Childhood and personal development
(This is a overview. I'll cover most of the topics in more detail on other pages.)
As a teenager, when our Unihockey team won a tournament, I had the honor of picking up the cup on behalf of my club, given to me by a pretty girl. Not wanting to defile myself, I refused the kiss, giving the lady a virtual slap and creating an uproar in the gym.
There are many reasons for this fundamental clumsiness:
I was inculcated with a very dark worldview. Having been in the extreme right wing of the evangelical movement for many years, I was taught the color book in Sunday school. It contains no words and is limited to four coloured pages:
|
|
In the movements I attended, the black heart is still taught today. In dogmatic jargon, this is called ‘fallen man’.
|
It took me many years of struggle before I dared to admit that there was a big gap between the teaching I had received and my personal experience, and before I could deepen my theological reflections: Thus, I finished the fifth and last year of study of classical Hebrew in 2022 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (the Old Testament is almost exclusively written in Hebrew.) I have also studied Biblical Greek for 3 years (the New Testament is in Greek). The discovery that most changed my worldview was the realization that 'hell by default' is a strange concept to Judaism, that it does not come from the Bible and that it only crept into Christianity during the third century CE by a madman, Mani, who created a sect named after him, Manichaeism.
Mani is perhaps as unknown to evangelical theologians as his imprint on Christianity is immense. Mani has escaped the scrutiny of theologians for several reasons. One reason may be that the sect has long since ceased to exist. Another is that it was fiercely fought. In the fourth century, a young philosopher by the name of Augustine, who was to become the most prominent Church Father in history, spent himself nine years immersed in Manichaeism before turning to what would become the Catholic Church. As a priest he would fight the sect he knew all too well, but unconsciously he would incorporate some of Mani's ideas into his Christian doctrines. Augustine was like an explorer in search of the unknown who could only evaluate his illuminations on the basis of what he already knew from Mani. Thus, according to St. Augustine, a child who died before baptism went to hell, even if both parents were Christians. At the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, Protestants and Catholics alike claimed to be followers of Augustine and perpetuated the teaching that one had to be a good Christian (that is, to have a true relationship with Jesus for Protestants, or a true relationship with the Church for Catholics) to escape eternal punishment and enter into the perpetual beatitudes. Of course, in the practice of modern Christianity these statements have faded away. But at its core, the 'black heart by nature' or 'hell by default' remains firmly rooted in the history and foundation of Christianity and particularly in the evangelical movements (all of which have emerged from a revival of Protestantism). According to the first chapters of the Bible God did not let man die in order to condemn him to hell, he subjected the world to impermanence in order to deliver him from it. If one has grown up in a fundamentalist Christian environment this is a thought as unthinkable as it is easy to conceive for a Jew. Both read the same text, it is true, but not through the same glasses. In Jesus' time, the Jews related the existence of evil to another event described in Genesis a few chapters later.
According to the Hebrew conception of the time, the evil on earth does not come from the woman (seduced by the serpent), it comes from gods / supernatural beings who coveted women.
In fact, we find many traces of this in the New Testament. Basically, the only difference between a Jew and a Christian is that the former is still waiting for the Messiah, while the latter is convinced that he has already come. But in reality things are a bit more complicated. Apart from that, the first Christians were all Jews, the early church was purely Jewish, and Christianity began to be seen as a separate movement from Judaism only in the first few centuries after Christ. The wiping of Israel off the map, its renaming as Palestine by the Romans (to make sure Israel would never be remembered again), the rise of increased anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire and finally the statehood of Christianity in the 4th century are some of the causes.
These reasons may seem ridiculous to you, but they have changed my life completely:
These reasons may seem ridiculous to you, but they have changed my life completely:
How can we trust the doctor at the hospital, the cashier at the shopping centre, the teacher at school or the fitness trainer if their hearts are black, if they have not received the Holy Spirit and are not regenerated?
An Iranian acquaintance who had to flee the Tehran regime correctly observed that all sectarian movements operate in this way: followers are led to believe that outside their movement, the world is dark and evil, and that the only place where they can find safety is within their circles. What you learn in your early childhood, you can't get rid of so easily! It was only when I was approaching forty and only after a lot of study that I was really able to admit intellectually what I had always known deep inside:
Mankind is born human, not corrupt!
My parents were of a different opinion. My mom several times warned me about a girl who occasionally invited me out for drinks, because her mother dressed in black and her behaviour seemed suspicious to my mom. The fact that my friend went to another evangelical church (admittedly different from ours) was of little consequence. Being a Christian did not necessarily mean being a real Christian! Introspection – or to put it a little more ecclesiastically – the pursuit of sanctification was another great burden in my life. I may have been given a white heart at the time of my new birth, but in the end, all it took was one sin to defile it. And the most dangerous object to be defiled was of female nature. Ah... the loose girls and the adulteress, I don't know if it was the church or my parents who hammered these warnings into my gullible, sincere and docile heart the most: Woman, an object of seduction and woe to anyone who succumbs to it!
The woman, an object!
I suffered from the dark, evangelical worldview from an early age. My mum, unlike my dad, was a sensitive soul and had to suffer under the yoke of her own beliefs. She struggled with digestive problems all her life. Even as a teenager, my pious delusions led also to insomnia. I eventually went into therapy with a Christian psychologist from the evangelical movement. This was later turned against me by my own parents when marital problems arose: ‘Chris has always been mentally weak’. In my search for inner peace, I sought refuge in religious fanaticism from a young age.
I was sinking deeper and deeper into evangelical extremism. In particular, it was contact with a sectarian theology professor, of which there will be many references, that was particularly toxic. My aunt warned my father when I was young, saying that this fanaticism was unhealthy for me. But her warning didn't carry the slightest weight with my father. When she was young, she fell in love with an Italian. And in Switzerland, Italians were despised at the time. Not only did he have no professional training, he was also Catholic. The fact that he has worked all his life didn't count for much. Marriage to such a good-for-nothing was out of the question in her family, so she remained a concubine. As a direct consequence, she had no place in the church and lives therefore ‘in the world’. My dad doesn't think much of her to this day. My aunt and her husband have been faithful to each other all their life. They now live together, but never married, even after my grandparents died.
If anyone has fallen prey to the most godly-looking seduction it is me. Being in the psychological language 'highly sensitive' – something I only recently discovered – I experience things emotionally more intensely than others, which makes it sometimes difficult for me to put a piece of information or in this case a warning in the right balance. Growing up in an environment where one did not have a balanced view of the world did not help. And yes, what I lacked most was balance. In my youth, the only thing that really mattered was faith. The right faith! That's how I cancelled the love of my life with a Polish girl because she was Catholic and not evangelical. Unlike the first girl, my mother would have supported me in this project, because they could see that she was a woman of value. This is all the more remarkable since my parents (especially my father) and my religious community painted a very dark image of Catholicism. On the advice of this theological scholar who was my role model at the time, I finally wrote a long letter to this girl, gathering all the theological arguments against the Catholic Church that I could find at the time. Why? She had to get soft, repent hard, kneel down and pray up. She needed to be born again. What I couldn't know in advance was that this letter would arrive at the time of her father's death. At the worst moment of her life I broke her heart and administered a resounding slap to her and her whole family. With that, she left Poland to live in the UK. Today she lives in Dubai and has never moved back to Poland again.
Shortly thereafter I met my ex-wife. As the daughter of a missionary family, she was the woman of my evangelical dreams, I who wanted to make a career as a pastor in the kingdom of heaven. Courting was complicated, but my friend, the scholar of theology, encouraged me to persevere. You know, every man of God is tempted by the adversary. My future wife's brother was shocked by my views on women in the church. He possibly also realised that we weren't a good match in terms of character, as my aunt definitely noted. But given the unwavering support of the greatest man of God of our time, my friend, the professor of theology faithful to God's word, the gentle questioning of my aunt (the wive of the Italian) and the concerned advice of my future brother-in-law to break off our engagement did not carry much weight. And yet the worst was yet to come in terms of my extremism! Just as the German soldiers went into battle singing at the beginning of the First World War, I boarded the ship of marriage cheering. But the singing soon faded. Our marriage wasn't working.
The basic problem was simple: We weren't made for each other, a concept I had hardly ever heard of.
Cause if two people love Jesus, they can't but love each other. For the first four years I didn't understand what was happening to me. I had done everything as I was told: I put Jesus first, went to church, read the Bible, prayed on my knees every day, etc. I completely stopped listening to rock music, whether it was Christian or not. Peter Reber's CDs were rotting in the junkyard (peterreber.ch) and my wife had to part with Jean-Jacques Goldmann's music (jjgoldman.net). For when the people of Israel made the Golden Calf their idol and Moses descended with Joshua from Mount Sinai, their music sounded like war cries (Ge 32:17-18): “Rock music!” You see, the Bible talks about it after all! Does rock music enchant you? That's because you are enchanted by a spirit of idolatry, just as the people of Israel once were by the golden calf! So, one can turn whatever Bible verse over to saying what one thinks it should to say. And those who see it differently are still in their infancy, spiritually speaking in the flesh, if born again at all. ‘There will be no drums in heaven,’ my friend, the theology professor inspired by the Holy Spirit sometimes thundered from the pulpit with divine authority. Not an angel, God himself had shown him that. Being friends with the then President of the United States would have been nothing in comparison. Over the years, I accumulated two boxes of letters from him. Unfortunately, I later threw them away. The warning against modern music, admittedly a little less severe, I had already heard it in my childhood, especially from my father (I was not allowed to listen to Polo Hofer for example, cf. www.polohofer.ch). Catholicism, Muslims, Christian rock music, lascivious women... My father had done good groundwork on many levels, so it was only a step to drift into the most extreme scene. During all this time our sex life was at 0. I could not have expressed it like that at the time, but in retrospect it was: My wife forbade me to be a man, as for me, I forbade her to be a woman! She had to do without earrings, give up make-up, had to wear long dresses and was not allowed to wear pants anymore:
The basic problem was simple: We weren't made for each other, a concept I had hardly ever heard of.
Cause if two people love Jesus, they can't but love each other. For the first four years I didn't understand what was happening to me. I had done everything as I was told: I put Jesus first, went to church, read the Bible, prayed on my knees every day, etc. I completely stopped listening to rock music, whether it was Christian or not. Peter Reber's CDs were rotting in the junkyard (peterreber.ch) and my wife had to part with Jean-Jacques Goldmann's music (jjgoldman.net). For when the people of Israel made the Golden Calf their idol and Moses descended with Joshua from Mount Sinai, their music sounded like war cries (Ge 32:17-18): “Rock music!” You see, the Bible talks about it after all! Does rock music enchant you? That's because you are enchanted by a spirit of idolatry, just as the people of Israel once were by the golden calf! So, one can turn whatever Bible verse over to saying what one thinks it should to say. And those who see it differently are still in their infancy, spiritually speaking in the flesh, if born again at all. ‘There will be no drums in heaven,’ my friend, the theology professor inspired by the Holy Spirit sometimes thundered from the pulpit with divine authority. Not an angel, God himself had shown him that. Being friends with the then President of the United States would have been nothing in comparison. Over the years, I accumulated two boxes of letters from him. Unfortunately, I later threw them away. The warning against modern music, admittedly a little less severe, I had already heard it in my childhood, especially from my father (I was not allowed to listen to Polo Hofer for example, cf. www.polohofer.ch). Catholicism, Muslims, Christian rock music, lascivious women... My father had done good groundwork on many levels, so it was only a step to drift into the most extreme scene. During all this time our sex life was at 0. I could not have expressed it like that at the time, but in retrospect it was: My wife forbade me to be a man, as for me, I forbade her to be a woman! She had to do without earrings, give up make-up, had to wear long dresses and was not allowed to wear pants anymore:
‘A woman shall not war anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment.’
(Dt 22:5).
(Dt 22:5).
So Moses had commanded. Men wore skirts back then, but the Hebrew legislator was really thinking of our time. So women are not allowed to wear trousers and men are not allowed to wear skirts. Are you Scottish? Well, tough luck! Provided you have repented vigorously, made things right with the Lord Jesus and consequently now have the fullness of the Holy Spirit, no further explanations are needed. And if your spiritual blindness has not yet convinced you of the truth of what this apostle of Christ has proclaimed, your fleshly vision will prove it to you unequivocally. 'Cause any public toilet bears witness to this:
Before our wedding, I had proudly sent a photo of my future fiancée and me, both sitting on the lawn in the height of summer, to my friend, the professor of theology. Seized by the Holy Spirit, he was quick to rebuke our indecency, for I was wearing shorts and a sleeveless vest, and although my fiancée was wearing a long dress as she should, her shoulders were not covered either. “I can still remember it well,” the professor wrote to me, “when, as a young minister, Jesus showed me that it is fitting for a man of God to wear clothing that covers his legs and arms.” So, at the start of our marriage, I dressed in such a way that only my hands and head were uncovered, even at the height of summer. Somehow the explanations of the godly theology professor never really convinced me, but unfortunately I couldn't measure up to him in terms of spiritual fullness. My companion couldn't really grasp my extremism either. At first she followed me wholeheartedly, but the more I sank into the mire of fanaticism, the more she had to do it with a divided heart. And she had to pay dearly for it, because her family no longer understood anything. This madness did not come from me, nor from my parents, it came from that scholar in theology that I mentioned before, who never tired of boasting about his faithfulness to the Word of God, the Bible. The most fascinating thing to me, apart from his charisma, was his happy marriage. He was always praising his dear wife and their marriage, which was only fulfilled because of their genuine relationship with the Lord Jesus.
A blissed marriage!
Of all the dreams I had at the time, this was the biggest.
To be happy in my marriage, I just had to do what he did. With hindsight today I am convinced that men who forbid women to be feminine have a real problem with their own masculine identity.
By Chris Zürcher. Page updated on 03 April 2025
