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

3 Questions About Jesus: Jason Coker

Today I’m beginning a new series called “3 Questions About Jesus.” The idea is to ask different people how they would explain Jesus Christ to someone who had heard about him, but really knew nothing about Christianity. Their questions are:

• Who is Jesus the Christ?
• What has he done?
• Why does it matter?

I’m of the opinion that most presentations of the gospel tend to answer only one or two of these questions, or answer all of them in a way that reduces the scope of the gospel drastically. The challenge of this series will be to try answering these questions in a way that does justice to the depth and breadth of the gospel without trying to give people a pocket-sized systematic theology (because nobody would sit and listen to that).

Every Monday for the next few months I’ll host a different person who will attempt to answer those questions in 300 words or less. I’ve encouraged people to be as creative as they like. And, of course, we’d love your interaction and feedback.

I’ll go first with, “The Parable of the Apple Tree.”

_____________________________________________________________

Jesus is like the story of an apple tree.

Once there was a farmer who gave his three sons an apple orchard, saying, “This is my gift to you. The orchard will care for you all your days if you will care for it.” But the sons despised their father’s gift and neglected it. Soon the trees died and the sons grew hungry. They called their father for help, who came and said, ”I will feed you.” Then, he knelt on the cracked earth and planted a seed.

Every day the sons begged their father for food, and every day they watched him water the seed and pull the weeds, saying, “I will feed you.”

Every day they watched him prune and tend the tender branches, and every day they begged for food. “I will feed you,” their father said.

Finally the tree grew strong and apples hung heavy from its branches. “This is my gift to you,” the father said. But the sons were bitter that they had been neglected for a tree. In a rage they cut it down and tore its limbs apart until their evil was exhausted.

As they sat ashamed at the foot of the desecrated tree their father brought apples plucked from its branches, saying, “This is my gift to you. Take and eat.”

The first son did not trust him. He refused the food and cursed his father, rejecting the gift. The second son bit into an apple but despised its flavor and cursed his father, rejecting the gift.

But the third son found the apples sweet and gratefully ate his fill. The father dug out the seeds and placed them in his son’s hands, saying, “This is my gift to you,” and beckoning toward the other sons, who were still hungry and ashamed, he added, “Now feed my sons.”

______________________________________________________________

Jason Coker is the host of Pastoralia.org. You can read more about him at the About page.

Technorati Tags: 3 Questions About Jesus, Jesus Christ, Parable of the Apple Tree, Parables, Stories, The Gospel