Salvation as th Offer You Can't Refuse

Back--after a week away in New York City. There I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), where I presented papers about the Creation Museum and about the "ex-gay" movement. More on those later.

I also had the opportunity to chat with some old friends about my work, and this blog came up. Specifically, I was having lunch with my former advisor (now friend) Sonja. I told her all about the ex-gays, the anti-evolutionist group Answers in Genesis, and of course about Ray Comfort and his Way of the Master (WotM). I even modeled for Sonja the standard WotM evangelizing conversation. Her reaction--as someone who isn't a Christian but who is unusually open to hearing other points of view--was pretty critical.

Her biggest problem with the WotM--well, one of her biggest problems--was one I've dealt with previously: how WotM evangelism blurs together the act of sin into the status of sinner. You've told a lie? You're a liar. You've been angry at a friend? You're a murderer.

"But no one can live up to that standard," she protested, falling easily into the WotM pattern. Exactly, I answered, telling her how Christ must therefore act as a substitute. "Ah," she said.

Note that comprehension did not lead to commitment. She understood the WotM's closed circuit of logic. Provided you accept the premises of WotM (God's sin-intolerant holiness, the indelibly contaminating effects of human sin, the efficacy of Christ's substitutionary atonement), the story more or less holds together. The problem, though, is that the logical functioning of the WotM's slavific narrative did absolutely nothing to persuade Sonja that the faith underlying it held any appeal. Indeed, she seemed a bit repulsed by the whole thing.

Or maybe I'm reading into her reactions. I know, in any case, that I'm repulsed by the cold absolutism of the whole setup. As I've written, the God of the WotM is capricious, tyranical, and by human standards narcissistic and unstable. God sets up an array of rules that are flatly impossible for humans to follow perfectly (don't be angry at someone--ever? Don't feel lust for anyone--ever?). If/When humans break them--even once, even in a minor circumstance,God condemns them to eternal torment (why eternal torment? Why not just annihilation? Or, better yet, why not just an OK-but-not-heaven world? My non-believing partner Alan often points out the comparative appeal of Mormonism: the Latter Day Saints have no hell in their theology). And the only thing that can save you is total commitment to God, who in a particularly bloodthirsty act, allowed God's son to be murdered in our place.

To reiterate my point once more: this is not an appealing God. WotM's insistence that God is loving and merciful falters in the face of the offer-you-can't-refuse threat of hellfire. Like a powerful mobster "graciously" agreeing not to shatter your kneecaps (or to shatter his son's) in exchange for your life's savings, the God of WotM operates like a divine extortionist. God's only appeal--the only one that wields persuasive force in the situation described by WotM theology--is God's omnipotence.

In that view, God's attractiveness to humanity is irrelevant. If God really is just as WotM describes God, then the hell/heaven setup is just the Way Things Are. Don't like it? Go create your own universe. Can't do that? Well, then, your options are quite narrow. You could simply reject the premises of the offer, decide not to believe in God, Christ, heaven, hell, etc. Or you could accept the premises but reject God's offer anyway in an act of existential rebellion.

Or--and here's the hoped-for result of the WotM--you could submit to the hand-over-fist (hand-over-fire?) offer of Christ. Perhaps you could convince yourself that the hand you take is benevolent and loving and try to live accordingly (though you still would have to remind yourself and others of the tough-love judgment that is God). Perhaps you could convince yourself that you are in fact truly wretched and unworthy in every respect except for the lone fact of being the object of God's regard. Or perhaps you simply surrender to the State of Things, living out a life defined by belief in Christ not because of any real desire to do so but because you truly don't have any other choice. It's Christ or unending agony. Might as well get used to it. You actively hope for some kind of theological Stockholm syndrome to set in to make your basic servitude-under-threat seem less like slavery to an unjust but irresistible oppressor.

Like I said, and like Sonja (and so many others who reject the WotM and related pitches) evinced: not an appealing God. More than that--the WotM and other fight-or-flight evangelisms produce unappealing Christians.

More tomorrow,

JF