by Bruce Bawer
And what of the statement that Jesus was at once wholly human and wholly God? This paradoxical claim, by which Christians have always felt challenged, was first formulated in an attempt to express the powerful sense of early Christians that Jesus, though wholly human, had been related to God in a unique way. Was it a matter of his being more intimate with God than other human beings, or of his being, in some astonishing way, actually identical with God? The church pronounced that it would be heretical to believe the former and orthodox to believe the latter: Jesus had, in short, been God. But what does it mean to say this? Jesus never claimed to be anything but human. In his preaching and on the cross he addressed God as Father, intimate yet still Other, and never spelled out the precise nature of his relationship to that Father. Early on, when some people sought to understand Jesus as being rather like the Greek and Roman deities who, in various myths, had been said to take on the guise of a human being for one reason or another, the bulk of Christians forcefully rejected the idea. They realized that it was vital to retain the understanding of Jesus as human. To view Jesus as a "God in disguise" was to diminish what he was, what he accomplished, and what he suffered. Yet many legalistic Christians today are extremely uncomfortable with the implications of Jesus' humanity—with, among much else, the notion that he experienced such emotions as fear, vulnerability, and sexual attraction. Legalists tend to prefer the totally transcendent Christ who, according to the theological visions of Darby, Scofield, Lindsey and Robertson, will return to Earth in power, will judge, and will destroy.
The real Jesus—the Jesus who was incontrovertibly human, even as he was connected to God in a remarkable way that utterly transformed the lives of the people who knew him—was not about asserting power, judging, or destroying; he was about love. To many legalistic Christians today, this sounds trivial, simplistic, and irrelevant to their perceived religious needs and desires. People whose lives contain an insufficiency of love may indeed find it difficult to believe that love—mere love— is really what it's all about. They are likely to be more impressed by power, hate, vengeance, and destructiveness than they are by love. In the world as they know it, love may seem a fragile commodity and may be more often connected with weakness than with power. But Jesus came precisely to speak to people like them and to tell them otherwise—to reveal to them the ultimate supremacy of love. Lose Jesus as a human being and you lose that: You lose Jesus as a model of how to lead a human life; you lose the possibility of love as a guiding principle of human relations; you lose Christianity—or, at least, you lose any Christianity worth the name.
And that's what legalistic Christianity in America today is about. If you wanted to destroy the idea of a Church of Love once and for all, you would target the real Jesus and attach his name instead to a vengeful, bloodthirsty monster. This is what legalistic Christianity does at its most extreme. Even some of the less-extreme legalistic churches, while invoking the idea of love, try to redefine the word in a way that would not have been recognizable to Jesus' original followers. "Love the sinner, hate the sin," legalists say, as an excuse for despising people who either refuse or are unable to change themselves in such a way as to eliminate those aspects of themselves that legalists consider sinful. Jesus would never have made such a distinction.
In Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the white boy Huck, who has helped the slave Jim to escape from his owner, Miss Watson, feels "the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm." He decides that in order to get right with God and avoid "everlasting fire," he's got to "do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was." He does so, and then feels "good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life."
But before posting the letter, Huck thinks of Jim. "And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind." He thinks about how sweet and good and gentle Jim always is with him, and what a good friend he is. Then Huck looks around and sees the letter he's written to Miss Watson.
I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up.
Though his society and its churches, which have set God up as a supporter of slavery, tell him he's wrong to help Jim escape and will go to hell for it, Huck's love and his conscience compel him to help Jim anyway. In the end, by acting in accordance with his love and conscience, Huck does the truly Christian thing. The story offers a useful lesson in the failings of the institutional church, and in the nature of real Christian thought and action. The true disciple of Jesus, Twain tells us here, is not someone who follows Church dogma out of fear of hell; it is someone who, in defiance of everything, up to and including the threat of hellfire, does the right thing out of love.
It should not be surprising that many people are not only willing but eager to believe in the kind of God who supports slavery or who has a Great Tribulation in store for all but a few of his children. Growing up in a culture fixated on material possessions and on the price tags attached to them can make it easy to believe in a God for whom the afterlife is a matter of cold-blooded dealmaking: Believe in me and I'll give you heaven; refuse and you go to hell. Given how much evil and pain there is in the world, one can hardly fault some people for believing in a wrathful God. But worshipping such a God? Rather than do so, I would suggest that we shake our heads firmly, affirming our allegiance to Jesus, and say with Huckleberry Finn, "All right, then, I'll go to hell."
Such is the kingdom of heaven.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Here follows a highly selective list of resources that are suitable for a general readership and available in at least some bookstores or libraries or online.
THE ANGLICAN TRADITION:
The Study of Anglicanism, ed. Stephen Sykes and John Booty (SPCK/Fortress Press, 1988), provides an excellent introduction. The Spirit of Anglicanism, ed. William J. Wolf (Morehouse-Barlow, 1979), contains essays on theologians who shaped Anglican spirituality; To Believe Is to Pray (Cowley, 1997) is a collection of Michael Ramsey's writings on Anglican belief. An unofficial Episcopal Church home page at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/mib/anglican/anglican.html has links to the official home pages of other mainline denominations and to such organizations as the World Council of Churches.
THE BAPTIST TRADITION:
E. Y. MuUins's Baptist Beliefs (1912, still in print from Judson Press) and Walter Shurden's The Baptist Identity (Smyth & Helwys, 1993) summarize historic Baptist principles; The Struggle for the Soul of the SBC (Mercer, 1993), edited by Shurden, recounts the moderate-fundamentalist conflict. Ex-SBC president Jimmy Allen's memoir Burden of a Secret (Moorings, 1995) describes some of his friction with SBC fundamentalists. The home page for Charles Stanley's First Baptist Church of Atlanta is at http://www.worship.com/fbca; Stanley's In Touch Ministries Web site is at http://www.intouch.org. Available at http://www.utm.edu/mar-tinarea/fbc/bfm.html are a copy of the Baptist Faith and Message and links to other SBC sites.
BIBLE:
L. William Countryman's Biblical Authority or Biblical Tyranny? (1982, available in a revised 1994 edition from Trinity Press International and Cowley) examines the nature of scriptural authority; Uta Ranke-Heinemann's Putting Away Childish Things (HarperCollins, 1994) separates biblical truth from "fairy tales"; John Shelby Spong's Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (HarperCollins, 1991) assails literal interpretations; Peter Gomes's The Good Book (Morrow, 1996) shows how the Bible has been
used to justify bigotry.
CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY:
The standard account of the movement, They Speak with Other Tongues, by Robert Sherrill (Revell, 1964), is available in a 1993 Spire paperback.
CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING NETWORK AND CHRISTIAN COALITION:
The Internet sites are at http://www.cbn.org and http://cc.org respectively. Key works include The Autobiography of Pat Robertson (Bridge, 1972); The Collected Works of Pat Robertson (Inspirational Press, 1994), which contains The New Millennium, The New World Order, and The Secret Kingdom; Ralph Reed's Active Faith (Free Press, 1996); and Contract with the American Family (Moorings, 1995).
CHURCH GROWTH:
Dean Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Harper & Row, 1972, 1977, 1986) and Roger Finke and Rodney Stark's The Churching of America 1116-1990 (Rutgers, 1992) offer convincing analyses and unsettling priorities; Thomas C. Reeves's The Empty Church (Free Press, 1996) is a legalistic Episcopalian's diatribe.
CULTURE WARS:
James Davison Hunter's Culture Wars (Basic, 1991) has a prolegalistic slant.
DISPENSATIONALISM:
The Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford, 1909) and the New Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford, 1967) are both in print; E. Schuyler English's Companion to the New Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford, 1972) and Charles C. Ryrie's Dispensationalism (Moody, 1995) provide partisan overviews.
DOCTRINE:
Jaroslav Pelikan's five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago, 1971-1989) is definitive; Hans Kiing's Christianity: Essence, History, and Future (Continuum, 1996) brilliantly reviews the evolution of Christian belief, showing how its faces have changed while its essence has not. Gerd Ludemann's Heretics (Westminster-John Knox, 1995) argues that the more authentic Christians lost early church battles over heresy.
EVANGELICALISM:
George M. Marsden's Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1991) surveys both movements; his Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1987) traces the New Evangelicalism's rise by focusing on its flagship seminary's history. Mark A. Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994) indicts the movement's anti-intellectualism. Contents of current and back issues of Christianity Today, Campus Life, and other magazines can be found at http://www.christianity.net and on AOL (keyword: "Christianity Today"), as can message boards aplenty in which legalistic Christians of every stripe dispute theological particulars.
FICTION:
Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989) are both in paper from Crossway. Pat Robertson's name adorns an End Times novel, The End of the Age (Word, 1996).
FOCUS ON THE FAMILY:
James Dobson's best-selling Dare to Discipline (Tyndale, 1977) has been succeeded by The New Dare to Discipline (Tyndale, 1996). Tyndale's Dr. Dobson Answers Your Questions series contains volumes on marriage, child-rearing, and other topics. Excerpts from Focus on the Family magazine and other FOF magazines—two focusing on politics and media, and others directed variously at children, teenagers, single parents, doctors, teachers, and pastors' families—are available at FOF's America Online site (keyword: "Focus on the Family"). Dobson's longtime radio cohost, Gil Alexander Moegerle, has written an expose, James Dobson's War on America (Prometheus, 1997).
FUNDAMENTALISM:
The Fundamentals (1920) is in print from Garland in a costly 1988 edition edited by George M. Marsden, whose Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford, 1980) superbly recounts American fundamentalism's genesis. James Barr's Fundamentalism (Westminster, 1978) and Nancy Tatom Ammerman's Bible Believers (Rutgers, 1987) anatomize the movement; Carl Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947) is a mid-century critique by a leading New Evangelical; Harold Bloom's The American Religion (Simon & Schuster, 1992) offers an idiosyncratic treatment of the Mormons, the SBC, and other legalistic groups; the five-volume Fundamentalism Project, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago, 1991—95), comprehensively examines fundamentalisms worldwide. Charles B. Strozier's Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Beacon, 1994) scrutinizes the fundamentalist sensibility as exemplified by members of a contemporary New York church; Stefan Ulstein's Growing Up Fundamentalist (Inter-Varsity, 1995) offers riveting testimonies; Sally Lowe Whitehead's The Truth Shall Set You Free (HarperCollins, 1997) recounts her family's journey through fundamentalism.
GENERAL:
The Yahoo search engine has a magnificent directory of resources at http://www.yahoo.com/Society__and__Culture/Religion/Christianity.
GOD:
Karen Armstrong's A History of God (Knopf, 1993) limns the changing perceptions of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; Jack Miles's God: A Biography (Knopf, 1995) traces the changing view of God as reflected in the Hebrew Bible; Marcus J. Borg's The God We Never Knew (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) seeks to move beyond legalistic images of God.
GOSPELS:
The Jefferson Bible is in print from Beacon (1989). The Five Gospels (Macmillan,
1993) presents the Jesus Seminar's conclusions as to what Jesus did and didn't say. Stephen Mitchell's The Gospel According to Jesus (HarperCollins, 1991) distills the Gospels into a single narrative. Spong's Resurrection: Myth or Reality (HarperCollins,
1994) reinterprets that event.
THE HISTORICAL JESUS:
The Jesus Seminar's official site is at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~religion/jsemi-nar/js_main.html. John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus (HarperCollins, 1991) and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperCollins, 1994), Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (HarperCollins, 1994), and E. P. Sanders's The Historical Figure of Jesus (Allen Lane, 1993) offer revisionist views; in The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (HarperCollins, 1996), Luke Timothy Johnson assails the revisionists; Russell Shorto's Gospel Truth (Riverhead, 1997) provides an overview of the controversy. Huston Smith's The World's Religions (HarperCollins, 1991) is wonderful on Jesus.
HISTORY:
Sydney Ahlstrom's Religious History of the American People (Yale, 1974) and Mark A. Noll's History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Eerdmans, 1992) provide comprehensive accounts; Martin E. Marty's Pilgrims in Their Own Land (Litde, Brown, 1984) shapes American religious history into an engaging narrative. Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is available in many standard anthologies of American literature as well as in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (Harper, revised 1963), a useful two-volume compendium edited by Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson. Christine Leigh Heyrman's Southern Cross (Knopf, 1997) surveys primary sources to show how different early Baptists and Methodists were from today's "traditional" members of those faiths.
INERRANCY:
Inerrantist manifestos include W. A. Criswell's Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True (Broadman and Holman, 1995) and Harold Lindsell's The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan, 1978). Critiques include Gordon James's Inerrancy and the Southern Baptist Convention (Southern Baptist Heritage Press, 1986).
INTELLECTUALS:
Examples of intellectuals' views of American religion are Andrew Delbanco's The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (1995), Richard Hof-stadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Knopf, 1962), and David Klinghoffer's essay in Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture, edited by Katharine Washburn and John F. Thornton (Norton, 1996).
MEGACHURCHES:
Charles Trueheart's "Welcome to the Next Church" in Atlantic Monthly (August 1996) is a fine overview; also see Willow Creek Community Church's site at http://www.willowcreek.org.
MODERN THEOLOGY:
Hans Kiing's On Being a Christian (Image, 1976) is a capacious meditation from a nonlegalistic perspective; his Credo (Doubleday, 1993) elegantly rereads the Nicene Creed. Love and Justice (Westminster/John Knox,
1992) collects some of Reinhold Niebuhr's shorter works. Though the 1988 Collier reprint of The Essential Tillich, which introduces Paul Tillich's work, is out of print, his The Courage to Be (Yale, 1952) is available.
PROMISE KEEPERS:
Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, edited by Al Janssen (Focus on the Family, 1994), is the official introduction; the official Web site is at http://www.promisekeep-ers.org.
PROPHECY:
Hal Lindsey's books include The Late Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970) and Planet Earth—2000 a.d (Western Front, 1994, 1996).
RELIGIOUS RIGHT:
William Martin's With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (Broadway, 1996), the accessible companion volume to the PBS series of the same name, avoids taking sides; Clyde Wilcox's Onward Christian Soldiers (Westview, 1996) is more academic but also more forthright.
SEXUAL MORALITY:
John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980) is definitive; Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household of God (Cowley, 1996), edited by Charles Hefling, Jr., contains superb essays on sex and Christianity; L. William Countryman's Dirt, Greed and Sex (Fortress, 1988) examines the contemporary implications of New Testament sexual ethics.
THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND AFTER: