On obedience and toxic Christianity. A thread:

Toxic Christianity pushes the notion of obedience and the importance to submit to pastors, leaders, parents, authorities. But obedience is blind, it strips you of agency and personhood, it asserts, ever so covertly, (1)

that whomever you are supposed to obey, knows better.

Moreover the word obedience doesn’t exist in the OT, and the words we have recorded of Jesus never invite anybody to obey. The closest he gets to it are the words in John 14:15 “if you love me, keep my commandments.”
(2)

The word ‘keep’ in John is the word τηρέω (tēreō) which means pay close attention to, observe, attend to carefully. And to see why this is not at all a call to obey Jesus we have to talk about the Hebrew word that is often translated as ‘obey’.
(3)

שָׁמַע (shama`) means to hear intelligently, to be attentive, to diligently listen. Many different translations use the word obey when שָׁמַע is in the text, but obedience means compliance w/an order, submission to another's authority. It is not at all about listening.
(4)

When Jesus says to keep his commandments, he’s asking his disciples to pay close attention to loving God and loving others as we love self. And immediately after he says that, he adds:
(5)

“I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever— the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.”
(6)

Because to know how to love God, and love others as we love self we need the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit has many names, I call it wisdom within sometimes, or ancestral wisdom, others call it intuition, gut instinct, divine wisdom.
(7)

And it is easy to confuse that with our trauma reactions (or what Jesus calls the world here), which is why it is so important to heal, so we know if we are responding to trauma, or leaning into our wisdom within.
(8)

So when Jesus says to ‘keep’, to pay close attention to, the invitation is to listen, to really truly listen, to pay attention to our hidden motivations and the reasons why we do what we do, because the goal isn’t obedience, obedience won’t lead us to wholeness.
(9)

The goal is to listen, to learn to recognize the trauma, the fight/flight response, to learn to lean in to our true selves and listen to the wisdom within.

(10)