Fight-or-Flight Christianity--Heretic Patrols

My father once preached on John 13:35: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (NRSV). "This is a dangerous verse," my father warned, "because here Jesus gives to the non-Christian world---'by this everyone will know'--the ability to judge us Christians. Here is the world's criteria: do we who claim to be Christian, in the eyes of the world, have love for one another? When the world looks at us, our attitudes, our actions, do they see love?"

I've always treasured this insight from my father. It reminds me of one of the first lessons I learned about theatre: the audience gets to judge what you put on stage. It doesn't matter if you as an actor intended to portray this or that emotion truthfully, thought for sure that you said this or that line audibly, or really wanted to convey this or that bit of action clearly. The audience decides whether the emotion is truthful, the line audible, or the action clear. It's a hard lesson to learn, this necessary act of submitting private standards to the audience's public reception.

Similarly, it's sobering to consider that, according to this scripture, our self-image or best intentions matter less than the world's perception when it comes to the issue of loving one another. Thus, our faith demands that we ask not only do I have love toward one another but also does everyone see this love? Is the way I treat my Christian sisters and brothers (to say nothing of my neighbors more generally) a witness to my love for them?

I pose this question in relation to the second unhappy side-effect of "fight-or-flight Christianity"--the tendencies of a faith life born in the emergency question, "Do you want to follow Jesus or burn in Hell forever?" I wrote yesterday that this high-adrenaline, life-or-death faith can too often result in an I-can't-think-about-that-or-I'll-burn resistance to deep or critical thought, a Denkverbot ("thoughtblock") on certain aspects of faith.

The Denkverbot represents the "flight" aspect of fight-or-flight Christianity--the pure avoidance of questions or viewpoints that might threaten certainty.. But emergency Christianity can, I think, just as often react with belligerent confrontation, turning and confronting perceived threats forcefully, fists up, guns a-blazing, and ready to kill or be killed.

If your faith is, from the get-go, primarily a matter of avoiding hell and getting to heaven--and about being utterly certain that you've done so prior to your ultimate fate--then understandably, you're going to spend the bulk of your mental and spiritual energy clarifying exactly what you believe about heaven, hell, and salvation. And, in one of those truisms that's actually true, humans tend to achieve definitional clarity about what they do believe by identifying exactly what it is they don't believe.

In other words, Christians develop a sense of what's orthodox by labeling, searching out, and strongly rejecting what's heterodox or heretical. For evangelicals, this might consist of deciding what the "Bible-believing Christian" really is via confrontation with other evangelicals who believe differently.

The "Battle over the Bible" in the Southern Baptist Church about the nature of Biblical inspiration is one example. Others off the top of my head:
Which Bible version is authoritative?
What role women should have in the church?
Is glossolalia (speaking in tongues--the "Baptism of the Holy Spirit") required or even allowed in worship?
Does salvation require simple profession of belief or repentance plus profession?
Which is correct--baptism by immersion or baptism by sprinkling?

And on into infinity.

Now, my beef here isn't about the fact that Christians disagree or even that they discover and develop different doctrines from and within conversations with each other. I'm more concerned with the tenor of these conversations, which all too often can turn quite nasty. Indeed, many secular observers of evangelical and fundamentalist culture note that often evangelicals reserve their harshest rhetoric not for obvious cultural enemies like atheists but for other churches, other Christians, who have come to slightly different conclusions than they.

Even when they appear minor or arcane to outsiders (ever try explaining the distinctions between various pre- and post-millennialists to someone unfamiliar with evangelicalism?), such disagreements can acquire church- or even denomination-splitting force. In Protestantism especially, heresy-hunting fads often presage schisms.

Of course, the act of heretic-finding, doctrine-defining, and church-splitting is as old as Christianity itself. Evangelicalism has no monopoly on harsh distinctions. But then--to return to my opening--what must the world think of Christians when it sees us making those hard-line distinctions? I sometimes wonder if the greatest challenge facing the Church is finding new and more loving ways for its members to disagree with each other.

I'm fascinated in the process by which a disagreement escalates from "we can agree to disagree" to "I can't consider you a Christian if you believe that." At what point does someone with a different opinion become a heretic? I'm not sure, but I suspect faith disagreements take a step towards schism once they become tinged with the certainty-anxiety surrounding hell/heaven/salvation. A conversation between a Calvinist and an Armenian can be cordial until one or both believe that only Calvinists or only Armenians get to heaven.

To the extent that fight-or-flight Christianity tinges all aspects of faith with the are-you-certain-you-aren't-going-to-hell question, it can too easily exacerbate inevitable differences of opinion among Christians.

More tomorrow,

JF