Balance, Exhaustion, Resentment

Wuff. Fighting off a sore throat today, so please bear with me.

I've been working through how I experienced my childhood faith (Southern Baptist) as a kind of "fight or flight" Christianity. That is, my faith was to a large extent based in and sustained by a fear of hell and divine judgment. I've criticized that kind of faith for its tendency to foster anti-intellectualism, defensiveness, and--for lack of a better term--exhaustion.

The reason adrenaline surges in the physical world don't last long is that they wear down the body. People who live lives characterized by frequent-to-constant adrenaline rushes--folk in combat zones, people in abusive relationships, people with anxiety disorders, etc.--are at risk for developing all sorts of physical and psychological problems (from heart disease to post-traumatic stress disorder) as their bodies and minds suffer from the the constant biochemical strain.

I think something similar happens to people exposed to constant spiritual stress. If your faith depends upon an ever-active fear of hell, if your faith practice involves frequent confrontations with that soul-threatening possibility, what are the consequences?

Ideally, and this is what I think most evangelicals would argue should happen, the fear that originally prompted you to walk down the aisle and get saved moves aside, grows smaller to make room for the in-breathing of the Holy Spirit. You still have fear--as in awe-filled appreciation of hell's reality, God's judgment, and Christ's sacrifice--but this fear gets put into perspective by the overwhelming loving-kindness of God for God's creatures and by the "peace that passes understanding." You don't live a fight-or-flight Christianity. As you grow in faith, you learn to trust in God's promises, to recognize that God's care for you isn't dependent upon your feelings of a moment. Evangelistic fear, then, ideally leads to a life of humility balanced with faith, not a life of cringing or paralysis.

To be honest, I grew up knowing many, many evangelical Christians who were old in the faith and who lived something akin to this ideal situation. They believed in and reminded others of the reality of eternal judgment, but this reality didn't cast a pall over their lives or their faith. Let me say that I have a great deal of respect for that configuration of faith. Their example continues to guide me today, tripping me up in the most productive ways lest I be too cavalier in dismissing the very idea of divine judgment.

Be that as it may, though, I have to balance my experience with such evangelical saints with my experience of secular friends and acquaintances who have retreated from or avoided church. Such people reacted differently to the fight-or-flight evangelism. Somehow the balance between fear and comfort that others find eluded them. For many, church became little more than a guilt/obligation bank to which they were forced to return weekly to refill their spirits with reminders about how wretched they were. They just burned out on spiritual anxiety, cut down on their church attendance, and found--surprise, surprise--that life could be much more pleasant without all that anxiety.

For others--and it pains me to say this--the God of fight-or-flight evangelism just seemed too much like an abusive parent or lover.

This is one of the most pervasive and unacknowledged set of mixed messages that evangelicalism (Christianity in general, actually) fosters: on the one hand, we are to picture God via family metaphors--God the father, Christ our brother, or even Christ the groom for the bride of the church. On the other hand, though, we are taught that God utterly transcends human relationships, that God disrupts or overturns familial ties ("if any man does not forsake his father and mother for my sake..."). Now, I don't mean to denigrate paradox per se; my own faith embraces multiple paradoxes (e.g., God as three-in-one).

The problem here is that Christians can be awfully opportunistic in terms of when and how they use family-God or transcendent-God in outreach and apologetics. God is family when the evangelistic pitch is about God's love. But when you talk about God's judgment, God conveniently ceases to be family and becomes transcendent.

Unsaved Person (UP): "If God is a loving father" [and here we should remind ourselves that many, many people in the world do not experience their fathers as present or loving] "then why would he judge me worthy of an eternity in the fire?"

Christian (C): "Well, you have to understand. God is holy and perfect. Imperfection cannot stand before him. We don't have the right as humans to judge God's standard because God is the standard."

UP: "Now wait a minute. Is he a father or is he an omnipotent deity with no tolerance for imperfection?"

C: "Yes."

UP: "Uh-uh. Listen: My dad loves me. I know that no matter what I do, even if I hurt him personally, he'll keep loving me. He may be driven to cut off ties with me. He may even be angry at me. But he would never say, 'You should spend the rest of forever in unimaginable, unending pain.' How--by any definition--is that loving?"

C: "There you go, using human standards again..."

UP: "Yeah? Well how come my human standards of love are so much more loving than your God's standards?"

And here's the impasse. In the how-to-evangelize literature I've absorbed, in the sample evangelizing conversations I've heard (there are tons on iTunes), evangelicals have a really hard time addressing that question in a deep way. To reiterate it: how is it loving for God to endorse an individual's burning in hell for all eternity? How is it possible to imagine a God who would do that as someone we are to love and adore?

[For that matter, the UP might demand to know how it's possible for an all-powerful God to allow suffering here on earth. It's the classic question of theodicy--how can God be all-powerful and all-good when evil exists? Responding to that challenge, evangelicalism offers several pat explanations, mostly dealing with original sin and the fallen world. I see many problems with that kind of answer, but I'm going to bracket dealing with those for now--total cop out!--to deal with the eternity-in-hell version.]

Exploring the common evangelical attempts to address the loving God/eternal hell paradox to the satisfaction of unbelievers will be tomorrow's task.

JF