At the opening address of the 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church this summer, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding Bishop, had this to say: “The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.”
Her comments, as you might imagine, have set off a firestorm of feedback, though I’ve yet to see a rebuttal that has as its basis an intellectually honest reading of the sacred scriptures along with an acknowledgment of how the world works. If I’m allowed to say that I think she was overstating her case in order to make the point, then I would assert that I agree with her statement.
We all have certain lenses through which we “do theology.” They have to do with our familial upbringing, our religious experiences, our presuppositions, etc. While it can be difficult to identify all the things we bring to the table, I can pinpoint two people at least whose influence informs the way I think about religion and theology. The first is my Great Grandfather, John R. Rice, one of the biggest Fundamentalist leaders of the 20th century. (See here for more about him.) I tell people the second formative principle for me can best be summed up by this autobiographical statement: I don’t talk to my father much ever since God told him to kill me, my mother, and my siblings. It should come as no surprise, then, that I am a bit skeptical of any claims regarding the value and/or legitimacy of an individualist Christianity. Larry Crabb addresses this fallacy in much of his writing, summed up best here: “The greatest lie believed today is that one can know God without being known by someone else.”
I also find Reinhold Neibuhr’s writings in this regard to be particularly helpful. This short essay below is from his book Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, written in 1924 during his first pastorate just out of Seminary. While he deals here specifically with revival meetings that press for “emotional commitments to Christ,” I would expand his category to encompass most of the preaching I hear, to say nothing of much of the “art” produced by the subculture responsible for those revival meetings.
A revival meeting seems never to get under my skin. Perhaps I am too fish-blooded to enjoy them. But I object not so much to the emotionalism as to the lack of intellectual honesty of the average revival preacher. I do not mean to imply that the evangelists are necessarily consciously dishonest. They just don’t know enough about life and history to present the problem of the Christian life in its full meaning. They are always assuming that nothing but an emotional commitment to Christ is needed to save the soul from its sin and chaos. They seem never to realize how many of the miseries of mankind are due not to malice but to misdirected zeal and unbalanced virtue. They never help the people who corrupt family love by making the family a selfish unit in society or those who brutalize industry by excessive devotion to the prudential virtues.
Of course that is all inevitable enough. If you don’t simplify issues you can’t arouse emotional crises. It’s the melodrama that captivates the crowd. Sober history is seldom melodramatic. God and the devil may be in conflict on the scene of life and history, but a victory follows every defeat and some kind of defeat every victory. The representatives of God are seldom divine and the minions of Satan are never quite diabolical.
I wonder whether there is any way of being potent oratorically without over-simplifying truth. Or must power always be bought at the expense of truth? Perhaps some simplification of life is justified. Every artist does, after all, obscure some details in order to present others in bolder relief. The religious rhetorician has a right to count himself among, and take his standards from, the artists rather than the scientists. The trouble is that he is usually no better than a cartoonist.
Great post, my friend. I feel at times that formula has replaced faith in protestantism. And faith does not come at a “point in time” and neither does salvation. For those that argue for that point… which point? Time is a tricky thing. A single second can be subdivided infinitely until an entire universe of stasis is opened. If I’m saved traveling close to the speed of light, my moment of salvation will take about 100,000 years to those left on earth.
A God outside of time is not dependent upon time to save your soul. It is beyond all of the nonsense of formulas or metaphors and it is beyond a personal conversion experience and even beyond the scope that our imagination conjures when we try to imagine the whole church washed in the blood, though a much more accurate picture than “I said this now, I’m saved.” Confess and believe are the prerequisites but no one knows or can see the Lamb’s book of life or the infinite mystery that unfolds behind every verse that attempts to describe it, however imperfect words are. Therefore, salvation is worked out, hoped for, believed in, but not bartered. “I’ll do this if you’ll do that.” It is worked out with fear and trembling – and its worked out together or not at all. “‘But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, And to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel’ ” It is clear that heaven won’t be empty waiting for me as if Jesus only died for me. And praise God for that.
Exactly, Seth, exactly. And I just came across a web comic posted on Tuesday that sums up that point brilliantly in just two panels: http://www.nakedpastor.com/archives/4001
Love it.
Good post, Stephen. I particularly like Neibuhr’s words, “I wonder whether there is any way of being potent oratorically without over-simplifying truth. Or must power always be bought at the expense of truth?”
I reread a sermon that I wrote in 2005 during seminary… funny how trite some of my imperatives and “guidance” seem now that I look back on them from a few years later. Maybe trite isn’t the right word… forced? perfunctory? more rhetorical than genuine?
Regardless, it does seem that in the context of a sermon, or even moreso in the midst of an argument between equal parties, the whole truth is often sacrificed for the sake of littler, less-significant truths which can be defended much more easily… hence wining the argument takes precedent over remembering the whole story as it actually was… potency replaces comprehensiveness… and “connecting” with your listeners from the pulpit over something true (but small) happens in place of communicating a complicated, but honest, statement of the depths of the matter.
The sermon I found was on the demon-possessed man that was chained up in the cave. I, of course, spoke to Jesus’ ability to rescue, to heal, to redeem, to restore. All truths. Much more difficult to speak with potency on the reality of the invisible, spiritual dimensions (Satan, demons) that Jesus confronted… and whether or not He continues to defend and deliver us from those forces now… and how badly that starts to scare me once I think about it for more than a few seconds.
Yeah, if I’m anything like the evangelists Neibuhr depicts, I’ll probably just stick with something simpler… and turn up the volume of my voice a bit to compensate.
Stephen, Matthew Paul Turner referred to you as a “fellow fundamentalism survivor” or something similar. I am the same–I graduated from Tennessee Temple High School, college, AND seminary! You mention your family relation to John R. Rice. So, you are related to Faith Lamb (who taught at Temple when I was there)? BTW, great post.
Thanks, Richard. And yes, Faith Lamb is my mother.
As a child and teenager I often felt guilty that I couldn’t remember the exact moment that I was saved! This guilt prompted several “salvation experiences” in my life, but left no relief from the feeling that I was missing something. As you did, I grew up around church and strong Bible teaching. As a teenager I thought that if all you had to do was believe in Jesus, then I’d pretty much been saved my whole life. I don’t remember a time that I didn’t believe in Him. But this thought coupled with the constant message from the pulpit that there is a moment in time that you become saved only led to confusion and nightly prayers that were nothing more than fire insurance! When we were at Temple, there was a speaker (I don’t remember his name, but he spoke from the floor instead of the pulpit and sat on a stool with a guitar) who said, “If you don’t want to call Him, Lord, you have no right calling Him, Savior.” While the ins and outs of theology would be a little fuzzy in that statement, it was the awakening moment in my mind. Battling through what that meant led me to the moment that I got on my knees and surrendered my life to the Lord. When people ask me when I got saved, I say Sept. 3, 1998, because that’s when I let go of doubt and fear and started living the abundant life promised by Christ. I was “saved” from the terminology of salvation that kept me in bondage. I am convinced that the moment I broke free, the Enemy changed his plot from “keep her bound in doubt and fear” to “keep her dissatisfied and doubting God’s goodness.” May the lies of the Deceiver be revealed so that our lives be lived in freedom for “such a time as this.”