I'm again delaying a response to conservative evangelical theology due to an experience in church today.
My congregation was blessed this morning with a special message from Virgil Gulker, the founder of Kid's Hope USA, a ministry that pairs adult mentors with underprivileged or at-risk elementary school children. Throughout the school year, the mentors each meet with their assigned child (each mentor has only one) for one hour each week. They may work on school projects, reading/math skills, play games, read stories, or just talk.
Although studies have shown that mentored kids exhibit marked academic improvement, Dr. Gulker clarified that the most vital benefits were intangible: the children have a friendly, consistent adult presence in their lives. Again and again, he says, children will ask their mentor, "What other schools do you go to? How many other kids do you mentor?" And the mentor will answer, "I only go to this school, and I only see you." The mentors show up, says Dr. Gulker, and they show up reliably, there totally for the child. For many of these kids, that's a phenomenon unheard of in their lives, and that's part of what makes Kids Hope work.
The other component of the Kids Hope ministry kids found miraculous, Dr. Gulker explained, was its volunteer nature. He told of a standard conversation between kids and their mentor:
"Why are you here? Are you teacher?" they ask. No. "Are you a social worker?" No. "I know--you're a teacher's aide." No. "Then how much do you make for seeing me?" Nothing. "Why would you do it?" Because you're my friend.
That, Dr. Gulker says, is the other miracle component from kids' perspectives: The mentors expect nothing in return for their friendship. They aren't paid, they aren't reimbursed, and they don't have to be there to fulfill some boss's mandate. They're good--for nothing.
That "good--for nothing" resonates with the core of the unconditional love I learned to identify as the prime attribute of God. As I've explained, I came to see my early evangelical faith as bound up in self-concern. I became a Christian, initially and primarily (if not exclusively), to avoid hell. I was to spread the gospel by activating others' sense of eternal self-preservation. You don't want to go to hell, do you? Then be saved by trusting in Christ.
The aura of contractual obligation--on me and on God--made it increasingly difficult for me to imagine how to be in love with God or how to show love to others without first thinking of the terms of the contract. Was I saved? Was I headed for heaven instead of hell? And I knew that, on facing God after death, God's first interaction with me was not "Welcome home, my child!" but "Is your name in my Book of Life? It is? Then--whom have you brought with you by your mortal witness?" Even reunion with God was a test--how had I fulfilled my half of the bargain (faith and not works, yes--but authentic faith: there's the rub).
This anxious questioning often crowded out every other thought, keeping my faith at a fight-or-flight panic status.
Imagining God's love as unconditional--love for nothing--freed me.
Early on in this blog, I mentioned the old story of the traveler passing a woman carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a flaming torch in the other. "I'm going to burn away the clouds and mansions of heaven, and I'm going to douse the fires of hell," she explained, "Then we'll see who still cares to follow the Way of Christ." Would we as humans love God--for nothing in return? What if the Christian philosophy had no sense of afterlife or immortal soul? Would the Christianity--a life lived in devotion to God and neighbor--be as attractive a life option for people?
Alternately, and in a way even more challenging to my evangelical roots: what if God loved us--loved everyone--with no eternal threat or reward to compel us to return that love? I've explored at length my troubles with the notion of God as Godfather, extending to humanity an offer it can't refuse: "put your entire faith in me--and enjoy eternal bliss--or decline to do so and face eternal torment." What if God's lovingkindness were extended freely?
Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith has a song along these lines titled, appropriately enough, "God Loves Everyone" (here's a nice cover of it, or you can find the original on his album Cobblestone Runway). It's both shockingly heretical from a conservative evangelical point of view--and somehow more right, more consonant with the most challenging, Spirit-filled moments of conviction I've experienced than any of my fear-filled, self-centered questionings regarding my eternal fate.
What if "there are no gates in Heaven/ everyone gets in/ queer or straight/ those of every fate"? What if God really does love "the killer in his cell/the atheist as well/ the pure at heart/ and the wild at heart"? What happens to Christianity when you don't have to be Christian--one of the elect--to receive the grace of God?
Ah, say my imaginary conservative-evangelical readers, you've still avoided the challenge you raised yesterday. Namely: what about all those scriptures attesting to God's hatred? "Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated." What about the God who calls for the destruction of enemies? The God who binds up and casts into the outer darkness those not heeding his call? The God who "gives them up" to their own fates? What about the God who forsakes us? Where is love in abandonment?
Is that a love that's good for nothing?
The answer, I think, begins by recognizing that Christ himself asked this same question on the Cross...
More tomorrow,
JF
Showing posts with label hell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hell. Show all posts
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
The Evangelical Counter to God's Unconditional Love
So--relating three Big Shifts in my life and faith that coincided with a transition out of evangelicalism for me, I told about my entry into the world of theatre (and therefore a wholly new way of thinking about what I could do) and my participation in a youth group led by a woman named Paulanne. I credited Paulanne with helping to revolutionize the way I see God.
To whit: she presented a picture of Christianity almost entirely devoid of the fear and anxiety about eternal salvation that had so characterized my early faith. Instead, Paulanne emphasized the idea of God's unconditional, passionate, overpowering love for us both as the prime condition of all existence and as the ethical standard of interaction that anyone who goes by the label Christian should choose as a pattern for life.
I pause here to address the fact that, in rhapsodizing about embracing God as unconditional love, I have fallen right into the conservative-evangelical stereotype of the proud apostate. A cautionary tale advanced by conservative evangelicals since at least the 1800s, the proud apostate is one who falls prey to the siren call of a false gospel--the gospel of God's love-without-judgment.
Practically every evangelist or evangelical ministry that mobilizes the gospel of avoiding hell eventually comes to address the fact that much of their message (i.e., the eternity-in-hell-for-sin part) makes God seem capricious and tyrannical rather than loving and worthy of adoration. Yet practically every such evangelist also has a standard criticism, sometimes bitter and sometimes sorrowful, of any ministry that abandons or mutes the hellfire judgment portion of the gospel message.
As I've explored at length in this blog, conservative evangelicals (generally speaking) refute the idea that God's love can exist at all apart from God's righteousness. Those attributes are, for evangelicals, two apsects of the same Person(ality). God judges not because, like some heavenly Jekyll/Hyde, God changes character from wrathful to loving. God judges because without that judgment God would be neither righteous nor loving.
How could God not judge a rapist or murder, these evangelicals will ask, and be called good? How could he welcome such vile criminals into Heaven and maintain that he loves people? How is that fair to the victims? Besides, the argument continues, God's love for humanity is more than proven by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. What more do you want?
There's a deeper argument from some evangelical circles that I've not really dealt with yet, the doctrine of reprobation. A thread especially prominent in Calvinist traditions, reprobation declares that, in fact, God's love is not as unlimited as the love Paulanne presented to me and that I try to embrace. Instead, goes this line of thought, it is possible for humans to offend God to such a degree through their pride and blasphemy that they drift beyond the ambit of God's grace. They go too far, and God lets them go--forever.
Indeed, insofar as evangelicals believe that the ability of humans to turn to Christ ceases at death or at the Final Judgment (whichever comes first), they set practical limits on the extent of God's love. For most conservative evangelicals, souls burning in hell are there eternally, having by their mortal unbelief abandoned themselves to their sad fate.
The other side of strict reprobation is of course the better-known Calvinist doctrine of election. Here I tread upon ground less familiar to me, but as I understand it, conservative Calvinism interprets most Biblical passages about God's love as referring not to humanity in general but to that portion of humanity that God in God's sovereignty chose to be God's own. That is, prior to existence, God chose (a word whose Latin translation forms the root of elect) which human souls would turn to God. It is for these that God sent Christ. The others--the un-elect--are destined to reject God and are of course not included in God's proclamations of love.
Now, Calvinist traditions boast as wide a range of interpretations about election/reprobation as you can imagine (e.g., for some, election simply means that God knows ahead of time which humans will choose to believe in God and which won't). But just about any way you cut it, reprobation and election in any of their forms suggest a limitation on the spatial or temporal scope of God's love. God either loves all people--but only up to a certain time, after which he only loves those who have believed on Christ--or God loves only a portion of humanity, a portion who conveniently enough are exactly those who believe on Christ. [I can actually see the appeal of a strict Calvinism. It neatly explains away the moral conundrum of God loving a soul that God is ultimately unable or unwilling to spare from Hell]
Either way, God's love is, from an eternal perspective, unconditional for Christians alone. To believe otherwise, to suggest that God really loves all humans without scope or limit, is to replace the God represented in the Bible with wishful thinking.
Like it or not, point out conservative evangelicals, the Bible does not present a God who is totally loving. In the Bible God hates, excoriates, delights in the afflictions of, punishes, kills, destroys, calls for the utter annihilation of, lets go of, curses, drives out, casts into the outer darkness, and abandons altogether those God judges as worthy of such treatment. How, ask evangelicals, do people get around the Biblical witness without ignoring or dismissing it, replacing the Word of God in Scripture with a God of their own imagining. Is this not the very idolatry, the very pride, that defines the reprobate mind?
My response tomorrow,
JF
To whit: she presented a picture of Christianity almost entirely devoid of the fear and anxiety about eternal salvation that had so characterized my early faith. Instead, Paulanne emphasized the idea of God's unconditional, passionate, overpowering love for us both as the prime condition of all existence and as the ethical standard of interaction that anyone who goes by the label Christian should choose as a pattern for life.
I pause here to address the fact that, in rhapsodizing about embracing God as unconditional love, I have fallen right into the conservative-evangelical stereotype of the proud apostate. A cautionary tale advanced by conservative evangelicals since at least the 1800s, the proud apostate is one who falls prey to the siren call of a false gospel--the gospel of God's love-without-judgment.
Practically every evangelist or evangelical ministry that mobilizes the gospel of avoiding hell eventually comes to address the fact that much of their message (i.e., the eternity-in-hell-for-sin part) makes God seem capricious and tyrannical rather than loving and worthy of adoration. Yet practically every such evangelist also has a standard criticism, sometimes bitter and sometimes sorrowful, of any ministry that abandons or mutes the hellfire judgment portion of the gospel message.
As I've explored at length in this blog, conservative evangelicals (generally speaking) refute the idea that God's love can exist at all apart from God's righteousness. Those attributes are, for evangelicals, two apsects of the same Person(ality). God judges not because, like some heavenly Jekyll/Hyde, God changes character from wrathful to loving. God judges because without that judgment God would be neither righteous nor loving.
How could God not judge a rapist or murder, these evangelicals will ask, and be called good? How could he welcome such vile criminals into Heaven and maintain that he loves people? How is that fair to the victims? Besides, the argument continues, God's love for humanity is more than proven by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. What more do you want?
There's a deeper argument from some evangelical circles that I've not really dealt with yet, the doctrine of reprobation. A thread especially prominent in Calvinist traditions, reprobation declares that, in fact, God's love is not as unlimited as the love Paulanne presented to me and that I try to embrace. Instead, goes this line of thought, it is possible for humans to offend God to such a degree through their pride and blasphemy that they drift beyond the ambit of God's grace. They go too far, and God lets them go--forever.
Indeed, insofar as evangelicals believe that the ability of humans to turn to Christ ceases at death or at the Final Judgment (whichever comes first), they set practical limits on the extent of God's love. For most conservative evangelicals, souls burning in hell are there eternally, having by their mortal unbelief abandoned themselves to their sad fate.
The other side of strict reprobation is of course the better-known Calvinist doctrine of election. Here I tread upon ground less familiar to me, but as I understand it, conservative Calvinism interprets most Biblical passages about God's love as referring not to humanity in general but to that portion of humanity that God in God's sovereignty chose to be God's own. That is, prior to existence, God chose (a word whose Latin translation forms the root of elect) which human souls would turn to God. It is for these that God sent Christ. The others--the un-elect--are destined to reject God and are of course not included in God's proclamations of love.
Now, Calvinist traditions boast as wide a range of interpretations about election/reprobation as you can imagine (e.g., for some, election simply means that God knows ahead of time which humans will choose to believe in God and which won't). But just about any way you cut it, reprobation and election in any of their forms suggest a limitation on the spatial or temporal scope of God's love. God either loves all people--but only up to a certain time, after which he only loves those who have believed on Christ--or God loves only a portion of humanity, a portion who conveniently enough are exactly those who believe on Christ. [I can actually see the appeal of a strict Calvinism. It neatly explains away the moral conundrum of God loving a soul that God is ultimately unable or unwilling to spare from Hell]
Either way, God's love is, from an eternal perspective, unconditional for Christians alone. To believe otherwise, to suggest that God really loves all humans without scope or limit, is to replace the God represented in the Bible with wishful thinking.
Like it or not, point out conservative evangelicals, the Bible does not present a God who is totally loving. In the Bible God hates, excoriates, delights in the afflictions of, punishes, kills, destroys, calls for the utter annihilation of, lets go of, curses, drives out, casts into the outer darkness, and abandons altogether those God judges as worthy of such treatment. How, ask evangelicals, do people get around the Biblical witness without ignoring or dismissing it, replacing the Word of God in Scripture with a God of their own imagining. Is this not the very idolatry, the very pride, that defines the reprobate mind?
My response tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Rightness, Appeal, Efficacy
Nothing I've said so far in any of my criticisms about hell-first, turn-or-burn, Way of the Master evangelism would likely make any real headway with an evangelist dedicated to such approaches.
Why?
Because, as Ray Comfort and other such hell-intensive evangelists insist, theirs is the only biblically supported means of sharing the gospel. They lead with conviction and fear of hellfire not because they think it's the most appealing or logical (by the world's standards) but because they understand the scriptures as mandating that the gospel be spread in that way.
To paraphrase their rationale: it's nice to talk about a loving God who wants the best for your life, but the Bible talks about hell, the lake of fire, and the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Hell's existence--the damnation awaiting humanity for its sin--is the controlling reality. Sovereign God ordains it, and only sovereign God can save a helpless humanity from it. To spread a gospel of love and ethics without highlighting the threat of eternal punishment is to corrupt the scripture, to go against doctrine.
Thus, in presenting a criticism about the lack of appeal of hell-first evangelism, I've missed the point. Its effectiveness in attracting the unsaved or in producing lifelong Christians is secondary. After all, it's the Holy Spirit, not the evangelist or her techniques, that enables conversion in the first place. The evangelist's job consists only of following what the Bible says to do, not to innovate new and better--hipper--techniques.
Churches and denominations go astray (in this line of thinking) when they borrow too much from the secular self-help culture of personal empowerment or liberal-left tolerance to re-make God as some kind of namby-pamby grandpa who loves without judgment. The Bible's image--a righteous God simultaneously infuriated at human sin and forgiving toward those whom God saves--naturally seems foolish to a rebellious culture. That's their problem.
Being right takes precedence over being appealing.
Indeed, many conservative evangelicals argue that the newer "soft-sell" (i.e., non-hell-first) techniques of evangelism are not only wrong but ineffective. Such goodness-of-God pitches, goes the argument, produce converts who expect that life as a Christian will be one blessing after another, full of health and prosperity. Disillusionment and bitterness soon follow, though, as these new converts discover that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Cancer, financial ruin, heartache--all of these affect Christians just as much as they affect anyone else. Thus the prosperity gospels (or Word of Faith theologies) get lambasted for offering a false promise and creating disappointed apostates convinced that the church is full of hypocrites and liars.
I support this line of argument. Any Christian pitch that promises wealth and comfort is in my book suspect, and I join conservative evangelicals in distrusting the prosperity or Word of Faith gospel movements.
But I would argue that the "hard-sell" fight-or-flight, avoid-hell evangelism is similarly ineffective.
I've criticized hell-first evangelicals for downplaying the full import of an eternity of unmitigated torture. Oh, the Way of the Master mentions hell, but it avoids dwelling on hell. To do so would be to underline the ludicrousness--the un-justness--of God's judgment. Even the worst convicts, the foulest offenders, receive finite punishments. Even for them, overt torture is distasteful. But Hell is God's place of torment for any and every offender, from the mass murder down to the occasional fibber, and it is infinite both in terms of sensation (hell is the worst, most unendurable pain you can imagine times a million) and in terms of time (hell lasts for ever with no reprieve). What possible offense--let alone a single violation of one of the ten commandments--could justify that punishment?
I submit that hell-first evangelicals likewise underplay the full import of Christianity. One of the defining features of evangelicalism, a feature with a longer legacy than even biblical inerrancy, is its picture of conversion as a singular experience. Evangelical testimonies typically revolve around an individual's moment of decision, the temporal point at which they become a Christian.
Now, this moment gets rendered in very particular ways depending upon the evangelical tradition. For some, the moment involves nothing more than belief in the saving act and power of Christ. For others, the moment involves "giving your life to Christ" or "accepting Jesus into your heart as Lord." For still others, the preferred language is "repentance," turning from dependency upon yourself and surrendering to the sovereign power of God to save you. These differences may seem minor to outsiders, but they can prove quite sharp, the source of vicious schisms and quarrels (more on that later).
Whatever the exact language--and nearly all evangelicals would insist their language involves faith, not works--the result ought to be a life lived for Christ. This is a vital point. Evangelicals will argue that no one can earn their way into salvation through good works or beneficent intentions. Humans by themselves cannot save themselves. Going to church, reading your Bible, following the ten commandments--none of that will save you. Only belief in Christ as savior can do that.
Nevertheless, the tacit understanding is that anyone who authentically believes in Christ (or whatever the exact term) will in practice strive to pattern their life in a way that results in church attendance, Bible-reading, commandment-following, etc. If someone makes a profession of faith (i.e., "gets saved") and then proceeds to live their life exactly as before, the legitimacy of their salvation experience is in doubt.
Now, evangelicals will divide on whether or not such a person is actually saved. Some are quite cavalier about weeding the true from the false converts. Others are hesitant to second-guess what the Spirit might be doing in the hearts and minds of others.
Regardless, however, the "normal" expectation among evangelicals is that turning to Christ ought to have consequences beyond the convert's essential salvation from hell. Turning to Christ, believing in Jesus's salvific act, ought to result in a deep and abiding change to the patterns of one's inner and outer life. It is a momentary decision with a lifetime result.
It's in the lifetime after the decision that I see the problem with fight-or-flight evangelism.
More tomorrow,
JF
Why?
Because, as Ray Comfort and other such hell-intensive evangelists insist, theirs is the only biblically supported means of sharing the gospel. They lead with conviction and fear of hellfire not because they think it's the most appealing or logical (by the world's standards) but because they understand the scriptures as mandating that the gospel be spread in that way.
To paraphrase their rationale: it's nice to talk about a loving God who wants the best for your life, but the Bible talks about hell, the lake of fire, and the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Hell's existence--the damnation awaiting humanity for its sin--is the controlling reality. Sovereign God ordains it, and only sovereign God can save a helpless humanity from it. To spread a gospel of love and ethics without highlighting the threat of eternal punishment is to corrupt the scripture, to go against doctrine.
Thus, in presenting a criticism about the lack of appeal of hell-first evangelism, I've missed the point. Its effectiveness in attracting the unsaved or in producing lifelong Christians is secondary. After all, it's the Holy Spirit, not the evangelist or her techniques, that enables conversion in the first place. The evangelist's job consists only of following what the Bible says to do, not to innovate new and better--hipper--techniques.
Churches and denominations go astray (in this line of thinking) when they borrow too much from the secular self-help culture of personal empowerment or liberal-left tolerance to re-make God as some kind of namby-pamby grandpa who loves without judgment. The Bible's image--a righteous God simultaneously infuriated at human sin and forgiving toward those whom God saves--naturally seems foolish to a rebellious culture. That's their problem.
Being right takes precedence over being appealing.
Indeed, many conservative evangelicals argue that the newer "soft-sell" (i.e., non-hell-first) techniques of evangelism are not only wrong but ineffective. Such goodness-of-God pitches, goes the argument, produce converts who expect that life as a Christian will be one blessing after another, full of health and prosperity. Disillusionment and bitterness soon follow, though, as these new converts discover that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Cancer, financial ruin, heartache--all of these affect Christians just as much as they affect anyone else. Thus the prosperity gospels (or Word of Faith theologies) get lambasted for offering a false promise and creating disappointed apostates convinced that the church is full of hypocrites and liars.
I support this line of argument. Any Christian pitch that promises wealth and comfort is in my book suspect, and I join conservative evangelicals in distrusting the prosperity or Word of Faith gospel movements.
But I would argue that the "hard-sell" fight-or-flight, avoid-hell evangelism is similarly ineffective.
I've criticized hell-first evangelicals for downplaying the full import of an eternity of unmitigated torture. Oh, the Way of the Master mentions hell, but it avoids dwelling on hell. To do so would be to underline the ludicrousness--the un-justness--of God's judgment. Even the worst convicts, the foulest offenders, receive finite punishments. Even for them, overt torture is distasteful. But Hell is God's place of torment for any and every offender, from the mass murder down to the occasional fibber, and it is infinite both in terms of sensation (hell is the worst, most unendurable pain you can imagine times a million) and in terms of time (hell lasts for ever with no reprieve). What possible offense--let alone a single violation of one of the ten commandments--could justify that punishment?
I submit that hell-first evangelicals likewise underplay the full import of Christianity. One of the defining features of evangelicalism, a feature with a longer legacy than even biblical inerrancy, is its picture of conversion as a singular experience. Evangelical testimonies typically revolve around an individual's moment of decision, the temporal point at which they become a Christian.
Now, this moment gets rendered in very particular ways depending upon the evangelical tradition. For some, the moment involves nothing more than belief in the saving act and power of Christ. For others, the moment involves "giving your life to Christ" or "accepting Jesus into your heart as Lord." For still others, the preferred language is "repentance," turning from dependency upon yourself and surrendering to the sovereign power of God to save you. These differences may seem minor to outsiders, but they can prove quite sharp, the source of vicious schisms and quarrels (more on that later).
Whatever the exact language--and nearly all evangelicals would insist their language involves faith, not works--the result ought to be a life lived for Christ. This is a vital point. Evangelicals will argue that no one can earn their way into salvation through good works or beneficent intentions. Humans by themselves cannot save themselves. Going to church, reading your Bible, following the ten commandments--none of that will save you. Only belief in Christ as savior can do that.
Nevertheless, the tacit understanding is that anyone who authentically believes in Christ (or whatever the exact term) will in practice strive to pattern their life in a way that results in church attendance, Bible-reading, commandment-following, etc. If someone makes a profession of faith (i.e., "gets saved") and then proceeds to live their life exactly as before, the legitimacy of their salvation experience is in doubt.
Now, evangelicals will divide on whether or not such a person is actually saved. Some are quite cavalier about weeding the true from the false converts. Others are hesitant to second-guess what the Spirit might be doing in the hearts and minds of others.
Regardless, however, the "normal" expectation among evangelicals is that turning to Christ ought to have consequences beyond the convert's essential salvation from hell. Turning to Christ, believing in Jesus's salvific act, ought to result in a deep and abiding change to the patterns of one's inner and outer life. It is a momentary decision with a lifetime result.
It's in the lifetime after the decision that I see the problem with fight-or-flight evangelism.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Salvation as th Offer You Can't Refuse
Back--after a week away in New York City. There I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), where I presented papers about the Creation Museum and about the "ex-gay" movement. More on those later.
I also had the opportunity to chat with some old friends about my work, and this blog came up. Specifically, I was having lunch with my former advisor (now friend) Sonja. I told her all about the ex-gays, the anti-evolutionist group Answers in Genesis, and of course about Ray Comfort and his Way of the Master (WotM). I even modeled for Sonja the standard WotM evangelizing conversation. Her reaction--as someone who isn't a Christian but who is unusually open to hearing other points of view--was pretty critical.
Her biggest problem with the WotM--well, one of her biggest problems--was one I've dealt with previously: how WotM evangelism blurs together the act of sin into the status of sinner. You've told a lie? You're a liar. You've been angry at a friend? You're a murderer.
"But no one can live up to that standard," she protested, falling easily into the WotM pattern. Exactly, I answered, telling her how Christ must therefore act as a substitute. "Ah," she said.
Note that comprehension did not lead to commitment. She understood the WotM's closed circuit of logic. Provided you accept the premises of WotM (God's sin-intolerant holiness, the indelibly contaminating effects of human sin, the efficacy of Christ's substitutionary atonement), the story more or less holds together. The problem, though, is that the logical functioning of the WotM's slavific narrative did absolutely nothing to persuade Sonja that the faith underlying it held any appeal. Indeed, she seemed a bit repulsed by the whole thing.
Or maybe I'm reading into her reactions. I know, in any case, that I'm repulsed by the cold absolutism of the whole setup. As I've written, the God of the WotM is capricious, tyranical, and by human standards narcissistic and unstable. God sets up an array of rules that are flatly impossible for humans to follow perfectly (don't be angry at someone--ever? Don't feel lust for anyone--ever?). If/When humans break them--even once, even in a minor circumstance,God condemns them to eternal torment (why eternal torment? Why not just annihilation? Or, better yet, why not just an OK-but-not-heaven world? My non-believing partner Alan often points out the comparative appeal of Mormonism: the Latter Day Saints have no hell in their theology). And the only thing that can save you is total commitment to God, who in a particularly bloodthirsty act, allowed God's son to be murdered in our place.
To reiterate my point once more: this is not an appealing God. WotM's insistence that God is loving and merciful falters in the face of the offer-you-can't-refuse threat of hellfire. Like a powerful mobster "graciously" agreeing not to shatter your kneecaps (or to shatter his son's) in exchange for your life's savings, the God of WotM operates like a divine extortionist. God's only appeal--the only one that wields persuasive force in the situation described by WotM theology--is God's omnipotence.
In that view, God's attractiveness to humanity is irrelevant. If God really is just as WotM describes God, then the hell/heaven setup is just the Way Things Are. Don't like it? Go create your own universe. Can't do that? Well, then, your options are quite narrow. You could simply reject the premises of the offer, decide not to believe in God, Christ, heaven, hell, etc. Or you could accept the premises but reject God's offer anyway in an act of existential rebellion.
Or--and here's the hoped-for result of the WotM--you could submit to the hand-over-fist (hand-over-fire?) offer of Christ. Perhaps you could convince yourself that the hand you take is benevolent and loving and try to live accordingly (though you still would have to remind yourself and others of the tough-love judgment that is God). Perhaps you could convince yourself that you are in fact truly wretched and unworthy in every respect except for the lone fact of being the object of God's regard. Or perhaps you simply surrender to the State of Things, living out a life defined by belief in Christ not because of any real desire to do so but because you truly don't have any other choice. It's Christ or unending agony. Might as well get used to it. You actively hope for some kind of theological Stockholm syndrome to set in to make your basic servitude-under-threat seem less like slavery to an unjust but irresistible oppressor.
Like I said, and like Sonja (and so many others who reject the WotM and related pitches) evinced: not an appealing God. More than that--the WotM and other fight-or-flight evangelisms produce unappealing Christians.
More tomorrow,
JF
I also had the opportunity to chat with some old friends about my work, and this blog came up. Specifically, I was having lunch with my former advisor (now friend) Sonja. I told her all about the ex-gays, the anti-evolutionist group Answers in Genesis, and of course about Ray Comfort and his Way of the Master (WotM). I even modeled for Sonja the standard WotM evangelizing conversation. Her reaction--as someone who isn't a Christian but who is unusually open to hearing other points of view--was pretty critical.
Her biggest problem with the WotM--well, one of her biggest problems--was one I've dealt with previously: how WotM evangelism blurs together the act of sin into the status of sinner. You've told a lie? You're a liar. You've been angry at a friend? You're a murderer.
"But no one can live up to that standard," she protested, falling easily into the WotM pattern. Exactly, I answered, telling her how Christ must therefore act as a substitute. "Ah," she said.
Note that comprehension did not lead to commitment. She understood the WotM's closed circuit of logic. Provided you accept the premises of WotM (God's sin-intolerant holiness, the indelibly contaminating effects of human sin, the efficacy of Christ's substitutionary atonement), the story more or less holds together. The problem, though, is that the logical functioning of the WotM's slavific narrative did absolutely nothing to persuade Sonja that the faith underlying it held any appeal. Indeed, she seemed a bit repulsed by the whole thing.
Or maybe I'm reading into her reactions. I know, in any case, that I'm repulsed by the cold absolutism of the whole setup. As I've written, the God of the WotM is capricious, tyranical, and by human standards narcissistic and unstable. God sets up an array of rules that are flatly impossible for humans to follow perfectly (don't be angry at someone--ever? Don't feel lust for anyone--ever?). If/When humans break them--even once, even in a minor circumstance,God condemns them to eternal torment (why eternal torment? Why not just annihilation? Or, better yet, why not just an OK-but-not-heaven world? My non-believing partner Alan often points out the comparative appeal of Mormonism: the Latter Day Saints have no hell in their theology). And the only thing that can save you is total commitment to God, who in a particularly bloodthirsty act, allowed God's son to be murdered in our place.
To reiterate my point once more: this is not an appealing God. WotM's insistence that God is loving and merciful falters in the face of the offer-you-can't-refuse threat of hellfire. Like a powerful mobster "graciously" agreeing not to shatter your kneecaps (or to shatter his son's) in exchange for your life's savings, the God of WotM operates like a divine extortionist. God's only appeal--the only one that wields persuasive force in the situation described by WotM theology--is God's omnipotence.
In that view, God's attractiveness to humanity is irrelevant. If God really is just as WotM describes God, then the hell/heaven setup is just the Way Things Are. Don't like it? Go create your own universe. Can't do that? Well, then, your options are quite narrow. You could simply reject the premises of the offer, decide not to believe in God, Christ, heaven, hell, etc. Or you could accept the premises but reject God's offer anyway in an act of existential rebellion.
Or--and here's the hoped-for result of the WotM--you could submit to the hand-over-fist (hand-over-fire?) offer of Christ. Perhaps you could convince yourself that the hand you take is benevolent and loving and try to live accordingly (though you still would have to remind yourself and others of the tough-love judgment that is God). Perhaps you could convince yourself that you are in fact truly wretched and unworthy in every respect except for the lone fact of being the object of God's regard. Or perhaps you simply surrender to the State of Things, living out a life defined by belief in Christ not because of any real desire to do so but because you truly don't have any other choice. It's Christ or unending agony. Might as well get used to it. You actively hope for some kind of theological Stockholm syndrome to set in to make your basic servitude-under-threat seem less like slavery to an unjust but irresistible oppressor.
Like I said, and like Sonja (and so many others who reject the WotM and related pitches) evinced: not an appealing God. More than that--the WotM and other fight-or-flight evangelisms produce unappealing Christians.
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Objections to WotM--Of Crime and Punishment
I've argued that one of the most popular on-the-spot evangelism techniques (exemplified by Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master") presents a God who, upon reflection, doesn't seem very loving. This is a God who stands ready to judge someone as worthy of an eternity in unimaginable agony for even the slightest infraction of God's law, a set of standards which no human can possibly live up to perfectly. If the story stopped there, then all of theology and human science would be directed toward investigating ways to assassinate this almighty tyrant, just as the resistance in George Orwell's 1984 resents Big Brother. But, WotM evangelists will say, the story doesn't end there. See, God sent Jesus to pay the price for our sin. All we have to do is turn to Him, professing Jesus as Lord (again, a scene from 1984 about Big Brother's wonderful mercy comes to mind).
I've presented three counter-arguments, apologias for the WotM, from the point of view of a WotM evangelist. Today I respond to those apologias.
The first apologetic approach tackled the allegation that Hell as a punishment for breaking God's law is unjust. It argued that Hell is a natural consequence, like getting frostbite when you go barefoot in the Antarctic. It's not a petty bit of revenge on God's part. In other words, God's law is a natural property of the universe, not a random bunch of divine whims.
My response: On several levels, the God's-law-as-neutral-condition-of-existence fails to satisfy.
Objection One: Let's say God's law (and its consequences) are neutral properties of the universe, like gravity or the strong nuclear force that keeps atoms from flying apart. That just raises the question of why God would create the universe defined by a law no human can keep. God's God, right? All-powerful? Well, an all-powerful God could surely have created a universe where either 1) there aren't transcendent moral laws to break; or 2) the consequences for breaking those laws aren't unending pain with no hope of respite--ever. The idea that God would create a universe specifically crafted to doom humans to Hell--except, conveniently, for the Christ escape clause (which, conveniently, involves eternal devotion to God)--that's repugnant.
Objection Two: The "natural law, not divine pique" argument doesn't wash. Gravity doesn't get angry when you try to defy it. God (in the WotM narrative) does.
From a purely inerrant/infallible, "take the plain words of Scripture seriously" sense, the idea that God doesn't get irritated or angry (or jealous) when people break his law isn't supportable. God gets angry--infuriated, even--all the time. Some of the imprecatory Psalms (that is, Psalms that explicitly wish violence or harm to come to people or nations) speak of God as taking positive delight in the agony of those God punishes. Or consider the famous words of Jonathan Edwards: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."
To their credit, I suppose, most WotM evangelists I've heard don't pretend that God isn't angered by sin. They argue instead that God's anger is just and right. "Lying, stealing, murdering, and the like are wrong. Of course God is right to be angered at us when we do such things."
This brings me to Objection Three: Even if we grant that God's law does provide a more or less useful of right and wrong, and even if we grant that our wrongdoing makes God angry, that it actually causes damage to our relationship with God, Hell is still over-the-top extreme.
As much as I've suggested that conservative evangelicals are hung up on the idea of Hell, I think that they largely fail to appreciate the philosophical magnitude of an eternity of unrelenting torment. Oh, hellfire and brimstone sermons (such as the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" I linked above) mention Hell, even describe it in lovingly gruesome detail. But in such sermons Hell functions as a fear button (or a guilt button) to make people receptive to the real point, the gospel. You show them just enough Hell to get them to convert. You don't dwell on it.
But do dwell on it for a moment. What possible sin or collection of sins deserves an infinity of torture? A human lifetime is only so long--say 100 years or so for extremely rare individuals. Even if that 100 years were filled to the brim with wickedness, surely after a million years or so in Hell (10,000 years for every year of earthly sin) would be enough. No? How about a billion years for every year of earthly sin? No matter what kind of calculation you employ, no matter what kind of punishment you can imagine, Hell is worse and longer.
And, for the record, I reject categorically the accusation here that I'm just substituting a limp-wristed, postmodern "no one deserves punishment or judgment" sensibility. "Liberals don't like the idea of Hell because liberals don't believe in standards." Poppycock! This liberal doesn't like the idea of Hell because Hell transcends any sane configuration of standards or transgressions or punishment. Hell isn't mere punishment. It's eternity in unrelenting pain.
What possible sinner, no matter how vile, really deserves that? WotM evangelists will occasionally invoke Hitler or Stalin (illustrating the evangelism corollary to Godwin's Law): "You wouldn't want Hitler in Heaven, would you? You wouldn't want rapists and child molesters going to Heaven, would you?"
Maybe not (though Jesus had quite a few parables that turn the tables on expectations of who gets to go to Heaven). But we're not talking about who goes to Heaven. We're talking about who deserves Hell. I submit: no one. Not even a Hitler. And if Hitler shouldn't be there, how much less should the proverbial "good person who only told a couple of lies but didn't believe in Christ"?
Hell is so extreme, such a hyperbolic response even to the very darkest human evil, that it's no wonder that it's one of the first facets of conservative evangelicalism to fall away (or perhaps morph into a metaphorical "separation from God" like in C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce or into an annihilationist idea a la Clark Pinnock) for many Christians as they step away from strict inerrancy. It's just too horrible to reconcile with any possible idea of God as loving.
Is this a human standard, this judgment that Hell is too much? Yes, it is. But all of my ideas about God--God as righteous, God as loving, God as transcendent, God as personal--all of them are constrained by my human imagination. And my human imagination simply cannot contain the idea of eternal Hell condoned by a God who is in any way loving.
More tomorrow, as I move on to counter-argument two.
JF
I've presented three counter-arguments, apologias for the WotM, from the point of view of a WotM evangelist. Today I respond to those apologias.
The first apologetic approach tackled the allegation that Hell as a punishment for breaking God's law is unjust. It argued that Hell is a natural consequence, like getting frostbite when you go barefoot in the Antarctic. It's not a petty bit of revenge on God's part. In other words, God's law is a natural property of the universe, not a random bunch of divine whims.
My response: On several levels, the God's-law-as-neutral-condition-of-existence fails to satisfy.
Objection One: Let's say God's law (and its consequences) are neutral properties of the universe, like gravity or the strong nuclear force that keeps atoms from flying apart. That just raises the question of why God would create the universe defined by a law no human can keep. God's God, right? All-powerful? Well, an all-powerful God could surely have created a universe where either 1) there aren't transcendent moral laws to break; or 2) the consequences for breaking those laws aren't unending pain with no hope of respite--ever. The idea that God would create a universe specifically crafted to doom humans to Hell--except, conveniently, for the Christ escape clause (which, conveniently, involves eternal devotion to God)--that's repugnant.
Objection Two: The "natural law, not divine pique" argument doesn't wash. Gravity doesn't get angry when you try to defy it. God (in the WotM narrative) does.
From a purely inerrant/infallible, "take the plain words of Scripture seriously" sense, the idea that God doesn't get irritated or angry (or jealous) when people break his law isn't supportable. God gets angry--infuriated, even--all the time. Some of the imprecatory Psalms (that is, Psalms that explicitly wish violence or harm to come to people or nations) speak of God as taking positive delight in the agony of those God punishes. Or consider the famous words of Jonathan Edwards: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."
To their credit, I suppose, most WotM evangelists I've heard don't pretend that God isn't angered by sin. They argue instead that God's anger is just and right. "Lying, stealing, murdering, and the like are wrong. Of course God is right to be angered at us when we do such things."
This brings me to Objection Three: Even if we grant that God's law does provide a more or less useful of right and wrong, and even if we grant that our wrongdoing makes God angry, that it actually causes damage to our relationship with God, Hell is still over-the-top extreme.
As much as I've suggested that conservative evangelicals are hung up on the idea of Hell, I think that they largely fail to appreciate the philosophical magnitude of an eternity of unrelenting torment. Oh, hellfire and brimstone sermons (such as the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" I linked above) mention Hell, even describe it in lovingly gruesome detail. But in such sermons Hell functions as a fear button (or a guilt button) to make people receptive to the real point, the gospel. You show them just enough Hell to get them to convert. You don't dwell on it.
But do dwell on it for a moment. What possible sin or collection of sins deserves an infinity of torture? A human lifetime is only so long--say 100 years or so for extremely rare individuals. Even if that 100 years were filled to the brim with wickedness, surely after a million years or so in Hell (10,000 years for every year of earthly sin) would be enough. No? How about a billion years for every year of earthly sin? No matter what kind of calculation you employ, no matter what kind of punishment you can imagine, Hell is worse and longer.
And, for the record, I reject categorically the accusation here that I'm just substituting a limp-wristed, postmodern "no one deserves punishment or judgment" sensibility. "Liberals don't like the idea of Hell because liberals don't believe in standards." Poppycock! This liberal doesn't like the idea of Hell because Hell transcends any sane configuration of standards or transgressions or punishment. Hell isn't mere punishment. It's eternity in unrelenting pain.
What possible sinner, no matter how vile, really deserves that? WotM evangelists will occasionally invoke Hitler or Stalin (illustrating the evangelism corollary to Godwin's Law): "You wouldn't want Hitler in Heaven, would you? You wouldn't want rapists and child molesters going to Heaven, would you?"
Maybe not (though Jesus had quite a few parables that turn the tables on expectations of who gets to go to Heaven). But we're not talking about who goes to Heaven. We're talking about who deserves Hell. I submit: no one. Not even a Hitler. And if Hitler shouldn't be there, how much less should the proverbial "good person who only told a couple of lies but didn't believe in Christ"?
Hell is so extreme, such a hyperbolic response even to the very darkest human evil, that it's no wonder that it's one of the first facets of conservative evangelicalism to fall away (or perhaps morph into a metaphorical "separation from God" like in C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce or into an annihilationist idea a la Clark Pinnock) for many Christians as they step away from strict inerrancy. It's just too horrible to reconcile with any possible idea of God as loving.
Is this a human standard, this judgment that Hell is too much? Yes, it is. But all of my ideas about God--God as righteous, God as loving, God as transcendent, God as personal--all of them are constrained by my human imagination. And my human imagination simply cannot contain the idea of eternal Hell condoned by a God who is in any way loving.
More tomorrow, as I move on to counter-argument two.
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
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Balance, Exhaustion, Resentment
Wuff. Fighting off a sore throat today, so please bear with me.
I've been working through how I experienced my childhood faith (Southern Baptist) as a kind of "fight or flight" Christianity. That is, my faith was to a large extent based in and sustained by a fear of hell and divine judgment. I've criticized that kind of faith for its tendency to foster anti-intellectualism, defensiveness, and--for lack of a better term--exhaustion.
The reason adrenaline surges in the physical world don't last long is that they wear down the body. People who live lives characterized by frequent-to-constant adrenaline rushes--folk in combat zones, people in abusive relationships, people with anxiety disorders, etc.--are at risk for developing all sorts of physical and psychological problems (from heart disease to post-traumatic stress disorder) as their bodies and minds suffer from the the constant biochemical strain.
I think something similar happens to people exposed to constant spiritual stress. If your faith depends upon an ever-active fear of hell, if your faith practice involves frequent confrontations with that soul-threatening possibility, what are the consequences?
Ideally, and this is what I think most evangelicals would argue should happen, the fear that originally prompted you to walk down the aisle and get saved moves aside, grows smaller to make room for the in-breathing of the Holy Spirit. You still have fear--as in awe-filled appreciation of hell's reality, God's judgment, and Christ's sacrifice--but this fear gets put into perspective by the overwhelming loving-kindness of God for God's creatures and by the "peace that passes understanding." You don't live a fight-or-flight Christianity. As you grow in faith, you learn to trust in God's promises, to recognize that God's care for you isn't dependent upon your feelings of a moment. Evangelistic fear, then, ideally leads to a life of humility balanced with faith, not a life of cringing or paralysis.
To be honest, I grew up knowing many, many evangelical Christians who were old in the faith and who lived something akin to this ideal situation. They believed in and reminded others of the reality of eternal judgment, but this reality didn't cast a pall over their lives or their faith. Let me say that I have a great deal of respect for that configuration of faith. Their example continues to guide me today, tripping me up in the most productive ways lest I be too cavalier in dismissing the very idea of divine judgment.
Be that as it may, though, I have to balance my experience with such evangelical saints with my experience of secular friends and acquaintances who have retreated from or avoided church. Such people reacted differently to the fight-or-flight evangelism. Somehow the balance between fear and comfort that others find eluded them. For many, church became little more than a guilt/obligation bank to which they were forced to return weekly to refill their spirits with reminders about how wretched they were. They just burned out on spiritual anxiety, cut down on their church attendance, and found--surprise, surprise--that life could be much more pleasant without all that anxiety.
For others--and it pains me to say this--the God of fight-or-flight evangelism just seemed too much like an abusive parent or lover.
This is one of the most pervasive and unacknowledged set of mixed messages that evangelicalism (Christianity in general, actually) fosters: on the one hand, we are to picture God via family metaphors--God the father, Christ our brother, or even Christ the groom for the bride of the church. On the other hand, though, we are taught that God utterly transcends human relationships, that God disrupts or overturns familial ties ("if any man does not forsake his father and mother for my sake..."). Now, I don't mean to denigrate paradox per se; my own faith embraces multiple paradoxes (e.g., God as three-in-one).
The problem here is that Christians can be awfully opportunistic in terms of when and how they use family-God or transcendent-God in outreach and apologetics. God is family when the evangelistic pitch is about God's love. But when you talk about God's judgment, God conveniently ceases to be family and becomes transcendent.
Unsaved Person (UP): "If God is a loving father" [and here we should remind ourselves that many, many people in the world do not experience their fathers as present or loving] "then why would he judge me worthy of an eternity in the fire?"
Christian (C): "Well, you have to understand. God is holy and perfect. Imperfection cannot stand before him. We don't have the right as humans to judge God's standard because God is the standard."
UP: "Now wait a minute. Is he a father or is he an omnipotent deity with no tolerance for imperfection?"
C: "Yes."
UP: "Uh-uh. Listen: My dad loves me. I know that no matter what I do, even if I hurt him personally, he'll keep loving me. He may be driven to cut off ties with me. He may even be angry at me. But he would never say, 'You should spend the rest of forever in unimaginable, unending pain.' How--by any definition--is that loving?"
C: "There you go, using human standards again..."
UP: "Yeah? Well how come my human standards of love are so much more loving than your God's standards?"
And here's the impasse. In the how-to-evangelize literature I've absorbed, in the sample evangelizing conversations I've heard (there are tons on iTunes), evangelicals have a really hard time addressing that question in a deep way. To reiterate it: how is it loving for God to endorse an individual's burning in hell for all eternity? How is it possible to imagine a God who would do that as someone we are to love and adore?
[For that matter, the UP might demand to know how it's possible for an all-powerful God to allow suffering here on earth. It's the classic question of theodicy--how can God be all-powerful and all-good when evil exists? Responding to that challenge, evangelicalism offers several pat explanations, mostly dealing with original sin and the fallen world. I see many problems with that kind of answer, but I'm going to bracket dealing with those for now--total cop out!--to deal with the eternity-in-hell version.]
Exploring the common evangelical attempts to address the loving God/eternal hell paradox to the satisfaction of unbelievers will be tomorrow's task.
JF
I've been working through how I experienced my childhood faith (Southern Baptist) as a kind of "fight or flight" Christianity. That is, my faith was to a large extent based in and sustained by a fear of hell and divine judgment. I've criticized that kind of faith for its tendency to foster anti-intellectualism, defensiveness, and--for lack of a better term--exhaustion.
The reason adrenaline surges in the physical world don't last long is that they wear down the body. People who live lives characterized by frequent-to-constant adrenaline rushes--folk in combat zones, people in abusive relationships, people with anxiety disorders, etc.--are at risk for developing all sorts of physical and psychological problems (from heart disease to post-traumatic stress disorder) as their bodies and minds suffer from the the constant biochemical strain.
I think something similar happens to people exposed to constant spiritual stress. If your faith depends upon an ever-active fear of hell, if your faith practice involves frequent confrontations with that soul-threatening possibility, what are the consequences?
Ideally, and this is what I think most evangelicals would argue should happen, the fear that originally prompted you to walk down the aisle and get saved moves aside, grows smaller to make room for the in-breathing of the Holy Spirit. You still have fear--as in awe-filled appreciation of hell's reality, God's judgment, and Christ's sacrifice--but this fear gets put into perspective by the overwhelming loving-kindness of God for God's creatures and by the "peace that passes understanding." You don't live a fight-or-flight Christianity. As you grow in faith, you learn to trust in God's promises, to recognize that God's care for you isn't dependent upon your feelings of a moment. Evangelistic fear, then, ideally leads to a life of humility balanced with faith, not a life of cringing or paralysis.
To be honest, I grew up knowing many, many evangelical Christians who were old in the faith and who lived something akin to this ideal situation. They believed in and reminded others of the reality of eternal judgment, but this reality didn't cast a pall over their lives or their faith. Let me say that I have a great deal of respect for that configuration of faith. Their example continues to guide me today, tripping me up in the most productive ways lest I be too cavalier in dismissing the very idea of divine judgment.
Be that as it may, though, I have to balance my experience with such evangelical saints with my experience of secular friends and acquaintances who have retreated from or avoided church. Such people reacted differently to the fight-or-flight evangelism. Somehow the balance between fear and comfort that others find eluded them. For many, church became little more than a guilt/obligation bank to which they were forced to return weekly to refill their spirits with reminders about how wretched they were. They just burned out on spiritual anxiety, cut down on their church attendance, and found--surprise, surprise--that life could be much more pleasant without all that anxiety.
For others--and it pains me to say this--the God of fight-or-flight evangelism just seemed too much like an abusive parent or lover.
This is one of the most pervasive and unacknowledged set of mixed messages that evangelicalism (Christianity in general, actually) fosters: on the one hand, we are to picture God via family metaphors--God the father, Christ our brother, or even Christ the groom for the bride of the church. On the other hand, though, we are taught that God utterly transcends human relationships, that God disrupts or overturns familial ties ("if any man does not forsake his father and mother for my sake..."). Now, I don't mean to denigrate paradox per se; my own faith embraces multiple paradoxes (e.g., God as three-in-one).
The problem here is that Christians can be awfully opportunistic in terms of when and how they use family-God or transcendent-God in outreach and apologetics. God is family when the evangelistic pitch is about God's love. But when you talk about God's judgment, God conveniently ceases to be family and becomes transcendent.
Unsaved Person (UP): "If God is a loving father" [and here we should remind ourselves that many, many people in the world do not experience their fathers as present or loving] "then why would he judge me worthy of an eternity in the fire?"
Christian (C): "Well, you have to understand. God is holy and perfect. Imperfection cannot stand before him. We don't have the right as humans to judge God's standard because God is the standard."
UP: "Now wait a minute. Is he a father or is he an omnipotent deity with no tolerance for imperfection?"
C: "Yes."
UP: "Uh-uh. Listen: My dad loves me. I know that no matter what I do, even if I hurt him personally, he'll keep loving me. He may be driven to cut off ties with me. He may even be angry at me. But he would never say, 'You should spend the rest of forever in unimaginable, unending pain.' How--by any definition--is that loving?"
C: "There you go, using human standards again..."
UP: "Yeah? Well how come my human standards of love are so much more loving than your God's standards?"
And here's the impasse. In the how-to-evangelize literature I've absorbed, in the sample evangelizing conversations I've heard (there are tons on iTunes), evangelicals have a really hard time addressing that question in a deep way. To reiterate it: how is it loving for God to endorse an individual's burning in hell for all eternity? How is it possible to imagine a God who would do that as someone we are to love and adore?
[For that matter, the UP might demand to know how it's possible for an all-powerful God to allow suffering here on earth. It's the classic question of theodicy--how can God be all-powerful and all-good when evil exists? Responding to that challenge, evangelicalism offers several pat explanations, mostly dealing with original sin and the fallen world. I see many problems with that kind of answer, but I'm going to bracket dealing with those for now--total cop out!--to deal with the eternity-in-hell version.]
Exploring the common evangelical attempts to address the loving God/eternal hell paradox to the satisfaction of unbelievers will be tomorrow's task.
JF
Friday, July 17, 2009
The Underside of Self-Centered Certainty
Thus continues my attempt to tease out for myself the differences between the certainty-anxiety combo I was exposed to as a youngster from what I think is a more productive, mature idea of faith. Yesterday I wrote about how that Southern Baptist version of faith-as-certainty can all too easily slide into a zone of self-centeredness. The hymn goes, "Oh, how I love Jesus/because He first loved me." But really, given the undercurrent of threat that saturated so much evangelical rhetoric, I wondered if "Oh how I love Jesus/because I don't want to burn" wouldn't have been more accurate.
I don't like the idea of Christianity's being presented as a get-out-of-Hell-free card, even such a presentation is only the initial pitch ("Better scared into heaven than comforted into hell," goes the logic). And yes, fear is often an effective short-term motivator. But the activated instinct for self-preservation generates a massive well of psychic gravity, warping other considerations, other elements of the Christian life. In my experience, this fear-distortion creates some unfortunate side-effects, particularly in terms of the Christian's relationship to others.
True confessions time: I remember once (well, several times) when in the course of explaining to some acquaintance the realities of heaven and hell I would meet with a "that's nice for you, but I just don't believe that" response on their part. Stymied at their apathy/agnosticism--how could someone not believe in, let alone not care about, hell?--I would more often than not retreat to a self-righteous, condescending-slow-head-shake: "Well, I'd hate to be you on Judgment Day. Guess we'll find out which of us is right then."
What happened there? I remember reflecting on those moments after they happened, knowing (with all the knowledge I then had) that I was right--I was going to heaven and they were going to hell. But still I knew that somehow I had committed a wrong, that something in my spirit had gone awry. I was supposed to be reaching out with love, leading this person to recognize their peril and act to let Christ save them. But I had ended in a place of pride.
More than pride--wounded pride. I was hurt that this person did not see the world the way I did, that they declined to take my word for the Realities Unseen that awaited them. I was certain, dammit! Didn't they see that? Did they think I was crazy or something? Didn't they know how hard it was for shy, nerdy me to expose myself like that?
And, going deeper, I recognized to my chagrin that part of my disappointment had to do with the fact that I couldn't count them on my list when I ascended to the pearly gates. Remember the Two Questions? I imagined God quizzing me in the afterlife: "Is your name in the Book of Life, John?" Yes, Lord. "Good. Now--second question: whom have you brought into heaven with you?" Well... I tried with ___, but he said no. "Hm. That's... disappointing. Come into heaven, I guess, my barely-adequate servant..."
Ugh. Like an Amway salesman who has to scratch a neighbor's name off his list of recruits after an unsuccessful pitch. To my credit, I suppose, I tried to militate against that notch-in-my-belt mentality by focusing intently on how much I wanted the person in heaven with me, how sad I would be (if one can be sad in heaven--I was vague on that) if they weren't with me in Eternal Bliss. And I did honestly want to share my Power-Droid-strewn heaven with everyone. Still, though: questions like "How many people have you led to the Lord this week?" are what passes for ice-breaking in some Southern Baptist circles. I wanted at least to have double-digits.
Beyond wounded pride and unsuccessful recruitment, though, I was threatened by this other person's unbelief. The knowledge of heaven and hell that formed the pretext for my faith was not mere trivia; it was the very matter that made up my worldview (that's a huge term, worldview--weltanschauung, and I'll be blogging a lot on that later).
I structured my existence--or a great deal of it, at least--around an active belief in the Final Judgment. Many's the morning when I would wake up, crane my neck up at my window, push aside the blinds, and try to catch a glimpse of open sky to see if it were ripped open. Whenever someone we knew died, I would always ask if that person had gone to heaven or hell. In times of fear (read: waking up from a particularly blood-curdling nightmare, certain I was about to be eaten by some slavering horror), I drew strength from the certainty that an eternal paradise awaited me.
For someone not to believe that--casually, calmly--shook me, made my certainty seem stilted and, well, a little crazy by comparison. It introduced the possibility that, in fact, the foundations of my worldview weren't actually necessary for everyone. And if that was the case, were they still actually foundations? Most of the time I didn't have to worry about that; I was lucky enough (if that's the word) to be surrounded most of the time by people who shared and fostered my worldview.
But evangelism requires outreach to those who are lost ("It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick..."). That meant that I was impelled to seek out and interact with people who did not necessarily share my worldview. But while the evangelical tricks and tactics for sharing faith I had learned functioned admirably to confirm to other evangelicals the basics of their worldview, I had surprisingly little to help me deal with someone who simply didn't buy the whole heaven/hell/Christ thing.
And so I resorted to the ugliness of pride: Just wait until my God comes back. Then you'll know. When you're burning up.
This kind of evangelistic ugliness, I'm convinced, is the flip side of evangelistic certainty, and it takes a variety of forms.
More tomorrow.
JF
I don't like the idea of Christianity's being presented as a get-out-of-Hell-free card, even such a presentation is only the initial pitch ("Better scared into heaven than comforted into hell," goes the logic). And yes, fear is often an effective short-term motivator. But the activated instinct for self-preservation generates a massive well of psychic gravity, warping other considerations, other elements of the Christian life. In my experience, this fear-distortion creates some unfortunate side-effects, particularly in terms of the Christian's relationship to others.
True confessions time: I remember once (well, several times) when in the course of explaining to some acquaintance the realities of heaven and hell I would meet with a "that's nice for you, but I just don't believe that" response on their part. Stymied at their apathy/agnosticism--how could someone not believe in, let alone not care about, hell?--I would more often than not retreat to a self-righteous, condescending-slow-head-shake: "Well, I'd hate to be you on Judgment Day. Guess we'll find out which of us is right then."
What happened there? I remember reflecting on those moments after they happened, knowing (with all the knowledge I then had) that I was right--I was going to heaven and they were going to hell. But still I knew that somehow I had committed a wrong, that something in my spirit had gone awry. I was supposed to be reaching out with love, leading this person to recognize their peril and act to let Christ save them. But I had ended in a place of pride.
More than pride--wounded pride. I was hurt that this person did not see the world the way I did, that they declined to take my word for the Realities Unseen that awaited them. I was certain, dammit! Didn't they see that? Did they think I was crazy or something? Didn't they know how hard it was for shy, nerdy me to expose myself like that?
And, going deeper, I recognized to my chagrin that part of my disappointment had to do with the fact that I couldn't count them on my list when I ascended to the pearly gates. Remember the Two Questions? I imagined God quizzing me in the afterlife: "Is your name in the Book of Life, John?" Yes, Lord. "Good. Now--second question: whom have you brought into heaven with you?" Well... I tried with ___, but he said no. "Hm. That's... disappointing. Come into heaven, I guess, my barely-adequate servant..."
Ugh. Like an Amway salesman who has to scratch a neighbor's name off his list of recruits after an unsuccessful pitch. To my credit, I suppose, I tried to militate against that notch-in-my-belt mentality by focusing intently on how much I wanted the person in heaven with me, how sad I would be (if one can be sad in heaven--I was vague on that) if they weren't with me in Eternal Bliss. And I did honestly want to share my Power-Droid-strewn heaven with everyone. Still, though: questions like "How many people have you led to the Lord this week?" are what passes for ice-breaking in some Southern Baptist circles. I wanted at least to have double-digits.
Beyond wounded pride and unsuccessful recruitment, though, I was threatened by this other person's unbelief. The knowledge of heaven and hell that formed the pretext for my faith was not mere trivia; it was the very matter that made up my worldview (that's a huge term, worldview--weltanschauung, and I'll be blogging a lot on that later).
I structured my existence--or a great deal of it, at least--around an active belief in the Final Judgment. Many's the morning when I would wake up, crane my neck up at my window, push aside the blinds, and try to catch a glimpse of open sky to see if it were ripped open. Whenever someone we knew died, I would always ask if that person had gone to heaven or hell. In times of fear (read: waking up from a particularly blood-curdling nightmare, certain I was about to be eaten by some slavering horror), I drew strength from the certainty that an eternal paradise awaited me.
For someone not to believe that--casually, calmly--shook me, made my certainty seem stilted and, well, a little crazy by comparison. It introduced the possibility that, in fact, the foundations of my worldview weren't actually necessary for everyone. And if that was the case, were they still actually foundations? Most of the time I didn't have to worry about that; I was lucky enough (if that's the word) to be surrounded most of the time by people who shared and fostered my worldview.
But evangelism requires outreach to those who are lost ("It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick..."). That meant that I was impelled to seek out and interact with people who did not necessarily share my worldview. But while the evangelical tricks and tactics for sharing faith I had learned functioned admirably to confirm to other evangelicals the basics of their worldview, I had surprisingly little to help me deal with someone who simply didn't buy the whole heaven/hell/Christ thing.
And so I resorted to the ugliness of pride: Just wait until my God comes back. Then you'll know. When you're burning up.
This kind of evangelistic ugliness, I'm convinced, is the flip side of evangelistic certainty, and it takes a variety of forms.
More tomorrow.
JF
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Self-Centered Certainty
So if I'm not against fear and trembling in faith altogether--if in fact I advocate a measure of destabilization and I've-not-gotten-this-yet in my faith practice--then what's my beef with the certainty/anxiety taught so consistently throughout my Southern Baptist childhood?
I should reiterate, before I switch to rant mode, that the negative aspects of the equation "faith=certainty and anxiety" function as tendencies rather than necessary attributes of conservative evangelical faith. They are pitfalls, excesses to which the faith I learned as a child and which I detect in much evangelical discourse currently are particularly vulnerable. Nor are these tendencies dark secrets whose existence evangelicals deny or hide. Like any mature discipline, evangelicalism itself boasts many thinkers and critics with a good grasp of evangelicalism's own limitations and weaknesses (see, for instance, Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind).
From my perspective, though, the primary flaw in the Falls Creek/Southern Baptist/Two Main Questions mode of certain-anxious faith involves its self-centeredness. As I mentioned in a previous post, it can seem sometimes like Christ is worth knowing (or buying into) for the material benefits He grants you. Know Christ and get out of Hell.
I will admit that such a pitch has the appeal of being quite effective. Heck, it worked in my case. If you're convinced (as I was) about the horrors of a literal hell, you'll want to do what you can to avoid it. The mass conversions ("decisions," as Southern Baptists call them) at Falls Creek and other such revivals testifies to the power of fear as a motivator.
But the self-preservation instinct's potency can be dangerous. The same impulse to save ourselves by believing in Christ at a revival is in other contexts the fight-or-flight mentality that shoves aside, tramples, and passes by those who otherwise need our help. The example of Jesus--if it's anything--is an example of someone willing to live against the grain of the pure self-preservation instinct. It rubs me wrong to have a brute desire not to burn at the core of my Christianity.
To paraphrase John 15:13, Jesus says that greater love has no one than this: that he or she lay down his/her life for others.
I'm reminded of a well-known parable (I've heard it attributed to St. Teresa, a 16th century nun) who imagined encountering a person carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a burning torch in the other. Inquiring as to what the person was doing, the traveler answered, "I'm going put out the fires of hell with this water, and I'm going to burn up the clouds of heaven with this torch. Then we'll see who the real Christians are."
So much of evangelicalism's main rhetorical tactic--the threat of hell--depends upon activating an instinct for self-preservation that I wonder what would remain of the faith if the afterlife factor were neutralized. Would Christianity be nearly so attractive to evangelicals if they didn't need it to avoid the Eternal Fire?
I'll get into this sometime down the way, but plenty of Christians have come to a place where they simply don't see how a literal place of eternal torment can function with a faith in the omnipotent, benevolent God. Hell becomes (in some interpretations) a place of instant and total annihilation rather than eternal torment (how often, such interpreters ask, do you throw something into a fire with the idea that it will burn forever and never be consumed?). In other lines of thinking, hell is not literal at all but a metaphor for present suffering or alienation from God.
For many conservative evangelicals, such a notion of a non-literal hell constitutes pure heresy. Take away Hell, they suggest, and apostasy and agnosticism or atheism is inevitable. Evangelical Christianity collapses without the certainty/terror of Eternal, Punishing Fire. And that's tragic, because--as any evangelical Christian will readily attest--Christianity is so much more than a tale of How I Avoided Eternal Fire. The certainty of hell, the fear of it, the centrality of it in evangelical Christianity tends to wipe out all other considerations, including and especially our Prime Consideration of Love for the Other.
A more disturbing thought experiment: imagine word came down from heaven of a New Deal: any Christian can trade places with an otherwise doomed non-Christian, going to hell in place of that person. Who would take that deal?
In all honesty, I can't say I would.
"Greater love has no one than this: that he (or she) lays down his/her life for another."
What if the "life" that Christ expects us to "lay down" is not (or not only) our present, material life on earth but our eternal life? I don't literally mean "you have to be tortured if you really love others" (though is this not literally what Jesus himself did?).
Rather, I wonder if Christian love requires us to come to a place where we relinquish our anxiety over our own eternal fate in the name of being Christ for other people. What is Christianity without the certainxiety of hell?
Healthier? More Christ-like?
More tomorrow.
JF
I should reiterate, before I switch to rant mode, that the negative aspects of the equation "faith=certainty and anxiety" function as tendencies rather than necessary attributes of conservative evangelical faith. They are pitfalls, excesses to which the faith I learned as a child and which I detect in much evangelical discourse currently are particularly vulnerable. Nor are these tendencies dark secrets whose existence evangelicals deny or hide. Like any mature discipline, evangelicalism itself boasts many thinkers and critics with a good grasp of evangelicalism's own limitations and weaknesses (see, for instance, Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind).
From my perspective, though, the primary flaw in the Falls Creek/Southern Baptist/Two Main Questions mode of certain-anxious faith involves its self-centeredness. As I mentioned in a previous post, it can seem sometimes like Christ is worth knowing (or buying into) for the material benefits He grants you. Know Christ and get out of Hell.
I will admit that such a pitch has the appeal of being quite effective. Heck, it worked in my case. If you're convinced (as I was) about the horrors of a literal hell, you'll want to do what you can to avoid it. The mass conversions ("decisions," as Southern Baptists call them) at Falls Creek and other such revivals testifies to the power of fear as a motivator.
But the self-preservation instinct's potency can be dangerous. The same impulse to save ourselves by believing in Christ at a revival is in other contexts the fight-or-flight mentality that shoves aside, tramples, and passes by those who otherwise need our help. The example of Jesus--if it's anything--is an example of someone willing to live against the grain of the pure self-preservation instinct. It rubs me wrong to have a brute desire not to burn at the core of my Christianity.
To paraphrase John 15:13, Jesus says that greater love has no one than this: that he or she lay down his/her life for others.
I'm reminded of a well-known parable (I've heard it attributed to St. Teresa, a 16th century nun) who imagined encountering a person carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a burning torch in the other. Inquiring as to what the person was doing, the traveler answered, "I'm going put out the fires of hell with this water, and I'm going to burn up the clouds of heaven with this torch. Then we'll see who the real Christians are."
So much of evangelicalism's main rhetorical tactic--the threat of hell--depends upon activating an instinct for self-preservation that I wonder what would remain of the faith if the afterlife factor were neutralized. Would Christianity be nearly so attractive to evangelicals if they didn't need it to avoid the Eternal Fire?
I'll get into this sometime down the way, but plenty of Christians have come to a place where they simply don't see how a literal place of eternal torment can function with a faith in the omnipotent, benevolent God. Hell becomes (in some interpretations) a place of instant and total annihilation rather than eternal torment (how often, such interpreters ask, do you throw something into a fire with the idea that it will burn forever and never be consumed?). In other lines of thinking, hell is not literal at all but a metaphor for present suffering or alienation from God.
For many conservative evangelicals, such a notion of a non-literal hell constitutes pure heresy. Take away Hell, they suggest, and apostasy and agnosticism or atheism is inevitable. Evangelical Christianity collapses without the certainty/terror of Eternal, Punishing Fire. And that's tragic, because--as any evangelical Christian will readily attest--Christianity is so much more than a tale of How I Avoided Eternal Fire. The certainty of hell, the fear of it, the centrality of it in evangelical Christianity tends to wipe out all other considerations, including and especially our Prime Consideration of Love for the Other.
A more disturbing thought experiment: imagine word came down from heaven of a New Deal: any Christian can trade places with an otherwise doomed non-Christian, going to hell in place of that person. Who would take that deal?
In all honesty, I can't say I would.
"Greater love has no one than this: that he (or she) lays down his/her life for another."
What if the "life" that Christ expects us to "lay down" is not (or not only) our present, material life on earth but our eternal life? I don't literally mean "you have to be tortured if you really love others" (though is this not literally what Jesus himself did?).
Rather, I wonder if Christian love requires us to come to a place where we relinquish our anxiety over our own eternal fate in the name of being Christ for other people. What is Christianity without the certainxiety of hell?
Healthier? More Christ-like?
More tomorrow.
JF
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Certainty and Anxiety in Evangelical Faith
So--by the time I was in my mid-teens, I had grown up about as immersed in Southern Baptist culture as one could be. By then, I was really, really sick of the evangelical definition of faith. Conservative evangelicalism, as I experienced it, tended to figure faith as a dialectic of certainty and anxiety. The parts of my faith that I knew I needed to have no doubts or fears about were simultaneously ones I needed to attend to constantly.
The result? Certanxiety--a swirling cluster of emotional patterns affirmed as essential to Christian life. Let's see if I can sketch out a few of these:
* The certainty of literal heaven/hell: In truth this is practically the same as the endorsement of the inerrant/infallible truth of the (Protestant) Bible, particularly basic stuff about the deity of Christ and the import of his advent, death, and resurrection. But in practice, the literal truth of Eternity tends to eclipse/precede/underlay those other truths. Why? Because the other face of the certainty about afterlife is...
* The anxiety about said afterlife. If you died right now, as you could at any moment [or, If Christ returned right now, as he could at any moment], would you awaken in heaven or hell?
From the Southern Baptist perspective, it's the Reality of Our Eternal Fate that moves us to begin (or, rather, accept) a relationship with God in the first place. A deep conviction about the fact of hell similarly motivates evangelism ("you wouldn't want your friends to suffer forever in the Pit, would you?"). Evangelism techniques often rely on convincing non-Christians of the reality of their ultimate destination (in Ray Comfort's oft-used analogy, if you're on a broken airplane that's going to crash, you convince other passengers to put on their parachutes by getting them to agree that the plane is doomed, not that parachutes make the flight more comfortable).
Even the vocabulary of conversion--salvation, getting saved--relies on the centrality of hell's literal reality. Now, for most Christians I know, evangelical and otherwise (for me, certainly), Christianity is more than a get-out-of-Hell-free scheme. But the certanxious emphasis on eternal punishment can sometimes make it seem like Christ and God are worth knowing only to the extent that they threaten me with/can save me from burning in unquenchable fire for all time. More on this later.
* The required amount of anxiety about that certainty: It isn't enough to be concerned enough about Hell to get saved. You must identify and cultivate a tense relationship to your own afterlife status, as expressed in the typical revival question, "Are you 100% sure about your eternal fate?" Anything less than total certainty suggests that you maybe-sorta don't have faith. Now, as I've said, this shouldn't be the case for Baptists who value the doctrine of eternal security.
Nevertheless, every revival sermon, every bible camp Friday night service, countless sermons and teachings I remember--all of these and more seemed designed to destabilize your own sense of eternal security. Yeah, you got saved early on in life, but was that an Authentic Experience? If it was, why have you backslid in X, Y, and Z ways? Why do you have doubts and questions about A, B, and C? Why aren't you more concerned or effective at reaching the lost? Are you "bearing Christian fruit"?
Many's the time when, after a particularly harrowing sermon, I'd be half-convinced that in fact I wasn't Christian enough, that I thought I was saved but I'd find--in a tragic reversal trope common to evangelical narratives--that in fact God will say, "Depart from me, ye accursed--I never knew you."
So. Christians were to be anxious about the certainty they felt about their fates. But (as a sub-paragraph to the law of anxious certainty), these demands for anxiety were coupled with repeated warnings about pride (don't be too self-confident about salvation) and fear (constant fear shows a lack of trust in Christ).
All of this certainxiety leads to one final dimension:
* The certainty of anxiety. Philippians 2:12b says that we are to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling." Evangelicalism of the Southern Baptist variety (and, from what I can tell, more generally) takes a literal view of this. Faith is like medicine. You know medicine works when it stings or tastes awful. You know faith works if it occasionally reduces you to tears at the fate you are sure to suffer without Christ. Part of life in the church, you can be sure, can and should involve a degree of anxiety provocation.
Pastors preach hellfire and damnation sermons not only to crowds of the unsaved but also (even primarily) to members of their own flock. Baptists believe in "once saved, always saved," but if you don't ever feel the need to walk down the aisle and rededicate your life, something's wrong. We are to be constantly reminded of the ultimate cause of our anxiety--Hell.
Hell, and the God who controls it.
More tomorrow.
The result? Certanxiety--a swirling cluster of emotional patterns affirmed as essential to Christian life. Let's see if I can sketch out a few of these:
* The certainty of literal heaven/hell: In truth this is practically the same as the endorsement of the inerrant/infallible truth of the (Protestant) Bible, particularly basic stuff about the deity of Christ and the import of his advent, death, and resurrection. But in practice, the literal truth of Eternity tends to eclipse/precede/underlay those other truths. Why? Because the other face of the certainty about afterlife is...
* The anxiety about said afterlife. If you died right now, as you could at any moment [or, If Christ returned right now, as he could at any moment], would you awaken in heaven or hell?
From the Southern Baptist perspective, it's the Reality of Our Eternal Fate that moves us to begin (or, rather, accept) a relationship with God in the first place. A deep conviction about the fact of hell similarly motivates evangelism ("you wouldn't want your friends to suffer forever in the Pit, would you?"). Evangelism techniques often rely on convincing non-Christians of the reality of their ultimate destination (in Ray Comfort's oft-used analogy, if you're on a broken airplane that's going to crash, you convince other passengers to put on their parachutes by getting them to agree that the plane is doomed, not that parachutes make the flight more comfortable).
Even the vocabulary of conversion--salvation, getting saved--relies on the centrality of hell's literal reality. Now, for most Christians I know, evangelical and otherwise (for me, certainly), Christianity is more than a get-out-of-Hell-free scheme. But the certanxious emphasis on eternal punishment can sometimes make it seem like Christ and God are worth knowing only to the extent that they threaten me with/can save me from burning in unquenchable fire for all time. More on this later.
* The required amount of anxiety about that certainty: It isn't enough to be concerned enough about Hell to get saved. You must identify and cultivate a tense relationship to your own afterlife status, as expressed in the typical revival question, "Are you 100% sure about your eternal fate?" Anything less than total certainty suggests that you maybe-sorta don't have faith. Now, as I've said, this shouldn't be the case for Baptists who value the doctrine of eternal security.
Nevertheless, every revival sermon, every bible camp Friday night service, countless sermons and teachings I remember--all of these and more seemed designed to destabilize your own sense of eternal security. Yeah, you got saved early on in life, but was that an Authentic Experience? If it was, why have you backslid in X, Y, and Z ways? Why do you have doubts and questions about A, B, and C? Why aren't you more concerned or effective at reaching the lost? Are you "bearing Christian fruit"?
Many's the time when, after a particularly harrowing sermon, I'd be half-convinced that in fact I wasn't Christian enough, that I thought I was saved but I'd find--in a tragic reversal trope common to evangelical narratives--that in fact God will say, "Depart from me, ye accursed--I never knew you."
So. Christians were to be anxious about the certainty they felt about their fates. But (as a sub-paragraph to the law of anxious certainty), these demands for anxiety were coupled with repeated warnings about pride (don't be too self-confident about salvation) and fear (constant fear shows a lack of trust in Christ).
All of this certainxiety leads to one final dimension:
* The certainty of anxiety. Philippians 2:12b says that we are to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling." Evangelicalism of the Southern Baptist variety (and, from what I can tell, more generally) takes a literal view of this. Faith is like medicine. You know medicine works when it stings or tastes awful. You know faith works if it occasionally reduces you to tears at the fate you are sure to suffer without Christ. Part of life in the church, you can be sure, can and should involve a degree of anxiety provocation.
Pastors preach hellfire and damnation sermons not only to crowds of the unsaved but also (even primarily) to members of their own flock. Baptists believe in "once saved, always saved," but if you don't ever feel the need to walk down the aisle and rededicate your life, something's wrong. We are to be constantly reminded of the ultimate cause of our anxiety--Hell.
Hell, and the God who controls it.
More tomorrow.
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