Christianity as fig leaf
A coworker told me about a sermon he heard once about why there are so many Christian denominations. It boiled down to this: after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit they covered themselves with fig leaves because they knew they were naked and didn’t want to be ashamed before God. Each Christian denomination is a fig leaf a believer puts on so that he or she won’t be ashamed in the sight of God. He was smiling why he was telling me this as though it was so illuminating everyone should hear it. I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I suppose I could have said, “Christ is has one body, not tens of thousands.” That would have been too adversarial. Perhaps I should have said that we as Christians don’t worship out of shame, we worship out of love and adoration for God. Or going even further with the clothing or covering analogy I could have asked him how do we know God approves of the religion what we’ve put on? Clearly there have been Christian sects and schismatics that were thoroughly wrong – does it help a man to practice a religion that denies the divinity of Christ? In the end I just let it go.