Suppose a genie appears. You get a message from Beyond. You magically just know it to be true: your neighbor or co-worker, that person over there you see practically every day? They vote for the other side. And they will never, ever change. You will never persuade them that they're wrong to vote for so-and-so person/party or such-and-such issue/position that you passionately oppose.
What then?
In all the bridge-building initiatives like Better Angels or Dialogue on Race Louisiana that I research and work with, the empathic listening and patient sharing I engage in have a tacit agenda: I might eventually convince enemies to convert. Such an agenda often figures as a rationale for civility in this polarized era. Pundits lecture, for example, how liberals need to listen more to conservatives if they want to win in 2020. I heard several presentations at the conference I attended last weekend about how the anti-abortion (or anti-choice) movement revamped itself in the last twenty years, going from sign-and-slogan, in-your-face yelling with gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses to a savvier, more empathic mode that favors listening and forming relationships (via, for example, crisis pregnancy centers).
There's an evangelical impulse to civility, a hope that a friendly overture might lead to transformation. I don't mean that civility is merely a cynical front for a sales pitch, though sometimes it may be. I mean that a natural (for me, anyway) resource for empathy is the idea that someone who isn't on my side really should be for their own good. I want everyone to be more feminist because I think feminism benefits everyone. I want people to step back from market fundamentalism (the free market will take care of all ills) because I think a bit more socialized organization would provide for people's needs better than competing profit motives. I want people to resist racism because a world without racism is just plain all-around better for humanity. It makes me sad that some people really believe that Drag Queen Story Hour poses a dire threat to children. It frustrates me that some people think that vaccinations are harmful or that immigrants are dangerous, dirty invaders. That's just not a great way to be.
So yeah, if I have a way I think is better, I want other people to be on board with me in following that way.
But what if, somehow, that hope were extinguished? What if I'm left with the neighbor who stands on the other side of an unbridgeable worldview gap?
We can't just agree to disagree on everything. At some point, one of us is going to vote for or against something or someone that's sacred to the other person. I'm pro-choice; my basic belief is that pregnant people should get to choose what to do with their bodies and should never be forced to be pregnant if they don't want to be. That belief runs smack into the deep conviction held by others that a pregnant person's desires must balance with (or, more often, be trumped by) the value of preserving embryonic life.
Most people believe neither in an absolute pro-choice or absolute pro-life stance. But legislation is about drawing lines that are functionally absolute. Laws and court decisions turn grey zones into sharply bordered zones of black and white. We just can't have it both ways. Either people have the legal ability to end pregnancies at a certain point or for certain reasons, or they don't.
The issue is political in Carl Schmitt's sense. It divides people into friend/enemy relations. No meta-rationale or meta-value has enough bilateral credibility to resolve the question. There's no scientific/historical fact, no ethical or religious system, that we can point to in a way that settles the matter for everyone. Abortion and reproductive rights necessitate straightforward agonism (struggle).
This, I think, is a better way--a more challenging way, at least--to think of the Christian precept of loving your enemy. The enemy isn't a potential friend or ally. The enemy is the opponent who espouses a stance you would resist with every fiber of your being.
How shall we treat the enemy?
Showing posts with label evangelism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evangelism. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Friday, February 26, 2010
Evangelizing Whys and Hows
Ugh. The creeping crud has descended upon me, so I'm home this evening doing what research my mushy brain will allow. I suppose I could draw a punnish parallel between hacking through various popular evangelical texts and hacking up... well, I'll not go into that.
Something that keeps coming up in my forays into comparative evangelicalisms is the differential impulse for evangelizing--and for choosing how to evangelize--that I sense from different writers.
On the "why evangelize?" question, I find a surprising amount of variation. For some, evangelization is essential for Christians because of the here-and-now problem of perdition. People are lost and going to hell. They could die tonight. I've read two different accounts now of 19th century evangelist Dwight L. Moody's Big Regret. The story goes that Moody preached a sermon to a Chicago audience that outlined most--but not all--of the gospel. He left his audience with a challenge to think on what he had said and return the next week to hear the conclusion (i.e., Jesus's saving grace). Alas, that night was in October 1871, the night of the Great Chicago Fire. Moody berated himself from then on for failing to give the full gospel to people at every opportunity. Similarly, "urgency evangelists" will point to the fact that every single person you meet may have only a day, an hour, a minute left of life here on earth. A failure to evangelize--fully, explicitly, from start to finish with an invitation at the end--could be eternally fatal.
Others seem to answer the "why evangelize" question more with a sense that Christianity, a living relationship to the living Christ, makes life in the here-and-now better, fuller, more ethical and rewarding. I was surprised, for example, to read how-to-evangelize guides from the 1960s by the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship that presented Christianity not as a get-out-of-hell-free card but as an answer to the emptiness of modern life. I found that the seeker-sensitive pastors (e.g., Hybels, Warren) profiled in Hunter's overview of evangelistic theology similarly stressed life fulfillment over turn-or-burn.
The idea here, and it's one I personally find compelling, is that the Christian life represents a better way to live out life here on earth. This isn't to say, of course, that Christians live easier lives free from suffering--quite the contrary. These evangelists typically admit that life here on earth is nasty, brutish, and short--but that Christ's solidarity with us in the midst of suffering gives us strength and hope. More, Christ's grace towards us impels us in turn to adopt a life of solidarity with those who suffer. We share the gospel message, then, not merely as or apart from the ministries of grace but as part of those ministries.
Now, in practice, there's plenty of overlap between the urgency model and the better-way-of-life model. While I myself have theological and ethical troubles with the notion of hell (as I've written about on here extensively), pastors like Rick Warren or Bill Hybels are hardly hell-deniers. Nor would most urgency evangelists deny that Christianity is ideally more than just a one-time profession of faith that saves. Nevertheless, in the context of any one ministerial approach, the emphasis--urgency or better-way-of-life--is marked.
Evangelists diverge more sharply over the issue of how to evangelize. The key issue here concerns efficacy. What's the point of sharing the gospel? Ostensibly, the goal is to bring people to Christ so that they are saved from hell and/or part of the body of Christ on earth. An evangelical technique is effective when it results in authentic conversions to Christianity.
But for a number of evangelicals I'm reading, the results criterion for any evangelistic technique takes a back seat to the orthodoxy of the evangelical technique. A number of evangelicals--Ray Comfort, for instance, or even Greg Stiers--insist that the only proper evangelical techniques must imitate patterns clearly outlined in scripture. The science of evangelism thus comes from studying (and categorizing) instances from the Gospels and book of Acts (mainly) of how Jesus or the disciples preached or witnessed to unbelievers. Indeed, even Old Testament examples of preaching/teaching/proclaiming like Elijah or Nathan or Daniel serve as how-to guides for the modern evangelical. The what's-in-the-Bible approach to evangelism matches the conservative evangelical doctrine of inerrancy whereby the Bible's plain sense words, properly contextualized, serve as the ultimate authority for Christians. Wondering how best to evangelize? Why, look in the Bible, which is God's Instruction Book for All Things Christian.
Typically, the what's-in-the-Bible approaches tend to tack more toward the turn-or-burn tactics. Gospel presentations must be brief and complete. You may have only one chance to witness to an unbeliever, so you'd better make it count. This means that, whatever trick or tactic you use to catch someone's attention, you steer quickly and directly to a presentation of the full gospel--human sin/depravity, God's judgment, Christ's atonement, and the possibility of salvation by grace.
In particular, there's no skimping on hell here. There is the hard sell of the gospel--or it is nothing. Ray Comfort, for example, excoriates any gospel presentation that soft-pedals the harsh truth of eternal damnation. Greg Stier, in a parallel way, suggests that the sure-fire sign of a good gospel presentation is audience incredulity at the depth of God's grace and judgment (i.e., the "You mean to tell me that my kindly agnostic aunt will go to hell but a rapist-murderer who repents will go to heaven?"). Comfort and Stier--who in practice pursue quite different ministries--both argue that muting the more extreme or potentially offensive parts of the gospel result in an evangelism that is both less effective and unbiblical. Or rather--it's less effective because it's unbiblical.
The assumption here--an essential assumption, Stier contends--is that the kerygma of the gospel (the plain, full presentation of sin/judgment/atonement/salvation) is effective regardless of time/place/method of presentation. It is God that saves, not humans. The Holy Spirit transforms the human soul, enabling it to turn to God, through the power of the Holy Word. To decide not to present the Word in its totality hinders the action of the Holy Spirit and, more insidiously, suggests a lack of faith in the power of the Gospel.
Such is the allegation sometimes leveled (not particularly by Comfort or Stier) at evangelists who imagine evangelism differently. A number of other evangelical approaches--worldview evangelism, Greg Koukl's tactical apologetics, Randy Siever's "Doable Evangelism"--consciously avoid the up-front/hard-sell approach. These approaches counsel an awareness of the fact that most non-Christians begin by being fairly closed to the gospel and even distrustful of overt proselytizing attempts. Prior to such full-gospel pitches, in these techniques' views, the Christian needs to stop and take stock of where non-Christians are in terms of their worldview or relationship to Christianity. These techniques teach modes of general interaction with non-Christians that allow evangelists to get a sense of who they're dealing with. Only after establishing a base-level relationship of trust and mutual sharing does it make any sense to present the gospel. And even then, gospel presentations don't stand wholly on their own; they must be accompanied by apologetic work.
This is long-term evangelism, seeing the work of outreach as a process of relationship-building that works over time. It's also an evangelism where efficacy means more than "copying Biblical examples exactly." Relational evangelism, in these evangelists' views, works better, gets more and more substantive results, than does the sudden turn-or-burn technique. Of course, most of these practitioners would dispute the accusation that they aren't being Biblical. They would point to the variety of Christ's interactions with non-believers (everything from a party to a one-on-one conversation at a well) or especially to Paul's sermon to Greek non-Christians at Mars Hill (Acts 17).
Again, I don't mean to draw too strict of a line between the Bible-copiers and the relationship-ers. Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share ministries), for example, grounds himself in Biblical examples and full-gospel presentations but draws a great deal on relational techniques as well. But the more obvious fractures amongst evangelicals--between the emerging church and the old-style evangelicals, for instance--mirror the fault lines around these questions of evangelical technique.
More later,
JF
Something that keeps coming up in my forays into comparative evangelicalisms is the differential impulse for evangelizing--and for choosing how to evangelize--that I sense from different writers.
On the "why evangelize?" question, I find a surprising amount of variation. For some, evangelization is essential for Christians because of the here-and-now problem of perdition. People are lost and going to hell. They could die tonight. I've read two different accounts now of 19th century evangelist Dwight L. Moody's Big Regret. The story goes that Moody preached a sermon to a Chicago audience that outlined most--but not all--of the gospel. He left his audience with a challenge to think on what he had said and return the next week to hear the conclusion (i.e., Jesus's saving grace). Alas, that night was in October 1871, the night of the Great Chicago Fire. Moody berated himself from then on for failing to give the full gospel to people at every opportunity. Similarly, "urgency evangelists" will point to the fact that every single person you meet may have only a day, an hour, a minute left of life here on earth. A failure to evangelize--fully, explicitly, from start to finish with an invitation at the end--could be eternally fatal.
Others seem to answer the "why evangelize" question more with a sense that Christianity, a living relationship to the living Christ, makes life in the here-and-now better, fuller, more ethical and rewarding. I was surprised, for example, to read how-to-evangelize guides from the 1960s by the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship that presented Christianity not as a get-out-of-hell-free card but as an answer to the emptiness of modern life. I found that the seeker-sensitive pastors (e.g., Hybels, Warren) profiled in Hunter's overview of evangelistic theology similarly stressed life fulfillment over turn-or-burn.
The idea here, and it's one I personally find compelling, is that the Christian life represents a better way to live out life here on earth. This isn't to say, of course, that Christians live easier lives free from suffering--quite the contrary. These evangelists typically admit that life here on earth is nasty, brutish, and short--but that Christ's solidarity with us in the midst of suffering gives us strength and hope. More, Christ's grace towards us impels us in turn to adopt a life of solidarity with those who suffer. We share the gospel message, then, not merely as or apart from the ministries of grace but as part of those ministries.
Now, in practice, there's plenty of overlap between the urgency model and the better-way-of-life model. While I myself have theological and ethical troubles with the notion of hell (as I've written about on here extensively), pastors like Rick Warren or Bill Hybels are hardly hell-deniers. Nor would most urgency evangelists deny that Christianity is ideally more than just a one-time profession of faith that saves. Nevertheless, in the context of any one ministerial approach, the emphasis--urgency or better-way-of-life--is marked.
Evangelists diverge more sharply over the issue of how to evangelize. The key issue here concerns efficacy. What's the point of sharing the gospel? Ostensibly, the goal is to bring people to Christ so that they are saved from hell and/or part of the body of Christ on earth. An evangelical technique is effective when it results in authentic conversions to Christianity.
But for a number of evangelicals I'm reading, the results criterion for any evangelistic technique takes a back seat to the orthodoxy of the evangelical technique. A number of evangelicals--Ray Comfort, for instance, or even Greg Stiers--insist that the only proper evangelical techniques must imitate patterns clearly outlined in scripture. The science of evangelism thus comes from studying (and categorizing) instances from the Gospels and book of Acts (mainly) of how Jesus or the disciples preached or witnessed to unbelievers. Indeed, even Old Testament examples of preaching/teaching/proclaiming like Elijah or Nathan or Daniel serve as how-to guides for the modern evangelical. The what's-in-the-Bible approach to evangelism matches the conservative evangelical doctrine of inerrancy whereby the Bible's plain sense words, properly contextualized, serve as the ultimate authority for Christians. Wondering how best to evangelize? Why, look in the Bible, which is God's Instruction Book for All Things Christian.
Typically, the what's-in-the-Bible approaches tend to tack more toward the turn-or-burn tactics. Gospel presentations must be brief and complete. You may have only one chance to witness to an unbeliever, so you'd better make it count. This means that, whatever trick or tactic you use to catch someone's attention, you steer quickly and directly to a presentation of the full gospel--human sin/depravity, God's judgment, Christ's atonement, and the possibility of salvation by grace.
In particular, there's no skimping on hell here. There is the hard sell of the gospel--or it is nothing. Ray Comfort, for example, excoriates any gospel presentation that soft-pedals the harsh truth of eternal damnation. Greg Stier, in a parallel way, suggests that the sure-fire sign of a good gospel presentation is audience incredulity at the depth of God's grace and judgment (i.e., the "You mean to tell me that my kindly agnostic aunt will go to hell but a rapist-murderer who repents will go to heaven?"). Comfort and Stier--who in practice pursue quite different ministries--both argue that muting the more extreme or potentially offensive parts of the gospel result in an evangelism that is both less effective and unbiblical. Or rather--it's less effective because it's unbiblical.
The assumption here--an essential assumption, Stier contends--is that the kerygma of the gospel (the plain, full presentation of sin/judgment/atonement/salvation) is effective regardless of time/place/method of presentation. It is God that saves, not humans. The Holy Spirit transforms the human soul, enabling it to turn to God, through the power of the Holy Word. To decide not to present the Word in its totality hinders the action of the Holy Spirit and, more insidiously, suggests a lack of faith in the power of the Gospel.
Such is the allegation sometimes leveled (not particularly by Comfort or Stier) at evangelists who imagine evangelism differently. A number of other evangelical approaches--worldview evangelism, Greg Koukl's tactical apologetics, Randy Siever's "Doable Evangelism"--consciously avoid the up-front/hard-sell approach. These approaches counsel an awareness of the fact that most non-Christians begin by being fairly closed to the gospel and even distrustful of overt proselytizing attempts. Prior to such full-gospel pitches, in these techniques' views, the Christian needs to stop and take stock of where non-Christians are in terms of their worldview or relationship to Christianity. These techniques teach modes of general interaction with non-Christians that allow evangelists to get a sense of who they're dealing with. Only after establishing a base-level relationship of trust and mutual sharing does it make any sense to present the gospel. And even then, gospel presentations don't stand wholly on their own; they must be accompanied by apologetic work.
This is long-term evangelism, seeing the work of outreach as a process of relationship-building that works over time. It's also an evangelism where efficacy means more than "copying Biblical examples exactly." Relational evangelism, in these evangelists' views, works better, gets more and more substantive results, than does the sudden turn-or-burn technique. Of course, most of these practitioners would dispute the accusation that they aren't being Biblical. They would point to the variety of Christ's interactions with non-believers (everything from a party to a one-on-one conversation at a well) or especially to Paul's sermon to Greek non-Christians at Mars Hill (Acts 17).
Again, I don't mean to draw too strict of a line between the Bible-copiers and the relationship-ers. Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share ministries), for example, grounds himself in Biblical examples and full-gospel presentations but draws a great deal on relational techniques as well. But the more obvious fractures amongst evangelicals--between the emerging church and the old-style evangelicals, for instance--mirror the fault lines around these questions of evangelical technique.
More later,
JF
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Non-Evangelical Evangelisms
So, after some hard work this weekend, I finally finished a draft of my book proposal about evangelical outreach techniques. Much rejoicing!
Apparently the effort left my brain somewhat drained, as I've been remiss about posting. More brainwork lies on the horizon. Next week I travel to an academic conference where I'm delivering a paper on--what else?--evangelical outreach techniques.
This paper has yet to be written.
But I've started work on it this evening. Now, ostensibly the paper concerns the confrontational evangelism of Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master" system, which I've written about on this blog extensively, as contrasted with more relational, less formulaic approaches like Greg Koukl's tactical evangelism (which I've also written about).
For all their differences, these two forms both fit into the category of "Christian outreach" that I tend to distance myself from since (at least) leaving the Southern Baptist faith of my childhood for more Methodist waters. Both emerge from theological stances much more conservative than my own, which makes them fascinating for me as a (progressive-liberal) scholar but alien to me as a (progressive-liberal) Christian. While I strive in my work to represent their rationales fairly, I do not feel especially compelled to grapple with how their particular form of proselytizing should inform my own faith.
As often happens in research, however, some of the work that I read this evening challenged my sense of (perhaps protective) isolation from my topic. Specifically, I read a book I had pilfered--uh, borrowed--from my minister father's collection of theology texts: How to Reach Secular People by George G. Hunter III (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992).
Now, I had grabbed this book as part of a stack of how-to guides to Christian outreach from the past 50 years or so that I've amassed. I chose it in order to explore how it compared to, say, Paul E. Little's How to Give Away Your Faith from 1960, or to Greg Stier's present-day "Dare 2 Share" program. Having read many of these self-help-style books, I expected to learn about Hunter's own take on why current evangelism is in trouble and how to fix it, perhaps with a sort-of-original set of metaphors and analogies to help the reader (who is assumed not to be a scholar or theologian).
Hunter is less interested, however, in promoting his own homemade system and more in presenting a brief overview of some of the more successful (in his eyes) evangelical endeavors. His chapters tend to consist of annotated lists, e.g., attributes of secular people, different models of conversion, characteristics of ministers who successfully reach secular people, etc.
Hunter writes in 1992, so the ministries that seem new, successful, and exciting are mainly those of the "seeker-sensitive" model (also called the "new paradigm"), like Bill Hybels's Willow Creek or Rick Warren's Saddleback congregations. These ministries distinguished themselves by doing market research (i.e., creating an average unchurched person or prospective member--"Unchurched Harry" or "Saddleback Sam") to determine what about "traditional" church was keeping people away from attending church. So informed, Hybels and Warren designed churches specifically to cater to people who felt regular Christianity was too boring, too irrelevant, and too moralizing to ever include them. Seeker-sensitive services typically strip away conventions of "regular church"--no hymnals, no pews, no offertories, no "churchy" language (what Hunter calls "Protestant Latin"), and a service that plays more like a rally or rock concert with an inspiring speech than a church service.
Especially in 1992, these were successful models. (The 1990s later saw a backlash of sorts against them, and recent problems with Saddleback's fincances and membership have cast doubts on the model's efficacy.)
But Hunter writes as well about Donald Soper, a street preacher who has made open-air preaching into a kind of art form. Now, I have lots of experience studying open-air preachers of the Ray Comfort or Free Speech Alley Fundamentalist variety. But Soper (in Hunter's representation) seems different.
Indeed, all of the evangelistic outreach methods and rationales Hunter relates differ from Comfort and even Koukl. The primary difference? The absence of hell-speak and the Absolute Truth You Must Submit To. For Comfort, evangelism consists of confronting a stranger with the reality of her sins and their hellish consequences (i.e., the Law) before sharing the possibility of Christ (i.e., grace). Koukl doesn't recommend hitting strangers with "for all have sinned," but his tactical apologetics certainly aim toward winning a rhetorical struggle, mainly by demonstrating the incoherence of the unbeliever's worldview.
While I get the sense that Hunter himself (and certainly those whom he discusses) holds a theology not at odds with the reality of hell or the exclusivity of Christian Truth, the model of outreach he presents and praises from Soper and others simply doesn't deal with Hell as a motivator for people to commit their lives to Christ.
Actually--that's another big difference between Hunter and Comfort/Koukl: commitment. In his presentation of evangelicalism, the aim that works is not "get the person saved" but "get the person committed to a life of Christ." To achieve that latter aim, existential threats or rhetorical victories don't count nearly as much as does presenting a compelling, authentic example of a Christianity that is attractive, consistent, and successful. He touches on this distinction a bit, noting that while some evangelistic techniques preach a single necessary conversion, the Christian life often requires multiple conversions, ongoing commitments not to a single belief but to a life lived for and within Christ. The most successful ministries, in his view, inspire unbelievers to see Christianity as alive, relevant, enriching, attractive, and finally irresistible.
And then it struck me--I was finding this read from 1992 so engaging because he was in a sense articulating what I'd like Christian evangelism to be. It's so different from the model of outreach driven by fear and smugly assured of its victory--the model I had absorbed as a Baptist and the model I see preached by so many evangelicals.
Needless to say (and here I engage in a bit of smugness myself), Hunter is a Methodist, not an evangelical. I appreciated, however, seeing how a non-evangelical (in the sense of Protestant subculture) theology can still passionately motivate an evangelical (in the outreach-sense) philosophy.
Of course, that's just a challenge to me as well: no longer can I simply study evangelism as a scholar. I need to begin to develop for myself a theology of evangelism.
More later,
JF
Apparently the effort left my brain somewhat drained, as I've been remiss about posting. More brainwork lies on the horizon. Next week I travel to an academic conference where I'm delivering a paper on--what else?--evangelical outreach techniques.
This paper has yet to be written.
But I've started work on it this evening. Now, ostensibly the paper concerns the confrontational evangelism of Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master" system, which I've written about on this blog extensively, as contrasted with more relational, less formulaic approaches like Greg Koukl's tactical evangelism (which I've also written about).
For all their differences, these two forms both fit into the category of "Christian outreach" that I tend to distance myself from since (at least) leaving the Southern Baptist faith of my childhood for more Methodist waters. Both emerge from theological stances much more conservative than my own, which makes them fascinating for me as a (progressive-liberal) scholar but alien to me as a (progressive-liberal) Christian. While I strive in my work to represent their rationales fairly, I do not feel especially compelled to grapple with how their particular form of proselytizing should inform my own faith.
As often happens in research, however, some of the work that I read this evening challenged my sense of (perhaps protective) isolation from my topic. Specifically, I read a book I had pilfered--uh, borrowed--from my minister father's collection of theology texts: How to Reach Secular People by George G. Hunter III (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992).
Now, I had grabbed this book as part of a stack of how-to guides to Christian outreach from the past 50 years or so that I've amassed. I chose it in order to explore how it compared to, say, Paul E. Little's How to Give Away Your Faith from 1960, or to Greg Stier's present-day "Dare 2 Share" program. Having read many of these self-help-style books, I expected to learn about Hunter's own take on why current evangelism is in trouble and how to fix it, perhaps with a sort-of-original set of metaphors and analogies to help the reader (who is assumed not to be a scholar or theologian).
Hunter is less interested, however, in promoting his own homemade system and more in presenting a brief overview of some of the more successful (in his eyes) evangelical endeavors. His chapters tend to consist of annotated lists, e.g., attributes of secular people, different models of conversion, characteristics of ministers who successfully reach secular people, etc.
Hunter writes in 1992, so the ministries that seem new, successful, and exciting are mainly those of the "seeker-sensitive" model (also called the "new paradigm"), like Bill Hybels's Willow Creek or Rick Warren's Saddleback congregations. These ministries distinguished themselves by doing market research (i.e., creating an average unchurched person or prospective member--"Unchurched Harry" or "Saddleback Sam") to determine what about "traditional" church was keeping people away from attending church. So informed, Hybels and Warren designed churches specifically to cater to people who felt regular Christianity was too boring, too irrelevant, and too moralizing to ever include them. Seeker-sensitive services typically strip away conventions of "regular church"--no hymnals, no pews, no offertories, no "churchy" language (what Hunter calls "Protestant Latin"), and a service that plays more like a rally or rock concert with an inspiring speech than a church service.
Especially in 1992, these were successful models. (The 1990s later saw a backlash of sorts against them, and recent problems with Saddleback's fincances and membership have cast doubts on the model's efficacy.)
But Hunter writes as well about Donald Soper, a street preacher who has made open-air preaching into a kind of art form. Now, I have lots of experience studying open-air preachers of the Ray Comfort or Free Speech Alley Fundamentalist variety. But Soper (in Hunter's representation) seems different.
Indeed, all of the evangelistic outreach methods and rationales Hunter relates differ from Comfort and even Koukl. The primary difference? The absence of hell-speak and the Absolute Truth You Must Submit To. For Comfort, evangelism consists of confronting a stranger with the reality of her sins and their hellish consequences (i.e., the Law) before sharing the possibility of Christ (i.e., grace). Koukl doesn't recommend hitting strangers with "for all have sinned," but his tactical apologetics certainly aim toward winning a rhetorical struggle, mainly by demonstrating the incoherence of the unbeliever's worldview.
While I get the sense that Hunter himself (and certainly those whom he discusses) holds a theology not at odds with the reality of hell or the exclusivity of Christian Truth, the model of outreach he presents and praises from Soper and others simply doesn't deal with Hell as a motivator for people to commit their lives to Christ.
Actually--that's another big difference between Hunter and Comfort/Koukl: commitment. In his presentation of evangelicalism, the aim that works is not "get the person saved" but "get the person committed to a life of Christ." To achieve that latter aim, existential threats or rhetorical victories don't count nearly as much as does presenting a compelling, authentic example of a Christianity that is attractive, consistent, and successful. He touches on this distinction a bit, noting that while some evangelistic techniques preach a single necessary conversion, the Christian life often requires multiple conversions, ongoing commitments not to a single belief but to a life lived for and within Christ. The most successful ministries, in his view, inspire unbelievers to see Christianity as alive, relevant, enriching, attractive, and finally irresistible.
And then it struck me--I was finding this read from 1992 so engaging because he was in a sense articulating what I'd like Christian evangelism to be. It's so different from the model of outreach driven by fear and smugly assured of its victory--the model I had absorbed as a Baptist and the model I see preached by so many evangelicals.
Needless to say (and here I engage in a bit of smugness myself), Hunter is a Methodist, not an evangelical. I appreciated, however, seeing how a non-evangelical (in the sense of Protestant subculture) theology can still passionately motivate an evangelical (in the outreach-sense) philosophy.
Of course, that's just a challenge to me as well: no longer can I simply study evangelism as a scholar. I need to begin to develop for myself a theology of evangelism.
More later,
JF
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Free Speech Alley Fundamentalists
"Well, I'm going to hell anyway," she sighed affably, "what's a few more sins?"
I had been joking today with a student of mine about a recent bout of illness she'd been having trouble kicking. After informing me of the name of her latest med (which seemed to be working), I shook my head. "You mean, you're murdering all those poor bacteria with that third-gen antibiotic?"
I didn't expect that bit of irony to prompt a comment about eternal damnation. I must have looked confused, for she followed up with an explanation. "Well, that's what they told me." She gestured in the direction of our student union. "I'm bound for hell."
Sadly, I knew exactly what she was talking about. The front of our student union boasts a "free speech alley"--a common fixture on university campuses--on which just about any group may (after securing a permit) discourse on whatever topic they please. Typically, our free speech alley blossoms with informational tables about student group activities or corporate-sponsored givaways of some soft drink or another.
About once a week, though, the Christians descend. These would be a small group of evangelists of the kerygma variety I discussed in my last post. They generally feature a few women (dressed in full-length, home-made dresses that signal "very conservative") handing out some tracts or fliers, a few other people with sandwich-board signs reading "REPENT" and the like, and a middle-aged man yelling hoarsely at passersby about how sinful they are. In my experience he's particularly fond of labeling sins based on his lightning-quick assessment of individual students and faculty on their way to lunch. I believe I got dinged once for my long hair ("Immodesty!").
Occasionally (even inevitably) someone will engage him in a shouting match, gathering a crowd of amused (or angry) gawkers. The yelling contest unfolds predictably (i.e., the heckler gets fed up and stomps off) as the women make their way through the crowd, seeding it with tracts informing everyone of their impending doom.
Most people who have been at my university for a while roll their eyes and move along, accepting the weekly visitations as an annoying if colorful distraction. I often use the group as an example in classes when I talk about activist performance.
But, looking at my student today--this young woman whom I know to be full of energy, intelligence, and talent; this woman whom I know endures a difficult home life few people could guess at; this young woman who is getting over a bad illness--hearing her submit, even humorously, to some stranger's telling her she deserves hell, I just got mad.
What a jerk thing to do--to yell at some random person about how bad they are. I get the evangelists' context. I get that they're following a theology that insists that salvation occurs only after conviction, which requires condemnation. I even get that they see their acts as necessary, even loving ("it's like yelling at someone that they're about to walk off of a cliff," I often hear). After all--better to realize one's total depravity now than to wake up surprised in hell.
I get all of that. And I still think that yelling guy is doing a chump deed, a low-down, mean thing.
How depressing is it that this is her experience of Christianity? That encounter--a random kick when she's already down--is the witness of Christ she got that day. I appreciate the evangelists' theology, but I can't for the life of me see how they expect anyone to receive that message and think that Christianity is anything but a mass of caustic dysfunction. "You're worthless! You're evil! Come to Christ!" Who thinks this is an effective message? Who cares about your intentions if your audience never understands them?
Jonah, of course, springs to mind as a counter-example. Did he not go through Nineveh doing basically the same thing? "You're all doomed. You're all evil. God will destroy you. Better repent." And it worked then, didn't it? Through his telling the rough, unadorned truth, a city was saved, no?
Maybe, but it strikes me that the point of the Jonah story isn't Nineveh but Jonah--Jonah who, after (finally) preaching his truth, high-tailed it out of the city to secure a comfy seat to watch the Nineveh Gets Destroyed By God show. Well, Nineveh repented, God relented, and Jonah sulked. And God says (I paraphrase--may God forgive me): "What the heck are you so angry about? So I spared a city of thousands! That's what I do--I'm God. I care. If you don't--tough!"
That's the danger of "truth-telling" evangelism of the turn-or-burn variety: it leads to smugness, to a lack of care about the people you're supposed to be helping to save.
Did the evangelists care about my student? I have no idea, but the message they sent to her was certainly clear enough: drop dead, sinner.
I stammered out a "Well, I don't believe that," but the damage had been done. Another unChristian, successfully taught to avoid those Christians whose only outreach seems to be insults.
Lord, help you-know-who.
JF
I had been joking today with a student of mine about a recent bout of illness she'd been having trouble kicking. After informing me of the name of her latest med (which seemed to be working), I shook my head. "You mean, you're murdering all those poor bacteria with that third-gen antibiotic?"
I didn't expect that bit of irony to prompt a comment about eternal damnation. I must have looked confused, for she followed up with an explanation. "Well, that's what they told me." She gestured in the direction of our student union. "I'm bound for hell."
Sadly, I knew exactly what she was talking about. The front of our student union boasts a "free speech alley"--a common fixture on university campuses--on which just about any group may (after securing a permit) discourse on whatever topic they please. Typically, our free speech alley blossoms with informational tables about student group activities or corporate-sponsored givaways of some soft drink or another.
About once a week, though, the Christians descend. These would be a small group of evangelists of the kerygma variety I discussed in my last post. They generally feature a few women (dressed in full-length, home-made dresses that signal "very conservative") handing out some tracts or fliers, a few other people with sandwich-board signs reading "REPENT" and the like, and a middle-aged man yelling hoarsely at passersby about how sinful they are. In my experience he's particularly fond of labeling sins based on his lightning-quick assessment of individual students and faculty on their way to lunch. I believe I got dinged once for my long hair ("Immodesty!").
Occasionally (even inevitably) someone will engage him in a shouting match, gathering a crowd of amused (or angry) gawkers. The yelling contest unfolds predictably (i.e., the heckler gets fed up and stomps off) as the women make their way through the crowd, seeding it with tracts informing everyone of their impending doom.
Most people who have been at my university for a while roll their eyes and move along, accepting the weekly visitations as an annoying if colorful distraction. I often use the group as an example in classes when I talk about activist performance.
But, looking at my student today--this young woman whom I know to be full of energy, intelligence, and talent; this woman whom I know endures a difficult home life few people could guess at; this young woman who is getting over a bad illness--hearing her submit, even humorously, to some stranger's telling her she deserves hell, I just got mad.
What a jerk thing to do--to yell at some random person about how bad they are. I get the evangelists' context. I get that they're following a theology that insists that salvation occurs only after conviction, which requires condemnation. I even get that they see their acts as necessary, even loving ("it's like yelling at someone that they're about to walk off of a cliff," I often hear). After all--better to realize one's total depravity now than to wake up surprised in hell.
I get all of that. And I still think that yelling guy is doing a chump deed, a low-down, mean thing.
How depressing is it that this is her experience of Christianity? That encounter--a random kick when she's already down--is the witness of Christ she got that day. I appreciate the evangelists' theology, but I can't for the life of me see how they expect anyone to receive that message and think that Christianity is anything but a mass of caustic dysfunction. "You're worthless! You're evil! Come to Christ!" Who thinks this is an effective message? Who cares about your intentions if your audience never understands them?
Jonah, of course, springs to mind as a counter-example. Did he not go through Nineveh doing basically the same thing? "You're all doomed. You're all evil. God will destroy you. Better repent." And it worked then, didn't it? Through his telling the rough, unadorned truth, a city was saved, no?
Maybe, but it strikes me that the point of the Jonah story isn't Nineveh but Jonah--Jonah who, after (finally) preaching his truth, high-tailed it out of the city to secure a comfy seat to watch the Nineveh Gets Destroyed By God show. Well, Nineveh repented, God relented, and Jonah sulked. And God says (I paraphrase--may God forgive me): "What the heck are you so angry about? So I spared a city of thousands! That's what I do--I'm God. I care. If you don't--tough!"
That's the danger of "truth-telling" evangelism of the turn-or-burn variety: it leads to smugness, to a lack of care about the people you're supposed to be helping to save.
Did the evangelists care about my student? I have no idea, but the message they sent to her was certainly clear enough: drop dead, sinner.
I stammered out a "Well, I don't believe that," but the damage had been done. Another unChristian, successfully taught to avoid those Christians whose only outreach seems to be insults.
Lord, help you-know-who.
JF
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Kerygma of Reality TV
Up late watching trashy Bravo TV. I've written before on here how I'm oddly, shamefully caught by those reality TV series like Tabitha's Salon Makeover, Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, or even Millionaire Matchmaker. Beyond showcasing a particular skill set (hairstyling/salon magement, cooking/restauranteering, dating/marriage), each of these programs tends to run on moments of Professional Truth-Telling, where Expert X (i.e., the star of the show) tells Wannabe Y what's what about their salon, entree, or romance skills.
To be sure, the experts Bravo and other such networks choose to focus on aren't merely experts; they're personalities--typically flamboyant, eccentric-bordering-on-unpleasant personalities. They are the harsh, drill sergeants of their particular profession, grinding their subjects down into nothing so that (ideally) they may be rebuilt, rehabilitated, made stronger and better. And episodes do end with the Wannabe eventually submitting to the Expert, overcoming bad habits, and improving. The shows' punch, however, comes from those "come to Jesus" scenes of prideful singles, salon owners, or chefs being told these Harsh Truths in no uncertain terms.
Inevitably, show producers/editors (even writers in some cases) follow these scenes with breakaway reaction interviews with those who have just been taken down a few notches. Reactions range from rage ("I can't believe that #&%@ said that! What does he/she know?") to chastened acceptance ("It was really hard to hear what so-and-so said, but I know it's true"). Sometimes--rarely--the reaction is so extreme that the person simply stalks off, never to be seen again. But the Expert is fine with that! "He/She couldn't take the truth," sighs the Expert, "and now s/he'll be a failure."
I wrote originally that my attraction to such scenes of putting-people-in-their-place stemmed from my own lack of self-assertiveness. These personalities seem simultaneously off-putting and admirable to me, I reasoned, largely because they are unafraid of presenting their opinions and experience as the textbook truth of their particular profession, and they brook no suggestion to the contrary. They know the truth, they know their skills, and--this is a biggie--they all prioritize presenting that truth bluntly over maintaining a relationship with the Wannabe to whom they present it. They establish truth as a standard to which the Wannabe must rise--or else--and they do so with unapologetic forcefulness.
To a degree, I recognize that I myself do something similar from time to time as a teacher. Indeed, I wonder if my fascination with these scenes has to do with how they play out a kind of pedagogical power-trip fantasy. Many's the time when I've felt the need to have a "come-to-Jesus" meeting with my students. "Here is standard X," I'd say, "and you are failing to meet it." Sometimes I want to--I have to--shock my students into a realization of their own ignorance or inexperience, forcing them to see the gap between where they are and where they need to be.
But in practice, I've rarely found that such moments play out like the truth-telling sessions on TV. Harsh truth-telling, in my experience, doesn't work as well as patience and persistence, meeting students half-way and helping them gradually gain more knowledge/expertise. Beyond a few specific instances, those times where I've attempted harsh conversations, tended to generate more problems than they solved.
Why? The difference is this: I am obliged as a teacher to be in relationship with my students in a way that TV Experts aren't with their Wannabes. My investment in my students transcends the space of a single episode. I can't afford do subsume maintaining the student-teacher relationship to the presentation of X or Y Truth about the subject I'm teaching. I have to balance the need for students to learn the skills/knowledge I teach with the fact that they will learn at different paces and in different ways than I did.
It strikes me that the distinction between TV Truth-Tellers and real-world pedagogues provides a way of thinking about a divergence of evangelicalism over the philosophy of Christian witness to the world. Evangelism, after all, involves a degree of truth-telling to an audience of people in need of that truth; it isn't coincidental that hard truth-telling sessions are known as "come to Jesus" meetings.
For some evangelists, the imperative of evangelism is simple proclamation--kerygma (Greek for "proclamation, teaching"). In this view, the evangelist is charged with proclaiming the truth of the Gospel without accommodation or compromise. Anything beyond that (e.g., winning converts) is God's work, not humans'. If the hearers receive and (through God's grace) submit themselves to the saving Gospel--great! If they don't, then all the evangelist can do is pray for them, shake the dust off their sandals (so to speak), and move on. Truth trumps relationships, for (within this understanding) no healthy relationship can obtain between those who know the Truth and those who will not accept the truth.
Other evangelists, while not discounting kerygma, focus more specifically on proselytism--making converts. Proclaiming the word, in this view, is necessary but not sufficient. One must speak the truth, yes, but speak it in ways that listeners hear and may be inspired by or attracted to it. For some within this view, kerygma can only occur effectively within the context of an established relationship of trust between believer and non-believer, a kind of prevangelism that prepares the soil of non-believer's heart to receive the seed of the Gospel. Here a relationship must precede and provide the support for Truth-telling.
While the TV fan in me finds the smackdown kerygma of "nothing but the truth" fascinating, the pedagogue in me causes me to prefer the relationship-first form of truth-telling. It's less dramatic, to be sure, and it often lacks the spectacle of ultimatum. But it seems, in the long run, more effective, more loving.
More later,
JF
To be sure, the experts Bravo and other such networks choose to focus on aren't merely experts; they're personalities--typically flamboyant, eccentric-bordering-on-unpleasant personalities. They are the harsh, drill sergeants of their particular profession, grinding their subjects down into nothing so that (ideally) they may be rebuilt, rehabilitated, made stronger and better. And episodes do end with the Wannabe eventually submitting to the Expert, overcoming bad habits, and improving. The shows' punch, however, comes from those "come to Jesus" scenes of prideful singles, salon owners, or chefs being told these Harsh Truths in no uncertain terms.
Inevitably, show producers/editors (even writers in some cases) follow these scenes with breakaway reaction interviews with those who have just been taken down a few notches. Reactions range from rage ("I can't believe that #&%@ said that! What does he/she know?") to chastened acceptance ("It was really hard to hear what so-and-so said, but I know it's true"). Sometimes--rarely--the reaction is so extreme that the person simply stalks off, never to be seen again. But the Expert is fine with that! "He/She couldn't take the truth," sighs the Expert, "and now s/he'll be a failure."
I wrote originally that my attraction to such scenes of putting-people-in-their-place stemmed from my own lack of self-assertiveness. These personalities seem simultaneously off-putting and admirable to me, I reasoned, largely because they are unafraid of presenting their opinions and experience as the textbook truth of their particular profession, and they brook no suggestion to the contrary. They know the truth, they know their skills, and--this is a biggie--they all prioritize presenting that truth bluntly over maintaining a relationship with the Wannabe to whom they present it. They establish truth as a standard to which the Wannabe must rise--or else--and they do so with unapologetic forcefulness.
To a degree, I recognize that I myself do something similar from time to time as a teacher. Indeed, I wonder if my fascination with these scenes has to do with how they play out a kind of pedagogical power-trip fantasy. Many's the time when I've felt the need to have a "come-to-Jesus" meeting with my students. "Here is standard X," I'd say, "and you are failing to meet it." Sometimes I want to--I have to--shock my students into a realization of their own ignorance or inexperience, forcing them to see the gap between where they are and where they need to be.
But in practice, I've rarely found that such moments play out like the truth-telling sessions on TV. Harsh truth-telling, in my experience, doesn't work as well as patience and persistence, meeting students half-way and helping them gradually gain more knowledge/expertise. Beyond a few specific instances, those times where I've attempted harsh conversations, tended to generate more problems than they solved.
Why? The difference is this: I am obliged as a teacher to be in relationship with my students in a way that TV Experts aren't with their Wannabes. My investment in my students transcends the space of a single episode. I can't afford do subsume maintaining the student-teacher relationship to the presentation of X or Y Truth about the subject I'm teaching. I have to balance the need for students to learn the skills/knowledge I teach with the fact that they will learn at different paces and in different ways than I did.
It strikes me that the distinction between TV Truth-Tellers and real-world pedagogues provides a way of thinking about a divergence of evangelicalism over the philosophy of Christian witness to the world. Evangelism, after all, involves a degree of truth-telling to an audience of people in need of that truth; it isn't coincidental that hard truth-telling sessions are known as "come to Jesus" meetings.
For some evangelists, the imperative of evangelism is simple proclamation--kerygma (Greek for "proclamation, teaching"). In this view, the evangelist is charged with proclaiming the truth of the Gospel without accommodation or compromise. Anything beyond that (e.g., winning converts) is God's work, not humans'. If the hearers receive and (through God's grace) submit themselves to the saving Gospel--great! If they don't, then all the evangelist can do is pray for them, shake the dust off their sandals (so to speak), and move on. Truth trumps relationships, for (within this understanding) no healthy relationship can obtain between those who know the Truth and those who will not accept the truth.
Other evangelists, while not discounting kerygma, focus more specifically on proselytism--making converts. Proclaiming the word, in this view, is necessary but not sufficient. One must speak the truth, yes, but speak it in ways that listeners hear and may be inspired by or attracted to it. For some within this view, kerygma can only occur effectively within the context of an established relationship of trust between believer and non-believer, a kind of prevangelism that prepares the soil of non-believer's heart to receive the seed of the Gospel. Here a relationship must precede and provide the support for Truth-telling.
While the TV fan in me finds the smackdown kerygma of "nothing but the truth" fascinating, the pedagogue in me causes me to prefer the relationship-first form of truth-telling. It's less dramatic, to be sure, and it often lacks the spectacle of ultimatum. But it seems, in the long run, more effective, more loving.
More later,
JF
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Permittted Free Speech and Open-Air Preaching in Georgia
"Permitted free speech?" repeats the man incredulously, "That's an oxymoron!"
It's March 28, 2008, a sunny day on what looks to be the central quad of Georgia Southern University. A group of people, led by a young man with longish brown hair, confront an administrator, who is flanked by a two burly campus police. What's the problem?
The man, Benjamin Bloedorn, had, along with a handful of other men, been evangelizing in public, "open-air preaching" (with some sign-waving and singing as well) in an attempt to encourage GSU students and passersby to convert. It appears, however, that in doing so he violated GSU's free speech policy, which requires that non-sponsored speakers apply for and receive permission to speak on campus. During the confrontation, which eventually led to Bloedorn's arrest, Bloedorn and his associates argued that GSU, as a public university supported by state taxpayer funds, cannot claim to be private property and thus has no standing to dictate who may or may not speak on their grass and sidewalks.
The police disagreed. So too, according to a story today on the conservative site Onenewsnow, did the Georgia court. Of course, Onenewsnow spins the story as yet another slight in a context of anti-Christian bias by the state: "Christian witnessing a no-no on campus," reads the headline. Other conservative evangelical websites echo this sentiment, alleging both that the act constitutes an attack on Christianity and an unconstitutional hindrance on free speech.
The Bloedorn affair represents something of a trend in which confrontational evangelists (and other kinds of activists) challenge the state's right to police free speech and expression. Other evangelists, such as Michael Marcavage of the group Repent America, regularly run afoul of officers' charging them with trespassing. Such charges, of course, fuel Marcavage's particular evangelistic philosophy, which interprets resistance by authorities as proof that God's word is being preached (and resisted by the devil).
Bloedorn, from what I can tell, seems linked to the Faithful Soldier School of Evangelism, a kind of homegrown training/evangelism group led by Jason and Sara Storms, specializing in confrontational campus evangelism, particularly around issues such as pro-life and anti-homosexuality. Bloedorn is an alumnus of this school (you can see him in Faithful Soldier pictures here and here), though I don't think the GSU protest was FSSE activity. Broadly, FSSE seems to follow a Ray Comfort-type philosophy that the best, most Biblically based evangelism takes place via open-air preaching that uses the Law (i.e., the Ten Commandments) to inspire listeners to confront their own guilt before God, repent, and receive Christ.
I gather that Bloedorn and company were doing just that when the GSU officials confronted them. This being the Youtube age, a video account of this confrontation and the subsequent arrest exists. Here's Bloedorn being arrested:
Videos of the arguments leading up to the arrest are here here and here. These video accounts match up to that contained in the brief filed on behalf of Bloedorn by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund.
Now, Bloedorn's evangelistic strategy of course interests me, given my research interests. But, as a matter of clarification, let me address the free speech arguments advanced by Bloedorn and by the ADF.
Is "permitted free speech" an oxymoron? Only in the abstract. In practice, no such thing as a right to utterly unrestricted speech has ever been recognized by the US government. Indeed, for a long time the "freedom of speech" meant only that the US federal government could not impose "prior restraint"--preemptively forbid speech. This prohibition did not necessarily extend to the state or local governments, nor did this prohibition exclude punitive measures by the State against speakers. Only in the twentieth century did speech rights come to mean more what we recognize today as the right of an individual to say or express whatever he or she pleases without fear of censorship or state reprisal.
And even this right isn't absolute. The right to free speech has never been understood to cover direct threats ("I'm going to kill you if you vote for X candidate"), incitements to violence ("you should shoot X candidate in the face when she gets up to speak"), disruptions of the peace (e.g., shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre), obscenity, or libel/slander. Nor is speech allowed just anywhere, at any time, whenever or wherever someone pleases. The US relies on a scheme of ordered liberty, not a free-for-all yelling match. The right to express whatever you'd like does not guarantee you an audience.
In this case, the evangelists repeatedly make two arguments: 1) that GSU, as a public university, cannot claim private property or restrict speech on its grounds; and 2) that the notion of permitted free speech is unconstitutional. The latter claim, as I've demonstrated, does not stand. All speech operates under certain prior restraints in the interests of public safety. As fo the former claim, the evangelists use questionable definitions of public and private. Yes, GSU is likely a public university. And yes, GSU has the right to restrict trespassers and speakers--especially when said speakers are not students at GSU (as Bloedorn was not).
The University official had it right when she pointed out to the evangelists that one cannot simply traipse into a courthouse or senate building, set up signs, and begin preaching (the camera operator--whom I think was Bloedorn--tried to argue that point, insisting he had heard of people who had done just that). The freedom of speech isn't the same as a freedom of universal access. Georgia taxpayers doubtless do pay for a great deal of GSU's budget; it does not follow that any one taxpayer has unfettered access to all parts of the University.
Tellingly, the ADF's brief does not attempt to make either of the evangelists' arguments. Instead it suggests that 1) the boundaries between public sidewalks and GSU property are unclear; and 2) GSU's procedures for granting non-sponsored speakers access are arduous and unfair, constituting a prior restraint.
Those procedures, by the way, are as follows (copied from the brief):
The administrator confronting the evangelists actually went over this procedure several times, offering them numerous opportunities to leave, fill out the form, get permission, and return. The evangelists seemed unaware of these procedures and, when informed of them, pointedly refused to abide by them.
The legal-civil issues at play here seem clear. GSU had set procedures for non-sponsored speakers to speak; Bloedorn and company declined to follow them.
The theological issues here actually interest me more.
More tomorrow,
JF
It's March 28, 2008, a sunny day on what looks to be the central quad of Georgia Southern University. A group of people, led by a young man with longish brown hair, confront an administrator, who is flanked by a two burly campus police. What's the problem?
The man, Benjamin Bloedorn, had, along with a handful of other men, been evangelizing in public, "open-air preaching" (with some sign-waving and singing as well) in an attempt to encourage GSU students and passersby to convert. It appears, however, that in doing so he violated GSU's free speech policy, which requires that non-sponsored speakers apply for and receive permission to speak on campus. During the confrontation, which eventually led to Bloedorn's arrest, Bloedorn and his associates argued that GSU, as a public university supported by state taxpayer funds, cannot claim to be private property and thus has no standing to dictate who may or may not speak on their grass and sidewalks.
The police disagreed. So too, according to a story today on the conservative site Onenewsnow, did the Georgia court. Of course, Onenewsnow spins the story as yet another slight in a context of anti-Christian bias by the state: "Christian witnessing a no-no on campus," reads the headline. Other conservative evangelical websites echo this sentiment, alleging both that the act constitutes an attack on Christianity and an unconstitutional hindrance on free speech.
The Bloedorn affair represents something of a trend in which confrontational evangelists (and other kinds of activists) challenge the state's right to police free speech and expression. Other evangelists, such as Michael Marcavage of the group Repent America, regularly run afoul of officers' charging them with trespassing. Such charges, of course, fuel Marcavage's particular evangelistic philosophy, which interprets resistance by authorities as proof that God's word is being preached (and resisted by the devil).
Bloedorn, from what I can tell, seems linked to the Faithful Soldier School of Evangelism, a kind of homegrown training/evangelism group led by Jason and Sara Storms, specializing in confrontational campus evangelism, particularly around issues such as pro-life and anti-homosexuality. Bloedorn is an alumnus of this school (you can see him in Faithful Soldier pictures here and here), though I don't think the GSU protest was FSSE activity. Broadly, FSSE seems to follow a Ray Comfort-type philosophy that the best, most Biblically based evangelism takes place via open-air preaching that uses the Law (i.e., the Ten Commandments) to inspire listeners to confront their own guilt before God, repent, and receive Christ.
I gather that Bloedorn and company were doing just that when the GSU officials confronted them. This being the Youtube age, a video account of this confrontation and the subsequent arrest exists. Here's Bloedorn being arrested:
Videos of the arguments leading up to the arrest are here here and here. These video accounts match up to that contained in the brief filed on behalf of Bloedorn by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund.
Now, Bloedorn's evangelistic strategy of course interests me, given my research interests. But, as a matter of clarification, let me address the free speech arguments advanced by Bloedorn and by the ADF.
Is "permitted free speech" an oxymoron? Only in the abstract. In practice, no such thing as a right to utterly unrestricted speech has ever been recognized by the US government. Indeed, for a long time the "freedom of speech" meant only that the US federal government could not impose "prior restraint"--preemptively forbid speech. This prohibition did not necessarily extend to the state or local governments, nor did this prohibition exclude punitive measures by the State against speakers. Only in the twentieth century did speech rights come to mean more what we recognize today as the right of an individual to say or express whatever he or she pleases without fear of censorship or state reprisal.
And even this right isn't absolute. The right to free speech has never been understood to cover direct threats ("I'm going to kill you if you vote for X candidate"), incitements to violence ("you should shoot X candidate in the face when she gets up to speak"), disruptions of the peace (e.g., shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre), obscenity, or libel/slander. Nor is speech allowed just anywhere, at any time, whenever or wherever someone pleases. The US relies on a scheme of ordered liberty, not a free-for-all yelling match. The right to express whatever you'd like does not guarantee you an audience.
In this case, the evangelists repeatedly make two arguments: 1) that GSU, as a public university, cannot claim private property or restrict speech on its grounds; and 2) that the notion of permitted free speech is unconstitutional. The latter claim, as I've demonstrated, does not stand. All speech operates under certain prior restraints in the interests of public safety. As fo the former claim, the evangelists use questionable definitions of public and private. Yes, GSU is likely a public university. And yes, GSU has the right to restrict trespassers and speakers--especially when said speakers are not students at GSU (as Bloedorn was not).
The University official had it right when she pointed out to the evangelists that one cannot simply traipse into a courthouse or senate building, set up signs, and begin preaching (the camera operator--whom I think was Bloedorn--tried to argue that point, insisting he had heard of people who had done just that). The freedom of speech isn't the same as a freedom of universal access. Georgia taxpayers doubtless do pay for a great deal of GSU's budget; it does not follow that any one taxpayer has unfettered access to all parts of the University.
Tellingly, the ADF's brief does not attempt to make either of the evangelists' arguments. Instead it suggests that 1) the boundaries between public sidewalks and GSU property are unclear; and 2) GSU's procedures for granting non-sponsored speakers access are arduous and unfair, constituting a prior restraint.
Those procedures, by the way, are as follows (copied from the brief):
It is the policy of Georgia Southern to permit the use of facilities by the general community in a manner which does not compete with the ongoing programs of the University. Speakers who are not sponsored by a campus organization may request permission to initiate a gathering on campus. Request forms are available in the Russell Union Office, Room 2070.
If a non-campus speaker is approved, the University reserves the right to assign space and designate time frequency and length of the proposed activity. A typical length of time for a speaker is one and a half hours. Frequency should be no more than once a month under normal circumstances. Under no conditions will a noncampus speaker be permitted to sell items or solicit funds on campus. (Members of the same group or organization dealing with the same general topic will be considered one speaker for the purpose of scheduling stipulation.)
The administrator confronting the evangelists actually went over this procedure several times, offering them numerous opportunities to leave, fill out the form, get permission, and return. The evangelists seemed unaware of these procedures and, when informed of them, pointedly refused to abide by them.
The legal-civil issues at play here seem clear. GSU had set procedures for non-sponsored speakers to speak; Bloedorn and company declined to follow them.
The theological issues here actually interest me more.
More tomorrow,
JF
Monday, December 14, 2009
Worldview Evangelism
Grading down--now just a dissertation to read before 10:00 tomorrow!
As I was winding down from a day of grading, doing my half-hour on the elliptical (a device I refer to as "the sweating machine"), I listened to a podcast from an evangelist named Randal Niles called Think Again (formerly, I believe, Think it Thru). Niles runs a number of evangelical websites aimed at skeptics, atheists, and the Christians who want to reach them. The podcast I heard dealt especially with the notion of worldviews, which I've written about here previously.
Worldview refers of course to a set of ideas, assumptions, and attitudes that shape how one moves through the world. A number of philosophers formal and informal have dealt with ideas similar to worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) for some time (for an overview and comparison/contrast of these notions--from a strictly evangelical perspective--see David K. Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept). The term itself rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century various evangelical apologists latched onto as a way of conceiving of Christianity as a comprehensive, unified mode of interpreting the universe.
Today, worldview apologetics in some form or another has become the preferred mode of outreach for a growing number of evangelicals--thus my interest in the subject. Niles, the podcaster, even hosts a website (one of his "all about" series) called "All About Worldview," which contains a variety of informative and critical articles, many of which come from Summit Ministries, an established purveyor of worldview curricula, conferences, and worskshops.
I have only just begun to sample Niles's particular take on worldview apologetics, but from what I can tell, his version is similar to most others. It's a three-step process. First, Christians have to clarify and become proficient in articulating (and defending, and advocating) the "Christian worldview," more commonly (and more tellingly) called "Biblical worldview." Descriptions of this worldview typically consist of litmus-test affirmations about the inerrancy of scripture, the exclusive verity of Christian doctrines, the superiority of literal-scriptural accounts of science and history (i.e., young-earth creationism), and conservative views of gender and sexuality.
Next in the worldview evangelism approach, Christians should educate themselves about the other competing worldviews operating at present. Different worldview evangelists will categorize these systems differently, but most lists (tables, more commonly) will include, for example, "Naturalistic Humanism" (i.e., materialist science), postmodernism, "new age" or "pantheism," and Communism/Marxism . Also included are worldviews arising from competing faiths: the Islamic worldview, the Jewish worldview, the Hindu worldview, etc. Evangelists in training learn key features of these worldviews, identifying presuppositions and noting salient differences from the Biblical Christian view. Since, as per the Biblical worldview's presuppositions, only the Biblical approach can claim absolute epistemological accuracy, worldview apologetics teaches about other systems in terms of their divergence from the truth of scripture.
The final step involves training Christians to interact with people living in and seeing the world through these other (inferior) sets of lenses. Of course, the approach is more complicated than simply going up to someone and lecturing them about how mistaken their deeply held beliefs are. Worldview apologetics departs from most other confrontational evangelistic approaches, largely eschewing a Bible-thumping, in-your-face approach as unproductive. Instead, worldview evangelists seek to demonstrate that 1) the Christian worldview is in fact cohesive and epistemologically appealing; and 2) other worldviews, in comparison, prove unsatisfactory. The trick, then, is to know the other's (non-Christian) worldview better than the other person does, guiding the person conversationally through an exploration of that worldview, helping the person to see where the non-Christian worldview proves inconsistent ro contradictory (in Greg Koukl's words, showing people how and where their worldview "commits suicide").
This, as worldview evangelists will tell you, is no easy task. It requires training, research, conversational practice, and a willingness to explore--and if necessary repair--one's own faith.
I find much to admire in worldview apologetics of this sort. The openness to others--engage them on their own terms rather than hectoring them from afar--is a refreshing departure from the stereotypical "turn or burn" tactic (or, more gently, from the "if you died right now, do you know where you'd wake up?" gotcha questions of the Way of the Master). I also like how this approach resists the anti-intellectualism that even many evangelicals lament has long afflicted present-day evangelicalism. Worldview apologetics requires that the evangelist be well-read and well-equipped with an arsenal of rhetorical and critical skills. As an educator, I can hardly argue with the value of training people to recognize the difference between logical fallacies and strong arguments. Indeed, I see in worldview apologists the seeds of a new evangelicalism (recognizing, of course, that "the seeds of a new evangelicalism" get discovered by countless writers every day). Worldview evangelism, however, does in fact aim to be an articulation of Christianity that does not just survive but competes in the marketplace of ideas.
That being said, the notion of worldviews as so elaborated by Niles, Summit Ministries, and the like has some features I find less attractive...
More tomorrow,
JF
As I was winding down from a day of grading, doing my half-hour on the elliptical (a device I refer to as "the sweating machine"), I listened to a podcast from an evangelist named Randal Niles called Think Again (formerly, I believe, Think it Thru). Niles runs a number of evangelical websites aimed at skeptics, atheists, and the Christians who want to reach them. The podcast I heard dealt especially with the notion of worldviews, which I've written about here previously.
Worldview refers of course to a set of ideas, assumptions, and attitudes that shape how one moves through the world. A number of philosophers formal and informal have dealt with ideas similar to worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) for some time (for an overview and comparison/contrast of these notions--from a strictly evangelical perspective--see David K. Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept). The term itself rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century various evangelical apologists latched onto as a way of conceiving of Christianity as a comprehensive, unified mode of interpreting the universe.
Today, worldview apologetics in some form or another has become the preferred mode of outreach for a growing number of evangelicals--thus my interest in the subject. Niles, the podcaster, even hosts a website (one of his "all about" series) called "All About Worldview," which contains a variety of informative and critical articles, many of which come from Summit Ministries, an established purveyor of worldview curricula, conferences, and worskshops.
I have only just begun to sample Niles's particular take on worldview apologetics, but from what I can tell, his version is similar to most others. It's a three-step process. First, Christians have to clarify and become proficient in articulating (and defending, and advocating) the "Christian worldview," more commonly (and more tellingly) called "Biblical worldview." Descriptions of this worldview typically consist of litmus-test affirmations about the inerrancy of scripture, the exclusive verity of Christian doctrines, the superiority of literal-scriptural accounts of science and history (i.e., young-earth creationism), and conservative views of gender and sexuality.
Next in the worldview evangelism approach, Christians should educate themselves about the other competing worldviews operating at present. Different worldview evangelists will categorize these systems differently, but most lists (tables, more commonly) will include, for example, "Naturalistic Humanism" (i.e., materialist science), postmodernism, "new age" or "pantheism," and Communism/Marxism . Also included are worldviews arising from competing faiths: the Islamic worldview, the Jewish worldview, the Hindu worldview, etc. Evangelists in training learn key features of these worldviews, identifying presuppositions and noting salient differences from the Biblical Christian view. Since, as per the Biblical worldview's presuppositions, only the Biblical approach can claim absolute epistemological accuracy, worldview apologetics teaches about other systems in terms of their divergence from the truth of scripture.
The final step involves training Christians to interact with people living in and seeing the world through these other (inferior) sets of lenses. Of course, the approach is more complicated than simply going up to someone and lecturing them about how mistaken their deeply held beliefs are. Worldview apologetics departs from most other confrontational evangelistic approaches, largely eschewing a Bible-thumping, in-your-face approach as unproductive. Instead, worldview evangelists seek to demonstrate that 1) the Christian worldview is in fact cohesive and epistemologically appealing; and 2) other worldviews, in comparison, prove unsatisfactory. The trick, then, is to know the other's (non-Christian) worldview better than the other person does, guiding the person conversationally through an exploration of that worldview, helping the person to see where the non-Christian worldview proves inconsistent ro contradictory (in Greg Koukl's words, showing people how and where their worldview "commits suicide").
This, as worldview evangelists will tell you, is no easy task. It requires training, research, conversational practice, and a willingness to explore--and if necessary repair--one's own faith.
I find much to admire in worldview apologetics of this sort. The openness to others--engage them on their own terms rather than hectoring them from afar--is a refreshing departure from the stereotypical "turn or burn" tactic (or, more gently, from the "if you died right now, do you know where you'd wake up?" gotcha questions of the Way of the Master). I also like how this approach resists the anti-intellectualism that even many evangelicals lament has long afflicted present-day evangelicalism. Worldview apologetics requires that the evangelist be well-read and well-equipped with an arsenal of rhetorical and critical skills. As an educator, I can hardly argue with the value of training people to recognize the difference between logical fallacies and strong arguments. Indeed, I see in worldview apologists the seeds of a new evangelicalism (recognizing, of course, that "the seeds of a new evangelicalism" get discovered by countless writers every day). Worldview evangelism, however, does in fact aim to be an articulation of Christianity that does not just survive but competes in the marketplace of ideas.
That being said, the notion of worldviews as so elaborated by Niles, Summit Ministries, and the like has some features I find less attractive...
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, November 8, 2009
All Bait, No Switch
Every scholar in academia has a secret fear that just as she is about to start or complete a new research project, someone else will publish a similar project, thus destroying any hope for originality.
Just such a fear struck my heart today as I drove to my coffee shop to do work for today. My radio, tuned as always to NPR, had the peerless radio program This American Life on it. For those who may not know, TAL chooses a weekly theme and produces three to five short segments about that theme. The segments are typically stories about some small-scale, personal situation--a feud between neighbors, a local band's struggle to become famous, a girl's attempt to work out her feelings for her ex--but the interviews, straightforward narration, a light production notes combine so deftly as to make for a riveting hour of programming. It's dangerous to turn on the radio when TAM is on and you have something else to do; it'll suck you in.
Today, wouldn't you know it, the topic of the story I tuned into was new techniques for personal evangelism--the very thing I'm writing about. Dagnabbit! I think, Beaten to the punch!
In fairness, I should admit that I've stolen--ah, been inspired by that radio show on a number of occasions. Much of my research (Hell Houses, flash mobs) I started or sharpened after hearing a show about that topic. So I have no real ground to complain that a show like this got to some fascinating topic before I did.
Besides, as I listened to the segment, it became clear that the show's theme wasn't evangelicalism per se but "bait and switch." Specifically, the host (Ira Glass) was interviewing one Jim Henderson, an evangelical author who champions what he calls "Doable Evangelism." His thesis is that most personal evangelism takes the form of a "bait-and-switch"--you start to strike up a conversation and then--inevitably--turn the talk toward Christ. Most non-church-going people, he argues, don't care much for that bait-and-switch. It feel manipulative.
"So," asks Glass, "what do you offer instead?"
Henderson then outlines his approach, which involves watching, praying (he speaks of "unauthorized praying"--praying for people without their knowing), and listening. "You ask them how they're doing," he explains, "and you just listen without interrupting."
"That's it?" asks Glass, "When do you give them the pitch?"
Henderson explains that the focus for his ministry isn't creating converts. "Christ said to go forth and make disciples, not converts," he argues. He says the first step is to get Christians out into culture, to detoxify (not his word) them in the eyes of the world.
Glass at this point seems incredulous. He shares how he and his wife have a number of deeply religious friends, but nothing about his friendship with them does anything to pull him towards church away from his "staunch atheism." "What does it matter?" he challenges Henderson, "It doesn't sound like your approach does anything. It's all bait and no switch."
Henderson accepts the criticism amiably, noting that that's just what his "ideological opponents in evangelicalism" would say. "But consider the alternative," he says. If you as a Christian turn every friendship with non-Christians into a sales pitch for church, you'll likely lose the friendship. Which is better: to preserve a friendly relationship with people or to alienate people in the name of Christ?
The segment ended soon after (and I breathed a sigh of relief to learn that the show had left my research area relatively unexplored). But I'm caught by the idea of Christianity as all bait and no switch.
Now, from my work I recognize that Henderson isn't doing something all that novel. "Friendship evangelism" of various sorts has been around for quite a while, emphasizing the need to create authentic and lasting relationships with people prior to broaching the subject of heaven, hell, and Things Eternal.
The obvious competitor strategy is what Michael Spencer calls the "wretched/urgency evangelism" of people like Ray Comfort or Todd Friel and their Way of the Master (about which I've written extensively here). Comfort would dispute the idea that the task of making disciples can begin with any other step than conviction and conversion through a presentation of the Law and Grace. People could die and spend eternity in Hell at any moment, and it's the Christian's job to do anything and everything to make people aware of that grim fact. It's not a lifetime of discipleship that saves, they would argue, but repentance and receiving the grace of God.
Not surprisingly, then, their tactics resemble the "bait and switch" that Henderson resists. They start with a normal conversation, shift to the "are you going to heaven?", go through the Ten Commandments, and end with the "here's how to get out of Hell" pitch. For their part, Friel and Comfort are as disparaging of friendship evangelism as Henderson is of urgency evangelism. Pointing to their "bait" parts--the hook that draws the "fish" in--Comfort says he can establish a rapport--a friendship--with someone in about a minute. But it does no good to be someone's friend, he argues, if you don't share with them the one truth that saves them from the Eternal Fire.
This would be the main argument against Henderson's style (at least as presented on the brief segment): if you believe in Hell and in salvation through Christ as literal realities, then isn't it an act of the most cynical animosity to withhold that information from your friends for fear of rejection? Comfort's favorite illustrations frame the situation in concrete images: if I have a spare parachute and know the plane we're on is about to crash--and I withhold that parachute from you for fear you'll find my offer pushy--how can I possibly call myself your friend?
Now--to tip my hand, I'm more on Henderson's side (I think--I'll need to do some research) than Comfort's. But for the friendship approach to score rhetorical points, it needs to overcome the strong argument against it from the urgency evangelism side.
More tomorrow,
JF
Just such a fear struck my heart today as I drove to my coffee shop to do work for today. My radio, tuned as always to NPR, had the peerless radio program This American Life on it. For those who may not know, TAL chooses a weekly theme and produces three to five short segments about that theme. The segments are typically stories about some small-scale, personal situation--a feud between neighbors, a local band's struggle to become famous, a girl's attempt to work out her feelings for her ex--but the interviews, straightforward narration, a light production notes combine so deftly as to make for a riveting hour of programming. It's dangerous to turn on the radio when TAM is on and you have something else to do; it'll suck you in.
Today, wouldn't you know it, the topic of the story I tuned into was new techniques for personal evangelism--the very thing I'm writing about. Dagnabbit! I think, Beaten to the punch!
In fairness, I should admit that I've stolen--ah, been inspired by that radio show on a number of occasions. Much of my research (Hell Houses, flash mobs) I started or sharpened after hearing a show about that topic. So I have no real ground to complain that a show like this got to some fascinating topic before I did.
Besides, as I listened to the segment, it became clear that the show's theme wasn't evangelicalism per se but "bait and switch." Specifically, the host (Ira Glass) was interviewing one Jim Henderson, an evangelical author who champions what he calls "Doable Evangelism." His thesis is that most personal evangelism takes the form of a "bait-and-switch"--you start to strike up a conversation and then--inevitably--turn the talk toward Christ. Most non-church-going people, he argues, don't care much for that bait-and-switch. It feel manipulative.
"So," asks Glass, "what do you offer instead?"
Henderson then outlines his approach, which involves watching, praying (he speaks of "unauthorized praying"--praying for people without their knowing), and listening. "You ask them how they're doing," he explains, "and you just listen without interrupting."
"That's it?" asks Glass, "When do you give them the pitch?"
Henderson explains that the focus for his ministry isn't creating converts. "Christ said to go forth and make disciples, not converts," he argues. He says the first step is to get Christians out into culture, to detoxify (not his word) them in the eyes of the world.
Glass at this point seems incredulous. He shares how he and his wife have a number of deeply religious friends, but nothing about his friendship with them does anything to pull him towards church away from his "staunch atheism." "What does it matter?" he challenges Henderson, "It doesn't sound like your approach does anything. It's all bait and no switch."
Henderson accepts the criticism amiably, noting that that's just what his "ideological opponents in evangelicalism" would say. "But consider the alternative," he says. If you as a Christian turn every friendship with non-Christians into a sales pitch for church, you'll likely lose the friendship. Which is better: to preserve a friendly relationship with people or to alienate people in the name of Christ?
The segment ended soon after (and I breathed a sigh of relief to learn that the show had left my research area relatively unexplored). But I'm caught by the idea of Christianity as all bait and no switch.
Now, from my work I recognize that Henderson isn't doing something all that novel. "Friendship evangelism" of various sorts has been around for quite a while, emphasizing the need to create authentic and lasting relationships with people prior to broaching the subject of heaven, hell, and Things Eternal.
The obvious competitor strategy is what Michael Spencer calls the "wretched/urgency evangelism" of people like Ray Comfort or Todd Friel and their Way of the Master (about which I've written extensively here). Comfort would dispute the idea that the task of making disciples can begin with any other step than conviction and conversion through a presentation of the Law and Grace. People could die and spend eternity in Hell at any moment, and it's the Christian's job to do anything and everything to make people aware of that grim fact. It's not a lifetime of discipleship that saves, they would argue, but repentance and receiving the grace of God.
Not surprisingly, then, their tactics resemble the "bait and switch" that Henderson resists. They start with a normal conversation, shift to the "are you going to heaven?", go through the Ten Commandments, and end with the "here's how to get out of Hell" pitch. For their part, Friel and Comfort are as disparaging of friendship evangelism as Henderson is of urgency evangelism. Pointing to their "bait" parts--the hook that draws the "fish" in--Comfort says he can establish a rapport--a friendship--with someone in about a minute. But it does no good to be someone's friend, he argues, if you don't share with them the one truth that saves them from the Eternal Fire.
This would be the main argument against Henderson's style (at least as presented on the brief segment): if you believe in Hell and in salvation through Christ as literal realities, then isn't it an act of the most cynical animosity to withhold that information from your friends for fear of rejection? Comfort's favorite illustrations frame the situation in concrete images: if I have a spare parachute and know the plane we're on is about to crash--and I withhold that parachute from you for fear you'll find my offer pushy--how can I possibly call myself your friend?
Now--to tip my hand, I'm more on Henderson's side (I think--I'll need to do some research) than Comfort's. But for the friendship approach to score rhetorical points, it needs to overcome the strong argument against it from the urgency evangelism side.
More tomorrow,
JF
Friday, September 4, 2009
A Pause--Dinner Conversations and Toxic Faith
Just back from a dinner with friends. Our after-dinner conversation ranged over many subjects, including religion. All of us were gay (well, three gay men and two lesbians), and many of us had grown up in conservative evangelical households.
I think I was the only practicing Christian of the bunch. Most of them had fairly harsh things to say about Christianity, particularly about how many of the Christians they had met had presented an ugly, hypocritical witness. At the heart of this negative witness, in the eyes of my friends, was the Christians' "cult-like" insistence on a literal, anti-intellectual, and sharp-edged understanding of the Bible.
Now, some of my friends at the dinner had considerable training in church history; they knew the Bible pretty well. But each of them had a story of how an honest question about scripture or theology had been met with vehement accusations of sacrilege followed by an injunction against questioning or thinking too deeply. "I knew then," said one of my dinner-mates, "this religion was not for me." Others around the table echoed his conclusion, linking that early hostility toward inquiry on the part of Christians to a close-mindedness about a host of other issues (particularly health care).
Was his memory--were the others' memories--of their experiences accurate? Did some pastor really tell him not to ask questions? I have no way of knowing. I'd like to think that there had been a misunderstanding. But regardless of what the Christian witness my friend encountered actually intended to do or say, the impression he left on my friend was permanent: Christians are close-minded, arrogant bullies.
Hearing these stories, I felt an oddly familiar sense--a nudge from my old evangelical days--that somehow I should say something to counter or correct these harmful witnesses. I shared a bit of my own experience--how I saw my faith working, how my parents and family knew their faith, how historically recent the whole plain-sense-Bible-only-ism was and how counter it ran to a grander, greater tradition of Christian intellectual discourse.
But frankly, I think my efforts made little impression. One friend's explanation of his attraction to Buddhism appeared quite appealing in comparison to a damaged evangelicalism that had somehow come to stand for all of Christianity. I wish I could have been a better witness.
It is useful, however, to realize just how damaging recent Christianity, particularly (I must say) evangelicalism driven by hell/conversion/Bible-onlyism, has been to the enterprise of making disciples for Christ--or even of showing love to others. The experience brings to mind a book I've been reading, UnChristian, by Barna Group researcher David Kinnaman (and Gabe Lyons). Kinnaman and Lyons conducted a series of polls to ascertain how younger people who did not identify as Christians ("outsiders" for short) viewed Christianity. Their results mirror the feelings evinced by my friends.
Kinnaman and Lyons find that by far the most common discriptors that outsiders link to present-day Christians are antihomosexual, judgmental, and hypocritical (27). Worse, the authors discover that a good many of these outsiders are not so much the unchurched as the dechurched--people who had early experiences with or training in the church and who subsequently became disenchanted enough to leave the church (74).
My father once preached (in his Baptist days) on this trend. He said that so many people in US culture had been inoculated against the Christian gospel. They had been given just enough of the gospel at some point in their past that they've developed resistances to the gospel as a whole.
Given my friends' experiences and the research done in UnChristian, I wonder if the problem is that the initial injection contains virulent, toxic strain of Christianity against which it is understandable and appropriate to develop antibodies. Such a thought--fully confronted by evangelicals like Kinnaman and Lyons--still seems forbidden in a lot of evangelical discourse. So much of the preaching and evangelism I research devotes time to rationalizing why people find the gospel message so unappealing. Primary among the reasons listed are unsaved people's pride and rebellious nature. They hate God and love themselves, goes this logic, so it's no wonder they are offended by the Holy Truth.
Nothing will ensure evangelicalism a surer, quicker death than embracing this self-justifying rationale. Evangelicals can fade to obscurity patting their backs about how they've not compromised the truth in their outreach or culture-war battles. Kinnaman and Lyons (and they are not alone) represent, I believe, the only possible adaptation to a culture inoculated against Christianity: stop being a disease. Stop harming people. Be honest about how much of the Christian message--more, the Christian manner, its affect, has been toxic. Not just different but awful. Apologize to the world. Repent of poisonous witness.
The advent of viral marketing has encouraged some evangelicals to adopt a disease metaphor to describe themselves (e.g., they want to spread, they want to infect people with the gospel). I would propose instead adopting a different medical metaphor: that of the doctor. It's not a perfect comparison; I certainly don't want to foster a holier-than-thou, we-have-the-cure-for-all-ills attitude among evangelicals. But what appeals to me about the doctor metaphor is element of the Hippocratic Oath that insists that physicians at least do no harm.
It occurred to me this evening that many Christians have missed "doing no harm" in their interactions with others. Selling the message, winning the soul, defending the faith--these all to often crowd out what should be a primary consideration for those following the Great Physician: don't harm people. What would evangelicalism look like if it 1) saw how some of its actions can harm people; and 2) thought about how to mitigate this harm?
More tomorrow,
JF
I think I was the only practicing Christian of the bunch. Most of them had fairly harsh things to say about Christianity, particularly about how many of the Christians they had met had presented an ugly, hypocritical witness. At the heart of this negative witness, in the eyes of my friends, was the Christians' "cult-like" insistence on a literal, anti-intellectual, and sharp-edged understanding of the Bible.
Now, some of my friends at the dinner had considerable training in church history; they knew the Bible pretty well. But each of them had a story of how an honest question about scripture or theology had been met with vehement accusations of sacrilege followed by an injunction against questioning or thinking too deeply. "I knew then," said one of my dinner-mates, "this religion was not for me." Others around the table echoed his conclusion, linking that early hostility toward inquiry on the part of Christians to a close-mindedness about a host of other issues (particularly health care).
Was his memory--were the others' memories--of their experiences accurate? Did some pastor really tell him not to ask questions? I have no way of knowing. I'd like to think that there had been a misunderstanding. But regardless of what the Christian witness my friend encountered actually intended to do or say, the impression he left on my friend was permanent: Christians are close-minded, arrogant bullies.
Hearing these stories, I felt an oddly familiar sense--a nudge from my old evangelical days--that somehow I should say something to counter or correct these harmful witnesses. I shared a bit of my own experience--how I saw my faith working, how my parents and family knew their faith, how historically recent the whole plain-sense-Bible-only-ism was and how counter it ran to a grander, greater tradition of Christian intellectual discourse.
But frankly, I think my efforts made little impression. One friend's explanation of his attraction to Buddhism appeared quite appealing in comparison to a damaged evangelicalism that had somehow come to stand for all of Christianity. I wish I could have been a better witness.
It is useful, however, to realize just how damaging recent Christianity, particularly (I must say) evangelicalism driven by hell/conversion/Bible-onlyism, has been to the enterprise of making disciples for Christ--or even of showing love to others. The experience brings to mind a book I've been reading, UnChristian, by Barna Group researcher David Kinnaman (and Gabe Lyons). Kinnaman and Lyons conducted a series of polls to ascertain how younger people who did not identify as Christians ("outsiders" for short) viewed Christianity. Their results mirror the feelings evinced by my friends.
Kinnaman and Lyons find that by far the most common discriptors that outsiders link to present-day Christians are antihomosexual, judgmental, and hypocritical (27). Worse, the authors discover that a good many of these outsiders are not so much the unchurched as the dechurched--people who had early experiences with or training in the church and who subsequently became disenchanted enough to leave the church (74).
My father once preached (in his Baptist days) on this trend. He said that so many people in US culture had been inoculated against the Christian gospel. They had been given just enough of the gospel at some point in their past that they've developed resistances to the gospel as a whole.
Given my friends' experiences and the research done in UnChristian, I wonder if the problem is that the initial injection contains virulent, toxic strain of Christianity against which it is understandable and appropriate to develop antibodies. Such a thought--fully confronted by evangelicals like Kinnaman and Lyons--still seems forbidden in a lot of evangelical discourse. So much of the preaching and evangelism I research devotes time to rationalizing why people find the gospel message so unappealing. Primary among the reasons listed are unsaved people's pride and rebellious nature. They hate God and love themselves, goes this logic, so it's no wonder they are offended by the Holy Truth.
Nothing will ensure evangelicalism a surer, quicker death than embracing this self-justifying rationale. Evangelicals can fade to obscurity patting their backs about how they've not compromised the truth in their outreach or culture-war battles. Kinnaman and Lyons (and they are not alone) represent, I believe, the only possible adaptation to a culture inoculated against Christianity: stop being a disease. Stop harming people. Be honest about how much of the Christian message--more, the Christian manner, its affect, has been toxic. Not just different but awful. Apologize to the world. Repent of poisonous witness.
The advent of viral marketing has encouraged some evangelicals to adopt a disease metaphor to describe themselves (e.g., they want to spread, they want to infect people with the gospel). I would propose instead adopting a different medical metaphor: that of the doctor. It's not a perfect comparison; I certainly don't want to foster a holier-than-thou, we-have-the-cure-for-all-ills attitude among evangelicals. But what appeals to me about the doctor metaphor is element of the Hippocratic Oath that insists that physicians at least do no harm.
It occurred to me this evening that many Christians have missed "doing no harm" in their interactions with others. Selling the message, winning the soul, defending the faith--these all to often crowd out what should be a primary consideration for those following the Great Physician: don't harm people. What would evangelicalism look like if it 1) saw how some of its actions can harm people; and 2) thought about how to mitigate this harm?
More 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
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Evangelical Responses to the Holiness/Love Paradox
To review: the fight-or-flight evangelism pitch--a main weapon in the evangelical arsenal of outreach techniques--goes basically like this:
Step one: convince the person that they have sinned (i.e., violated at some time or another the Laws of God). [Technically, some evangelicals will clarify, it's the Holy Spirit that does the convicting here. The evangelist just creates the proper atmosphere for the Spirit to do its divine work.]
Step two: convince the person that their sin--no matter how big or small, no matter how frequent or infrequent--condemns them to an eternity in Hell because God is utterly holy. It's here that extreme descriptions/depictions of hell might come into play (evangelicals are divided as to the utility of such depictions).
Step three: share with them the avoid-this-horrible-fate opportunity that is Jesus. (i.e., God, not wanting you to suffer in Hell forever, sent his son, who was wholly innocent of sin, to suffer and die in your place.)
Step four: convince them to believe in (and, depending on the exact theology, ask for/accept) that salvation, generally through prayer.
Step five: Oh, yes--remind them that in doing so they've made what amounts to an eternal covenant with the living God, and that, as a saved person, they will spend the rest of their lives in service to him. This may entail church membership, baptism, daily Bible reading, evangelism, etc. But, even though human effort doesn't save, the lack of any effort or commitment to Christ post-salvation isn't interpreted as a good sign...
What's the problem? I look back on my younger years and realize that for a very long time, I had little to no problem with this narrative. It's just the Way Things Are. To think otherwise would be to engage in Doubt, which (a la the tenets of fight-or-flight Christianity) signifies a lack of certainty, which in turn bespeaks a faith deficit, which in turn may indicate that you aren't saved after all. Best not to think about it.
As I grew older and met people who didn't go to church, however, people who haven't been brought up in the faith, I came to see how certain elements of this narrative can seem contradictory, even nonsensical. Specifically: the eternity-in-hell element (God's holiness/righteousness) seems to jar with the God-is-love element.
Now, such confusion is nothing new to dedicated evangelists. They're used to hearing and fielding incredulity at the thought that God (who is loving) will judge people forever. I've heard any number of rationales that such evangelists use to explain this incredulity as well as various evangelistic techniques to get past it. Among these rationales/techniques:
People have a wrong idea about love: the world, goes this rationale, defines love as "total acceptance." But that isn't love. How do you convince an unsaved person of this? Use an analogy: If we were to see parents who said "OK, whatever" to anything their children do, refusing to punish or set boundaries, we'd call that irresponsibility, not love. God loves us enough, goes this logic, to give us free will and to experience the consequences of our choices. He loves us enough to let us choose heaven or hell.
People fear a judging creator, preferring a self-made God: Inevitably, evangelical sermons about the intransigence of people to the gospel will lament that in these postmodern times, people place such a value on "tolerance" that any sort of moral or ethical discrimination becomes unthinkable. People think that they are the ultimate authorities on right and wrong, rejecting God's authority. It's no wonder, then, that they have trouble with God's eternal standard. The thing to do, then, is to present them with some "moral absolutes" situations--Was the Holocaust wrong? Is murder wrong? Rape? Child abuse? ("You wouldn't want Hitler to go to heaven, would you?" I've heard several evangelists ask). By securing an "of course those acts are wrong" from people, the evangelist can then draw them into a realization that these are wrong because God said so. Moral absolutes=God=righteousness of judgment=need for salvation.
People refuse to see the love inherent in Christ's sacrifice: That is, people who think that the heaven/hell/salvation set up isn't loving need to think more about just how loving it is that God in his mercy deigned to incarnate himself and die in our place. Here the courtroom analogy often comes into play: "So--you're in court, and the judge has rendered a verdict: guilty. The sentence is Hell. But suddenly, someone, an innocent man, stands up and offers to take your place, to accept your sentence for you. How does this make you feel?"
There are other rationales and techniques for diffusing people's reticence to accept the gospel, but these three are some of the more common. The problem is--the logic behind these three avoids rather than confronts the very real tension between holiness and love in the main evangelical gospel pitch.
Indeed, there are times when I listen to very well-intended, gentle Christians make these sincere arguments, and my blood just boils.
I gotta give a "now wait a minute" speech.
That tomorrow.
JF
Step one: convince the person that they have sinned (i.e., violated at some time or another the Laws of God). [Technically, some evangelicals will clarify, it's the Holy Spirit that does the convicting here. The evangelist just creates the proper atmosphere for the Spirit to do its divine work.]
Step two: convince the person that their sin--no matter how big or small, no matter how frequent or infrequent--condemns them to an eternity in Hell because God is utterly holy. It's here that extreme descriptions/depictions of hell might come into play (evangelicals are divided as to the utility of such depictions).
Step three: share with them the avoid-this-horrible-fate opportunity that is Jesus. (i.e., God, not wanting you to suffer in Hell forever, sent his son, who was wholly innocent of sin, to suffer and die in your place.)
Step four: convince them to believe in (and, depending on the exact theology, ask for/accept) that salvation, generally through prayer.
Step five: Oh, yes--remind them that in doing so they've made what amounts to an eternal covenant with the living God, and that, as a saved person, they will spend the rest of their lives in service to him. This may entail church membership, baptism, daily Bible reading, evangelism, etc. But, even though human effort doesn't save, the lack of any effort or commitment to Christ post-salvation isn't interpreted as a good sign...
What's the problem? I look back on my younger years and realize that for a very long time, I had little to no problem with this narrative. It's just the Way Things Are. To think otherwise would be to engage in Doubt, which (a la the tenets of fight-or-flight Christianity) signifies a lack of certainty, which in turn bespeaks a faith deficit, which in turn may indicate that you aren't saved after all. Best not to think about it.
As I grew older and met people who didn't go to church, however, people who haven't been brought up in the faith, I came to see how certain elements of this narrative can seem contradictory, even nonsensical. Specifically: the eternity-in-hell element (God's holiness/righteousness) seems to jar with the God-is-love element.
Now, such confusion is nothing new to dedicated evangelists. They're used to hearing and fielding incredulity at the thought that God (who is loving) will judge people forever. I've heard any number of rationales that such evangelists use to explain this incredulity as well as various evangelistic techniques to get past it. Among these rationales/techniques:
People have a wrong idea about love: the world, goes this rationale, defines love as "total acceptance." But that isn't love. How do you convince an unsaved person of this? Use an analogy: If we were to see parents who said "OK, whatever" to anything their children do, refusing to punish or set boundaries, we'd call that irresponsibility, not love. God loves us enough, goes this logic, to give us free will and to experience the consequences of our choices. He loves us enough to let us choose heaven or hell.
People fear a judging creator, preferring a self-made God: Inevitably, evangelical sermons about the intransigence of people to the gospel will lament that in these postmodern times, people place such a value on "tolerance" that any sort of moral or ethical discrimination becomes unthinkable. People think that they are the ultimate authorities on right and wrong, rejecting God's authority. It's no wonder, then, that they have trouble with God's eternal standard. The thing to do, then, is to present them with some "moral absolutes" situations--Was the Holocaust wrong? Is murder wrong? Rape? Child abuse? ("You wouldn't want Hitler to go to heaven, would you?" I've heard several evangelists ask). By securing an "of course those acts are wrong" from people, the evangelist can then draw them into a realization that these are wrong because God said so. Moral absolutes=God=righteousness of judgment=need for salvation.
People refuse to see the love inherent in Christ's sacrifice: That is, people who think that the heaven/hell/salvation set up isn't loving need to think more about just how loving it is that God in his mercy deigned to incarnate himself and die in our place. Here the courtroom analogy often comes into play: "So--you're in court, and the judge has rendered a verdict: guilty. The sentence is Hell. But suddenly, someone, an innocent man, stands up and offers to take your place, to accept your sentence for you. How does this make you feel?"
There are other rationales and techniques for diffusing people's reticence to accept the gospel, but these three are some of the more common. The problem is--the logic behind these three avoids rather than confronts the very real tension between holiness and love in the main evangelical gospel pitch.
Indeed, there are times when I listen to very well-intended, gentle Christians make these sincere arguments, and my blood just boils.
I gotta give a "now wait a minute" speech.
That tomorrow.
JF
Friday, July 24, 2009
The Dual/Dueling Attributes of God: Holiness and Love
Yesterday I contrasted an image of God defined by unconditional love (from Good Goats) with an image of God defined by uncompromising moral standards promoted by Ray Comfort's 'Way of the Master." I risk breaking one of my own rules of writing about evangelical folk--don't shortchange their sophistication--if I don't point out that most evangelicals are explicitly aware of the the dual (dueling?) images of God as utterly loving and as utterly holy.
I just now ran into a good example of this, reading John W. Sire's latest (4th) edition of The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog (Downer's Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004). In relating the Christian worldview--Christian theism, as he labels it--Sire gives a quick outline of a Christian (actually, evangelical Christian) view of God. Namely, he asserts that God's goodness--the primary attribute of God--plays out in his love on the one hand and in his holiness on the other (28-29).
What Sire in this volume does not acknowledge, however, is that these two concepts seem in tension with each other. As a relational attitude, for instance, love suggests an impulse toward togetherness, intimacy, an impulse understood to work against or through barriers to that intimacy. A parent (ideally) loves his daughter even if she tells a lie. Romeo loves Juliet despite the fact that their families try to kill each other. God so loved the world that God incarnated as Jesus to suffer and die on the cross.
To be sure, human love has limits. Betrayals, insults, or even just mundane passage of time can dim or overpower the impulse toward togetherness and mutual well-being. But here God's--well, God-ness, God's deity comes into play. God, in the faith I was brought up in, loves no matter what; God is not willing that any should perish (and any means all). What can separate us from the love of God? asks Paul rhetorically. Nothing. No power on heaven or earth. We may sin. We may disappoint God. We may even make God angry, but--and on this my Southern Baptist upbringing was clear--God's offer of repentance is always available.
[A quick story from my childhood repository of sermon illustrations: A man lived a long life full of terrible evil. He lied, he cheated, he hurt others, he did just about anything evil there was to do. The moment before he died of old age, he cried out to God in his heart, "Oh, Lord Jesus, save me, a sinner. I believe wholly in you." And then he passed away. Now, this deathbed conversion caused some degree of consternation in Heaven. Various angelic lawyers insisted that, if anyone deserved Hell, it was this man. They pointed out that it was unfair in the extreme to let him off the hook, so to speak, after a lifetime of vicious evil just for a thirty-second conversion at the last moment. "I mean," one said, "just how much leeway do we want to give such a person?" At that point, Christ stood up, and the heavenly conference room fell silent. "We give him this much leeway," Jesus said, and extended his arms wide, creating the shape of the cross on which he died for all. Point of the story? Baptists believe in deathbed conversions. ]
So that's the God-as-Divine-Love side. The Holy God side, however, stresses the fact that God is, well, God. He is holy--literally set apart. His standards (or rather the standard that is God) are uncompromising, universal, and impossible for humans to live by perfectly. All have sinned, we are taught, and fall short of the glory of God (it's one of the Old Standard verses evangelicals memorize). Moreover, the holiness/unholiness line is absolute. One sin--no matter how small--renders you just as unholy as any other. Recall the Way of The Master--even a single white lie as a child makes you, in God's eyes, a liar.
The rationale? God, being utterly holy, can't stand unholiness. Or, as evangelicals would likely prefer it put, nothing tainted with unholiness can stand God. Thus Hell, in some kinder-gentler formations, becomes a place of eternal separation from God; that separation--plus the too-late knowledge of the intimacy you as a human could have had with God--is the real "pain and suffering" of Hell. Other evangelicals, uncomfortable with this soft formulation, insist upon the physical torment.
Either way, though, Hell serves a necessary adjunct to and expression of God's holiness.
The tension for secular folk comes when they realize that, at the end of the day, holiness in this configuration serves as a limit on a supposedly infinite love. God loves you, but that love is bounded by God's holiness. The loving invitation of Christ operates only as long as your physical life on earth, and then--poof!--the holiness takes over. For eternity. Beyond the span of a human life God will not (cannot?) go.
I should stress that I don't suggest that evangelicals are unaware of this tension, quite the contrary. I will suggest, however, that the fight-or-flight evangelism I've been writing about, the evangelism that stresses avoiding hell, downplays or outright covers up this tension. Indeed, this is one of the primary thoughtstops that evangelicalism tacitly imposes: that inquiring too deeply into the tension between holy judgment and unconditional love is itself a sign of disrespect toward God. "Hell only seems unfair to you because you judge with your human standards. God's standards are better." Or: "Job asked a question much like this. You know what God told him? 'Did you create the world and all its creatures? Who are you to judge the mind of God?'"
But there's the problem--the Way of the Master (which serves as a particularly well-articulated set of evangelism techniques) explicitly invites people to use their own standards, to put themselves in God's courtroom and guess what God will do.
When Way of the Master folk lead people through the "good person test" and arrive at the punchline,"Given that you're a lying, thieving, adulterous blasphemer, would God judge you innocent or guilty?" the other person will almost inevitably raise some protest. They might say, "Well, guilty, but I still don't think he'd send me to hell." Or they might even say, "Innocent, because--yes, I've lied a few times over the course of my life, but for the most part I've tried to be honest. And I think God will know that."
The Way of the Master evangelist inevitably has to correct this human view with God's: "Well, actually, you would be guilty and you will be going to Hell."
This standard is unsatisfying because, as it's presented, God's standard is less fair, less loving, than a human imagining of unconditional love and goodness. I almost get the feeling, in some of the conversations I've heard, that the evangelists wish that God were more like what secular folk imagine, i.e., able to forgive minor infractions in the context of a lifetime of basic goodness. That God isn't like that, that God is utterly holy, plants a seed of resentment.
More tomorrow,
JF
I just now ran into a good example of this, reading John W. Sire's latest (4th) edition of The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog (Downer's Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004). In relating the Christian worldview--Christian theism, as he labels it--Sire gives a quick outline of a Christian (actually, evangelical Christian) view of God. Namely, he asserts that God's goodness--the primary attribute of God--plays out in his love on the one hand and in his holiness on the other (28-29).
What Sire in this volume does not acknowledge, however, is that these two concepts seem in tension with each other. As a relational attitude, for instance, love suggests an impulse toward togetherness, intimacy, an impulse understood to work against or through barriers to that intimacy. A parent (ideally) loves his daughter even if she tells a lie. Romeo loves Juliet despite the fact that their families try to kill each other. God so loved the world that God incarnated as Jesus to suffer and die on the cross.
To be sure, human love has limits. Betrayals, insults, or even just mundane passage of time can dim or overpower the impulse toward togetherness and mutual well-being. But here God's--well, God-ness, God's deity comes into play. God, in the faith I was brought up in, loves no matter what; God is not willing that any should perish (and any means all). What can separate us from the love of God? asks Paul rhetorically. Nothing. No power on heaven or earth. We may sin. We may disappoint God. We may even make God angry, but--and on this my Southern Baptist upbringing was clear--God's offer of repentance is always available.
[A quick story from my childhood repository of sermon illustrations: A man lived a long life full of terrible evil. He lied, he cheated, he hurt others, he did just about anything evil there was to do. The moment before he died of old age, he cried out to God in his heart, "Oh, Lord Jesus, save me, a sinner. I believe wholly in you." And then he passed away. Now, this deathbed conversion caused some degree of consternation in Heaven. Various angelic lawyers insisted that, if anyone deserved Hell, it was this man. They pointed out that it was unfair in the extreme to let him off the hook, so to speak, after a lifetime of vicious evil just for a thirty-second conversion at the last moment. "I mean," one said, "just how much leeway do we want to give such a person?" At that point, Christ stood up, and the heavenly conference room fell silent. "We give him this much leeway," Jesus said, and extended his arms wide, creating the shape of the cross on which he died for all. Point of the story? Baptists believe in deathbed conversions. ]
So that's the God-as-Divine-Love side. The Holy God side, however, stresses the fact that God is, well, God. He is holy--literally set apart. His standards (or rather the standard that is God) are uncompromising, universal, and impossible for humans to live by perfectly. All have sinned, we are taught, and fall short of the glory of God (it's one of the Old Standard verses evangelicals memorize). Moreover, the holiness/unholiness line is absolute. One sin--no matter how small--renders you just as unholy as any other. Recall the Way of The Master--even a single white lie as a child makes you, in God's eyes, a liar.
The rationale? God, being utterly holy, can't stand unholiness. Or, as evangelicals would likely prefer it put, nothing tainted with unholiness can stand God. Thus Hell, in some kinder-gentler formations, becomes a place of eternal separation from God; that separation--plus the too-late knowledge of the intimacy you as a human could have had with God--is the real "pain and suffering" of Hell. Other evangelicals, uncomfortable with this soft formulation, insist upon the physical torment.
Either way, though, Hell serves a necessary adjunct to and expression of God's holiness.
The tension for secular folk comes when they realize that, at the end of the day, holiness in this configuration serves as a limit on a supposedly infinite love. God loves you, but that love is bounded by God's holiness. The loving invitation of Christ operates only as long as your physical life on earth, and then--poof!--the holiness takes over. For eternity. Beyond the span of a human life God will not (cannot?) go.
I should stress that I don't suggest that evangelicals are unaware of this tension, quite the contrary. I will suggest, however, that the fight-or-flight evangelism I've been writing about, the evangelism that stresses avoiding hell, downplays or outright covers up this tension. Indeed, this is one of the primary thoughtstops that evangelicalism tacitly imposes: that inquiring too deeply into the tension between holy judgment and unconditional love is itself a sign of disrespect toward God. "Hell only seems unfair to you because you judge with your human standards. God's standards are better." Or: "Job asked a question much like this. You know what God told him? 'Did you create the world and all its creatures? Who are you to judge the mind of God?'"
But there's the problem--the Way of the Master (which serves as a particularly well-articulated set of evangelism techniques) explicitly invites people to use their own standards, to put themselves in God's courtroom and guess what God will do.
When Way of the Master folk lead people through the "good person test" and arrive at the punchline,"Given that you're a lying, thieving, adulterous blasphemer, would God judge you innocent or guilty?" the other person will almost inevitably raise some protest. They might say, "Well, guilty, but I still don't think he'd send me to hell." Or they might even say, "Innocent, because--yes, I've lied a few times over the course of my life, but for the most part I've tried to be honest. And I think God will know that."
The Way of the Master evangelist inevitably has to correct this human view with God's: "Well, actually, you would be guilty and you will be going to Hell."
This standard is unsatisfying because, as it's presented, God's standard is less fair, less loving, than a human imagining of unconditional love and goodness. I almost get the feeling, in some of the conversations I've heard, that the evangelists wish that God were more like what secular folk imagine, i.e., able to forgive minor infractions in the context of a lifetime of basic goodness. That God isn't like that, that God is utterly holy, plants a seed of resentment.
More tomorrow,
JF
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