Bonding vs Bridging Communities: Fear & Retribution in Fundamentalism

Last week I attended a conference hosted by a fundamentalist-leaning evangelical church. There were roughly 3000 people in attendance and I heard some of the most celebrated preachers from that particular corner of the Christian universe. Frankly, what I heard was largely disheartening. If I were to summarize the majority of the preaching, it would be this:

Jesus is the one true God who came to suffer and die in your place so you might avoid the eternal conscious torment of hell, and to think any other way about Jesus is to resign yourself to condemnation.

I’m sure each of those preachers would be delighted to know that’s what I heard. However, not only does this narrow message contain propositions that are legitimately debated in Christianity, it neglects important nuances about the teaching and work of Jesus and ignores the massive implications of Christ as the inaugurated future of hope and redemption.

Most of all, though, the way it was presented transformed the gospel from a message of liberation to one of fear and escape. Accordingly, Jesus ceases to be the person who empowers humanity to finally live into its incredible promise as the image of God, and becomes the ultimate conqueror who puts you in your place…because he loves you.

There were other ways this parochialism was constantly reinforced:

• Jesus is coming back as a “dominant and domineering” savior who will wipe out his enemies
• If you do not have a strong man preaching this message to you every week then you are in danger of failing in the Christian life and should find a new church
• If you cease to believe this message then you demonstrate you never really knew God in the first place and were always bound for hell
• If you are a woman, showing too much of your body in public is a significant betrayal of your duty to represent Jesus
• “Right doctrine is the litmus test for your life”
• God’s wrath is not only satisfied by death, but by suffering too
• People who reject penal substitution and the divinity of Christ are among the most radical and perverse members of society. L. Ron Hubbard was quoted as an example, and immediately described as, “…a man who exhibited many of the markers of pedophilia.”
• You must be able to understand and agree with an abstract concept of God (the Trinity) and a specific technical role for Jesus (penal substitutionary atonement) to be saved from hell: “You can get [the question about who Jesus is] nearly right and still end up in hell.”

Consider what kind of affect these statements might have on someone who is deeply afraid of disapproval and rejection. Or, consider how appealing they might seem to someone seeking to dominate or control others.

Preached this way, Christ and Christianity become a powerful means of keeping people in their place. This has its advantages. Forming a community around fear and guilt creates tremendous bonds among its members, even between those who are in control and those who are being controlled. The disadvantage is that it requires force and hostility to maintain, which takes its toll on the members and sets your community at odds with other communities.

During my time at the conference I read Peter Block’s book Community, and while I can’t endorse everything in it, he makes some insightful and helpful observations:

[Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein in their book Better Together] distinguish between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital. Bonding social capital are networks that are inward looking, composed of people of like mind. Other social networks encompass different types of people and tend to be outward looking – bridging social capital [...] As Putnam and Feldstein put it, “A society that has only bonding social capital will…be segregated into mutually hostile camps.”

Block goes on to insightfully point out that the only way to maintain this sort of bonding community is through retribution, law, and force.

At every level of society we live in the landscape of retribution. The retributive community is sustained by several aspects of the modern community conversation [...] the marketing of fear and fault, gravitation toward more laws and oversight, an obsession with romanticized leadership, marginalizing hope and possibility, and devaluing associational life [freely chosen voluntary associations] to the point of invisibility.

That’s fundamentalism in a nutshell.

The gospel, on the other hand, is about Christ’s eradication of barriers. Now, the Resolved preachers would agree – but they would likely say the barrier Christ eradicates is the one between the individual sinner and God. I would say it includes that, but extends pervasively to all other barriers as well – those between men and women, between races and religions, between ideologies, between humanity and the earth, etc.

Ironically, these preachers often quoted Paul’s condemnation of “another gospel” in Galatians 6 as a defense of penal substitution, (which is not the subject of that letter), but their messages were very similar to the one Paul rejected: one that creates an externally approved and exclusive religious group. Christ, on the other hand, doesn’t merely create a new and better conclave of exclusive religious adherents. That would just be another form of ancient Judaism. Christianity isn’t just a better form of Judaism. Rather, it is what God always intended to accomplish through Judaism on a cosmic scale: liberation from the destructive power of death in our everyday lives and from the paternalistic bonds of law and religion through the creation of a new and unified humanity:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  ~ Galatians 3:28 (ESV)

This is what Galatians – and the gospel itself – is all about. Not fear from danger or protection within a closed community or tightly constructed system of beliefs, but liberation from such fear, isolation, and retribution. Moreover, this is accomplished not by separating us from others, but by being a people who are distinctive because they are sent to eradicate such barriers and become what Peter block calls a “bridging community.”

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. ~ Galatians 5:1

Technorati Tags: Bondage, Fundamentalism, Jesus Christ, Liberty, The Gospel

Resolved, Not To Think Too Rigorously About Jesus

I’ve interacted with literally hundreds of people at Resolved and I have to say that everyone has been wonderful. People are kind, upbeat, and demonstrate a singular passion for learning about God and worshipping fervently – and I appreciate the hospitality that has been shown by the event crew.

Saturday afternoon’s speaker was Steve Lawson. I’d never heard him before and I was anxious to shed my frustration from the morning session with Al Mohler.

It was not to be.

I’ll admit up front that Steve’s rhetorical style bothered me from the start. He’s an old-time preacher that likes to build a crescendo by saying the same thing, sentence after sentence, in a slightly different way in order to drive a point home. As in:

“Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The trinitarian ikon. The divine logos. The incarnated deity. Fully God and fully man. Not 50% God and 50% man. Not 100% God. Not 100% man. 100% God and 100% man!”

You get the picture. It’s like listening to a live version of the Amplified Bible. I can’t stand the Amplified Bible. As my friend Jason Dougherty once said, “It’s a poet’s nightmare.”

But that’s just a matter of taste. Some people like that style, and as far as that style goes, Steve is very skilled. His topic was “Who is Jesus Christ?” and his approach was to rifle through the various claims made about Jesus in scripture. Not a bad approach. And, honestly, I wholeheartedly agreed with everything he said about Jesus – until he decided to get defensive about challenges to Jesus’ divinity.

Steve offered the following 5 irrefutable “proofs” of Jesus’ divinity:

• Divine attributes: Jesus possesses the incommunicable attributes of God
• Divine works: Jesus performs the works that only God can perform
• Divine names: Jesus is called by names reserved only for God
• Divine worship: Jesus receives the worship that only God can receive
• Divine quality: Jesus is doxologically referred to as God by the NT writers.

Let me be clear: I believe each of these statements constitute genuine knowledge about Jesus and I believe they are true. However, they are not facts and they do not constitute “proof” of anything other than a certain measure of internal consistency in Christian scripture. Yet, Steve Lawson postured them as irrefutable proof that Jesus Christ was and is, in fact, the incarnate God of the universe.

There are a few problems with this kind of foundationalist approach to preaching. First, it imparts a feeble epistemology – which could explain why so many college-bound evangelical Christians lose their faith. If you’ve been told your whole life that Jesus is God because the Bible says so then you’ll be unable to compete in a marketplace of ideas steeped in the worldview of empirical data. Christendom is over. The Bible is just another book as far as the world is concerned, and there’s no compelling reason to take its claims at face value.

In response, fundamentalism attempts to play the empirical game by dressing up doctrinal beliefs as empirical data. The exact opposite is needed. We must openly admit what any rational person can see – that faith claims are not facts – while faithfully demonstrating that empirical data is not the only valid form of true knowledge. Just because faith must be subjectively tried and tested doesn’t mean it isn’t genuinely powerful knowledge.

And therein lies the cruel catch: the power of faith is found in its ability to liberate people toward a life of divinely ordained possibilities, but that power cannot be experienced without being tested – a process that involves stages of frustration and doubt. Yet, most people won’t risk this if they’ve been told – under threat of ridicule, ostracism, and eternal damnation – that they must unquestioningly accept faith claims as irrefutable facts. By doing so, we impose constricting limitations on people rather than create horizons of freedom and possibility.

Author and organizational consultant Peter Block speaks to this in his excellent and provocative book, Community. speaking of the power of stories in our lives, he says:

The stories that are useful and fulfilling are the ones that are metaphors, signposts, parables, and inspiration for the fullest expression of our humanity. They are communal teaching stories. Creation stories, wisdom stories, sometimes personal stories that have a mythic quality, even if they come from a person sitting next to me [...] Limiting stories are the ones that present themselves as if they were true. Facts.

What Peter Block is describing here is the difference between how law and grace work in the imagination of a community. Law tells stories that restrict us; stories of fear and the need for boundaries in order to be safe. Grace tells stories that liberate us; stories of possibility and assurance that inspire us to take risks. Often the difference is not in the content, it’s in the telling. Even though all his content was true, Steve Lawson told a story of fear, restriction, and law rather than one of grace and freedom.

I was beginning to think the whole weekend would be an exercise in frustration…until C.J. Mahaney took the stage. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Foundationalism, Fundamentalism, Jesus Christ, Knowledge, Peter Block, Resolved Conference, Steve Lawson

Resolved, Not To Wear a Bikini

(My apologies for being late on my posts. There is no wifi access at the convention center and the connection here at the hotel is spotty, at best.)

In many ways Resolved is Grace’s version of a young adult conference – and it shows. The burgeoning crowd is overwhelmingly twenty-somethings peppered with boomer-age stalwarts ready to pass the torch. As I mixed with the crowd I met people from southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the deep south, and even a few folks from overseas: The U.K., New Zealand, and Canada (Canada feels like it’s overseas doesn’t it?).

Friday night Rick Holland was the featured speaker and he introduced this year’s conference theme: “Jesus.” I liked how Rick spoke of the “problem of God” in terms of the tension between transcendence and immanence. He effectively gave voice to the frustration experienced by those trying desperately to connect with God, and he did so by first visiting the book of Job and then introduced Christ as the concrete “confluence” of the abstract streams of transcendence and immanence.

Nicely done. I think directing our theological imaginations toward the incarnation is the right direction to go and Rick did a nice job of pointing us toward the inherent vistas of possibility birthed with Jesus as the eternal God-man. I mean this sincerely: I think overall Rick preached a fine message about the unique role of the incarnation and I appreciated it.

However, there were a few bewildering moments for me. For example, Rick took one small passage in Job and used it to pronounce that the book wasn’t an indictment of God concerning unjust suffering at all, but rather the account of one sinful man’s inability to connect with a transcendent Holy God. In other words, Job simply demonstrates the need for atonement (ahem…someone’s penal substitution is showing). Rick also made the curious statement, “Most of what Job’s friends tell him is theologically true – just insensitively applied,” summarizing Job’s freind’s as saying, “God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked – a truism!”

This is what happens when you’re a slave to systematics. When everything in the bible, according to your theological prejudice, by necessity must harmonize perfectly as a factual representation of God’s revealed perfect will, you lose the ability to see the trees for the forest and the biblical narrative becomes a limitation on humanity rather than a liberating story of possibility. The problem with this summary of Job is that there is no harmonizing Job with, say, Proverbs because these writings are at odds with each other – and its best to leave them that way. We’re not just at odds with the consequences of our foolish sin (Proverbs in a nutshell), we are also at odds with a world and a God that frequently makes no sense to our sensibilities (Job in a nutshell). The fact is, the unjust do often suffer and the unrighteous do often prosper. That’s exactly why we have alternative wisdom like Job and Ecclesiastes – to give cathartic lament to the reality of an unjust world and, yes, to indict God for it.

To ignore this is to ignore not only the obvious content of these writings, but to ignore the historical and cultural context of them as well. Job is a semitic version of a well-known Babylonian writing: “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” the point of both is clearly to question the conventional wisdom of divine blessings and curses. Even more tragically, whitewashing the indictment of God in Job effectively silences the voice of those who cry out to God in lament.

Which brings me to my biggest objection from Friday night.

The most egregious thing I heard Friday wasn’t in Rick’s message, it was in his opening welcome tot he conference attendees. After giving a rundown of what to expect from the weekend, Rick made a plea to “watch your witness.” Palm Springs would be watching, Rick said, and we are to be ambassadors for Christ. Then Rick chose one specific thing to hammer home:

“Ladies, when you’re swimming at your hotel pool, please show modesty.”

This nicely demonstrates my problem with fundamentalist-leaning evangelicalism: it is a system of fear, shame, and control. When given the opportunity to put flesh and blood on what it means to be a Christian before a watching world to 3000 young adults, Rick chose to focus on the inherent sin of being a woman and the resulting need for women to be under the control of parochial sensibilities. The more distant implication (and I don’t think this is unfair given his comments about Job) is that when women are the victims of inappropriate sexual attention they aren’t really victims at all, because, as he later said in his message, “God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked – a truism!”

So, never mind being ambassadors of Christ by serving the people of Palm Springs. Never mind brining a message of reconciliation or meeting the needs of the poor in town. Never mind prophetically indicting the powers of conspicuous wealth so grotesquely displayed all around town. After all, it’s hard to find displays of wealth unjust when your theology has fundamentally baptized wealth as an indication of God’s approval. It’s even harder to have compassion for the poor – and there are poor here – when your theology has fundamentally vilified them as a demonstration of God’s just judgment.

No. Being an ambassador for Christ means that women musn’t show too much skin.

Technorati Tags: Fundamentalism, Job, justice, Resolved Conference, Rick Holland, Sexuality