Back to posting after some time off.
What's there to post about, evangelical-culture-wise? Whenever I feel stymied about something to blog about for this site, I visit one of several handy-dandy conservative-evangelical blogs. One of my favorite, as I've mentioned, is Ray Comfort's "Atheist Central" blog, where the "Way of the Master" evangelist posts a daily bit of atheist-bait for his flock (herd? gaggle?) of commentators to squabble over.
I've written about Comfort's evangelical technique at some length. His atheist site, however, seems at first more of a side-project, a distraction from his main work of educating neophyte evangelists to spread the faith as Jesus did (i.e., via open-air preaching).
Unlike the random pedestrians Comfort generally focuses on, those who read and comment every day on "Atheist Central" generally have their minds made up about Comfort's views. He has ardent defenders and persistent (almost to the point of fixation) critics. Comfort's postings range from simple scriptural exegesis to announcements about his ministry's actions (e.g., the Origin of the Species giveaway) to occasional commentary on a culture war issue or to. Hardly a post goes by, however, without Comfort's inserting some jab at the foolishness and pride associated with willful unbelief.
Such jabs in turn prompt each day's comments, which feature an almost ritual re-enactment of the same jeers-and-cheers discussion between those who find Comfort mendacious or vapid and those who find him praiseworthy. "There you go again, Ray," write the critics. "There you go again, atheists," write his defenders. And so on. Comfort occasionally responds to this or that poster and will delete any comment that uses offensive language or in which the words God or Jesus are not capitalized.
I have to admit, I've been puzzled in the past about Comfort's attention to this site. His usual ministry, which he patterns after his take on Christ's ministerial example, focuses on street preaching and improvisational Q&A encounters with passersby. His atheist page, however, boasts a "congregation" of regulars seemingly addicted to the flame wars about the provocation du jour. In a sense, he's preaching to the converted, which isn't all that unusual for a pastor. The converted to whom he preaches on that site, though, are those converted utterly against him. His is a site dedicated (ostensibly) to ministry to atheists and atheism. It's preaching to the heretics.
Now, I have a longstanding interest in how activists--which I'll define as people ardently dedicated to changing attitudes and/or material conditions of or for others--interact with those who oppose them. Confronted with someone dead-set against your values, what do you do? (I imagine one of those Windows pop-up choice boxes: "Political Opponent Detected: Ignore, Delete, Retry?") Most political and ideological oppositions play out indirectly, as activists teach insider/outsider distinctions to their own political communities. You learn how to be a Tea Party activist, for example, as much by recognizing common foes as by identifying fellow travelers. It's rare for activists actually to address each other to try to persuade or reconcile. One of the fascinating features of evangelicalism for me is the fact that evangelists regularly reach out honestly and hopefully to those most opposed to them.
Is Comfort's atheism site an example, then, of just such a trans-ideological outreach?
I don't think so--at least not primarily. Moreover, I think that, at least in Comfort's mind (which of course I don't claim to know--this is educated guess sort of stuff), the atheism site does embody an online version of his street ministry. In his evangelism training curricula, Comfort and his proteges discuss the complexities of open-air street preaching. One particular obstacle they mention is the heckler--someone who "answers back" combatively, arguing with the street evangelist's points. Handling such a heckler is a tricky situation, cautions Comfort, especially if they become violent or too disruptive. But often, he says, hecklers are good because they attract a crowd.
As a response tactic, then, Comfort suggests dealing with the heckler directly, addressing him or her respectfully and repeating your key points--but without the expectation that you'll suddenly convince the dedicated atheist (or critic) to accept the message. You aren't there to win an intellectual argument; you just want to get your message across clearly. The real audience, of course, isn't the heckler but the crowd that gathers to hear the squabble. It's at that point, argues Comfort, that a Christian witness can play out effectively, as the audience (ideally) sees how loving, calm, and well-reasoned your arguments are in comparison to the hateful (i.e., intolerant) performance of the heckler.
Atheist Central functions much like the on-the-street encounter between Comfort and an angry heckler. Comfort engages (and enrages) atheists, in other words, not to convince them--his arguments (like theirs) tend toward the repetitive--but to attract net traffic, gawkers who might will get a dose of law/gospel from Comfort's postings no matter when they come.
It works. I encountered the site from a news report, which seemed amused that a dedicated evangelist like him would so spit into the atheist wind by seemingly inviting reams of vitriol from his atheist detractors. I would imagine that similar net passersby drop in, see the debate, and move on. Comfort's self-deprecating style, which his regular critics cite as infuriatingly twee, works well to a first-timer. Comfort seems sincere and calm, just posting his thoughts about topic X or scripture Z. His critics, by comparison, resemble the bitter atheist stereotypes he so often recycles in his posts.
Now, one can argue whether such drive-by (click-by?) evangelism works in terms of creating converts (particularly the "true" converts Comfort seeks), but Comfort's tactic, I find, remains at least consistent.
More later,
JF
Showing posts with label way of the master. Show all posts
Showing posts with label way of the master. Show all posts
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Monday, November 9, 2009
Friendship Evangelism: Skepticism and Defense
It's uncomfortable for me to speak in positive terms about evangelizing. As I've written before, my early experiences in the Southern Baptist Church--where "evangelizing" meant "constantly asking strangers whether they had given their lives to Christ"--left me cold toward the idea of inflicting my faith on others.
Listening to Ira Glass interviewing Jim Henderson on this week's This American Life, I found myself agreeing with Glass's incredulity about the efficacy of Henderson's "doable evangelism." A variety of "friendship evangelism," Henderson's technique seeks to avoid the confrontational approach--the "urgency" approach--of the Way of the Master. Rather, friendship evangelism's focus is on cultivating authentic relationships with non-believers, letting faith convictions emerge naturally as part of the relationship rather than artificially as part of some "bait and switch" sales pitch.
I can see the appeal. Ideally, a Christian's life should be legitimately distinct enough that any close friend of a Christian would note it. Moreover, one would hope that the Christian's loving attitude would on its own attract new converts or at least provoke people to wonder, "What's up with that person? I want what she has..." People are more apt to listen and learn from someone if they ask of their own accord. The confrontational, if-you-died-right-now-would-you-go-to-heaven questioning of the urgency evangelists presents a face of Christianity that is at best little more than a get-out-of-hell-free card and at worst a shrill, judgmental harangue.
Glass's criticism--his honest confusion, I should say--was this: What if Christianity never comes up? It's perfectly possible to co-exist with people of other faiths, or of no faith at all, and never broach the subject of Things Eternal. Or, as is more often the case, friends practice mutual awareness of and respect for their colleagues' beliefs without needing to know everything about them or feeling like they have to make an issue out of that difference.
What's the difference, in other words, between being a friendship evangelist and just plain being nice? If the goal of the evangelist is to spread the good news, then can you really call a technique that doesn't involve sharing the good news evangelism at all?
The pro-friendship response (and I should emphasize that I have not read Henderson's own work--this is my guess) would likely acknowledge and embrace the risk of the difference-with-no-difference. But that's the point--if your Christianity co-exists seamlessly with non-Christianity, perhaps (as the LOLcats say) "ur doin it wrong." The challenge of friendship evangelism--life evangelism--is to not confine your "ambassador for Christ" identity to discrete, on-the-street encounters where you're in "evangelist mode." Rather, you pattern your entire life after an awareness of your status as Christ's representative on earth. You are aware at all times--not just when "soul winning"--that you are to embody the loving-grace-kindness (chesed) of God for all people.
The challenge is to make this practice of all-the-time-chesed so authentically interlaced into your daily life that people take notice. In a way, this is a deeper challenge, a harder discipline, than even the stage-fright-defying tactics of the Way of the Master. And there's a good amount of scriptural support for this approach.
The life-evangelism approach also highlights the fact that urgency evangelism can at times present a distinctly un-loving and un-Christian face.
Now, Way of the Master folk would (and do) counter that they are the ones showing true love. If someone's blithely walking toward a cliff edge, is it loving to do nothing to warn them, hoping perhaps that they simply see your behavior and follow your example of not-going-toward-the-edge? No! The loving thing to do when you know a saving truth is to shout, scream, plead, challenge--do everything you can to get the person to stop, to turn around, to be saved.
The problem is that in the urgency scenario the love is often only obvious to the evangelists. To the people they're trying to save--the people to whom they're showing real love--the evangelists can seem not loving but annoying, pushy, and hateful. In theatre, we warn young actors that it matters less about whether they think they're communicating X emotion or Y subtext; it only matters if the audience gets it. If the actor (or director or designer or playwright) has to explain that the audience didn't get it but that it's really there, trust me!--then the message effectively doesn't exist.
In other words, love between two people that only one party recognizes as such is at least suspect. True, parents often have to discipline their children ("don't touch that hot stove!" "don't run into the street!"), which is unpleasant for children. The children may not in the moment of discipline feel love per se, but the parent is nonetheless showing love by setting and enforcing healthy boundaries. But even that logic has limits. Abusive parents exercise unhealthy discipline; calling physical violence against a child "love" does not make it so.
Moreover, the child-parent relationship feels wrong when transferred to the evangelistic relationship. For the evangelist to treat nonbelievers as children--they don't know I'm being loving, but I really am!--is a dubious tactic at best. As friendship/life evangelism techniques argue, if it looks like un-love, sounds like un-love, and feels like un-love--well, it's probably un-love.
More tomorrow,
JF
Listening to Ira Glass interviewing Jim Henderson on this week's This American Life, I found myself agreeing with Glass's incredulity about the efficacy of Henderson's "doable evangelism." A variety of "friendship evangelism," Henderson's technique seeks to avoid the confrontational approach--the "urgency" approach--of the Way of the Master. Rather, friendship evangelism's focus is on cultivating authentic relationships with non-believers, letting faith convictions emerge naturally as part of the relationship rather than artificially as part of some "bait and switch" sales pitch.
I can see the appeal. Ideally, a Christian's life should be legitimately distinct enough that any close friend of a Christian would note it. Moreover, one would hope that the Christian's loving attitude would on its own attract new converts or at least provoke people to wonder, "What's up with that person? I want what she has..." People are more apt to listen and learn from someone if they ask of their own accord. The confrontational, if-you-died-right-now-would-you-go-to-heaven questioning of the urgency evangelists presents a face of Christianity that is at best little more than a get-out-of-hell-free card and at worst a shrill, judgmental harangue.
Glass's criticism--his honest confusion, I should say--was this: What if Christianity never comes up? It's perfectly possible to co-exist with people of other faiths, or of no faith at all, and never broach the subject of Things Eternal. Or, as is more often the case, friends practice mutual awareness of and respect for their colleagues' beliefs without needing to know everything about them or feeling like they have to make an issue out of that difference.
What's the difference, in other words, between being a friendship evangelist and just plain being nice? If the goal of the evangelist is to spread the good news, then can you really call a technique that doesn't involve sharing the good news evangelism at all?
The pro-friendship response (and I should emphasize that I have not read Henderson's own work--this is my guess) would likely acknowledge and embrace the risk of the difference-with-no-difference. But that's the point--if your Christianity co-exists seamlessly with non-Christianity, perhaps (as the LOLcats say) "ur doin it wrong." The challenge of friendship evangelism--life evangelism--is to not confine your "ambassador for Christ" identity to discrete, on-the-street encounters where you're in "evangelist mode." Rather, you pattern your entire life after an awareness of your status as Christ's representative on earth. You are aware at all times--not just when "soul winning"--that you are to embody the loving-grace-kindness (chesed) of God for all people.
The challenge is to make this practice of all-the-time-chesed so authentically interlaced into your daily life that people take notice. In a way, this is a deeper challenge, a harder discipline, than even the stage-fright-defying tactics of the Way of the Master. And there's a good amount of scriptural support for this approach.
The life-evangelism approach also highlights the fact that urgency evangelism can at times present a distinctly un-loving and un-Christian face.
Now, Way of the Master folk would (and do) counter that they are the ones showing true love. If someone's blithely walking toward a cliff edge, is it loving to do nothing to warn them, hoping perhaps that they simply see your behavior and follow your example of not-going-toward-the-edge? No! The loving thing to do when you know a saving truth is to shout, scream, plead, challenge--do everything you can to get the person to stop, to turn around, to be saved.
The problem is that in the urgency scenario the love is often only obvious to the evangelists. To the people they're trying to save--the people to whom they're showing real love--the evangelists can seem not loving but annoying, pushy, and hateful. In theatre, we warn young actors that it matters less about whether they think they're communicating X emotion or Y subtext; it only matters if the audience gets it. If the actor (or director or designer or playwright) has to explain that the audience didn't get it but that it's really there, trust me!--then the message effectively doesn't exist.
In other words, love between two people that only one party recognizes as such is at least suspect. True, parents often have to discipline their children ("don't touch that hot stove!" "don't run into the street!"), which is unpleasant for children. The children may not in the moment of discipline feel love per se, but the parent is nonetheless showing love by setting and enforcing healthy boundaries. But even that logic has limits. Abusive parents exercise unhealthy discipline; calling physical violence against a child "love" does not make it so.
Moreover, the child-parent relationship feels wrong when transferred to the evangelistic relationship. For the evangelist to treat nonbelievers as children--they don't know I'm being loving, but I really am!--is a dubious tactic at best. As friendship/life evangelism techniques argue, if it looks like un-love, sounds like un-love, and feels like un-love--well, it's probably un-love.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Salvation as th Offer You Can't Refuse
Back--after a week away in New York City. There I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), where I presented papers about the Creation Museum and about the "ex-gay" movement. More on those later.
I also had the opportunity to chat with some old friends about my work, and this blog came up. Specifically, I was having lunch with my former advisor (now friend) Sonja. I told her all about the ex-gays, the anti-evolutionist group Answers in Genesis, and of course about Ray Comfort and his Way of the Master (WotM). I even modeled for Sonja the standard WotM evangelizing conversation. Her reaction--as someone who isn't a Christian but who is unusually open to hearing other points of view--was pretty critical.
Her biggest problem with the WotM--well, one of her biggest problems--was one I've dealt with previously: how WotM evangelism blurs together the act of sin into the status of sinner. You've told a lie? You're a liar. You've been angry at a friend? You're a murderer.
"But no one can live up to that standard," she protested, falling easily into the WotM pattern. Exactly, I answered, telling her how Christ must therefore act as a substitute. "Ah," she said.
Note that comprehension did not lead to commitment. She understood the WotM's closed circuit of logic. Provided you accept the premises of WotM (God's sin-intolerant holiness, the indelibly contaminating effects of human sin, the efficacy of Christ's substitutionary atonement), the story more or less holds together. The problem, though, is that the logical functioning of the WotM's slavific narrative did absolutely nothing to persuade Sonja that the faith underlying it held any appeal. Indeed, she seemed a bit repulsed by the whole thing.
Or maybe I'm reading into her reactions. I know, in any case, that I'm repulsed by the cold absolutism of the whole setup. As I've written, the God of the WotM is capricious, tyranical, and by human standards narcissistic and unstable. God sets up an array of rules that are flatly impossible for humans to follow perfectly (don't be angry at someone--ever? Don't feel lust for anyone--ever?). If/When humans break them--even once, even in a minor circumstance,God condemns them to eternal torment (why eternal torment? Why not just annihilation? Or, better yet, why not just an OK-but-not-heaven world? My non-believing partner Alan often points out the comparative appeal of Mormonism: the Latter Day Saints have no hell in their theology). And the only thing that can save you is total commitment to God, who in a particularly bloodthirsty act, allowed God's son to be murdered in our place.
To reiterate my point once more: this is not an appealing God. WotM's insistence that God is loving and merciful falters in the face of the offer-you-can't-refuse threat of hellfire. Like a powerful mobster "graciously" agreeing not to shatter your kneecaps (or to shatter his son's) in exchange for your life's savings, the God of WotM operates like a divine extortionist. God's only appeal--the only one that wields persuasive force in the situation described by WotM theology--is God's omnipotence.
In that view, God's attractiveness to humanity is irrelevant. If God really is just as WotM describes God, then the hell/heaven setup is just the Way Things Are. Don't like it? Go create your own universe. Can't do that? Well, then, your options are quite narrow. You could simply reject the premises of the offer, decide not to believe in God, Christ, heaven, hell, etc. Or you could accept the premises but reject God's offer anyway in an act of existential rebellion.
Or--and here's the hoped-for result of the WotM--you could submit to the hand-over-fist (hand-over-fire?) offer of Christ. Perhaps you could convince yourself that the hand you take is benevolent and loving and try to live accordingly (though you still would have to remind yourself and others of the tough-love judgment that is God). Perhaps you could convince yourself that you are in fact truly wretched and unworthy in every respect except for the lone fact of being the object of God's regard. Or perhaps you simply surrender to the State of Things, living out a life defined by belief in Christ not because of any real desire to do so but because you truly don't have any other choice. It's Christ or unending agony. Might as well get used to it. You actively hope for some kind of theological Stockholm syndrome to set in to make your basic servitude-under-threat seem less like slavery to an unjust but irresistible oppressor.
Like I said, and like Sonja (and so many others who reject the WotM and related pitches) evinced: not an appealing God. More than that--the WotM and other fight-or-flight evangelisms produce unappealing Christians.
More tomorrow,
JF
I also had the opportunity to chat with some old friends about my work, and this blog came up. Specifically, I was having lunch with my former advisor (now friend) Sonja. I told her all about the ex-gays, the anti-evolutionist group Answers in Genesis, and of course about Ray Comfort and his Way of the Master (WotM). I even modeled for Sonja the standard WotM evangelizing conversation. Her reaction--as someone who isn't a Christian but who is unusually open to hearing other points of view--was pretty critical.
Her biggest problem with the WotM--well, one of her biggest problems--was one I've dealt with previously: how WotM evangelism blurs together the act of sin into the status of sinner. You've told a lie? You're a liar. You've been angry at a friend? You're a murderer.
"But no one can live up to that standard," she protested, falling easily into the WotM pattern. Exactly, I answered, telling her how Christ must therefore act as a substitute. "Ah," she said.
Note that comprehension did not lead to commitment. She understood the WotM's closed circuit of logic. Provided you accept the premises of WotM (God's sin-intolerant holiness, the indelibly contaminating effects of human sin, the efficacy of Christ's substitutionary atonement), the story more or less holds together. The problem, though, is that the logical functioning of the WotM's slavific narrative did absolutely nothing to persuade Sonja that the faith underlying it held any appeal. Indeed, she seemed a bit repulsed by the whole thing.
Or maybe I'm reading into her reactions. I know, in any case, that I'm repulsed by the cold absolutism of the whole setup. As I've written, the God of the WotM is capricious, tyranical, and by human standards narcissistic and unstable. God sets up an array of rules that are flatly impossible for humans to follow perfectly (don't be angry at someone--ever? Don't feel lust for anyone--ever?). If/When humans break them--even once, even in a minor circumstance,God condemns them to eternal torment (why eternal torment? Why not just annihilation? Or, better yet, why not just an OK-but-not-heaven world? My non-believing partner Alan often points out the comparative appeal of Mormonism: the Latter Day Saints have no hell in their theology). And the only thing that can save you is total commitment to God, who in a particularly bloodthirsty act, allowed God's son to be murdered in our place.
To reiterate my point once more: this is not an appealing God. WotM's insistence that God is loving and merciful falters in the face of the offer-you-can't-refuse threat of hellfire. Like a powerful mobster "graciously" agreeing not to shatter your kneecaps (or to shatter his son's) in exchange for your life's savings, the God of WotM operates like a divine extortionist. God's only appeal--the only one that wields persuasive force in the situation described by WotM theology--is God's omnipotence.
In that view, God's attractiveness to humanity is irrelevant. If God really is just as WotM describes God, then the hell/heaven setup is just the Way Things Are. Don't like it? Go create your own universe. Can't do that? Well, then, your options are quite narrow. You could simply reject the premises of the offer, decide not to believe in God, Christ, heaven, hell, etc. Or you could accept the premises but reject God's offer anyway in an act of existential rebellion.
Or--and here's the hoped-for result of the WotM--you could submit to the hand-over-fist (hand-over-fire?) offer of Christ. Perhaps you could convince yourself that the hand you take is benevolent and loving and try to live accordingly (though you still would have to remind yourself and others of the tough-love judgment that is God). Perhaps you could convince yourself that you are in fact truly wretched and unworthy in every respect except for the lone fact of being the object of God's regard. Or perhaps you simply surrender to the State of Things, living out a life defined by belief in Christ not because of any real desire to do so but because you truly don't have any other choice. It's Christ or unending agony. Might as well get used to it. You actively hope for some kind of theological Stockholm syndrome to set in to make your basic servitude-under-threat seem less like slavery to an unjust but irresistible oppressor.
Like I said, and like Sonja (and so many others who reject the WotM and related pitches) evinced: not an appealing God. More than that--the WotM and other fight-or-flight evangelisms produce unappealing Christians.
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Picard the Theologian: on Absolute Justice
Perhaps the most substantial apologetic defense of God-of-judgment has to do with the existence and necessity of transcendent moral standards. By God-of-judgment evangelism I mean the pitch outlined by Ray Comfort's Way of the Master (WotM). You lead with the law (i.e., all humans have broken God's law at some point), emphasize judgment (Hell), and then swoop in with the deus ex machina of Jesus (who gets humans out of Hell). I've criticized this style of evangelism for its portrayal of God as a kind of divine extortionist: God (in the WotM narrative) offers the free gift of being saved...from God.
Thus: God saves you from God. You need saving because God (in his righteousness) is furious at your violations of God's law. You get saved because God (in his love) sent Jesus to die in your place.
I've presented several counter-arguments/defenses I think that an evangelist who uses such a judgment-heavy technique might present. I've been spending the last few days rebutting these counter-arguments. The last counter argument: God's standards--whether we like them personally or not, whether we think they're fair or not--form the moral framework of the human universe. The unfailing enforcement of any truly uncompromised and uncompromising standard will strike individual humans as unfair in some way. Nevertheless, without such perfect standards, humans' own moral universe turns into a black hole of relativism. The truths we take to be self-evident, the transcendent ideals of justice and fairness that we use as a measure for any set of temporal laws--these are God's standards. We need a God who embodies and enforces them absolutely, or they vanish.
My response? First, let me say that I'm going to side-step tackling the issue of whether or not trans-historical, trans-cultural Truths (moral or otherwise) exist. That's an important issue, but engaging it in a general way would require more time than this one posting. This objection is rather about the justice of transcendent justice. Are moral standards at their best, their most good and right, when they operate as absolutes?
I answer, initially, by way of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In their first (and often most embarrassing) season, the crew of the next-gen Enterprise visited a world that seemed like a paradise: no crime, all pleasure, attractive and openly affectionate natives (like hippies, only with buff beach bodies and clean-cut hairstyles). While playing with some teen-aged versions of these natives, young Wesley Crusher (that scamp) accidentally crashes into a low fence and into a flower garden. The natives are scandalized; he didn't mean to do it, but he broke one of their rules. The police (more buff-bodied adonises) show up, shake their heads sadly, and pull out a syringe. It seems the punishment for any infraction, however slight, is instant execution.
The Enterprise crew of course intervene, only to find out that this planet's oddly strict moral code is enforced by a being the natives call "God. This being, who looks like some sort of whirling machine, appears right beside the orbiting Enterprise. Through some standard Star Trek camara-shaking/actors-stumbling action, we learn that "God" is quite powerful enough to crack the ship wide open if Wesley doesn't submit to his lethal injection.
Captain Picard eventually calls for a trial in which he essentially questions this planet's entire all-or-nothing law system (a clear violation of the Prime Directive, but--well--first season...). The sum of his argument: "There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute." The argument apparently made sense to "God," who let Wesley go and let the Enterprise speed away from hippie-adonis world for good.
It's silly, of course--allegory painted with a mile-wide brush. But even as a youngster myself, watching that episode for the first time, the lesson soaked in: absolute laws absolutely enforced do not yield justice. Indeed, Star Trek's suggestion (in not just this but many episodes, particularly in the original series) is that only machines operate with no regard for specifics of person or situation. Such machines are invariably the antagonists in the episode.
Is our imagination so limited that we can only imagine God as a holy and perfect judge by turning God into a kind of divine Justice Machine? Let's up the ante: does Jesus--God in the flesh--operate that way? Certainly the Gospels record Jesus passing judgment on lots of people. Certainly Jesus said that he is here to fulfill the law. Certainly he councils the rich young ruler to follow the ten commandments.
But Jesus's actions just as often involve his breaking the rules, bending them, or ignoring them altogether. He touches lepers, speaks to Samaritan women, drinks with tax collectors, heals on the Sabbath--the list goes on and on. Indeed, many of the judgments he passes are not of people failing to obey the holy law but of people who make the law their entire standard. Love, as Jesus practices it, does not lay out clear sets of rules about exactly what to do in every situation. Love acts more as an ethic--a set of concerns or questions than as a list of rules to be fulfilled exactly. Think of the Golden Rule (itself a well-known Jewish guide): not an absolute law but a situational ethic. How would I want to be treated in this situation? It forces you to question rather than outlining exactly what to do and not do.
Here, I know, the WotM people would say, "Of course Jesus shows us the way of grace rather than the way of the law. We've never said differently! People need the grace of Jesus, the mercy of God, because they can't live wholly by the law." But here's our difference: the WotM narrative frames the idea of absolute law/absolute judgment as the ideal--things would be best if humans actually did follow God's standards as laid out in Scripture exactly. Jesus's act of mercy and grace is, then, a divine Plan B, a safety net. It'll do, but it'd be better if it didn't have to be at all.
I see the Christ event as asserting something altogether different about holy law. Jesus doesn't criticize the Pharisees for (or only for) failing to fulfill the law. Indeed, the Pharisees were in Jesus's day the best and most law-abiding citizens (we won't even get into the anti-orthodox-Jewish tensions that inform the gospel writers). Jesus doesn't merely suggest that the law is impossible to follow; he argues through his words and actions that the law is incomplete even and especially when followed to the letter. It is in need of the fulfillment that is Christ and Christ's kingdom love--the solidarity and intimate contact with the other that God makes manifest. Jesus is righteous because he observes the law; he is Christ because he transcends it when the situation demands.
In the WotM narrative, God's machine-like, inhuman Justice necessitates God's act of mercy. In Jesus's own life as presented in the gospels, God's justice equals God's mercy.
Hm.
That's it for now. I'm headed off to New York City for the next week for a conference, so I may not be able to post as often. I'll be back soon, though!
JF
Thus: God saves you from God. You need saving because God (in his righteousness) is furious at your violations of God's law. You get saved because God (in his love) sent Jesus to die in your place.
I've presented several counter-arguments/defenses I think that an evangelist who uses such a judgment-heavy technique might present. I've been spending the last few days rebutting these counter-arguments. The last counter argument: God's standards--whether we like them personally or not, whether we think they're fair or not--form the moral framework of the human universe. The unfailing enforcement of any truly uncompromised and uncompromising standard will strike individual humans as unfair in some way. Nevertheless, without such perfect standards, humans' own moral universe turns into a black hole of relativism. The truths we take to be self-evident, the transcendent ideals of justice and fairness that we use as a measure for any set of temporal laws--these are God's standards. We need a God who embodies and enforces them absolutely, or they vanish.
My response? First, let me say that I'm going to side-step tackling the issue of whether or not trans-historical, trans-cultural Truths (moral or otherwise) exist. That's an important issue, but engaging it in a general way would require more time than this one posting. This objection is rather about the justice of transcendent justice. Are moral standards at their best, their most good and right, when they operate as absolutes?
I answer, initially, by way of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In their first (and often most embarrassing) season, the crew of the next-gen Enterprise visited a world that seemed like a paradise: no crime, all pleasure, attractive and openly affectionate natives (like hippies, only with buff beach bodies and clean-cut hairstyles). While playing with some teen-aged versions of these natives, young Wesley Crusher (that scamp) accidentally crashes into a low fence and into a flower garden. The natives are scandalized; he didn't mean to do it, but he broke one of their rules. The police (more buff-bodied adonises) show up, shake their heads sadly, and pull out a syringe. It seems the punishment for any infraction, however slight, is instant execution.
The Enterprise crew of course intervene, only to find out that this planet's oddly strict moral code is enforced by a being the natives call "God. This being, who looks like some sort of whirling machine, appears right beside the orbiting Enterprise. Through some standard Star Trek camara-shaking/actors-stumbling action, we learn that "God" is quite powerful enough to crack the ship wide open if Wesley doesn't submit to his lethal injection.
Captain Picard eventually calls for a trial in which he essentially questions this planet's entire all-or-nothing law system (a clear violation of the Prime Directive, but--well--first season...). The sum of his argument: "There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute." The argument apparently made sense to "God," who let Wesley go and let the Enterprise speed away from hippie-adonis world for good.
It's silly, of course--allegory painted with a mile-wide brush. But even as a youngster myself, watching that episode for the first time, the lesson soaked in: absolute laws absolutely enforced do not yield justice. Indeed, Star Trek's suggestion (in not just this but many episodes, particularly in the original series) is that only machines operate with no regard for specifics of person or situation. Such machines are invariably the antagonists in the episode.
Is our imagination so limited that we can only imagine God as a holy and perfect judge by turning God into a kind of divine Justice Machine? Let's up the ante: does Jesus--God in the flesh--operate that way? Certainly the Gospels record Jesus passing judgment on lots of people. Certainly Jesus said that he is here to fulfill the law. Certainly he councils the rich young ruler to follow the ten commandments.
But Jesus's actions just as often involve his breaking the rules, bending them, or ignoring them altogether. He touches lepers, speaks to Samaritan women, drinks with tax collectors, heals on the Sabbath--the list goes on and on. Indeed, many of the judgments he passes are not of people failing to obey the holy law but of people who make the law their entire standard. Love, as Jesus practices it, does not lay out clear sets of rules about exactly what to do in every situation. Love acts more as an ethic--a set of concerns or questions than as a list of rules to be fulfilled exactly. Think of the Golden Rule (itself a well-known Jewish guide): not an absolute law but a situational ethic. How would I want to be treated in this situation? It forces you to question rather than outlining exactly what to do and not do.
Here, I know, the WotM people would say, "Of course Jesus shows us the way of grace rather than the way of the law. We've never said differently! People need the grace of Jesus, the mercy of God, because they can't live wholly by the law." But here's our difference: the WotM narrative frames the idea of absolute law/absolute judgment as the ideal--things would be best if humans actually did follow God's standards as laid out in Scripture exactly. Jesus's act of mercy and grace is, then, a divine Plan B, a safety net. It'll do, but it'd be better if it didn't have to be at all.
I see the Christ event as asserting something altogether different about holy law. Jesus doesn't criticize the Pharisees for (or only for) failing to fulfill the law. Indeed, the Pharisees were in Jesus's day the best and most law-abiding citizens (we won't even get into the anti-orthodox-Jewish tensions that inform the gospel writers). Jesus doesn't merely suggest that the law is impossible to follow; he argues through his words and actions that the law is incomplete even and especially when followed to the letter. It is in need of the fulfillment that is Christ and Christ's kingdom love--the solidarity and intimate contact with the other that God makes manifest. Jesus is righteous because he observes the law; he is Christ because he transcends it when the situation demands.
In the WotM narrative, God's machine-like, inhuman Justice necessitates God's act of mercy. In Jesus's own life as presented in the gospels, God's justice equals God's mercy.
Hm.
That's it for now. I'm headed off to New York City for the next week for a conference, so I may not be able to post as often. I'll be back soon, though!
JF
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Affect of Conviction or the Affect of Disappointment?
It seems counterintuitive, to say the least, for a movement that desires to attract members, a movement that in fact wants life-long devotees, to stress the utter reprehensibility of all humanity in their main publicity techniques. Yet this message--humanity is wretched--headlines the evangelistic narrative of the Way of the Master (WotM), Ray Comfort's popular quasi-formula for street proselytizing.
I have criticized this technique's main narrative arc--its dramaturgy, if you will (dramaturgy in this context referring to the way in which parts of a dramatic plot are selected, arranged, and presented). The WotM typically leads a the person being proselytized through several of the ten commandments, showing her not only that she's sinned (for example, that she's told lies on occasion) but also that, as a result, she is indelibly marked with that sin (that she's a liar because she's told lies). God, whose standard is perfection (i.e., Godself), is therefore fully justified in condemning to eternal Hell all liars, thieves, adulterers, murderers, blasphemers, etc.
The point, for WotM folk, is to lead the person into a state of conviction (or, rather, to prepare the way for the Holy Spirit to convict them) where they accept that, yes, they do deserve Hell. WotM evangelists, in their many sample evangelical encounters, listen for and highlight the moment when the person being evangelized shifts their tone or affect: becoming somber, ceasing to argue or joke, perhaps even shedding a tear.
And indeed, in radio and television replays of such encounters (on podcasts like Last Words Radio or on TV shows such as Way of the Master or Wretched), the subject often does go through such a change. Where the conversation had begun with an easygoing (if a bit wary) question-and-answer. But all this changes by the time the evangelist finishes the "good person test" and presents them with the standard question: "So, by your own admission, you're a lying, thieving, blaspheming adulterer. If you were to stand before God right now, would he judge you innocent or guilty?"
Any answer but "guilty" is wrong, evidence that the person is not yet ready to receive the good news of the gospel. It's essential, in the WotM's underlying theology, for the person to accept that they are guilty and God is righteous for judging them.
Here's where my criticism of WotM and other judgment-first proselytizing techniques comes in. I've argued that these techniques, the script that leads from conviction to fear to grateful salvation, make God into a strikingly unlikable figure--a divine tyrant, in fact.
The WotM people seem to believe that, when the person being evangelized shifts into serious mode, this change proves that they have been convicted of their sins, that they realize their wretchedness and need of salvation. Perhaps. I can't read the minds of all their subjects. But it seems just as likely to me that the shift in affect has a different subtext.
For instance, by the time that the subject's shift in affect happens, the evangelist has also shifted their "character." Whereas they began with conversational give-and-take, listening to what the person says and responding in sensible ways (like any good improv actor will), they have by the "you are wretched" part of the conversation commandeered the conversation. The subject by now knows that the rhetorical conventions of the conversation are different: this person is going to preach to me, and I'm not expected to respond except in particular ways.
In other words, the conversation changes from open questions that may be answered freely ("What do you think happens to us when we die?") to rhetorical questions that, like the faux-casual exchanges between an elementary school teacher and his students, have only one proper answer ("So since you're a murderous blasphemer, do you think that righteous God who condemns all sin will judge you innocent or guilty?"). The silence on the part of the subject may have less to do with honest conviction than with their adaptation to a conversation whose underlying tone has changed vastly. They may, to put it another way, just be waiting for the sermon to end.
But--say the person isn't just waiting to get away. Say the person is quiet because they realize that, yes, in the eyes of God, they are filthy and guilty. I submit that this situation isn't so great for the evangelist or for Christianity in general. The WotM kicks into gear with some variation of the question, "Do you think you are a good person?" This question invites the subject to create--on the spot--a set of criteria that they consider reasonable. Most people will allow that they are not perfect, but they try. They would not, in other words, condemn themselves to eternal Hell.
The point of the WotM is to get the person to replace those personal standards with God's impossibly perfect standard. Subjects of WotM seem good to themselves, but God thinks differently. Now, the quietness, the tears--all of these shifts the evangelist interprets as the person realizing yes, I've been wrong. I really am as wretched as God sees me. But again, it seems just as likely to me that the subtext is something like What a tyrant this God is. If he were my boss, I'd quit before he could fire me. But since I can't, I guess I'll have to submit to whatever plan of salvation God offers. It's not like I have any other choice.
See the difference? The first (the WotM's ideal situation) is honest conviction and triteness plus a real desire to be reconciled with a just God. And again, maybe that's what some people experience. But much more likely in my view is the second scenario: the disappointment of finding out that, at the end of the day, the Boss of the Universe is crazy-mean. You can't quit, so you just have to grin and bear it, saying "yes, sir--of course, sir--thank you, sir" to whatever insane demands that Boss has.
And the WotM invites this response by beginning the conversation by asking, "What set of ethical standards seem reasonable to you?"--only to follow up with "Sorry--it turns out the real standards are impossible, but you're stuck with them anyway. So you better deal with it." Why would you invite a person to create an image of justice only to shatter it? Because, let me be frank: the image of justice and love that most people come up with when asked to describe God makes the "real" God of the WotM into quite the cosmic let-down.
More tomorrow,
JF
I have criticized this technique's main narrative arc--its dramaturgy, if you will (dramaturgy in this context referring to the way in which parts of a dramatic plot are selected, arranged, and presented). The WotM typically leads a the person being proselytized through several of the ten commandments, showing her not only that she's sinned (for example, that she's told lies on occasion) but also that, as a result, she is indelibly marked with that sin (that she's a liar because she's told lies). God, whose standard is perfection (i.e., Godself), is therefore fully justified in condemning to eternal Hell all liars, thieves, adulterers, murderers, blasphemers, etc.
The point, for WotM folk, is to lead the person into a state of conviction (or, rather, to prepare the way for the Holy Spirit to convict them) where they accept that, yes, they do deserve Hell. WotM evangelists, in their many sample evangelical encounters, listen for and highlight the moment when the person being evangelized shifts their tone or affect: becoming somber, ceasing to argue or joke, perhaps even shedding a tear.
And indeed, in radio and television replays of such encounters (on podcasts like Last Words Radio or on TV shows such as Way of the Master or Wretched), the subject often does go through such a change. Where the conversation had begun with an easygoing (if a bit wary) question-and-answer. But all this changes by the time the evangelist finishes the "good person test" and presents them with the standard question: "So, by your own admission, you're a lying, thieving, blaspheming adulterer. If you were to stand before God right now, would he judge you innocent or guilty?"
Any answer but "guilty" is wrong, evidence that the person is not yet ready to receive the good news of the gospel. It's essential, in the WotM's underlying theology, for the person to accept that they are guilty and God is righteous for judging them.
Here's where my criticism of WotM and other judgment-first proselytizing techniques comes in. I've argued that these techniques, the script that leads from conviction to fear to grateful salvation, make God into a strikingly unlikable figure--a divine tyrant, in fact.
The WotM people seem to believe that, when the person being evangelized shifts into serious mode, this change proves that they have been convicted of their sins, that they realize their wretchedness and need of salvation. Perhaps. I can't read the minds of all their subjects. But it seems just as likely to me that the shift in affect has a different subtext.
For instance, by the time that the subject's shift in affect happens, the evangelist has also shifted their "character." Whereas they began with conversational give-and-take, listening to what the person says and responding in sensible ways (like any good improv actor will), they have by the "you are wretched" part of the conversation commandeered the conversation. The subject by now knows that the rhetorical conventions of the conversation are different: this person is going to preach to me, and I'm not expected to respond except in particular ways.
In other words, the conversation changes from open questions that may be answered freely ("What do you think happens to us when we die?") to rhetorical questions that, like the faux-casual exchanges between an elementary school teacher and his students, have only one proper answer ("So since you're a murderous blasphemer, do you think that righteous God who condemns all sin will judge you innocent or guilty?"). The silence on the part of the subject may have less to do with honest conviction than with their adaptation to a conversation whose underlying tone has changed vastly. They may, to put it another way, just be waiting for the sermon to end.
But--say the person isn't just waiting to get away. Say the person is quiet because they realize that, yes, in the eyes of God, they are filthy and guilty. I submit that this situation isn't so great for the evangelist or for Christianity in general. The WotM kicks into gear with some variation of the question, "Do you think you are a good person?" This question invites the subject to create--on the spot--a set of criteria that they consider reasonable. Most people will allow that they are not perfect, but they try. They would not, in other words, condemn themselves to eternal Hell.
The point of the WotM is to get the person to replace those personal standards with God's impossibly perfect standard. Subjects of WotM seem good to themselves, but God thinks differently. Now, the quietness, the tears--all of these shifts the evangelist interprets as the person realizing yes, I've been wrong. I really am as wretched as God sees me. But again, it seems just as likely to me that the subtext is something like What a tyrant this God is. If he were my boss, I'd quit before he could fire me. But since I can't, I guess I'll have to submit to whatever plan of salvation God offers. It's not like I have any other choice.
See the difference? The first (the WotM's ideal situation) is honest conviction and triteness plus a real desire to be reconciled with a just God. And again, maybe that's what some people experience. But much more likely in my view is the second scenario: the disappointment of finding out that, at the end of the day, the Boss of the Universe is crazy-mean. You can't quit, so you just have to grin and bear it, saying "yes, sir--of course, sir--thank you, sir" to whatever insane demands that Boss has.
And the WotM invites this response by beginning the conversation by asking, "What set of ethical standards seem reasonable to you?"--only to follow up with "Sorry--it turns out the real standards are impossible, but you're stuck with them anyway. So you better deal with it." Why would you invite a person to create an image of justice only to shatter it? Because, let me be frank: the image of justice and love that most people come up with when asked to describe God makes the "real" God of the WotM into quite the cosmic let-down.
More tomorrow,
JF
Monday, August 3, 2009
An Addendum Before the Third Round
After posting my blog yesterday, I went to the gym. Well, in truth, I went to the gym several hours after posting, having finally convinced myself that, tired or not, my lazy butt needed some exercise. Luckily I go to 24-hour gym, so around midnight-thirty last night I was doing my pathetically light weight-lifting and listening on my iPod to that Way-of-the-Master protege show, Last Words Radio.
As I've written previously, the Last Words folk spend about fifty minutes discussing various on-the-street evangelism techniques, and their favorite is Ray Comfort's Way of the Master (WotM), which basically consists of A) convincing people that they've sinned; B) leading people to realize that they're therefore headed to Hell; and C) explaining the saving gospel (which for them is belief plus repentance). On every show, the hosts try to have a conversation on the phone with a "fish," someone off the street who agrees to talk to them on the air. Often this person is more or less an unbeliever. Sometimes, however, the person is (or at least considers himself or herself) a Christian.
Such was the case on the show I listened to. The "fish" (I'm not a fan of that term) was a practicing Southern Baptist. Now, when the hosts encounter a case like this, the practice is to quiz them on the basics of sin, hell, and salvation--to interrogate their orthodoxy. Generally this rattles the Christian, as they aren't usually quizzed so exactly on their faith. Plus, the hosts have a very specific idea of orthodoxy in this area; denominational variations sometimes meet with a lecture about what the Bible actually says (interpreted, of course, by the hosts).
This woman, for the most part, did fine. But then the hosts, playing devil's advocate, posed the question: "That Hell thing seems pretty harsh, doesn't it? I mean, you make mistakes as a person, but it's kind of extreme for God to send basically good people to Hell, isn't it?" The woman allowed that yes, it was. She knew like any good Southern Baptist that salvation depends upon genuine belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior (Baptists tend to endorse "faith plus nothing" rather than "faith plus repentance," though in practice what they mean by faith encompasses a turning-away from sin). She knew, furthermore, that anyone not believing in Christ--whether they're good or bad--is doomed for Hell. Still, she seemed distressed. "Yes," she admitted, "it does seem hard that good people can go to Hell."
Ah, I thought, that's the wrong answer for these guys. As indeed it was. In the WotM system (or, in the hosts' words, "according to the Bible") conviction consists not merely of the realization that you've committed sin but also of the acknowledgment that, as a result of your sin, you are filthy--wretched in the eyes of God. The question, "Isn't it harsh of God to condemn good people to Hell?" is a trick. No one is good. Humans aren't just sinful; they are cosmic trash. God is right--perfectly justified--in being angry at humans and wanting them to burn. We really are quite awful.
Indeed, to see yourself as anything other than belly lint is itself a sign of sin. It's you, in your sinful pride, denying the offensiveness of your sins. This is why the WotM's favored technique--the "good person test"--relies not just on getting people to admit that they've lied but also to conclude that, because they have lied, they are therefore liars. Because they've stolen, or hated (i.e., murder), or said "OMG" (blasphemy), or lusted (i.e., adultery), they're liars, thieves, murderers, blasphemers, and adulterers (and that's just scratching the surface!). Sin necessarily translates into status. God justly condemns liars, thieves, murderers, etc., as any judge would.
Only when such conviction has truly taken place (and WotM evangelists are trained to look for shifts in personal affect--solemnity, downcast eyes, silence, tears--as proof of conviction) can the evangelist present the gospel.
I'm guessing here--Comfort and crew don't often foreground their place in a particular theological tradition--but this sounds Reformed/Calvinist, with a heavy emphasis on Total Depravity. (Certain other indicators in Comfort's and other WotM materials reinforce this suspicion.) For Calvin, the entire Christian story depends upon God's miraculous--as in nonsensical, as in why-would-God-do-this--decision to resuscitate humans who are utterly dead and powerless to save themselves.
In the WotM, the case that humans are Totally Depraved must be made, so it tends to take center stage.
I mention all of this because it presents a counter-argument to my core criticism of the WotM and similar evangelical approaches. Namely, I've suggested that WotM makes God seem pretty darn awful--punishing people for any infraction with an eternity in horrible agony. The fact that God graciously offers humans an escape route--from God's own wrath, and on top of that that the escape route involves lifelong love and devotion--that narrative just rubs me the wrong way.
In an attempt to get outside my own preconceptions (to the extent anyone can really do that), I've presented three different counter-arguments that try to pick apart my core criticism. I realized, after listening to the show at the gym, that I've left out the WotM's own counter-argument: the idea that no one is good in God's eyes, and that God's eyes are the only ones who count in this case.
I shall therefore respond to this added counter-argument before proceeding to the counter-argument about transcendent standards (which is a biggie).
More tomorrow!
JF
As I've written previously, the Last Words folk spend about fifty minutes discussing various on-the-street evangelism techniques, and their favorite is Ray Comfort's Way of the Master (WotM), which basically consists of A) convincing people that they've sinned; B) leading people to realize that they're therefore headed to Hell; and C) explaining the saving gospel (which for them is belief plus repentance). On every show, the hosts try to have a conversation on the phone with a "fish," someone off the street who agrees to talk to them on the air. Often this person is more or less an unbeliever. Sometimes, however, the person is (or at least considers himself or herself) a Christian.
Such was the case on the show I listened to. The "fish" (I'm not a fan of that term) was a practicing Southern Baptist. Now, when the hosts encounter a case like this, the practice is to quiz them on the basics of sin, hell, and salvation--to interrogate their orthodoxy. Generally this rattles the Christian, as they aren't usually quizzed so exactly on their faith. Plus, the hosts have a very specific idea of orthodoxy in this area; denominational variations sometimes meet with a lecture about what the Bible actually says (interpreted, of course, by the hosts).
This woman, for the most part, did fine. But then the hosts, playing devil's advocate, posed the question: "That Hell thing seems pretty harsh, doesn't it? I mean, you make mistakes as a person, but it's kind of extreme for God to send basically good people to Hell, isn't it?" The woman allowed that yes, it was. She knew like any good Southern Baptist that salvation depends upon genuine belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior (Baptists tend to endorse "faith plus nothing" rather than "faith plus repentance," though in practice what they mean by faith encompasses a turning-away from sin). She knew, furthermore, that anyone not believing in Christ--whether they're good or bad--is doomed for Hell. Still, she seemed distressed. "Yes," she admitted, "it does seem hard that good people can go to Hell."
Ah, I thought, that's the wrong answer for these guys. As indeed it was. In the WotM system (or, in the hosts' words, "according to the Bible") conviction consists not merely of the realization that you've committed sin but also of the acknowledgment that, as a result of your sin, you are filthy--wretched in the eyes of God. The question, "Isn't it harsh of God to condemn good people to Hell?" is a trick. No one is good. Humans aren't just sinful; they are cosmic trash. God is right--perfectly justified--in being angry at humans and wanting them to burn. We really are quite awful.
Indeed, to see yourself as anything other than belly lint is itself a sign of sin. It's you, in your sinful pride, denying the offensiveness of your sins. This is why the WotM's favored technique--the "good person test"--relies not just on getting people to admit that they've lied but also to conclude that, because they have lied, they are therefore liars. Because they've stolen, or hated (i.e., murder), or said "OMG" (blasphemy), or lusted (i.e., adultery), they're liars, thieves, murderers, blasphemers, and adulterers (and that's just scratching the surface!). Sin necessarily translates into status. God justly condemns liars, thieves, murderers, etc., as any judge would.
Only when such conviction has truly taken place (and WotM evangelists are trained to look for shifts in personal affect--solemnity, downcast eyes, silence, tears--as proof of conviction) can the evangelist present the gospel.
I'm guessing here--Comfort and crew don't often foreground their place in a particular theological tradition--but this sounds Reformed/Calvinist, with a heavy emphasis on Total Depravity. (Certain other indicators in Comfort's and other WotM materials reinforce this suspicion.) For Calvin, the entire Christian story depends upon God's miraculous--as in nonsensical, as in why-would-God-do-this--decision to resuscitate humans who are utterly dead and powerless to save themselves.
In the WotM, the case that humans are Totally Depraved must be made, so it tends to take center stage.
I mention all of this because it presents a counter-argument to my core criticism of the WotM and similar evangelical approaches. Namely, I've suggested that WotM makes God seem pretty darn awful--punishing people for any infraction with an eternity in horrible agony. The fact that God graciously offers humans an escape route--from God's own wrath, and on top of that that the escape route involves lifelong love and devotion--that narrative just rubs me the wrong way.
In an attempt to get outside my own preconceptions (to the extent anyone can really do that), I've presented three different counter-arguments that try to pick apart my core criticism. I realized, after listening to the show at the gym, that I've left out the WotM's own counter-argument: the idea that no one is good in God's eyes, and that God's eyes are the only ones who count in this case.
I shall therefore respond to this added counter-argument before proceeding to the counter-argument about transcendent standards (which is a biggie).
More tomorrow!
JF
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Objections Against the Love of God in Evangelistic Narratives
The original argument I made: the Hell-intensive evangelism (exemplified by Ray Comfort's Way of the Master) promotes an image of God as unstable, all-powerful bully. In righteous anger, God condemns people to an eternity in Hell; only by committing their lives to him (preferably in an attitude of gratefulness that the Eternal One would save wretches like them) can humans escape. If Superman demanded a similar deal from the citizens of Metropolis, he'd be a villain.
I made three counter-arguments, the second of which I'll deal with today. That second counter-argument? Hell isn't the point; love is. At the end of the day, God is God, and we're not. To overlook that is to underestimate the magnitude of the Christ event, where God substituted Godself for us, taking the punishment due to us. Realizing the miracle of the Advent and crucifixion, to suggest that God is a tyrant is extraordinarily shocking.
My objections to this counter-argument?
My first objection repeats a bit of a point I made yesterday: You can't overlook Hell. In the WotM narrative, it's Hell--the fear of punishment--that provides the appeal for Christianity, not love. The WotM pitch leads with conviction and punishment: you've broken God's law, which makes you guilty enough (somehow) to spend the rest of eternity without hope of reprieve in the fiery bowels of Hell.
At this point in the evangelistic encounter, provided that the person is A) convinced that they have sinned, and B) convinced that they're headed for Hell, then the rationale behind the way of salvation that God offers is irrelevant. So God saved us because God loved us? Great. But what if the story were instead that God had sent Jesus to save us because, say, God is addicted to human devotion and wanted a convenient way to weed out those humans who weren't willing or able to devote everything to him. That wouldn't be love, exactly, but a sick kind of need. Or what if the story were that God sent Jesus because he wants to make the devil angry by denying him a monopoly on human souls?
The thing is--it wouldn't matter. The Way of the Master would be just as effective--its motivational effectiveness falter not one bit--if evangelists substituted some emotion other than love (or no emotion at all) as the reason God sent Jesus. The WotM banks on people's fear of Hell, not on people's attraction to God's love. People want to avoid Hell, and if they have to devote themselves to Christ to do so, they will. It's nice that God saves out of love, but then it'd be even nicer if there weren't a Hell at all, wouldn't it?
Just to be crystal clear, I do believe that God loves us, and I think that love matters a great deal. My point, however, is that the WotM evangelistic strategy makes that divine love secondary, even superfluous.
Objection Two: So... does God love us or hate us? The WotM argues both simultaneously and makes no real effort to deal with that contradiction. God loves humanity, but hates sin (which according to scripture often slides right into God hating sinners, to be perfectly frank). When humans sin, somehow that mortal act overcomes God's divine love--at least to the extent that nothing but a divine blood sacrifice can restore the relationship.
What... what kind of love is that? Remember, in Christ's sacrifice--God's love for the world made manifest--we Christians are to see the pattern of love and servanthood that we are to take as a life example. I am unable to think of a moment in the gospels where Jesus ceased to love (Maybe the cleansing of the temple? Maybe calling the Pharisees a brood of snakes and vipers? Even those don't hold up). Even as soldiers crucified him, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them." He needed no blood sacrifice to reach out and touch the leper. He needed no blood sacrifice to speak to the tax collector. He needed no blood sacrifice to save the woman caught in adultery from judgment.
I have difficulty reconciling Jesus' example of love with the hatred (or at least the limited love) that the WotM argues shapes God's attitude toward us.
Finally: As powerful as the WotM insists that God's love is for humans, humans can imagine and practice a love that seems much stronger.
How is Jesus' love--this love that breaks laws, shatters barriers, cares about the enemy, frightens us with its intensity--how is this love at all like a love which, at the slightest sin, turns to hate? Even if you somehow say this love doesn't turn to hate, in the WotM narrative God's love at least weakens enough for there to be established a gap between humans and God, a gap that only Christ's death can bridge.
But think about any long-term relationship of love between humans, say a marriage of fifty years or a parent-child relationship. Are these relationships free from sins or betrayals? Certainly not. I'm no expert, but in my own relationship, I've learned that love--real love--depends upon how you deal with and recover from such mutual failures. Sure, sometimes those failures or betrayals are too much, and the relationship ends. But a relationship unable to endure even one little betrayal--well, that's more of a one-night fling, isn't it?
And aren't Christians, in their relationships to others, expected to be even more loving than that? "Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you." How many times must I forgive my brother? "Seventy times seven." We aren't as Christians allowed to have gaps established between us and others, even and especially those who wrong us.
My point: How is it that human love can in so many instances overcome betrayals that God's love (as framed by the WotM) seemingly can't? If our sin--any sin, no matter how trifling--separates us from God's love, doesn't that make sin (or, conversely, God's holiness--his intolerance of sin) stronger than God's love? Doesn't that make my own parents' love for each other (40+ years) and love for me (33, going on 34) stronger than God's love?
More tomorrow,
JF
I made three counter-arguments, the second of which I'll deal with today. That second counter-argument? Hell isn't the point; love is. At the end of the day, God is God, and we're not. To overlook that is to underestimate the magnitude of the Christ event, where God substituted Godself for us, taking the punishment due to us. Realizing the miracle of the Advent and crucifixion, to suggest that God is a tyrant is extraordinarily shocking.
My objections to this counter-argument?
My first objection repeats a bit of a point I made yesterday: You can't overlook Hell. In the WotM narrative, it's Hell--the fear of punishment--that provides the appeal for Christianity, not love. The WotM pitch leads with conviction and punishment: you've broken God's law, which makes you guilty enough (somehow) to spend the rest of eternity without hope of reprieve in the fiery bowels of Hell.
At this point in the evangelistic encounter, provided that the person is A) convinced that they have sinned, and B) convinced that they're headed for Hell, then the rationale behind the way of salvation that God offers is irrelevant. So God saved us because God loved us? Great. But what if the story were instead that God had sent Jesus to save us because, say, God is addicted to human devotion and wanted a convenient way to weed out those humans who weren't willing or able to devote everything to him. That wouldn't be love, exactly, but a sick kind of need. Or what if the story were that God sent Jesus because he wants to make the devil angry by denying him a monopoly on human souls?
The thing is--it wouldn't matter. The Way of the Master would be just as effective--its motivational effectiveness falter not one bit--if evangelists substituted some emotion other than love (or no emotion at all) as the reason God sent Jesus. The WotM banks on people's fear of Hell, not on people's attraction to God's love. People want to avoid Hell, and if they have to devote themselves to Christ to do so, they will. It's nice that God saves out of love, but then it'd be even nicer if there weren't a Hell at all, wouldn't it?
Just to be crystal clear, I do believe that God loves us, and I think that love matters a great deal. My point, however, is that the WotM evangelistic strategy makes that divine love secondary, even superfluous.
Objection Two: So... does God love us or hate us? The WotM argues both simultaneously and makes no real effort to deal with that contradiction. God loves humanity, but hates sin (which according to scripture often slides right into God hating sinners, to be perfectly frank). When humans sin, somehow that mortal act overcomes God's divine love--at least to the extent that nothing but a divine blood sacrifice can restore the relationship.
What... what kind of love is that? Remember, in Christ's sacrifice--God's love for the world made manifest--we Christians are to see the pattern of love and servanthood that we are to take as a life example. I am unable to think of a moment in the gospels where Jesus ceased to love (Maybe the cleansing of the temple? Maybe calling the Pharisees a brood of snakes and vipers? Even those don't hold up). Even as soldiers crucified him, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them." He needed no blood sacrifice to reach out and touch the leper. He needed no blood sacrifice to speak to the tax collector. He needed no blood sacrifice to save the woman caught in adultery from judgment.
I have difficulty reconciling Jesus' example of love with the hatred (or at least the limited love) that the WotM argues shapes God's attitude toward us.
Finally: As powerful as the WotM insists that God's love is for humans, humans can imagine and practice a love that seems much stronger.
How is Jesus' love--this love that breaks laws, shatters barriers, cares about the enemy, frightens us with its intensity--how is this love at all like a love which, at the slightest sin, turns to hate? Even if you somehow say this love doesn't turn to hate, in the WotM narrative God's love at least weakens enough for there to be established a gap between humans and God, a gap that only Christ's death can bridge.
But think about any long-term relationship of love between humans, say a marriage of fifty years or a parent-child relationship. Are these relationships free from sins or betrayals? Certainly not. I'm no expert, but in my own relationship, I've learned that love--real love--depends upon how you deal with and recover from such mutual failures. Sure, sometimes those failures or betrayals are too much, and the relationship ends. But a relationship unable to endure even one little betrayal--well, that's more of a one-night fling, isn't it?
And aren't Christians, in their relationships to others, expected to be even more loving than that? "Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you." How many times must I forgive my brother? "Seventy times seven." We aren't as Christians allowed to have gaps established between us and others, even and especially those who wrong us.
My point: How is it that human love can in so many instances overcome betrayals that God's love (as framed by the WotM) seemingly can't? If our sin--any sin, no matter how trifling--separates us from God's love, doesn't that make sin (or, conversely, God's holiness--his intolerance of sin) stronger than God's love? Doesn't that make my own parents' love for each other (40+ years) and love for me (33, going on 34) stronger than God's love?
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Objections to WotM--Of Crime and Punishment
I've argued that one of the most popular on-the-spot evangelism techniques (exemplified by Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master") presents a God who, upon reflection, doesn't seem very loving. This is a God who stands ready to judge someone as worthy of an eternity in unimaginable agony for even the slightest infraction of God's law, a set of standards which no human can possibly live up to perfectly. If the story stopped there, then all of theology and human science would be directed toward investigating ways to assassinate this almighty tyrant, just as the resistance in George Orwell's 1984 resents Big Brother. But, WotM evangelists will say, the story doesn't end there. See, God sent Jesus to pay the price for our sin. All we have to do is turn to Him, professing Jesus as Lord (again, a scene from 1984 about Big Brother's wonderful mercy comes to mind).
I've presented three counter-arguments, apologias for the WotM, from the point of view of a WotM evangelist. Today I respond to those apologias.
The first apologetic approach tackled the allegation that Hell as a punishment for breaking God's law is unjust. It argued that Hell is a natural consequence, like getting frostbite when you go barefoot in the Antarctic. It's not a petty bit of revenge on God's part. In other words, God's law is a natural property of the universe, not a random bunch of divine whims.
My response: On several levels, the God's-law-as-neutral-condition-of-existence fails to satisfy.
Objection One: Let's say God's law (and its consequences) are neutral properties of the universe, like gravity or the strong nuclear force that keeps atoms from flying apart. That just raises the question of why God would create the universe defined by a law no human can keep. God's God, right? All-powerful? Well, an all-powerful God could surely have created a universe where either 1) there aren't transcendent moral laws to break; or 2) the consequences for breaking those laws aren't unending pain with no hope of respite--ever. The idea that God would create a universe specifically crafted to doom humans to Hell--except, conveniently, for the Christ escape clause (which, conveniently, involves eternal devotion to God)--that's repugnant.
Objection Two: The "natural law, not divine pique" argument doesn't wash. Gravity doesn't get angry when you try to defy it. God (in the WotM narrative) does.
From a purely inerrant/infallible, "take the plain words of Scripture seriously" sense, the idea that God doesn't get irritated or angry (or jealous) when people break his law isn't supportable. God gets angry--infuriated, even--all the time. Some of the imprecatory Psalms (that is, Psalms that explicitly wish violence or harm to come to people or nations) speak of God as taking positive delight in the agony of those God punishes. Or consider the famous words of Jonathan Edwards: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."
To their credit, I suppose, most WotM evangelists I've heard don't pretend that God isn't angered by sin. They argue instead that God's anger is just and right. "Lying, stealing, murdering, and the like are wrong. Of course God is right to be angered at us when we do such things."
This brings me to Objection Three: Even if we grant that God's law does provide a more or less useful of right and wrong, and even if we grant that our wrongdoing makes God angry, that it actually causes damage to our relationship with God, Hell is still over-the-top extreme.
As much as I've suggested that conservative evangelicals are hung up on the idea of Hell, I think that they largely fail to appreciate the philosophical magnitude of an eternity of unrelenting torment. Oh, hellfire and brimstone sermons (such as the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" I linked above) mention Hell, even describe it in lovingly gruesome detail. But in such sermons Hell functions as a fear button (or a guilt button) to make people receptive to the real point, the gospel. You show them just enough Hell to get them to convert. You don't dwell on it.
But do dwell on it for a moment. What possible sin or collection of sins deserves an infinity of torture? A human lifetime is only so long--say 100 years or so for extremely rare individuals. Even if that 100 years were filled to the brim with wickedness, surely after a million years or so in Hell (10,000 years for every year of earthly sin) would be enough. No? How about a billion years for every year of earthly sin? No matter what kind of calculation you employ, no matter what kind of punishment you can imagine, Hell is worse and longer.
And, for the record, I reject categorically the accusation here that I'm just substituting a limp-wristed, postmodern "no one deserves punishment or judgment" sensibility. "Liberals don't like the idea of Hell because liberals don't believe in standards." Poppycock! This liberal doesn't like the idea of Hell because Hell transcends any sane configuration of standards or transgressions or punishment. Hell isn't mere punishment. It's eternity in unrelenting pain.
What possible sinner, no matter how vile, really deserves that? WotM evangelists will occasionally invoke Hitler or Stalin (illustrating the evangelism corollary to Godwin's Law): "You wouldn't want Hitler in Heaven, would you? You wouldn't want rapists and child molesters going to Heaven, would you?"
Maybe not (though Jesus had quite a few parables that turn the tables on expectations of who gets to go to Heaven). But we're not talking about who goes to Heaven. We're talking about who deserves Hell. I submit: no one. Not even a Hitler. And if Hitler shouldn't be there, how much less should the proverbial "good person who only told a couple of lies but didn't believe in Christ"?
Hell is so extreme, such a hyperbolic response even to the very darkest human evil, that it's no wonder that it's one of the first facets of conservative evangelicalism to fall away (or perhaps morph into a metaphorical "separation from God" like in C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce or into an annihilationist idea a la Clark Pinnock) for many Christians as they step away from strict inerrancy. It's just too horrible to reconcile with any possible idea of God as loving.
Is this a human standard, this judgment that Hell is too much? Yes, it is. But all of my ideas about God--God as righteous, God as loving, God as transcendent, God as personal--all of them are constrained by my human imagination. And my human imagination simply cannot contain the idea of eternal Hell condoned by a God who is in any way loving.
More tomorrow, as I move on to counter-argument two.
JF
I've presented three counter-arguments, apologias for the WotM, from the point of view of a WotM evangelist. Today I respond to those apologias.
The first apologetic approach tackled the allegation that Hell as a punishment for breaking God's law is unjust. It argued that Hell is a natural consequence, like getting frostbite when you go barefoot in the Antarctic. It's not a petty bit of revenge on God's part. In other words, God's law is a natural property of the universe, not a random bunch of divine whims.
My response: On several levels, the God's-law-as-neutral-condition-of-existence fails to satisfy.
Objection One: Let's say God's law (and its consequences) are neutral properties of the universe, like gravity or the strong nuclear force that keeps atoms from flying apart. That just raises the question of why God would create the universe defined by a law no human can keep. God's God, right? All-powerful? Well, an all-powerful God could surely have created a universe where either 1) there aren't transcendent moral laws to break; or 2) the consequences for breaking those laws aren't unending pain with no hope of respite--ever. The idea that God would create a universe specifically crafted to doom humans to Hell--except, conveniently, for the Christ escape clause (which, conveniently, involves eternal devotion to God)--that's repugnant.
Objection Two: The "natural law, not divine pique" argument doesn't wash. Gravity doesn't get angry when you try to defy it. God (in the WotM narrative) does.
From a purely inerrant/infallible, "take the plain words of Scripture seriously" sense, the idea that God doesn't get irritated or angry (or jealous) when people break his law isn't supportable. God gets angry--infuriated, even--all the time. Some of the imprecatory Psalms (that is, Psalms that explicitly wish violence or harm to come to people or nations) speak of God as taking positive delight in the agony of those God punishes. Or consider the famous words of Jonathan Edwards: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."
To their credit, I suppose, most WotM evangelists I've heard don't pretend that God isn't angered by sin. They argue instead that God's anger is just and right. "Lying, stealing, murdering, and the like are wrong. Of course God is right to be angered at us when we do such things."
This brings me to Objection Three: Even if we grant that God's law does provide a more or less useful of right and wrong, and even if we grant that our wrongdoing makes God angry, that it actually causes damage to our relationship with God, Hell is still over-the-top extreme.
As much as I've suggested that conservative evangelicals are hung up on the idea of Hell, I think that they largely fail to appreciate the philosophical magnitude of an eternity of unrelenting torment. Oh, hellfire and brimstone sermons (such as the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" I linked above) mention Hell, even describe it in lovingly gruesome detail. But in such sermons Hell functions as a fear button (or a guilt button) to make people receptive to the real point, the gospel. You show them just enough Hell to get them to convert. You don't dwell on it.
But do dwell on it for a moment. What possible sin or collection of sins deserves an infinity of torture? A human lifetime is only so long--say 100 years or so for extremely rare individuals. Even if that 100 years were filled to the brim with wickedness, surely after a million years or so in Hell (10,000 years for every year of earthly sin) would be enough. No? How about a billion years for every year of earthly sin? No matter what kind of calculation you employ, no matter what kind of punishment you can imagine, Hell is worse and longer.
And, for the record, I reject categorically the accusation here that I'm just substituting a limp-wristed, postmodern "no one deserves punishment or judgment" sensibility. "Liberals don't like the idea of Hell because liberals don't believe in standards." Poppycock! This liberal doesn't like the idea of Hell because Hell transcends any sane configuration of standards or transgressions or punishment. Hell isn't mere punishment. It's eternity in unrelenting pain.
What possible sinner, no matter how vile, really deserves that? WotM evangelists will occasionally invoke Hitler or Stalin (illustrating the evangelism corollary to Godwin's Law): "You wouldn't want Hitler in Heaven, would you? You wouldn't want rapists and child molesters going to Heaven, would you?"
Maybe not (though Jesus had quite a few parables that turn the tables on expectations of who gets to go to Heaven). But we're not talking about who goes to Heaven. We're talking about who deserves Hell. I submit: no one. Not even a Hitler. And if Hitler shouldn't be there, how much less should the proverbial "good person who only told a couple of lies but didn't believe in Christ"?
Hell is so extreme, such a hyperbolic response even to the very darkest human evil, that it's no wonder that it's one of the first facets of conservative evangelicalism to fall away (or perhaps morph into a metaphorical "separation from God" like in C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce or into an annihilationist idea a la Clark Pinnock) for many Christians as they step away from strict inerrancy. It's just too horrible to reconcile with any possible idea of God as loving.
Is this a human standard, this judgment that Hell is too much? Yes, it is. But all of my ideas about God--God as righteous, God as loving, God as transcendent, God as personal--all of them are constrained by my human imagination. And my human imagination simply cannot contain the idea of eternal Hell condoned by a God who is in any way loving.
More tomorrow, as I move on to counter-argument two.
JF
Friday, July 31, 2009
Summary and some pre-response clarifications
So, for the past few day's I've been crawling into the mind of a particular kind of evangelist, namely the kind whose primary tactic for convincing people to convert to Christianity consists of three basic steps: 1) convince the person that, in the eyes of God, they have sinned; 2) convince the person that, because of that fact, they are doomed to an eternity in Hell; 3) present the person with the Gospel--that news that Jesus (God in the flesh) paid that penalty for everyone if they only turn to him.
This style of evangelism, which I experienced (and practiced) throughout my childhood and which is today exemplified in Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master" system, generates no small amount of resentment in me. I've alleged that this particular narrative suggests that God operates like a mercurial, unstable tyrant, an omnipotent bully who threatens you with Hell for violating the least commandment and then expects a life of gratitude, love, and service for saving you from God's own wrath.
Given the gravity of that charge (my inner Southern Baptist child is quite alarmed that I'd even write such a thing), I wanted to makes sure I gave the strongest, best rebuttal I could think of. In other words, I don't want to create a straw man out of the Way of the Master (WotM), misrepresenting its theology in reductive ways only to crow about how easily I can knock down that misrepresentation.
Thus my three forays into the mind of a WotM: three defenses against the argument I leveled. Briefly, they are as follows: A) God's law is a natural condition of reality, not a random assortment of preferences God conjured on the spot. Breaking that law brings consequences just as surely as stepping off a high-rise building results in a fall. Complaining about the unfairness of Hell is like complaining against the unfairness of gravitation. B) The real focus of the WotM isn't Hell; it's God's love. If you believe that God is God (omnipotent, transcendent, etc.), then you must come to appreciate the magnitude of God's sacrifice in becoming Jesus and dying on the cross for us. To call God petty after that sacrifice... well, that's a whole lot of ingratitude (and gall). C) Hell is unpleasant but necessary. Transcendent moral truths require eternal consequences. If no negative consequences for doing wrong existed, distinctions between right and wrong would disappear. The ethical universe demands ethical laws. And even here--God gives you an out-clause. Are you really going to spit in God's face for letting you off the hook of universal justice?
Those are my hypothetical three counter-arguments against myself. Now, before I respond to them (as myself), I want to make a few disclaimers.
First, there's nothing new under the sun. What I've been doing over the last few days is an exercise in Christian apologetics (from the Greek, apologia, meaning defense or justification). To be blunt, over the two millennia of Christianity, many, many people--thinkers and poets and saints of far greater experience, education, and spirit than I--have engaged in apologetics. Scholars make careers out of studying the history of apologetic thought. Nothing I've come up with here is novel, and it's my own ignorance that prevents me from expressing my attempts at apologetic in modes as sophisticated as, say, Thomas Aquinas.
Second, there's nothing new under the sun--part two. For at least as long as there have been apologetics, there have been critics of the faith. I would be surprised if even my initial critique had not been made many times over--often by Christian thinkers themselves. Again, mea culpa for re-inventing the wheel (it is a blog, after all, and not a research paper).
Finally, I doubt that there's anything, argumentatively speaking, that's new to Ray Comfort and company. While I have theological and ethical problems with his technique, I respect the fact that he's been refining this technique (actually a set of techniques) for many years. He's spoken to thousands of people (more?), engaged in hundreds of in-depth conversations with just about every argument against his technique that you could think up.
Oddly enough, though, his latest apologetical project aims squarely at atheists, particularly militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. His newest book, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Drink exemplifies this direction of his ministry.
I'm fascinated by his website and its techniques (confrontational anti-atheism?), and I'll likely discuss those down the way. But I find it interesting that that in following the anti-atheist apologetic path he side-steps an infra-Christian criticism: namely, that from a Christian perspective "the Way of the Master" has faults.
Comfort has many proteges, among them a lively little podcast/radio show called "Last Words Radio" (LWR). LWR is made up of an affable bunch of folk in California who basically practice the Way of the Master and other open-air preaching techniques and talk about it for an hour or so every Saturday (though they have said that they may be ending the program due to funding difficulties). Their program, which I typically listen to as I work out, features a casual grab-bag of reports from the field, live evangelism segments where a host talks to a "fish" on the phone, and ruminations about evangelism in general.
And often--every week--the hosts marvel at how the biggest source of resistance they face on the street comes not (or not usually) from militant atheists but from "people who claim to be Christian." I wonder if this is the case with Ray Comfort as well. If so, I wonder if he hears anything like my argument. And I wonder how he responds to it and why that response--and the situation that provokes it--isn't more common in his writings.
Which of course makes me wonder in turn: how will I respond to my own counter-arguments?
More tomorrow,
JF
This style of evangelism, which I experienced (and practiced) throughout my childhood and which is today exemplified in Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master" system, generates no small amount of resentment in me. I've alleged that this particular narrative suggests that God operates like a mercurial, unstable tyrant, an omnipotent bully who threatens you with Hell for violating the least commandment and then expects a life of gratitude, love, and service for saving you from God's own wrath.
Given the gravity of that charge (my inner Southern Baptist child is quite alarmed that I'd even write such a thing), I wanted to makes sure I gave the strongest, best rebuttal I could think of. In other words, I don't want to create a straw man out of the Way of the Master (WotM), misrepresenting its theology in reductive ways only to crow about how easily I can knock down that misrepresentation.
Thus my three forays into the mind of a WotM: three defenses against the argument I leveled. Briefly, they are as follows: A) God's law is a natural condition of reality, not a random assortment of preferences God conjured on the spot. Breaking that law brings consequences just as surely as stepping off a high-rise building results in a fall. Complaining about the unfairness of Hell is like complaining against the unfairness of gravitation. B) The real focus of the WotM isn't Hell; it's God's love. If you believe that God is God (omnipotent, transcendent, etc.), then you must come to appreciate the magnitude of God's sacrifice in becoming Jesus and dying on the cross for us. To call God petty after that sacrifice... well, that's a whole lot of ingratitude (and gall). C) Hell is unpleasant but necessary. Transcendent moral truths require eternal consequences. If no negative consequences for doing wrong existed, distinctions between right and wrong would disappear. The ethical universe demands ethical laws. And even here--God gives you an out-clause. Are you really going to spit in God's face for letting you off the hook of universal justice?
Those are my hypothetical three counter-arguments against myself. Now, before I respond to them (as myself), I want to make a few disclaimers.
First, there's nothing new under the sun. What I've been doing over the last few days is an exercise in Christian apologetics (from the Greek, apologia, meaning defense or justification). To be blunt, over the two millennia of Christianity, many, many people--thinkers and poets and saints of far greater experience, education, and spirit than I--have engaged in apologetics. Scholars make careers out of studying the history of apologetic thought. Nothing I've come up with here is novel, and it's my own ignorance that prevents me from expressing my attempts at apologetic in modes as sophisticated as, say, Thomas Aquinas.
Second, there's nothing new under the sun--part two. For at least as long as there have been apologetics, there have been critics of the faith. I would be surprised if even my initial critique had not been made many times over--often by Christian thinkers themselves. Again, mea culpa for re-inventing the wheel (it is a blog, after all, and not a research paper).
Finally, I doubt that there's anything, argumentatively speaking, that's new to Ray Comfort and company. While I have theological and ethical problems with his technique, I respect the fact that he's been refining this technique (actually a set of techniques) for many years. He's spoken to thousands of people (more?), engaged in hundreds of in-depth conversations with just about every argument against his technique that you could think up.
Oddly enough, though, his latest apologetical project aims squarely at atheists, particularly militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. His newest book, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Drink exemplifies this direction of his ministry.
I'm fascinated by his website and its techniques (confrontational anti-atheism?), and I'll likely discuss those down the way. But I find it interesting that that in following the anti-atheist apologetic path he side-steps an infra-Christian criticism: namely, that from a Christian perspective "the Way of the Master" has faults.
Comfort has many proteges, among them a lively little podcast/radio show called "Last Words Radio" (LWR). LWR is made up of an affable bunch of folk in California who basically practice the Way of the Master and other open-air preaching techniques and talk about it for an hour or so every Saturday (though they have said that they may be ending the program due to funding difficulties). Their program, which I typically listen to as I work out, features a casual grab-bag of reports from the field, live evangelism segments where a host talks to a "fish" on the phone, and ruminations about evangelism in general.
And often--every week--the hosts marvel at how the biggest source of resistance they face on the street comes not (or not usually) from militant atheists but from "people who claim to be Christian." I wonder if this is the case with Ray Comfort as well. If so, I wonder if he hears anything like my argument. And I wonder how he responds to it and why that response--and the situation that provokes it--isn't more common in his writings.
Which of course makes me wonder in turn: how will I respond to my own counter-arguments?
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, July 30, 2009
A last defense of the WotM
Suppose you argue, as I did, against the evangelistic technique of leading people to Christ by 1) convincing them they've sinned; 2) presenting them with the threat of eternal hell; and 3) sharing with them the way out of Hell: becoming a Christian.
Suppose you reasoned, as I did, that such a technique, while often effective at getting people to convert (who wants to go to Hell, after all?), presents an image of God that's strikingly unlovely. Indeed, it presents God as a kind of divine tyrant who dangles you above the flames of Hell for violating even the least of God's impossible-to-follow-perfectly commandments and then, after snatching you away from that Hell, demands not just servitude but grateful, heart-soul-mind-and-strength love.
I think that's a fairly serious set of allegations to lay at the feet of one of the most widespread evangelizing narratives currently in circulation. It behooves me, therefore, to explore the Case For this Technique (a technique best exemplified in Ray Comfort's system, "The Way of the Master"). To that end I'm trying to make the best, strongest counter-arguments I can make from the perspective of a hypothetical Way of the Master evangelist.
Yesterday, I argued that the Case Against the Technique was unfair in that it shortchanged the reality-shattering love that God (who is infinitely beyond humans) shows to humanity even in reaching out at all, let alone dying for us as we shake our fists in God's face.. The day before, I argued that the Case Against mistakes as human pique or irritability the natural consequences of human sin. God is holy, which doesn't mean self-righteous in the human sense. It means that unholy things (i.e., humans contaminated by sin) cannot exist it God's presence any more than light can escape from a black hole. It's just the Way Things Are.
One last attempt, then [again, I take on the "voice" of a WotM evangelist]:
So you don't like the idea of judgment. You say it makes God petty, like that bossy kid you knew as a child who forced everyone to play tag exactly according to his rules.
But think of this: what's the alternative you're offering? What is life without the judgment of God?
Say someone steals something. Maybe they're caught; maybe they're not. If the thief isn't caught, does it make the act of stealing OK? Bernie Madoff seemed to think so. Or what about adultery? If the cheating spouse isn't caught, is it still cheating? It's like a variation on the tree falling in deserted woods question: what makes wrong things wrong?
One answer, perhaps: human laws, a social and civic network of tacit or explicit guidelines and prohibitions define what's right and wrong, permissible and non-permissible.
But think, in times before the 13th and 14th Amendments, before the Emancipation Proclaimation, before the Civil War, before the abolitionist movement even had much steam--in times when slavery was considered OK, even supported by scripture--was slavery wrong then? Or what about female suffrage? Was it just optional prior to 1920? Or was it always wrong to deny women the right to vote, even when the rest of society (including, it must be said, many women) believed it was proper and right to do so?
The answer, for many Christians, is that a standard of right and wrong exists that transcends specifics of time, place, and culture. Admittedly, there's a great deal in civic morality that is context-specific (e.g., "pay your internet bill on time" makes sense only in societies that have commercial internet). But some things--lying, stealing, murdering, raping--these things are always and in all times/places tinged with un-rightness. Though some acts--like untruthfulness--may be required due to extreme circumstances, these are "necessary evils," and their existence doesn't make lying in general any less wrong. Others acts, like rape, are always wrong--even if no one catches the rapist, and even if the society in question doesn't recognize the wrong as such.
Where does this standard come from if not from society? What does it depend upon if not society? For many Christians, the answer is found in Romans 2:15, where Paul writes that God's transcendent law is written on the human heart, and that every person's conscience bears witness to it. Even someone who has never heard of Christianity has a sense of right and wrong. Insofar as any society is just and fair, it derives its notions of justice and fairness from that inner, God-given standard. God is in this sense the Justice in unjust times, the eternal Demand for Mercy in a merciless world.
So you complain about the judgment of God against wrongdoing. But your own inner sense of right and wrong should tell you that you want--you need--there to be judgment. Wrong things must be judged as such, if not in this world than in the next. Else, where is justice? And no, judgment never feels good when it falls on us rather than working for us; we hate to be caught in a fib or indicted for stealing or viewed as guilty. But I accept that my lies against others would cost me in exchange for considering it good and right for others not to lie to or about me. My expectation of honesty depends upon a knowledge that I would be judged by that standard as well.
But what's the alternative? A cold, dog-eat-dog world of private justice? A world where self-evident truths of life and liberty are fabrications to that can be tossed aside (or legislated out of existence)? Without God-given standards of justice as First Principles (or Ultimate Concerns--whatever), life becomes literally unlivable. Society collapses. Humanity's flame gutters and goes out. Goodness requires standards. Standards require judgment. The only right judgment comes from the Ultimate Judge--and even that judge has provided a way to be declared "not guilty"
More tomorrow!
JF
Suppose you reasoned, as I did, that such a technique, while often effective at getting people to convert (who wants to go to Hell, after all?), presents an image of God that's strikingly unlovely. Indeed, it presents God as a kind of divine tyrant who dangles you above the flames of Hell for violating even the least of God's impossible-to-follow-perfectly commandments and then, after snatching you away from that Hell, demands not just servitude but grateful, heart-soul-mind-and-strength love.
I think that's a fairly serious set of allegations to lay at the feet of one of the most widespread evangelizing narratives currently in circulation. It behooves me, therefore, to explore the Case For this Technique (a technique best exemplified in Ray Comfort's system, "The Way of the Master"). To that end I'm trying to make the best, strongest counter-arguments I can make from the perspective of a hypothetical Way of the Master evangelist.
Yesterday, I argued that the Case Against the Technique was unfair in that it shortchanged the reality-shattering love that God (who is infinitely beyond humans) shows to humanity even in reaching out at all, let alone dying for us as we shake our fists in God's face.. The day before, I argued that the Case Against mistakes as human pique or irritability the natural consequences of human sin. God is holy, which doesn't mean self-righteous in the human sense. It means that unholy things (i.e., humans contaminated by sin) cannot exist it God's presence any more than light can escape from a black hole. It's just the Way Things Are.
One last attempt, then [again, I take on the "voice" of a WotM evangelist]:
So you don't like the idea of judgment. You say it makes God petty, like that bossy kid you knew as a child who forced everyone to play tag exactly according to his rules.
But think of this: what's the alternative you're offering? What is life without the judgment of God?
Say someone steals something. Maybe they're caught; maybe they're not. If the thief isn't caught, does it make the act of stealing OK? Bernie Madoff seemed to think so. Or what about adultery? If the cheating spouse isn't caught, is it still cheating? It's like a variation on the tree falling in deserted woods question: what makes wrong things wrong?
One answer, perhaps: human laws, a social and civic network of tacit or explicit guidelines and prohibitions define what's right and wrong, permissible and non-permissible.
But think, in times before the 13th and 14th Amendments, before the Emancipation Proclaimation, before the Civil War, before the abolitionist movement even had much steam--in times when slavery was considered OK, even supported by scripture--was slavery wrong then? Or what about female suffrage? Was it just optional prior to 1920? Or was it always wrong to deny women the right to vote, even when the rest of society (including, it must be said, many women) believed it was proper and right to do so?
The answer, for many Christians, is that a standard of right and wrong exists that transcends specifics of time, place, and culture. Admittedly, there's a great deal in civic morality that is context-specific (e.g., "pay your internet bill on time" makes sense only in societies that have commercial internet). But some things--lying, stealing, murdering, raping--these things are always and in all times/places tinged with un-rightness. Though some acts--like untruthfulness--may be required due to extreme circumstances, these are "necessary evils," and their existence doesn't make lying in general any less wrong. Others acts, like rape, are always wrong--even if no one catches the rapist, and even if the society in question doesn't recognize the wrong as such.
Where does this standard come from if not from society? What does it depend upon if not society? For many Christians, the answer is found in Romans 2:15, where Paul writes that God's transcendent law is written on the human heart, and that every person's conscience bears witness to it. Even someone who has never heard of Christianity has a sense of right and wrong. Insofar as any society is just and fair, it derives its notions of justice and fairness from that inner, God-given standard. God is in this sense the Justice in unjust times, the eternal Demand for Mercy in a merciless world.
So you complain about the judgment of God against wrongdoing. But your own inner sense of right and wrong should tell you that you want--you need--there to be judgment. Wrong things must be judged as such, if not in this world than in the next. Else, where is justice? And no, judgment never feels good when it falls on us rather than working for us; we hate to be caught in a fib or indicted for stealing or viewed as guilty. But I accept that my lies against others would cost me in exchange for considering it good and right for others not to lie to or about me. My expectation of honesty depends upon a knowledge that I would be judged by that standard as well.
But what's the alternative? A cold, dog-eat-dog world of private justice? A world where self-evident truths of life and liberty are fabrications to that can be tossed aside (or legislated out of existence)? Without God-given standards of justice as First Principles (or Ultimate Concerns--whatever), life becomes literally unlivable. Society collapses. Humanity's flame gutters and goes out. Goodness requires standards. Standards require judgment. The only right judgment comes from the Ultimate Judge--and even that judge has provided a way to be declared "not guilty"
More tomorrow!
JF
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Another Defense of the Way of the Master
In an effort to be dialectical about my criticisms of a particular style of evangelism (exemplified in Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master"), I'm putting myself in the shoes of a pro-Way-of-the-Master evangelist. That is, I'm thinking of possible responses to or rebuttals of my initial criticism of the theology/psychology underlying the Way of the Master.
To whit: I argued that focusing the evangelistic conversation entirely on humanity's wretchedness, damnation, and need for salvation, highlighting the imminent threat of hellfire, makes God into a kind of divine tyrant. God threatens humanity with eternal damnation for even the slightest infraction, at any point in a human life--and then expects total love, devotion, and gratefulness for saving people from God's own wrath. This is the action of an abusive spouse or totalitarian dictator, not of a benevolent God.
My initial rebuttal (yesterday) suggested that the God-as-tyrant argument inappropriately assigns human psychology to God. God's holiness--God's intolerance for human sin--is not a psychological quirk, like a germaphobe fussing at a messy counter. Rather, God's holiness is a natural law, like gravitation or electromagnetism; it's a neutral and necessary condition of existence. God is God; humans aren't. To gripe about this makes about as much sense as complaining that eyesight requires light or that animals need oxygen in order to live.
Let me try a different argument today. Namely, that the God-as-tyrant argument underestimates--offensively so--the magnitude of God's love and Christ's sacrifice.
[In the voice of an evangelist responding to a critic]: It's easy to get stuck in the whole idea of divine judgment and hellfire. "Isn't God petty for not overlooking my sin?" That whole argument misses the point: God is willing, eager even, to wipe away your sins. God is so eager to reconcile all people to God that God sent Jesus--dear to him as a beloved son, intimate as God's own self--to suffer and die in our place.
Think about that. In becoming human, God came down to our level, submitting to mortality, to pain, to rejection and loneliness--to the very worst that human existence has to offer. God gave up a measure of what it means to be the deity in order to live with us. For Jesus to suffer and die as He did--that suffering and dying, horrible as it would be for any human--means so much more because it was God doing it. Jesus allowed it to be done to Himself, taking all of humanity's punishment on Himself, when (as the old hymn says) he could have called ten thousand angels at any moment, repairing His human body instantly and vaporizing the nails, the crown of thorns, the whips, and the spear. But he did not. He suffered. He died. The Nicene Creed says "he descended into Hell" for the space of three days--God in Hell, God suffering Hellfire instead of us!
All of these unGodlike acts God did, all for our sake. Jesus substituted Himself for us. And the miracle here is that all we have to do is turn from the myth of our own self-righteousness, believing and trusting in the love behind that sacrifice, and poof! We are as innocent in God's eyes as Christ was. Gravity reverses. We see without light. Natural law shatters in the face of that Grandest of Sacrifices.
So, you see, to question that love, to call that world-changing act of self-sacrifice a petty tyranny--that's exactly like spitting contemptuously in the face of a paramedic who's given you lifesaving CPR.
Or, more exactly: Cornelius Van Til, the great apologist of the early 20th century, once told of watching a tiny child, barely a toddler, on a train. The child's father, hearing her cry, had lifted her up and seated her on his knee. The toddler turned and, in a fit of tantrummy frustration, smacked his face with her little hand.
This scene, Van Til, suggested, reflects our relationship with God. The condition of existence makes us humans helpless infants--less, far less, actually--compared to the infinite majesty of God. That God deigns to bend to our level, lifting us up so we can perceive God's face--this itself is a miracle. And then, for us to respond by slapping his face! Calling his gesture of love and atonement (literally at-one-ment) the work of a dictator!
The point, Van Til continues, is that it is only by God's grace and power that we can reach his face to slap it. God's love exposes Godself to our human contempt--all in the hope that we might respond in love rather than in rebellion.
[back to my own voice]: I'll try one more rebuttal tomorrow.
JF
To whit: I argued that focusing the evangelistic conversation entirely on humanity's wretchedness, damnation, and need for salvation, highlighting the imminent threat of hellfire, makes God into a kind of divine tyrant. God threatens humanity with eternal damnation for even the slightest infraction, at any point in a human life--and then expects total love, devotion, and gratefulness for saving people from God's own wrath. This is the action of an abusive spouse or totalitarian dictator, not of a benevolent God.
My initial rebuttal (yesterday) suggested that the God-as-tyrant argument inappropriately assigns human psychology to God. God's holiness--God's intolerance for human sin--is not a psychological quirk, like a germaphobe fussing at a messy counter. Rather, God's holiness is a natural law, like gravitation or electromagnetism; it's a neutral and necessary condition of existence. God is God; humans aren't. To gripe about this makes about as much sense as complaining that eyesight requires light or that animals need oxygen in order to live.
Let me try a different argument today. Namely, that the God-as-tyrant argument underestimates--offensively so--the magnitude of God's love and Christ's sacrifice.
[In the voice of an evangelist responding to a critic]: It's easy to get stuck in the whole idea of divine judgment and hellfire. "Isn't God petty for not overlooking my sin?" That whole argument misses the point: God is willing, eager even, to wipe away your sins. God is so eager to reconcile all people to God that God sent Jesus--dear to him as a beloved son, intimate as God's own self--to suffer and die in our place.
Think about that. In becoming human, God came down to our level, submitting to mortality, to pain, to rejection and loneliness--to the very worst that human existence has to offer. God gave up a measure of what it means to be the deity in order to live with us. For Jesus to suffer and die as He did--that suffering and dying, horrible as it would be for any human--means so much more because it was God doing it. Jesus allowed it to be done to Himself, taking all of humanity's punishment on Himself, when (as the old hymn says) he could have called ten thousand angels at any moment, repairing His human body instantly and vaporizing the nails, the crown of thorns, the whips, and the spear. But he did not. He suffered. He died. The Nicene Creed says "he descended into Hell" for the space of three days--God in Hell, God suffering Hellfire instead of us!
All of these unGodlike acts God did, all for our sake. Jesus substituted Himself for us. And the miracle here is that all we have to do is turn from the myth of our own self-righteousness, believing and trusting in the love behind that sacrifice, and poof! We are as innocent in God's eyes as Christ was. Gravity reverses. We see without light. Natural law shatters in the face of that Grandest of Sacrifices.
So, you see, to question that love, to call that world-changing act of self-sacrifice a petty tyranny--that's exactly like spitting contemptuously in the face of a paramedic who's given you lifesaving CPR.
Or, more exactly: Cornelius Van Til, the great apologist of the early 20th century, once told of watching a tiny child, barely a toddler, on a train. The child's father, hearing her cry, had lifted her up and seated her on his knee. The toddler turned and, in a fit of tantrummy frustration, smacked his face with her little hand.
This scene, Van Til, suggested, reflects our relationship with God. The condition of existence makes us humans helpless infants--less, far less, actually--compared to the infinite majesty of God. That God deigns to bend to our level, lifting us up so we can perceive God's face--this itself is a miracle. And then, for us to respond by slapping his face! Calling his gesture of love and atonement (literally at-one-ment) the work of a dictator!
The point, Van Til continues, is that it is only by God's grace and power that we can reach his face to slap it. God's love exposes Godself to our human contempt--all in the hope that we might respond in love rather than in rebellion.
[back to my own voice]: I'll try one more rebuttal tomorrow.
JF
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The Counter-Case
One of the most valuable classes I took in high school was debate in Shawnee High School in 1991-2. It wasn't a class I chose; to schedule me in Honors Biology, I had to take whatever elective was offered. Debate it was, with Sharon Davis. Now, I was never a great debater (to this day I have difficulty coming up with cogent arguments when I'm flustered), but the intellectual exercises I had to undertake in that class benefit me to this day. Specifically--given any debate topic (or, rather, resolution, such as "Resolved: Human engineering is morally justified") we were required to research, construct, and argue thoughtful, well-supported, and above all compelling cases both for the resolution (the affirmative case) and against it (the negative case).
It's difficult to overstate the worth of learning to occupy a point of view or argumentative stance utterly at odds with your own. It teaches you perspective, seeing that, no matter how dedicated you may be to your point of view, it is possible in most cases to construct a coherent argument for the opposite view. It forces you to to see your own beliefs from an antagonistic point of view, to examine and account for weaknesses in your own rationale, and to anticipate and respond to probable attacks against your case.
Most of all, though, it grants a degree of intellectual empathy, reminding me that my opponent's passion and methods have a rationale behind them just as mine do. Such empathy does not necessarily mean that I will agree with my opponent, nor does it imply that the debate can be shelved. But it does grant a degree of humility and respect as one criticizes the deeply held views or practices of a neighbor.
In this spirit, then, I want to take the other side of a perspective that I critiqued rather harshly yesterday: namely the "Way of the Master" style of evangelism that stresses to the non-believer the need for salvation by confronting them with the imminent, uncompromising, and eternal judgment of God. You--all humans--are guilty in the eyes of the Holy God, having broken one or all of his divine commandments. As such, you will be rightfully sentenced to the punishment God establishes for all such convicts: an eternity in Hell. But God's love offers you a way out: Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, who offers to substitute his own innocent life for you, taking your punishment for you. Your belief in and commitment to Christ will save you from divine judgment.
I characterized this narrative as troublesome in that its presentation of God as a kind of all-powerful abuser or tyrant, threatening out-of-proportion punishment for even the tiniest infraction one minute and then mercifully withholding that punishment--even though you deserve it--the next.
How might an evangelist who uses this technique respond? Here's my stab at one response: Basically (now imagining myself as such an evangelist, speaking to a critic)--you're over-extending the analogy of the judge and the courtroom. Seeing God as a judge in a courtroom gives us a concrete way of picturing abstract concepts, but like any analogy, it has some flaws.
The biggest one? In human courts of law in the US, the judge is herself separate from and subject to the body of rules she interprets to adjudicate guilt or innocence. Moreover, the law itself is understood to be an attempt at the ideal of justice rather than identical to justice itself. Human laws are human creations. As such, they are fallible and mutable. A judge may, in rare cases, decide that a particular law, rather than the defendant, is unjust and order that the law be changed or invalidated.
The situation is different with God. Unlike a human judge, God is identical to the Law; God, by virtue of God's very deity, is Godself the standard of all moral and ethical perfection. God defines what justice is, thus God's law is perfect, immutable and infallible.
It can seem horribly unfair, from a human perspective, to be subject to that divine law. We have the ability to imagine, after all, a world in which we rather than God set standards for morality and fairness. But just because we can imagine an alternative set of rules does not make the actually extant standard any less compelling.
Think of it this way: to complain at the consequences for rebelling against God's holy law is like complaining at the consequences for rebelling against a natural law like gravity or the need for respiration. "That gravity! What a dictator! All I did was walk out of a second-story window--just a step! Just once! And now I've broken my leg and have to wear a cast for the next six weeks. That's totally out of proportion." Sure, you can imagine a world in which you gravity doesn't exist or is weaker or more permissive. But that doesn't make gravity any less real, and railing against it doesn't change a thing. No one forced you to take a step out of a second-story window, after all.
Another point: it's easy to curse gravity when we're smarting from the consequences of ignoring it. But in such moments of pique we can too often forget that our lives depend upon the reliable, all-encompassing operation of gravity. How chaotic would it be if each individual could declare when and how gravity applies for everyone else? "The city of Los Angeles floated away into space, killing all of its citizens, because Joe Schmoe in Toledo, OH, decided to turn off gravity on the West coast."
Similarly, a world without a natural moral standard of justice would be unthinkable, a world of all against all, where--on a personal whim--I could declare it "just" for me to take all of your possessions, beat you up, or even kill you. Those things are wrong, however, not because I personally think they're wrong but because God's law, which is written on our hearts, declares it to be so.
Again, it can seem terribly, existentially unfair to humans that they are subject to natural laws. But them's the breaks. Creating home-made natural laws or standards just doesn't work.
More tomorrow,
JF
It's difficult to overstate the worth of learning to occupy a point of view or argumentative stance utterly at odds with your own. It teaches you perspective, seeing that, no matter how dedicated you may be to your point of view, it is possible in most cases to construct a coherent argument for the opposite view. It forces you to to see your own beliefs from an antagonistic point of view, to examine and account for weaknesses in your own rationale, and to anticipate and respond to probable attacks against your case.
Most of all, though, it grants a degree of intellectual empathy, reminding me that my opponent's passion and methods have a rationale behind them just as mine do. Such empathy does not necessarily mean that I will agree with my opponent, nor does it imply that the debate can be shelved. But it does grant a degree of humility and respect as one criticizes the deeply held views or practices of a neighbor.
In this spirit, then, I want to take the other side of a perspective that I critiqued rather harshly yesterday: namely the "Way of the Master" style of evangelism that stresses to the non-believer the need for salvation by confronting them with the imminent, uncompromising, and eternal judgment of God. You--all humans--are guilty in the eyes of the Holy God, having broken one or all of his divine commandments. As such, you will be rightfully sentenced to the punishment God establishes for all such convicts: an eternity in Hell. But God's love offers you a way out: Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, who offers to substitute his own innocent life for you, taking your punishment for you. Your belief in and commitment to Christ will save you from divine judgment.
I characterized this narrative as troublesome in that its presentation of God as a kind of all-powerful abuser or tyrant, threatening out-of-proportion punishment for even the tiniest infraction one minute and then mercifully withholding that punishment--even though you deserve it--the next.
How might an evangelist who uses this technique respond? Here's my stab at one response: Basically (now imagining myself as such an evangelist, speaking to a critic)--you're over-extending the analogy of the judge and the courtroom. Seeing God as a judge in a courtroom gives us a concrete way of picturing abstract concepts, but like any analogy, it has some flaws.
The biggest one? In human courts of law in the US, the judge is herself separate from and subject to the body of rules she interprets to adjudicate guilt or innocence. Moreover, the law itself is understood to be an attempt at the ideal of justice rather than identical to justice itself. Human laws are human creations. As such, they are fallible and mutable. A judge may, in rare cases, decide that a particular law, rather than the defendant, is unjust and order that the law be changed or invalidated.
The situation is different with God. Unlike a human judge, God is identical to the Law; God, by virtue of God's very deity, is Godself the standard of all moral and ethical perfection. God defines what justice is, thus God's law is perfect, immutable and infallible.
It can seem horribly unfair, from a human perspective, to be subject to that divine law. We have the ability to imagine, after all, a world in which we rather than God set standards for morality and fairness. But just because we can imagine an alternative set of rules does not make the actually extant standard any less compelling.
Think of it this way: to complain at the consequences for rebelling against God's holy law is like complaining at the consequences for rebelling against a natural law like gravity or the need for respiration. "That gravity! What a dictator! All I did was walk out of a second-story window--just a step! Just once! And now I've broken my leg and have to wear a cast for the next six weeks. That's totally out of proportion." Sure, you can imagine a world in which you gravity doesn't exist or is weaker or more permissive. But that doesn't make gravity any less real, and railing against it doesn't change a thing. No one forced you to take a step out of a second-story window, after all.
Another point: it's easy to curse gravity when we're smarting from the consequences of ignoring it. But in such moments of pique we can too often forget that our lives depend upon the reliable, all-encompassing operation of gravity. How chaotic would it be if each individual could declare when and how gravity applies for everyone else? "The city of Los Angeles floated away into space, killing all of its citizens, because Joe Schmoe in Toledo, OH, decided to turn off gravity on the West coast."
Similarly, a world without a natural moral standard of justice would be unthinkable, a world of all against all, where--on a personal whim--I could declare it "just" for me to take all of your possessions, beat you up, or even kill you. Those things are wrong, however, not because I personally think they're wrong but because God's law, which is written on our hearts, declares it to be so.
Again, it can seem terribly, existentially unfair to humans that they are subject to natural laws. But them's the breaks. Creating home-made natural laws or standards just doesn't work.
More tomorrow,
JF
Monday, July 27, 2009
Still not Ranting, but Some Resentment Expressed Nevertheless
Boy, you take one step back from the verge of a self-righteous rant, and suddenly the precipice just doesn't seem as inviting. The rant I was going to dive into yesterday, of course, was a hypothetical response to a particular brand of evangelism that seems popular today, a brand popularized by Australian evangelist Ray Comfort (along with former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron and radio/TV personality Todd Friel, whose show Wretched can be watched here).
Comfort calls his style "The Way of the Master" since he sees it as the evangelistic style most closely patterned after the example of Christ. Briefly, the Way of the Master uses impromptu, one-on-one encounters between an evangelist and a stranger (often called a "fish"--as in "fishing for men"--by some of Comfort's followers). "Hooking" the fish with some kind of lead-in, which could be anything from a provocative question ("If you had only three minutes to live, what would you do?") to a novelty prop, such as the "one million dollar bill"--actually a Bible tract shaped like an oversized bill with President Obama's face on it-- that the evangelist offers as a prize to whomever can prove that they are a "good" person (though you may want to consider this story I found prior to purchasing these bills).
And the "good person test" forms the crux of the Way of the Master approach. The evangelist gets the fish to declare whether or not she is a good person. Then (really, no matter what she says), the evangelist leads the fish through four or five of the Ten Commandments (typically, lying, stealing, adultery/lust, and blasphemy/using God's name in vain). When the fish inevitably admits that she's lied (stolen, lusted, etc.) at least once in her life, the evangelist confronts her with the awful truth: that she would, if she were to face God now, be judged guilty and sentenced to Hell. Having led the fish to a realization of her own wretchedness before God, her imminent damnation, the evangelist follows up with the Good News (i.e., Christ's substitutionary atonement, the availability of repentance and salvation, etc.).
I've spent a lot of time on this blog so far outlining some problems I have with this style of evangelism, which (in less formal ways) defined many of the styles to which I was exposed growing up in the Southern Baptist Church. Indeed, I've developed an active distaste for fear-based evangelism. Why? Because the God it presents isn't someone I'd care to know. One minute (in the context of the Way of the Master narrative) He's holy and utterly righteous, the Uncompromising Judge that will rightfully condemn you to an eternity in Hell for even one lie. The next minute--namely the minute you have a panic attack about the idea of burning for eternity--He swoops in as the Ultimate Lover who sacrificed Himself for your sins.
The Way of the Master depends upon the fish making a decision for Christ out of grateful relief that God saved her... from Himself.
Imagine if a person were to act this way: threatening you with severe (to say nothing of everlasting) bodily harm for even a minor infraction one minute and then magnanimously saying, "That's OK. I've beaten myself up in your place, and if you dedicate yourself to me, I'll let my self-pummeling serve as a substitution. If you choose not to turn to serve and love me, though--POW! But it's your free choice."
Add to this scenario a set of followers, each of whom has taken the guy's deal, who are simply confounded that you would have any sort of problem with this setup. "How can you be so ungrateful?" they ask, "You're the one who violated his laws. He's absolutely right to judge you guilty; you deserve the hurt that's coming to you. We all do. But he's so merciful that he'll not beat you up at all if only you'd repent of your rebellious ways."
I hate to draw this comparison--it's crude as all get-out--but doesn't that mentality seem an awful lot like Stockholm Syndrome? Or, even cruder, battered spouse syndrome? "He's so good to me. He doesn't beat me up even when I deserve it." I've often had the sneaking suspicion that, in their heart of hearts, fight-or-flight Christians would commit deicide--just snap and kill the God of that story--if they thought they could get away with it. Certainly I attribute much of the resentment I feel toward certain strands of evangelicalism to a lingering distaste for that narrative.
In any case the God of fight-or-flight evangelism is not a God I care to worship. Worse, recall the lesson from Good Goats: we become like the God we worship. God, please save me from being like the guy in that story.
But perhaps I'm being overly reductive. I'll try to deal with some of the obvious counter-arguments to the criticism I've laid out here tomorrow.
Comfort calls his style "The Way of the Master" since he sees it as the evangelistic style most closely patterned after the example of Christ. Briefly, the Way of the Master uses impromptu, one-on-one encounters between an evangelist and a stranger (often called a "fish"--as in "fishing for men"--by some of Comfort's followers). "Hooking" the fish with some kind of lead-in, which could be anything from a provocative question ("If you had only three minutes to live, what would you do?") to a novelty prop, such as the "one million dollar bill"--actually a Bible tract shaped like an oversized bill with President Obama's face on it-- that the evangelist offers as a prize to whomever can prove that they are a "good" person (though you may want to consider this story I found prior to purchasing these bills).
And the "good person test" forms the crux of the Way of the Master approach. The evangelist gets the fish to declare whether or not she is a good person. Then (really, no matter what she says), the evangelist leads the fish through four or five of the Ten Commandments (typically, lying, stealing, adultery/lust, and blasphemy/using God's name in vain). When the fish inevitably admits that she's lied (stolen, lusted, etc.) at least once in her life, the evangelist confronts her with the awful truth: that she would, if she were to face God now, be judged guilty and sentenced to Hell. Having led the fish to a realization of her own wretchedness before God, her imminent damnation, the evangelist follows up with the Good News (i.e., Christ's substitutionary atonement, the availability of repentance and salvation, etc.).
I've spent a lot of time on this blog so far outlining some problems I have with this style of evangelism, which (in less formal ways) defined many of the styles to which I was exposed growing up in the Southern Baptist Church. Indeed, I've developed an active distaste for fear-based evangelism. Why? Because the God it presents isn't someone I'd care to know. One minute (in the context of the Way of the Master narrative) He's holy and utterly righteous, the Uncompromising Judge that will rightfully condemn you to an eternity in Hell for even one lie. The next minute--namely the minute you have a panic attack about the idea of burning for eternity--He swoops in as the Ultimate Lover who sacrificed Himself for your sins.
The Way of the Master depends upon the fish making a decision for Christ out of grateful relief that God saved her... from Himself.
Imagine if a person were to act this way: threatening you with severe (to say nothing of everlasting) bodily harm for even a minor infraction one minute and then magnanimously saying, "That's OK. I've beaten myself up in your place, and if you dedicate yourself to me, I'll let my self-pummeling serve as a substitution. If you choose not to turn to serve and love me, though--POW! But it's your free choice."
Add to this scenario a set of followers, each of whom has taken the guy's deal, who are simply confounded that you would have any sort of problem with this setup. "How can you be so ungrateful?" they ask, "You're the one who violated his laws. He's absolutely right to judge you guilty; you deserve the hurt that's coming to you. We all do. But he's so merciful that he'll not beat you up at all if only you'd repent of your rebellious ways."
I hate to draw this comparison--it's crude as all get-out--but doesn't that mentality seem an awful lot like Stockholm Syndrome? Or, even cruder, battered spouse syndrome? "He's so good to me. He doesn't beat me up even when I deserve it." I've often had the sneaking suspicion that, in their heart of hearts, fight-or-flight Christians would commit deicide--just snap and kill the God of that story--if they thought they could get away with it. Certainly I attribute much of the resentment I feel toward certain strands of evangelicalism to a lingering distaste for that narrative.
In any case the God of fight-or-flight evangelism is not a God I care to worship. Worse, recall the lesson from Good Goats: we become like the God we worship. God, please save me from being like the guy in that story.
But perhaps I'm being overly reductive. I'll try to deal with some of the obvious counter-arguments to the criticism I've laid out here tomorrow.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Good Goats and the Way of the Master
One of my father's favorite books--and now one of mine--is Good Goats: Healing our Image of God by Dennis Linn (co-authored with his family). It's a thin, large paperback that resembles a children's book, complete with simple illustrations. But the theology behind it really captures some of my own thoughts and feelings about God.
Linn's basic thesis is that we come to resemble the God we worship. If we imagine God as a stern, distant judge who is forever ready and willing to find our faults (but who, lucky for us, is juuuust merciful enough to let the sacrifice of his son make up for it), then in all likelihood we too will become stern, distant, and judgmental in our relationships to others. That kind of God, Linn suggests, makes our faith unpalatable both to ourselves and to others.
As a counter-example (which I'm paraphrasing--get the book to read the original account), he describes an experience where he (in his professional role as a counselor) was talking to a mother who had lost her adult son. The mother was worried that the son, who had lived a life of unhealthy addictions and rebellion, was burning in hell.
Linn asked the mother to close her eyes and imagine that her son was there in the room before her. She did so. "Now," said Linn, "what do you most want to do right now with your son before you? What do you want to say?" The mother replied that, more than anything, she'd like to wrap her arms around her son and tell him how much she loved him--this despite all the hurt she'd gone through because of his choices. Gently, Linn suggested that surely God's love for her son exceeded even hers, and that she could--with full confidence in that divine love--imagine Jesus wrapping his arms around her son and saying "I love you."
His point: if we believe in a loving God, then surely we must imagine that God as loving us at least as much as the person in the world who loves us the most. This is not to say that love implies easy acceptance; it's not a doormat love. Just as love between people here on earth must occasionally involve creating hard boundaries, so to do I think that God allows people to choose separation. But a family cutting off ties with an addict relative who would otherwise manipulate or rob them is by no means comparable to a God who would condemn a person to eternal hell for their sins.
I get impatient with Christian proselytics that uphold "God is love" alongside "You're destined for hell." As an example--one among a host--take the "Way of the Master" techniques developed by evangelist Ron Comfort. I expect to spend a lot of time here and in my research analyzing Comfort's distinctive outreach techniques, but for now let me sketch out his basic approach. Comfort believes that most conversions in churches to day are false in that they do not involve true repentance. True repentance comes, Comfort argues, when an unsaved person becomes convinced and convicted that they are in fact wretched in the eyes of the Lord, destined to be judged guilty when held up to God's standard.
Comfort's evangelistic technique (the eponymous "way of the master") is to engage a person in a conversation that leads to some variation of the question, "Do you think you're a good person?" If the person says yes (or anything but "absolutely not"), Comfort invites them to test their goodness by comparison with the ten commandments. The conversation goes something like this:
"Have you ever told a lie? Even once, at any point in your life?"
Yes.
"What do you call a person who tells a lie?"
A liar.
"OK. Have you ever stolen anything?"
Yes, when I was a child.
"OK, so what do you call someone who steals?"
[Typically the person will say "A stealer," and Comfort will gently suggest "thief" as a better term].
"Have you ever used the name of the Lord in vain, like 'OMG' or something?"
Yes.
"You know, that's blasphemy, using God's holy name as a curse word, and God takes that sin very seriously. One more question: have you ever looked at someone with lust in your heart?"
Yes.
"You know, Jesus said that if you look at someone you aren't married to with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery in your heart. So--by your own admission, you're a lying, thieving, blaspheming adulterer. If you were to die right now and stand before God in his heavenly court of law, would you be judged innocent or guilty?"
Guilty, I guess.
And from there (provided they haven't started to argue with him or walk away), Comfort takes them through his understanding of the Gospel--repent of sins, believe in Christ, etc.
This is fight-or-flight evangelism at its finest. Convince the person that they are in immediate danger of the fires of hell and then give them the get-out-of-hell free card that is Christianity (Ray Comfort's brand of Christianity, mind you. There's another strand of evangelicalism that vehemently believes that preaching repentance as a component of salvation is heretical. See here, for example).
Again, from Comfort's perspective, life really is an emergency situation. Death could come at any moment. Or Jesus could return in the twinkling of an eye. Either way, judgment is upon us. A fight-or-flight response is therefore appropriate.
I have grave doubts, though, about how well the courtroom-judgment analogy in this context works in fostering a long-term relationship with the living, loving God. Rather than "the beginning of a beautiful friendship," the way of the master seems more like a shotgun marriage between the neophyte believer and the very-easily-pissed-off deity.
More tomorrow,
JF
Linn's basic thesis is that we come to resemble the God we worship. If we imagine God as a stern, distant judge who is forever ready and willing to find our faults (but who, lucky for us, is juuuust merciful enough to let the sacrifice of his son make up for it), then in all likelihood we too will become stern, distant, and judgmental in our relationships to others. That kind of God, Linn suggests, makes our faith unpalatable both to ourselves and to others.
As a counter-example (which I'm paraphrasing--get the book to read the original account), he describes an experience where he (in his professional role as a counselor) was talking to a mother who had lost her adult son. The mother was worried that the son, who had lived a life of unhealthy addictions and rebellion, was burning in hell.
Linn asked the mother to close her eyes and imagine that her son was there in the room before her. She did so. "Now," said Linn, "what do you most want to do right now with your son before you? What do you want to say?" The mother replied that, more than anything, she'd like to wrap her arms around her son and tell him how much she loved him--this despite all the hurt she'd gone through because of his choices. Gently, Linn suggested that surely God's love for her son exceeded even hers, and that she could--with full confidence in that divine love--imagine Jesus wrapping his arms around her son and saying "I love you."
His point: if we believe in a loving God, then surely we must imagine that God as loving us at least as much as the person in the world who loves us the most. This is not to say that love implies easy acceptance; it's not a doormat love. Just as love between people here on earth must occasionally involve creating hard boundaries, so to do I think that God allows people to choose separation. But a family cutting off ties with an addict relative who would otherwise manipulate or rob them is by no means comparable to a God who would condemn a person to eternal hell for their sins.
I get impatient with Christian proselytics that uphold "God is love" alongside "You're destined for hell." As an example--one among a host--take the "Way of the Master" techniques developed by evangelist Ron Comfort. I expect to spend a lot of time here and in my research analyzing Comfort's distinctive outreach techniques, but for now let me sketch out his basic approach. Comfort believes that most conversions in churches to day are false in that they do not involve true repentance. True repentance comes, Comfort argues, when an unsaved person becomes convinced and convicted that they are in fact wretched in the eyes of the Lord, destined to be judged guilty when held up to God's standard.
Comfort's evangelistic technique (the eponymous "way of the master") is to engage a person in a conversation that leads to some variation of the question, "Do you think you're a good person?" If the person says yes (or anything but "absolutely not"), Comfort invites them to test their goodness by comparison with the ten commandments. The conversation goes something like this:
"Have you ever told a lie? Even once, at any point in your life?"
Yes.
"What do you call a person who tells a lie?"
A liar.
"OK. Have you ever stolen anything?"
Yes, when I was a child.
"OK, so what do you call someone who steals?"
[Typically the person will say "A stealer," and Comfort will gently suggest "thief" as a better term].
"Have you ever used the name of the Lord in vain, like 'OMG' or something?"
Yes.
"You know, that's blasphemy, using God's holy name as a curse word, and God takes that sin very seriously. One more question: have you ever looked at someone with lust in your heart?"
Yes.
"You know, Jesus said that if you look at someone you aren't married to with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery in your heart. So--by your own admission, you're a lying, thieving, blaspheming adulterer. If you were to die right now and stand before God in his heavenly court of law, would you be judged innocent or guilty?"
Guilty, I guess.
And from there (provided they haven't started to argue with him or walk away), Comfort takes them through his understanding of the Gospel--repent of sins, believe in Christ, etc.
This is fight-or-flight evangelism at its finest. Convince the person that they are in immediate danger of the fires of hell and then give them the get-out-of-hell free card that is Christianity (Ray Comfort's brand of Christianity, mind you. There's another strand of evangelicalism that vehemently believes that preaching repentance as a component of salvation is heretical. See here, for example).
Again, from Comfort's perspective, life really is an emergency situation. Death could come at any moment. Or Jesus could return in the twinkling of an eye. Either way, judgment is upon us. A fight-or-flight response is therefore appropriate.
I have grave doubts, though, about how well the courtroom-judgment analogy in this context works in fostering a long-term relationship with the living, loving God. Rather than "the beginning of a beautiful friendship," the way of the master seems more like a shotgun marriage between the neophyte believer and the very-easily-pissed-off deity.
More tomorrow,
JF
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