Still finishing up a research article due tomorrow... so another brief post.
Before the Steven Anderson side-track, I had been relating my (and my family's) transition from the conservative evangelicalism of the Southern Baptist Church to the mainline Protestantism of the United Methodist Church. In the course of that shift--about a three-year period in the early nineties when I was in high school--I discovered a love of theatre, I internalized a whole new perspective on God, and my father became a Methodist minister. Since Methodists are appointed by the conference bishop, our family moved from the mid-sized city near Oklahoma City to a tiny town near the Oklahoma/Arkansas border.
It was my senior year. Life in a small town was nothing new, really, but I had grown accustomed to the offerings of the larger city--a robust theatre program in the school, a large group of friends, a university atmosphere. The new town had a stoplight. As I said--tiny.
Nevertheless, my sister and I managed, with the help of a supportive teacher, to start a mini-theatre program there. I adapted to the school's smaller offerings (Spanish instead of Latin, for example), and made friends with folk there. Daddy settled into his familiar role as minister, though he had a new appreciation for how much more regularized the Methodist Church was compared to the Baptists. My sister found a social circle of her own, and she and I went back to being preacher's kids.
My mother, though, was not nearly as content. Having largely supported us through her teaching job for the past few years, going back to being "pastor's wife" as a full-time job did not hold special appeal. It's not that she loved teaching that much--she did not. But she had always been either a kind of informal co-minister with my father or a full-time breadwinner herself. In this particular church, the co-ministerial roles were already more or less filled by a capable congregation. Methodist churches, I find, tend to boast more self-sufficient congregations. Since the clergy itinerancy system rarely lets ministers stay for more than five years in one place, congregations often learn to keep the church's ministries afloat themselves. It left less for my mother to do.
As I've mentioned, my mother had a seminary degree herself--a Master of Religious Education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The MRE was at the time she earned it the "women's version" of the Master of Divinity, the terminal degree for ordained ministers. Since Baptists (holding to a literal reading of certain verses in the Bible) forbade women from ordination, the MRE was often seen as the obvious choice. Many times I heard Mama express some regret that she had not gone ahead and pursued the M-Div anyway.
It did not take long, however, for Daddy's immediate superior, the District Superintendent (DS), to notice both Mama's theological training and her desire to serve in the ministry. It was that DS who first encouraged Mama to pursue a path similar to that my father was already on: professional ministry as a pastor.
Now, the understanding at the time was that people coming into the ministry from other Protestant faiths, people who had degrees from non-Methodist seminaries, began as a "local pastor" (or "local licensed pastor," as they were called then). Local pastors have full authority of a minister in their local congregations, but they lack the "member in full connection" status of ordained Methodist clergy (e.g., the ability to vote as clergy at Annual Conference meetings). Instead, local pastors undergo a weeks-long condensed training and are assigned to a congregation or two. Daddy's plan was to serve as a local pastor until such time as he could update his seminary degree by taking a few more classes in Methodist history and polity from a nearby (sort-of nearby) seminary. At that time, his M-Div would be accepted by the UMC and he could pursue "elder" status--fully ordained membership.
The same process, our DS told us, could work for Mama.
Thus, soon after I entered college, my mother became a pastor, and I became a double PK.
I remain so proud of my mother for achieving her dream--realizing her calling--of being a minister.
At the same time as she was moving into her new role, however, I was making some other discoveries that greatly affected my faith life.
More tomorrow (when, Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll have finished the article to my satisfaction),
JF
Showing posts with label my childhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my childhood. Show all posts
Monday, September 14, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Shift 3: United Methodism!
Fiftieth post--woo-hoo!
So--the three key changes in my high school years that marked a transition from conservative evangelicalism to...a different kind of Christianity. First, there was theatre, and the attendant self-confidence/perspective/maturity it opened for me. Second, there was my encounter with a radical (for me) theology that stressed unconditional love rather than fear/anxiety of hell.
The third change: my family went Methodist.
As I've written, my father--an ordained Southern Baptist minister--was in the early 90s not able to find livable employment from a Baptist church. Churches were too poor and the denomination had become too conservative. Daddy found work instead as the custodian for the university-affiliated Baptist church in the town we lived in.
Around our third year of membership, the pastor of that church and his wife divorced. A common reality for many (even most) heterosexual couples in the US, divorce generally spells the death of a career as a Southern Baptist minister. Baptist standards specify that church pastors not be divorced.
The church's minister switched to the United Methodist Church, becoming initially a "Locally Licensed Pastor" (the term is different nowadays)--basically a lower-level certification for ministry in UM churches. With a few more seminary courses, though, the UMC would formally accept his Baptist credentials. He could become a fully ordained Methodist minister.
He advised my father to do the same, and thus began our family's transition into the Methodist denomination.
I had been only vaguely aware of what Methodists were beyond "that church over there" as a Baptist. Most of the places I had lived were so heavily Baptist (or half-Baptist and half-Catholic) that the other Protestant varieties seemed exotic. I soon learned, however, that Methodists were in fact quite different from Southern Baptists in organization, practice, and theology. In the interests of time, I'll summarize brutally:
1) Organizationally: Although they operate under the aegis of the Southern Baptist Convention and affirm its statement of belief (The Baptist Faith and Message), each SBC congregation is autonomous. Pastors are, as I've noted, free agents, hired and fired at will by individual congregations. Practice and theology between churches can vary greatly (some SBC congregations have even ordained women, facing disfellowship from the Convention itself).
The United Methodist Church operates connectionally rather than congregationally. Individual conferences are less autonomous, more tied to the approved procedures contained in the UMC-wide Book of Discipline. The UMC is structured into subdivisions called "Conferences," most of which the US correlate to a state (those in the North and West US organize regionally, e.g., the "California-Pacific Conference"). Each conference has a Bishop appointed to it. Bishops act mainly as managers or CEO's, assisted by several "District Superintendents," each of whom in turn is responsible for managing regional areas.
Ministers in the Methodist church are not free agents but lifetime employees of the Conference they serve. One of the Bishops' main tasks is appointing pastors to individual congregations. While the Bishop (in consultation with local and district personnel) try to create a positive match between pastor and local congregation, at the end of the day congregations do not wield the same hire/fire control over their ministers as do Baptists. Moreover, most Bishops like to rotate pastors every 3-5 years, meaning that almost all Methodist ministers are itinerant.
On the one hand, this means that sometimes it's difficult for ministers to set down deep roots in a single congregation (though most successful ministers develop such skills early in their careers). On the other hand, though, the connectional system communicates the sense that pastoral authority is not something subject to the whims of an individual congregation. Methodist ministers are to a certain extent freer to "afflict the comforted"--challenging their congregations to grow, to give, and to live in more Christ-like ways. It also means that ministers get a guaranteed position with a guaranteed wage--quite a change from the uncertainties of Baptist pastorates.
2) In practice (i.e., Sunday morning services), the Methodist church is more formal, more "high church," that Baptists. Their hymns are slower, fewer, and generally less exuberant than those sung in the average Baptist service. Methodists favor the affirmation of classical creeds of the church (e.g., the Apostles' Creed) and memorizing/reciting such creeds forms a standard component of worship services. They offer communion (what Baptists call "Lord's Supper") more often than Baptists do. They Baptize infants as well as adults, and they generally do so by sprinkling instead of dunking. They celebrate Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Advent and are on the whole more connected to the liturgical year than are Baptists.
But the biggest differences--the ones most related to my personal faith shift--have to do with differences in theology.
More tomorrow,
JF
So--the three key changes in my high school years that marked a transition from conservative evangelicalism to...a different kind of Christianity. First, there was theatre, and the attendant self-confidence/perspective/maturity it opened for me. Second, there was my encounter with a radical (for me) theology that stressed unconditional love rather than fear/anxiety of hell.
The third change: my family went Methodist.
As I've written, my father--an ordained Southern Baptist minister--was in the early 90s not able to find livable employment from a Baptist church. Churches were too poor and the denomination had become too conservative. Daddy found work instead as the custodian for the university-affiliated Baptist church in the town we lived in.
Around our third year of membership, the pastor of that church and his wife divorced. A common reality for many (even most) heterosexual couples in the US, divorce generally spells the death of a career as a Southern Baptist minister. Baptist standards specify that church pastors not be divorced.
The church's minister switched to the United Methodist Church, becoming initially a "Locally Licensed Pastor" (the term is different nowadays)--basically a lower-level certification for ministry in UM churches. With a few more seminary courses, though, the UMC would formally accept his Baptist credentials. He could become a fully ordained Methodist minister.
He advised my father to do the same, and thus began our family's transition into the Methodist denomination.
I had been only vaguely aware of what Methodists were beyond "that church over there" as a Baptist. Most of the places I had lived were so heavily Baptist (or half-Baptist and half-Catholic) that the other Protestant varieties seemed exotic. I soon learned, however, that Methodists were in fact quite different from Southern Baptists in organization, practice, and theology. In the interests of time, I'll summarize brutally:
1) Organizationally: Although they operate under the aegis of the Southern Baptist Convention and affirm its statement of belief (The Baptist Faith and Message), each SBC congregation is autonomous. Pastors are, as I've noted, free agents, hired and fired at will by individual congregations. Practice and theology between churches can vary greatly (some SBC congregations have even ordained women, facing disfellowship from the Convention itself).
The United Methodist Church operates connectionally rather than congregationally. Individual conferences are less autonomous, more tied to the approved procedures contained in the UMC-wide Book of Discipline. The UMC is structured into subdivisions called "Conferences," most of which the US correlate to a state (those in the North and West US organize regionally, e.g., the "California-Pacific Conference"). Each conference has a Bishop appointed to it. Bishops act mainly as managers or CEO's, assisted by several "District Superintendents," each of whom in turn is responsible for managing regional areas.
Ministers in the Methodist church are not free agents but lifetime employees of the Conference they serve. One of the Bishops' main tasks is appointing pastors to individual congregations. While the Bishop (in consultation with local and district personnel) try to create a positive match between pastor and local congregation, at the end of the day congregations do not wield the same hire/fire control over their ministers as do Baptists. Moreover, most Bishops like to rotate pastors every 3-5 years, meaning that almost all Methodist ministers are itinerant.
On the one hand, this means that sometimes it's difficult for ministers to set down deep roots in a single congregation (though most successful ministers develop such skills early in their careers). On the other hand, though, the connectional system communicates the sense that pastoral authority is not something subject to the whims of an individual congregation. Methodist ministers are to a certain extent freer to "afflict the comforted"--challenging their congregations to grow, to give, and to live in more Christ-like ways. It also means that ministers get a guaranteed position with a guaranteed wage--quite a change from the uncertainties of Baptist pastorates.
2) In practice (i.e., Sunday morning services), the Methodist church is more formal, more "high church," that Baptists. Their hymns are slower, fewer, and generally less exuberant than those sung in the average Baptist service. Methodists favor the affirmation of classical creeds of the church (e.g., the Apostles' Creed) and memorizing/reciting such creeds forms a standard component of worship services. They offer communion (what Baptists call "Lord's Supper") more often than Baptists do. They Baptize infants as well as adults, and they generally do so by sprinkling instead of dunking. They celebrate Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Advent and are on the whole more connected to the liturgical year than are Baptists.
But the biggest differences--the ones most related to my personal faith shift--have to do with differences in theology.
More tomorrow,
JF
Friday, August 28, 2009
Big Shifts in my Faith: Youth Groups and Unconditional Love
I mentioned yesterday that, during my family's hard time in the early nineties, my father (once a Southern Baptist pastor) found himself on the wrong side--the moderate/liberal side--of the denomination's shift to the right. No pastoring jobs were to be found. As a result, our family had to shift from "preacher's family" to "lay-folks-struggling-to-survive-during-a-recession family." My mother went back to teaching high school. My father went back to being a custodian at the town's university-affiliated Baptist church.
And that, too, was a very new thing for us as a family: being members of a church in which Daddy was not the pastor, Mama was not the pastor's wife, and my sister and I were not PKs.
There were other differences. The congregation was much larger than what we were accustomed to. The people--many of whom were faculty, staff, and alumni of the Baptist university across the street--tended toward a higher economic class and educational level than we were used to. The economic difference felt particularly sharp given our family's financial difficulties.
One more difference: although, as I have mentioned, my parents were never exactly conservative Southern Baptists, this church was decidedly on the liberal side of things. Even a Baptist university has some liberalizing effects on the culture. Women participated widely in church life (save, of course, for the position of pastor). The sermons tended toward thoughtful re-readings and explorations of scripture rather than literal "Bible-readings." And the youth leader...well, Paulann's influence on my faith was the second major shift to come from this period of my life.
Paulann at the time led the church's well-developed youth program. She taught Bible lessons, led guitar-accompanied sing-alongs, promoted various ministerial activities, took us to Falls Creek (and groused with us about the fundamentalist messages promulgated therein), and most of all shared her vision of who God is.
For Paulann, God's defining feature was passionate, unconditional love for each of us. Now, that was not anything I hadn't heard about previously. Everyone in my faith tradition grew up singing "Jesus Loves Me." John 3:16 talks about how much God loved the world. The love of God as witnessed in Christ's sacrifice on the cross forms a central narrative point in the salvation pitch of conservative evangelicals.
What made Paulann's version different? I think part of it has to do with that word unconditional. Again, the word itself as a descriptor of God's love was not unheard-of in my Baptist life. But somehow the divine love operating in the get-out-of-hell story that drove my childhood faith seemed less than unconditional.
In the Baptist image of God that I initially learned to serve, divine love was caught up in--even overpowered by--divine disgust with humanity's sin. Experiencing that love required that I internalize a deep sense of my own wretchedness, and an even deeper sense of obligation toward God's grandiose act of sacrifice on the cross to atone for my sins. That love felt sick, contaminated by negative feelings. I could never love God nor think about how much God loved me without also feeling guilty, enslaved to a debt I could never repay, and frankly frightened that this all-powerful Being might judge me insufficiently grateful.
Paulann's version of God's love purged that emotion. God loves you, she told us repeatedly, more than we could ever love ourselves. Before we knew God, before we knew anything, before we existed, God adored us. And we didn't have to--couldn't--do anything to make God love us. Nor can we ever do anything to make God stop loving us. God's love for us is fearsome, not a tame thing, passionate, refusing all limit or boundary, intrusive, insistent, constantly knocking at the door of our heart.
She defined for me what unconditional really is, what the fact of an all-powerful God who loves me really means.
And not once did she mention hell. Not once did we dwell on the final judgment. Fear for the destination of our eternal souls simply played no part in her argument about why we should follow the way of Christ. Not that this was a whatever-we-want-God-to-be faith. God's essence as love was for Christians an imperative to love. We were to love everyone as unconditionally and as fully as God. Sin, for Paulanne, was anti-love, disruptions of or failures to love as God does. Nor was love easy. Paulanne did not hesitate to press her youth to harsh self-reflections, honest confrontations with what was most difficult in our lives.
I remember one Friday evening at Falls Creek--not in the main tabernacle watching weeping preteens stumble down the aisle to be saved, but on the rooftop patio of our sleeping quarters. Paulann asked us to reflect on what God was doing for us in our lives, adding that she expected to hear us talk and would keep us there until we did. That night was one of the deepest, most soul-wrenching communal experiences I have ever had. There were tears, silences, admissions, questions, doubts, songs, lots of hugging. It left us shaken but stirred.
That was another thing I learned from Paulann: it was possible for love to be difficult, painful even, without being life/soul-threatening. We could doubt, we could get angry--we could even get angry at God--confident that nothing we could do or say, think or feel could separate us from God's all-powerful love. God's perfect love cast out fear.
This love that Paulann taught, this love that Paulann showed, this love that I realized had lain all along at the heart of my family--this was the love of God, the substance of Christianity.
This love saved my life some years later.
More tomorrow,
JF
And that, too, was a very new thing for us as a family: being members of a church in which Daddy was not the pastor, Mama was not the pastor's wife, and my sister and I were not PKs.
There were other differences. The congregation was much larger than what we were accustomed to. The people--many of whom were faculty, staff, and alumni of the Baptist university across the street--tended toward a higher economic class and educational level than we were used to. The economic difference felt particularly sharp given our family's financial difficulties.
One more difference: although, as I have mentioned, my parents were never exactly conservative Southern Baptists, this church was decidedly on the liberal side of things. Even a Baptist university has some liberalizing effects on the culture. Women participated widely in church life (save, of course, for the position of pastor). The sermons tended toward thoughtful re-readings and explorations of scripture rather than literal "Bible-readings." And the youth leader...well, Paulann's influence on my faith was the second major shift to come from this period of my life.
Paulann at the time led the church's well-developed youth program. She taught Bible lessons, led guitar-accompanied sing-alongs, promoted various ministerial activities, took us to Falls Creek (and groused with us about the fundamentalist messages promulgated therein), and most of all shared her vision of who God is.
For Paulann, God's defining feature was passionate, unconditional love for each of us. Now, that was not anything I hadn't heard about previously. Everyone in my faith tradition grew up singing "Jesus Loves Me." John 3:16 talks about how much God loved the world. The love of God as witnessed in Christ's sacrifice on the cross forms a central narrative point in the salvation pitch of conservative evangelicals.
What made Paulann's version different? I think part of it has to do with that word unconditional. Again, the word itself as a descriptor of God's love was not unheard-of in my Baptist life. But somehow the divine love operating in the get-out-of-hell story that drove my childhood faith seemed less than unconditional.
In the Baptist image of God that I initially learned to serve, divine love was caught up in--even overpowered by--divine disgust with humanity's sin. Experiencing that love required that I internalize a deep sense of my own wretchedness, and an even deeper sense of obligation toward God's grandiose act of sacrifice on the cross to atone for my sins. That love felt sick, contaminated by negative feelings. I could never love God nor think about how much God loved me without also feeling guilty, enslaved to a debt I could never repay, and frankly frightened that this all-powerful Being might judge me insufficiently grateful.
Paulann's version of God's love purged that emotion. God loves you, she told us repeatedly, more than we could ever love ourselves. Before we knew God, before we knew anything, before we existed, God adored us. And we didn't have to--couldn't--do anything to make God love us. Nor can we ever do anything to make God stop loving us. God's love for us is fearsome, not a tame thing, passionate, refusing all limit or boundary, intrusive, insistent, constantly knocking at the door of our heart.
She defined for me what unconditional really is, what the fact of an all-powerful God who loves me really means.
And not once did she mention hell. Not once did we dwell on the final judgment. Fear for the destination of our eternal souls simply played no part in her argument about why we should follow the way of Christ. Not that this was a whatever-we-want-God-to-be faith. God's essence as love was for Christians an imperative to love. We were to love everyone as unconditionally and as fully as God. Sin, for Paulanne, was anti-love, disruptions of or failures to love as God does. Nor was love easy. Paulanne did not hesitate to press her youth to harsh self-reflections, honest confrontations with what was most difficult in our lives.
I remember one Friday evening at Falls Creek--not in the main tabernacle watching weeping preteens stumble down the aisle to be saved, but on the rooftop patio of our sleeping quarters. Paulann asked us to reflect on what God was doing for us in our lives, adding that she expected to hear us talk and would keep us there until we did. That night was one of the deepest, most soul-wrenching communal experiences I have ever had. There were tears, silences, admissions, questions, doubts, songs, lots of hugging. It left us shaken but stirred.
That was another thing I learned from Paulann: it was possible for love to be difficult, painful even, without being life/soul-threatening. We could doubt, we could get angry--we could even get angry at God--confident that nothing we could do or say, think or feel could separate us from God's all-powerful love. God's perfect love cast out fear.
This love that Paulann taught, this love that Paulann showed, this love that I realized had lain all along at the heart of my family--this was the love of God, the substance of Christianity.
This love saved my life some years later.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Three Big Life Changes Part I: Drama
Wow, I'm tired. I started this blog in the summer partially as a way to get me writing every day. I had forgotten how, during the school year, I do write every day...leaving surprisingly little brain-juice for blogging.
Anyway, back to my first Big Life/Faith Crisis, part umpteenth:
When I entered the ninth grade (1990-ish), I was for the very first time in my life a non-PK. The double whammy of the economic recession and the Southern Baptist Convention's lurch to the right had left my pastor father without a ministerial appointment. Instead, he found work as custodian in the University-affiliated Baptist Church in the town we lived in. The pastor and staff joked that the church's standards were so high that even the custodian had a Master of Divinity.
Such were the thin jokes of our family's hard time.
My mother fell back on her pre-seminary teaching degrees, getting hired as an overworked English/Speech teacher in a tiny, rural school which my sister and I attended for that year. The next year, Mama switched to an even tinier school even further away, and my sister and I transferred to the large school system of the town we lived in.
Again--hard times all around. We went bankrupt. We switched rental homes several times, once because the land lord (we discovered) had been charged with some illegal something-or-other. I didn't mind that time; that house was infested with fleas. You walked across the living room and felt them biting your feet. You sat on the furniture and felt them biting your arm. You went to school or church and--ugh--found one biting you. I still have the occasional nightmare about fleas...
I also developed an intolerance of roast beef sandwiches from Arby's. At the time they advertised 5 sandwiches for $5, which was just the right price for our cash-strapped family. I think I just overloaded. I can barely stand the thought of them now.
Of course, I shouldn't overdramatize. Lots of families were much worse off than we were. We ate cheaply, but never in my memory did we have to go without food. Nor were we ever without a home, without a car, or without clothing. And--corny as it sounds--we had each other, drawing closer together as a family.
Three big factors changed my life in a big way during that time.
The first involved my going to a very large high school. I had grown up in a series of small towns and had attended a series of small schools. This high school had approximately 1200 students. Though that's still small by many standards, that number was larger than the population of the previous town we had lived in. It was immense to me, overwhelming. The first day (10th grade), I wandered from class to class, hoping I had the right schedule.
I had wanted to take Honors Biology; at the time, I had an interest in ichthyology--long story. I realized, however, that the Biology class I was in wasn't quite at the Honors level. What tipped me off: we were assigned to draw a food chain--any food chain--that included humans. One student asked, "Do we eat eagles?" Intellectual snob that I am, I asked the teacher (discretely) if this was Honors Biology. She said no, I went to the office to get added into that class and my whole course schedule changed.
I got into Honors Biology (Teri Savage as a teacher--what a hoot she was!), yes, but I also got put into a Debate class (largely because it was the only available elective for my new schedule). Debate class involved participation in the high school's speech and theatre club as well as trips to weekend speech/theatre competitions. I joined the club, went to the competitions... and began getting involved in theatre. I got cast in Oklahoma! (my first play) that year. I played cranky old farmer Andrew Carnes, who opens the second act with "The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" (I went blank and just mouthed the words during one performance). I got to say "Hell" on stage. I made friends (!!). What a blast.
More: I discovered, at those weekend competitions, that I was terrible at debate. Just terrible. I liked writing arguments, seeing two sides of the same issue, encountering philosophy and persuasive skills--but I did not like live confrontation. I still don't. So I never did well in debate, which happened on Friday nights. I stayed at those competitions, however, through Saturday, which is when the drama competitions happened (events with names like "Dramatic Duet" or "Humorous Interpretation").
I saw two high-schoolers from another school perform a ten-minute cutting from On Golden Pond and thought: This, truly, is Art. Also: I think I can do this.
The next year my (my 11th grade) sister joined that school (as a 10th grader), and we began competing in Humorous Duet (a ten-minute cutting of How to Eat Like a Child And Other Lessons in Not Being A Grown-up by Delia Ephron). We won.
I continued to act, I got cast in shows, I had a circle of friends, I won some medals--it was like I had discovered some kind of varsity sport I was good at.
From then on, theatre was a part of my life. That was the first change.
More tomorrow,
JF
Anyway, back to my first Big Life/Faith Crisis, part umpteenth:
When I entered the ninth grade (1990-ish), I was for the very first time in my life a non-PK. The double whammy of the economic recession and the Southern Baptist Convention's lurch to the right had left my pastor father without a ministerial appointment. Instead, he found work as custodian in the University-affiliated Baptist Church in the town we lived in. The pastor and staff joked that the church's standards were so high that even the custodian had a Master of Divinity.
Such were the thin jokes of our family's hard time.
My mother fell back on her pre-seminary teaching degrees, getting hired as an overworked English/Speech teacher in a tiny, rural school which my sister and I attended for that year. The next year, Mama switched to an even tinier school even further away, and my sister and I transferred to the large school system of the town we lived in.
Again--hard times all around. We went bankrupt. We switched rental homes several times, once because the land lord (we discovered) had been charged with some illegal something-or-other. I didn't mind that time; that house was infested with fleas. You walked across the living room and felt them biting your feet. You sat on the furniture and felt them biting your arm. You went to school or church and--ugh--found one biting you. I still have the occasional nightmare about fleas...
I also developed an intolerance of roast beef sandwiches from Arby's. At the time they advertised 5 sandwiches for $5, which was just the right price for our cash-strapped family. I think I just overloaded. I can barely stand the thought of them now.
Of course, I shouldn't overdramatize. Lots of families were much worse off than we were. We ate cheaply, but never in my memory did we have to go without food. Nor were we ever without a home, without a car, or without clothing. And--corny as it sounds--we had each other, drawing closer together as a family.
Three big factors changed my life in a big way during that time.
The first involved my going to a very large high school. I had grown up in a series of small towns and had attended a series of small schools. This high school had approximately 1200 students. Though that's still small by many standards, that number was larger than the population of the previous town we had lived in. It was immense to me, overwhelming. The first day (10th grade), I wandered from class to class, hoping I had the right schedule.
I had wanted to take Honors Biology; at the time, I had an interest in ichthyology--long story. I realized, however, that the Biology class I was in wasn't quite at the Honors level. What tipped me off: we were assigned to draw a food chain--any food chain--that included humans. One student asked, "Do we eat eagles?" Intellectual snob that I am, I asked the teacher (discretely) if this was Honors Biology. She said no, I went to the office to get added into that class and my whole course schedule changed.
I got into Honors Biology (Teri Savage as a teacher--what a hoot she was!), yes, but I also got put into a Debate class (largely because it was the only available elective for my new schedule). Debate class involved participation in the high school's speech and theatre club as well as trips to weekend speech/theatre competitions. I joined the club, went to the competitions... and began getting involved in theatre. I got cast in Oklahoma! (my first play) that year. I played cranky old farmer Andrew Carnes, who opens the second act with "The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" (I went blank and just mouthed the words during one performance). I got to say "Hell" on stage. I made friends (!!). What a blast.
More: I discovered, at those weekend competitions, that I was terrible at debate. Just terrible. I liked writing arguments, seeing two sides of the same issue, encountering philosophy and persuasive skills--but I did not like live confrontation. I still don't. So I never did well in debate, which happened on Friday nights. I stayed at those competitions, however, through Saturday, which is when the drama competitions happened (events with names like "Dramatic Duet" or "Humorous Interpretation").
I saw two high-schoolers from another school perform a ten-minute cutting from On Golden Pond and thought: This, truly, is Art. Also: I think I can do this.
The next year my (my 11th grade) sister joined that school (as a 10th grader), and we began competing in Humorous Duet (a ten-minute cutting of How to Eat Like a Child And Other Lessons in Not Being A Grown-up by Delia Ephron). We won.
I continued to act, I got cast in shows, I had a circle of friends, I won some medals--it was like I had discovered some kind of varsity sport I was good at.
From then on, theatre was a part of my life. That was the first change.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Bibe Believing and Women
To review: in the 1970s and 80s, the Southern Baptist Convention underwent a sea change in which the conservative forces essentially took over. These conservatives (opposed not by liberals but by "moderates") purged the ranks of the SBC's upper bureaucracy and its seminaries of non-conservatives, winnowing the wheat from the tares by means of a simple question: do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God?
Thus were my parents on the losing side of the Battle for the Bible. As I've mentioned, both my mother and my father held graduate degrees (a Master of Religious Education for my mother, a Master of Divinity for my father) from Southern Baptist seminaries. It is a marker of how radically the SBC transformed that I generally have to qualify to other seminary-trained clergy that my parents got their degrees before the Big Shift happened.
Now, by the standards of more liberal denominations, my parents' training and (at the time) theological orientation likely fell solidly on the conservative end of things. By Southern Baptist standards, however, they were quite "moderate," becoming more so as the Takeover unfolded year after year.
I do not recall either of my parents ever strongly taking a stand on the inerrancy of scripture. They never in my memory came close to claiming that every assertion in the Bible is scientifically accurate, but neither did they campaign explicitly against such an assertion. I do remember times when my father presented passages such as those from Genesis or Revelation as possibly metaphorical rather than literal--a no-no for strict "Bible-believers." By the mid 1980s, however, the simple failure to affirm dogmatically the inerrancy of Scripture was itself viewed by the SBC as evidence of heterodoxy. While my parents did not occupy high enough positions in Baptist hierarchy to be themselves subject to an official test of faith, the culture of inerrancy-only trickled down to local levels, making it awkward to be a Baptist without insisting upon, say, a literal understanding of Revelation imagery (the flying scorpions, etc.).
I always had the sense that my mother's views of scripture were a bit more conservative than my father's. Yet her departure from SBC's rightward drift was no less ignorable. As a whip-smart woman gifted with considerable abilities, my mother did not conform neatly to the preferred SBC role of the wife (particularly the pastor's wife) as submissive help-mate. She did not hide her opinions, remaining "silent" in church as women are supposed to do. She took up leadership positions (at least, those offered by the church) eagerly and fulfilled them excellently.
Such agency from a female jarred with the SBC's growing culture of Bible-believing. I have in previous posts explored how inerrancy doctrine functions in maintaining the cycle of certainty/anxiety fueling conservative evangelical views of salvation. But of course inerrancy also functions to ratify certain social structures and stances as divinely inspired. Most configurations of inerrancy preserve men's political superiority over women as ordained and required by God. The Bible's presentation of women isn't exactly diverse; with some notable exceptions (Deborah, for example) scripture tends to categorize women in terms of their relationships with men: wives, daughters, mothers, widows, or prostitutes. True to the patriarchal cultures of Biblical peoples, men are allowed to act as free agents in the world in ways that women are not. Women, in general, belong to, or at least fall under the authority of, men (by blood or by contract).
Inerrancy doctrine argues that this system of gender relations isn't an accident of history but a kind of Command By Example: thus did God create the two genders, male and female. Now, current evangelicals will typically insist that they do not see females as constitutionally inferior to males (this is of course a departure from historical understandings of divine gender design). God creates the two genders with separate roles but with equal worth. Women are made to tend to the home and to children. They are built to sustain emotional ties, to be supportive, and to follow their husbands' lead. Men are made to protect and provide for their wives, giving totally of themselves to their spouses but never relinquishing their duty to lead.
For conservative Baptists then and now, feminism represented an unscriptural overturning of this divine plan. The equality of the sexes promoted by the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the distinction of the sexes that (conveniently) kept men in control politically and socially. Worse, the feminist impulse was seen as inspiring a truly awful bit of heresy: ordained female ministers. Like other culture war issues (homosexuality being one of the main ones currently), the question of women's ordination contained focused into one argument the underlying questions about Biblical interpretation and inerrancy.
To an inerrantist, the Bible--in the epistles--is clear: women are not to be preachers. They are to remain silent in the church (I Corinthians 14:33-35). It cuts no mustard to point out that this passage and others like it may refer to a specific situation in a specific church or to ask whether cultural norms from two thousand years ago ought to be applied today. Such historicizing (qualifying Biblical assertions as bound to a particular era or culture) is precisely the anti-literal trend that Bible-believers have resisted since the mid-1800s. Either the Bible is true in an unchanging way, they argue, or every assertion in the Bible becomes vulnerable to the charge of historical/cultural contingency.
Now--my mother did not so far as I know formally advocate for women's ordination during the Battle for the Bible era. But I doubt that anyone talking to her, anyone observing her activity in the life of the church, could doubt the fact that she saw herself as called to ministry, woman or not.
Thus, as the SBC lurched to the right, my parents--simply by staying still--moved to the relative left. Baptist churches were by the early 1990s no longer comfortable places for my parents to work.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thus were my parents on the losing side of the Battle for the Bible. As I've mentioned, both my mother and my father held graduate degrees (a Master of Religious Education for my mother, a Master of Divinity for my father) from Southern Baptist seminaries. It is a marker of how radically the SBC transformed that I generally have to qualify to other seminary-trained clergy that my parents got their degrees before the Big Shift happened.
Now, by the standards of more liberal denominations, my parents' training and (at the time) theological orientation likely fell solidly on the conservative end of things. By Southern Baptist standards, however, they were quite "moderate," becoming more so as the Takeover unfolded year after year.
I do not recall either of my parents ever strongly taking a stand on the inerrancy of scripture. They never in my memory came close to claiming that every assertion in the Bible is scientifically accurate, but neither did they campaign explicitly against such an assertion. I do remember times when my father presented passages such as those from Genesis or Revelation as possibly metaphorical rather than literal--a no-no for strict "Bible-believers." By the mid 1980s, however, the simple failure to affirm dogmatically the inerrancy of Scripture was itself viewed by the SBC as evidence of heterodoxy. While my parents did not occupy high enough positions in Baptist hierarchy to be themselves subject to an official test of faith, the culture of inerrancy-only trickled down to local levels, making it awkward to be a Baptist without insisting upon, say, a literal understanding of Revelation imagery (the flying scorpions, etc.).
I always had the sense that my mother's views of scripture were a bit more conservative than my father's. Yet her departure from SBC's rightward drift was no less ignorable. As a whip-smart woman gifted with considerable abilities, my mother did not conform neatly to the preferred SBC role of the wife (particularly the pastor's wife) as submissive help-mate. She did not hide her opinions, remaining "silent" in church as women are supposed to do. She took up leadership positions (at least, those offered by the church) eagerly and fulfilled them excellently.
Such agency from a female jarred with the SBC's growing culture of Bible-believing. I have in previous posts explored how inerrancy doctrine functions in maintaining the cycle of certainty/anxiety fueling conservative evangelical views of salvation. But of course inerrancy also functions to ratify certain social structures and stances as divinely inspired. Most configurations of inerrancy preserve men's political superiority over women as ordained and required by God. The Bible's presentation of women isn't exactly diverse; with some notable exceptions (Deborah, for example) scripture tends to categorize women in terms of their relationships with men: wives, daughters, mothers, widows, or prostitutes. True to the patriarchal cultures of Biblical peoples, men are allowed to act as free agents in the world in ways that women are not. Women, in general, belong to, or at least fall under the authority of, men (by blood or by contract).
Inerrancy doctrine argues that this system of gender relations isn't an accident of history but a kind of Command By Example: thus did God create the two genders, male and female. Now, current evangelicals will typically insist that they do not see females as constitutionally inferior to males (this is of course a departure from historical understandings of divine gender design). God creates the two genders with separate roles but with equal worth. Women are made to tend to the home and to children. They are built to sustain emotional ties, to be supportive, and to follow their husbands' lead. Men are made to protect and provide for their wives, giving totally of themselves to their spouses but never relinquishing their duty to lead.
For conservative Baptists then and now, feminism represented an unscriptural overturning of this divine plan. The equality of the sexes promoted by the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the distinction of the sexes that (conveniently) kept men in control politically and socially. Worse, the feminist impulse was seen as inspiring a truly awful bit of heresy: ordained female ministers. Like other culture war issues (homosexuality being one of the main ones currently), the question of women's ordination contained focused into one argument the underlying questions about Biblical interpretation and inerrancy.
To an inerrantist, the Bible--in the epistles--is clear: women are not to be preachers. They are to remain silent in the church (I Corinthians 14:33-35). It cuts no mustard to point out that this passage and others like it may refer to a specific situation in a specific church or to ask whether cultural norms from two thousand years ago ought to be applied today. Such historicizing (qualifying Biblical assertions as bound to a particular era or culture) is precisely the anti-literal trend that Bible-believers have resisted since the mid-1800s. Either the Bible is true in an unchanging way, they argue, or every assertion in the Bible becomes vulnerable to the charge of historical/cultural contingency.
Now--my mother did not so far as I know formally advocate for women's ordination during the Battle for the Bible era. But I doubt that anyone talking to her, anyone observing her activity in the life of the church, could doubt the fact that she saw herself as called to ministry, woman or not.
Thus, as the SBC lurched to the right, my parents--simply by staying still--moved to the relative left. Baptist churches were by the early 1990s no longer comfortable places for my parents to work.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Confessions of a Southern Baptist PK: Transitions
Curiously enough, around the time that I began realizing that I needed a new kind of faith (a way to be a Christian without constantly saturating myself and others in self-centering, thought-stopping, soul-exhausting fear)--around that time my parents were going through a similar sort of crisis-of-faith.
My father, as I've mentioned, was a Southern Baptist preacher. That role had defined his life and the lives of the rest of our family. My sister and I weren't just children; we were PKs--preacher's kids (only later did I learn what kind of reputation PKs had). My mother, though she had a masters degree from a seminary--indeed, though she had gotten her degree before Daddy had his--she was a pastor's wife. Southern Baptists, citing Biblical injunctions for women to be silent and submissive, forbade women from serving as pastors, no matter how talented or called they may be. Instead, Mama's function, like those of pastors' wives in many conservative evangelical churches, was something like "unpaid associate minister." She headed up Sunday school classes, coordinated vacation bible schools, sang in the choir, organized home Bible studies and outreach ministries--a host of jobs, really. Practically any time Daddy had to be at church, Mama accompanied him (and vice versa).
Around 1988/89 (I was 13-14), we were living in a mobile home in a small town in southern Louisiana, where Daddy served as minister for the First Baptist Church. Daddy began feeling called to a different sort of pastoral ministry--the chaplaincy. To serve as a paid chaplain, one typically needs credits in CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE training generally takes place in the context of a large teaching hospital complex, where the chaplain-in-training basically undergoes a year or more of on-the-job training as a working chaplain. Since the tiny town we lived in had no such hospital or CPE program, we were faced with the option of moving. We could, my parents said, conceivably move anywhere we'd like. Now, such a wide-open option was pretty novel for my sister and me; we had up until then understood moving as something you did entirely at God's whim. God called Daddy to X place; we went. God called Daddy to Y place; we went. Having our pick of locations? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?
Nevertheless, we bypassed considerations of any other location than the one we had left some six years before: Oklahoma. My sister and I had lived the first part of our lives largely in small-town, southeastern OK, and we had long romanticized those memories into the "good times"--in contrast to the really wretched school systems we encountered in Louisiana.
Thus we packed up and moved back to southeastern Oklahoma. While Daddy looked around for a CPE program in the state and preached part time at a small church, Mama tapped into her pre-seminary days as a high school English and Spanish teacher and went to work (another novel experience). My sister and I were happy to be back in a state we identified with "home," even though the town we initially moved to was many times smaller than the one we had left. Soon, Daddy found a suitable CPE program in Oklahoma City, and we moved to a mid-sized sleepover town near there. Mama kept working as a teacher in a little town beyond that. After a year in the CPE program, Daddy decided to return to full-time preaching and began the process of applying to various churches.
A word about the Southern Baptist Convention: in contrast to many mainline denominations (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians), Baptist have a congregational structure. Individual churches enjoy a great deal of autonomy in determining their policies and in choosing their staff. Whereas a Methodist pastor participates in a tiered, formal, ecclesiastical structure and is appointed to a local congregation by his or her bishop, Baptist pastors are essentially free agents, hired and fired at will by a congregation in question. Applying for work as a Baptist pastor, then, functions much like applying for work in any job, save that most other jobs follow standard guidelines for job descriptions, contracts, hiring, etc. Churches too act as free agents, able to shape the pastor's job description, contract, and salary largely to their liking. A successful "call"--a simpatico between pastor and congregation--thus involves a unique mix of logistic, economic, spiritual, and political negotiations.
In my memory up to then, my father had never had much difficulty at that navigating those dynamics (as I grew older, I of course learned that there was much about our past churches that I had not perceived). I knew my father to be an excellent pastor, having experienced by then many, many other pastors in my life. His skills had not diminished. Congregations still responded favorably to him.
But for some reason he was unable to find a full-time position. Or, rather: my father was unable to find a church that was willing to pay him more than a part-time wage for a full-time position. One church in a nearby state, for instance, invited us to visit, met our family, heard Daddy preach, and enthusiastically voted to hire him--at a pittance of a salary. When Daddy frankly told them he could not afford to move his family there and live on that salary, the church reversed its vote. This pattern repeated in other churches.
Several factors were converging at once. First, smaller churches rarely have a good grasp on exactly what their pastor is worth. Particularly in congregational systems, individual congregations tend to develop (ferment might be more appropriate) a home-brew definition of what they expect a pastor to do, a definition often based upon hazy-but-glowing memories of old Pastor so-and-so, who was a Saint Upon the Earth. In no case is this definition limited merely to giving a thirty-minute speech every Sunday.
Churches expect pastors to be a combination accountant, administrator, teacher, counselor, event coordinator, childcare specialist, political advocate, marriage-maker, funeral-giver, hospital-visitor, community figurehead, and all-around friendly guy. And they expect pastors to provide these services on call, 24/7, backed up with the requisite (though unsalaried) pastor's wife, who is preferably herself gifted with a range of vital skills. But, since of course to the church none of this is actually work in the sense of clocking-in/clocking-out, pastors should expect to get by on a barely-above-the-poverty-line salary. Thus it was not completely surprising that a smallish church would balk at supporting a family of four.
Another factor: during the last 80s/early 90s, the nation was undergoing something of a recession. Budgets had become fairly tight. Churches were not able to pay much, and we were not able to accept little.
But one of the biggest factors in my father's difficulty landing a Southern Baptist pastorate was the change that had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention itself, a change that threw my family's faith transition into sharper contrast.
More tomorrow,
JF
My father, as I've mentioned, was a Southern Baptist preacher. That role had defined his life and the lives of the rest of our family. My sister and I weren't just children; we were PKs--preacher's kids (only later did I learn what kind of reputation PKs had). My mother, though she had a masters degree from a seminary--indeed, though she had gotten her degree before Daddy had his--she was a pastor's wife. Southern Baptists, citing Biblical injunctions for women to be silent and submissive, forbade women from serving as pastors, no matter how talented or called they may be. Instead, Mama's function, like those of pastors' wives in many conservative evangelical churches, was something like "unpaid associate minister." She headed up Sunday school classes, coordinated vacation bible schools, sang in the choir, organized home Bible studies and outreach ministries--a host of jobs, really. Practically any time Daddy had to be at church, Mama accompanied him (and vice versa).
Around 1988/89 (I was 13-14), we were living in a mobile home in a small town in southern Louisiana, where Daddy served as minister for the First Baptist Church. Daddy began feeling called to a different sort of pastoral ministry--the chaplaincy. To serve as a paid chaplain, one typically needs credits in CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE training generally takes place in the context of a large teaching hospital complex, where the chaplain-in-training basically undergoes a year or more of on-the-job training as a working chaplain. Since the tiny town we lived in had no such hospital or CPE program, we were faced with the option of moving. We could, my parents said, conceivably move anywhere we'd like. Now, such a wide-open option was pretty novel for my sister and me; we had up until then understood moving as something you did entirely at God's whim. God called Daddy to X place; we went. God called Daddy to Y place; we went. Having our pick of locations? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?
Nevertheless, we bypassed considerations of any other location than the one we had left some six years before: Oklahoma. My sister and I had lived the first part of our lives largely in small-town, southeastern OK, and we had long romanticized those memories into the "good times"--in contrast to the really wretched school systems we encountered in Louisiana.
Thus we packed up and moved back to southeastern Oklahoma. While Daddy looked around for a CPE program in the state and preached part time at a small church, Mama tapped into her pre-seminary days as a high school English and Spanish teacher and went to work (another novel experience). My sister and I were happy to be back in a state we identified with "home," even though the town we initially moved to was many times smaller than the one we had left. Soon, Daddy found a suitable CPE program in Oklahoma City, and we moved to a mid-sized sleepover town near there. Mama kept working as a teacher in a little town beyond that. After a year in the CPE program, Daddy decided to return to full-time preaching and began the process of applying to various churches.
A word about the Southern Baptist Convention: in contrast to many mainline denominations (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians), Baptist have a congregational structure. Individual churches enjoy a great deal of autonomy in determining their policies and in choosing their staff. Whereas a Methodist pastor participates in a tiered, formal, ecclesiastical structure and is appointed to a local congregation by his or her bishop, Baptist pastors are essentially free agents, hired and fired at will by a congregation in question. Applying for work as a Baptist pastor, then, functions much like applying for work in any job, save that most other jobs follow standard guidelines for job descriptions, contracts, hiring, etc. Churches too act as free agents, able to shape the pastor's job description, contract, and salary largely to their liking. A successful "call"--a simpatico between pastor and congregation--thus involves a unique mix of logistic, economic, spiritual, and political negotiations.
In my memory up to then, my father had never had much difficulty at that navigating those dynamics (as I grew older, I of course learned that there was much about our past churches that I had not perceived). I knew my father to be an excellent pastor, having experienced by then many, many other pastors in my life. His skills had not diminished. Congregations still responded favorably to him.
But for some reason he was unable to find a full-time position. Or, rather: my father was unable to find a church that was willing to pay him more than a part-time wage for a full-time position. One church in a nearby state, for instance, invited us to visit, met our family, heard Daddy preach, and enthusiastically voted to hire him--at a pittance of a salary. When Daddy frankly told them he could not afford to move his family there and live on that salary, the church reversed its vote. This pattern repeated in other churches.
Several factors were converging at once. First, smaller churches rarely have a good grasp on exactly what their pastor is worth. Particularly in congregational systems, individual congregations tend to develop (ferment might be more appropriate) a home-brew definition of what they expect a pastor to do, a definition often based upon hazy-but-glowing memories of old Pastor so-and-so, who was a Saint Upon the Earth. In no case is this definition limited merely to giving a thirty-minute speech every Sunday.
Churches expect pastors to be a combination accountant, administrator, teacher, counselor, event coordinator, childcare specialist, political advocate, marriage-maker, funeral-giver, hospital-visitor, community figurehead, and all-around friendly guy. And they expect pastors to provide these services on call, 24/7, backed up with the requisite (though unsalaried) pastor's wife, who is preferably herself gifted with a range of vital skills. But, since of course to the church none of this is actually work in the sense of clocking-in/clocking-out, pastors should expect to get by on a barely-above-the-poverty-line salary. Thus it was not completely surprising that a smallish church would balk at supporting a family of four.
Another factor: during the last 80s/early 90s, the nation was undergoing something of a recession. Budgets had become fairly tight. Churches were not able to pay much, and we were not able to accept little.
But one of the biggest factors in my father's difficulty landing a Southern Baptist pastorate was the change that had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention itself, a change that threw my family's faith transition into sharper contrast.
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Faith of Threats
Wuff! I'm still worked up about the whole health care town hall meeting thing--so worked up, in fact, that I had to spend some time before posting here washing my brain clean with some refreshing youtubes of babies laughing.
Does the trick, generally.
Back to the task at hand: I've been exploring my childhood faith experience, trying to figure out why that conservative evangelical faith began to seem so wrong to me as I grew older. One factor, I've suggested, has to do with the fact that my childhood faith preached love for one's neighbors while relying for its genesis, upkeep, and spread on fearful self-interest. You became a Christian in my faith primarily to avoid the threat of Hell. Avoiding hell remains the core motivation in many of the more popular versions of conservative evangelism.
Although effective in the short term (that is, for people who accept the premises of God, hell, sin, and judgment), I've argued that this faith actually has several negative long-term consequences. First and foremost, it's short-lived. Intense, adrenaline-surge evangelism purchases emotional power at the price of longevity. It burns out, especially as the reality of what it means to be a Christian (not just a momentary decision but a lifetime of commitment) sinks in.
To stave off burnout, fight-or-flight Christianity applies more fire--hellfire, that is, stoking the embers of anxiety 1) about one's eternal fate (Are you sure you've really, truly turned to Christ? Might you just be fooling yourself?), or 2) about the degree to which one is evangelizing (Have you led others to Christ? You know, real Christians share their faith all the time. If you aren't doing that, well... you may want to go back to concern #1...).
The problem with this constant fear-mongering is twofold (at least). First, fear works like an addictive substance. It generates an intense emotional high while deactivating higher brain functions. It's difficult to think clearly or carefully when you're rushing for the fire exit. But what an exquisite feeling it is, the pure certainty of danger, the need for salvation. Such simple, unadulterated emotions are hard to come by for adults. It's not that fear is altogether pleasant, but its ability to reduce the complex world into a straightforward, life-or-death decision can be refreshing. You feel in touch with a reservoir of Truth (I've got to act or I'll die) that mimics the Truth you learn about in Sunday School (God is real, is watching, is here). Thus, you come to link the simple certainty of the hellfire-and-damnation message with the certainty appropriate to Christian faith throughout a lifetime.
The trouble is, the world is complex. Christianity, insofar as it exceeds the temporal bounds of the singular moment of conversion, must therefore also be complex. Certainty about how exactly we as Christians ought to live, how exactly we should act in every situation, just isn't possible. But fight-or-flight faith insists that it's certainty--certain belief--that ensures our salvation. Doubt, which is almost always a byproduct of thought, is therefore verboten. Fight-or-flight evangelism can all to easily lead to a faith defined by a fetish for fearful, insular thoughtlessness.
Second problem: these regular activations of the eternal soul's survival instinct hinder the other-directed life that Christians are supposed to lead. You turn to Christ to get yourself saved (which of course is Christ saving you rather than you saving yourself, etc.). You evangelize not merely because you wish others to be saved, too, but also because evangelizing is proof-in-the-pudding that your salvation is genuine. It's not that evangelists aren't deeply concerned with the eternal destinations of those around them, but this other-concern is nevertheless tied to the self-concern of their own salvation. Would there be as much focus on evangelizing if Jesus had given believers an out-clause? "You may make disciples, but you don't have to."
Or, to return to a question I cited early on in this blog, if heaven and hell were neutralized--if there were no final judgment of the sort spoken of in evangelical discourse, would people still be Christians? Is Jesus worth following apart from His ability to snatch us from the pit?
By the time I was entering high school, these questions had joined others I was having about, say, what happened to people who had never heard the gospel of Christ or how the Bible's words about creation could be reconciled with scientific consensus about the earth's age. Intellectually, I was searching for something more satisfying. Emotionally and spiritually, I was dog-tired of being threatened with the eternal judgment and sick with the thought that a Christian lifestyle required me to introduce others to that threat.
I was needing another way to be a Christian.
More tomorrow,
JF
Does the trick, generally.
Back to the task at hand: I've been exploring my childhood faith experience, trying to figure out why that conservative evangelical faith began to seem so wrong to me as I grew older. One factor, I've suggested, has to do with the fact that my childhood faith preached love for one's neighbors while relying for its genesis, upkeep, and spread on fearful self-interest. You became a Christian in my faith primarily to avoid the threat of Hell. Avoiding hell remains the core motivation in many of the more popular versions of conservative evangelism.
Although effective in the short term (that is, for people who accept the premises of God, hell, sin, and judgment), I've argued that this faith actually has several negative long-term consequences. First and foremost, it's short-lived. Intense, adrenaline-surge evangelism purchases emotional power at the price of longevity. It burns out, especially as the reality of what it means to be a Christian (not just a momentary decision but a lifetime of commitment) sinks in.
To stave off burnout, fight-or-flight Christianity applies more fire--hellfire, that is, stoking the embers of anxiety 1) about one's eternal fate (Are you sure you've really, truly turned to Christ? Might you just be fooling yourself?), or 2) about the degree to which one is evangelizing (Have you led others to Christ? You know, real Christians share their faith all the time. If you aren't doing that, well... you may want to go back to concern #1...).
The problem with this constant fear-mongering is twofold (at least). First, fear works like an addictive substance. It generates an intense emotional high while deactivating higher brain functions. It's difficult to think clearly or carefully when you're rushing for the fire exit. But what an exquisite feeling it is, the pure certainty of danger, the need for salvation. Such simple, unadulterated emotions are hard to come by for adults. It's not that fear is altogether pleasant, but its ability to reduce the complex world into a straightforward, life-or-death decision can be refreshing. You feel in touch with a reservoir of Truth (I've got to act or I'll die) that mimics the Truth you learn about in Sunday School (God is real, is watching, is here). Thus, you come to link the simple certainty of the hellfire-and-damnation message with the certainty appropriate to Christian faith throughout a lifetime.
The trouble is, the world is complex. Christianity, insofar as it exceeds the temporal bounds of the singular moment of conversion, must therefore also be complex. Certainty about how exactly we as Christians ought to live, how exactly we should act in every situation, just isn't possible. But fight-or-flight faith insists that it's certainty--certain belief--that ensures our salvation. Doubt, which is almost always a byproduct of thought, is therefore verboten. Fight-or-flight evangelism can all to easily lead to a faith defined by a fetish for fearful, insular thoughtlessness.
Second problem: these regular activations of the eternal soul's survival instinct hinder the other-directed life that Christians are supposed to lead. You turn to Christ to get yourself saved (which of course is Christ saving you rather than you saving yourself, etc.). You evangelize not merely because you wish others to be saved, too, but also because evangelizing is proof-in-the-pudding that your salvation is genuine. It's not that evangelists aren't deeply concerned with the eternal destinations of those around them, but this other-concern is nevertheless tied to the self-concern of their own salvation. Would there be as much focus on evangelizing if Jesus had given believers an out-clause? "You may make disciples, but you don't have to."
Or, to return to a question I cited early on in this blog, if heaven and hell were neutralized--if there were no final judgment of the sort spoken of in evangelical discourse, would people still be Christians? Is Jesus worth following apart from His ability to snatch us from the pit?
By the time I was entering high school, these questions had joined others I was having about, say, what happened to people who had never heard the gospel of Christ or how the Bible's words about creation could be reconciled with scientific consensus about the earth's age. Intellectually, I was searching for something more satisfying. Emotionally and spiritually, I was dog-tired of being threatened with the eternal judgment and sick with the thought that a Christian lifestyle required me to introduce others to that threat.
I was needing another way to be a Christian.
More tomorrow,
JF
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
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.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Bible Camp and the Gospel of Certainty (PK Confessions)
In the summer, Southern Baptist kids go to bible camp.
By "bible camp," I mean a largish, out-of-the-way estate that hosts successive weeks of Southern Baptist evangelical mini-conferences. Churches from all over sign up to send their youth (plus various chaperons/adult volunteers) for this or that particular week. For six nights and seven days--Sunday afternoon through Saturday morning--they occupy a time-shared cabin (generally fully equipped with kitchen/bathrooms/rooms/bunk beds). Daily schedules take campers through recreational activities, individual skill/bible study classes, meals, and worship services (two to three a day, generally).
Being a preacher's kid, I attended bible camps throughout my childhood (camps are generally for middle- to high-school students). In Oklahoma, the go-to Baptist camp is Falls Creek. In south Louisiana, we went to Acadian Baptist Center (ABC).
The camps aimed mainly at evangelism--basically confronting young campers the Two Big Questions (Are you going to heaven? Are you leading others to the Lord?). The worship speakers would mainly be either missionaries (stories of spreading the word overseas, overcoming hardships, etc.) or revivalistic preachers (read: preachers who could capture and keep the attention of X-thousands of teens).
Evening worship services were typically the longest, about 2 hours or so of music and the sermon. The whole week's worship services lead up to Friday night--the final worship service--where the preacher pulls out all the stops. If he (and it's always a he) has a fire-and-brimstone in his repertoire, this is where he deploys it, pumping up anxiety about the Two Questions to generate a kind of mega-altar-call that (to my childhood mind) generally lasted for frickin' ever. "Just one more verse of 'I Have Decided to Follow Jesus,'" the pastor would say, and sure enough dozens more teenagers would clamber out of their pews and shuffle down the aisle to be counseled/prayed over by waiting adults.
Even as an easily bored child, I could tell that this was a Meaningful Event. I mean, the people moving down the aisles were often clearly moved, weeping openly and holding on to each other as they walked.
As I entered my teens, the questions I had about Genesis, about Revelation, and about everything in between multiplied. I also began listening more closely to these camp meeting sermons and lessons. I quickly realized, though, that one shouldn't go to ABC or Falls Creek expecting help thinking through, say, how an all-powerful and all-loving God could allow someone raised in a wholly other culture/religion to suffer for eternity in Hell after death.
Bible camps weren't so much about grappling with such questions. Rather, these camps mobilize the Gospel of Certainty, the idea that Christian faith is a matter of unshakable knowledge. Knowledge that the Bible is literally true, that the hell is real, that Christ saves, and that Judgment is coming. With these certainties in place, the only questions allowed are the Big Two: Are you Going to Heaven? (Yes! Though it couldn't hurt to rededicate myself...) Are you evangelizing? (Yes! Though I could do more...).
These were really the only topics that mattered. Every other realm of inquiry could and should be subsumed by one or both of those Questions. And heaven help you (literally) if your questions led you to a less-than-full endorsement of the pretexts for the Big Two.
See, doubt--doubt about the literal truth of the Bible's every word, doubt about the specifics of salvation, doubt about the workability of loving with all our hearts a God who threatens us with Eternal Torment and Flying Scorpions from the Pit--any doubt indicated a terminal weakness in our faith life. It was the devil (or, less stridently "the world") tempting us away from the saving power of the Gospel. Real Christians overcome doubt, quashing down or shoving aside troublesome voices from culture or from our wicked intellect.
Now, I have nothing against a strong faith. Nor do I subscribe to a model of Christian faith that consists of a paralyzing quagmire of confusion. But it was at camps like Falls Creek and ABC that I learned to distrust evangelical certainty.
What's to distrust? More tomorrow.
JF
By "bible camp," I mean a largish, out-of-the-way estate that hosts successive weeks of Southern Baptist evangelical mini-conferences. Churches from all over sign up to send their youth (plus various chaperons/adult volunteers) for this or that particular week. For six nights and seven days--Sunday afternoon through Saturday morning--they occupy a time-shared cabin (generally fully equipped with kitchen/bathrooms/rooms/bunk beds). Daily schedules take campers through recreational activities, individual skill/bible study classes, meals, and worship services (two to three a day, generally).
Being a preacher's kid, I attended bible camps throughout my childhood (camps are generally for middle- to high-school students). In Oklahoma, the go-to Baptist camp is Falls Creek. In south Louisiana, we went to Acadian Baptist Center (ABC).
The camps aimed mainly at evangelism--basically confronting young campers the Two Big Questions (Are you going to heaven? Are you leading others to the Lord?). The worship speakers would mainly be either missionaries (stories of spreading the word overseas, overcoming hardships, etc.) or revivalistic preachers (read: preachers who could capture and keep the attention of X-thousands of teens).
Evening worship services were typically the longest, about 2 hours or so of music and the sermon. The whole week's worship services lead up to Friday night--the final worship service--where the preacher pulls out all the stops. If he (and it's always a he) has a fire-and-brimstone in his repertoire, this is where he deploys it, pumping up anxiety about the Two Questions to generate a kind of mega-altar-call that (to my childhood mind) generally lasted for frickin' ever. "Just one more verse of 'I Have Decided to Follow Jesus,'" the pastor would say, and sure enough dozens more teenagers would clamber out of their pews and shuffle down the aisle to be counseled/prayed over by waiting adults.
Even as an easily bored child, I could tell that this was a Meaningful Event. I mean, the people moving down the aisles were often clearly moved, weeping openly and holding on to each other as they walked.
As I entered my teens, the questions I had about Genesis, about Revelation, and about everything in between multiplied. I also began listening more closely to these camp meeting sermons and lessons. I quickly realized, though, that one shouldn't go to ABC or Falls Creek expecting help thinking through, say, how an all-powerful and all-loving God could allow someone raised in a wholly other culture/religion to suffer for eternity in Hell after death.
Bible camps weren't so much about grappling with such questions. Rather, these camps mobilize the Gospel of Certainty, the idea that Christian faith is a matter of unshakable knowledge. Knowledge that the Bible is literally true, that the hell is real, that Christ saves, and that Judgment is coming. With these certainties in place, the only questions allowed are the Big Two: Are you Going to Heaven? (Yes! Though it couldn't hurt to rededicate myself...) Are you evangelizing? (Yes! Though I could do more...).
These were really the only topics that mattered. Every other realm of inquiry could and should be subsumed by one or both of those Questions. And heaven help you (literally) if your questions led you to a less-than-full endorsement of the pretexts for the Big Two.
See, doubt--doubt about the literal truth of the Bible's every word, doubt about the specifics of salvation, doubt about the workability of loving with all our hearts a God who threatens us with Eternal Torment and Flying Scorpions from the Pit--any doubt indicated a terminal weakness in our faith life. It was the devil (or, less stridently "the world") tempting us away from the saving power of the Gospel. Real Christians overcome doubt, quashing down or shoving aside troublesome voices from culture or from our wicked intellect.
Now, I have nothing against a strong faith. Nor do I subscribe to a model of Christian faith that consists of a paralyzing quagmire of confusion. But it was at camps like Falls Creek and ABC that I learned to distrust evangelical certainty.
What's to distrust? More tomorrow.
JF
Sunday, July 12, 2009
PK Confessions--Dinosaurs and other conundrums
Right around the time I got saved (8-ish), I got a brand new Bible--a New Revised Standard Version (or perhaps a New International Version). Anyway, it was leather, with my name in tiny gold letters on the front cover. I was very proud of it, and my parents were proud that I was proud of it.
Understandably, then, when my father discovered that I had drawn a large, complex picture in the back of it, on the last page of Revelation (last book in the Bible), he was upset. He confronted me, Bible in hand opened to the page in question. I think I stammered something, some excuse that wasn't cutting the mustard with him, when Mama intervened.
"I think," she said, examining my artwork, "he was drawing the scene in Revelation with the Christians surrounding God and Christ. Is that what it is, John?"
Relieved at my mother's ability to put into words what I had tried to put into images, I nodded, pointing out to my father the exact verse references. Though I think he mentioned something about maybe not drawing right inside the Bible, the explanation mollified him.
In truth, I was quite a doodler as a child. I'd doodle mostly in the innumerable church services, splitting an offering envelope silently open to make a triptych of three blank spaces to fill with superheroes, spaceships, or--sometimes--bits of Bible imagery.
Because--to be honest--there's a ton of cool stuff to imagine in the Bible. Aside from the Hi-Def pictures of heaven and hell I absorbed as a child.
I was particularly drawn to the images in Revelation. For someone interested in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, that book is a goldmine of nightmare sequences. Take Revelation 9, where an army of flying scorpion-locusts emerges from smoke coming from a bottomless pit (the result of a star crashing to earth): "In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces. their hair like women's hair, and their teeth like lions' teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. [Here's the really good part] They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is the power to harm people for five months" (9:7-10, NRSV).
Cool-o, huh? Well, horrifying, really. But still.
Lots to imagine, and it was all true. It had happened--or at least it was going to happen. Everything from the 6-days creation, the serpent and Garden of Eden, the flood, the tower of Babel, the 10 plagues, the Exodus, the loads of wacky-weird stuff in the Hebrew Testament that most people don't know about (a talking donkey, gruesome dismemberment, flaming chasms that split the earth to swallow hundreds, wild bears that kill teenagers who make fun of a prophet's baldness--I could go on and on). And that's all pre-Jesus!
And, truthfully, I could believe it--the literal truth of it. Jonah swallowed by a big fish, lives there three days, gets vomited out on the shore? Check. A multitude of people fed with a few loaves of bread and fish? Check. Flying scorpion-locusts? Shudder/check. Heck, I believed in God, and all-powerful, all-knowing invisible Being who created everything. Still do, actually. After that hurdle, the other stuff is an easy-cheezy hop of faith.
The problem for me came initially not in what was in the Bible, but what wasn't in there. Take dinosaurs. Like many youngsters, I liked dinosaurs a great deal. We had seen, on vacation, huge dinosaur excavation museums (I think Daddy described that vacation as "if there were dinosaurs, we went there").
Yet I wasn't able to find much evidence of them in the Bible (sorry, but general descriptions of behemoth or leviathan in Job didn't cut it). What about the dinosaurs? And mammoths? And cave men (cave women, too)? In that respect the Genesis accounts of creation and the flood seemed... lacking. Dinos and other such creatures/epochs, I gathered, formed a significant part of Earth's history, but zippo mention of them in a book that's supposed to be Everything. Even the picture books or comic books of those accounts tended to omit dinosaurs.
And, switching to non-extinct subjects, what about other people in the big, wide world who had nothing to do with the Jewish or Christian stories? Asians? Australian Aborigines? Native Americans? Inca? Maya? Southern Africans? Northern Europeans?
The more I learned about the world, about history, about science, about the universe, the narrower my Bible--the sovereign Word of God for All People--came to seem.
I began having a lot of perfectly normal, perfectly reasonable questions about just what the Bible was about.
Luckily for me, I had at my disposal two seminary-trained professionals to consult...
Understandably, then, when my father discovered that I had drawn a large, complex picture in the back of it, on the last page of Revelation (last book in the Bible), he was upset. He confronted me, Bible in hand opened to the page in question. I think I stammered something, some excuse that wasn't cutting the mustard with him, when Mama intervened.
"I think," she said, examining my artwork, "he was drawing the scene in Revelation with the Christians surrounding God and Christ. Is that what it is, John?"
Relieved at my mother's ability to put into words what I had tried to put into images, I nodded, pointing out to my father the exact verse references. Though I think he mentioned something about maybe not drawing right inside the Bible, the explanation mollified him.
In truth, I was quite a doodler as a child. I'd doodle mostly in the innumerable church services, splitting an offering envelope silently open to make a triptych of three blank spaces to fill with superheroes, spaceships, or--sometimes--bits of Bible imagery.
Because--to be honest--there's a ton of cool stuff to imagine in the Bible. Aside from the Hi-Def pictures of heaven and hell I absorbed as a child.
I was particularly drawn to the images in Revelation. For someone interested in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, that book is a goldmine of nightmare sequences. Take Revelation 9, where an army of flying scorpion-locusts emerges from smoke coming from a bottomless pit (the result of a star crashing to earth): "In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces. their hair like women's hair, and their teeth like lions' teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. [Here's the really good part] They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is the power to harm people for five months" (9:7-10, NRSV).
Cool-o, huh? Well, horrifying, really. But still.
Lots to imagine, and it was all true. It had happened--or at least it was going to happen. Everything from the 6-days creation, the serpent and Garden of Eden, the flood, the tower of Babel, the 10 plagues, the Exodus, the loads of wacky-weird stuff in the Hebrew Testament that most people don't know about (a talking donkey, gruesome dismemberment, flaming chasms that split the earth to swallow hundreds, wild bears that kill teenagers who make fun of a prophet's baldness--I could go on and on). And that's all pre-Jesus!
And, truthfully, I could believe it--the literal truth of it. Jonah swallowed by a big fish, lives there three days, gets vomited out on the shore? Check. A multitude of people fed with a few loaves of bread and fish? Check. Flying scorpion-locusts? Shudder/check. Heck, I believed in God, and all-powerful, all-knowing invisible Being who created everything. Still do, actually. After that hurdle, the other stuff is an easy-cheezy hop of faith.
The problem for me came initially not in what was in the Bible, but what wasn't in there. Take dinosaurs. Like many youngsters, I liked dinosaurs a great deal. We had seen, on vacation, huge dinosaur excavation museums (I think Daddy described that vacation as "if there were dinosaurs, we went there").
Yet I wasn't able to find much evidence of them in the Bible (sorry, but general descriptions of behemoth or leviathan in Job didn't cut it). What about the dinosaurs? And mammoths? And cave men (cave women, too)? In that respect the Genesis accounts of creation and the flood seemed... lacking. Dinos and other such creatures/epochs, I gathered, formed a significant part of Earth's history, but zippo mention of them in a book that's supposed to be Everything. Even the picture books or comic books of those accounts tended to omit dinosaurs.
And, switching to non-extinct subjects, what about other people in the big, wide world who had nothing to do with the Jewish or Christian stories? Asians? Australian Aborigines? Native Americans? Inca? Maya? Southern Africans? Northern Europeans?
The more I learned about the world, about history, about science, about the universe, the narrower my Bible--the sovereign Word of God for All People--came to seem.
I began having a lot of perfectly normal, perfectly reasonable questions about just what the Bible was about.
Luckily for me, I had at my disposal two seminary-trained professionals to consult...
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Word of God Battle of the Bible (PK Confessions)
So--to continue with the whole inerrancy issue (i.e., the notion that the Bible is a cohesive, error-free set of divine propositional truths unblemished by any shade of contradiction or error).
As a youngster Southern Baptist, I remained ignorant of the fine distinctions between theological terms like inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration. I more or less endorsed a simple, "if the Bible says it, it's true" doctrine. I would venture to say that this is where most of the members of my father's churches lived. This is not to say they weren't committed Christians; it's just that debates about which exact doctrine of inspiration one subscribes to tends to be the stuff of professional theologians. The average church member is as likely to know about the 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy as the average US citizen is likely to know how many amendments there are to the US Constitution (27) or who the current Secretary of Agriculture is (Tom Vilsack). Yes, these are important bits of information, but the average citizen can operate without knowing these. They exist on the back burner of vital civic knowledge.
Similarly, the inerrant-infallible status of the Bible in my early church training operated as a kind of sub-principle shaping other, more obvious facets of church life. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon or Sunday school lesson about inerrancy per se, but a high reverence for the Bible permeated church experience.
There were songs, such as "The B-I-B-L-E/That's the book for me." There was the Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible we recited each day during Vacation Bible School ("I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God"). There was the expectation that everyone attending church would own and bring to every worship service their own Bible (all the better if you had a fancy leather carrying case). Readings from the Bible structured every level of worship: sermons were based on a passage (or passages), Sunday School curricula took classes systematically through particular books of the Bible, endless contests or requirements urged children to memorize verse after verse (I can still recite tons of them), and of course stories from the Bible filled home and church life.
What I was unaware of as a youngster was the degree to which the question of Biblical inerrancy as such had moved to the forefront of the minds of many Southern Baptist leaders. Time and a lack of expertise makes this a brutally abridged account, but basically the 1970s and early 80s saw a massive shift in the ideological and theological focus of the Southern Baptist Convention--the denomination as a whole. This shift--alternately called the fundamentalist takeover or the conservative resurgence, depending on the historian's perspective--consisted of the conservative segments of the denomination establishing control over the political levers of the denomination.
For instance, by flooding the Convention's ballot boxes with local church supporters (I say flood, not stuff--they did nothing illegal), conservatives gained control of some key leadership positions. These conservative leaders in turn nominated similarly conservative sub-leaders, and so on. They thus democratically achieved a political hegemony within the denomination.
At the same time, conservatives pushed for and achieved a purge of non-conservatives (who were typically described not as "liberals" but as "moderates") from both denominational and seminary leadership. They did so through the tool of a doctrinal question: Do you affirm the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Those leaders, missionaries, seminary professors, etc. who did not affirm this position were forced out.
The seminary victory was particularly important. Pre-takeover (i.e., when my parents got their degrees), Baptist seminaries featured a range of theological and biblical-critical methods. Post-takeover, any pastor with seminary credentials (typically a Master of Divinity) would have been trained in methods of Biblical criticism hostile to the "higher criticism" of other Protestant traditions.
The inerrancy question had thus assumed a kind of definitional importance it had not had previously in Baptist culture. Now, Southern Baptists are congregational rather than connectional in structure. That is, each congregation enjoys a good deal of autonomy in terms of its operation (contrasting with connectional systems like the Roman Catholic Church or the United Methodist Church). The Convention itself could not directly enforce inerrancy orthodoxy on the local church level, and some Southern Baptist churches remained moderate-to-liberal. Ripples from the takeover were thus slow to reach me personally as a Southern Baptist.
By the mid-80s, however, my parents--both of whom were moderates--had begun to feel that their time in the Southern Baptist Church might be limited. They returned from yearly denominational meetings increasingly dispirited. My mother wrote (and saw published) a letter critical of the takeover in the national Baptist periodical. My father began considering parachurch ministries, such as hospital chaplaincy.
Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I began to have some questions about the whole inerrancy thing...
As a youngster Southern Baptist, I remained ignorant of the fine distinctions between theological terms like inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration. I more or less endorsed a simple, "if the Bible says it, it's true" doctrine. I would venture to say that this is where most of the members of my father's churches lived. This is not to say they weren't committed Christians; it's just that debates about which exact doctrine of inspiration one subscribes to tends to be the stuff of professional theologians. The average church member is as likely to know about the 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy as the average US citizen is likely to know how many amendments there are to the US Constitution (27) or who the current Secretary of Agriculture is (Tom Vilsack). Yes, these are important bits of information, but the average citizen can operate without knowing these. They exist on the back burner of vital civic knowledge.
Similarly, the inerrant-infallible status of the Bible in my early church training operated as a kind of sub-principle shaping other, more obvious facets of church life. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon or Sunday school lesson about inerrancy per se, but a high reverence for the Bible permeated church experience.
There were songs, such as "The B-I-B-L-E/That's the book for me." There was the Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible we recited each day during Vacation Bible School ("I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God"). There was the expectation that everyone attending church would own and bring to every worship service their own Bible (all the better if you had a fancy leather carrying case). Readings from the Bible structured every level of worship: sermons were based on a passage (or passages), Sunday School curricula took classes systematically through particular books of the Bible, endless contests or requirements urged children to memorize verse after verse (I can still recite tons of them), and of course stories from the Bible filled home and church life.
What I was unaware of as a youngster was the degree to which the question of Biblical inerrancy as such had moved to the forefront of the minds of many Southern Baptist leaders. Time and a lack of expertise makes this a brutally abridged account, but basically the 1970s and early 80s saw a massive shift in the ideological and theological focus of the Southern Baptist Convention--the denomination as a whole. This shift--alternately called the fundamentalist takeover or the conservative resurgence, depending on the historian's perspective--consisted of the conservative segments of the denomination establishing control over the political levers of the denomination.
For instance, by flooding the Convention's ballot boxes with local church supporters (I say flood, not stuff--they did nothing illegal), conservatives gained control of some key leadership positions. These conservative leaders in turn nominated similarly conservative sub-leaders, and so on. They thus democratically achieved a political hegemony within the denomination.
At the same time, conservatives pushed for and achieved a purge of non-conservatives (who were typically described not as "liberals" but as "moderates") from both denominational and seminary leadership. They did so through the tool of a doctrinal question: Do you affirm the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Those leaders, missionaries, seminary professors, etc. who did not affirm this position were forced out.
The seminary victory was particularly important. Pre-takeover (i.e., when my parents got their degrees), Baptist seminaries featured a range of theological and biblical-critical methods. Post-takeover, any pastor with seminary credentials (typically a Master of Divinity) would have been trained in methods of Biblical criticism hostile to the "higher criticism" of other Protestant traditions.
The inerrancy question had thus assumed a kind of definitional importance it had not had previously in Baptist culture. Now, Southern Baptists are congregational rather than connectional in structure. That is, each congregation enjoys a good deal of autonomy in terms of its operation (contrasting with connectional systems like the Roman Catholic Church or the United Methodist Church). The Convention itself could not directly enforce inerrancy orthodoxy on the local church level, and some Southern Baptist churches remained moderate-to-liberal. Ripples from the takeover were thus slow to reach me personally as a Southern Baptist.
By the mid-80s, however, my parents--both of whom were moderates--had begun to feel that their time in the Southern Baptist Church might be limited. They returned from yearly denominational meetings increasingly dispirited. My mother wrote (and saw published) a letter critical of the takeover in the national Baptist periodical. My father began considering parachurch ministries, such as hospital chaplaincy.
Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I began to have some questions about the whole inerrancy thing...
Friday, July 10, 2009
The Word of God--explanations (PK Confessions, part 3)
You know, I started this mini-series about The Faith I Grew Up With thinking I was just doing some necessary exposition--who is this guy writing?--before getting to nitty gritty details about conservative evangelicalism.
In relating some of the key components of my childhood faith culture, though, I realize I'm actually running through some of the commonly mentioned distinctives of present-day evangelicalism. There's the emphasis on personal conversion (with heavy stress on a literal heaven/hell afterlife), the emphasis on personal evangelism, and--today's topic--the status of the Bible as inerrant, infallible Word of God.
Actually, a full discussion of inerrancy would take much longer than a single blog posting to deal with. I'd go so far as to say that few other issues can compete with Biblical Inerrancy for the title of Most Perennially Divisive Issue in Evangelicalism. To keep things sanely short, then, I'll restrict myself to some basic definitions and clarifications in this post.
In general, biblical inerrancy refers to the belief that the Christian Bible (as Protestants affirm the canon--sixty-six books) is accurate, consistent, and factual in all aspects--not just authoritative in matters of faith or doctrine but reliable on any subject (science, psychology, history, geography) that it cares to mention.
Scholars and theologians (evangelical and otherwise) often distinguish between inerrancy and infallibility, the latter referring to a belief that affirms the Bible's reliability in matters of Christian faith but declines to endorse the "every detail" case of inerrancy.
More general still is the doctrine that the Bible is inspired, "God-breathed," full of divine truths about life and faith if not necessarily a set of cohesive, comprehensive propositions about faith. Most Christians of any stripe (evangelicals, non-evangelicals/mainline Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and many groups that evangelicals would consider pseudo-Christian sects, like the Mormans or Jehovah's Witnesses) would affirm the inspiration of the Bible.
Most conservative evangelicals, however, stress a particular brand of inspiration, commonly referred to as "verbal, plenary" inspiration. Plenary means "complete"--as in everything in the Bible, every book, every sentence, every story, every bit of doctrine. By verbal, evangelicals mean an understanding that God inspired every single word in the scriptures. Thus, by "verbal, plenary inspiration," evangelicals (those that affirm verbal-plenary inspiration, that is) propose that the scriptures contain no human-authorial excrescences or textual surpluses.
Now, for a variety of reasons I'll detail later, I do not subscribe to plenary-verbal-inerrant-infallible inspiration (indeed, I find the doctrine pernicious). Be that as it may, I need to make some quick clarifications about what a doctrine of inerrancy does not entail, lest I erect a straw-man of a belief central to many evangelicals. Most of these qualifications (and more) are included/explained in a much-cited document, the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, found here.
1. Inerrancy does not mean literalism. Like other writings, ancient and otherwise, the Bible occasionally uses literary devices like metaphor, simile, symbolism, allegory, or poetic imagery. It would be rare for an inerrantist to insist that a phrase like "built like a lion" means the person being described resembles some nightmare patchwork of lion-parts and human-parts. Inerrancy as most commonly conceived and practice recognizes and works with literary forms as they are found int the Bible. If there is some ambiguity as to whether a passage could be taken literally or allegorically (e.g., the Genesis creation account), however, inerrantists will typically affirm a literal reading. "Literal where possible" is the rule of thumb.
2. Most inerrantists tend to affirm that plenary/verbal inspiration applies to the original texts in the original languages--what are called the autographs. This qualification grants a few advantages. First, it lets evangelicals off the hook of having to affirm the authority of Bible copies that are clearly corrupted or misprinted (see this Wikipedia article for an idea of what I'm talking about). Second, the autograph concession gives evangelicals an "easy out"--or at least an Ultimate out--if they are confronted with what seems like a clear contradiction in scripture (a difference in numbers or names in parallel accounts of the same event, for instance). Since the autographs are lost, an irresolvable contradiction could be blamed on a copyist's error. I should mention, though, that in practice most scholars who subscribe to inerrancy will do their utmost to explain or reconcile seeming contradictions without recourse to the "easy out."
Finally, the autographs qualification defuses (or attempts to defuse) much of the debate about versions of the Bible--i.e., which English translation of the Bible is authoritative? Those inerrantists who affirm the 1978 Statement or something like it can endorse a range of translations (King James, New King James, New International Version, etc.). Crucially, though, there's a considerable number of conservative evangelicals who will insist not only on verbal/plenary inspiration but also on a corollary doctrine of preservation--namely that the only version of the Bible that preserves the autographs' (and therefore God's) exact words is the 1611 King James Bible, based on the Greek Textus Receptus. Such "King James Only" believers can be quite adamant in insisting in the inadequacy, even heresy of other versions.
Most evangelicals, however, are not KJV-only.
Why is all this important? What does this have to do with my Southern Baptist childhood?
To answer that, we'll have to get into what's known as the Battle for the Bible.
Peace,
JF
In relating some of the key components of my childhood faith culture, though, I realize I'm actually running through some of the commonly mentioned distinctives of present-day evangelicalism. There's the emphasis on personal conversion (with heavy stress on a literal heaven/hell afterlife), the emphasis on personal evangelism, and--today's topic--the status of the Bible as inerrant, infallible Word of God.
Actually, a full discussion of inerrancy would take much longer than a single blog posting to deal with. I'd go so far as to say that few other issues can compete with Biblical Inerrancy for the title of Most Perennially Divisive Issue in Evangelicalism. To keep things sanely short, then, I'll restrict myself to some basic definitions and clarifications in this post.
In general, biblical inerrancy refers to the belief that the Christian Bible (as Protestants affirm the canon--sixty-six books) is accurate, consistent, and factual in all aspects--not just authoritative in matters of faith or doctrine but reliable on any subject (science, psychology, history, geography) that it cares to mention.
Scholars and theologians (evangelical and otherwise) often distinguish between inerrancy and infallibility, the latter referring to a belief that affirms the Bible's reliability in matters of Christian faith but declines to endorse the "every detail" case of inerrancy.
More general still is the doctrine that the Bible is inspired, "God-breathed," full of divine truths about life and faith if not necessarily a set of cohesive, comprehensive propositions about faith. Most Christians of any stripe (evangelicals, non-evangelicals/mainline Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and many groups that evangelicals would consider pseudo-Christian sects, like the Mormans or Jehovah's Witnesses) would affirm the inspiration of the Bible.
Most conservative evangelicals, however, stress a particular brand of inspiration, commonly referred to as "verbal, plenary" inspiration. Plenary means "complete"--as in everything in the Bible, every book, every sentence, every story, every bit of doctrine. By verbal, evangelicals mean an understanding that God inspired every single word in the scriptures. Thus, by "verbal, plenary inspiration," evangelicals (those that affirm verbal-plenary inspiration, that is) propose that the scriptures contain no human-authorial excrescences or textual surpluses.
Now, for a variety of reasons I'll detail later, I do not subscribe to plenary-verbal-inerrant-infallible inspiration (indeed, I find the doctrine pernicious). Be that as it may, I need to make some quick clarifications about what a doctrine of inerrancy does not entail, lest I erect a straw-man of a belief central to many evangelicals. Most of these qualifications (and more) are included/explained in a much-cited document, the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, found here.
1. Inerrancy does not mean literalism. Like other writings, ancient and otherwise, the Bible occasionally uses literary devices like metaphor, simile, symbolism, allegory, or poetic imagery. It would be rare for an inerrantist to insist that a phrase like "built like a lion" means the person being described resembles some nightmare patchwork of lion-parts and human-parts. Inerrancy as most commonly conceived and practice recognizes and works with literary forms as they are found int the Bible. If there is some ambiguity as to whether a passage could be taken literally or allegorically (e.g., the Genesis creation account), however, inerrantists will typically affirm a literal reading. "Literal where possible" is the rule of thumb.
2. Most inerrantists tend to affirm that plenary/verbal inspiration applies to the original texts in the original languages--what are called the autographs. This qualification grants a few advantages. First, it lets evangelicals off the hook of having to affirm the authority of Bible copies that are clearly corrupted or misprinted (see this Wikipedia article for an idea of what I'm talking about). Second, the autograph concession gives evangelicals an "easy out"--or at least an Ultimate out--if they are confronted with what seems like a clear contradiction in scripture (a difference in numbers or names in parallel accounts of the same event, for instance). Since the autographs are lost, an irresolvable contradiction could be blamed on a copyist's error. I should mention, though, that in practice most scholars who subscribe to inerrancy will do their utmost to explain or reconcile seeming contradictions without recourse to the "easy out."
Finally, the autographs qualification defuses (or attempts to defuse) much of the debate about versions of the Bible--i.e., which English translation of the Bible is authoritative? Those inerrantists who affirm the 1978 Statement or something like it can endorse a range of translations (King James, New King James, New International Version, etc.). Crucially, though, there's a considerable number of conservative evangelicals who will insist not only on verbal/plenary inspiration but also on a corollary doctrine of preservation--namely that the only version of the Bible that preserves the autographs' (and therefore God's) exact words is the 1611 King James Bible, based on the Greek Textus Receptus. Such "King James Only" believers can be quite adamant in insisting in the inadequacy, even heresy of other versions.
Most evangelicals, however, are not KJV-only.
Why is all this important? What does this have to do with my Southern Baptist childhood?
To answer that, we'll have to get into what's known as the Battle for the Bible.
Peace,
JF
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