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gospel

Theology

“Radical” review: 161-182

We are approaching the end of Radical, finally– there’s only one more chapter after this one, and then we’re moving on. On that note, recommendations for the next book review would be wonderful. I’m thinking about tackling a purity culture book this time around– maybe something like I Kissed Dating Goodbye or When God Writes Your Love Story? Is there a book that’s really popular in purity culture circles today?

Today’s chapter of Radical— “Living When Dying is Gain”– is one of the few chapters where I agree with the starting premise. It’s happened a handful of times through this reading (more often than any other book I’ve reviewed with the exception of Zimzum, I should note), but each time I ultimately disagree with the final conclusion, because David and I are working with very different theological underpinnings.

He focuses this chapter around Matthew 10, which, to be honest, has a bunch of contradictory and perplexing stuff in it. Jesus forbids the disciples from going to Gentiles and says “I do not bring peace but a sword,” but just a few chapters later he condemns those who take up swords. Needless to say, there’s a few things that seem to complicate this chapter that David just breezes right over– most noticeably here:

Out of all the amazing statements in Matthew 10 this one may be … the most important: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

… Jesus was telling them–and us–that we need to fear God, not people. God is the ultimate judge, and he holds eternity in his hands. (175)

The problem with this is that even the most cursory glance at the commentaries would tell you that we’ve argued over who exactly “the One” is for centuries. Some say it’s God, some say it’s Satan, and some people argue that it’s neither. But David ignores the contested nature of this verse and the translation difficulties and spends the last seven pages building his argument off this interpretation. Because he personally reads the text as “fear God who can [and will] destroy your soul and body in hell,” he extrapolates from that to argue how we need to see death as the ultimate reward and how this physical existence doesn’t matter (179).

Obviously that is where David and I definitely part ways. However, our paths diverged a long while before this because our basic assumptions about Matthew 10 are radically different. He reads the instructions Jesus gave to the apostles there and decided to see it in terms of the Christian missionary movement (175-78). He views Matthew 10 through the lens of missionary biographies and stories about Christian persecution. When he reads Jesus talking about how he’s “sending you out like sheep among wolves,” the way he thinks about it is colored by a life spent reading about Jim Elliot and Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

Except when he says that “It’s Christian history. Persecution and suffering as we see today in the Middle East, Asia, an Africa have marked followers of Christ from the beginning of the church” (168), he’s speaking ethnocentrically. He’s blithely ignoring the “Christian history” of things like the Crusades, or the Protestant campaign against Catholics that frequently led to burning priests. Modernly, Christians spread hate against Muslims that frequently lead to their deaths, to American Muslim homes being destroyed, and their Mosques attacked or defaced. In fact, he does that himself when he says “The tribe was 100 percent Muslim. Talk about sheep in the middle of wolves” (165).

Christians aren’t the only persecuted religious group. Far from it. Buddhists persecute Muslims in Myanmar, atheists are persecuted, sometimes killed, for their lack of belief in many countries, and Muslims persecute Hindus. David is either ignorant of this– something he cannot afford to be considering his work in global missions– or he is deliberately misleading his readers.

He puts forward that “if we really become like Jesus, the world will hate us. Why? Because the world hated him” (167), but he never bothers to ask the question why did they hate Jesus? The traditional evangelical understanding is that people hate Jesus because they don’t want to feel guilty about their sin. They want to live their lives in peace, unbothered by any attempts by Christians to tell them that what they’re doing is wrong and they could go to hell for it. They don’t like feeling convicted, so they hate either Christ or his messenger.

I read this passage differently. Because my view of the Bible is rooted in liberation theology, I read “I send you out as a sheep among wolves” and I’m reminded of the protests in Ferguson, or the protests against Trump rallies in Chicago and Kansas City last week. To me it’s clear that standing up against oppression and hatred is what Christ has called us to do, and few things earn you more hatred and revilement in this country than daring to take a stand against bigotry. Don’t obey, don’t comply, don’t keep your head down and keep walking– you could be assaulted, arrested, tear gassed, shot.

I agree with David that proclaiming the life and message of Christ can be dangerous to live out. We just fundamentally disagree about why. I believe there is something in the message of the Cross that many find deeply challenging because I believe that the Cross is a subversion of power. I believe that Jesus’ life flies in the face of Empire and systemic, institutionalized oppressions. If I am called to be like him– which I believe I am– then yes, I’m going to be hated, because Empire hates resistance. Those in power will always try to dominate and control the ones who have no power, and will always be shocked and then vengeful when we rebel. When we do not contort our faces when the old men say “smile,” when we step off a sidewalk at a protest, when we stand proudly in the face of a heil führer salute, those in power will loathe us.

Like Jesus said, we should not be surprised by that. We should not be surprised when our friends and family abandon us when we fight against racism, when they betray us and spread lies about us because we’re a feminist, when we’re disowned and thrown out into the street for being LGBT+ . . .

However, unlike David, I think that our resistance matters. I have hope that each time we fight can make a difference. I believe that participating in Jesus’ vision to bring the kingdom of God to earth is the whole point of the gospel.

March 14, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 141-160

With a title like “There is No Plan B: Why Going is Urgent, Not Optional,” it should be obvious that this is one of those chapters were David and I definitely disagree. In fact, one of the biggest things I disagree with him on appears on the first page:

Applied to faith, this [equality] means that in a world where different people have different religious views, all such views should be treated as fundamentally equal. In this system of thinking, faith is a matter of taste, not of truth. (141)

What a reductionist view. Unfortunately, I understand where he’s coming from. David’s view of theology is one of the reasons why Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism can occasionally appear identical. If you believe in the Eternal Conscious Torment model of hell and that the only way to avoid being burned alive for all of eternity is to “receive the gospel,” then you cannot afford to be wrong. There are enormous and extremely permanent consequences to what you think about God, Jesus, the Atonement, and soteriology. If you’re convinced of this sequence, then you’re going to have serious problems with pluralism, as you should if you’re a decent person on any level.

However, all of that is one of the biggest reasons why I believe that the evangelical conceptualization of theology is immoral, and that their religion is based on an immoral deity. At one point David tries to argue that concerns like mine are a matter of “emotion” (148), but they’re not. It’s a matter of morality. Asking whether or not God condemns people to eternal conscious torment because they’ve never heard the gospel — and their only option for hearing the gospel is dependent on flawed beings– isn’t an emotional question, it’s a moral one with high emotional stakes. Many people, myself included, have concluded that a god who behaves like that would be, possibly, the most evil creature to ever exist.

David’s argument has one core problem: out one side of his mouth he says that people are not condemned to eternal conscious torment because they never heard of Jesus, but because they “rejected God” (144-45); the other side of his mouth says that accepting God is defined by receiving the gospel (153). He’s forced into this position by the Bible as things like the Hall of Faith in Hebrews make “hearing the gospel” an impossible standard. Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah– they’d never heard of Jesus, had no understanding whatsoever of the evangelical definition of “the gospel.” He tries to wiggle around this by saying that “they were trusting in the redemption God would bring through Christ” but this comes after ten pages of him saying that people “doing their best with the information they have” are condemned to burn for all eternity. How Abraham doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “did his best with the information he had at the time” is beyond me.

The logic pattern of “all people have knowledge of God, and all people reject God” is internally consistent, however it’s based in the premise that all people have knowledge of the Christian god, and that premise is a far cry from being realistic, let alone proven. Supposedly, according to David, the Christian god does something to reveal themself in such a way that it’s possible for every single last person on the planet to have consciously rejected them. This manifestation cannot look like Tonatiuh, or Ra, or Belenos, or Yuyi, or Sol … for reasons that no one has ever demonstrated to me convincingly. Because I said so is about as far as they get, usually.

There’s no logical separation between “God condemns us to hell because we’ve never heard of Jesus” and “God condemns us to hell for rejecting themself” when the mechanism of accepting the Christian God is fallible humans preaching the gospel. That is a morally repugnant position. If the eternal damnation of billions of souls rests on people being healthy enough, wealthy enough, educated enough, and self-sacrificing enough to go to “unreached people groups” and talk about Jesus, then Christianity is a catastrophic moral failure on a scale I can barely comprehend. But this is what David believes (156).

He believes this because of a fairly common problem in evangelicalism: he reads the Pauline letters in isolation. Without Jesus, without James, without John the Revelator, it seems inevitable for people who embrace biblical inspiration to arrive at this conclusion. However, Paul is only one man, and a fallible one. His perspective is not the sum total of soteriology, and his articulation is only one view. This is why we have the collected library of Scripture. Paul, held in balance with James, John, and Peter, and viewed in light of the words of Christ helps paint us a complex and nuanced picture of faith.

I don’t hold with the position that the gospel is “Jesus died on the cross to cover your sins with his blood so that you can be admitted to heaven.” I believe that the gospel is far more rich than that. I believe that Jesus’ entire life and earthly ministry is “the Good News,” and that reducing faith to a single, solitary belief is to make Jesus almost totally irrelevant. I believe that Jesus came to save sinners, but the question is how. I believe that he wants each of us to do what he did– to serve, to heal, to liberate, to love. I believe that Christianity isn’t about a single question. It’s about Jesus’ entire life. It’s about our entire life.

Seeing the gospel in this light enables me to read the same passages as David does and see a message of hope and encouragement instead of despair. I don’t see a world condemned to burn, but a world that desperately needs us to love it. I can grieve with Paul in the opening to Romans as he looks around and sees so many terrible things. Each of us should be compelled to grieve for all the ways the world is broken and all the ways it breaks us. It should make us angry, like it made Paul angry … but it doesn’t stop there in Romans, and it shouldn’t end there for us, either. Romans continues to assure us that Jesus’ life– the gospel– makes it possible for things to be different. I believe that Paul is trying to show us that our broken world can be repaired.

March 7, 2016 by
Theology

faith of a child

I’d been in South Carolina for five days when it happened.

My mom and her friend Sandy* had driven up from Florida to attend a ladies’ retreat, which had been entertaining, and then we attended a Revival that week at Sandy’s father’s church. That week, the evangelist preached several “salvation” messages (a message focused on delivering the gospel and an eventual call to the altar to pray the Sinner’s Prayer), leading up to Thursday night. That night, he read A Physicians’ View of the Crucifixion of Christ. It was bloodthirsty, and violent, and terrifying. I’d never heard anything like it.

Jesus did all of that . . . for me? I remember thinking, shocked and horrified at the brutalities he had suffered.

~~~~

I was five years old the first time I encountered the idea of “Jesus coming into your heart.” I was in Sunday school, a few days before Halloween, and I remember the Sunday school teacher turning all of the lights off, and lighting a large pumpkin-scented candle. He described the ancient rites of the Druids, how they would travel from house to house, and the parents would surrender their children for the sacrifice. The druids would lay the little girl on a table, cut her skin off, and burn it over a candle lit in a pumpkin. He said they did this to bring the evil spirits into every home– it was part of the deal the Druids had negotiated to keep the demons away the rest of the year.

But, he said, that didn’t actually work. The only thing that can keep demons away is Jesus. Demons will never bother you if you ask Jesus into your heart to protect you.

I went home, silent. I stayed quiet all day. I didn’t know what to do. How did you ask Jesus to come into your heart? Did you just have to say it? Did you have to burn a candle? Was there a certain way you had to sit, or stand, or kneel?

Halloween came, and I was desperate, terrified. I lay in bed, positive that the shadows would come alive and devour me.

Jesus, please come into my heart. Please. I don’t want the demons to take me away. Please don’t let them get me. Jesus, please, I remember praying for hours that night.

~~~~

I was seven the first time I saw a baptism. I connected the dots and realized that if you’d “prayed to ask Jesus to come into your heart,” then you were supposed to get baptized. I asked my mother, she said we’d talk to someone at church. The lady we talked to took me into another room, away from my mother, and asked me if I’d ever asked Jesus into my heart. I said yes.

She didn’t exactly believe me, if the inquisition that followed was any indication. I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Had I repented? Did I know what hell was? I was bewildered, and then frustrated. The end result was that I didn’t get baptized– until a year later, when I found out what the “answers” to those questions were.

~~~~

So, in South Carolina, when I was eleven, I realized something. I had never really understood any of the answers. I knew how to say the words– I could list off the Roman’s Road with ease, but I’d had no idea what any of it meant. Jesus had died for me. Me. My sin. Mine alone.

Oh.

I knew that what logically followed a revelation like that was “getting saved,” so I decided I’d go down for the altar call I knew was coming in about twenty minutes. Then I stopped- what if the Rapture happens before then? People who knew they were supposed to get saved before the Rapture happens will be given over to a “reprobate mind.” I couldn’t let that happen.

I led myself through the Roman’s Road, right there in the pew, and prayed the Sinner’s Prayer I knew by heart.

~~~~

A dozen years later I was re-examining everything I ever thought I knew. What does it mean to be a Christian? What is this whole “getting saved” business? What’s Arminianism? What is Calvinism– actually, and not what I’d been told Calvinism was by Arminians. Wait– Molinism? That’s interesting.

Hold on, ignore all of that.

What does the Bible say the gospel is?

And, I realized, that, in the Bible, it’s fairly simple. You’re a sinner. God loves you. Jesus is God’s son. He was crucified, and here’s the kicker– he defeated death. He took your sin.

That’s it. It’s really not that complicated. I decided to forget all of the labels, and all of the methods, and all of the processes. I didn’t care any more if I had free will or was predestined, because it’s all the same in the end anyway– at least, when it comes to this. I didn’t care if I had a “lightbulb moment” that I could turn to in moments of “doubting my salvation.” I didn’t need it. I didn’t need a Sinner’s Prayer, or an altar call, or for someone to “declare” me a child of God. I just was. I just am. 

*all names changed

Photo by Nathaniel Hayag
February 7, 2013 by