Mister Rogers

Back after a few days away. I think I'll be dropping down to 3-4 posts a week so as not to feel bad when I don't post every single day.

For today: One of the odder things I've been doing with my DVR of late is recording re-runs of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. PBS no longer officially broadcasts that show, but individual stations may show it in syndication. Lucky for me, my local PBS station shows one episode twice a weekend at 6:00 AM.

What can I say? Watching that show is like enjoying a cool cup of distilled water after a week of drinking nothing but lukewarm, off-brand soda pop. It's pure and unpretentious at once. Every episode is the same familiar formula--the "Won't You Be My Neighbor" entrance, the changeover from business to sweaters-and-sneakers, some fairly aimless activities, songs, and reflective talk; a trip to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe; and then back with Mr. Rogers for more talk, a song, and then the final changeover and goodbye set to "It's Such a Good Feeling."

And every activity, every song, every reflection unfolds guided Fred Rogers's unhurried, sincere, gentle attention focused right at the camera, i.e., at you, his "television neighbors." He peppers the show with reminders--all delivered naturally, like an old lesson he's just rediscovered--"You know, there's only one person like you in all the whole wide world. You're special and fine because you're you."

Only now, watching it armed with my Professional Dramaturgical Eye do I see how excellent it is on the level of pure craft. Take Fred Rogers as an actor, presenting himself as a character in every show. I mean, Rogers delivered practically the same basic message every day ("you're a special person") and never does it come off as anything but utterly honest, utterly motivated and appropriate to the moment. He has a talent for tapping into some reservoir of joyful fascination with anything--any object, any process, any person--he happens to meet. I know actors who work years and never achieve anything like that level of conviction.

Watching those 6 AM reruns, I realize that part of what makes the show so refreshing, so unusual, stems from its avoidance of any irony, camp, tongue-in-cheekness, or innuendo. We are used to children's programming that operates on at least two levels, one pitched toward the youngsters and one signaling to the adults. There's a winking awareness of grittier or more sexual aspects of life even in shows like Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer (I won't even get into the hyper-sexualized preteen fare of the Disney Channel et al.).

In Mister Rogers, though, what you see is what you get. What people say is purely and literally what they mean. Even the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a land of fantasy costumes and characters ruled by a puppet king, remains firmly framed as make-believe. On several occasions Rogers shows his audience exactly how the puppets work, reinforcing a realistic substrate to all of the imagination and disguise play going on.

Of course, such unironic sincerity makes the show an easy target for parodies in which a cynical or sexualized subtext gets laced into the show's format. So pervasive are such parodies that I sometimes find myself thinking of the show through the lens of the parodist, i.e., as a doofy, moralizing, high-handed exercise in naivete.

Watching the show, though, erases such misconceptions. Rogers does a surprisingly minimal amount of moral instruction. Most of his reflections and monologues deal not with what you should do or shouldn't do but how things are. "Sometimes we get angry, don't we?" he says with absolute conviction, "Or sometimes we get lonely." And then he pauses to let that sink in. He's surprisingly frank about the reality of unpleasant events, scary things, and sad feelings. There's no theodicy here; the show scrupulously avoids any overtly religious subtext. Things simply aren't always as we would have them.

And what does Mister Rogers do with such darker realities? He encourages us to express them as such, explores our reaction to them, and reassures us that nothing that happens affects the fact of our worth as special people.

Case in point: from an episode I recorded recently and which by some miracle was uploaded to Youtube:







Aside from noting the truly clever songwriting and the talented performers (Rogers as Daniel and Betty Aberlin as Lady Aberlin), I'm blown away by the simple, powerful ethic of valuing the other that's expressed here.

I mean, isn't this precisely what agape is? How different would Christianity be if we imagined God (not always, but sometimes) as the one who sings to us when we feel like mistakes? This would be the God who doesn't merely tolerate us, who doesn't have to hold God's nose to deal with us, who isn't defined by wrathful-with-a-touch-of-grace. This would be the God (and we would be the Church) who sees everyone as a neighbor. This would be the God/Church that sings to everyone they meet that "it's such a good feeling/to know you're alive."

Be well,

JF

Love Wins

So--to pick up with yesterday's challenge: If God's essential feature is unconditional love, what about all the angry/vengeful/jealous God parts of the Bible?

I've been relating my life transition out of conservative evangelicalism (Southern Baptist-ism, specifically). Central to this shift was my encounter with a youth leader named Paulanne, who opened my eyes to the possibility that perhaps the miraculous thing about God's love was that it was offered to everyone, forever, full stop. It is good--for nothing. There's no threat of hell for those who don't accept it; there's no particular reward reserved only for those who do. God's all-powerful, insistent love pursues us forever. Death cannot stop it. Our unbelief or rebellion does not cause it to fade. It transcends mortality and attends us in whatever is to come. It is unconditional and unlimited in scope and power. It is stronger than judgment, stronger than sin, stronger than consequences.

To be fair, this isn't an idea entirely unknown to evangelicalism. Donald Bloesch (Essentials of Evangelical Theology) speaks of the possibility that Christ's redemptive, atoning gestures follow us beyond the grave, that Christ reaches out to us wherever we may be. Indeed, so powerful and eternal is that love in this line of thought that it is assumed that, in the fullness of eternity, all human souls will find rest in God, that God's loving openness and patience will outlast even the most stubborn of souls. C. S. Lewis, in his The Great Divorce, seems to endorse a similar possibility, viewing hell as a place of misanthropic self-isolation that souls may choose to relinquish (though in that book and in others--The Last Battle, for example--there is the suggestion that the soul's stubbornness may be permanent).

More recently, many strands of the Emergent conversation, a diverse network of postmodern evangelicals, affirm the power of God's love to overcome traditional theological barriers of mortality and sin. Dan Kimball, for example, tells of how when first presented with the gospel he wondered how powerful God could really be if even the smallest sin could establish a gulf between God and humanity. Or, more simply, Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church makes itself known in Grand Rapids via blunt, white-letters-on-black-background bumper stickers reading: "Love Wins."

And that's what the unconditional love of God means--love wins. But what about divine righteousness? Love wins. What about how the Hitlers and child rapists of the world deserve hell? Love wins. What about those who have never heard and do not believe? Love wins. What about those who believe sincerely, but not in Jesus Christ? Love wins.

It's a simple, shattering answer for conservative evangelical theology, for which judgment and eternal consequences (hell) must follow as a natural fact from human sin. To respond to the contrast of God's perfection versus human's sinful contamination with "love wins" is to nonchalantly dismiss a major part of who God is and what God does. It upends sense, suspends the rules of the universe--rules that God Godself established--it cheats, in other words. Love wins by cheating, declaring the rules void. A just God, cries this theology, would never do that.

But then, but then--is this not the God who in Christ said "the first will be last, and the last will be first?" Is this not the God who in the parable said that God-the-vineyard-owner will pay all workers equally no matter if they labored a full day, a half day, or but a few hours? Is this not the God who told Peter to eat flesh forbidden him, to consort with people forbidden him, to "not call unclean what I have called clean"? "Where is thy victory, o Death? Where is thy sting?" God has rendered all human concepts of sin and punishment void.

Love wins.

But, counters conservative evangelical theology, God doesn't love everyone! Did he love the people drowned in the flood? Did God love the Canaanites that God ordered the Hebrews to vanquish (men, women, and children)? Did God love those the Psalmist insists that God hates and in whose suffering God delights? Did God love Judas? Did God love Esau? Yes, an all-loving God might be nice--but the scriptures point to a God who is not forever patient, a God who can be angered to the point of annihilating cities, a God who can abandon humans. Where is God's love in that?

My answer is twofold: First, as conservative evangelicals may guess, I do not view every word written in the Bible as coming from God's mouth. I can affirm the inspiration of the Bible without overlooking the fact that the various parts serve other purposes: explanatory myths about the origins of the world and of a nation, justificatory narratives about the past strength of a people now oppressed and in captivity, epistolary fragments for churches in specific situations, apocalyptic visions used to frame contemporary criticisms. My convictions about who God is, my knowledge of how Christ lived, my fullest understanding of the Spirit's power in my life--these move me to reject as un-God verses that call for the shattering of infant skulls against the rocks simply because the infants are the enemy's offspring (Psalms 137:8-9).

Or-better yet--to treat these verses not as the literal Words of God or even as the Sentiments of God, but instead as the sentiments of God's people who at that point were hurting horribly. Human, not Godly.

And, secondly, as for other instances of God's abandonment, I turn to Christ, who in quoting one of those Psalms cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" At that point Christ was hurting horribly, having been betrayed and abandoned by nearly all around him, crucified by the people he sought to save. Yet the witness of Immanuel--God With Us--is this: that at that very point at which we are suffering most, at the point where we feel most abandoned by God--there God is, feeling our abandonment with us in the most literal terms. Even when we are lost, God's love wins its way to us.

And I do not suggest that this knowledge magically makes suffering or abandonment or loss disappear (any more than Christ's cry prevented his dying). It may not even be something we feel at the time. I agree with my conservative evangelical sisters and brothers in affirming that the Christian way does not guarantee protection from suffering. But the image of Christ as God's solidarity, God's at-one-ment with us at our most alienated--this is utterly different than the picture of a God who abandons humanity to an eternal torment.

More tomorrow,

JF

Good for Nothing

I'm again delaying a response to conservative evangelical theology due to an experience in church today.

My congregation was blessed this morning with a special message from Virgil Gulker, the founder of Kid's Hope USA, a ministry that pairs adult mentors with underprivileged or at-risk elementary school children. Throughout the school year, the mentors each meet with their assigned child (each mentor has only one) for one hour each week. They may work on school projects, reading/math skills, play games, read stories, or just talk.

Although studies have shown that mentored kids exhibit marked academic improvement, Dr. Gulker clarified that the most vital benefits were intangible: the children have a friendly, consistent adult presence in their lives. Again and again, he says, children will ask their mentor, "What other schools do you go to? How many other kids do you mentor?" And the mentor will answer, "I only go to this school, and I only see you." The mentors show up, says Dr. Gulker, and they show up reliably, there totally for the child. For many of these kids, that's a phenomenon unheard of in their lives, and that's part of what makes Kids Hope work.

The other component of the Kids Hope ministry kids found miraculous, Dr. Gulker explained, was its volunteer nature. He told of a standard conversation between kids and their mentor:

"Why are you here? Are you teacher?" they ask. No. "Are you a social worker?" No. "I know--you're a teacher's aide." No. "Then how much do you make for seeing me?" Nothing. "Why would you do it?" Because you're my friend.

That, Dr. Gulker says, is the other miracle component from kids' perspectives: The mentors expect nothing in return for their friendship. They aren't paid, they aren't reimbursed, and they don't have to be there to fulfill some boss's mandate. They're good--for nothing.

That "good--for nothing" resonates with the core of the unconditional love I learned to identify as the prime attribute of God. As I've explained, I came to see my early evangelical faith as bound up in self-concern. I became a Christian, initially and primarily (if not exclusively), to avoid hell. I was to spread the gospel by activating others' sense of eternal self-preservation. You don't want to go to hell, do you? Then be saved by trusting in Christ.

The aura of contractual obligation--on me and on God--made it increasingly difficult for me to imagine how to be in love with God or how to show love to others without first thinking of the terms of the contract. Was I saved? Was I headed for heaven instead of hell? And I knew that, on facing God after death, God's first interaction with me was not "Welcome home, my child!" but "Is your name in my Book of Life? It is? Then--whom have you brought with you by your mortal witness?" Even reunion with God was a test--how had I fulfilled my half of the bargain (faith and not works, yes--but authentic faith: there's the rub).

This anxious questioning often crowded out every other thought, keeping my faith at a fight-or-flight panic status.

Imagining God's love as unconditional--love for nothing--freed me.

Early on in this blog, I mentioned the old story of the traveler passing a woman carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a flaming torch in the other. "I'm going to burn away the clouds and mansions of heaven, and I'm going to douse the fires of hell," she explained, "Then we'll see who still cares to follow the Way of Christ." Would we as humans love God--for nothing in return? What if the Christian philosophy had no sense of afterlife or immortal soul? Would the Christianity--a life lived in devotion to God and neighbor--be as attractive a life option for people?

Alternately, and in a way even more challenging to my evangelical roots: what if God loved us--loved everyone--with no eternal threat or reward to compel us to return that love? I've explored at length my troubles with the notion of God as Godfather, extending to humanity an offer it can't refuse: "put your entire faith in me--and enjoy eternal bliss--or decline to do so and face eternal torment." What if God's lovingkindness were extended freely?

Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith has a song along these lines titled, appropriately enough, "God Loves Everyone" (here's a nice cover of it, or you can find the original on his album Cobblestone Runway). It's both shockingly heretical from a conservative evangelical point of view--and somehow more right, more consonant with the most challenging, Spirit-filled moments of conviction I've experienced than any of my fear-filled, self-centered questionings regarding my eternal fate.

What if "there are no gates in Heaven/ everyone gets in/ queer or straight/ those of every fate"? What if God really does love "the killer in his cell/the atheist as well/ the pure at heart/ and the wild at heart"? What happens to Christianity when you don't have to be Christian--one of the elect--to receive the grace of God?

Ah, say my imaginary conservative-evangelical readers, you've still avoided the challenge you raised yesterday. Namely: what about all those scriptures attesting to God's hatred? "Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated." What about the God who calls for the destruction of enemies? The God who binds up and casts into the outer darkness those not heeding his call? The God who "gives them up" to their own fates? What about the God who forsakes us? Where is love in abandonment?

Is that a love that's good for nothing?

The answer, I think, begins by recognizing that Christ himself asked this same question on the Cross...

More tomorrow,

JF

The Evangelical Counter to God's Unconditional Love

So--relating three Big Shifts in my life and faith that coincided with a transition out of evangelicalism for me, I told about my entry into the world of theatre (and therefore a wholly new way of thinking about what I could do) and my participation in a youth group led by a woman named Paulanne. I credited Paulanne with helping to revolutionize the way I see God.

To whit: she presented a picture of Christianity almost entirely devoid of the fear and anxiety about eternal salvation that had so characterized my early faith. Instead, Paulanne emphasized the idea of God's unconditional, passionate, overpowering love for us both as the prime condition of all existence and as the ethical standard of interaction that anyone who goes by the label Christian should choose as a pattern for life.

I pause here to address the fact that, in rhapsodizing about embracing God as unconditional love, I have fallen right into the conservative-evangelical stereotype of the proud apostate. A cautionary tale advanced by conservative evangelicals since at least the 1800s, the proud apostate is one who falls prey to the siren call of a false gospel--the gospel of God's love-without-judgment.

Practically every evangelist or evangelical ministry that mobilizes the gospel of avoiding hell eventually comes to address the fact that much of their message (i.e., the eternity-in-hell-for-sin part) makes God seem capricious and tyrannical rather than loving and worthy of adoration. Yet practically every such evangelist also has a standard criticism, sometimes bitter and sometimes sorrowful, of any ministry that abandons or mutes the hellfire judgment portion of the gospel message.

As I've explored at length in this blog, conservative evangelicals (generally speaking) refute the idea that God's love can exist at all apart from God's righteousness. Those attributes are, for evangelicals, two apsects of the same Person(ality). God judges not because, like some heavenly Jekyll/Hyde, God changes character from wrathful to loving. God judges because without that judgment God would be neither righteous nor loving.

How could God not judge a rapist or murder, these evangelicals will ask, and be called good? How could he welcome such vile criminals into Heaven and maintain that he loves people? How is that fair to the victims? Besides, the argument continues, God's love for humanity is more than proven by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. What more do you want?

There's a deeper argument from some evangelical circles that I've not really dealt with yet, the doctrine of reprobation. A thread especially prominent in Calvinist traditions, reprobation declares that, in fact, God's love is not as unlimited as the love Paulanne presented to me and that I try to embrace. Instead, goes this line of thought, it is possible for humans to offend God to such a degree through their pride and blasphemy that they drift beyond the ambit of God's grace. They go too far, and God lets them go--forever.

Indeed, insofar as evangelicals believe that the ability of humans to turn to Christ ceases at death or at the Final Judgment (whichever comes first), they set practical limits on the extent of God's love. For most conservative evangelicals, souls burning in hell are there eternally, having by their mortal unbelief abandoned themselves to their sad fate.

The other side of strict reprobation is of course the better-known Calvinist doctrine of election. Here I tread upon ground less familiar to me, but as I understand it, conservative Calvinism interprets most Biblical passages about God's love as referring not to humanity in general but to that portion of humanity that God in God's sovereignty chose to be God's own. That is, prior to existence, God chose (a word whose Latin translation forms the root of elect) which human souls would turn to God. It is for these that God sent Christ. The others--the un-elect--are destined to reject God and are of course not included in God's proclamations of love.

Now, Calvinist traditions boast as wide a range of interpretations about election/reprobation as you can imagine (e.g., for some, election simply means that God knows ahead of time which humans will choose to believe in God and which won't). But just about any way you cut it, reprobation and election in any of their forms suggest a limitation on the spatial or temporal scope of God's love. God either loves all people--but only up to a certain time, after which he only loves those who have believed on Christ--or God loves only a portion of humanity, a portion who conveniently enough are exactly those who believe on Christ. [I can actually see the appeal of a strict Calvinism. It neatly explains away the moral conundrum of God loving a soul that God is ultimately unable or unwilling to spare from Hell]

Either way, God's love is, from an eternal perspective, unconditional for Christians alone. To believe otherwise, to suggest that God really loves all humans without scope or limit, is to replace the God represented in the Bible with wishful thinking.

Like it or not, point out conservative evangelicals, the Bible does not present a God who is totally loving. In the Bible God hates, excoriates, delights in the afflictions of, punishes, kills, destroys, calls for the utter annihilation of, lets go of, curses, drives out, casts into the outer darkness, and abandons altogether those God judges as worthy of such treatment. How, ask evangelicals, do people get around the Biblical witness without ignoring or dismissing it, replacing the Word of God in Scripture with a God of their own imagining. Is this not the very idolatry, the very pride, that defines the reprobate mind?

My response tomorrow,

JF

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