Good Goats and the Way of the Master

One of my father's favorite books--and now one of mine--is Good Goats: Healing our Image of God by Dennis Linn (co-authored with his family). It's a thin, large paperback that resembles a children's book, complete with simple illustrations. But the theology behind it really captures some of my own thoughts and feelings about God.

Linn's basic thesis is that we come to resemble the God we worship. If we imagine God as a stern, distant judge who is forever ready and willing to find our faults (but who, lucky for us, is juuuust merciful enough to let the sacrifice of his son make up for it), then in all likelihood we too will become stern, distant, and judgmental in our relationships to others. That kind of God, Linn suggests, makes our faith unpalatable both to ourselves and to others.

As a counter-example (which I'm paraphrasing--get the book to read the original account), he describes an experience where he (in his professional role as a counselor) was talking to a mother who had lost her adult son. The mother was worried that the son, who had lived a life of unhealthy addictions and rebellion, was burning in hell.

Linn asked the mother to close her eyes and imagine that her son was there in the room before her. She did so. "Now," said Linn, "what do you most want to do right now with your son before you? What do you want to say?" The mother replied that, more than anything, she'd like to wrap her arms around her son and tell him how much she loved him--this despite all the hurt she'd gone through because of his choices. Gently, Linn suggested that surely God's love for her son exceeded even hers, and that she could--with full confidence in that divine love--imagine Jesus wrapping his arms around her son and saying "I love you."

His point: if we believe in a loving God, then surely we must imagine that God as loving us at least as much as the person in the world who loves us the most. This is not to say that love implies easy acceptance; it's not a doormat love. Just as love between people here on earth must occasionally involve creating hard boundaries, so to do I think that God allows people to choose separation. But a family cutting off ties with an addict relative who would otherwise manipulate or rob them is by no means comparable to a God who would condemn a person to eternal hell for their sins.

I get impatient with Christian proselytics that uphold "God is love" alongside "You're destined for hell." As an example--one among a host--take the "Way of the Master" techniques developed by evangelist Ron Comfort. I expect to spend a lot of time here and in my research analyzing Comfort's distinctive outreach techniques, but for now let me sketch out his basic approach. Comfort believes that most conversions in churches to day are false in that they do not involve true repentance. True repentance comes, Comfort argues, when an unsaved person becomes convinced and convicted that they are in fact wretched in the eyes of the Lord, destined to be judged guilty when held up to God's standard.

Comfort's evangelistic technique (the eponymous "way of the master") is to engage a person in a conversation that leads to some variation of the question, "Do you think you're a good person?" If the person says yes (or anything but "absolutely not"), Comfort invites them to test their goodness by comparison with the ten commandments. The conversation goes something like this:

"Have you ever told a lie? Even once, at any point in your life?"
Yes.
"What do you call a person who tells a lie?"
A liar.
"OK. Have you ever stolen anything?"
Yes, when I was a child.
"OK, so what do you call someone who steals?"
[Typically the person will say "A stealer," and Comfort will gently suggest "thief" as a better term].
"Have you ever used the name of the Lord in vain, like 'OMG' or something?"
Yes.
"You know, that's blasphemy, using God's holy name as a curse word, and God takes that sin very seriously. One more question: have you ever looked at someone with lust in your heart?"
Yes.
"You know, Jesus said that if you look at someone you aren't married to with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery in your heart. So--by your own admission, you're a lying, thieving, blaspheming adulterer. If you were to die right now and stand before God in his heavenly court of law, would you be judged innocent or guilty?"
Guilty, I guess.

And from there (provided they haven't started to argue with him or walk away), Comfort takes them through his understanding of the Gospel--repent of sins, believe in Christ, etc.

This is fight-or-flight evangelism at its finest. Convince the person that they are in immediate danger of the fires of hell and then give them the get-out-of-hell free card that is Christianity (Ray Comfort's brand of Christianity, mind you. There's another strand of evangelicalism that vehemently believes that preaching repentance as a component of salvation is heretical. See here, for example).

Again, from Comfort's perspective, life really is an emergency situation. Death could come at any moment. Or Jesus could return in the twinkling of an eye. Either way, judgment is upon us. A fight-or-flight response is therefore appropriate.

I have grave doubts, though, about how well the courtroom-judgment analogy in this context works in fostering a long-term relationship with the living, loving God. Rather than "the beginning of a beautiful friendship," the way of the master seems more like a shotgun marriage between the neophyte believer and the very-easily-pissed-off deity.

More tomorrow,

JF