So--to pick up with yesterday's challenge: If God's essential feature is unconditional love, what about all the angry/vengeful/jealous God parts of the Bible?
I've been relating my life transition out of conservative evangelicalism (Southern Baptist-ism, specifically). Central to this shift was my encounter with a youth leader named Paulanne, who opened my eyes to the possibility that perhaps the miraculous thing about God's love was that it was offered to everyone, forever, full stop. It is good--for nothing. There's no threat of hell for those who don't accept it; there's no particular reward reserved only for those who do. God's all-powerful, insistent love pursues us forever. Death cannot stop it. Our unbelief or rebellion does not cause it to fade. It transcends mortality and attends us in whatever is to come. It is unconditional and unlimited in scope and power. It is stronger than judgment, stronger than sin, stronger than consequences.
To be fair, this isn't an idea entirely unknown to evangelicalism. Donald Bloesch (Essentials of Evangelical Theology) speaks of the possibility that Christ's redemptive, atoning gestures follow us beyond the grave, that Christ reaches out to us wherever we may be. Indeed, so powerful and eternal is that love in this line of thought that it is assumed that, in the fullness of eternity, all human souls will find rest in God, that God's loving openness and patience will outlast even the most stubborn of souls. C. S. Lewis, in his The Great Divorce, seems to endorse a similar possibility, viewing hell as a place of misanthropic self-isolation that souls may choose to relinquish (though in that book and in others--The Last Battle, for example--there is the suggestion that the soul's stubbornness may be permanent).
More recently, many strands of the Emergent conversation, a diverse network of postmodern evangelicals, affirm the power of God's love to overcome traditional theological barriers of mortality and sin. Dan Kimball, for example, tells of how when first presented with the gospel he wondered how powerful God could really be if even the smallest sin could establish a gulf between God and humanity. Or, more simply, Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church makes itself known in Grand Rapids via blunt, white-letters-on-black-background bumper stickers reading: "Love Wins."
And that's what the unconditional love of God means--love wins. But what about divine righteousness? Love wins. What about how the Hitlers and child rapists of the world deserve hell? Love wins. What about those who have never heard and do not believe? Love wins. What about those who believe sincerely, but not in Jesus Christ? Love wins.
It's a simple, shattering answer for conservative evangelical theology, for which judgment and eternal consequences (hell) must follow as a natural fact from human sin. To respond to the contrast of God's perfection versus human's sinful contamination with "love wins" is to nonchalantly dismiss a major part of who God is and what God does. It upends sense, suspends the rules of the universe--rules that God Godself established--it cheats, in other words. Love wins by cheating, declaring the rules void. A just God, cries this theology, would never do that.
But then, but then--is this not the God who in Christ said "the first will be last, and the last will be first?" Is this not the God who in the parable said that God-the-vineyard-owner will pay all workers equally no matter if they labored a full day, a half day, or but a few hours? Is this not the God who told Peter to eat flesh forbidden him, to consort with people forbidden him, to "not call unclean what I have called clean"? "Where is thy victory, o Death? Where is thy sting?" God has rendered all human concepts of sin and punishment void.
Love wins.
But, counters conservative evangelical theology, God doesn't love everyone! Did he love the people drowned in the flood? Did God love the Canaanites that God ordered the Hebrews to vanquish (men, women, and children)? Did God love those the Psalmist insists that God hates and in whose suffering God delights? Did God love Judas? Did God love Esau? Yes, an all-loving God might be nice--but the scriptures point to a God who is not forever patient, a God who can be angered to the point of annihilating cities, a God who can abandon humans. Where is God's love in that?
My answer is twofold: First, as conservative evangelicals may guess, I do not view every word written in the Bible as coming from God's mouth. I can affirm the inspiration of the Bible without overlooking the fact that the various parts serve other purposes: explanatory myths about the origins of the world and of a nation, justificatory narratives about the past strength of a people now oppressed and in captivity, epistolary fragments for churches in specific situations, apocalyptic visions used to frame contemporary criticisms. My convictions about who God is, my knowledge of how Christ lived, my fullest understanding of the Spirit's power in my life--these move me to reject as un-God verses that call for the shattering of infant skulls against the rocks simply because the infants are the enemy's offspring (Psalms 137:8-9).
Or-better yet--to treat these verses not as the literal Words of God or even as the Sentiments of God, but instead as the sentiments of God's people who at that point were hurting horribly. Human, not Godly.
And, secondly, as for other instances of God's abandonment, I turn to Christ, who in quoting one of those Psalms cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" At that point Christ was hurting horribly, having been betrayed and abandoned by nearly all around him, crucified by the people he sought to save. Yet the witness of Immanuel--God With Us--is this: that at that very point at which we are suffering most, at the point where we feel most abandoned by God--there God is, feeling our abandonment with us in the most literal terms. Even when we are lost, God's love wins its way to us.
And I do not suggest that this knowledge magically makes suffering or abandonment or loss disappear (any more than Christ's cry prevented his dying). It may not even be something we feel at the time. I agree with my conservative evangelical sisters and brothers in affirming that the Christian way does not guarantee protection from suffering. But the image of Christ as God's solidarity, God's at-one-ment with us at our most alienated--this is utterly different than the picture of a God who abandons humanity to an eternal torment.
More tomorrow,
JF
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Good for Nothing
I'm again delaying a response to conservative evangelical theology due to an experience in church today.
My congregation was blessed this morning with a special message from Virgil Gulker, the founder of Kid's Hope USA, a ministry that pairs adult mentors with underprivileged or at-risk elementary school children. Throughout the school year, the mentors each meet with their assigned child (each mentor has only one) for one hour each week. They may work on school projects, reading/math skills, play games, read stories, or just talk.
Although studies have shown that mentored kids exhibit marked academic improvement, Dr. Gulker clarified that the most vital benefits were intangible: the children have a friendly, consistent adult presence in their lives. Again and again, he says, children will ask their mentor, "What other schools do you go to? How many other kids do you mentor?" And the mentor will answer, "I only go to this school, and I only see you." The mentors show up, says Dr. Gulker, and they show up reliably, there totally for the child. For many of these kids, that's a phenomenon unheard of in their lives, and that's part of what makes Kids Hope work.
The other component of the Kids Hope ministry kids found miraculous, Dr. Gulker explained, was its volunteer nature. He told of a standard conversation between kids and their mentor:
"Why are you here? Are you teacher?" they ask. No. "Are you a social worker?" No. "I know--you're a teacher's aide." No. "Then how much do you make for seeing me?" Nothing. "Why would you do it?" Because you're my friend.
That, Dr. Gulker says, is the other miracle component from kids' perspectives: The mentors expect nothing in return for their friendship. They aren't paid, they aren't reimbursed, and they don't have to be there to fulfill some boss's mandate. They're good--for nothing.
That "good--for nothing" resonates with the core of the unconditional love I learned to identify as the prime attribute of God. As I've explained, I came to see my early evangelical faith as bound up in self-concern. I became a Christian, initially and primarily (if not exclusively), to avoid hell. I was to spread the gospel by activating others' sense of eternal self-preservation. You don't want to go to hell, do you? Then be saved by trusting in Christ.
The aura of contractual obligation--on me and on God--made it increasingly difficult for me to imagine how to be in love with God or how to show love to others without first thinking of the terms of the contract. Was I saved? Was I headed for heaven instead of hell? And I knew that, on facing God after death, God's first interaction with me was not "Welcome home, my child!" but "Is your name in my Book of Life? It is? Then--whom have you brought with you by your mortal witness?" Even reunion with God was a test--how had I fulfilled my half of the bargain (faith and not works, yes--but authentic faith: there's the rub).
This anxious questioning often crowded out every other thought, keeping my faith at a fight-or-flight panic status.
Imagining God's love as unconditional--love for nothing--freed me.
Early on in this blog, I mentioned the old story of the traveler passing a woman carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a flaming torch in the other. "I'm going to burn away the clouds and mansions of heaven, and I'm going to douse the fires of hell," she explained, "Then we'll see who still cares to follow the Way of Christ." Would we as humans love God--for nothing in return? What if the Christian philosophy had no sense of afterlife or immortal soul? Would the Christianity--a life lived in devotion to God and neighbor--be as attractive a life option for people?
Alternately, and in a way even more challenging to my evangelical roots: what if God loved us--loved everyone--with no eternal threat or reward to compel us to return that love? I've explored at length my troubles with the notion of God as Godfather, extending to humanity an offer it can't refuse: "put your entire faith in me--and enjoy eternal bliss--or decline to do so and face eternal torment." What if God's lovingkindness were extended freely?
Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith has a song along these lines titled, appropriately enough, "God Loves Everyone" (here's a nice cover of it, or you can find the original on his album Cobblestone Runway). It's both shockingly heretical from a conservative evangelical point of view--and somehow more right, more consonant with the most challenging, Spirit-filled moments of conviction I've experienced than any of my fear-filled, self-centered questionings regarding my eternal fate.
What if "there are no gates in Heaven/ everyone gets in/ queer or straight/ those of every fate"? What if God really does love "the killer in his cell/the atheist as well/ the pure at heart/ and the wild at heart"? What happens to Christianity when you don't have to be Christian--one of the elect--to receive the grace of God?
Ah, say my imaginary conservative-evangelical readers, you've still avoided the challenge you raised yesterday. Namely: what about all those scriptures attesting to God's hatred? "Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated." What about the God who calls for the destruction of enemies? The God who binds up and casts into the outer darkness those not heeding his call? The God who "gives them up" to their own fates? What about the God who forsakes us? Where is love in abandonment?
Is that a love that's good for nothing?
The answer, I think, begins by recognizing that Christ himself asked this same question on the Cross...
More tomorrow,
JF
My congregation was blessed this morning with a special message from Virgil Gulker, the founder of Kid's Hope USA, a ministry that pairs adult mentors with underprivileged or at-risk elementary school children. Throughout the school year, the mentors each meet with their assigned child (each mentor has only one) for one hour each week. They may work on school projects, reading/math skills, play games, read stories, or just talk.
Although studies have shown that mentored kids exhibit marked academic improvement, Dr. Gulker clarified that the most vital benefits were intangible: the children have a friendly, consistent adult presence in their lives. Again and again, he says, children will ask their mentor, "What other schools do you go to? How many other kids do you mentor?" And the mentor will answer, "I only go to this school, and I only see you." The mentors show up, says Dr. Gulker, and they show up reliably, there totally for the child. For many of these kids, that's a phenomenon unheard of in their lives, and that's part of what makes Kids Hope work.
The other component of the Kids Hope ministry kids found miraculous, Dr. Gulker explained, was its volunteer nature. He told of a standard conversation between kids and their mentor:
"Why are you here? Are you teacher?" they ask. No. "Are you a social worker?" No. "I know--you're a teacher's aide." No. "Then how much do you make for seeing me?" Nothing. "Why would you do it?" Because you're my friend.
That, Dr. Gulker says, is the other miracle component from kids' perspectives: The mentors expect nothing in return for their friendship. They aren't paid, they aren't reimbursed, and they don't have to be there to fulfill some boss's mandate. They're good--for nothing.
That "good--for nothing" resonates with the core of the unconditional love I learned to identify as the prime attribute of God. As I've explained, I came to see my early evangelical faith as bound up in self-concern. I became a Christian, initially and primarily (if not exclusively), to avoid hell. I was to spread the gospel by activating others' sense of eternal self-preservation. You don't want to go to hell, do you? Then be saved by trusting in Christ.
The aura of contractual obligation--on me and on God--made it increasingly difficult for me to imagine how to be in love with God or how to show love to others without first thinking of the terms of the contract. Was I saved? Was I headed for heaven instead of hell? And I knew that, on facing God after death, God's first interaction with me was not "Welcome home, my child!" but "Is your name in my Book of Life? It is? Then--whom have you brought with you by your mortal witness?" Even reunion with God was a test--how had I fulfilled my half of the bargain (faith and not works, yes--but authentic faith: there's the rub).
This anxious questioning often crowded out every other thought, keeping my faith at a fight-or-flight panic status.
Imagining God's love as unconditional--love for nothing--freed me.
Early on in this blog, I mentioned the old story of the traveler passing a woman carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a flaming torch in the other. "I'm going to burn away the clouds and mansions of heaven, and I'm going to douse the fires of hell," she explained, "Then we'll see who still cares to follow the Way of Christ." Would we as humans love God--for nothing in return? What if the Christian philosophy had no sense of afterlife or immortal soul? Would the Christianity--a life lived in devotion to God and neighbor--be as attractive a life option for people?
Alternately, and in a way even more challenging to my evangelical roots: what if God loved us--loved everyone--with no eternal threat or reward to compel us to return that love? I've explored at length my troubles with the notion of God as Godfather, extending to humanity an offer it can't refuse: "put your entire faith in me--and enjoy eternal bliss--or decline to do so and face eternal torment." What if God's lovingkindness were extended freely?
Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith has a song along these lines titled, appropriately enough, "God Loves Everyone" (here's a nice cover of it, or you can find the original on his album Cobblestone Runway). It's both shockingly heretical from a conservative evangelical point of view--and somehow more right, more consonant with the most challenging, Spirit-filled moments of conviction I've experienced than any of my fear-filled, self-centered questionings regarding my eternal fate.
What if "there are no gates in Heaven/ everyone gets in/ queer or straight/ those of every fate"? What if God really does love "the killer in his cell/the atheist as well/ the pure at heart/ and the wild at heart"? What happens to Christianity when you don't have to be Christian--one of the elect--to receive the grace of God?
Ah, say my imaginary conservative-evangelical readers, you've still avoided the challenge you raised yesterday. Namely: what about all those scriptures attesting to God's hatred? "Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated." What about the God who calls for the destruction of enemies? The God who binds up and casts into the outer darkness those not heeding his call? The God who "gives them up" to their own fates? What about the God who forsakes us? Where is love in abandonment?
Is that a love that's good for nothing?
The answer, I think, begins by recognizing that Christ himself asked this same question on the Cross...
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, August 29, 2009
The Evangelical Counter to God's Unconditional Love
So--relating three Big Shifts in my life and faith that coincided with a transition out of evangelicalism for me, I told about my entry into the world of theatre (and therefore a wholly new way of thinking about what I could do) and my participation in a youth group led by a woman named Paulanne. I credited Paulanne with helping to revolutionize the way I see God.
To whit: she presented a picture of Christianity almost entirely devoid of the fear and anxiety about eternal salvation that had so characterized my early faith. Instead, Paulanne emphasized the idea of God's unconditional, passionate, overpowering love for us both as the prime condition of all existence and as the ethical standard of interaction that anyone who goes by the label Christian should choose as a pattern for life.
I pause here to address the fact that, in rhapsodizing about embracing God as unconditional love, I have fallen right into the conservative-evangelical stereotype of the proud apostate. A cautionary tale advanced by conservative evangelicals since at least the 1800s, the proud apostate is one who falls prey to the siren call of a false gospel--the gospel of God's love-without-judgment.
Practically every evangelist or evangelical ministry that mobilizes the gospel of avoiding hell eventually comes to address the fact that much of their message (i.e., the eternity-in-hell-for-sin part) makes God seem capricious and tyrannical rather than loving and worthy of adoration. Yet practically every such evangelist also has a standard criticism, sometimes bitter and sometimes sorrowful, of any ministry that abandons or mutes the hellfire judgment portion of the gospel message.
As I've explored at length in this blog, conservative evangelicals (generally speaking) refute the idea that God's love can exist at all apart from God's righteousness. Those attributes are, for evangelicals, two apsects of the same Person(ality). God judges not because, like some heavenly Jekyll/Hyde, God changes character from wrathful to loving. God judges because without that judgment God would be neither righteous nor loving.
How could God not judge a rapist or murder, these evangelicals will ask, and be called good? How could he welcome such vile criminals into Heaven and maintain that he loves people? How is that fair to the victims? Besides, the argument continues, God's love for humanity is more than proven by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. What more do you want?
There's a deeper argument from some evangelical circles that I've not really dealt with yet, the doctrine of reprobation. A thread especially prominent in Calvinist traditions, reprobation declares that, in fact, God's love is not as unlimited as the love Paulanne presented to me and that I try to embrace. Instead, goes this line of thought, it is possible for humans to offend God to such a degree through their pride and blasphemy that they drift beyond the ambit of God's grace. They go too far, and God lets them go--forever.
Indeed, insofar as evangelicals believe that the ability of humans to turn to Christ ceases at death or at the Final Judgment (whichever comes first), they set practical limits on the extent of God's love. For most conservative evangelicals, souls burning in hell are there eternally, having by their mortal unbelief abandoned themselves to their sad fate.
The other side of strict reprobation is of course the better-known Calvinist doctrine of election. Here I tread upon ground less familiar to me, but as I understand it, conservative Calvinism interprets most Biblical passages about God's love as referring not to humanity in general but to that portion of humanity that God in God's sovereignty chose to be God's own. That is, prior to existence, God chose (a word whose Latin translation forms the root of elect) which human souls would turn to God. It is for these that God sent Christ. The others--the un-elect--are destined to reject God and are of course not included in God's proclamations of love.
Now, Calvinist traditions boast as wide a range of interpretations about election/reprobation as you can imagine (e.g., for some, election simply means that God knows ahead of time which humans will choose to believe in God and which won't). But just about any way you cut it, reprobation and election in any of their forms suggest a limitation on the spatial or temporal scope of God's love. God either loves all people--but only up to a certain time, after which he only loves those who have believed on Christ--or God loves only a portion of humanity, a portion who conveniently enough are exactly those who believe on Christ. [I can actually see the appeal of a strict Calvinism. It neatly explains away the moral conundrum of God loving a soul that God is ultimately unable or unwilling to spare from Hell]
Either way, God's love is, from an eternal perspective, unconditional for Christians alone. To believe otherwise, to suggest that God really loves all humans without scope or limit, is to replace the God represented in the Bible with wishful thinking.
Like it or not, point out conservative evangelicals, the Bible does not present a God who is totally loving. In the Bible God hates, excoriates, delights in the afflictions of, punishes, kills, destroys, calls for the utter annihilation of, lets go of, curses, drives out, casts into the outer darkness, and abandons altogether those God judges as worthy of such treatment. How, ask evangelicals, do people get around the Biblical witness without ignoring or dismissing it, replacing the Word of God in Scripture with a God of their own imagining. Is this not the very idolatry, the very pride, that defines the reprobate mind?
My response tomorrow,
JF
To whit: she presented a picture of Christianity almost entirely devoid of the fear and anxiety about eternal salvation that had so characterized my early faith. Instead, Paulanne emphasized the idea of God's unconditional, passionate, overpowering love for us both as the prime condition of all existence and as the ethical standard of interaction that anyone who goes by the label Christian should choose as a pattern for life.
I pause here to address the fact that, in rhapsodizing about embracing God as unconditional love, I have fallen right into the conservative-evangelical stereotype of the proud apostate. A cautionary tale advanced by conservative evangelicals since at least the 1800s, the proud apostate is one who falls prey to the siren call of a false gospel--the gospel of God's love-without-judgment.
Practically every evangelist or evangelical ministry that mobilizes the gospel of avoiding hell eventually comes to address the fact that much of their message (i.e., the eternity-in-hell-for-sin part) makes God seem capricious and tyrannical rather than loving and worthy of adoration. Yet practically every such evangelist also has a standard criticism, sometimes bitter and sometimes sorrowful, of any ministry that abandons or mutes the hellfire judgment portion of the gospel message.
As I've explored at length in this blog, conservative evangelicals (generally speaking) refute the idea that God's love can exist at all apart from God's righteousness. Those attributes are, for evangelicals, two apsects of the same Person(ality). God judges not because, like some heavenly Jekyll/Hyde, God changes character from wrathful to loving. God judges because without that judgment God would be neither righteous nor loving.
How could God not judge a rapist or murder, these evangelicals will ask, and be called good? How could he welcome such vile criminals into Heaven and maintain that he loves people? How is that fair to the victims? Besides, the argument continues, God's love for humanity is more than proven by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. What more do you want?
There's a deeper argument from some evangelical circles that I've not really dealt with yet, the doctrine of reprobation. A thread especially prominent in Calvinist traditions, reprobation declares that, in fact, God's love is not as unlimited as the love Paulanne presented to me and that I try to embrace. Instead, goes this line of thought, it is possible for humans to offend God to such a degree through their pride and blasphemy that they drift beyond the ambit of God's grace. They go too far, and God lets them go--forever.
Indeed, insofar as evangelicals believe that the ability of humans to turn to Christ ceases at death or at the Final Judgment (whichever comes first), they set practical limits on the extent of God's love. For most conservative evangelicals, souls burning in hell are there eternally, having by their mortal unbelief abandoned themselves to their sad fate.
The other side of strict reprobation is of course the better-known Calvinist doctrine of election. Here I tread upon ground less familiar to me, but as I understand it, conservative Calvinism interprets most Biblical passages about God's love as referring not to humanity in general but to that portion of humanity that God in God's sovereignty chose to be God's own. That is, prior to existence, God chose (a word whose Latin translation forms the root of elect) which human souls would turn to God. It is for these that God sent Christ. The others--the un-elect--are destined to reject God and are of course not included in God's proclamations of love.
Now, Calvinist traditions boast as wide a range of interpretations about election/reprobation as you can imagine (e.g., for some, election simply means that God knows ahead of time which humans will choose to believe in God and which won't). But just about any way you cut it, reprobation and election in any of their forms suggest a limitation on the spatial or temporal scope of God's love. God either loves all people--but only up to a certain time, after which he only loves those who have believed on Christ--or God loves only a portion of humanity, a portion who conveniently enough are exactly those who believe on Christ. [I can actually see the appeal of a strict Calvinism. It neatly explains away the moral conundrum of God loving a soul that God is ultimately unable or unwilling to spare from Hell]
Either way, God's love is, from an eternal perspective, unconditional for Christians alone. To believe otherwise, to suggest that God really loves all humans without scope or limit, is to replace the God represented in the Bible with wishful thinking.
Like it or not, point out conservative evangelicals, the Bible does not present a God who is totally loving. In the Bible God hates, excoriates, delights in the afflictions of, punishes, kills, destroys, calls for the utter annihilation of, lets go of, curses, drives out, casts into the outer darkness, and abandons altogether those God judges as worthy of such treatment. How, ask evangelicals, do people get around the Biblical witness without ignoring or dismissing it, replacing the Word of God in Scripture with a God of their own imagining. Is this not the very idolatry, the very pride, that defines the reprobate mind?
My response tomorrow,
JF
Friday, August 28, 2009
Big Shifts in my Faith: Youth Groups and Unconditional Love
I mentioned yesterday that, during my family's hard time in the early nineties, my father (once a Southern Baptist pastor) found himself on the wrong side--the moderate/liberal side--of the denomination's shift to the right. No pastoring jobs were to be found. As a result, our family had to shift from "preacher's family" to "lay-folks-struggling-to-survive-during-a-recession family." My mother went back to teaching high school. My father went back to being a custodian at the town's university-affiliated Baptist church.
And that, too, was a very new thing for us as a family: being members of a church in which Daddy was not the pastor, Mama was not the pastor's wife, and my sister and I were not PKs.
There were other differences. The congregation was much larger than what we were accustomed to. The people--many of whom were faculty, staff, and alumni of the Baptist university across the street--tended toward a higher economic class and educational level than we were used to. The economic difference felt particularly sharp given our family's financial difficulties.
One more difference: although, as I have mentioned, my parents were never exactly conservative Southern Baptists, this church was decidedly on the liberal side of things. Even a Baptist university has some liberalizing effects on the culture. Women participated widely in church life (save, of course, for the position of pastor). The sermons tended toward thoughtful re-readings and explorations of scripture rather than literal "Bible-readings." And the youth leader...well, Paulann's influence on my faith was the second major shift to come from this period of my life.
Paulann at the time led the church's well-developed youth program. She taught Bible lessons, led guitar-accompanied sing-alongs, promoted various ministerial activities, took us to Falls Creek (and groused with us about the fundamentalist messages promulgated therein), and most of all shared her vision of who God is.
For Paulann, God's defining feature was passionate, unconditional love for each of us. Now, that was not anything I hadn't heard about previously. Everyone in my faith tradition grew up singing "Jesus Loves Me." John 3:16 talks about how much God loved the world. The love of God as witnessed in Christ's sacrifice on the cross forms a central narrative point in the salvation pitch of conservative evangelicals.
What made Paulann's version different? I think part of it has to do with that word unconditional. Again, the word itself as a descriptor of God's love was not unheard-of in my Baptist life. But somehow the divine love operating in the get-out-of-hell story that drove my childhood faith seemed less than unconditional.
In the Baptist image of God that I initially learned to serve, divine love was caught up in--even overpowered by--divine disgust with humanity's sin. Experiencing that love required that I internalize a deep sense of my own wretchedness, and an even deeper sense of obligation toward God's grandiose act of sacrifice on the cross to atone for my sins. That love felt sick, contaminated by negative feelings. I could never love God nor think about how much God loved me without also feeling guilty, enslaved to a debt I could never repay, and frankly frightened that this all-powerful Being might judge me insufficiently grateful.
Paulann's version of God's love purged that emotion. God loves you, she told us repeatedly, more than we could ever love ourselves. Before we knew God, before we knew anything, before we existed, God adored us. And we didn't have to--couldn't--do anything to make God love us. Nor can we ever do anything to make God stop loving us. God's love for us is fearsome, not a tame thing, passionate, refusing all limit or boundary, intrusive, insistent, constantly knocking at the door of our heart.
She defined for me what unconditional really is, what the fact of an all-powerful God who loves me really means.
And not once did she mention hell. Not once did we dwell on the final judgment. Fear for the destination of our eternal souls simply played no part in her argument about why we should follow the way of Christ. Not that this was a whatever-we-want-God-to-be faith. God's essence as love was for Christians an imperative to love. We were to love everyone as unconditionally and as fully as God. Sin, for Paulanne, was anti-love, disruptions of or failures to love as God does. Nor was love easy. Paulanne did not hesitate to press her youth to harsh self-reflections, honest confrontations with what was most difficult in our lives.
I remember one Friday evening at Falls Creek--not in the main tabernacle watching weeping preteens stumble down the aisle to be saved, but on the rooftop patio of our sleeping quarters. Paulann asked us to reflect on what God was doing for us in our lives, adding that she expected to hear us talk and would keep us there until we did. That night was one of the deepest, most soul-wrenching communal experiences I have ever had. There were tears, silences, admissions, questions, doubts, songs, lots of hugging. It left us shaken but stirred.
That was another thing I learned from Paulann: it was possible for love to be difficult, painful even, without being life/soul-threatening. We could doubt, we could get angry--we could even get angry at God--confident that nothing we could do or say, think or feel could separate us from God's all-powerful love. God's perfect love cast out fear.
This love that Paulann taught, this love that Paulann showed, this love that I realized had lain all along at the heart of my family--this was the love of God, the substance of Christianity.
This love saved my life some years later.
More tomorrow,
JF
And that, too, was a very new thing for us as a family: being members of a church in which Daddy was not the pastor, Mama was not the pastor's wife, and my sister and I were not PKs.
There were other differences. The congregation was much larger than what we were accustomed to. The people--many of whom were faculty, staff, and alumni of the Baptist university across the street--tended toward a higher economic class and educational level than we were used to. The economic difference felt particularly sharp given our family's financial difficulties.
One more difference: although, as I have mentioned, my parents were never exactly conservative Southern Baptists, this church was decidedly on the liberal side of things. Even a Baptist university has some liberalizing effects on the culture. Women participated widely in church life (save, of course, for the position of pastor). The sermons tended toward thoughtful re-readings and explorations of scripture rather than literal "Bible-readings." And the youth leader...well, Paulann's influence on my faith was the second major shift to come from this period of my life.
Paulann at the time led the church's well-developed youth program. She taught Bible lessons, led guitar-accompanied sing-alongs, promoted various ministerial activities, took us to Falls Creek (and groused with us about the fundamentalist messages promulgated therein), and most of all shared her vision of who God is.
For Paulann, God's defining feature was passionate, unconditional love for each of us. Now, that was not anything I hadn't heard about previously. Everyone in my faith tradition grew up singing "Jesus Loves Me." John 3:16 talks about how much God loved the world. The love of God as witnessed in Christ's sacrifice on the cross forms a central narrative point in the salvation pitch of conservative evangelicals.
What made Paulann's version different? I think part of it has to do with that word unconditional. Again, the word itself as a descriptor of God's love was not unheard-of in my Baptist life. But somehow the divine love operating in the get-out-of-hell story that drove my childhood faith seemed less than unconditional.
In the Baptist image of God that I initially learned to serve, divine love was caught up in--even overpowered by--divine disgust with humanity's sin. Experiencing that love required that I internalize a deep sense of my own wretchedness, and an even deeper sense of obligation toward God's grandiose act of sacrifice on the cross to atone for my sins. That love felt sick, contaminated by negative feelings. I could never love God nor think about how much God loved me without also feeling guilty, enslaved to a debt I could never repay, and frankly frightened that this all-powerful Being might judge me insufficiently grateful.
Paulann's version of God's love purged that emotion. God loves you, she told us repeatedly, more than we could ever love ourselves. Before we knew God, before we knew anything, before we existed, God adored us. And we didn't have to--couldn't--do anything to make God love us. Nor can we ever do anything to make God stop loving us. God's love for us is fearsome, not a tame thing, passionate, refusing all limit or boundary, intrusive, insistent, constantly knocking at the door of our heart.
She defined for me what unconditional really is, what the fact of an all-powerful God who loves me really means.
And not once did she mention hell. Not once did we dwell on the final judgment. Fear for the destination of our eternal souls simply played no part in her argument about why we should follow the way of Christ. Not that this was a whatever-we-want-God-to-be faith. God's essence as love was for Christians an imperative to love. We were to love everyone as unconditionally and as fully as God. Sin, for Paulanne, was anti-love, disruptions of or failures to love as God does. Nor was love easy. Paulanne did not hesitate to press her youth to harsh self-reflections, honest confrontations with what was most difficult in our lives.
I remember one Friday evening at Falls Creek--not in the main tabernacle watching weeping preteens stumble down the aisle to be saved, but on the rooftop patio of our sleeping quarters. Paulann asked us to reflect on what God was doing for us in our lives, adding that she expected to hear us talk and would keep us there until we did. That night was one of the deepest, most soul-wrenching communal experiences I have ever had. There were tears, silences, admissions, questions, doubts, songs, lots of hugging. It left us shaken but stirred.
That was another thing I learned from Paulann: it was possible for love to be difficult, painful even, without being life/soul-threatening. We could doubt, we could get angry--we could even get angry at God--confident that nothing we could do or say, think or feel could separate us from God's all-powerful love. God's perfect love cast out fear.
This love that Paulann taught, this love that Paulann showed, this love that I realized had lain all along at the heart of my family--this was the love of God, the substance of Christianity.
This love saved my life some years later.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Three Big Life Changes Part I: Drama
Wow, I'm tired. I started this blog in the summer partially as a way to get me writing every day. I had forgotten how, during the school year, I do write every day...leaving surprisingly little brain-juice for blogging.
Anyway, back to my first Big Life/Faith Crisis, part umpteenth:
When I entered the ninth grade (1990-ish), I was for the very first time in my life a non-PK. The double whammy of the economic recession and the Southern Baptist Convention's lurch to the right had left my pastor father without a ministerial appointment. Instead, he found work as custodian in the University-affiliated Baptist Church in the town we lived in. The pastor and staff joked that the church's standards were so high that even the custodian had a Master of Divinity.
Such were the thin jokes of our family's hard time.
My mother fell back on her pre-seminary teaching degrees, getting hired as an overworked English/Speech teacher in a tiny, rural school which my sister and I attended for that year. The next year, Mama switched to an even tinier school even further away, and my sister and I transferred to the large school system of the town we lived in.
Again--hard times all around. We went bankrupt. We switched rental homes several times, once because the land lord (we discovered) had been charged with some illegal something-or-other. I didn't mind that time; that house was infested with fleas. You walked across the living room and felt them biting your feet. You sat on the furniture and felt them biting your arm. You went to school or church and--ugh--found one biting you. I still have the occasional nightmare about fleas...
I also developed an intolerance of roast beef sandwiches from Arby's. At the time they advertised 5 sandwiches for $5, which was just the right price for our cash-strapped family. I think I just overloaded. I can barely stand the thought of them now.
Of course, I shouldn't overdramatize. Lots of families were much worse off than we were. We ate cheaply, but never in my memory did we have to go without food. Nor were we ever without a home, without a car, or without clothing. And--corny as it sounds--we had each other, drawing closer together as a family.
Three big factors changed my life in a big way during that time.
The first involved my going to a very large high school. I had grown up in a series of small towns and had attended a series of small schools. This high school had approximately 1200 students. Though that's still small by many standards, that number was larger than the population of the previous town we had lived in. It was immense to me, overwhelming. The first day (10th grade), I wandered from class to class, hoping I had the right schedule.
I had wanted to take Honors Biology; at the time, I had an interest in ichthyology--long story. I realized, however, that the Biology class I was in wasn't quite at the Honors level. What tipped me off: we were assigned to draw a food chain--any food chain--that included humans. One student asked, "Do we eat eagles?" Intellectual snob that I am, I asked the teacher (discretely) if this was Honors Biology. She said no, I went to the office to get added into that class and my whole course schedule changed.
I got into Honors Biology (Teri Savage as a teacher--what a hoot she was!), yes, but I also got put into a Debate class (largely because it was the only available elective for my new schedule). Debate class involved participation in the high school's speech and theatre club as well as trips to weekend speech/theatre competitions. I joined the club, went to the competitions... and began getting involved in theatre. I got cast in Oklahoma! (my first play) that year. I played cranky old farmer Andrew Carnes, who opens the second act with "The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" (I went blank and just mouthed the words during one performance). I got to say "Hell" on stage. I made friends (!!). What a blast.
More: I discovered, at those weekend competitions, that I was terrible at debate. Just terrible. I liked writing arguments, seeing two sides of the same issue, encountering philosophy and persuasive skills--but I did not like live confrontation. I still don't. So I never did well in debate, which happened on Friday nights. I stayed at those competitions, however, through Saturday, which is when the drama competitions happened (events with names like "Dramatic Duet" or "Humorous Interpretation").
I saw two high-schoolers from another school perform a ten-minute cutting from On Golden Pond and thought: This, truly, is Art. Also: I think I can do this.
The next year my (my 11th grade) sister joined that school (as a 10th grader), and we began competing in Humorous Duet (a ten-minute cutting of How to Eat Like a Child And Other Lessons in Not Being A Grown-up by Delia Ephron). We won.
I continued to act, I got cast in shows, I had a circle of friends, I won some medals--it was like I had discovered some kind of varsity sport I was good at.
From then on, theatre was a part of my life. That was the first change.
More tomorrow,
JF
Anyway, back to my first Big Life/Faith Crisis, part umpteenth:
When I entered the ninth grade (1990-ish), I was for the very first time in my life a non-PK. The double whammy of the economic recession and the Southern Baptist Convention's lurch to the right had left my pastor father without a ministerial appointment. Instead, he found work as custodian in the University-affiliated Baptist Church in the town we lived in. The pastor and staff joked that the church's standards were so high that even the custodian had a Master of Divinity.
Such were the thin jokes of our family's hard time.
My mother fell back on her pre-seminary teaching degrees, getting hired as an overworked English/Speech teacher in a tiny, rural school which my sister and I attended for that year. The next year, Mama switched to an even tinier school even further away, and my sister and I transferred to the large school system of the town we lived in.
Again--hard times all around. We went bankrupt. We switched rental homes several times, once because the land lord (we discovered) had been charged with some illegal something-or-other. I didn't mind that time; that house was infested with fleas. You walked across the living room and felt them biting your feet. You sat on the furniture and felt them biting your arm. You went to school or church and--ugh--found one biting you. I still have the occasional nightmare about fleas...
I also developed an intolerance of roast beef sandwiches from Arby's. At the time they advertised 5 sandwiches for $5, which was just the right price for our cash-strapped family. I think I just overloaded. I can barely stand the thought of them now.
Of course, I shouldn't overdramatize. Lots of families were much worse off than we were. We ate cheaply, but never in my memory did we have to go without food. Nor were we ever without a home, without a car, or without clothing. And--corny as it sounds--we had each other, drawing closer together as a family.
Three big factors changed my life in a big way during that time.
The first involved my going to a very large high school. I had grown up in a series of small towns and had attended a series of small schools. This high school had approximately 1200 students. Though that's still small by many standards, that number was larger than the population of the previous town we had lived in. It was immense to me, overwhelming. The first day (10th grade), I wandered from class to class, hoping I had the right schedule.
I had wanted to take Honors Biology; at the time, I had an interest in ichthyology--long story. I realized, however, that the Biology class I was in wasn't quite at the Honors level. What tipped me off: we were assigned to draw a food chain--any food chain--that included humans. One student asked, "Do we eat eagles?" Intellectual snob that I am, I asked the teacher (discretely) if this was Honors Biology. She said no, I went to the office to get added into that class and my whole course schedule changed.
I got into Honors Biology (Teri Savage as a teacher--what a hoot she was!), yes, but I also got put into a Debate class (largely because it was the only available elective for my new schedule). Debate class involved participation in the high school's speech and theatre club as well as trips to weekend speech/theatre competitions. I joined the club, went to the competitions... and began getting involved in theatre. I got cast in Oklahoma! (my first play) that year. I played cranky old farmer Andrew Carnes, who opens the second act with "The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" (I went blank and just mouthed the words during one performance). I got to say "Hell" on stage. I made friends (!!). What a blast.
More: I discovered, at those weekend competitions, that I was terrible at debate. Just terrible. I liked writing arguments, seeing two sides of the same issue, encountering philosophy and persuasive skills--but I did not like live confrontation. I still don't. So I never did well in debate, which happened on Friday nights. I stayed at those competitions, however, through Saturday, which is when the drama competitions happened (events with names like "Dramatic Duet" or "Humorous Interpretation").
I saw two high-schoolers from another school perform a ten-minute cutting from On Golden Pond and thought: This, truly, is Art. Also: I think I can do this.
The next year my (my 11th grade) sister joined that school (as a 10th grader), and we began competing in Humorous Duet (a ten-minute cutting of How to Eat Like a Child And Other Lessons in Not Being A Grown-up by Delia Ephron). We won.
I continued to act, I got cast in shows, I had a circle of friends, I won some medals--it was like I had discovered some kind of varsity sport I was good at.
From then on, theatre was a part of my life. That was the first change.
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
"That Thing You Did" (an outage-induced pause)
Wuff--Long day, sprinkled with some internet outage. Happily, the internet connection just came back on, but I'm afraid I'm going to be a bit short with today's entry.
Let me pause the story of my shift from conservative evangelical Southern Baptist PK to gay United Methodist PK. Specifically, I want to take up a bit of my friend Sonja's challenge: I write about conservative evangelicals quite a bit, but do I ever share my insights with them?
I have, actually, in the past. I once wrote an article about evangelical "hell houses"--haunted house alternatives that instead of ghosts and monster feature scenes of temptation and hellish punishment (with of course the gospel message at the end). I saw a hell house in Tallahassee, FL, and that production formed the crux of my article. In that case, I did end up sharing a final(ish) draft with the youth pastor who created the hell house. He thought I had treated his point of view fairly.
I have no illusions, however, that my other work on, say, Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps would make any kind of impression on him or on his Westboro Baptist Church. They simply don't care what people outside of their enclave (i.e., reprobates) say about them. There are other evangelical figures whom I know I wouldn't even be able to speak to without radically altering my appearance and doing a lot of acting. One of my favorite fundamentalist pastors to listen to, for example, would kick me right out the door of his storefront church for my hippie-ish hair.
Nevertheless, I'd say that most conservative evangelicals would themselves find Phelps or other fundamentalists off-putting. I'm often surprised at the degree of fear that many progressives have of conservative Bible-believers, lumping them together with Phelps at his fire-breathing worst. I tell my friends about, for instance, attending an "ex-gay" conference this summer, and their jaws drop. "Did you have to go undercover? What happened when they found you out?" (no, I didn't need to go "undercover," and there was really no inquisitional search to weed out people not supportive of "reparative" ministries).
That said, I do wonder sometimes about the extent to which I as gay United Methodist could have any sway whatsoever on the average evangelical. I can deliver a paper to a room full of (mainly progressive) academics and be, I think, fairly persuasive in getting them to reconsider their impressions of evangelicalism. I'm not sure that I could do the reverse for a room full of not-so-progressive evangelicals (i.e., get them to reconsider progressives). The last time I gave a message to a large congregation of not-necessarily-progressives, several of them left the church (I'll write about that another day).
Encounters between gay United Methodists and conservative evangelicals (some of whom also identify as Methodist) are difficult, often solidifying the polar oppositions that distinguish them.
It strikes me, however, that perhaps someday I (or someone reading this) might have an opportunity to enact a non-polarizing intervention with a conservative evangelical who does or utters something I take to be offensive or unloving. A friend recently linked me to this video by Hip Hop Vlogger Joe Smooth, "How to Tell People They Sound Racist," and I've found it useful in thinking through how I might converse with a Christian whom I view as doing or saying unloving (sexist, homophobic, racist) things. . .
Of course, a conservative evangelical could easily appropriate the same tactic for use against me (and they do!): "That lifestyle you're living is unChristian."
Hm.
More tomorrow,
JF
Let me pause the story of my shift from conservative evangelical Southern Baptist PK to gay United Methodist PK. Specifically, I want to take up a bit of my friend Sonja's challenge: I write about conservative evangelicals quite a bit, but do I ever share my insights with them?
I have, actually, in the past. I once wrote an article about evangelical "hell houses"--haunted house alternatives that instead of ghosts and monster feature scenes of temptation and hellish punishment (with of course the gospel message at the end). I saw a hell house in Tallahassee, FL, and that production formed the crux of my article. In that case, I did end up sharing a final(ish) draft with the youth pastor who created the hell house. He thought I had treated his point of view fairly.
I have no illusions, however, that my other work on, say, Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps would make any kind of impression on him or on his Westboro Baptist Church. They simply don't care what people outside of their enclave (i.e., reprobates) say about them. There are other evangelical figures whom I know I wouldn't even be able to speak to without radically altering my appearance and doing a lot of acting. One of my favorite fundamentalist pastors to listen to, for example, would kick me right out the door of his storefront church for my hippie-ish hair.
Nevertheless, I'd say that most conservative evangelicals would themselves find Phelps or other fundamentalists off-putting. I'm often surprised at the degree of fear that many progressives have of conservative Bible-believers, lumping them together with Phelps at his fire-breathing worst. I tell my friends about, for instance, attending an "ex-gay" conference this summer, and their jaws drop. "Did you have to go undercover? What happened when they found you out?" (no, I didn't need to go "undercover," and there was really no inquisitional search to weed out people not supportive of "reparative" ministries).
That said, I do wonder sometimes about the extent to which I as gay United Methodist could have any sway whatsoever on the average evangelical. I can deliver a paper to a room full of (mainly progressive) academics and be, I think, fairly persuasive in getting them to reconsider their impressions of evangelicalism. I'm not sure that I could do the reverse for a room full of not-so-progressive evangelicals (i.e., get them to reconsider progressives). The last time I gave a message to a large congregation of not-necessarily-progressives, several of them left the church (I'll write about that another day).
Encounters between gay United Methodists and conservative evangelicals (some of whom also identify as Methodist) are difficult, often solidifying the polar oppositions that distinguish them.
It strikes me, however, that perhaps someday I (or someone reading this) might have an opportunity to enact a non-polarizing intervention with a conservative evangelical who does or utters something I take to be offensive or unloving. A friend recently linked me to this video by Hip Hop Vlogger Joe Smooth, "How to Tell People They Sound Racist," and I've found it useful in thinking through how I might converse with a Christian whom I view as doing or saying unloving (sexist, homophobic, racist) things. . .
Of course, a conservative evangelical could easily appropriate the same tactic for use against me (and they do!): "That lifestyle you're living is unChristian."
Hm.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Bibe Believing and Women
To review: in the 1970s and 80s, the Southern Baptist Convention underwent a sea change in which the conservative forces essentially took over. These conservatives (opposed not by liberals but by "moderates") purged the ranks of the SBC's upper bureaucracy and its seminaries of non-conservatives, winnowing the wheat from the tares by means of a simple question: do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God?
Thus were my parents on the losing side of the Battle for the Bible. As I've mentioned, both my mother and my father held graduate degrees (a Master of Religious Education for my mother, a Master of Divinity for my father) from Southern Baptist seminaries. It is a marker of how radically the SBC transformed that I generally have to qualify to other seminary-trained clergy that my parents got their degrees before the Big Shift happened.
Now, by the standards of more liberal denominations, my parents' training and (at the time) theological orientation likely fell solidly on the conservative end of things. By Southern Baptist standards, however, they were quite "moderate," becoming more so as the Takeover unfolded year after year.
I do not recall either of my parents ever strongly taking a stand on the inerrancy of scripture. They never in my memory came close to claiming that every assertion in the Bible is scientifically accurate, but neither did they campaign explicitly against such an assertion. I do remember times when my father presented passages such as those from Genesis or Revelation as possibly metaphorical rather than literal--a no-no for strict "Bible-believers." By the mid 1980s, however, the simple failure to affirm dogmatically the inerrancy of Scripture was itself viewed by the SBC as evidence of heterodoxy. While my parents did not occupy high enough positions in Baptist hierarchy to be themselves subject to an official test of faith, the culture of inerrancy-only trickled down to local levels, making it awkward to be a Baptist without insisting upon, say, a literal understanding of Revelation imagery (the flying scorpions, etc.).
I always had the sense that my mother's views of scripture were a bit more conservative than my father's. Yet her departure from SBC's rightward drift was no less ignorable. As a whip-smart woman gifted with considerable abilities, my mother did not conform neatly to the preferred SBC role of the wife (particularly the pastor's wife) as submissive help-mate. She did not hide her opinions, remaining "silent" in church as women are supposed to do. She took up leadership positions (at least, those offered by the church) eagerly and fulfilled them excellently.
Such agency from a female jarred with the SBC's growing culture of Bible-believing. I have in previous posts explored how inerrancy doctrine functions in maintaining the cycle of certainty/anxiety fueling conservative evangelical views of salvation. But of course inerrancy also functions to ratify certain social structures and stances as divinely inspired. Most configurations of inerrancy preserve men's political superiority over women as ordained and required by God. The Bible's presentation of women isn't exactly diverse; with some notable exceptions (Deborah, for example) scripture tends to categorize women in terms of their relationships with men: wives, daughters, mothers, widows, or prostitutes. True to the patriarchal cultures of Biblical peoples, men are allowed to act as free agents in the world in ways that women are not. Women, in general, belong to, or at least fall under the authority of, men (by blood or by contract).
Inerrancy doctrine argues that this system of gender relations isn't an accident of history but a kind of Command By Example: thus did God create the two genders, male and female. Now, current evangelicals will typically insist that they do not see females as constitutionally inferior to males (this is of course a departure from historical understandings of divine gender design). God creates the two genders with separate roles but with equal worth. Women are made to tend to the home and to children. They are built to sustain emotional ties, to be supportive, and to follow their husbands' lead. Men are made to protect and provide for their wives, giving totally of themselves to their spouses but never relinquishing their duty to lead.
For conservative Baptists then and now, feminism represented an unscriptural overturning of this divine plan. The equality of the sexes promoted by the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the distinction of the sexes that (conveniently) kept men in control politically and socially. Worse, the feminist impulse was seen as inspiring a truly awful bit of heresy: ordained female ministers. Like other culture war issues (homosexuality being one of the main ones currently), the question of women's ordination contained focused into one argument the underlying questions about Biblical interpretation and inerrancy.
To an inerrantist, the Bible--in the epistles--is clear: women are not to be preachers. They are to remain silent in the church (I Corinthians 14:33-35). It cuts no mustard to point out that this passage and others like it may refer to a specific situation in a specific church or to ask whether cultural norms from two thousand years ago ought to be applied today. Such historicizing (qualifying Biblical assertions as bound to a particular era or culture) is precisely the anti-literal trend that Bible-believers have resisted since the mid-1800s. Either the Bible is true in an unchanging way, they argue, or every assertion in the Bible becomes vulnerable to the charge of historical/cultural contingency.
Now--my mother did not so far as I know formally advocate for women's ordination during the Battle for the Bible era. But I doubt that anyone talking to her, anyone observing her activity in the life of the church, could doubt the fact that she saw herself as called to ministry, woman or not.
Thus, as the SBC lurched to the right, my parents--simply by staying still--moved to the relative left. Baptist churches were by the early 1990s no longer comfortable places for my parents to work.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thus were my parents on the losing side of the Battle for the Bible. As I've mentioned, both my mother and my father held graduate degrees (a Master of Religious Education for my mother, a Master of Divinity for my father) from Southern Baptist seminaries. It is a marker of how radically the SBC transformed that I generally have to qualify to other seminary-trained clergy that my parents got their degrees before the Big Shift happened.
Now, by the standards of more liberal denominations, my parents' training and (at the time) theological orientation likely fell solidly on the conservative end of things. By Southern Baptist standards, however, they were quite "moderate," becoming more so as the Takeover unfolded year after year.
I do not recall either of my parents ever strongly taking a stand on the inerrancy of scripture. They never in my memory came close to claiming that every assertion in the Bible is scientifically accurate, but neither did they campaign explicitly against such an assertion. I do remember times when my father presented passages such as those from Genesis or Revelation as possibly metaphorical rather than literal--a no-no for strict "Bible-believers." By the mid 1980s, however, the simple failure to affirm dogmatically the inerrancy of Scripture was itself viewed by the SBC as evidence of heterodoxy. While my parents did not occupy high enough positions in Baptist hierarchy to be themselves subject to an official test of faith, the culture of inerrancy-only trickled down to local levels, making it awkward to be a Baptist without insisting upon, say, a literal understanding of Revelation imagery (the flying scorpions, etc.).
I always had the sense that my mother's views of scripture were a bit more conservative than my father's. Yet her departure from SBC's rightward drift was no less ignorable. As a whip-smart woman gifted with considerable abilities, my mother did not conform neatly to the preferred SBC role of the wife (particularly the pastor's wife) as submissive help-mate. She did not hide her opinions, remaining "silent" in church as women are supposed to do. She took up leadership positions (at least, those offered by the church) eagerly and fulfilled them excellently.
Such agency from a female jarred with the SBC's growing culture of Bible-believing. I have in previous posts explored how inerrancy doctrine functions in maintaining the cycle of certainty/anxiety fueling conservative evangelical views of salvation. But of course inerrancy also functions to ratify certain social structures and stances as divinely inspired. Most configurations of inerrancy preserve men's political superiority over women as ordained and required by God. The Bible's presentation of women isn't exactly diverse; with some notable exceptions (Deborah, for example) scripture tends to categorize women in terms of their relationships with men: wives, daughters, mothers, widows, or prostitutes. True to the patriarchal cultures of Biblical peoples, men are allowed to act as free agents in the world in ways that women are not. Women, in general, belong to, or at least fall under the authority of, men (by blood or by contract).
Inerrancy doctrine argues that this system of gender relations isn't an accident of history but a kind of Command By Example: thus did God create the two genders, male and female. Now, current evangelicals will typically insist that they do not see females as constitutionally inferior to males (this is of course a departure from historical understandings of divine gender design). God creates the two genders with separate roles but with equal worth. Women are made to tend to the home and to children. They are built to sustain emotional ties, to be supportive, and to follow their husbands' lead. Men are made to protect and provide for their wives, giving totally of themselves to their spouses but never relinquishing their duty to lead.
For conservative Baptists then and now, feminism represented an unscriptural overturning of this divine plan. The equality of the sexes promoted by the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the distinction of the sexes that (conveniently) kept men in control politically and socially. Worse, the feminist impulse was seen as inspiring a truly awful bit of heresy: ordained female ministers. Like other culture war issues (homosexuality being one of the main ones currently), the question of women's ordination contained focused into one argument the underlying questions about Biblical interpretation and inerrancy.
To an inerrantist, the Bible--in the epistles--is clear: women are not to be preachers. They are to remain silent in the church (I Corinthians 14:33-35). It cuts no mustard to point out that this passage and others like it may refer to a specific situation in a specific church or to ask whether cultural norms from two thousand years ago ought to be applied today. Such historicizing (qualifying Biblical assertions as bound to a particular era or culture) is precisely the anti-literal trend that Bible-believers have resisted since the mid-1800s. Either the Bible is true in an unchanging way, they argue, or every assertion in the Bible becomes vulnerable to the charge of historical/cultural contingency.
Now--my mother did not so far as I know formally advocate for women's ordination during the Battle for the Bible era. But I doubt that anyone talking to her, anyone observing her activity in the life of the church, could doubt the fact that she saw herself as called to ministry, woman or not.
Thus, as the SBC lurched to the right, my parents--simply by staying still--moved to the relative left. Baptist churches were by the early 1990s no longer comfortable places for my parents to work.
More tomorrow,
JF
Monday, August 24, 2009
Against Venting
I do a lot of venting on this site. Part of the reason I started this blog, after all, involved putting into words some long-withheld feelings about the theologies practiced by the conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists I study. Some recent experiences, however, have led me to question the wisdom and ethics of that venting.
Some of these experiences?
1) Like any semi-enclosed community, the theatre department I work in occasionally encounters some internal dissent. So-and-so's direction of X play is bad. Such-and-such group of popular kids always get the choice roles. Professor Y is mean or incompetent. Again like most such communities, this dissent circulates and festers through streams and pools of gossip. We as a faculty have been trying to take steps to drain the venom out of our program, mainly by encouraging a culture of responsible communication. If you have a problem, don't stew about it; deal with it. It's the old kindergarten rule: don't gossip. Part of our new initiative, of course, involves recognizing the ways in which we as faculty participate in a gossip culture. To my chagrin, I recognize that sometimes I fall into this practice myself, generally under the guise of "stress relief."
2) Related to this conscious initiative, I realize, is a less conscious quasi-paranoia brought on by my job. The higher up the administrative ladder I climb, the more cautious I become about communication. I've learned from painful experience how e-mail messages I meant for only one person soon get circulated to everyone in creation--to maximum damage. I routinely counsel my students not to put anything into e-mail form that they do not want as part as public paper trail leading directly to them (and sometimes, I tell them, you do want a paper trail).
Nor is my paranoia merely about electronic or written communication. We've just moved back into a renovated office/theatre space. One of the first things I learned (and was told) about the space was that the walls between offices are quite thin. I had grown used to being able to close my office door and speak candidly; this is no longer possible. I'm trying to practice a standard polite-yet-firm "I have nothing to say about that."
Finally, on a more university-wide level, people in all departments are having to polish their best political poker faces. Finances are very tight (as they are in most universities), and the university is desperate to cut wasteful or problematic programs. In practice, this often translates into an excuse to clean house of troublemakers. Everyone is therefore doing their best not to seem like a whiner. Indeed, one administrator advised us to accompany every complaint or request to higher-ups with at least five positive reports.
It's just as well, then, that I'm trying not to gossip; even if I wanted to, it's become less wise to do so.
3) Finally, and most importantly, venting isn't just imprudent; it's counterproductive. I ran into this article from the American Psychological Association, which punctures the longstanding myth that "getting your anger out" through complaining or hitting something helps. The researchers in this study found, in fact, that such venting behavior makes anger worse. My sister, a mental health expert herself, has often said something similar.
I have no such expertise myself, but my guess is that neither the APA nor my sister mean that people should never speak about their anger or the reasons behind it. I suspect that repression and silence cost more than venting. And I can see a value in "reality checking"--seeking either the validation or correction of our reactions to a situation from someone with a fresher perspective. But I would also guess that a point comes wherein a healthy articulation of one's anger crosses over into an unhealthy obsession with it. I heard once (and I have no evidence to back this up) that our brain chemicals enable us to have a brief burst of anger--something like a minute or two. After that we have to make ourselves angry, feeding more fuel into the fire.
This rings true to me. Often I'll find myself rehearsing instances in which I perceived a slight against me (the "here's what I shoulda said" conversation). Of late, I've been trying to stop myself when I notice such mental patterns. I tend to get more frustrated that I didn't do anything in the moment, linking that one often trifling instance to other instances where I similarly didn't do anything--and the whole feeling snowballs.
The problem (and here I'm channeling my counselor sister) isn't so much with anger per se as it is what we do with that anger. There's a difference, I suppose, between expressing anger to someone who made us angry and venting, which implies that we're talking about our anger to someone not actually related to the problem situation. In such a case, we're complaining instead of acting. The rush of righteous indignation replaces rather than prompts constructive action.
All of these thoughts make me reconsider this blog. Am I not here venting--to audiences (myself, mainly) not directly related to the problem? Or, as my friend Sonja asked me after hearing about my research, "Do you ever envision telling all this to conservative evangelicals themselves?"
Good question...
More tomorrow,
JF
Some of these experiences?
1) Like any semi-enclosed community, the theatre department I work in occasionally encounters some internal dissent. So-and-so's direction of X play is bad. Such-and-such group of popular kids always get the choice roles. Professor Y is mean or incompetent. Again like most such communities, this dissent circulates and festers through streams and pools of gossip. We as a faculty have been trying to take steps to drain the venom out of our program, mainly by encouraging a culture of responsible communication. If you have a problem, don't stew about it; deal with it. It's the old kindergarten rule: don't gossip. Part of our new initiative, of course, involves recognizing the ways in which we as faculty participate in a gossip culture. To my chagrin, I recognize that sometimes I fall into this practice myself, generally under the guise of "stress relief."
2) Related to this conscious initiative, I realize, is a less conscious quasi-paranoia brought on by my job. The higher up the administrative ladder I climb, the more cautious I become about communication. I've learned from painful experience how e-mail messages I meant for only one person soon get circulated to everyone in creation--to maximum damage. I routinely counsel my students not to put anything into e-mail form that they do not want as part as public paper trail leading directly to them (and sometimes, I tell them, you do want a paper trail).
Nor is my paranoia merely about electronic or written communication. We've just moved back into a renovated office/theatre space. One of the first things I learned (and was told) about the space was that the walls between offices are quite thin. I had grown used to being able to close my office door and speak candidly; this is no longer possible. I'm trying to practice a standard polite-yet-firm "I have nothing to say about that."
Finally, on a more university-wide level, people in all departments are having to polish their best political poker faces. Finances are very tight (as they are in most universities), and the university is desperate to cut wasteful or problematic programs. In practice, this often translates into an excuse to clean house of troublemakers. Everyone is therefore doing their best not to seem like a whiner. Indeed, one administrator advised us to accompany every complaint or request to higher-ups with at least five positive reports.
It's just as well, then, that I'm trying not to gossip; even if I wanted to, it's become less wise to do so.
3) Finally, and most importantly, venting isn't just imprudent; it's counterproductive. I ran into this article from the American Psychological Association, which punctures the longstanding myth that "getting your anger out" through complaining or hitting something helps. The researchers in this study found, in fact, that such venting behavior makes anger worse. My sister, a mental health expert herself, has often said something similar.
I have no such expertise myself, but my guess is that neither the APA nor my sister mean that people should never speak about their anger or the reasons behind it. I suspect that repression and silence cost more than venting. And I can see a value in "reality checking"--seeking either the validation or correction of our reactions to a situation from someone with a fresher perspective. But I would also guess that a point comes wherein a healthy articulation of one's anger crosses over into an unhealthy obsession with it. I heard once (and I have no evidence to back this up) that our brain chemicals enable us to have a brief burst of anger--something like a minute or two. After that we have to make ourselves angry, feeding more fuel into the fire.
This rings true to me. Often I'll find myself rehearsing instances in which I perceived a slight against me (the "here's what I shoulda said" conversation). Of late, I've been trying to stop myself when I notice such mental patterns. I tend to get more frustrated that I didn't do anything in the moment, linking that one often trifling instance to other instances where I similarly didn't do anything--and the whole feeling snowballs.
The problem (and here I'm channeling my counselor sister) isn't so much with anger per se as it is what we do with that anger. There's a difference, I suppose, between expressing anger to someone who made us angry and venting, which implies that we're talking about our anger to someone not actually related to the problem situation. In such a case, we're complaining instead of acting. The rush of righteous indignation replaces rather than prompts constructive action.
All of these thoughts make me reconsider this blog. Am I not here venting--to audiences (myself, mainly) not directly related to the problem? Or, as my friend Sonja asked me after hearing about my research, "Do you ever envision telling all this to conservative evangelicals themselves?"
Good question...
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Ecclesia Militans and Vacation Bible School memories.
Today in church the pastor disclosed a contention that had brewed within the staff over the last week. As I've mentioned, I attend a United Methodist church connected with the university where I'm employed. Today was the welcome-(back)-to-university-life Sunday, where freshman, returning students, alumni, faculty/staff, and assorted friends and family all attended. Apparently (I had missed this fact in previous such Sundays), "Onward Christian Soldiers" traditionally serves as the closing hymn. Long-time church members fully expect to hear it on Return Sunday.
My pastor, however, described how some of the church staff (including himself, I suspect) expressed reservations about a hymn that advances so militaristic a vision of the church.
With a pang of nostalgia/embarrassment, I remembered how central that hymn had been to my childhood. It was one of the first hymns I learned how to play, doing so in order to accompany the throng of children and teachers marching in every morning of Vacation Bible School. And I have to say, though I share my pastor's uneasiness with jingoistic spirituality, many of my favorite hymns from my Baptist past are in essence rousing calls to military confrontation. "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Once to Every Man and Nation,"
Or take "Faith is the Victory" (here's a midi of the tune):
Encamped upon the hills of light
Ye Christian soldiers rise
And press the battle 'ere the night
Shall veil the glowing skies
Against the foe in vales below
Let all our strength be hurled
Faith is the victory, we know,
That overcomes the World.
Faith is the victory,
Faith is the victory
Oh, glorious victory
That overcomes the World.
It's quite rousing! I'm humming and grinning just writing out the words. And try as I might, I cannot deny that much of my Christian heritage mobilizes a battle imagery. Why, even the text my pastor used today comes from Ephesians 6:10-20, about putting on the "full armor of God" (the shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit, the breastplate of righteousness, etc.).
I mention this to trouble the line of criticism I've been leveling at hard-line, confrontational biblical inerrancy doctrine. I described, for example, how conservative-fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention used the doctrinal litmus-test question "do you believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God" as a knife to cut away those they viewed as heterodox. I've dipped into the history of evangelical (or even fundamentalist) "Bible-believing" to suggest that inerrancy doctrine, when forcefully emphasized, inevitably collides with the culture at large. My implication was that fundamentalism's (and by relation evangelicalism's) reputation as being anti-everything (anti-evolution, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-abortion, anti-science, anti-intellectual, etc.) has largely to do with the abrasive nature of inerrancy.
But, as the militaristic hymns and warlike Biblical imagery suggests, some degree of friction with the non-Christian world seems intrinsic to my faith. A truism of sociological theories of community notes that, as touchy-feely-inclusive as a word like community may seem, communities exist thanks not only to their inclusivity but also of their exclusivity. A community that accepted everyone equally would cease to be a community except in the most vapid-metaphorical sense. Communities qualify as communities insofar as they are not other communities (or unattached individuals). Distinctiveness is vital to any community.
Onward Christian Soldiers Bible-believing calls not only for distinctiveness but for resistance, opposition, even fierce struggle. But, to be honest, so too do Christian movements I have less qualms about identifying with--movements of social justice and liberation. Abolitionists, for instance, preached a not-just-different-but-better message: slavery is wrong. It should be resisted, abolished. Ditto the Christian socialist movements that decried economic exploitation or fought against the idea that anyone deserves to die for lack of money to buy food or medicine (a view that I hope catches fire again).
Or take the mid-1900s civil rights movements, whose songs shared the rousing confrontationalism of "Faith is the Victory": "We Shall Not Be Moved" or "We Shall Overcome" are just as defiant, just as abrasive a call to arms, as any song of my childhood.
"For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood," writes the author of Ephesians, "but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness..."
I would think it a poor faith indeed that sees nothing dark in this world, nothing worth fighting against. Whether racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, apathy, selfishness, greed, and the like qualify as "cosmic powers" I am not sure, but such tendencies certainly seem adept at ensconcing themselves within human authority structures. And to that extent I hope my faith rouses me to battle with them in society, in my church, and in myself.
If, then, confrontation--forward resistance to aspects of culture--is not necessarily a flaw, where do I think the "Bible-believing" trend goes wrong?
More tomorrow,
JF-- Oh, yes: my church resolved the dispute over the closing hymn by choosing "Forward Through the Ages"--a hymn that puts different lyrics to Arthur Sullivan's "Onward, Christian Soldiers" tune. Just a reminder that the full armor of God includes shodding your feet in the gospel of peace.
My pastor, however, described how some of the church staff (including himself, I suspect) expressed reservations about a hymn that advances so militaristic a vision of the church.
With a pang of nostalgia/embarrassment, I remembered how central that hymn had been to my childhood. It was one of the first hymns I learned how to play, doing so in order to accompany the throng of children and teachers marching in every morning of Vacation Bible School. And I have to say, though I share my pastor's uneasiness with jingoistic spirituality, many of my favorite hymns from my Baptist past are in essence rousing calls to military confrontation. "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Once to Every Man and Nation,"
Or take "Faith is the Victory" (here's a midi of the tune):
Encamped upon the hills of light
Ye Christian soldiers rise
And press the battle 'ere the night
Shall veil the glowing skies
Against the foe in vales below
Let all our strength be hurled
Faith is the victory, we know,
That overcomes the World.
Faith is the victory,
Faith is the victory
Oh, glorious victory
That overcomes the World.
It's quite rousing! I'm humming and grinning just writing out the words. And try as I might, I cannot deny that much of my Christian heritage mobilizes a battle imagery. Why, even the text my pastor used today comes from Ephesians 6:10-20, about putting on the "full armor of God" (the shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit, the breastplate of righteousness, etc.).
I mention this to trouble the line of criticism I've been leveling at hard-line, confrontational biblical inerrancy doctrine. I described, for example, how conservative-fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention used the doctrinal litmus-test question "do you believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God" as a knife to cut away those they viewed as heterodox. I've dipped into the history of evangelical (or even fundamentalist) "Bible-believing" to suggest that inerrancy doctrine, when forcefully emphasized, inevitably collides with the culture at large. My implication was that fundamentalism's (and by relation evangelicalism's) reputation as being anti-everything (anti-evolution, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-abortion, anti-science, anti-intellectual, etc.) has largely to do with the abrasive nature of inerrancy.
But, as the militaristic hymns and warlike Biblical imagery suggests, some degree of friction with the non-Christian world seems intrinsic to my faith. A truism of sociological theories of community notes that, as touchy-feely-inclusive as a word like community may seem, communities exist thanks not only to their inclusivity but also of their exclusivity. A community that accepted everyone equally would cease to be a community except in the most vapid-metaphorical sense. Communities qualify as communities insofar as they are not other communities (or unattached individuals). Distinctiveness is vital to any community.
Onward Christian Soldiers Bible-believing calls not only for distinctiveness but for resistance, opposition, even fierce struggle. But, to be honest, so too do Christian movements I have less qualms about identifying with--movements of social justice and liberation. Abolitionists, for instance, preached a not-just-different-but-better message: slavery is wrong. It should be resisted, abolished. Ditto the Christian socialist movements that decried economic exploitation or fought against the idea that anyone deserves to die for lack of money to buy food or medicine (a view that I hope catches fire again).
Or take the mid-1900s civil rights movements, whose songs shared the rousing confrontationalism of "Faith is the Victory": "We Shall Not Be Moved" or "We Shall Overcome" are just as defiant, just as abrasive a call to arms, as any song of my childhood.
"For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood," writes the author of Ephesians, "but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness..."
I would think it a poor faith indeed that sees nothing dark in this world, nothing worth fighting against. Whether racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, apathy, selfishness, greed, and the like qualify as "cosmic powers" I am not sure, but such tendencies certainly seem adept at ensconcing themselves within human authority structures. And to that extent I hope my faith rouses me to battle with them in society, in my church, and in myself.
If, then, confrontation--forward resistance to aspects of culture--is not necessarily a flaw, where do I think the "Bible-believing" trend goes wrong?
More tomorrow,
JF-- Oh, yes: my church resolved the dispute over the closing hymn by choosing "Forward Through the Ages"--a hymn that puts different lyrics to Arthur Sullivan's "Onward, Christian Soldiers" tune. Just a reminder that the full armor of God includes shodding your feet in the gospel of peace.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
BIble-believing and Cultural Confrontations
Why has "Bible-believing" achieved such popularity within conservative evangelicalism?
By "Bible-believing," I refer not merely to a general reverence for Christian scripture but to a view that holds the Bible boasts the following features:
* full inspiration: the Bible's words are not men's words (i.e., not merely Paul or Peter or Luke speaking) but God's words. Imperfections and ambiguities that plague human communication do not apply to the Bible. When the scripture advances a proposition, it is as if God had spoken it word-for-word.
* completeness: the Bible offers no loose threads; it needs no further additions.
* freedom from error: not only does the Bible contain trustworthy precepts for faith; it is also factually accurate in its every assertion (historical, scientific, psychological).
* freedom from internal contradiction: apparent contradictions between scriptures are really human failures to interpret the Bible properly
* coherence: the Bible is reliably self-referential, making trustworthy assertions about itself. The Bible "interprets itself."
* transparency/accessibility: the Bible--in English translations--is perfectly amenable to readings by any person regardless of theological or doctrinal education. It is meant to be understood in its plainest sense.
I reviewed yesterday some historical factors that made Bible-believing attractive to 19th century evangelicals. Specifically, Bible-believing provided a populist basis for resisting certain features of modernity. The 1800s witnessed an increasing secularization of domains (society, politics, economics) once assumed to be part and parcel of theological world-views. As evidenced by Darwinism, the natural sciences had somehow garnered enough authority to challenge the Biblical account of creation. Politics and economics began defining themselves as public, even secular practices, distinguishing themselves from religious convictions they labeled as properly private--and therefore ignorable or suppressible--attributes.
In reaction to these trends, Bible-believing advanced a counter-discourse of divine knowledge as competitively (even superlatively) normative, accurate, and authoritative. The Bible was not "merely" a religious document but also a treatise on politics, science, history, anthropology, and psychology. Moreover, unlike the ivory-tower, esoteric practices of higher criticism or Darwinism, "Bible-believing" offered a way of knowing accessible to anyone who could read. One could become a sophisticate through a comprehensive knowledge of the King James Bible.
The problem is, of course, that once you assert that the Bible boasts a degree of accuracy comparable or superior to (secular) scientific fields, you have set yourself on a certain path of confrontation when the assertions of, say, astronomical science fail to reaffirm a literal understanding of the Genesis creation account (e.g., the sun being created only after plants). You've forced an either-or dichotomy: either science [or history, archeology, anthropology, philology, pyschology, etc.] or literal Biblicism.
Moreover, Bible-believing ramps up the stakes of any such confrontation, asserting another either/or: EITHER the Bible is totally and completely factual in every single assertion it makes OR the entire Bible is a pack of lies and fantasies. Bible-believing makes Christianity entirely into a matter of the reliability of the Bible as a set of truth propositions. If the Bible falls short of a scientific standard of accuracy, then Christianity loses all intellectual force.
Yet, despite some rather stunning defeats (the Scopes monkey trial in 1925 was particularly embarrassing for US fundamentalists--even though they "won," they lost), inerrancy doctrine is perhaps more entrenched than ever in US evangelicalism. The Southern Baptist Church's "Battle for the Bible" serves as one of the most obvious examples. Using the "do you believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God?" litmus test, conservatives were able to transform the SBC from a moderately conservative denomination to a strictly conservative-bordering-on-fundamentalist one.
Given that Bible-believing inspires such sharp divisions within denominations and churches, and given also that inerrancy makes Christian faith into a series of either/or confrontations with modern culture, why would evangelicalism--which is ostensibly oriented toward spreading the gospel and making more disciples within contemporary culture--so consistently and stridently insist upon it?
More on the appeal of distinctions tomorrow,
JF
By "Bible-believing," I refer not merely to a general reverence for Christian scripture but to a view that holds the Bible boasts the following features:
* full inspiration: the Bible's words are not men's words (i.e., not merely Paul or Peter or Luke speaking) but God's words. Imperfections and ambiguities that plague human communication do not apply to the Bible. When the scripture advances a proposition, it is as if God had spoken it word-for-word.
* completeness: the Bible offers no loose threads; it needs no further additions.
* freedom from error: not only does the Bible contain trustworthy precepts for faith; it is also factually accurate in its every assertion (historical, scientific, psychological).
* freedom from internal contradiction: apparent contradictions between scriptures are really human failures to interpret the Bible properly
* coherence: the Bible is reliably self-referential, making trustworthy assertions about itself. The Bible "interprets itself."
* transparency/accessibility: the Bible--in English translations--is perfectly amenable to readings by any person regardless of theological or doctrinal education. It is meant to be understood in its plainest sense.
I reviewed yesterday some historical factors that made Bible-believing attractive to 19th century evangelicals. Specifically, Bible-believing provided a populist basis for resisting certain features of modernity. The 1800s witnessed an increasing secularization of domains (society, politics, economics) once assumed to be part and parcel of theological world-views. As evidenced by Darwinism, the natural sciences had somehow garnered enough authority to challenge the Biblical account of creation. Politics and economics began defining themselves as public, even secular practices, distinguishing themselves from religious convictions they labeled as properly private--and therefore ignorable or suppressible--attributes.
In reaction to these trends, Bible-believing advanced a counter-discourse of divine knowledge as competitively (even superlatively) normative, accurate, and authoritative. The Bible was not "merely" a religious document but also a treatise on politics, science, history, anthropology, and psychology. Moreover, unlike the ivory-tower, esoteric practices of higher criticism or Darwinism, "Bible-believing" offered a way of knowing accessible to anyone who could read. One could become a sophisticate through a comprehensive knowledge of the King James Bible.
The problem is, of course, that once you assert that the Bible boasts a degree of accuracy comparable or superior to (secular) scientific fields, you have set yourself on a certain path of confrontation when the assertions of, say, astronomical science fail to reaffirm a literal understanding of the Genesis creation account (e.g., the sun being created only after plants). You've forced an either-or dichotomy: either science [or history, archeology, anthropology, philology, pyschology, etc.] or literal Biblicism.
Moreover, Bible-believing ramps up the stakes of any such confrontation, asserting another either/or: EITHER the Bible is totally and completely factual in every single assertion it makes OR the entire Bible is a pack of lies and fantasies. Bible-believing makes Christianity entirely into a matter of the reliability of the Bible as a set of truth propositions. If the Bible falls short of a scientific standard of accuracy, then Christianity loses all intellectual force.
Yet, despite some rather stunning defeats (the Scopes monkey trial in 1925 was particularly embarrassing for US fundamentalists--even though they "won," they lost), inerrancy doctrine is perhaps more entrenched than ever in US evangelicalism. The Southern Baptist Church's "Battle for the Bible" serves as one of the most obvious examples. Using the "do you believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God?" litmus test, conservatives were able to transform the SBC from a moderately conservative denomination to a strictly conservative-bordering-on-fundamentalist one.
Given that Bible-believing inspires such sharp divisions within denominations and churches, and given also that inerrancy makes Christian faith into a series of either/or confrontations with modern culture, why would evangelicalism--which is ostensibly oriented toward spreading the gospel and making more disciples within contemporary culture--so consistently and stridently insist upon it?
More on the appeal of distinctions tomorrow,
JF
Friday, August 21, 2009
BIble Believing in (truncated/simplified) History
So--after many successful years as a Southern Baptist pastor in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Louisiana, my father found himself (in 1990/91-ish) unable to find a Baptist church willing to hire him for a wage sufficient to support the rest of us. What was going on? I mentioned the general oddities endemic to congregational church systems as well as the early 90s financial crunch.
A bigger issue, however, was the shift within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as a whole. I've referenced this before, but to recap: Over the course of the 70s and early 80s, the SBC as a denomination experienced a kind of slow-motion coup. The more fundamentalist/conservative wings of the church--using entirely legal means--won several key leadership positions within the upper administrative bodies of the Convention. These positions enabled the conservatives to purge denominational boards, agencies, and eventually seminaries of non-conservative people.
As is the case with any complex transformation, a number of factors (historical, cultural, geographic) colluded to make this shift possible. Most prominent among these, however, was the "Battle for the Bible," which I've also written about. Conservatives established a bright-line separation between themselves and everyone else with the doctrine of inerrancy: "Do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God"?
Now--some quick historical review. For most of Christian history (at least that part of history after the canon of scripture had been basically established) one could say generally that Christians viewed scripture as authoritative and reliably "true" in a general sense. Of course, only a thin sliver of Christians through the medieval and early modern periods actually enjoyed access to scripture (people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible in to the vernacular). Nevertheless, the question of the Bible's truth status played little if any role in the first millennium or so of Christianity. None of the many, many creeds churned out to weed heresy from orthodoxy mentioned anything about belief in God's Word as an essential Christian tenet.
What changed, to be brutally simplistic, was Martin Luther. Attempting to reform the Catholic (i.e., "universal") Church, Luther promulgated a number of departures from traditional Roman Catholic doctrine. Among these: sola scriptura--that Scripture alone, and not the edicts of the Popes or the traditions of the Church, serves as the proper basis of all Christian belief and action.
Very quickly, Luther's Reformation inspired Catholic breakaways throughout Europe, many of which began reading and translating the Bible in an effort to establish a uniquely non-catholic (or Reformed) set of creeds (the Westminster Confession of 1646 is a particularly influential example). These creeds notably incorporated belief in the authority of scripture as essential to Christian doctrine.
Reformation Christians soon found, however, that different people (or groups of people) can arrive at stunningly divergent understandings of what the same set of words on a page mean. Schism became and remains one of the defining tendencies of Protestant faiths. Parallel to this rise in "reading the Bible for yourself" trends, the Renaissance and after that the Enlightenment weaned intellectual Europe (and the Americas) further from dependency on the authority of Rome. "Sapare aude," said Immanuel Kant in his famous essay, "What is Enlightenment?": "Dare to think."
But thinking--the Enlightenment faith in the progressive possibilities of human reason--led many to turn a more skeptical eye on the Bible itself as a source of authority. In the 19th century, several northern European seminaries began studying the Bible not (or not only) as a sacred Word to be revered but (also) as a human document amenable to investigation by archeological, literary, and philological techniques. This "higher criticism" came to view the Bible as a patchwork collection of heavily redacted documents from a number of sources.
This higher criticism, as well as other 19th century cultural shifts (Darwinism being a particularly visible one), inspired in various Protestant communities (especially in the US) a counter-reaction, one which reaffirmed the Bible as error-free, complete, and utterly factual in all of its assertions (from creation to genealogies to miracles). This literalist reaction had a higher-education equivalen (mainly Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 1800s), but it spread largely through loose networks of evangelists, speakers, and Bible colleges. "Bible-believers" (fundamentalist wasn't coined until 1920) practiced "Bible-reading," by which they meant a hermeneutic of plain sense.
The Bible, in this line of though, is perfectly understandable to any believing reader--no need for fancy education or philological analysis. God has preserved the Word, protecting it from corruption over the centuries and ensuring that it remains accessible to the common Christian. Its words are to be understood, where possible, in their simplest, plainest sense. The earth created in six days? Check. A global flood? Check. A talking donkey? A man swallowed, then vomited up, by a giant fish? A literal, bodily resurrection? Check, check, and check. Certainly the Bible uses metaphor or parable now and then (no one suggested taking every phrase literally), but these instances are obvious to the common reader and do not counter any commonsense understanding.
Over the twentieth century, as fundamentalism per se largely ceded ground to the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and 50s, "Bible believing" remained (and remains) a defining doctrine of evangelicals, including Southern Baptists. Most evangelicals, however, tend not to define "Bible believing" in too terribly specific a way. "Do you believe the Bible?" Yes, of course. "Do you believe that God created the universe in six, twenty-four hour days?" Well..."days" might actually mean "age..." In practice, Bible-believing usually allows for a degree of variation in believers' interpretations.
When the SBC underwent its conversion (or rededication, depending upon your point of view), the conservatives gave "Bible-believing" a very narrow, very specific definition. Those who could not or would not declare themselves in favor of an utterly-true-every-word-every-fact notion of scripture had to go.
As far as I know, my father was never challenged formally with this litmus test. Nevertheless, the inerrancy purge in the SBC had ripple effects throughout the denomination.
More tomorrow,
JF
A bigger issue, however, was the shift within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as a whole. I've referenced this before, but to recap: Over the course of the 70s and early 80s, the SBC as a denomination experienced a kind of slow-motion coup. The more fundamentalist/conservative wings of the church--using entirely legal means--won several key leadership positions within the upper administrative bodies of the Convention. These positions enabled the conservatives to purge denominational boards, agencies, and eventually seminaries of non-conservative people.
As is the case with any complex transformation, a number of factors (historical, cultural, geographic) colluded to make this shift possible. Most prominent among these, however, was the "Battle for the Bible," which I've also written about. Conservatives established a bright-line separation between themselves and everyone else with the doctrine of inerrancy: "Do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God"?
Now--some quick historical review. For most of Christian history (at least that part of history after the canon of scripture had been basically established) one could say generally that Christians viewed scripture as authoritative and reliably "true" in a general sense. Of course, only a thin sliver of Christians through the medieval and early modern periods actually enjoyed access to scripture (people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible in to the vernacular). Nevertheless, the question of the Bible's truth status played little if any role in the first millennium or so of Christianity. None of the many, many creeds churned out to weed heresy from orthodoxy mentioned anything about belief in God's Word as an essential Christian tenet.
What changed, to be brutally simplistic, was Martin Luther. Attempting to reform the Catholic (i.e., "universal") Church, Luther promulgated a number of departures from traditional Roman Catholic doctrine. Among these: sola scriptura--that Scripture alone, and not the edicts of the Popes or the traditions of the Church, serves as the proper basis of all Christian belief and action.
Very quickly, Luther's Reformation inspired Catholic breakaways throughout Europe, many of which began reading and translating the Bible in an effort to establish a uniquely non-catholic (or Reformed) set of creeds (the Westminster Confession of 1646 is a particularly influential example). These creeds notably incorporated belief in the authority of scripture as essential to Christian doctrine.
Reformation Christians soon found, however, that different people (or groups of people) can arrive at stunningly divergent understandings of what the same set of words on a page mean. Schism became and remains one of the defining tendencies of Protestant faiths. Parallel to this rise in "reading the Bible for yourself" trends, the Renaissance and after that the Enlightenment weaned intellectual Europe (and the Americas) further from dependency on the authority of Rome. "Sapare aude," said Immanuel Kant in his famous essay, "What is Enlightenment?": "Dare to think."
But thinking--the Enlightenment faith in the progressive possibilities of human reason--led many to turn a more skeptical eye on the Bible itself as a source of authority. In the 19th century, several northern European seminaries began studying the Bible not (or not only) as a sacred Word to be revered but (also) as a human document amenable to investigation by archeological, literary, and philological techniques. This "higher criticism" came to view the Bible as a patchwork collection of heavily redacted documents from a number of sources.
This higher criticism, as well as other 19th century cultural shifts (Darwinism being a particularly visible one), inspired in various Protestant communities (especially in the US) a counter-reaction, one which reaffirmed the Bible as error-free, complete, and utterly factual in all of its assertions (from creation to genealogies to miracles). This literalist reaction had a higher-education equivalen (mainly Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 1800s), but it spread largely through loose networks of evangelists, speakers, and Bible colleges. "Bible-believers" (fundamentalist wasn't coined until 1920) practiced "Bible-reading," by which they meant a hermeneutic of plain sense.
The Bible, in this line of though, is perfectly understandable to any believing reader--no need for fancy education or philological analysis. God has preserved the Word, protecting it from corruption over the centuries and ensuring that it remains accessible to the common Christian. Its words are to be understood, where possible, in their simplest, plainest sense. The earth created in six days? Check. A global flood? Check. A talking donkey? A man swallowed, then vomited up, by a giant fish? A literal, bodily resurrection? Check, check, and check. Certainly the Bible uses metaphor or parable now and then (no one suggested taking every phrase literally), but these instances are obvious to the common reader and do not counter any commonsense understanding.
Over the twentieth century, as fundamentalism per se largely ceded ground to the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and 50s, "Bible believing" remained (and remains) a defining doctrine of evangelicals, including Southern Baptists. Most evangelicals, however, tend not to define "Bible believing" in too terribly specific a way. "Do you believe the Bible?" Yes, of course. "Do you believe that God created the universe in six, twenty-four hour days?" Well..."days" might actually mean "age..." In practice, Bible-believing usually allows for a degree of variation in believers' interpretations.
When the SBC underwent its conversion (or rededication, depending upon your point of view), the conservatives gave "Bible-believing" a very narrow, very specific definition. Those who could not or would not declare themselves in favor of an utterly-true-every-word-every-fact notion of scripture had to go.
As far as I know, my father was never challenged formally with this litmus test. Nevertheless, the inerrancy purge in the SBC had ripple effects throughout the denomination.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Confessions of a Southern Baptist PK: Transitions
Curiously enough, around the time that I began realizing that I needed a new kind of faith (a way to be a Christian without constantly saturating myself and others in self-centering, thought-stopping, soul-exhausting fear)--around that time my parents were going through a similar sort of crisis-of-faith.
My father, as I've mentioned, was a Southern Baptist preacher. That role had defined his life and the lives of the rest of our family. My sister and I weren't just children; we were PKs--preacher's kids (only later did I learn what kind of reputation PKs had). My mother, though she had a masters degree from a seminary--indeed, though she had gotten her degree before Daddy had his--she was a pastor's wife. Southern Baptists, citing Biblical injunctions for women to be silent and submissive, forbade women from serving as pastors, no matter how talented or called they may be. Instead, Mama's function, like those of pastors' wives in many conservative evangelical churches, was something like "unpaid associate minister." She headed up Sunday school classes, coordinated vacation bible schools, sang in the choir, organized home Bible studies and outreach ministries--a host of jobs, really. Practically any time Daddy had to be at church, Mama accompanied him (and vice versa).
Around 1988/89 (I was 13-14), we were living in a mobile home in a small town in southern Louisiana, where Daddy served as minister for the First Baptist Church. Daddy began feeling called to a different sort of pastoral ministry--the chaplaincy. To serve as a paid chaplain, one typically needs credits in CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE training generally takes place in the context of a large teaching hospital complex, where the chaplain-in-training basically undergoes a year or more of on-the-job training as a working chaplain. Since the tiny town we lived in had no such hospital or CPE program, we were faced with the option of moving. We could, my parents said, conceivably move anywhere we'd like. Now, such a wide-open option was pretty novel for my sister and me; we had up until then understood moving as something you did entirely at God's whim. God called Daddy to X place; we went. God called Daddy to Y place; we went. Having our pick of locations? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?
Nevertheless, we bypassed considerations of any other location than the one we had left some six years before: Oklahoma. My sister and I had lived the first part of our lives largely in small-town, southeastern OK, and we had long romanticized those memories into the "good times"--in contrast to the really wretched school systems we encountered in Louisiana.
Thus we packed up and moved back to southeastern Oklahoma. While Daddy looked around for a CPE program in the state and preached part time at a small church, Mama tapped into her pre-seminary days as a high school English and Spanish teacher and went to work (another novel experience). My sister and I were happy to be back in a state we identified with "home," even though the town we initially moved to was many times smaller than the one we had left. Soon, Daddy found a suitable CPE program in Oklahoma City, and we moved to a mid-sized sleepover town near there. Mama kept working as a teacher in a little town beyond that. After a year in the CPE program, Daddy decided to return to full-time preaching and began the process of applying to various churches.
A word about the Southern Baptist Convention: in contrast to many mainline denominations (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians), Baptist have a congregational structure. Individual churches enjoy a great deal of autonomy in determining their policies and in choosing their staff. Whereas a Methodist pastor participates in a tiered, formal, ecclesiastical structure and is appointed to a local congregation by his or her bishop, Baptist pastors are essentially free agents, hired and fired at will by a congregation in question. Applying for work as a Baptist pastor, then, functions much like applying for work in any job, save that most other jobs follow standard guidelines for job descriptions, contracts, hiring, etc. Churches too act as free agents, able to shape the pastor's job description, contract, and salary largely to their liking. A successful "call"--a simpatico between pastor and congregation--thus involves a unique mix of logistic, economic, spiritual, and political negotiations.
In my memory up to then, my father had never had much difficulty at that navigating those dynamics (as I grew older, I of course learned that there was much about our past churches that I had not perceived). I knew my father to be an excellent pastor, having experienced by then many, many other pastors in my life. His skills had not diminished. Congregations still responded favorably to him.
But for some reason he was unable to find a full-time position. Or, rather: my father was unable to find a church that was willing to pay him more than a part-time wage for a full-time position. One church in a nearby state, for instance, invited us to visit, met our family, heard Daddy preach, and enthusiastically voted to hire him--at a pittance of a salary. When Daddy frankly told them he could not afford to move his family there and live on that salary, the church reversed its vote. This pattern repeated in other churches.
Several factors were converging at once. First, smaller churches rarely have a good grasp on exactly what their pastor is worth. Particularly in congregational systems, individual congregations tend to develop (ferment might be more appropriate) a home-brew definition of what they expect a pastor to do, a definition often based upon hazy-but-glowing memories of old Pastor so-and-so, who was a Saint Upon the Earth. In no case is this definition limited merely to giving a thirty-minute speech every Sunday.
Churches expect pastors to be a combination accountant, administrator, teacher, counselor, event coordinator, childcare specialist, political advocate, marriage-maker, funeral-giver, hospital-visitor, community figurehead, and all-around friendly guy. And they expect pastors to provide these services on call, 24/7, backed up with the requisite (though unsalaried) pastor's wife, who is preferably herself gifted with a range of vital skills. But, since of course to the church none of this is actually work in the sense of clocking-in/clocking-out, pastors should expect to get by on a barely-above-the-poverty-line salary. Thus it was not completely surprising that a smallish church would balk at supporting a family of four.
Another factor: during the last 80s/early 90s, the nation was undergoing something of a recession. Budgets had become fairly tight. Churches were not able to pay much, and we were not able to accept little.
But one of the biggest factors in my father's difficulty landing a Southern Baptist pastorate was the change that had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention itself, a change that threw my family's faith transition into sharper contrast.
More tomorrow,
JF
My father, as I've mentioned, was a Southern Baptist preacher. That role had defined his life and the lives of the rest of our family. My sister and I weren't just children; we were PKs--preacher's kids (only later did I learn what kind of reputation PKs had). My mother, though she had a masters degree from a seminary--indeed, though she had gotten her degree before Daddy had his--she was a pastor's wife. Southern Baptists, citing Biblical injunctions for women to be silent and submissive, forbade women from serving as pastors, no matter how talented or called they may be. Instead, Mama's function, like those of pastors' wives in many conservative evangelical churches, was something like "unpaid associate minister." She headed up Sunday school classes, coordinated vacation bible schools, sang in the choir, organized home Bible studies and outreach ministries--a host of jobs, really. Practically any time Daddy had to be at church, Mama accompanied him (and vice versa).
Around 1988/89 (I was 13-14), we were living in a mobile home in a small town in southern Louisiana, where Daddy served as minister for the First Baptist Church. Daddy began feeling called to a different sort of pastoral ministry--the chaplaincy. To serve as a paid chaplain, one typically needs credits in CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE training generally takes place in the context of a large teaching hospital complex, where the chaplain-in-training basically undergoes a year or more of on-the-job training as a working chaplain. Since the tiny town we lived in had no such hospital or CPE program, we were faced with the option of moving. We could, my parents said, conceivably move anywhere we'd like. Now, such a wide-open option was pretty novel for my sister and me; we had up until then understood moving as something you did entirely at God's whim. God called Daddy to X place; we went. God called Daddy to Y place; we went. Having our pick of locations? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?
Nevertheless, we bypassed considerations of any other location than the one we had left some six years before: Oklahoma. My sister and I had lived the first part of our lives largely in small-town, southeastern OK, and we had long romanticized those memories into the "good times"--in contrast to the really wretched school systems we encountered in Louisiana.
Thus we packed up and moved back to southeastern Oklahoma. While Daddy looked around for a CPE program in the state and preached part time at a small church, Mama tapped into her pre-seminary days as a high school English and Spanish teacher and went to work (another novel experience). My sister and I were happy to be back in a state we identified with "home," even though the town we initially moved to was many times smaller than the one we had left. Soon, Daddy found a suitable CPE program in Oklahoma City, and we moved to a mid-sized sleepover town near there. Mama kept working as a teacher in a little town beyond that. After a year in the CPE program, Daddy decided to return to full-time preaching and began the process of applying to various churches.
A word about the Southern Baptist Convention: in contrast to many mainline denominations (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians), Baptist have a congregational structure. Individual churches enjoy a great deal of autonomy in determining their policies and in choosing their staff. Whereas a Methodist pastor participates in a tiered, formal, ecclesiastical structure and is appointed to a local congregation by his or her bishop, Baptist pastors are essentially free agents, hired and fired at will by a congregation in question. Applying for work as a Baptist pastor, then, functions much like applying for work in any job, save that most other jobs follow standard guidelines for job descriptions, contracts, hiring, etc. Churches too act as free agents, able to shape the pastor's job description, contract, and salary largely to their liking. A successful "call"--a simpatico between pastor and congregation--thus involves a unique mix of logistic, economic, spiritual, and political negotiations.
In my memory up to then, my father had never had much difficulty at that navigating those dynamics (as I grew older, I of course learned that there was much about our past churches that I had not perceived). I knew my father to be an excellent pastor, having experienced by then many, many other pastors in my life. His skills had not diminished. Congregations still responded favorably to him.
But for some reason he was unable to find a full-time position. Or, rather: my father was unable to find a church that was willing to pay him more than a part-time wage for a full-time position. One church in a nearby state, for instance, invited us to visit, met our family, heard Daddy preach, and enthusiastically voted to hire him--at a pittance of a salary. When Daddy frankly told them he could not afford to move his family there and live on that salary, the church reversed its vote. This pattern repeated in other churches.
Several factors were converging at once. First, smaller churches rarely have a good grasp on exactly what their pastor is worth. Particularly in congregational systems, individual congregations tend to develop (ferment might be more appropriate) a home-brew definition of what they expect a pastor to do, a definition often based upon hazy-but-glowing memories of old Pastor so-and-so, who was a Saint Upon the Earth. In no case is this definition limited merely to giving a thirty-minute speech every Sunday.
Churches expect pastors to be a combination accountant, administrator, teacher, counselor, event coordinator, childcare specialist, political advocate, marriage-maker, funeral-giver, hospital-visitor, community figurehead, and all-around friendly guy. And they expect pastors to provide these services on call, 24/7, backed up with the requisite (though unsalaried) pastor's wife, who is preferably herself gifted with a range of vital skills. But, since of course to the church none of this is actually work in the sense of clocking-in/clocking-out, pastors should expect to get by on a barely-above-the-poverty-line salary. Thus it was not completely surprising that a smallish church would balk at supporting a family of four.
Another factor: during the last 80s/early 90s, the nation was undergoing something of a recession. Budgets had become fairly tight. Churches were not able to pay much, and we were not able to accept little.
But one of the biggest factors in my father's difficulty landing a Southern Baptist pastorate was the change that had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention itself, a change that threw my family's faith transition into sharper contrast.
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Faith of Threats
Wuff! I'm still worked up about the whole health care town hall meeting thing--so worked up, in fact, that I had to spend some time before posting here washing my brain clean with some refreshing youtubes of babies laughing.
Does the trick, generally.
Back to the task at hand: I've been exploring my childhood faith experience, trying to figure out why that conservative evangelical faith began to seem so wrong to me as I grew older. One factor, I've suggested, has to do with the fact that my childhood faith preached love for one's neighbors while relying for its genesis, upkeep, and spread on fearful self-interest. You became a Christian in my faith primarily to avoid the threat of Hell. Avoiding hell remains the core motivation in many of the more popular versions of conservative evangelism.
Although effective in the short term (that is, for people who accept the premises of God, hell, sin, and judgment), I've argued that this faith actually has several negative long-term consequences. First and foremost, it's short-lived. Intense, adrenaline-surge evangelism purchases emotional power at the price of longevity. It burns out, especially as the reality of what it means to be a Christian (not just a momentary decision but a lifetime of commitment) sinks in.
To stave off burnout, fight-or-flight Christianity applies more fire--hellfire, that is, stoking the embers of anxiety 1) about one's eternal fate (Are you sure you've really, truly turned to Christ? Might you just be fooling yourself?), or 2) about the degree to which one is evangelizing (Have you led others to Christ? You know, real Christians share their faith all the time. If you aren't doing that, well... you may want to go back to concern #1...).
The problem with this constant fear-mongering is twofold (at least). First, fear works like an addictive substance. It generates an intense emotional high while deactivating higher brain functions. It's difficult to think clearly or carefully when you're rushing for the fire exit. But what an exquisite feeling it is, the pure certainty of danger, the need for salvation. Such simple, unadulterated emotions are hard to come by for adults. It's not that fear is altogether pleasant, but its ability to reduce the complex world into a straightforward, life-or-death decision can be refreshing. You feel in touch with a reservoir of Truth (I've got to act or I'll die) that mimics the Truth you learn about in Sunday School (God is real, is watching, is here). Thus, you come to link the simple certainty of the hellfire-and-damnation message with the certainty appropriate to Christian faith throughout a lifetime.
The trouble is, the world is complex. Christianity, insofar as it exceeds the temporal bounds of the singular moment of conversion, must therefore also be complex. Certainty about how exactly we as Christians ought to live, how exactly we should act in every situation, just isn't possible. But fight-or-flight faith insists that it's certainty--certain belief--that ensures our salvation. Doubt, which is almost always a byproduct of thought, is therefore verboten. Fight-or-flight evangelism can all to easily lead to a faith defined by a fetish for fearful, insular thoughtlessness.
Second problem: these regular activations of the eternal soul's survival instinct hinder the other-directed life that Christians are supposed to lead. You turn to Christ to get yourself saved (which of course is Christ saving you rather than you saving yourself, etc.). You evangelize not merely because you wish others to be saved, too, but also because evangelizing is proof-in-the-pudding that your salvation is genuine. It's not that evangelists aren't deeply concerned with the eternal destinations of those around them, but this other-concern is nevertheless tied to the self-concern of their own salvation. Would there be as much focus on evangelizing if Jesus had given believers an out-clause? "You may make disciples, but you don't have to."
Or, to return to a question I cited early on in this blog, if heaven and hell were neutralized--if there were no final judgment of the sort spoken of in evangelical discourse, would people still be Christians? Is Jesus worth following apart from His ability to snatch us from the pit?
By the time I was entering high school, these questions had joined others I was having about, say, what happened to people who had never heard the gospel of Christ or how the Bible's words about creation could be reconciled with scientific consensus about the earth's age. Intellectually, I was searching for something more satisfying. Emotionally and spiritually, I was dog-tired of being threatened with the eternal judgment and sick with the thought that a Christian lifestyle required me to introduce others to that threat.
I was needing another way to be a Christian.
More tomorrow,
JF
Does the trick, generally.
Back to the task at hand: I've been exploring my childhood faith experience, trying to figure out why that conservative evangelical faith began to seem so wrong to me as I grew older. One factor, I've suggested, has to do with the fact that my childhood faith preached love for one's neighbors while relying for its genesis, upkeep, and spread on fearful self-interest. You became a Christian in my faith primarily to avoid the threat of Hell. Avoiding hell remains the core motivation in many of the more popular versions of conservative evangelism.
Although effective in the short term (that is, for people who accept the premises of God, hell, sin, and judgment), I've argued that this faith actually has several negative long-term consequences. First and foremost, it's short-lived. Intense, adrenaline-surge evangelism purchases emotional power at the price of longevity. It burns out, especially as the reality of what it means to be a Christian (not just a momentary decision but a lifetime of commitment) sinks in.
To stave off burnout, fight-or-flight Christianity applies more fire--hellfire, that is, stoking the embers of anxiety 1) about one's eternal fate (Are you sure you've really, truly turned to Christ? Might you just be fooling yourself?), or 2) about the degree to which one is evangelizing (Have you led others to Christ? You know, real Christians share their faith all the time. If you aren't doing that, well... you may want to go back to concern #1...).
The problem with this constant fear-mongering is twofold (at least). First, fear works like an addictive substance. It generates an intense emotional high while deactivating higher brain functions. It's difficult to think clearly or carefully when you're rushing for the fire exit. But what an exquisite feeling it is, the pure certainty of danger, the need for salvation. Such simple, unadulterated emotions are hard to come by for adults. It's not that fear is altogether pleasant, but its ability to reduce the complex world into a straightforward, life-or-death decision can be refreshing. You feel in touch with a reservoir of Truth (I've got to act or I'll die) that mimics the Truth you learn about in Sunday School (God is real, is watching, is here). Thus, you come to link the simple certainty of the hellfire-and-damnation message with the certainty appropriate to Christian faith throughout a lifetime.
The trouble is, the world is complex. Christianity, insofar as it exceeds the temporal bounds of the singular moment of conversion, must therefore also be complex. Certainty about how exactly we as Christians ought to live, how exactly we should act in every situation, just isn't possible. But fight-or-flight faith insists that it's certainty--certain belief--that ensures our salvation. Doubt, which is almost always a byproduct of thought, is therefore verboten. Fight-or-flight evangelism can all to easily lead to a faith defined by a fetish for fearful, insular thoughtlessness.
Second problem: these regular activations of the eternal soul's survival instinct hinder the other-directed life that Christians are supposed to lead. You turn to Christ to get yourself saved (which of course is Christ saving you rather than you saving yourself, etc.). You evangelize not merely because you wish others to be saved, too, but also because evangelizing is proof-in-the-pudding that your salvation is genuine. It's not that evangelists aren't deeply concerned with the eternal destinations of those around them, but this other-concern is nevertheless tied to the self-concern of their own salvation. Would there be as much focus on evangelizing if Jesus had given believers an out-clause? "You may make disciples, but you don't have to."
Or, to return to a question I cited early on in this blog, if heaven and hell were neutralized--if there were no final judgment of the sort spoken of in evangelical discourse, would people still be Christians? Is Jesus worth following apart from His ability to snatch us from the pit?
By the time I was entering high school, these questions had joined others I was having about, say, what happened to people who had never heard the gospel of Christ or how the Bible's words about creation could be reconciled with scientific consensus about the earth's age. Intellectually, I was searching for something more satisfying. Emotionally and spiritually, I was dog-tired of being threatened with the eternal judgment and sick with the thought that a Christian lifestyle required me to introduce others to that threat.
I was needing another way to be a Christian.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
WWJD about Health Care and an Odd Reading of the Good Samaritan
Today I interrupt my ongoing examination of evangelical outreach (particularly the afterlife-focused, hell-first outreach techniques). I saw a link today on one of my usual conservative news websites that boiled my blood. The theme is "WWJD [What Would Jesus Do]--about health care?"
Now, I've been interested in the health care reform movement for some time, believing as I do that health care ought to be considered a right protected by our government rather than a privilege for those who can afford it. As a student of conservative popular culture in general, I've watched with growing alarm the recent outbursts by various people at congressional "town hall" meetings. Like the "TEA Party" demonstrations of a few months back, these youtubed meetings provide frustrated conservatives of a certain stripe with a national stage on which to perform their political beliefs, to make their political cases.
Typically, I'm all for political performances of this sort (I use the word performance not as a synonym for fake but in the active sense of performing a task). Indeed, my whole dissertation focused on instances of "democratic performance activism," where groups and individuals embody and display for a large audience their notions of what it means to live in a liberal democracy.
That said, I've been depressed at the degree to which the performers getting the most attention in the health care debate--the spokespeople at these town hall meetings who capture the sound byte on the evening news--these people seem to offer little more than incoherent, belligerent rage peppered with outright fabrications. Take, for example, the "death panel" myth--that Obama's plan secretly (or not-so-secretly, since apparently a host of right-wing pundits have "discovered' it) calls for the creation of soulless panels that will withhold care from elderly or terminally ill patients, mandate euthanasia, etc. Of course, none of this is so. For a sample rebuttal, see here.
I could go on, but my focus here isn't on the health care debate per se but on evangelical/Christian reactions to it. I've been curious to see how evangelicals would position themselves in relation to a drive to cover the uninsured, to make insurance companies actually pay for care they promised to cover, to prevent insurance companies from turning people down for preexisting conditions, etc. I have to say the whole thing seems open-and-shut to me. Who Would Jesus Insure? Everyone. It's even a liberal bumper sticker my father once used in a sermon. The Great Physician never refused to cure someone. Not ever. And, whatever one's views on inerrancy, it's just hard to read the plain words of the Gospels as saying anything but that Christians are to care for the sick and needy.
Nevertheless, the blog I read today did just that. Posing the WWJD question in terms of health care reform, the blogger (a pundit for the Cato institute) cited his "theologian father," who cited the parable of the good Samaritan. Now, on its face, this parable would seem to demand that Christians do what they can for anyone in need. That is: if the question is "who is the neighbor toward whom I am to show love?" Jesus' answer is "anyone and everyone in need."
Yet this blogger (or his father) renders the story thusly: The Levite and the Priest--the ones who hypocritically pass by the man in need of medical attention--represent the Government. The Samaritan represents the Christian. Thus, argues the blogger, Jesus is saying that individual Christians--and not the government--should be in charge of medical care. Government can't or won't help, so Christians should. Thus health care reform is evil.
Oy.
Conservative evangelicals will often shake their heads in wonder at the ways that liberal Christians can "warp" verses of scripture prohibiting, say, homosexual behavior or female preachers, re-reading the verses to mean the opposite of what they seem to say on the surface. I typically find myself on the side of the re-readers since I 1) do not view the Bible as inerrant, and 2) do no believe in a "plain sense" interpretation of scripture that ignores variations of culture, language, and history. Thanks to this blogger's innovative interpretation of the Good Samaritan parable, though, I have a sense of what this surreal sense of disbelief feels like--really? You're serious? That's how you interpret this?
Battling past my shock, though, let me sketch out a few problems with this interpretation.
Objection 1: Even if the Priest and the Levite represent "the government"--Jesus is condemning their inaction, not validating it. They are hypocrites because they should be helping the wounded man but do not do so. Surely, then, Jesus' condemnation of "government" would mean that we should A) see caring for the sick as government's job; and B) criticize the government as acting hypocritically when it fails to do this job. Far from supporting a notion that the government has no business in health care, Jesus (in this interpretation) seems to argue that it's absolutely government's job to ensure that people receive health care. Christians step in when the government fails to do its proper job, but by no means does this mean that governments ought to be let off the hook (Jesus didn't imply that the Priest and the Levite were somehow exempt from the duties they failed to perform).
Objection 2: The fact that the Samaritan helps the man personally doesn't mean that the only aid Christians are allowed to give is one-on-one. Jesus advocates expanding the scope of our concern, reaching out to more and more people. Never does Jesus suggest that one-on-one ministry is the only legitimate ministerial mode. Else, how would churches justify denominational or ecumenical ministries?
On a related note, this is a bizarre conclusion for a conservative evangelical to draw, this notion that Christians must restrict their moral duties to the private sphere. Certainly conservative evangelicals have been arguing for some time that Christian convictions ought to have a place in government and politics. They (and I'm generalizing here) do not back down from insisting that government respect and enforce their faith-based views on homosexuality, abortion, gambling, pornography, and a host of other such church/state issues.
Objection 3: This is more political than theological, but here's a point the parable interpretation misses: unlike the Roman Empire of Jesus' time, ours is a representative democracy. We are the government, so it does no good to pretend that there's a separation between Christian citizens and the government-of-the-people they support through their taxes and votes. Christians therefore have greater mechanisms at their disposal than merely individual charity. Surely it's at least as Christian to advocate that the government protect people's health it is to advocate that the government protect, say, the unborn or heterosexual marriage.
Whew.
Had to get that off my chest.
Back to evangelical outreach tomorrow,
JF
Now, I've been interested in the health care reform movement for some time, believing as I do that health care ought to be considered a right protected by our government rather than a privilege for those who can afford it. As a student of conservative popular culture in general, I've watched with growing alarm the recent outbursts by various people at congressional "town hall" meetings. Like the "TEA Party" demonstrations of a few months back, these youtubed meetings provide frustrated conservatives of a certain stripe with a national stage on which to perform their political beliefs, to make their political cases.
Typically, I'm all for political performances of this sort (I use the word performance not as a synonym for fake but in the active sense of performing a task). Indeed, my whole dissertation focused on instances of "democratic performance activism," where groups and individuals embody and display for a large audience their notions of what it means to live in a liberal democracy.
That said, I've been depressed at the degree to which the performers getting the most attention in the health care debate--the spokespeople at these town hall meetings who capture the sound byte on the evening news--these people seem to offer little more than incoherent, belligerent rage peppered with outright fabrications. Take, for example, the "death panel" myth--that Obama's plan secretly (or not-so-secretly, since apparently a host of right-wing pundits have "discovered' it) calls for the creation of soulless panels that will withhold care from elderly or terminally ill patients, mandate euthanasia, etc. Of course, none of this is so. For a sample rebuttal, see here.
I could go on, but my focus here isn't on the health care debate per se but on evangelical/Christian reactions to it. I've been curious to see how evangelicals would position themselves in relation to a drive to cover the uninsured, to make insurance companies actually pay for care they promised to cover, to prevent insurance companies from turning people down for preexisting conditions, etc. I have to say the whole thing seems open-and-shut to me. Who Would Jesus Insure? Everyone. It's even a liberal bumper sticker my father once used in a sermon. The Great Physician never refused to cure someone. Not ever. And, whatever one's views on inerrancy, it's just hard to read the plain words of the Gospels as saying anything but that Christians are to care for the sick and needy.
Nevertheless, the blog I read today did just that. Posing the WWJD question in terms of health care reform, the blogger (a pundit for the Cato institute) cited his "theologian father," who cited the parable of the good Samaritan. Now, on its face, this parable would seem to demand that Christians do what they can for anyone in need. That is: if the question is "who is the neighbor toward whom I am to show love?" Jesus' answer is "anyone and everyone in need."
Yet this blogger (or his father) renders the story thusly: The Levite and the Priest--the ones who hypocritically pass by the man in need of medical attention--represent the Government. The Samaritan represents the Christian. Thus, argues the blogger, Jesus is saying that individual Christians--and not the government--should be in charge of medical care. Government can't or won't help, so Christians should. Thus health care reform is evil.
Oy.
Conservative evangelicals will often shake their heads in wonder at the ways that liberal Christians can "warp" verses of scripture prohibiting, say, homosexual behavior or female preachers, re-reading the verses to mean the opposite of what they seem to say on the surface. I typically find myself on the side of the re-readers since I 1) do not view the Bible as inerrant, and 2) do no believe in a "plain sense" interpretation of scripture that ignores variations of culture, language, and history. Thanks to this blogger's innovative interpretation of the Good Samaritan parable, though, I have a sense of what this surreal sense of disbelief feels like--really? You're serious? That's how you interpret this?
Battling past my shock, though, let me sketch out a few problems with this interpretation.
Objection 1: Even if the Priest and the Levite represent "the government"--Jesus is condemning their inaction, not validating it. They are hypocrites because they should be helping the wounded man but do not do so. Surely, then, Jesus' condemnation of "government" would mean that we should A) see caring for the sick as government's job; and B) criticize the government as acting hypocritically when it fails to do this job. Far from supporting a notion that the government has no business in health care, Jesus (in this interpretation) seems to argue that it's absolutely government's job to ensure that people receive health care. Christians step in when the government fails to do its proper job, but by no means does this mean that governments ought to be let off the hook (Jesus didn't imply that the Priest and the Levite were somehow exempt from the duties they failed to perform).
Objection 2: The fact that the Samaritan helps the man personally doesn't mean that the only aid Christians are allowed to give is one-on-one. Jesus advocates expanding the scope of our concern, reaching out to more and more people. Never does Jesus suggest that one-on-one ministry is the only legitimate ministerial mode. Else, how would churches justify denominational or ecumenical ministries?
On a related note, this is a bizarre conclusion for a conservative evangelical to draw, this notion that Christians must restrict their moral duties to the private sphere. Certainly conservative evangelicals have been arguing for some time that Christian convictions ought to have a place in government and politics. They (and I'm generalizing here) do not back down from insisting that government respect and enforce their faith-based views on homosexuality, abortion, gambling, pornography, and a host of other such church/state issues.
Objection 3: This is more political than theological, but here's a point the parable interpretation misses: unlike the Roman Empire of Jesus' time, ours is a representative democracy. We are the government, so it does no good to pretend that there's a separation between Christian citizens and the government-of-the-people they support through their taxes and votes. Christians therefore have greater mechanisms at their disposal than merely individual charity. Surely it's at least as Christian to advocate that the government protect people's health it is to advocate that the government protect, say, the unborn or heterosexual marriage.
Whew.
Had to get that off my chest.
Back to evangelical outreach tomorrow,
JF
Monday, August 17, 2009
But Don't Afterlife-focused Evangelists Show More Love Than Social Gospel Evangelists?
Yesterday I faulted afterlife-focused evangelism--the "trust Jesus in order to avoid Hell" approach--for fostering a lack of care for people's temporal concerns. Why care about solving poverty, addressing injustices, or repairing the environment if the only thing that really matters is your soul's eternal resting place? Certainly, many afterlife-focused evangelicals also participate in social justice ministries, seeing an either/or, social gospel/evangelizing dichotomy as false. But a significant number of evangelists, however, view a church's focus on social gospel programs as a distraction, draining time and energy away from the one true mission: evangelize.
These latter evangelicals would take offense at the idea that they are somehow showing less love to their neighbors than do the feed-the-poor, comfort-the-afflicted social gospel Christians. Indeed, the argument from the afterlife-focused point of view is that saving someone's soul before saving their bodies shows greater love.
Why? Well, for one thing, earthly suffering can never be totally eradicated; they result from the fallen-ness that has corrupted God's good creation since Eden. Efforts to ameliorate that suffering are like trying to hold back the tide. In the long run, they can never work. The only aspect of creation that is redeemable is the human soul, and that only by the sanctifying action of Christ. This redemption, while it does not make earthly suffering disappear, has an eternal character and a certain outcome: the soul goes to heaven for eternity.
If you accept the afterlife-focused premises, the logic is fairly convincing. Even Penn Jillette, an outspoken atheist, got raves from evangelicals for his argument that anyone who believes in a literal, eternal hell ought to proselytize. Indeed, Jillette sees proselytization as evidence of conviction. He proselytizes about his Truth; afterlife-focused evangelicals proselytize about theirs. Anyone who doesn't proselytize, for Jillette, deserves no respect since they stand for no Truth.
As I've hinted, though, I do not buy the afterlife-focused premises of a literal/eternal hell and the irredeemability of the world. But besides that, my own experience as a former afterlife-focused evangelical leads me to question the greater-love argument.
I want to take people at their word when they insist that they evangelize out of a sincere love for their neighbors. They don't want anyone to end up in hell, so all of their efforts are dedicated to getting people to trust in Christ for their salvation. But--and I can only speak for myself here--so much of my experience as a Southern Baptist surrounded the evangelical imperative with an aura of self-concern.
To review: I think it's fairly apparent that the afterlife-focused evangelical appeal plays on a person's instincts for self-preservation: you don't want to go to hell, do you? Once you believe in the reality of hell and the inevitability of damnation, then trusting Christ/becoming a Christian becomes a foregone conclusion. It's an offer you dare not refuse. (As I've also argued, in this configuration of salvation, it really doesn't matter whether you see God as loving or as a capricious tyrant. If God is the only means of salvation from eternal torture, you'll take God no matter what, right?).
I have trouble, then, seeing how a conversion experience born out of self-concern blossoms into a faith life of self-sacrifice. More than that, I lived that difficulty in my childhood and teenage years as I struggled to reach out to others in faith. Evangelical training teaches you to imagine the immanent danger that the unsaved around you face. How would you like it if they went to hell? Of course I wouldn't like that. I wanted my friends and neighbors--heck, even strangers--to avoid the unimaginable torments of the lake of fire.
But surprisingly that desire often wasn't quite enough for me to broach the subject of Christianity to them. The social conventions that restrain people from turning a conversation toward the Threat Of Hell are exquisitely difficult to break. Whole books, curricula, sermons, podcasts, etc. deal with this very issue: getting past fear to "Dare 2 Share."
What got me past that fear, though, wasn't love. It was guilt. Or, more accurately, it was a deeper fear that, if I didn't share then I didn't really believe. It's Jillette's Law of Ultimate Truths. If you really believe in a truth, you will proselytize. Not proselytizing=not really believing.
I mentioned early on that I was taught that God poses not one but two questions to souls at the Judgment: 1) Is your name written in the Book of Life (i.e., are you saved)? 2) Whom did you bring with you? Now technically, only the first question was necessary for salvation. A mass murderer who, on her deathbed, truly trusts in Christ is saved--full stop. Moreover, merely proselytizing does not in and of itself save--no human work does.
Nevertheless, if you are saved, the logic goes, you will proselytize. And if you don't share your faith? If you don't breech those social (i.e., man-made, worldly, not-of-God) conventions? Well...you have to wonder about your faith.
Thus--again, I can only speak for myself--while I did wish for those around me to go to heaven, it was my own fate, my own afterlife that moved me to actually share the gospel with people.
This mix of other-love and self-interest, I submit, shapes the tenor of evangelical outreach techniques. If your evangelism has as its goal actually seeing other people convert, then your strategy will be efficacy-focused: what techniques actually reach people? If your evangelism has as its goal fulfilling a requirement for your own salvation, though, efficacy falls by the wayside...
More tomorrow,
JF
These latter evangelicals would take offense at the idea that they are somehow showing less love to their neighbors than do the feed-the-poor, comfort-the-afflicted social gospel Christians. Indeed, the argument from the afterlife-focused point of view is that saving someone's soul before saving their bodies shows greater love.
Why? Well, for one thing, earthly suffering can never be totally eradicated; they result from the fallen-ness that has corrupted God's good creation since Eden. Efforts to ameliorate that suffering are like trying to hold back the tide. In the long run, they can never work. The only aspect of creation that is redeemable is the human soul, and that only by the sanctifying action of Christ. This redemption, while it does not make earthly suffering disappear, has an eternal character and a certain outcome: the soul goes to heaven for eternity.
If you accept the afterlife-focused premises, the logic is fairly convincing. Even Penn Jillette, an outspoken atheist, got raves from evangelicals for his argument that anyone who believes in a literal, eternal hell ought to proselytize. Indeed, Jillette sees proselytization as evidence of conviction. He proselytizes about his Truth; afterlife-focused evangelicals proselytize about theirs. Anyone who doesn't proselytize, for Jillette, deserves no respect since they stand for no Truth.
As I've hinted, though, I do not buy the afterlife-focused premises of a literal/eternal hell and the irredeemability of the world. But besides that, my own experience as a former afterlife-focused evangelical leads me to question the greater-love argument.
I want to take people at their word when they insist that they evangelize out of a sincere love for their neighbors. They don't want anyone to end up in hell, so all of their efforts are dedicated to getting people to trust in Christ for their salvation. But--and I can only speak for myself here--so much of my experience as a Southern Baptist surrounded the evangelical imperative with an aura of self-concern.
To review: I think it's fairly apparent that the afterlife-focused evangelical appeal plays on a person's instincts for self-preservation: you don't want to go to hell, do you? Once you believe in the reality of hell and the inevitability of damnation, then trusting Christ/becoming a Christian becomes a foregone conclusion. It's an offer you dare not refuse. (As I've also argued, in this configuration of salvation, it really doesn't matter whether you see God as loving or as a capricious tyrant. If God is the only means of salvation from eternal torture, you'll take God no matter what, right?).
I have trouble, then, seeing how a conversion experience born out of self-concern blossoms into a faith life of self-sacrifice. More than that, I lived that difficulty in my childhood and teenage years as I struggled to reach out to others in faith. Evangelical training teaches you to imagine the immanent danger that the unsaved around you face. How would you like it if they went to hell? Of course I wouldn't like that. I wanted my friends and neighbors--heck, even strangers--to avoid the unimaginable torments of the lake of fire.
But surprisingly that desire often wasn't quite enough for me to broach the subject of Christianity to them. The social conventions that restrain people from turning a conversation toward the Threat Of Hell are exquisitely difficult to break. Whole books, curricula, sermons, podcasts, etc. deal with this very issue: getting past fear to "Dare 2 Share."
What got me past that fear, though, wasn't love. It was guilt. Or, more accurately, it was a deeper fear that, if I didn't share then I didn't really believe. It's Jillette's Law of Ultimate Truths. If you really believe in a truth, you will proselytize. Not proselytizing=not really believing.
I mentioned early on that I was taught that God poses not one but two questions to souls at the Judgment: 1) Is your name written in the Book of Life (i.e., are you saved)? 2) Whom did you bring with you? Now technically, only the first question was necessary for salvation. A mass murderer who, on her deathbed, truly trusts in Christ is saved--full stop. Moreover, merely proselytizing does not in and of itself save--no human work does.
Nevertheless, if you are saved, the logic goes, you will proselytize. And if you don't share your faith? If you don't breech those social (i.e., man-made, worldly, not-of-God) conventions? Well...you have to wonder about your faith.
Thus--again, I can only speak for myself--while I did wish for those around me to go to heaven, it was my own fate, my own afterlife that moved me to actually share the gospel with people.
This mix of other-love and self-interest, I submit, shapes the tenor of evangelical outreach techniques. If your evangelism has as its goal actually seeing other people convert, then your strategy will be efficacy-focused: what techniques actually reach people? If your evangelism has as its goal fulfilling a requirement for your own salvation, though, efficacy falls by the wayside...
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Afterlife-focused Evangelisms
I suggested yesterday that many conservative evangelicals underplay the full import of "giving your life to Christ" (or "being born agian," "getting saved," what have you). The hell-first, you-need-Christ-to-avoid-the-fire-below proselytizing pitch so popular in evangelical culture front-loads all of the critical attention onto the "hell" aspect of faith. You become a Christian, at least initially, in the faith that Christ will spare you from the wrath of God.
Now, from eternity's perspective, certainly this is a grand deal. Make one decision and enjoy a hell-free afterlife. (Alternately, as I've argued, the eternity perspective could also be framed as an offer-you-can't-refuse: make a decision now or face unending, mind-shattering torture). And, as most evangelical fans of the hell-first approach will readily admit, they operate from just such an eternal-over-temporal perspective. This is what leads to a minor (sometimes major) tension within certain evangelical arenas: to what extent should material ministries to the poor and needy compete with proselytic ministries to lead people to the Lord?
From the hell-first perspective, giving someone on an airplane a nice in-flight meal--even if that person is starving for something to eat--matters little if the plane itself is about to crash. In such a case, offering a parachute (i.e., the gospel)--saving their eternal soul--takes precedence over attending to their temporal needs. Now, most evangelicals will aver that ministries to the poor/homeless/needy/prisoners/widows are noble and important. But these are ultimately less important than fulfilling the Great Commission's mandate to "go ye therefore. . . and make disciples."
Variations of this afterlife-matters-more-than-social-service attitude, by the way, crop up throughout Christian history. In the 19th century US and Britain, the rise of premillennialism served as a still-influential example. Premillennialism, in general, understands the Bible as teaching that Christ will at some point (usually "very soon" or "any time now") return to earth to establish a thousand-year-long earthly kingdom, followed by the Final Judgment. A number of sub-species exist, notably premillennial dispensationalism (I'll get to that later) and pre-tribulation rapture version. (An excellent if dated go-to source for premillennialism in the 19th century is Ernest Sandeen).
Whatever their exact configurations of the End Times, premillennialists' belief in a perfect order-to-come lead them to disengage from the irredeemably imperfect world-that-is. So the world has problems of poverty, starvation, disease, violence, etc? Of course it does. These, to the premillennialist (I generalize), are endemic to the fallen human world. Any human effort to alleviate these problems can only be palliative, a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. "The poor will always be with you," said Jesus. Thus, while Christians should be charitable toward those less fortunate, they need to direct their attention forward to the World To Come.
The 19th century premillennialists in the US and Britain faced competition from other evangelicals who valued as integral to the Christian life struggle against human structures of oppression and injustice. Abolitionists, social gospelers, Christian socialists--all of these and more rejected the idea that Christians got a God-given pass from addressing the here-and-now needs of "the least of these." They drew on other parts of scripture--the calls for justice and mercy, the directives toward hospitality and charity, the example of Christ--to imagine a Christian ministry larger than a finger pointing to hell.
Again, I simplify; most evangelicals now as then would not classify themselves in either camp exclusively. But one can today see struggles between afterlife-focused and world-focused viewpoints similar to those of the social gospelers and the premillennialists of over a century ago. Take the divisions within evangelicalism over environmentalism, for instance. Several key evangelicals (Rick Warren, for example) have begun to argue that evangelicals ought to be concerned about humanity's negative impact on the natural world. Other evangelicals, often aligning with global warming skeptics, counter that 1) God is in control of the fate of the world, not humans; and 2) the world is destined for re-making in any respect, so our present attention needs to be focused not on saving a doomed world but on saving the damned souls living upon it.
Or, closer to my own interests, consider the different valences of "missionary work" when spoken of by different sorts of evangelicals. For some, "missionary work" means spreading the gospel--full stop. You go to a different country (or to a different part of your own country) and do nothing but share the gospel, translate and distribute Bibles, preach on the streets, etc. The "foreign missionary"--a US-based evangelist who travels to and lives for a time in a foreign country--is a common hero in evangelical circles. I remember a Sunday night service from my Baptist childhood hearing a visiting foreign missionary who had spent years in some dark jungle trying to find a way to translate "ask Jesus to come into your heart" for people whose culture put the center of self into the throat rather than the heart (thus: "let Jesus come into your throat").
Better still, I remember, were the stories of foreign missionaries who had to work covertly in countries with regimes hostile to Christianity. Many a story of secret bible meetings, surreptitious prayer circles, jail time, and even martyrdom cast an aura of 007-style romance around the lives of such missionaries.
"Mission work" means something different in other denominations. In the United Methodist Church, for instance, missions work (represented by the UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief) more often means material assistance to people in need: food for the hungry, micro-loans and education for the poor, medical intervention for the sick and injured, infrastructural support for those whose homes have been destroyed, etc.
Again, the two poles are less exclusive than I've laid out here. But in terms of basic orientation, in terms of the answer to the question, what should a Christian's ministerial focus be?--evangelicals and Methodists (along with other mainline denominations) part ways most dramatically.
Just to be clear: I am at this point in my life convinced that the way of Christ demands that my attention and efforts be directed at addressing and alleviating instances of human suffering. I do not see this as a distraction from a "real" Christian mission but the Christian mission par excellence.
This is not to say that I do not see certain pitfalls or disadvantages to such an orientation (these I will deal with another time). But, having lived an afterlife-focused faith for much of my childhood into my teenaged years, I prefer the material-needs/solidarity-with-those-who-suffer approach.
And, though I think that the Methodist/UMCOR definiton of missions is more in line with the will of God, my main concern with afterlife-focused evangelism is not (or not only) that it ignores the temporal lives of those around the evangelist (the sick, the poor, the suffering) but (more) that it ignores the temporal life of the afterlife-focused Christian.
More tomorrow,
JF
Now, from eternity's perspective, certainly this is a grand deal. Make one decision and enjoy a hell-free afterlife. (Alternately, as I've argued, the eternity perspective could also be framed as an offer-you-can't-refuse: make a decision now or face unending, mind-shattering torture). And, as most evangelical fans of the hell-first approach will readily admit, they operate from just such an eternal-over-temporal perspective. This is what leads to a minor (sometimes major) tension within certain evangelical arenas: to what extent should material ministries to the poor and needy compete with proselytic ministries to lead people to the Lord?
From the hell-first perspective, giving someone on an airplane a nice in-flight meal--even if that person is starving for something to eat--matters little if the plane itself is about to crash. In such a case, offering a parachute (i.e., the gospel)--saving their eternal soul--takes precedence over attending to their temporal needs. Now, most evangelicals will aver that ministries to the poor/homeless/needy/prisoners/widows are noble and important. But these are ultimately less important than fulfilling the Great Commission's mandate to "go ye therefore. . . and make disciples."
Variations of this afterlife-matters-more-than-social-service attitude, by the way, crop up throughout Christian history. In the 19th century US and Britain, the rise of premillennialism served as a still-influential example. Premillennialism, in general, understands the Bible as teaching that Christ will at some point (usually "very soon" or "any time now") return to earth to establish a thousand-year-long earthly kingdom, followed by the Final Judgment. A number of sub-species exist, notably premillennial dispensationalism (I'll get to that later) and pre-tribulation rapture version. (An excellent if dated go-to source for premillennialism in the 19th century is Ernest Sandeen).
Whatever their exact configurations of the End Times, premillennialists' belief in a perfect order-to-come lead them to disengage from the irredeemably imperfect world-that-is. So the world has problems of poverty, starvation, disease, violence, etc? Of course it does. These, to the premillennialist (I generalize), are endemic to the fallen human world. Any human effort to alleviate these problems can only be palliative, a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. "The poor will always be with you," said Jesus. Thus, while Christians should be charitable toward those less fortunate, they need to direct their attention forward to the World To Come.
The 19th century premillennialists in the US and Britain faced competition from other evangelicals who valued as integral to the Christian life struggle against human structures of oppression and injustice. Abolitionists, social gospelers, Christian socialists--all of these and more rejected the idea that Christians got a God-given pass from addressing the here-and-now needs of "the least of these." They drew on other parts of scripture--the calls for justice and mercy, the directives toward hospitality and charity, the example of Christ--to imagine a Christian ministry larger than a finger pointing to hell.
Again, I simplify; most evangelicals now as then would not classify themselves in either camp exclusively. But one can today see struggles between afterlife-focused and world-focused viewpoints similar to those of the social gospelers and the premillennialists of over a century ago. Take the divisions within evangelicalism over environmentalism, for instance. Several key evangelicals (Rick Warren, for example) have begun to argue that evangelicals ought to be concerned about humanity's negative impact on the natural world. Other evangelicals, often aligning with global warming skeptics, counter that 1) God is in control of the fate of the world, not humans; and 2) the world is destined for re-making in any respect, so our present attention needs to be focused not on saving a doomed world but on saving the damned souls living upon it.
Or, closer to my own interests, consider the different valences of "missionary work" when spoken of by different sorts of evangelicals. For some, "missionary work" means spreading the gospel--full stop. You go to a different country (or to a different part of your own country) and do nothing but share the gospel, translate and distribute Bibles, preach on the streets, etc. The "foreign missionary"--a US-based evangelist who travels to and lives for a time in a foreign country--is a common hero in evangelical circles. I remember a Sunday night service from my Baptist childhood hearing a visiting foreign missionary who had spent years in some dark jungle trying to find a way to translate "ask Jesus to come into your heart" for people whose culture put the center of self into the throat rather than the heart (thus: "let Jesus come into your throat").
Better still, I remember, were the stories of foreign missionaries who had to work covertly in countries with regimes hostile to Christianity. Many a story of secret bible meetings, surreptitious prayer circles, jail time, and even martyrdom cast an aura of 007-style romance around the lives of such missionaries.
"Mission work" means something different in other denominations. In the United Methodist Church, for instance, missions work (represented by the UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief) more often means material assistance to people in need: food for the hungry, micro-loans and education for the poor, medical intervention for the sick and injured, infrastructural support for those whose homes have been destroyed, etc.
Again, the two poles are less exclusive than I've laid out here. But in terms of basic orientation, in terms of the answer to the question, what should a Christian's ministerial focus be?--evangelicals and Methodists (along with other mainline denominations) part ways most dramatically.
Just to be clear: I am at this point in my life convinced that the way of Christ demands that my attention and efforts be directed at addressing and alleviating instances of human suffering. I do not see this as a distraction from a "real" Christian mission but the Christian mission par excellence.
This is not to say that I do not see certain pitfalls or disadvantages to such an orientation (these I will deal with another time). But, having lived an afterlife-focused faith for much of my childhood into my teenaged years, I prefer the material-needs/solidarity-with-those-who-suffer approach.
And, though I think that the Methodist/UMCOR definiton of missions is more in line with the will of God, my main concern with afterlife-focused evangelism is not (or not only) that it ignores the temporal lives of those around the evangelist (the sick, the poor, the suffering) but (more) that it ignores the temporal life of the afterlife-focused Christian.
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Rightness, Appeal, Efficacy
Nothing I've said so far in any of my criticisms about hell-first, turn-or-burn, Way of the Master evangelism would likely make any real headway with an evangelist dedicated to such approaches.
Why?
Because, as Ray Comfort and other such hell-intensive evangelists insist, theirs is the only biblically supported means of sharing the gospel. They lead with conviction and fear of hellfire not because they think it's the most appealing or logical (by the world's standards) but because they understand the scriptures as mandating that the gospel be spread in that way.
To paraphrase their rationale: it's nice to talk about a loving God who wants the best for your life, but the Bible talks about hell, the lake of fire, and the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Hell's existence--the damnation awaiting humanity for its sin--is the controlling reality. Sovereign God ordains it, and only sovereign God can save a helpless humanity from it. To spread a gospel of love and ethics without highlighting the threat of eternal punishment is to corrupt the scripture, to go against doctrine.
Thus, in presenting a criticism about the lack of appeal of hell-first evangelism, I've missed the point. Its effectiveness in attracting the unsaved or in producing lifelong Christians is secondary. After all, it's the Holy Spirit, not the evangelist or her techniques, that enables conversion in the first place. The evangelist's job consists only of following what the Bible says to do, not to innovate new and better--hipper--techniques.
Churches and denominations go astray (in this line of thinking) when they borrow too much from the secular self-help culture of personal empowerment or liberal-left tolerance to re-make God as some kind of namby-pamby grandpa who loves without judgment. The Bible's image--a righteous God simultaneously infuriated at human sin and forgiving toward those whom God saves--naturally seems foolish to a rebellious culture. That's their problem.
Being right takes precedence over being appealing.
Indeed, many conservative evangelicals argue that the newer "soft-sell" (i.e., non-hell-first) techniques of evangelism are not only wrong but ineffective. Such goodness-of-God pitches, goes the argument, produce converts who expect that life as a Christian will be one blessing after another, full of health and prosperity. Disillusionment and bitterness soon follow, though, as these new converts discover that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Cancer, financial ruin, heartache--all of these affect Christians just as much as they affect anyone else. Thus the prosperity gospels (or Word of Faith theologies) get lambasted for offering a false promise and creating disappointed apostates convinced that the church is full of hypocrites and liars.
I support this line of argument. Any Christian pitch that promises wealth and comfort is in my book suspect, and I join conservative evangelicals in distrusting the prosperity or Word of Faith gospel movements.
But I would argue that the "hard-sell" fight-or-flight, avoid-hell evangelism is similarly ineffective.
I've criticized hell-first evangelicals for downplaying the full import of an eternity of unmitigated torture. Oh, the Way of the Master mentions hell, but it avoids dwelling on hell. To do so would be to underline the ludicrousness--the un-justness--of God's judgment. Even the worst convicts, the foulest offenders, receive finite punishments. Even for them, overt torture is distasteful. But Hell is God's place of torment for any and every offender, from the mass murder down to the occasional fibber, and it is infinite both in terms of sensation (hell is the worst, most unendurable pain you can imagine times a million) and in terms of time (hell lasts for ever with no reprieve). What possible offense--let alone a single violation of one of the ten commandments--could justify that punishment?
I submit that hell-first evangelicals likewise underplay the full import of Christianity. One of the defining features of evangelicalism, a feature with a longer legacy than even biblical inerrancy, is its picture of conversion as a singular experience. Evangelical testimonies typically revolve around an individual's moment of decision, the temporal point at which they become a Christian.
Now, this moment gets rendered in very particular ways depending upon the evangelical tradition. For some, the moment involves nothing more than belief in the saving act and power of Christ. For others, the moment involves "giving your life to Christ" or "accepting Jesus into your heart as Lord." For still others, the preferred language is "repentance," turning from dependency upon yourself and surrendering to the sovereign power of God to save you. These differences may seem minor to outsiders, but they can prove quite sharp, the source of vicious schisms and quarrels (more on that later).
Whatever the exact language--and nearly all evangelicals would insist their language involves faith, not works--the result ought to be a life lived for Christ. This is a vital point. Evangelicals will argue that no one can earn their way into salvation through good works or beneficent intentions. Humans by themselves cannot save themselves. Going to church, reading your Bible, following the ten commandments--none of that will save you. Only belief in Christ as savior can do that.
Nevertheless, the tacit understanding is that anyone who authentically believes in Christ (or whatever the exact term) will in practice strive to pattern their life in a way that results in church attendance, Bible-reading, commandment-following, etc. If someone makes a profession of faith (i.e., "gets saved") and then proceeds to live their life exactly as before, the legitimacy of their salvation experience is in doubt.
Now, evangelicals will divide on whether or not such a person is actually saved. Some are quite cavalier about weeding the true from the false converts. Others are hesitant to second-guess what the Spirit might be doing in the hearts and minds of others.
Regardless, however, the "normal" expectation among evangelicals is that turning to Christ ought to have consequences beyond the convert's essential salvation from hell. Turning to Christ, believing in Jesus's salvific act, ought to result in a deep and abiding change to the patterns of one's inner and outer life. It is a momentary decision with a lifetime result.
It's in the lifetime after the decision that I see the problem with fight-or-flight evangelism.
More tomorrow,
JF
Why?
Because, as Ray Comfort and other such hell-intensive evangelists insist, theirs is the only biblically supported means of sharing the gospel. They lead with conviction and fear of hellfire not because they think it's the most appealing or logical (by the world's standards) but because they understand the scriptures as mandating that the gospel be spread in that way.
To paraphrase their rationale: it's nice to talk about a loving God who wants the best for your life, but the Bible talks about hell, the lake of fire, and the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Hell's existence--the damnation awaiting humanity for its sin--is the controlling reality. Sovereign God ordains it, and only sovereign God can save a helpless humanity from it. To spread a gospel of love and ethics without highlighting the threat of eternal punishment is to corrupt the scripture, to go against doctrine.
Thus, in presenting a criticism about the lack of appeal of hell-first evangelism, I've missed the point. Its effectiveness in attracting the unsaved or in producing lifelong Christians is secondary. After all, it's the Holy Spirit, not the evangelist or her techniques, that enables conversion in the first place. The evangelist's job consists only of following what the Bible says to do, not to innovate new and better--hipper--techniques.
Churches and denominations go astray (in this line of thinking) when they borrow too much from the secular self-help culture of personal empowerment or liberal-left tolerance to re-make God as some kind of namby-pamby grandpa who loves without judgment. The Bible's image--a righteous God simultaneously infuriated at human sin and forgiving toward those whom God saves--naturally seems foolish to a rebellious culture. That's their problem.
Being right takes precedence over being appealing.
Indeed, many conservative evangelicals argue that the newer "soft-sell" (i.e., non-hell-first) techniques of evangelism are not only wrong but ineffective. Such goodness-of-God pitches, goes the argument, produce converts who expect that life as a Christian will be one blessing after another, full of health and prosperity. Disillusionment and bitterness soon follow, though, as these new converts discover that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Cancer, financial ruin, heartache--all of these affect Christians just as much as they affect anyone else. Thus the prosperity gospels (or Word of Faith theologies) get lambasted for offering a false promise and creating disappointed apostates convinced that the church is full of hypocrites and liars.
I support this line of argument. Any Christian pitch that promises wealth and comfort is in my book suspect, and I join conservative evangelicals in distrusting the prosperity or Word of Faith gospel movements.
But I would argue that the "hard-sell" fight-or-flight, avoid-hell evangelism is similarly ineffective.
I've criticized hell-first evangelicals for downplaying the full import of an eternity of unmitigated torture. Oh, the Way of the Master mentions hell, but it avoids dwelling on hell. To do so would be to underline the ludicrousness--the un-justness--of God's judgment. Even the worst convicts, the foulest offenders, receive finite punishments. Even for them, overt torture is distasteful. But Hell is God's place of torment for any and every offender, from the mass murder down to the occasional fibber, and it is infinite both in terms of sensation (hell is the worst, most unendurable pain you can imagine times a million) and in terms of time (hell lasts for ever with no reprieve). What possible offense--let alone a single violation of one of the ten commandments--could justify that punishment?
I submit that hell-first evangelicals likewise underplay the full import of Christianity. One of the defining features of evangelicalism, a feature with a longer legacy than even biblical inerrancy, is its picture of conversion as a singular experience. Evangelical testimonies typically revolve around an individual's moment of decision, the temporal point at which they become a Christian.
Now, this moment gets rendered in very particular ways depending upon the evangelical tradition. For some, the moment involves nothing more than belief in the saving act and power of Christ. For others, the moment involves "giving your life to Christ" or "accepting Jesus into your heart as Lord." For still others, the preferred language is "repentance," turning from dependency upon yourself and surrendering to the sovereign power of God to save you. These differences may seem minor to outsiders, but they can prove quite sharp, the source of vicious schisms and quarrels (more on that later).
Whatever the exact language--and nearly all evangelicals would insist their language involves faith, not works--the result ought to be a life lived for Christ. This is a vital point. Evangelicals will argue that no one can earn their way into salvation through good works or beneficent intentions. Humans by themselves cannot save themselves. Going to church, reading your Bible, following the ten commandments--none of that will save you. Only belief in Christ as savior can do that.
Nevertheless, the tacit understanding is that anyone who authentically believes in Christ (or whatever the exact term) will in practice strive to pattern their life in a way that results in church attendance, Bible-reading, commandment-following, etc. If someone makes a profession of faith (i.e., "gets saved") and then proceeds to live their life exactly as before, the legitimacy of their salvation experience is in doubt.
Now, evangelicals will divide on whether or not such a person is actually saved. Some are quite cavalier about weeding the true from the false converts. Others are hesitant to second-guess what the Spirit might be doing in the hearts and minds of others.
Regardless, however, the "normal" expectation among evangelicals is that turning to Christ ought to have consequences beyond the convert's essential salvation from hell. Turning to Christ, believing in Jesus's salvific act, ought to result in a deep and abiding change to the patterns of one's inner and outer life. It is a momentary decision with a lifetime result.
It's in the lifetime after the decision that I see the problem with fight-or-flight evangelism.
More tomorrow,
JF
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