People love their labels: “conservative,” “liberal,” “fundamentalist,” “modern.” They give the illusion of clarity, but they don’t touch the heart of faith. What unites believers across all these divides is far more fundamental: Christ is alive, literally and existentially — present in the thick of our real lives, in ways we experience and feel, not just as an abstract idea. Faith is not a camp or doctrine; it’s a Person—risen, present, and active in both our reality and a reality bigger than ours.
Not everyone sees Christ this way. Some read the resurrection as a myth or symbol. That’s fine—symbolic or literal, it points to the same root: life stronger than death, love stronger than despair. Experiencing Christ existentially—in the grind of life, in pain, in hope, in choice—is what gives the Gospel its transformative power.
This emphasis on a hidden, foundational Reality echoes the early Church Fathers, who saw the spiritual as more real than the visible world:
They didn’t despise the world; they affirmed it while pointing to the transcendent Reality. Encountering that reality existentially—in living, suffering, and choosing faith—is how their insight remains alive today.
Camps get dangerous when ideology trumps encounter:
Conservative or liberal, fundamentalist or modern—if they obscure Christ, they miss the living root. The point isn’t winning debates; it’s meeting the living Christ in life.
Camps have real-world consequences. Some “orthodox” Christians defended slavery in the nineteenth century. During the civil rights era, some churches clung to segregation. Yet others, often called “liberal,” pressed closer to the Gospel: human dignity, justice, love. Orthodoxy can disguise culture; the real measure is fidelity to Christ—lived and experienced in real history, in the thick of struggle.
The world is broken. Suffering is real. All is not well. But God enters the trenches. God allows himself to be crucified, experiences human suffering, and still cannot be killed or stop loving us. This is the existential reality of resurrection—experienced in the midst of life’s despair and hope:
All is not well—but Christ is risen now, in our midst, and the Gospel is alive. Encountering this Reality existentially—in suffering, in hope, in daily life—matters more than any camp. Faith isn’t understanding everything; it’s trusting the One who cannot be defeated, whose love cannot be stopped. That is the good news. That is damn good news.
I wanted to say a few words about the idea that all is well, all is well.
Point number one, it’s common to hear people in the spiritual world say that everything’s okay, all is well, don’t worry.
And if you just look at the world the way it is, that’s wishful thinking, that’s denial.
Bad things happen every day, look at the news, or better yet, look at the news carefully with others in your faith community and think about ways you can respond to it.
But clearly, all is not well and it’s tempting to listen to spiritual cleverness that tries to anesthetize us from this reality.
Two, what does the Christian faith have to say about this?
Well, the first thing it has to say is that not only is all not well, but it can’t get any worse.
In fact, it’s so bad that God’s children crucified, tortured, God himself, and God died.
It doesn’t get any worse than that.
Three, after God died, something weird happened and there are a lot of conflicting reports about what happened, even within the scriptures, even within the Bible itself, there are different conflicting reports about exactly what happened.
But for my money, what I look to is this outlandish claim that Jesus was raised from the dead.
And not only is that story still hanging around, but lots and lots of people then and now were and are willing to be tortured and killed rather than deny it.
So Jesus is still alive, and by alive, I mean literally alive, and it doesn’t matter whether you believe Jesus is literally sitting on a cloud, or my view is he’s kind of in a, there’s kind of a greater reality.
The reality that we’re in is part of a larger reality, and that Jesus is certainly in our reality, but he’s also inhabiting a greater reality that is bigger and grander and more comprehensive than the reality that we’re in.
And that’s more along the lines of what the Church Fathers believed, and I think it’s also more in line with what modern cosmology tells us, but I’m getting a little bit out of my expertise there.
But Jesus is still alive, so it doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative regarding the Bible interpretation, we can all agree that Jesus is still alive literally, not just symbolically, although he is alive symbolically too, because his literal being aliveness is also a symbol.
It’s more than a symbol in the sense that it relates and has relevance to understanding other things, but it’s not just an abstract concept.
And what does Jesus aliveness mean?
What does it literally mean?
It means that there’s nothing we can do to kill God permanently, and there’s nothing we can do to make God stop loving us.
It means that God is in the trenches with us.
He’s willing to get **way** down into the trenches by letting us kill him.
He’s with us.
He can experience death, he can experience our lot, but we cannot cancel his love.
And for those of us who are a little bit iffy about this idea of resurrection, not in terms of if it can happen, but in terms of if we wanted it to happen, if you’re a pessimist or maybe you’re struggling with depression and the idea of eternal life sounds a little bit horrible, well, that’s where I come back to my view of the resurrection, which is that if I could understand it, in other words, any concept of resurrection that I could conceive of that contained any of my life experience in this world, that’s not something I would want to eternalize.
And there’s a respected theologian that I won’t name because I don’t want to misquote him, but I don’t think he’s the first person to say this, and I think this is probably something that we assume too when we think about eternal life, but if there’s going to be any me on the other side of eternity, in other words, if I’m going to be eternalized, if my life is going to be eternalized, then it’s going to have to be my life, which has a lot of bullshit in it, has a lot of pain in it, and I don’t want that eternalized.
Not if that means I have to keep experiencing it for eternity or thinking about it for eternity.
Or going to therapy for it for eternity, but yet if I sweep the decks and dust everything away and get rid of everything, then it’s how is it me at all?
Well, let me cut to the chase.
My view is that I cannot get an answer to that question, and I don’t want an answer to that question because any question, any answer rather that explains to me why heaven is going to be great, is necessarily not good enough.
That’s where faith comes in.
And as one brilliant theologian said, Christian faith cannot be contained within human reason, and I think that’s a feature, not a bug, because if I’m a drowning man, if I’m existentially drowning, if I could think up a life ring, I wouldn’t need faith.
If I’m drowning, that means I need a life ring.
That means I need Jesus.
In other words, I need something that I don’t understand because everything that I do understand is leading me to despair, is leading me to distraction, maybe for some of us it’s substance abuse or it’s family patterns that we can’t escape because they’re so ingrained or whatever.
But basically, we come face to face with the idea that all is not well.
But we can have cheer, we can have hope, that’s what Christian hope is about.
That’s not the end of the story.
We can have resurrection.
That’s why Easter is actually good news, although I wrote a whole article as I said about it called, Why Easter Is Not a Tragedy.
Well, it’s not a tragedy.
And it’s not a tragedy because it’s not just one more thing that I can think of, which is going to always give way to despair.
It’s something much bigger than that, it’s something much bolder than that, and it’s something that people have been willing to be martyred for from the beginning.
And as I heard at the Greek Orthodox Church, Christos Anesti!, Christos Anesti!, I think that means, I hope I pronounced it right, it means Christ is risen, and it doesn’t just mean Christ is risen when the Easter Bunny comes around and the flowers bloom, it means that Christ is risen right now, even if it’s the middle of December.
Christ has risen and all is well, and we can say that all is well, not because we’re closing our eyes to reality, but because we have a Savior, and we don’t understand it all, and we don’t need to understand it all, and we don’t want to understand it all.
And that is good news. That is damn good news. God bless.
One of the things I’ve been contemplating lately is surrender, surrendering not [sic] to God’s will and not because of some act of piety or virtue, but because I’m completely overwhelmed and this is not the first time in the last two years or so that I’ve gotten into a situation where there are so many variables and so many people and so many expectations that change that even if I had three clones of myself who didn’t need sleep, working 24 hours a day to do this management, there’s literally no way that I’d be able to use common sense and organization techniques to move forward in my life in any kind of sane way based on my own abilities.
As I told a friend recently I’m walking on blind faith right now, blind faith and again this is not because of some real virtue on my part, it is because I have been completely defeated by my life’s circumstances.
I am completely incapable of moving forward in any kind of human-centric way unless I were just devolving to preference or some other kind of random approach.
So this has forced me into increasing levels of surrender.
But the funny thing is, the more that I surrender, the further away I get from my mind and my ability to process things or better said, my inability to process things, the further away I get from doing things my way, the closer I get to doing things God’s way.
And to me in the past that always sounded like a chore or a sacrifice.
I want to do things my way but I want to be a good Christian so I’m going to try to do things God’s way.
I want to do things my way but I want to follow a wisdom tradition.
I want to try to be wise so I’m going to do things in a surrendered way
—but just just the same way that death leads to life—And as I say, and by the way I’m not advocating any self-harm here—but just as in our tradition physical death leads to resurrection.
And even if you don’t believe that, you can take it symbolically.
I was going to say something about existential death.
Let me just cut to the chase.
My circumstances have crucified me metaphorically and they have forced me to rely on the mind of God, not my mind.
That may sound a little bit crazy but I’m literally having to look to God for each step of the way.
Everybody’s journey is different.
As I’ve said before here, I felt God being very close to me during this past two or three years or so in particular, and helping me to see the next step.
I know that there were times in the past where I felt like my prayers bounced off the ceiling and came back down to me, but God has his own ways of working with each of us.
I’m just sharing my own story.
The nice thing is that I’ve been able to actually have some peace now because I’ve been forced to surrender.
And the funny thing is this Rubik’s Cube that changes colors, that is unsolvable that I’ve tried to solve, and that I’ve surrendered—
—It’s too hard for me, but it’s not too hard for God.
I know there’s a lot of talk in the theology world and the church nerd world about infinity and eternity and all that stuff.
My view is: who cares?
I don’t care what the definition of eternity is or whatever.
I’ll leave that to the brothers and sisters and other humans who are called to preserve the mystery of our faith from intellectual and spiritual contamination so that we can all enjoy it and draw benefit from it and live in it.
But for me, all that stuff means that I can rely on the mind of God to do the Rubik’s Cube for me.
All I have to do is keep listening as best I can and keep doing the next right thing, as I understand it.
Even if that means sitting quietly and listening or having my prayers bounce off the wall or the ceiling.
At the end of the day, God knows my situation better than I do.
All I have to do is ask and he’ll take care of me as best as he can—which is perfectly.
It may not feel perfect, but God is our Father and things are messy, and you know what?
I’m being tempted here to get into some kind of theological analysis, but I don’t need to do that either.
I can let God worry about that.
I just have to be a child and ask for help and trust.
And don’t take my word for it.
Try it for yourself.
Boyd Camak actively dismantles complex theology to strip away what he sees as inauthentic or obscuring layers, aiming to reveal the raw, simple, and transformative core of the Gospel. His approach combines a direct, unvarnished style with a sharp critique of intellectual elitism and superficial religious expressions.
Here’s how Camak dismantles complex theology:
1. Emphasizing the Gospel’s Simplicity and Counterintuitive Nature
Camak insists that the Gospel is “not sophisticated”—it is “so simple that it upends all of [his] categories and exposes the vacuity of all of [his] intellectual constructs.” He presents the Gospel as a framework for living that often runs counter to conventional wisdom, bringing peace and joy even in suffering. He asks bluntly, “Why can’t we just say ‘God loves you,’ and leave it at that?”
2. Prioritizing Lived Experience over Intellectual Abstraction and Formulas
For Camak, authentic Christian faith is a “Way of living” and a “lived experience” rather than mere assent to propositions, formulas, or academic theories. He stresses the tangible events of Jesus’s life, teachings, death, and resurrection as a practical guide for life and for understanding God’s relationship to humanity. He critiques the tendency to over-intellectualize, remarking that “atonement theories are to please theologians, not God.”
3. Rejecting Intellectual Elitism and Gatekeeping
Camak argues that deep faith is not the exclusive domain of scholars. He reassures those alienated by academic theology, suggesting that those without credentials may be closer to Christ precisely because they are free from intimidation by philosophy or complex systems. He insists that Christian wisdom should be accessible and “scattered,” not “holed up in the possession of ‘church nerds’ or dusty bookshelves.” To theologians and scholars, he levels the prophetic call: “Let My people go!”
4. “Demythologizing” and Clearing Away Constructs
Describing his approach as “existentialist Christianity,” Camak emphasizes “clearing away, a setting aside of the formulas and the theologies” to focus on the “bare facts” of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection. He temporarily sets aside questions of the supernatural to underscore Christ’s practical framework for orienting oneself in a seemingly meaningless world. While he finds “liberation by constraint” in the Catholic Church’s tradition of scriptural interpretation, he does so critically.
5. Confronting and Condemning Harmful Theologies and Institutions
Camak is unflinching in critiquing doctrines and structures he sees as spiritually abusive or dishonest. He calls the Roman Catholic doctrine of eternal damnation for mortal sin “complete bullshit” and labels severe expressions of Calvinism (TULIP) “metaphysical rape” and a “theology of death” for denying human dignity and God’s love. Provocatively, he declares that “most theology is demonic” when it becomes a system that obscures Christ rather than preserving mystery. He condemns much of contemporary American Christianity as “false revelation” or “paint-by-numbers spirituality,” rejecting the “believe or burn” mentality as a fear-driven distortion of the gospel.
6. Challenging “Conventional Wisdom” and Worldly Solutions
Camak explicitly critiques “conventional wisdom” for masking complicity with injustice—even crucifying Christ. He advocates for “confrontational non-violence” that tells disruptive truths. He distinguishes Christ’s Kingdom as “Reality” itself, over and against human cultural constructs like Western Civilization, whose conflation with the Gospel he calls a “profound theological error” and “irrelevant.”
7. Using Confrontational and Raw Rhetoric
Camak’s style is raw, jarring, and deliberately confrontational. He uses strong language to “name bullshit” and shatter complacency, dismissing certain doctrines as “complete nonsense” or worse. His bluntness is not gratuitous but designed to clear space for readers to encounter the Gospel afresh.
In essence, Camak’s dismantling of complex theology is an aggressive act of purification, aimed at liberating the Gospel from intellectual and institutional scaffolding that he believes obscures its simple, radical, and transformative power for ordinary people living amid the harsh realities of life.
more topics: https://boydcamak.wordpress.com/zine-1-0/
Boyd Camak’s theology is explicitly described as “trauma-informed” because of its unflinching emphasis on facing suffering directly. His approach is shaped by a candid acknowledgment of human pain, disillusionment, and the harsh realities of life, offering a framework for those reeling from loss, injustice, or cruelty.
Here are the key dimensions of how his theology reflects a trauma-informed perspective:
1. Validation of Suffering and Disillusionment
Camak refuses to “sugarcoat reality.” He declares that “life already is hell” and will “crucify” us all. He frequently validates feelings of exhaustion and being “done,” recognizing the world’s brokenness and the tragic, absurd, and evil aspects of existence. His writings express a deep weariness with this brokenness and grapple openly with disappointment and despair. For him, true faith begins with an unblinking confrontation of the tragic dimensions of the human condition, rejecting the “toxic positivity” that glosses over pain and blocks authentic engagement with the gospel and resurrection.
2. Embracing Suffering as a Path to Deeper Faith and Healing
For Camak, suffering is not incidental but spiritually formative. He believes that “the deeper the knowledge, the deeper the suffering,” and that wisdom arises from this reality. He urges believers to “stay inside the pain rather than escape it,” since fleeing pain only deepens it. Personal suffering, he teaches, is a “real-time sharing in Christ’s crucifixion” that brings cleansing and internal liberation from fear, shame, and manipulation. This “existential burning” becomes a necessary precursor to genuine belief.
3. Redefining God’s Love and Salvation
Camak rejects fear-based theologies—such as “believe or burn” rhetoric or depictions of God as a tyrant—that wound rather than heal. He labels severe forms of Calvinism (e.g., TULIP) as “metaphysical rape” and a “theology of death” for denying human dignity and God’s love. In contrast, he emphasizes God’s “infinitely extreme love,” which goes to “insane, psychotic lengths” to rescue humanity by entering the human condition Himself. For Camak, repentance is not appeasing divine wrath but awakening to the truth that God has already forgiven us, freeing us from guilt, shame, and fear.
4. Freedom from Toxic Authority and Spiritual Abuse
A recurring theme is liberation from manipulative power structures, especially within religion. Camak names and critiques spiritual abuse, intimidation, and shame-based control, condemning leaders who block access to Christ or impose “twisted authoritarian packaging” on theology. His focus is on cultivating inner peace and moral courage, so believers can face external threats with “peace, joy, and self-possession.”
5. The Cross as Solidarity and Internal Freedom
At the heart of his theology is the Cross—not as abstract doctrine, but as the central revelation of God’s love through suffering. Camak insists that God is “in the trenches with us” and “took the hit.” The crucifixion shows God’s solidarity with those in pain, validating their experiences and uniting them with Christ’s suffering. Paradoxically, identification with Christ’s shame and agony becomes the path to freedom from personal shame and the discovery of one’s worth in Him.
6. Critique of Superficiality and Intellectual Elitism
Camak resists “polished,” “commodified,” and “feel-good” versions of Christianity that sidestep suffering. He dismantles elaborate theological systems and intellectual constructs that alienate ordinary people. Instead, he insists that the gospel is simple and unvarnished, often most clearly grasped by those without academic credentials. His direct honesty challenges easy assumptions and opens space for encountering Christ afresh.
In essence, Camak’s theology is trauma-informed by:
Boyd Camak holds a nuanced view of psychotherapy and faith, acknowledging the legitimacy of mental health care while emphasizing the profound, transformative power of Christian spiritual practices for inner freedom and healing. Here’s a breakdown of his perspective:
Camak views psychotherapy as a legitimate and sometimes necessary clinical intervention for mental health conditions, acknowledging its place and even deriving personal benefit from it. However, he differentiates his core spiritual path from purely secular therapeutic or self-help models. Authentic Christian faith, in his view, offers a deeper “Way” to internal freedom, peace, and integration—particularly through embracing suffering and surrendering to God’s love—even when it challenges conventional wisdom.
“Brothers and sisters:
Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved,
heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,
bearing with one another and forgiving one another,
if one has a grievance against another;
as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.
And over all these put on love,
that is, the bond of perfection.
And let the peace of Christ control your hearts,
the peace into which you were also called in one Body.
And be thankful.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,
as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another,
singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs
with gratitude in your hearts to God.
And whatever you do, in word or in deed,
do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
Colossians 3:12-17
more topics: https://boydcamak.wordpress.com/zine-1-0/
Boyd Camak 