their funerals with a fire that terrified the government. But he never treated his enemies as less than human. In 1985, at a funeral for activists, an angry crowd turned on a man they believed was a police informer and were about to burn him alive. Tutu pushed into that crowd, threw himself between them and the man, and saved his life. Bishop Tutu fought apartheid with everything he had, and he would not let the movement become the very thing it was fighting. For Tutu, the goal was never just defeating his oppressors. It was a future where oppressor and oppressed could both be free, both be human, both be reconciled. Truth told plainly. Justice demanded. And mercy held out, even to the guilty. So here's the myth I’m trying to bust: that loving your enemy means going soft on evil. Tutu shows us the opposite. You can name the monster. You can fight the monster with everything you have. And you can still refuse to let hatred make you one, because even your enemy was made in the image of God. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

  2. Sep 23

    The Gospel According to Jelly Roll, Part Two

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Last week I talked about the Gospel according to Jelly Roll, how a country star with forty arrests and a face full of tattoos ended up preaching a better sermon on Jimmy Kimmel Live than most seminary graduates, busting the myth that Christianity is about being right while everyone else is wrong. He did it by reminding us there's no asterisk after the word “neighbor.” This week, I want to tell part two of that story. Near the end of his monologue on his final night hosting Jimmy Kimmel, he shared a story of his dad when he was on his deathbed. I’ll quote him here:  “My father, Buddy DeFord, God rest his soul, was a blue-collar Democrat, and his brother was a red-hat Republican. And this might be hard for people out there to understand, but they were absolutely best friends. And when my father was in hospice on his deathbed and I had the opportunity to ask him everything I wanted to know, I said, 'Dad, how are you and your brother so tight when y'all didn't agree about anything?' "And he looked at me and said, 'Son, we agreed about hundreds of things. We only didn't agree about a few things, and we were not going to let the few things we didn't agree about define our entire relationship.'” Now, if you’ve listened to me at all, you probably know that I have some strong feelings about what’s facing our country right now, what’s facing the church, what’s facing us as humans on this fragile blue ball in space. But I think Jelly Roll is saying something important here. It connects to the other quote I used at the end of last week’s episode, “While we are fighting monsters, we must be careful not to become a monster ourselves.” That quote is actually a paraphrase of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche (talk about unlikely preachers), but it speaks to a real and true danger each of us face—especially those of us who are the most passionate. Here's the myth I think Buddy DeFord’s deathbed wisdom busts: that conviction and relationship are somehow opposites, that the more strongly you believe something, the less room you have left to love the person across the table who believes differently. Buddy and his brother apparently never got that memo. They didn’t pretend the disagreements weren’t real. They just refused to let a handful of disagreements be bigger than the hundreds of things that actually held them together. That's not moral relativism, and it’s not indifference to what matters. It's something the desert fathers and mothers understood deeply… that the person in front of you is never reducible to how they first appear to you. Saint Anthony didn’t retreat to the wilderness because he’d stopped caring about truth. He went there to learn how to see the image of God in every person he met, including the ones who’d wronged him. That’s hard, disciplined work, and it’s the opposite of the algorithm-fed outrage that tells us the person who disagrees with us is an enemy to be destroyed rather than a neighbor to be loved. I don't think Jesus is calling us to stop fighting monsters. There are monsters worth fighting—injustice, cruelty, misogyny, heterosexism, transphobia, the systems that grind down the poor and the stranger and the immigrant… But he is calling us to fight them as people who still remember how to sit at a table with people who think differently than us, how to engage them with mercy, gentleness, kindness, and a bit of curiosity, to remember that the goal was never to win the argument but to love the neighbor. Buddy DeFord figured that out somewhere along the way. I hope the rest of us can figure it out before it's too late. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

  3. Sep 16

    The Gospel According to Jelly Roll

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. It is good to be back with you after having just concluded a four month sabbatical from ministry. Those four months of rest, renewal, and study have invigorated my ministry. I also did significant work on a book I’m writing, tentatively titled Revelation Unbound: Inspiring a Community of Resistance. Today, however, I find myself drawn to Jimmy Kimmel and Jelly Roll. Now, I don't often find myself citing Jimmy Kimmel Live as a source for a segment on Christian theology. Same thing for Jelly Roll. True, he is a country music star, three-time Grammy winner, a man who by his own count has been arrested around forty times. He is a man covered with tattoos, including on his face, and someone who has been clear about the scars in his life. So, he’s someone a lot of people know, but that doesn’t mean he’s generally a go-to for theology.  However, Jelly Roll recently spent a couple of weeks guest hosting Kimmel’s show. On his final night hosting, after a week of Trump jokes had gotten him raked over the coals by conservative media, he took a break from the monologue and just… talked. For several minutes. A few times through tears. No, that’s not it. He didn’t just talk. He preached. And he preached against one of the strongest myths of American Christianity—that it’s all about you being right and others being wrong.  Jelly Roll dismantled that myth better than most seminary-trained preachers I know. He talked about the experience of people having previously assumed he was MAGA and now assuming he is a mouthpiece for the liberal media.  He talked about his sense of calling to be a voice for the voiceless, because he knows those people. He grew up and lived his life as one of those people. And then, holding back the tears, he said, “My daddy always told me it is never too late to do the right thing. So I am going to try to do the right thing right now because human dignity isn’t Republican nor Democrat. Compassion isn’t left wing, and mercy isn’t right wing. Pain and healing knows no partisanship. Hurting hearts are more important than poll numbers, and there are no boundaries or borders for broken families.” He went on to talk about being a person of second chances and how that has shaped who he is. He insisted that second chances and the American dream cannot just be for people like him. He insisted that though he cusses and tells jokes he truly is a man of faith and that he cannot read the Gospels without being confronted by the words of Jesus himself in Matthew chapter twenty-five: when I was hungry, you gave me food; when I was thirsty, you gave me a drink; when I was a stranger, you welcomed me in.” He then drew our attention to what Jesus said are the two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And reminded us that there is no asterisk after neighbor. In his words, “There wasn’t a political party exemption. It did not require us to know what country you were born in. There wasn’t a sentence afterward that said, ‘Unless you’re afraid of them.’ It just said, ‘Love your neighbor.” This is, of course, exactly what the tradition of the church has always taught, even when the church itself has failed to live it. Augustine and Aquinas both wrestled with what it means to love rightly—not by drawing tighter and tighter circles around people like us, but by letting the love of God push us outward, past our comfort, into love of stranger and even enemy. Jelly Roll didn’t need a doctorate in theology to get there. He needed a hard life, an honest reading of the Gospels, and the nerve to say it on network television. He also said something else worth sitting with: while we’re fighting monsters, we have to be careful not to become monsters ourselves. That’s not a bad one-sentence summary of about half the New Testament. And there’s not much more I could say that’s better than that. So, thanks Jelly Roll. You basically wrote my first Mythbusters back for me.  Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

  4. Apr 25

    Your Worth Is Not What You Produce

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Today I want to talk about rest. And why so many Christians are terrible at it. The myth I want to bust is one that runs so deep in American Christianity that most of us don't even recognize it as a theological claim. It's this: that your worth is determined by what you produce. What you accomplish. What you create, what you say, what you do. That busyness is next to godliness. This is often called the Protestant Work Ethic, and its roots go back to the Reformation — particularly to Calvinist theology, which tied disciplined, productive labor to signs of divine election. If you worked hard and prospered, it meant God was with you. Over time, especially in America, that theological framework got absorbed into the culture so thoroughly that it no longer needs a church to sustain it. It just is the water we swim in. Hustle culture. Productivity optimization. The glorification of busy. But here's what the Bible actually says: on the seventh day, God rested. Not because God was tired. Not because there was nothing left to do. God rested because rest is built into the fabric of creation itself. Sabbath isn't an afterthought. It's the crown of the creation story. The whole week points toward it. The Hebrew word is shabbat — to cease, to stop, to let be. And in the Torah, sabbath rest was not optional or aspirational. It was commanded. It was liberation theology in calendar form — a weekly reminder that the Israelites were no longer slaves in Egypt, no longer defined by their output, no longer subject to Pharaoh's endless demand for more bricks. And precisely because they were once slaves, God insisted that not only should they rest but that they must build a society in which everyone, down to the lowest and most vulnerable, was given a day to rest… a day simply… to be.  Which means that when we refuse to rest, when we feel guilty about stopping, when our identity collapses without our to-do lists, we are acting like people who have forgotten they've been set free. And this touches my own life. Starting tomorrow, I begin a sabbatical — what our church is calling a “Renewal Leave” — that will carry me through mid-September. (That means there won’t be any more productions of Christian Mythbusters for the next four months.) This sabbatical is a genuine gift, and I don't take it for granted for a single moment. I know that most people listening don't get sabbaticals. The rhythms of sabbath rest are not equally available to everyone, and that itself is a justice issue worth naming. When rest becomes a luxury only some can afford, something has gone badly wrong. But sabbath was always meant to be more than a perk for the privileged. The Torah extended it to servants, to animals, to the land itself. It was a social practice, not just a personal one. Which means the church should be asking hard questions about a society that makes rest impossible for so many — and should be working to change it. In the meantime, here is what I know from theology and from my own life: you can build sabbath into your days even without a sabbatical. Not by escaping your responsibilities, but by regularly, intentionally, ceasing. One evening a week away from the screen. One morning that belongs to something life-giving rather than productive. A walk where you are not also listening to a podcast or wor. A meal where you are just eating. Small sabbaths, practiced faithfully, can begin to loosen the grip of the myth that you are only as valuable as what you produce. Because here is the truth: God is saving the world. Not you. Not me. We each have our part to play — and those parts matter deeply. But the weight of making things right does not rest on our shoulders alone. That is God's work, and God will see it through. Which means it is not just permissible for us to rest. It is essential. It is an act of faith. I’ll try to live in that trust, to rest in that grace and love, until I talk to you again in September. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

  5. Apr 15

    Christianity Isn't an Exit Strategy

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. This week I came across a video of retired Anglican Bishop and renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, and he was making a point that I think is worth sitting with: that Christianity is not primarily about your soul escaping this world and going to heaven when you die. Now, I know that might sound strange. For a lot of people, your soul going to heaven is Christianity. The whole point. Get saved, go to heaven. And that assumption runs so deep that most of us never think to question it. It's like being a fish in water. You don't notice the water. That means it’s definitely a myth worth breaking. I was reminded of just how deep that assumption runs when I was watching an old episode of Lost the other night. The subject of baptism came up, and John Locke explained to Claire that baptism was basically eternal insurance. A way to make sure the baby got to heaven if something happened to him. And when Claire later talked to Mr. Eko, the character who, theoretically, had the most Christian formation of anyone on the island, he didn't push back on that understanding at all. When she worried about being separated from Aaron, he essentially offered to baptize them both. An insurance double plan, apparently. Now, I don't want to be too hard on a television show. But that scene captures something real. It's the version of Christianity that enormous numbers of people have actually received. Baptism as a ticket. Salvation as an exit strategy. The point of faith is to get your soul safely out of this world and into the next one. But here's the thing: that's not what Scripture actually teaches. Wright points to the Lord's Prayer as a window into the heart of what Jesus was actually about. Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say, "Our Father, may our souls ascend to you in heaven." He says, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." The direction of movement, if you want to put it that way, is not souls leaving earth for heaven. It's God's reign arriving here in our broken, beloved world. The healing of creation. The renewal of all things. This is why the resurrection matters so much. Jesus did not rise as a disembodied spirit finally freed from the physical world. He rose bodily, as the first fruits of a new creation. The great promise of Scripture is not that God will eventually discard the physical world and take faithful souls somewhere else. It's that God will renew, restore, and redeem this world. And that changes everything about what the Christian life is for. If salvation is an exit strategy, then your job is just to get yourself and maybe a few others safely through the door before things get worse. But if salvation is about God's kingdom coming, then you are called to be part of that renewal right now. To practice justice. To love your neighbor. To work for the healing of what is broken. Not because it earns you anything, but because that is what it looks like to live in the reality Jesus announced. Baptism, in this fuller picture, is not insurance. It's initiation into a people who are learning to live as if the kingdom is already breaking in. Because it is. So the next time someone asks what Christianity is really about, you might resist the urge to reach for the heaven-and-hell framework. Instead, try this: it's about a God who loves this world so much that he entered into it, and who is committed to setting it right and healing all things—a God who invites us to be part of that work. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

  6. Apr 1

    The Betrayer is Beloved

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. This week, we're in the middle of the Holy Week and Easter observances, the most sacred time of the year. Some of you are hearing this closer to Easter, but the day I’m recording this (and the day the first version is being aired) is Wednesday itself, a day the church has long called "Spy Wednesday." This is the day we remember how Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and agreed to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. And whenever Spy Wednesday comes around, so do the myths about Judas. The biggest myth is this: Judas was uniquely evil, the worst of all sinners, the one man beyond redemption. Dante put Judas in the lowest circle of hell, frozen in the mouth of Satan himself. For centuries, Christian preachers have used Judas as a symbol of ultimate betrayal, of irredeemable wickedness.  But let's slow down and take a harder look at the story. First, the Gospels don't actually agree on why Judas did what he did. Mark gives no reason for the betrayal. Matthew focuses on the money. In Luke and John, we are told that Satan entered Judas, rendering his actions not his own entirely. There's no single, tidy explanation, which should make us cautious about building a whole theology of damnation on one man we barely understand.  And yet, across all four Gospels, Jesus shares the Last Supper with Judas, breaks bread with him, does not exclude him from the table. In John's Gospel specifically, Jesus even washes the feet of Judas. Jesus meets Judas with the same love and care he offers every other disciple, even knowing what is coming. The betrayer is also the beloved. Second, it's worth noting what Jesus himself says. In John's Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that none of them has been lost except "the one destined to be lost, so that scripture might be fulfilled." That phrase, destined to be lost, has troubled theologians for centuries. But the dominant interpretation among the early church fathers is that though Jesus foresaw the free choice of Judas to betray Jesus, even that freedom is harder to assess than we might think. Third, and maybe most importantly, we often forget that Judas felt genuine remorse. Matthew tells us he threw the thirty pieces of silver back at the priests, declared that he had betrayed innocent blood, and then went out and died by suicide. Whatever drove him to betray Jesus, he could not live with what he had done. That's not the portrait of a man who had fully rejected Christ. And here's where the Christian tradition, at its best, has something remarkable to offer: the doctrine of the harrowing of hell, the idea (expressed in the Apostles’ Creed) that Christ descended to the dead on Holy Saturday. A poet named Ruth Etchells imagined what that might be in a poem she wrote called "The Ballad of the Judas Tree."  In Hell there grew a Judas Tree / Where Judas hanged and died / Because he could not bear to see / His master crucified / Our Lord descended into Hell / And found his Judas there / For ever hanging on the tree / Grown from his own despair / So Jesus cut his Judas down / And took him in his arms / "It was for this I came" he said / "And not to do you harm / My Father gave me twelve good men / And all of them I kept / Though one betrayed and one denied / Some fled and others slept / In three days' time I must return / To make the others glad / But first I had to come to Hell / And share the death you had / My tree will grow in place of yours / Its roots lie here as well / There is no final victory / Without this soul from Hell"/ So when we all condemned him / As of every traitor worst / Remember that of all his men / Our Lord forgave him first. That last line is the theological punch: our Lord forgave him first. The myth says Judas is the exception, the one person even God's love couldn't reach. The gospel says there are no exceptions. We profess in the creeds that Christ descended into hell. We believe that the love of God pursues us into the very darkest places we can go, including the darkness we make for ourselves. Judas is a warning, yes, about the corrosive power of betrayal and despair, even more so about what happens when you so form Christ in your own image and expectations that you turn away from the real goodness God holds out to you. But if Etchells is right, Judas can also be a testimony to the relentless, pursuing love of Jesus Christ.  Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

  7. Mar 25

    Neurospicy and Made in God's Image

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Recently, a lot of our conversations together have been about questions where people have confused what is common or dominant (cisgender identity, male dominance in culture) with the depth of the divine life. The results is that anyone who falls outside the boundaries of what is deemed “normal” is seen as an outlier to God’s intent for the world we live in. Today, I want to tackle one particular way that narrative plays out in an area of which we are only recently more aware—the concept of neurodiversity. Many people assume that there is one kind of normal brain, and that people who don't have it are somehow less than fully who they should be. This is a myth definitely worth breaking.  I want to talk about what the neurodivergent—or neurospicy, which is my own favorite term—can teach the rest of us. The term was "neurodiversity" was coined in 1998 by autistic Australian sociologist Judy Singer — and she was very clear that it wasn't a medical term. It was a political one. Her idea was simple: no two human minds are exactly alike, and that variation is not a defect. It is a fact about our species. Autism activists took that idea and ran with it, pushing back against what they call the "pathology model" — the assumption that there is one correct way for a brain to develop, and that every deviation from it is a disorder to be cured. Daniel Bowman Jr., a poet and English professor who is also autistic, puts it plainly: autism is his operating system, not a bug. He is not broken. He is different. And the neurotypical insistence that their way of being human is the standard makes the lives of neurodivergent people unnecessarily hard — not because their brains don't work, but because the world keeps telling them they don't fit. Now here's where the theology gets interesting. Christians have long wrestled with what it means to be made in the image of God — the imago Dei. Over the last century, a dominant answer has been: relationality. To be fully human, in the image of God, is to be in relationship — the I-Thou of Martin Buber, taken up by Barth and Bonhoeffer and half the systematic theologians of the twentieth century. The problem, as scholar Joanna Leidenhag has shown, is that when you define personhood primarily through the capacity for certain kinds of social and emotional relationship, you have — almost by accident — defined autistic people as less than fully human. Some churches have even used this framework to suggest that people with autism are incapable of genuine sanctification. That is a theological catastrophe, and it needs to be named as one. Here is what I think is closer to the truth: God, in Scripture, reveals a mind that is both deeply systematic and profoundly empathic. The orderliness of creation, the precision of the tabernacle instructions, Paul's declaration that God is not a God of disorder but of peace — these point to a divine mind that finds beauty and meaning in pattern and structure. But God also weeps. God notices Jonah's sulking over a withered plant. God is moved. Both modes of knowing and being belong to God, which means both modes of knowing and being belong to the image of God we carry. And here is what our neurospicy siblings can teach us: they often experience one or both of these modes with astonishing intensity. Bowman writes that his autistic friends are every bit as feeling, compassionate, and caring as his neurotypical ones — sometimes more so. What looks like emotional flatness from the outside is frequently a nervous system overwhelmed by the depth of what it is taking in. That is not a deficit. That is a different kind of depth. Scholar Lauren Calvin Cooke makes a related point about how the church has mistakenly equated deep faith with cognitive articulation — the ability to explain sanctification, to recite the creed, to answer the right questions in confirmation class.  But the Word did not become a proposition. The Word became flesh.  Embodied, sensory, particular human experience, that is what God entered. Which means knowledge of God lives in the body… in the bread on the tongue, in the knees that learn to kneel, in the hands that learn to receive. Our neurodivergent siblings, who often experience the world through their senses with extraordinary vividness, may have access to embodied, incarnational knowing that those of us who live mostly in our heads have been trained to overlook. To be clear: the neurospicy don't need to be fixed so they can participate in our church. Those of us who are neruotypical need to expand what we think participation looks like. We need to build communities where the fidgeter and the avoider of eye contact and the person who needs the same seat every week is not seen as a problem to manage, but as a bearer of the divine image — offering us a facet of God we might never otherwise encounter. The myth is that normal is the goal. The truth is that the image of God is far larger than any one of us — or any one kind of brain — can contain. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

  8. Mar 18

    Saved by His Humanity, Not His Maleness

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Last week I talked about the myth that God is a man—and why Christian theology has always known that God transcends gender entirely. Today I want to go deeper, because some listeners pushed back with an obvious question: “But Jesus was a man, wasn't he?” And yes—historically, he was. So, what do we do with that? This brings us to today's myth: the myth that because Jesus was male, maleness must be closer to God, some key part of the divine inner life, or more capable of representing the divine. To untangle this, I want to introduce you to one of the most important theological principles in all of Christian history. It comes from St. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing around 382 AD: “That which he did not assume, he cannot save.” In other words, for Christ to redeem humanity, he had to take on full human nature—not just a body, but a mind, a will, emotions, and all the complexity of what it means to be a person. Gregory was arguing against those who thought Jesus only seemed human, or was human in only a partial way. No, Gregory insisted: the redemption of the whole person requires the incarnation of the whole person. Now here's where it gets interesting. If the saving power of the incarnation flows from Christ's humanity—from his taking on the full depth of human experience—then what follows? It follows that his maleness was a feature of his historical particularity, not the theological engine of salvation. Feminist theologians have been making this exact point for decades. While Jesus' male sex was as intrinsic to his historical particularity as were his Jewish race, his Galilean village roots, his class, and his ethnic heritage, it reveals nothing about the nature or gender of God, nor about the appropriateness of male images for the divine. Jesus was also a first-century Palestinian Jew who wore sandals and spoke Aramaic. We don't conclude from that that God is Aramaic-speaking—or that Galileans are somehow closer to the divine. As Elizabeth Johnson put it, “The heart of the problem is not that Jesus was male, but that more males have not been like Jesus.” The point is this: the incarnation saves because God entered fully into human life—into vulnerability, suffering, love, and death. The redemptive power is in the depth of that union, not in the gender of the vessel. And if that's true, then Gregory's maxim cuts in an unexpected direction. If the unassumed is the unhealed, then a Christ who only assumed male humanity would leave the rest of humanity—women, nonbinary people, anyone who doesn't fit the narrow category of male—somehow outside the full reach of salvation. Christian theology has sometimes dignified maleness as the only genuine way of being human, making Jesus' embodiment as male an ontological necessity rather than a historical option. But that's not the Gospel. That's a distortion of it. The good news—and it really is good news—is that what Christ assumed was humanity itself, in its full breadth and depth. And that means the healing of the incarnation extends to every human being: women, men, and people of every gender identity. All of it was assumed. All of it is being redeemed. This is why the diversity of human gender and identity is not a threat to Christian faith. It is, if anything, a reminder of the vastness of what God entered into—and the vastness of what God is saving. The mystery of human embodiment in all its variety doesn't shrink the Gospel. It reveals how wide the incarnation truly is. Gregory of Nazianzus wanted us to take the incarnation seriously. So let's do that—all the way to its most expansive, most healing conclusion. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

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Each week Father Jared Cramer, the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, MI, offers a brief 3-5 minute episode where he tried to unpack, debunk, and reconsider some of the ways we often think about Christianity and the church.

Information

  • Creator
    Fr. Jared C. Cramer
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    142
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Christian Mythbusters
  • Show Website
    Christian Mythbusters

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