I mentioned yesterday that, during my family's hard time in the early nineties, my father (once a Southern Baptist pastor) found himself on the wrong side--the moderate/liberal side--of the denomination's shift to the right. No pastoring jobs were to be found. As a result, our family had to shift from "preacher's family" to "lay-folks-struggling-to-survive-during-a-recession family." My mother went back to teaching high school. My father went back to being a custodian at the town's university-affiliated Baptist church.
And that, too, was a very new thing for us as a family: being members of a church in which Daddy was not the pastor, Mama was not the pastor's wife, and my sister and I were not PKs.
There were other differences. The congregation was much larger than what we were accustomed to. The people--many of whom were faculty, staff, and alumni of the Baptist university across the street--tended toward a higher economic class and educational level than we were used to. The economic difference felt particularly sharp given our family's financial difficulties.
One more difference: although, as I have mentioned, my parents were never exactly conservative Southern Baptists, this church was decidedly on the liberal side of things. Even a Baptist university has some liberalizing effects on the culture. Women participated widely in church life (save, of course, for the position of pastor). The sermons tended toward thoughtful re-readings and explorations of scripture rather than literal "Bible-readings." And the youth leader...well, Paulann's influence on my faith was the second major shift to come from this period of my life.
Paulann at the time led the church's well-developed youth program. She taught Bible lessons, led guitar-accompanied sing-alongs, promoted various ministerial activities, took us to Falls Creek (and groused with us about the fundamentalist messages promulgated therein), and most of all shared her vision of who God is.
For Paulann, God's defining feature was passionate, unconditional love for each of us. Now, that was not anything I hadn't heard about previously. Everyone in my faith tradition grew up singing "Jesus Loves Me." John 3:16 talks about how much God loved the world. The love of God as witnessed in Christ's sacrifice on the cross forms a central narrative point in the salvation pitch of conservative evangelicals.
What made Paulann's version different? I think part of it has to do with that word unconditional. Again, the word itself as a descriptor of God's love was not unheard-of in my Baptist life. But somehow the divine love operating in the get-out-of-hell story that drove my childhood faith seemed less than unconditional.
In the Baptist image of God that I initially learned to serve, divine love was caught up in--even overpowered by--divine disgust with humanity's sin. Experiencing that love required that I internalize a deep sense of my own wretchedness, and an even deeper sense of obligation toward God's grandiose act of sacrifice on the cross to atone for my sins. That love felt sick, contaminated by negative feelings. I could never love God nor think about how much God loved me without also feeling guilty, enslaved to a debt I could never repay, and frankly frightened that this all-powerful Being might judge me insufficiently grateful.
Paulann's version of God's love purged that emotion. God loves you, she told us repeatedly, more than we could ever love ourselves. Before we knew God, before we knew anything, before we existed, God adored us. And we didn't have to--couldn't--do anything to make God love us. Nor can we ever do anything to make God stop loving us. God's love for us is fearsome, not a tame thing, passionate, refusing all limit or boundary, intrusive, insistent, constantly knocking at the door of our heart.
She defined for me what unconditional really is, what the fact of an all-powerful God who loves me really means.
And not once did she mention hell. Not once did we dwell on the final judgment. Fear for the destination of our eternal souls simply played no part in her argument about why we should follow the way of Christ. Not that this was a whatever-we-want-God-to-be faith. God's essence as love was for Christians an imperative to love. We were to love everyone as unconditionally and as fully as God. Sin, for Paulanne, was anti-love, disruptions of or failures to love as God does. Nor was love easy. Paulanne did not hesitate to press her youth to harsh self-reflections, honest confrontations with what was most difficult in our lives.
I remember one Friday evening at Falls Creek--not in the main tabernacle watching weeping preteens stumble down the aisle to be saved, but on the rooftop patio of our sleeping quarters. Paulann asked us to reflect on what God was doing for us in our lives, adding that she expected to hear us talk and would keep us there until we did. That night was one of the deepest, most soul-wrenching communal experiences I have ever had. There were tears, silences, admissions, questions, doubts, songs, lots of hugging. It left us shaken but stirred.
That was another thing I learned from Paulann: it was possible for love to be difficult, painful even, without being life/soul-threatening. We could doubt, we could get angry--we could even get angry at God--confident that nothing we could do or say, think or feel could separate us from God's all-powerful love. God's perfect love cast out fear.
This love that Paulann taught, this love that Paulann showed, this love that I realized had lain all along at the heart of my family--this was the love of God, the substance of Christianity.
This love saved my life some years later.
More tomorrow,
JF
Showing posts with label loving God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loving God. Show all posts
Friday, August 28, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Picard the Theologian: on Absolute Justice
Perhaps the most substantial apologetic defense of God-of-judgment has to do with the existence and necessity of transcendent moral standards. By God-of-judgment evangelism I mean the pitch outlined by Ray Comfort's Way of the Master (WotM). You lead with the law (i.e., all humans have broken God's law at some point), emphasize judgment (Hell), and then swoop in with the deus ex machina of Jesus (who gets humans out of Hell). I've criticized this style of evangelism for its portrayal of God as a kind of divine extortionist: God (in the WotM narrative) offers the free gift of being saved...from God.
Thus: God saves you from God. You need saving because God (in his righteousness) is furious at your violations of God's law. You get saved because God (in his love) sent Jesus to die in your place.
I've presented several counter-arguments/defenses I think that an evangelist who uses such a judgment-heavy technique might present. I've been spending the last few days rebutting these counter-arguments. The last counter argument: God's standards--whether we like them personally or not, whether we think they're fair or not--form the moral framework of the human universe. The unfailing enforcement of any truly uncompromised and uncompromising standard will strike individual humans as unfair in some way. Nevertheless, without such perfect standards, humans' own moral universe turns into a black hole of relativism. The truths we take to be self-evident, the transcendent ideals of justice and fairness that we use as a measure for any set of temporal laws--these are God's standards. We need a God who embodies and enforces them absolutely, or they vanish.
My response? First, let me say that I'm going to side-step tackling the issue of whether or not trans-historical, trans-cultural Truths (moral or otherwise) exist. That's an important issue, but engaging it in a general way would require more time than this one posting. This objection is rather about the justice of transcendent justice. Are moral standards at their best, their most good and right, when they operate as absolutes?
I answer, initially, by way of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In their first (and often most embarrassing) season, the crew of the next-gen Enterprise visited a world that seemed like a paradise: no crime, all pleasure, attractive and openly affectionate natives (like hippies, only with buff beach bodies and clean-cut hairstyles). While playing with some teen-aged versions of these natives, young Wesley Crusher (that scamp) accidentally crashes into a low fence and into a flower garden. The natives are scandalized; he didn't mean to do it, but he broke one of their rules. The police (more buff-bodied adonises) show up, shake their heads sadly, and pull out a syringe. It seems the punishment for any infraction, however slight, is instant execution.
The Enterprise crew of course intervene, only to find out that this planet's oddly strict moral code is enforced by a being the natives call "God. This being, who looks like some sort of whirling machine, appears right beside the orbiting Enterprise. Through some standard Star Trek camara-shaking/actors-stumbling action, we learn that "God" is quite powerful enough to crack the ship wide open if Wesley doesn't submit to his lethal injection.
Captain Picard eventually calls for a trial in which he essentially questions this planet's entire all-or-nothing law system (a clear violation of the Prime Directive, but--well--first season...). The sum of his argument: "There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute." The argument apparently made sense to "God," who let Wesley go and let the Enterprise speed away from hippie-adonis world for good.
It's silly, of course--allegory painted with a mile-wide brush. But even as a youngster myself, watching that episode for the first time, the lesson soaked in: absolute laws absolutely enforced do not yield justice. Indeed, Star Trek's suggestion (in not just this but many episodes, particularly in the original series) is that only machines operate with no regard for specifics of person or situation. Such machines are invariably the antagonists in the episode.
Is our imagination so limited that we can only imagine God as a holy and perfect judge by turning God into a kind of divine Justice Machine? Let's up the ante: does Jesus--God in the flesh--operate that way? Certainly the Gospels record Jesus passing judgment on lots of people. Certainly Jesus said that he is here to fulfill the law. Certainly he councils the rich young ruler to follow the ten commandments.
But Jesus's actions just as often involve his breaking the rules, bending them, or ignoring them altogether. He touches lepers, speaks to Samaritan women, drinks with tax collectors, heals on the Sabbath--the list goes on and on. Indeed, many of the judgments he passes are not of people failing to obey the holy law but of people who make the law their entire standard. Love, as Jesus practices it, does not lay out clear sets of rules about exactly what to do in every situation. Love acts more as an ethic--a set of concerns or questions than as a list of rules to be fulfilled exactly. Think of the Golden Rule (itself a well-known Jewish guide): not an absolute law but a situational ethic. How would I want to be treated in this situation? It forces you to question rather than outlining exactly what to do and not do.
Here, I know, the WotM people would say, "Of course Jesus shows us the way of grace rather than the way of the law. We've never said differently! People need the grace of Jesus, the mercy of God, because they can't live wholly by the law." But here's our difference: the WotM narrative frames the idea of absolute law/absolute judgment as the ideal--things would be best if humans actually did follow God's standards as laid out in Scripture exactly. Jesus's act of mercy and grace is, then, a divine Plan B, a safety net. It'll do, but it'd be better if it didn't have to be at all.
I see the Christ event as asserting something altogether different about holy law. Jesus doesn't criticize the Pharisees for (or only for) failing to fulfill the law. Indeed, the Pharisees were in Jesus's day the best and most law-abiding citizens (we won't even get into the anti-orthodox-Jewish tensions that inform the gospel writers). Jesus doesn't merely suggest that the law is impossible to follow; he argues through his words and actions that the law is incomplete even and especially when followed to the letter. It is in need of the fulfillment that is Christ and Christ's kingdom love--the solidarity and intimate contact with the other that God makes manifest. Jesus is righteous because he observes the law; he is Christ because he transcends it when the situation demands.
In the WotM narrative, God's machine-like, inhuman Justice necessitates God's act of mercy. In Jesus's own life as presented in the gospels, God's justice equals God's mercy.
Hm.
That's it for now. I'm headed off to New York City for the next week for a conference, so I may not be able to post as often. I'll be back soon, though!
JF
Thus: God saves you from God. You need saving because God (in his righteousness) is furious at your violations of God's law. You get saved because God (in his love) sent Jesus to die in your place.
I've presented several counter-arguments/defenses I think that an evangelist who uses such a judgment-heavy technique might present. I've been spending the last few days rebutting these counter-arguments. The last counter argument: God's standards--whether we like them personally or not, whether we think they're fair or not--form the moral framework of the human universe. The unfailing enforcement of any truly uncompromised and uncompromising standard will strike individual humans as unfair in some way. Nevertheless, without such perfect standards, humans' own moral universe turns into a black hole of relativism. The truths we take to be self-evident, the transcendent ideals of justice and fairness that we use as a measure for any set of temporal laws--these are God's standards. We need a God who embodies and enforces them absolutely, or they vanish.
My response? First, let me say that I'm going to side-step tackling the issue of whether or not trans-historical, trans-cultural Truths (moral or otherwise) exist. That's an important issue, but engaging it in a general way would require more time than this one posting. This objection is rather about the justice of transcendent justice. Are moral standards at their best, their most good and right, when they operate as absolutes?
I answer, initially, by way of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In their first (and often most embarrassing) season, the crew of the next-gen Enterprise visited a world that seemed like a paradise: no crime, all pleasure, attractive and openly affectionate natives (like hippies, only with buff beach bodies and clean-cut hairstyles). While playing with some teen-aged versions of these natives, young Wesley Crusher (that scamp) accidentally crashes into a low fence and into a flower garden. The natives are scandalized; he didn't mean to do it, but he broke one of their rules. The police (more buff-bodied adonises) show up, shake their heads sadly, and pull out a syringe. It seems the punishment for any infraction, however slight, is instant execution.
The Enterprise crew of course intervene, only to find out that this planet's oddly strict moral code is enforced by a being the natives call "God. This being, who looks like some sort of whirling machine, appears right beside the orbiting Enterprise. Through some standard Star Trek camara-shaking/actors-stumbling action, we learn that "God" is quite powerful enough to crack the ship wide open if Wesley doesn't submit to his lethal injection.
Captain Picard eventually calls for a trial in which he essentially questions this planet's entire all-or-nothing law system (a clear violation of the Prime Directive, but--well--first season...). The sum of his argument: "There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute." The argument apparently made sense to "God," who let Wesley go and let the Enterprise speed away from hippie-adonis world for good.
It's silly, of course--allegory painted with a mile-wide brush. But even as a youngster myself, watching that episode for the first time, the lesson soaked in: absolute laws absolutely enforced do not yield justice. Indeed, Star Trek's suggestion (in not just this but many episodes, particularly in the original series) is that only machines operate with no regard for specifics of person or situation. Such machines are invariably the antagonists in the episode.
Is our imagination so limited that we can only imagine God as a holy and perfect judge by turning God into a kind of divine Justice Machine? Let's up the ante: does Jesus--God in the flesh--operate that way? Certainly the Gospels record Jesus passing judgment on lots of people. Certainly Jesus said that he is here to fulfill the law. Certainly he councils the rich young ruler to follow the ten commandments.
But Jesus's actions just as often involve his breaking the rules, bending them, or ignoring them altogether. He touches lepers, speaks to Samaritan women, drinks with tax collectors, heals on the Sabbath--the list goes on and on. Indeed, many of the judgments he passes are not of people failing to obey the holy law but of people who make the law their entire standard. Love, as Jesus practices it, does not lay out clear sets of rules about exactly what to do in every situation. Love acts more as an ethic--a set of concerns or questions than as a list of rules to be fulfilled exactly. Think of the Golden Rule (itself a well-known Jewish guide): not an absolute law but a situational ethic. How would I want to be treated in this situation? It forces you to question rather than outlining exactly what to do and not do.
Here, I know, the WotM people would say, "Of course Jesus shows us the way of grace rather than the way of the law. We've never said differently! People need the grace of Jesus, the mercy of God, because they can't live wholly by the law." But here's our difference: the WotM narrative frames the idea of absolute law/absolute judgment as the ideal--things would be best if humans actually did follow God's standards as laid out in Scripture exactly. Jesus's act of mercy and grace is, then, a divine Plan B, a safety net. It'll do, but it'd be better if it didn't have to be at all.
I see the Christ event as asserting something altogether different about holy law. Jesus doesn't criticize the Pharisees for (or only for) failing to fulfill the law. Indeed, the Pharisees were in Jesus's day the best and most law-abiding citizens (we won't even get into the anti-orthodox-Jewish tensions that inform the gospel writers). Jesus doesn't merely suggest that the law is impossible to follow; he argues through his words and actions that the law is incomplete even and especially when followed to the letter. It is in need of the fulfillment that is Christ and Christ's kingdom love--the solidarity and intimate contact with the other that God makes manifest. Jesus is righteous because he observes the law; he is Christ because he transcends it when the situation demands.
In the WotM narrative, God's machine-like, inhuman Justice necessitates God's act of mercy. In Jesus's own life as presented in the gospels, God's justice equals God's mercy.
Hm.
That's it for now. I'm headed off to New York City for the next week for a conference, so I may not be able to post as often. I'll be back soon, though!
JF
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Objections Against the Love of God in Evangelistic Narratives
The original argument I made: the Hell-intensive evangelism (exemplified by Ray Comfort's Way of the Master) promotes an image of God as unstable, all-powerful bully. In righteous anger, God condemns people to an eternity in Hell; only by committing their lives to him (preferably in an attitude of gratefulness that the Eternal One would save wretches like them) can humans escape. If Superman demanded a similar deal from the citizens of Metropolis, he'd be a villain.
I made three counter-arguments, the second of which I'll deal with today. That second counter-argument? Hell isn't the point; love is. At the end of the day, God is God, and we're not. To overlook that is to underestimate the magnitude of the Christ event, where God substituted Godself for us, taking the punishment due to us. Realizing the miracle of the Advent and crucifixion, to suggest that God is a tyrant is extraordinarily shocking.
My objections to this counter-argument?
My first objection repeats a bit of a point I made yesterday: You can't overlook Hell. In the WotM narrative, it's Hell--the fear of punishment--that provides the appeal for Christianity, not love. The WotM pitch leads with conviction and punishment: you've broken God's law, which makes you guilty enough (somehow) to spend the rest of eternity without hope of reprieve in the fiery bowels of Hell.
At this point in the evangelistic encounter, provided that the person is A) convinced that they have sinned, and B) convinced that they're headed for Hell, then the rationale behind the way of salvation that God offers is irrelevant. So God saved us because God loved us? Great. But what if the story were instead that God had sent Jesus to save us because, say, God is addicted to human devotion and wanted a convenient way to weed out those humans who weren't willing or able to devote everything to him. That wouldn't be love, exactly, but a sick kind of need. Or what if the story were that God sent Jesus because he wants to make the devil angry by denying him a monopoly on human souls?
The thing is--it wouldn't matter. The Way of the Master would be just as effective--its motivational effectiveness falter not one bit--if evangelists substituted some emotion other than love (or no emotion at all) as the reason God sent Jesus. The WotM banks on people's fear of Hell, not on people's attraction to God's love. People want to avoid Hell, and if they have to devote themselves to Christ to do so, they will. It's nice that God saves out of love, but then it'd be even nicer if there weren't a Hell at all, wouldn't it?
Just to be crystal clear, I do believe that God loves us, and I think that love matters a great deal. My point, however, is that the WotM evangelistic strategy makes that divine love secondary, even superfluous.
Objection Two: So... does God love us or hate us? The WotM argues both simultaneously and makes no real effort to deal with that contradiction. God loves humanity, but hates sin (which according to scripture often slides right into God hating sinners, to be perfectly frank). When humans sin, somehow that mortal act overcomes God's divine love--at least to the extent that nothing but a divine blood sacrifice can restore the relationship.
What... what kind of love is that? Remember, in Christ's sacrifice--God's love for the world made manifest--we Christians are to see the pattern of love and servanthood that we are to take as a life example. I am unable to think of a moment in the gospels where Jesus ceased to love (Maybe the cleansing of the temple? Maybe calling the Pharisees a brood of snakes and vipers? Even those don't hold up). Even as soldiers crucified him, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them." He needed no blood sacrifice to reach out and touch the leper. He needed no blood sacrifice to speak to the tax collector. He needed no blood sacrifice to save the woman caught in adultery from judgment.
I have difficulty reconciling Jesus' example of love with the hatred (or at least the limited love) that the WotM argues shapes God's attitude toward us.
Finally: As powerful as the WotM insists that God's love is for humans, humans can imagine and practice a love that seems much stronger.
How is Jesus' love--this love that breaks laws, shatters barriers, cares about the enemy, frightens us with its intensity--how is this love at all like a love which, at the slightest sin, turns to hate? Even if you somehow say this love doesn't turn to hate, in the WotM narrative God's love at least weakens enough for there to be established a gap between humans and God, a gap that only Christ's death can bridge.
But think about any long-term relationship of love between humans, say a marriage of fifty years or a parent-child relationship. Are these relationships free from sins or betrayals? Certainly not. I'm no expert, but in my own relationship, I've learned that love--real love--depends upon how you deal with and recover from such mutual failures. Sure, sometimes those failures or betrayals are too much, and the relationship ends. But a relationship unable to endure even one little betrayal--well, that's more of a one-night fling, isn't it?
And aren't Christians, in their relationships to others, expected to be even more loving than that? "Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you." How many times must I forgive my brother? "Seventy times seven." We aren't as Christians allowed to have gaps established between us and others, even and especially those who wrong us.
My point: How is it that human love can in so many instances overcome betrayals that God's love (as framed by the WotM) seemingly can't? If our sin--any sin, no matter how trifling--separates us from God's love, doesn't that make sin (or, conversely, God's holiness--his intolerance of sin) stronger than God's love? Doesn't that make my own parents' love for each other (40+ years) and love for me (33, going on 34) stronger than God's love?
More tomorrow,
JF
I made three counter-arguments, the second of which I'll deal with today. That second counter-argument? Hell isn't the point; love is. At the end of the day, God is God, and we're not. To overlook that is to underestimate the magnitude of the Christ event, where God substituted Godself for us, taking the punishment due to us. Realizing the miracle of the Advent and crucifixion, to suggest that God is a tyrant is extraordinarily shocking.
My objections to this counter-argument?
My first objection repeats a bit of a point I made yesterday: You can't overlook Hell. In the WotM narrative, it's Hell--the fear of punishment--that provides the appeal for Christianity, not love. The WotM pitch leads with conviction and punishment: you've broken God's law, which makes you guilty enough (somehow) to spend the rest of eternity without hope of reprieve in the fiery bowels of Hell.
At this point in the evangelistic encounter, provided that the person is A) convinced that they have sinned, and B) convinced that they're headed for Hell, then the rationale behind the way of salvation that God offers is irrelevant. So God saved us because God loved us? Great. But what if the story were instead that God had sent Jesus to save us because, say, God is addicted to human devotion and wanted a convenient way to weed out those humans who weren't willing or able to devote everything to him. That wouldn't be love, exactly, but a sick kind of need. Or what if the story were that God sent Jesus because he wants to make the devil angry by denying him a monopoly on human souls?
The thing is--it wouldn't matter. The Way of the Master would be just as effective--its motivational effectiveness falter not one bit--if evangelists substituted some emotion other than love (or no emotion at all) as the reason God sent Jesus. The WotM banks on people's fear of Hell, not on people's attraction to God's love. People want to avoid Hell, and if they have to devote themselves to Christ to do so, they will. It's nice that God saves out of love, but then it'd be even nicer if there weren't a Hell at all, wouldn't it?
Just to be crystal clear, I do believe that God loves us, and I think that love matters a great deal. My point, however, is that the WotM evangelistic strategy makes that divine love secondary, even superfluous.
Objection Two: So... does God love us or hate us? The WotM argues both simultaneously and makes no real effort to deal with that contradiction. God loves humanity, but hates sin (which according to scripture often slides right into God hating sinners, to be perfectly frank). When humans sin, somehow that mortal act overcomes God's divine love--at least to the extent that nothing but a divine blood sacrifice can restore the relationship.
What... what kind of love is that? Remember, in Christ's sacrifice--God's love for the world made manifest--we Christians are to see the pattern of love and servanthood that we are to take as a life example. I am unable to think of a moment in the gospels where Jesus ceased to love (Maybe the cleansing of the temple? Maybe calling the Pharisees a brood of snakes and vipers? Even those don't hold up). Even as soldiers crucified him, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them." He needed no blood sacrifice to reach out and touch the leper. He needed no blood sacrifice to speak to the tax collector. He needed no blood sacrifice to save the woman caught in adultery from judgment.
I have difficulty reconciling Jesus' example of love with the hatred (or at least the limited love) that the WotM argues shapes God's attitude toward us.
Finally: As powerful as the WotM insists that God's love is for humans, humans can imagine and practice a love that seems much stronger.
How is Jesus' love--this love that breaks laws, shatters barriers, cares about the enemy, frightens us with its intensity--how is this love at all like a love which, at the slightest sin, turns to hate? Even if you somehow say this love doesn't turn to hate, in the WotM narrative God's love at least weakens enough for there to be established a gap between humans and God, a gap that only Christ's death can bridge.
But think about any long-term relationship of love between humans, say a marriage of fifty years or a parent-child relationship. Are these relationships free from sins or betrayals? Certainly not. I'm no expert, but in my own relationship, I've learned that love--real love--depends upon how you deal with and recover from such mutual failures. Sure, sometimes those failures or betrayals are too much, and the relationship ends. But a relationship unable to endure even one little betrayal--well, that's more of a one-night fling, isn't it?
And aren't Christians, in their relationships to others, expected to be even more loving than that? "Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you." How many times must I forgive my brother? "Seventy times seven." We aren't as Christians allowed to have gaps established between us and others, even and especially those who wrong us.
My point: How is it that human love can in so many instances overcome betrayals that God's love (as framed by the WotM) seemingly can't? If our sin--any sin, no matter how trifling--separates us from God's love, doesn't that make sin (or, conversely, God's holiness--his intolerance of sin) stronger than God's love? Doesn't that make my own parents' love for each other (40+ years) and love for me (33, going on 34) stronger than God's love?
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Evangelical Responses to the Holiness/Love Paradox
To review: the fight-or-flight evangelism pitch--a main weapon in the evangelical arsenal of outreach techniques--goes basically like this:
Step one: convince the person that they have sinned (i.e., violated at some time or another the Laws of God). [Technically, some evangelicals will clarify, it's the Holy Spirit that does the convicting here. The evangelist just creates the proper atmosphere for the Spirit to do its divine work.]
Step two: convince the person that their sin--no matter how big or small, no matter how frequent or infrequent--condemns them to an eternity in Hell because God is utterly holy. It's here that extreme descriptions/depictions of hell might come into play (evangelicals are divided as to the utility of such depictions).
Step three: share with them the avoid-this-horrible-fate opportunity that is Jesus. (i.e., God, not wanting you to suffer in Hell forever, sent his son, who was wholly innocent of sin, to suffer and die in your place.)
Step four: convince them to believe in (and, depending on the exact theology, ask for/accept) that salvation, generally through prayer.
Step five: Oh, yes--remind them that in doing so they've made what amounts to an eternal covenant with the living God, and that, as a saved person, they will spend the rest of their lives in service to him. This may entail church membership, baptism, daily Bible reading, evangelism, etc. But, even though human effort doesn't save, the lack of any effort or commitment to Christ post-salvation isn't interpreted as a good sign...
What's the problem? I look back on my younger years and realize that for a very long time, I had little to no problem with this narrative. It's just the Way Things Are. To think otherwise would be to engage in Doubt, which (a la the tenets of fight-or-flight Christianity) signifies a lack of certainty, which in turn bespeaks a faith deficit, which in turn may indicate that you aren't saved after all. Best not to think about it.
As I grew older and met people who didn't go to church, however, people who haven't been brought up in the faith, I came to see how certain elements of this narrative can seem contradictory, even nonsensical. Specifically: the eternity-in-hell element (God's holiness/righteousness) seems to jar with the God-is-love element.
Now, such confusion is nothing new to dedicated evangelists. They're used to hearing and fielding incredulity at the thought that God (who is loving) will judge people forever. I've heard any number of rationales that such evangelists use to explain this incredulity as well as various evangelistic techniques to get past it. Among these rationales/techniques:
People have a wrong idea about love: the world, goes this rationale, defines love as "total acceptance." But that isn't love. How do you convince an unsaved person of this? Use an analogy: If we were to see parents who said "OK, whatever" to anything their children do, refusing to punish or set boundaries, we'd call that irresponsibility, not love. God loves us enough, goes this logic, to give us free will and to experience the consequences of our choices. He loves us enough to let us choose heaven or hell.
People fear a judging creator, preferring a self-made God: Inevitably, evangelical sermons about the intransigence of people to the gospel will lament that in these postmodern times, people place such a value on "tolerance" that any sort of moral or ethical discrimination becomes unthinkable. People think that they are the ultimate authorities on right and wrong, rejecting God's authority. It's no wonder, then, that they have trouble with God's eternal standard. The thing to do, then, is to present them with some "moral absolutes" situations--Was the Holocaust wrong? Is murder wrong? Rape? Child abuse? ("You wouldn't want Hitler to go to heaven, would you?" I've heard several evangelists ask). By securing an "of course those acts are wrong" from people, the evangelist can then draw them into a realization that these are wrong because God said so. Moral absolutes=God=righteousness of judgment=need for salvation.
People refuse to see the love inherent in Christ's sacrifice: That is, people who think that the heaven/hell/salvation set up isn't loving need to think more about just how loving it is that God in his mercy deigned to incarnate himself and die in our place. Here the courtroom analogy often comes into play: "So--you're in court, and the judge has rendered a verdict: guilty. The sentence is Hell. But suddenly, someone, an innocent man, stands up and offers to take your place, to accept your sentence for you. How does this make you feel?"
There are other rationales and techniques for diffusing people's reticence to accept the gospel, but these three are some of the more common. The problem is--the logic behind these three avoids rather than confronts the very real tension between holiness and love in the main evangelical gospel pitch.
Indeed, there are times when I listen to very well-intended, gentle Christians make these sincere arguments, and my blood just boils.
I gotta give a "now wait a minute" speech.
That tomorrow.
JF
Step one: convince the person that they have sinned (i.e., violated at some time or another the Laws of God). [Technically, some evangelicals will clarify, it's the Holy Spirit that does the convicting here. The evangelist just creates the proper atmosphere for the Spirit to do its divine work.]
Step two: convince the person that their sin--no matter how big or small, no matter how frequent or infrequent--condemns them to an eternity in Hell because God is utterly holy. It's here that extreme descriptions/depictions of hell might come into play (evangelicals are divided as to the utility of such depictions).
Step three: share with them the avoid-this-horrible-fate opportunity that is Jesus. (i.e., God, not wanting you to suffer in Hell forever, sent his son, who was wholly innocent of sin, to suffer and die in your place.)
Step four: convince them to believe in (and, depending on the exact theology, ask for/accept) that salvation, generally through prayer.
Step five: Oh, yes--remind them that in doing so they've made what amounts to an eternal covenant with the living God, and that, as a saved person, they will spend the rest of their lives in service to him. This may entail church membership, baptism, daily Bible reading, evangelism, etc. But, even though human effort doesn't save, the lack of any effort or commitment to Christ post-salvation isn't interpreted as a good sign...
What's the problem? I look back on my younger years and realize that for a very long time, I had little to no problem with this narrative. It's just the Way Things Are. To think otherwise would be to engage in Doubt, which (a la the tenets of fight-or-flight Christianity) signifies a lack of certainty, which in turn bespeaks a faith deficit, which in turn may indicate that you aren't saved after all. Best not to think about it.
As I grew older and met people who didn't go to church, however, people who haven't been brought up in the faith, I came to see how certain elements of this narrative can seem contradictory, even nonsensical. Specifically: the eternity-in-hell element (God's holiness/righteousness) seems to jar with the God-is-love element.
Now, such confusion is nothing new to dedicated evangelists. They're used to hearing and fielding incredulity at the thought that God (who is loving) will judge people forever. I've heard any number of rationales that such evangelists use to explain this incredulity as well as various evangelistic techniques to get past it. Among these rationales/techniques:
People have a wrong idea about love: the world, goes this rationale, defines love as "total acceptance." But that isn't love. How do you convince an unsaved person of this? Use an analogy: If we were to see parents who said "OK, whatever" to anything their children do, refusing to punish or set boundaries, we'd call that irresponsibility, not love. God loves us enough, goes this logic, to give us free will and to experience the consequences of our choices. He loves us enough to let us choose heaven or hell.
People fear a judging creator, preferring a self-made God: Inevitably, evangelical sermons about the intransigence of people to the gospel will lament that in these postmodern times, people place such a value on "tolerance" that any sort of moral or ethical discrimination becomes unthinkable. People think that they are the ultimate authorities on right and wrong, rejecting God's authority. It's no wonder, then, that they have trouble with God's eternal standard. The thing to do, then, is to present them with some "moral absolutes" situations--Was the Holocaust wrong? Is murder wrong? Rape? Child abuse? ("You wouldn't want Hitler to go to heaven, would you?" I've heard several evangelists ask). By securing an "of course those acts are wrong" from people, the evangelist can then draw them into a realization that these are wrong because God said so. Moral absolutes=God=righteousness of judgment=need for salvation.
People refuse to see the love inherent in Christ's sacrifice: That is, people who think that the heaven/hell/salvation set up isn't loving need to think more about just how loving it is that God in his mercy deigned to incarnate himself and die in our place. Here the courtroom analogy often comes into play: "So--you're in court, and the judge has rendered a verdict: guilty. The sentence is Hell. But suddenly, someone, an innocent man, stands up and offers to take your place, to accept your sentence for you. How does this make you feel?"
There are other rationales and techniques for diffusing people's reticence to accept the gospel, but these three are some of the more common. The problem is--the logic behind these three avoids rather than confronts the very real tension between holiness and love in the main evangelical gospel pitch.
Indeed, there are times when I listen to very well-intended, gentle Christians make these sincere arguments, and my blood just boils.
I gotta give a "now wait a minute" speech.
That tomorrow.
JF
Friday, July 24, 2009
The Dual/Dueling Attributes of God: Holiness and Love
Yesterday I contrasted an image of God defined by unconditional love (from Good Goats) with an image of God defined by uncompromising moral standards promoted by Ray Comfort's 'Way of the Master." I risk breaking one of my own rules of writing about evangelical folk--don't shortchange their sophistication--if I don't point out that most evangelicals are explicitly aware of the the dual (dueling?) images of God as utterly loving and as utterly holy.
I just now ran into a good example of this, reading John W. Sire's latest (4th) edition of The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog (Downer's Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004). In relating the Christian worldview--Christian theism, as he labels it--Sire gives a quick outline of a Christian (actually, evangelical Christian) view of God. Namely, he asserts that God's goodness--the primary attribute of God--plays out in his love on the one hand and in his holiness on the other (28-29).
What Sire in this volume does not acknowledge, however, is that these two concepts seem in tension with each other. As a relational attitude, for instance, love suggests an impulse toward togetherness, intimacy, an impulse understood to work against or through barriers to that intimacy. A parent (ideally) loves his daughter even if she tells a lie. Romeo loves Juliet despite the fact that their families try to kill each other. God so loved the world that God incarnated as Jesus to suffer and die on the cross.
To be sure, human love has limits. Betrayals, insults, or even just mundane passage of time can dim or overpower the impulse toward togetherness and mutual well-being. But here God's--well, God-ness, God's deity comes into play. God, in the faith I was brought up in, loves no matter what; God is not willing that any should perish (and any means all). What can separate us from the love of God? asks Paul rhetorically. Nothing. No power on heaven or earth. We may sin. We may disappoint God. We may even make God angry, but--and on this my Southern Baptist upbringing was clear--God's offer of repentance is always available.
[A quick story from my childhood repository of sermon illustrations: A man lived a long life full of terrible evil. He lied, he cheated, he hurt others, he did just about anything evil there was to do. The moment before he died of old age, he cried out to God in his heart, "Oh, Lord Jesus, save me, a sinner. I believe wholly in you." And then he passed away. Now, this deathbed conversion caused some degree of consternation in Heaven. Various angelic lawyers insisted that, if anyone deserved Hell, it was this man. They pointed out that it was unfair in the extreme to let him off the hook, so to speak, after a lifetime of vicious evil just for a thirty-second conversion at the last moment. "I mean," one said, "just how much leeway do we want to give such a person?" At that point, Christ stood up, and the heavenly conference room fell silent. "We give him this much leeway," Jesus said, and extended his arms wide, creating the shape of the cross on which he died for all. Point of the story? Baptists believe in deathbed conversions. ]
So that's the God-as-Divine-Love side. The Holy God side, however, stresses the fact that God is, well, God. He is holy--literally set apart. His standards (or rather the standard that is God) are uncompromising, universal, and impossible for humans to live by perfectly. All have sinned, we are taught, and fall short of the glory of God (it's one of the Old Standard verses evangelicals memorize). Moreover, the holiness/unholiness line is absolute. One sin--no matter how small--renders you just as unholy as any other. Recall the Way of The Master--even a single white lie as a child makes you, in God's eyes, a liar.
The rationale? God, being utterly holy, can't stand unholiness. Or, as evangelicals would likely prefer it put, nothing tainted with unholiness can stand God. Thus Hell, in some kinder-gentler formations, becomes a place of eternal separation from God; that separation--plus the too-late knowledge of the intimacy you as a human could have had with God--is the real "pain and suffering" of Hell. Other evangelicals, uncomfortable with this soft formulation, insist upon the physical torment.
Either way, though, Hell serves a necessary adjunct to and expression of God's holiness.
The tension for secular folk comes when they realize that, at the end of the day, holiness in this configuration serves as a limit on a supposedly infinite love. God loves you, but that love is bounded by God's holiness. The loving invitation of Christ operates only as long as your physical life on earth, and then--poof!--the holiness takes over. For eternity. Beyond the span of a human life God will not (cannot?) go.
I should stress that I don't suggest that evangelicals are unaware of this tension, quite the contrary. I will suggest, however, that the fight-or-flight evangelism I've been writing about, the evangelism that stresses avoiding hell, downplays or outright covers up this tension. Indeed, this is one of the primary thoughtstops that evangelicalism tacitly imposes: that inquiring too deeply into the tension between holy judgment and unconditional love is itself a sign of disrespect toward God. "Hell only seems unfair to you because you judge with your human standards. God's standards are better." Or: "Job asked a question much like this. You know what God told him? 'Did you create the world and all its creatures? Who are you to judge the mind of God?'"
But there's the problem--the Way of the Master (which serves as a particularly well-articulated set of evangelism techniques) explicitly invites people to use their own standards, to put themselves in God's courtroom and guess what God will do.
When Way of the Master folk lead people through the "good person test" and arrive at the punchline,"Given that you're a lying, thieving, adulterous blasphemer, would God judge you innocent or guilty?" the other person will almost inevitably raise some protest. They might say, "Well, guilty, but I still don't think he'd send me to hell." Or they might even say, "Innocent, because--yes, I've lied a few times over the course of my life, but for the most part I've tried to be honest. And I think God will know that."
The Way of the Master evangelist inevitably has to correct this human view with God's: "Well, actually, you would be guilty and you will be going to Hell."
This standard is unsatisfying because, as it's presented, God's standard is less fair, less loving, than a human imagining of unconditional love and goodness. I almost get the feeling, in some of the conversations I've heard, that the evangelists wish that God were more like what secular folk imagine, i.e., able to forgive minor infractions in the context of a lifetime of basic goodness. That God isn't like that, that God is utterly holy, plants a seed of resentment.
More tomorrow,
JF
I just now ran into a good example of this, reading John W. Sire's latest (4th) edition of The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog (Downer's Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004). In relating the Christian worldview--Christian theism, as he labels it--Sire gives a quick outline of a Christian (actually, evangelical Christian) view of God. Namely, he asserts that God's goodness--the primary attribute of God--plays out in his love on the one hand and in his holiness on the other (28-29).
What Sire in this volume does not acknowledge, however, is that these two concepts seem in tension with each other. As a relational attitude, for instance, love suggests an impulse toward togetherness, intimacy, an impulse understood to work against or through barriers to that intimacy. A parent (ideally) loves his daughter even if she tells a lie. Romeo loves Juliet despite the fact that their families try to kill each other. God so loved the world that God incarnated as Jesus to suffer and die on the cross.
To be sure, human love has limits. Betrayals, insults, or even just mundane passage of time can dim or overpower the impulse toward togetherness and mutual well-being. But here God's--well, God-ness, God's deity comes into play. God, in the faith I was brought up in, loves no matter what; God is not willing that any should perish (and any means all). What can separate us from the love of God? asks Paul rhetorically. Nothing. No power on heaven or earth. We may sin. We may disappoint God. We may even make God angry, but--and on this my Southern Baptist upbringing was clear--God's offer of repentance is always available.
[A quick story from my childhood repository of sermon illustrations: A man lived a long life full of terrible evil. He lied, he cheated, he hurt others, he did just about anything evil there was to do. The moment before he died of old age, he cried out to God in his heart, "Oh, Lord Jesus, save me, a sinner. I believe wholly in you." And then he passed away. Now, this deathbed conversion caused some degree of consternation in Heaven. Various angelic lawyers insisted that, if anyone deserved Hell, it was this man. They pointed out that it was unfair in the extreme to let him off the hook, so to speak, after a lifetime of vicious evil just for a thirty-second conversion at the last moment. "I mean," one said, "just how much leeway do we want to give such a person?" At that point, Christ stood up, and the heavenly conference room fell silent. "We give him this much leeway," Jesus said, and extended his arms wide, creating the shape of the cross on which he died for all. Point of the story? Baptists believe in deathbed conversions. ]
So that's the God-as-Divine-Love side. The Holy God side, however, stresses the fact that God is, well, God. He is holy--literally set apart. His standards (or rather the standard that is God) are uncompromising, universal, and impossible for humans to live by perfectly. All have sinned, we are taught, and fall short of the glory of God (it's one of the Old Standard verses evangelicals memorize). Moreover, the holiness/unholiness line is absolute. One sin--no matter how small--renders you just as unholy as any other. Recall the Way of The Master--even a single white lie as a child makes you, in God's eyes, a liar.
The rationale? God, being utterly holy, can't stand unholiness. Or, as evangelicals would likely prefer it put, nothing tainted with unholiness can stand God. Thus Hell, in some kinder-gentler formations, becomes a place of eternal separation from God; that separation--plus the too-late knowledge of the intimacy you as a human could have had with God--is the real "pain and suffering" of Hell. Other evangelicals, uncomfortable with this soft formulation, insist upon the physical torment.
Either way, though, Hell serves a necessary adjunct to and expression of God's holiness.
The tension for secular folk comes when they realize that, at the end of the day, holiness in this configuration serves as a limit on a supposedly infinite love. God loves you, but that love is bounded by God's holiness. The loving invitation of Christ operates only as long as your physical life on earth, and then--poof!--the holiness takes over. For eternity. Beyond the span of a human life God will not (cannot?) go.
I should stress that I don't suggest that evangelicals are unaware of this tension, quite the contrary. I will suggest, however, that the fight-or-flight evangelism I've been writing about, the evangelism that stresses avoiding hell, downplays or outright covers up this tension. Indeed, this is one of the primary thoughtstops that evangelicalism tacitly imposes: that inquiring too deeply into the tension between holy judgment and unconditional love is itself a sign of disrespect toward God. "Hell only seems unfair to you because you judge with your human standards. God's standards are better." Or: "Job asked a question much like this. You know what God told him? 'Did you create the world and all its creatures? Who are you to judge the mind of God?'"
But there's the problem--the Way of the Master (which serves as a particularly well-articulated set of evangelism techniques) explicitly invites people to use their own standards, to put themselves in God's courtroom and guess what God will do.
When Way of the Master folk lead people through the "good person test" and arrive at the punchline,"Given that you're a lying, thieving, adulterous blasphemer, would God judge you innocent or guilty?" the other person will almost inevitably raise some protest. They might say, "Well, guilty, but I still don't think he'd send me to hell." Or they might even say, "Innocent, because--yes, I've lied a few times over the course of my life, but for the most part I've tried to be honest. And I think God will know that."
The Way of the Master evangelist inevitably has to correct this human view with God's: "Well, actually, you would be guilty and you will be going to Hell."
This standard is unsatisfying because, as it's presented, God's standard is less fair, less loving, than a human imagining of unconditional love and goodness. I almost get the feeling, in some of the conversations I've heard, that the evangelists wish that God were more like what secular folk imagine, i.e., able to forgive minor infractions in the context of a lifetime of basic goodness. That God isn't like that, that God is utterly holy, plants a seed of resentment.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Good Goats and the Way of the Master
One of my father's favorite books--and now one of mine--is Good Goats: Healing our Image of God by Dennis Linn (co-authored with his family). It's a thin, large paperback that resembles a children's book, complete with simple illustrations. But the theology behind it really captures some of my own thoughts and feelings about God.
Linn's basic thesis is that we come to resemble the God we worship. If we imagine God as a stern, distant judge who is forever ready and willing to find our faults (but who, lucky for us, is juuuust merciful enough to let the sacrifice of his son make up for it), then in all likelihood we too will become stern, distant, and judgmental in our relationships to others. That kind of God, Linn suggests, makes our faith unpalatable both to ourselves and to others.
As a counter-example (which I'm paraphrasing--get the book to read the original account), he describes an experience where he (in his professional role as a counselor) was talking to a mother who had lost her adult son. The mother was worried that the son, who had lived a life of unhealthy addictions and rebellion, was burning in hell.
Linn asked the mother to close her eyes and imagine that her son was there in the room before her. She did so. "Now," said Linn, "what do you most want to do right now with your son before you? What do you want to say?" The mother replied that, more than anything, she'd like to wrap her arms around her son and tell him how much she loved him--this despite all the hurt she'd gone through because of his choices. Gently, Linn suggested that surely God's love for her son exceeded even hers, and that she could--with full confidence in that divine love--imagine Jesus wrapping his arms around her son and saying "I love you."
His point: if we believe in a loving God, then surely we must imagine that God as loving us at least as much as the person in the world who loves us the most. This is not to say that love implies easy acceptance; it's not a doormat love. Just as love between people here on earth must occasionally involve creating hard boundaries, so to do I think that God allows people to choose separation. But a family cutting off ties with an addict relative who would otherwise manipulate or rob them is by no means comparable to a God who would condemn a person to eternal hell for their sins.
I get impatient with Christian proselytics that uphold "God is love" alongside "You're destined for hell." As an example--one among a host--take the "Way of the Master" techniques developed by evangelist Ron Comfort. I expect to spend a lot of time here and in my research analyzing Comfort's distinctive outreach techniques, but for now let me sketch out his basic approach. Comfort believes that most conversions in churches to day are false in that they do not involve true repentance. True repentance comes, Comfort argues, when an unsaved person becomes convinced and convicted that they are in fact wretched in the eyes of the Lord, destined to be judged guilty when held up to God's standard.
Comfort's evangelistic technique (the eponymous "way of the master") is to engage a person in a conversation that leads to some variation of the question, "Do you think you're a good person?" If the person says yes (or anything but "absolutely not"), Comfort invites them to test their goodness by comparison with the ten commandments. The conversation goes something like this:
"Have you ever told a lie? Even once, at any point in your life?"
Yes.
"What do you call a person who tells a lie?"
A liar.
"OK. Have you ever stolen anything?"
Yes, when I was a child.
"OK, so what do you call someone who steals?"
[Typically the person will say "A stealer," and Comfort will gently suggest "thief" as a better term].
"Have you ever used the name of the Lord in vain, like 'OMG' or something?"
Yes.
"You know, that's blasphemy, using God's holy name as a curse word, and God takes that sin very seriously. One more question: have you ever looked at someone with lust in your heart?"
Yes.
"You know, Jesus said that if you look at someone you aren't married to with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery in your heart. So--by your own admission, you're a lying, thieving, blaspheming adulterer. If you were to die right now and stand before God in his heavenly court of law, would you be judged innocent or guilty?"
Guilty, I guess.
And from there (provided they haven't started to argue with him or walk away), Comfort takes them through his understanding of the Gospel--repent of sins, believe in Christ, etc.
This is fight-or-flight evangelism at its finest. Convince the person that they are in immediate danger of the fires of hell and then give them the get-out-of-hell free card that is Christianity (Ray Comfort's brand of Christianity, mind you. There's another strand of evangelicalism that vehemently believes that preaching repentance as a component of salvation is heretical. See here, for example).
Again, from Comfort's perspective, life really is an emergency situation. Death could come at any moment. Or Jesus could return in the twinkling of an eye. Either way, judgment is upon us. A fight-or-flight response is therefore appropriate.
I have grave doubts, though, about how well the courtroom-judgment analogy in this context works in fostering a long-term relationship with the living, loving God. Rather than "the beginning of a beautiful friendship," the way of the master seems more like a shotgun marriage between the neophyte believer and the very-easily-pissed-off deity.
More tomorrow,
JF
Linn's basic thesis is that we come to resemble the God we worship. If we imagine God as a stern, distant judge who is forever ready and willing to find our faults (but who, lucky for us, is juuuust merciful enough to let the sacrifice of his son make up for it), then in all likelihood we too will become stern, distant, and judgmental in our relationships to others. That kind of God, Linn suggests, makes our faith unpalatable both to ourselves and to others.
As a counter-example (which I'm paraphrasing--get the book to read the original account), he describes an experience where he (in his professional role as a counselor) was talking to a mother who had lost her adult son. The mother was worried that the son, who had lived a life of unhealthy addictions and rebellion, was burning in hell.
Linn asked the mother to close her eyes and imagine that her son was there in the room before her. She did so. "Now," said Linn, "what do you most want to do right now with your son before you? What do you want to say?" The mother replied that, more than anything, she'd like to wrap her arms around her son and tell him how much she loved him--this despite all the hurt she'd gone through because of his choices. Gently, Linn suggested that surely God's love for her son exceeded even hers, and that she could--with full confidence in that divine love--imagine Jesus wrapping his arms around her son and saying "I love you."
His point: if we believe in a loving God, then surely we must imagine that God as loving us at least as much as the person in the world who loves us the most. This is not to say that love implies easy acceptance; it's not a doormat love. Just as love between people here on earth must occasionally involve creating hard boundaries, so to do I think that God allows people to choose separation. But a family cutting off ties with an addict relative who would otherwise manipulate or rob them is by no means comparable to a God who would condemn a person to eternal hell for their sins.
I get impatient with Christian proselytics that uphold "God is love" alongside "You're destined for hell." As an example--one among a host--take the "Way of the Master" techniques developed by evangelist Ron Comfort. I expect to spend a lot of time here and in my research analyzing Comfort's distinctive outreach techniques, but for now let me sketch out his basic approach. Comfort believes that most conversions in churches to day are false in that they do not involve true repentance. True repentance comes, Comfort argues, when an unsaved person becomes convinced and convicted that they are in fact wretched in the eyes of the Lord, destined to be judged guilty when held up to God's standard.
Comfort's evangelistic technique (the eponymous "way of the master") is to engage a person in a conversation that leads to some variation of the question, "Do you think you're a good person?" If the person says yes (or anything but "absolutely not"), Comfort invites them to test their goodness by comparison with the ten commandments. The conversation goes something like this:
"Have you ever told a lie? Even once, at any point in your life?"
Yes.
"What do you call a person who tells a lie?"
A liar.
"OK. Have you ever stolen anything?"
Yes, when I was a child.
"OK, so what do you call someone who steals?"
[Typically the person will say "A stealer," and Comfort will gently suggest "thief" as a better term].
"Have you ever used the name of the Lord in vain, like 'OMG' or something?"
Yes.
"You know, that's blasphemy, using God's holy name as a curse word, and God takes that sin very seriously. One more question: have you ever looked at someone with lust in your heart?"
Yes.
"You know, Jesus said that if you look at someone you aren't married to with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery in your heart. So--by your own admission, you're a lying, thieving, blaspheming adulterer. If you were to die right now and stand before God in his heavenly court of law, would you be judged innocent or guilty?"
Guilty, I guess.
And from there (provided they haven't started to argue with him or walk away), Comfort takes them through his understanding of the Gospel--repent of sins, believe in Christ, etc.
This is fight-or-flight evangelism at its finest. Convince the person that they are in immediate danger of the fires of hell and then give them the get-out-of-hell free card that is Christianity (Ray Comfort's brand of Christianity, mind you. There's another strand of evangelicalism that vehemently believes that preaching repentance as a component of salvation is heretical. See here, for example).
Again, from Comfort's perspective, life really is an emergency situation. Death could come at any moment. Or Jesus could return in the twinkling of an eye. Either way, judgment is upon us. A fight-or-flight response is therefore appropriate.
I have grave doubts, though, about how well the courtroom-judgment analogy in this context works in fostering a long-term relationship with the living, loving God. Rather than "the beginning of a beautiful friendship," the way of the master seems more like a shotgun marriage between the neophyte believer and the very-easily-pissed-off deity.
More tomorrow,
JF
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)