Quote from the play Night of the Iguana written by Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams III).
"I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this angry, petulant old man in whom you believe. You’ve turned your backs on the God of love and compassion and invented for yourself this cruel, senile delinquent who blames the world and all that he created for his own faults."
I had to smile when I read (my hearing prohibited watching the old 1964 movie) 'Night of the Iguana' and came across this quote from Tennessee Williams character Lawrence Shannon. A minister, Shannon is recounting a moment when he had a nervous breakdown in the pulpit. This pivotal moment in the life of Shannon is reflective of the stress under which a pastor lives when his intellectual thought and his mental or physical failure to be a model of moral virtue ignite into a diatribe of honesty.
Sadly, the complicity of God for the human condition is ignored in the literalist biblical readings of evangelicals. In contrast I think God is complicit for our existence and guilty of being merciful enough to let us live.
Evangelical literalist readings of scripture go against reason and lift the written word above God's gift of intelligence that has produced a 'religion' void of a functional hermeneutic that brings life. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin says the scripture. So, rather than have faith in God to provides us with functional reason, reason is abandoned to absurdity. In evangelicalism there is no study of language or literature or structure or any form of critique permitted to challenge one's beliefs because the written word is become their God.
