Self-Centered Certainty

So if I'm not against fear and trembling in faith altogether--if in fact I advocate a measure of destabilization and I've-not-gotten-this-yet in my faith practice--then what's my beef with the certainty/anxiety taught so consistently throughout my Southern Baptist childhood?

I should reiterate, before I switch to rant mode, that the negative aspects of the equation "faith=certainty and anxiety" function as tendencies rather than necessary attributes of conservative evangelical faith. They are pitfalls, excesses to which the faith I learned as a child and which I detect in much evangelical discourse currently are particularly vulnerable. Nor are these tendencies dark secrets whose existence evangelicals deny or hide. Like any mature discipline, evangelicalism itself boasts many thinkers and critics with a good grasp of evangelicalism's own limitations and weaknesses (see, for instance, Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind).

From my perspective, though, the primary flaw in the Falls Creek/Southern Baptist/Two Main Questions mode of certain-anxious faith involves its self-centeredness. As I mentioned in a previous post, it can seem sometimes like Christ is worth knowing (or buying into) for the material benefits He grants you. Know Christ and get out of Hell.

I will admit that such a pitch has the appeal of being quite effective. Heck, it worked in my case. If you're convinced (as I was) about the horrors of a literal hell, you'll want to do what you can to avoid it. The mass conversions ("decisions," as Southern Baptists call them) at Falls Creek and other such revivals testifies to the power of fear as a motivator.

But the self-preservation instinct's potency can be dangerous. The same impulse to save ourselves by believing in Christ at a revival is in other contexts the fight-or-flight mentality that shoves aside, tramples, and passes by those who otherwise need our help. The example of Jesus--if it's anything--is an example of someone willing to live against the grain of the pure self-preservation instinct. It rubs me wrong to have a brute desire not to burn at the core of my Christianity.

To paraphrase John 15:13, Jesus says that greater love has no one than this: that he or she lay down his/her life for others.

I'm reminded of a well-known parable (I've heard it attributed to St. Teresa, a 16th century nun) who imagined encountering a person carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a burning torch in the other. Inquiring as to what the person was doing, the traveler answered, "I'm going put out the fires of hell with this water, and I'm going to burn up the clouds of heaven with this torch. Then we'll see who the real Christians are."

So much of evangelicalism's main rhetorical tactic--the threat of hell--depends upon activating an instinct for self-preservation that I wonder what would remain of the faith if the afterlife factor were neutralized. Would Christianity be nearly so attractive to evangelicals if they didn't need it to avoid the Eternal Fire?

I'll get into this sometime down the way, but plenty of Christians have come to a place where they simply don't see how a literal place of eternal torment can function with a faith in the omnipotent, benevolent God. Hell becomes (in some interpretations) a place of instant and total annihilation rather than eternal torment (how often, such interpreters ask, do you throw something into a fire with the idea that it will burn forever and never be consumed?). In other lines of thinking, hell is not literal at all but a metaphor for present suffering or alienation from God.

For many conservative evangelicals, such a notion of a non-literal hell constitutes pure heresy. Take away Hell, they suggest, and apostasy and agnosticism or atheism is inevitable. Evangelical Christianity collapses without the certainty/terror of Eternal, Punishing Fire. And that's tragic, because--as any evangelical Christian will readily attest--Christianity is so much more than a tale of How I Avoided Eternal Fire. The certainty of hell, the fear of it, the centrality of it in evangelical Christianity tends to wipe out all other considerations, including and especially our Prime Consideration of Love for the Other.

A more disturbing thought experiment: imagine word came down from heaven of a New Deal: any Christian can trade places with an otherwise doomed non-Christian, going to hell in place of that person. Who would take that deal?

In all honesty, I can't say I would.

"Greater love has no one than this: that he (or she) lays down his/her life for another."

What if the "life" that Christ expects us to "lay down" is not (or not only) our present, material life on earth but our eternal life? I don't literally mean "you have to be tortured if you really love others" (though is this not literally what Jesus himself did?).

Rather, I wonder if Christian love requires us to come to a place where we relinquish our anxiety over our own eternal fate in the name of being Christ for other people. What is Christianity without the certainxiety of hell?

Healthier? More Christ-like?

More tomorrow.

JF