Undeception

In a section recapping some Olympic news, the September 8 issue of World Magazine had a short piece about Ryan Hall, a record-setting runner who many considered to hold great promise as a contender in the 2012 Olympics. He received lots of attention due to his successes, and was the subject of a cover feature by Runner’s World Magazine in 2008 and appeared in an AT&T commercial this summer.

In London in 2007, running only the third marathon of his life, Hall posted the fastest time ever by a U.S.-born American citizen, 2:06:17.

So how did he do in the 2012 Olympics?

Five years later, in the same city and with Olympic glory at stake, Hall pulled out of the marathon after 10 miles due to a right hamstring strain. It was a disappointing follow-up to his 10th-place finish four years ago in Beijing.

What’s sad is the reason why he performed so badly.

Hall’s Olympic shortcomings have critics questioning his training practices. The 29-year-old left the prestigious Mammoth Track Club and coach Terence Mahon two years ago, moving to Redding, Calif., to join Bethel Church, a faith-healing ministry. Hall believes his Christian faith and self-awareness preclude his need for a coach. [my emphasis]

For those not familiar with the bubble of charismatic Christianity and its celebrity worship, Bethel Church is the famous headquarters of pastor Bill Johnson and associate pastor Kris Vallaton, whose prosperity gospel and healing “ministries” are extremely popular in the charismatic community these days. The Redding church has a famous “school” that teaches its students how to “move in the gifts of the Spirit”, and its leaders globetrot spreading their message and demonstrating their techniques. I know a local church (in Georgia!) that got turned inside outwards because many started devoutly following the Bethel movement; a core group from the church left it and began attending a Bethel-affiliated church two hours away, ostensibly to get closer to the “power source”. It’s a destructive theological system in more ways than one, and Ryan Hall is yet another victim of its message.

I hope others will learn from this. But unfortunately, the gatekeeping apologists for it will have explanations for his failure other than the obvious, and the acute leader-centrism of the charismatic movement will preclude much reevaluation by the people in the congregations. But here’s hoping anyway.

But it seems to me that it’s not just charismatics that have things to learn from the shortcomings of this deus ex machina theology that keep its adherents blissfully, sinfully inert while awaiting a divine quick-fix. Many aspects of more mainstream Evangelicalism treat God as a shortcut to things we should be working harder on ourselves. And often enough, the negative results dwarf Ryan Hall’s embarrassing Olympic performance.

Praying for those in need is one that comes to mind. It’s fine, good, and even important to pray for everyone undergoing hardship, but even if we believe intercessory prayer is going to solve the problem, our prayers should all the more focus on submitting to God to develop within us a greater empathy, to be more keenly attuned to the needs of those around us, and especially to be on the lookout for ways to help people firsthand instead of outsourcing it to someone else (or Someone else) to take care of. Jesus didn’t divide up the sheep and the goats based on whether they prayed for “the least of these”. Surely those who had a chance to do something and yet satisfied their deus ex machina theology (conveniently mollifying their conscience at the same time) by praying for them would be closer to the goats in that parable. Or in the words of James 2.15-16, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?”

Now, I’m not calling just any belief that God will step in to set things aright by the name of deus ex machina theology. It’s the thinking that we have some justification for kicking back and resting on our laurels in the name of “faith” or “monergism” that I’m criticizing. The faith that pleases God is faith in action, not blind, complacent trust in some ethereal solution to our problems.

Even if God is an interventionist God – indeed, even if He regularly intervenes in the dramatically supernatural ways expected by charismatics at their sufficiently faith-empowered whim – can there be any doubt that He’d rather be at the beck and call of His most obedient children who only ask for His empowerment after having sought to emulate His behavior to the best of their ability?

I recently read two articles that, while they’re directed at very different audiences, have a common thread between them that regular readers will recognize as a concern of mine lately.

English writer Francis Spufford is on the press-junket for his book, Unapologetic. This article he wrote for the Guardian (with a tip of the hat to Arni) seems to be setting up an approach toward speaking of religion that consciously and…well, unapologetically avoids putting up faith as “Reason 2.0″ as is done by most Christian apologists. To give you an idea of his approach, which is sure to be controversial among believers and unbelievers alike, here’s a bit from the post:

The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don’t talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.

I have recently been considering that the goal of “breaking down the barrier between faith and reason” may be misguided, at least to the extent to which it tries to blur the line between them. “Faith isn’t against reason: it is reason!” The enterprise of making sure that people don’t conclude that our religious convictions contradict the world of reason too often slides into the quagmire of “proving” our unprovable convictions.

This pitfall comes from the ubiquitous misconstrual of “faith” as “believing”. Faith is not belief, but a commitment to a belief (at least in its dullest form: for the Christian it should be a commitment to the Truth himself). Reason is for believing; faith is for living. I think Spufford was trying to say that we will only live out what we want to, what is emotionally real to us.

To be sure, we don’t want to base our beliefs on things that we know aren’t true (which isn’t the same thing as resting in beliefs we aren’t sure are true). But living without reasonable beliefs is the danger of Scylla to the Charybdis of reasonable beliefs without faithfulness.

It’s the latter danger that I see gobbling up most Evangelicals. Everything important to them about their faith has to do with beliefs about this or that fact or “truth”. If Jesus were to come back today, they’d rather be found committing an act of sin (since we’re all hopeless, dirty sinners) than believing something incorrectly (something about finding “faith” on the earth, wasn’t it?). Completely, utterly, hopelessly backwards.

This observation is behind the other post I wanted to share, a post by Zac Bailes called “Jesus, Truth, and Coffee“. It’s his reflections on a conversation with one of those Evangelicals I was just talking about. Here’s a salient quote:

Christians across the globe have become so concerned with making sure people know the truth about Jesus that they forget what that truth provokes. Love for the neighbor becomes sublimated to a concern about recognizing truth. They remained entombed in the truth of power, rather than the liberation of love.

No wonder our faith seems so trivial to the world! We tell them it’s about believing “facts” without any evidence, often enough in contradiction of evidence, and then we refuse to live as though those “facts” had any value for our lives at all. When the positivists tell us that our beliefs must be proved to be worth anything, we take them at their word and get waylaid as we single-mindedly turn our entire religion into an exercise of maintaining the right beliefs and proving them to others.

Instead, we have despised the only thing that could demonstrate the value of faith, the one unmistakably clear charge given to us by the one in whose name we claim to be acting: devotion to God as expressed by devotion to one another. The most emotional investment we have is put into holding everyone else accountable for behaving in ways that indicate that they believe correctly. This is why, as Spufford notes, the world looks at believers as people doing our level best to shut our eyes, clench our fists, and just believe something. We do not attempt to feel our faith; we are content to believe it. We do not love that in which we believe; we are not committed to it enough to energize it with the affection of commitment.

And in so doing, we demonstrate ourselves faithless.

For most of us growing up as conservative Evangelicals, the term humanism was scarcely used apart from the modifier “secular”, and even it when it was, that scary adjective was implied and inferred. For this reason, one of my theology teachers in undergrad liked to try to reclaim humanism from the clutches of secular humanism among his students by describing the great movement of Christian humanism as represented by Erasmus. Dr. Bowdle defined humanism simply as “trying to be the best human you can be,” or the desire to reach one’s full potential as a human being in all areas, physical, mental, emotional, etc. I came to think of humanism as a main goal of Christianity — mine at least.

In a recent post called “Christianity as humanism,” David Withun reproduces part of a summary of Irenaeus‘ thought as described by Paul Tillich. Here’s a bit of it:

“Here we have a profound doctrine of what I call a transcendent humanism, a humanism which says that Christ is the fulfillment of essential man, of the Adamic nature. Such a fulfillment became necessary because a break occurred in the development of man; Adam fell away from what he was to be come. The childish innocence of Adam has been lost; but the second Adam can become what he was to become, fully human. And we can become fully human through participation in this full humanity which has appeared in Christ.”

So in a mystical sense, Christianity has the potential to be humanistic. I do not at all disagree. But I am afraid that even many who champion this understanding of Christian humanism fail to distribute their emphasis in all the necessary places. More on that in a minute.

Erasmus the scholastic humanist

One of the ideals that modern Christians have lost out on after eschewing humanism as dirty, atheistic idolatry (humans are crap — didn’t you get Augustine’s memo?) is the importance of education and the development of the mind. Great institutions of higher learning were begun by those who believed that Christians couldn’t be the best humans they could be without an emphasis upon the life of the mind, whereas the early twentieth century saw the tide of Protestants intent on pitting the life of the mind against the life of the Spirit swelling, warning of the dangers of “overeducation”.

Education is a vital aspect of humanism, obviously. Learning the right stuff is important, no doubt. So is keeping our bodies healthy, producing art, etc. But how about our moral and ethical behavior? Isn’t being as good a human as I can be actually dependent on how I live? Certainly, as good humanists will tell you, because humanism is about a holistic approach to betterment; it’s about a dedication to excel for all the things human can excel in. This means that humanism, at least Christian humanism, is not an end in itself. You don’t become the best human you can be just so you can be proud of yourself. It’s because you recognize humanity as something valuable — and not just your own humanity.

Looking back, I see that the appreciation for humanism that awoke in me during college probably influenced my conviction about the importance of social concern as a necessary feature of Christianity. It might be returned that I’m confusing humanism with humanitarianism, but I would disagree: the latter is a significant element of the former. Integral to valuing humanity and human potential is being interested not only in what it means to be human, but being interested in actual humans. This is especially true of Christian humanism, or Tillich’s “transcendent humanism”, because NT theology teaches us that kenosis is an essential feature of God’s character (John Piper’s warped views notwithstanding). From a Christian perspective, the desire to become the best human you can be necessarily entails becoming more God-centered; becoming as divine as you can be (theosis) necessarily entails becoming more human-centered. “And the second is like it,” said our teacher.

Tragically, because of the lie that works = human effort and a myopic misunderstanding of Christian social concern as “the social gospel”, most conservative American Evangelicals really stink at this stuff. I give these guys are hard time for that. But unfortunately, it’s not just them: there are other faith traditions that despite being keenly aware of the need for orthopraxis as a complement of orthodoxy nonetheless seem to think that worship, whether in ritual/liturgical practices or in emotive song services, satisfies the bulk of the requirement. I asked one believer from the Orthodox tradition what the Christian life was all about, and the response consisted of things like mystic communion with God and following the ritual/liturgical guidelines prescribed by the Church. The Orthodox may affirm “transcendent humanism” all day long, but an attempt to partake of the divine nature and commune with God apart from cultivating the desire to emulate God’s love by substantive efforts to mitigate the suffering of fellow humans is not at all sufficient to be called humanism.

Developing one’s mind and body and contributing to human achievement are valid components of humanism; likewise, praying and communing with the Spirit of God are wonderful. But until we learn to obey God by developing His heart within us, our worship and rituals are nothing at all but clanging cymbals. Your praxis is not truly orthē and your sanctification/theosis is a farce without humanitarianism. In the Gospels, the manifestation of the Kingdom of God frequently took the form of Jesus demonstrating compassion — not just feeling it or passing the buck to God by praying that He intervene. We can’t then “become fully human through participation in this full humanity which has appeared in Christ” without an ever-present sense of compassion that erupts in action. “Oh, those poor suffering people” is a contemptibly selfish sentiment when it’s not followed through on, much like feeling sorry for or simply praying for a woman as you see her being raped in front of you.

Let me put it bluntly, brothers and sisters: you simply cannot live an authentic Christian life without being consumed by the passion that motivated God in Jesus: love and care for humanity. And not just their eternal destinies (which is mostly out of your jurisdiction anyway), but every part about them. We prove our dedication to God by taking care of their material circumstances and let God worry about whether they dedicate themselves to Him.

The brute fact is that people are dying of starvation and preventable disease, and we’re sitting over here in our comfort expecting to commune with God while we take care of our marginal concerns. This should not be so.

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

Philippians 2.4-7

What makes us think that the “full humanity” which Christ brings with him could look like anything other than full, self-emptying submission to God through service of others?

What in the world am I trying to do with this site? Who am I writing for? Who do I expect to come away with something of value?

I ask myself these questions periodically. Am I a “faith” blogger or a “skeptic” blogger? The posts I write criticizing aspects of evangelicalism are the most popular, and are quite common given that those beliefs are most often the object of my own undeception; on the other hand, I make no bones about my own abiding faith. Yet in observing those who encounter difficulties with the Bible, especially in the blogosphere, it seems things too often go in two diametrically opposed directions:

• The Disillusioned: The Bible is acknowledged to have deep flaws. Discussion develops around criticizing the Bible’s flaws and sneering at the inanities of Christians who deny them.
• The Defenders: The Bible is perfect. Any discussion of alleged flaws in it is stolidly defensive; more often, it is outsourced to apologists.

From there both camps trudge along their separate, well-worn paths. Typically the more bitter of the Disillusioned become the Deconverted. I come across many deconversion blogs, which isn’t surprising considering that disillusionment and deconversion are so emotionally repercussive. Their communities and survivors’ groups form very easily, commenting and linking to one another as a form of mutual support.

There are plenty of blogs by those militantly confident in their Christianity as well; the Defenders remain happy where they are…at all costs, seemingly.

Comparing the content of the blogs from those groups to mine, you’d see many more affinities between me and the Disillusioned. Indeed, because I spend so much time discussing the deep flaws in the Bible and in the forms of Christianity championed by the Defenders, my blog attracts mostly the Disillusioned and the Deconverted. But I do not count myself among either group. Rather, I am a part of an increasing number of believers no longer confident in either the pat answers of the apologists or the knee-jerk reactions of the self-styled enemies of Christianity. Even upon realization that our pursuit of God and His truth does not terminate in Scripture or systematic theologies, we do not find enough grounds to repudiate that pursuit.

I know that both the Defenders and the Disillusioned/Deconverted would consider me and the growing numbers of people like me to be living in an untenable state of cognitive dissonance. They would say I am the unreasonable, illusioned defender, denying the fruits of the doubts and disbelief I have uncovered and at times trumpeted. Their premise is that without an inerrant Bible that tells us exactly what to believe we have no good reason to believe in anything resembling the God of the Bible. I reject this premise as reactionary as I rest hopeful in a conviction that a good God, and one that bears more than a coincidental and passing resemblance to the God the Christians have always worshiped, actually exists. Why is this?

Please do not think that I offer the following as any sort of philosophical treatise, but as a statement of my current stance given my own analysis, based on my own experience, constantly and repeatedly judged against the various philosophical ideas I encounter in my reading. Crucially, none of it is proof: in a universe in which proof is impossible, we are all, to a person, left choosing what to believe.

I believe in God because I believe in goodness; I believe in God because I believe in beauty; I believe in God because I believe in justice; I believe in God because I believe in non-arbitrary meaning. I choose to believe in these absolutes not because of proof, of which there is none, or because of overwhelming evidence, of which there is precious little; I realize that it could just as well be that there is evil, ugliness, injustice, and/or chaos at the bottom of the universe. But I will not worship those things, even as far as to grant their absolute existence or entertain the notion that they will have the final victory. I will worship what is good and right and lovely, and grant it all the honor of believing in and even worshiping its absolute existence as the Ultimate. We are disappointed to have seen those ideal virtues violated or at least imperfectly modeled in other people; it makes sense that this is in part because there is actually a Person in whom those virtues are embodied perfectly. I find that the God of Christianity coincides with these expectations to my satisfaction.

I cannot help being convinced that certain absolute ideal principles exist regardless of any prevailing cultural sensibilities. Loving concern for a child: always right. Torturing a child: always wrong. Looking out for the interests of women: always right. Raping a woman: always wrong. Showing honor to an honest man: always right. Slandering an honest man: always wrong. These evaluations are grounded in the existence and primacy of Goodness. Evil – what shouldn’t be – doesn’t have an independent existence, but is an often quite palpable negation of what is good – what should be. The question inevitably comes: why is there any negation of should-be? Isn’t that reason enough to doubt such a thing as a should-be?

Another attribute of the Ultimate that I did not mention is also responsible for my continuing faith: it is mystery, the consort of the Ultimate’s transcendence. It is that which does not allow me to declare with as much certainty as I would like that those ideals I place my hope in truly exist; it is what does not allow me to conclude that the existence of evil, ugliness, injustice, and chaos in this world is a defeater of my hope in goodness, beauty, justice, and meaning; worst of all, it necessitates the humility that we as humans resist to the bitter end. But unlike those other attributes, mystery is not eternal: my Christian hope is in the eventual resolution of this mystery/transcendence, the closing of the gap between heaven and earth, the eventual elimination of shouldn’t-be from the midst of should-be. And it is this hope that I lay down before the perfect object of my worship, the one of whom I have been fathered from a young age and who has given me peace and joy to spare, but more importantly, a deep-seated concern and empathy for others.

There are many who imagine that they are caught up somewhere above the mystery into the very certainty of God. Doubt, which may be thought of as an intentional filling of one’s lungs with the air of mystery, is thought by these to be a denial of the God whom they have experienced. This is how certainty is achieved for the Defenders.

There are also many who can no longer pretend that they are experiencing the certainties promised them beyond that yawning gap of mystery; these are often troubled, hurting, and angry by this revelation. It seems only natural that those in the painful throes of the transcendence of God, mistaking it for His absence, cling to the firm ground and renounce all else. This is how certainty is achieved for the Disillusioned.

And then there are some of us who seek to keep our feet planted in reality, unflinchingly seeking out truths that the Defenders disavow, but who, inhaling the mystery, strain to reach that transcendent-yet-imminent Goodness of which we catch vivid glimpses. We deny that certainty is anything but an illusion. Our faith is not about maintaining beliefs, but about fervently striving to bring the Goodness we have known closer to the waiting world. While valuing the insights into the human and divine natures the biblical authors have to offer us, and while humbly and thoroughly subjecting those insights to all of the reconstructions and deconstructions suggested by critical inquiry, we do not lean on either understanding. We trust instead in the God for whom our souls yearn and without whom all the truths on the earth would be nothing more than clanging cymbals. Our faith is realized in an ethic intended to make those virtues manifest in our own lives, for the sake of others: we demonstrate our hope for the victory of love by acting faithfully, seeking to embody goodness, beauty, justice, meaning, and above all, Love. This is what we call serving God. We are Christians because we were – and are – taught these things by Jesus.

I’m not trying to pigeon-hole every human into these few categories. There are many others: most people are happily oblivious to all these debates; others are well aware of the debates, but have become fatigued and battle-weary, wanting to hope but struggling to find the will to wade through the divide between the different dogmatic positions. I hope to have something useful to say to those in both of those categories without becoming an obnoxious crusader. Although at times my temper has no doubt flared against certain egregious examples of problematic thinking among the groups I’ve described, I do not want to demonize anyone. I write this blog to offer another way of dealing with doubts, one which has the potential to heal the often bitter and vitriolic gash separating the Defenders and the bitter Disillusioned, for the sake especially of those caught in the middle. My hope is that by sharing my search for truth on this blog, stripping away what is false and shoring up what is true, I will eventually help motivate all, whether Christian, heretic, or apostate, who share the ethic of an overcoming goodness that I call Christianity in action.

I doff my hat to Robin Parry…

I used to think that if I could see the lost in hell, surely I must weep for them. If I could hear their horrid wailings and see the dreadful contortions of their anguish, then surely I must pity them. But there is no such sentiment as that known in heaven. There the believer will be so satisfied with all of God’s will that he will quite forget the lost in the idea that God has done it for the best, that even their loss has been their own fault, and that he is infinitely just in it.

If my parents could see me in hell they wouldn’t have a tear to shed for me, even if they’re in heaven, for they would say, “It is justice, O great God; and Your justice must be magnified, as well as Your mercy;” and not only that, but they would feel that God was so much above his creatures that they would be satisfied to see those creatures crushed if it might increase God’s glory. Oh yes, in heaven I believe we will think rightly of men. Here men seem great things to us; but in heaven they will seem to be nothing more than a few creeping insects that are swept away in plowing a field for harvest; they will appear no more than a tiny handful of dust, or like some nest of wasps that ought to be exterminated for the injury they have done. They will appear such little things when we sit on high with God, and look down on the nations of the earth as grasshoppers, and “count the isles as very little things.”

Oh, the satire! Wait…it is satire, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, no. In fact, apart from a few tweaks in wording I applied in order to obscure its provenance (the 19th century), the above was from an actual sermon, ”The Hope of Future Bliss.“ by none other than Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It’s amazing how this much revered preacher (who I have little time for) breathlessly affirmed almost the identical picture recently painted by Chad Holtz, but at least Chad wrote his piece actually conscious of how problematic that picture was. I dearly hope that those Christians whose theology lines up with Spurgeon’s will feel ashamed to see it so starkly stated; yet my fear is that instead, many will feel emboldened and more dedicated to haranguing us all with this cancer that they call “the gospel” (“good [sic] news”).

Theologians like Spurgeon certainly paved the way for a movement that currently seems to be gaining in influence in America. But how did Christians miss the fact that his concepts of the relationship of justice, mercy, and love, though popular even now, were questioned and (I do not hesitate to say) soundly defeated within twenty years of this sermon?

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Spurgeon’s words is the fact that it’s hard to propose a rationale for why the dehumanization of humanity and especially the devaluation of non-Christians should not be acknowledged right here and now, long before that time when we, the elect, are issued our harps in the sweet by and by. In fact, Spurgeon impatiently emotes that this disregard for the well-being of our fellow humans, and even our own family, is something precious that we can look forward to fully grasping only in the hereafter!

No wonder some among us have more of an interest in transplanting wasps’ nests up to Glory Land than they do for alleviating the suffering of the wasps’ deservedly baneful existence!

Incredible.

Remember, if indeed thou art able to know it, that not in any church is the service done that he requires. He will say to no man, ‘You never went to church: depart from me; I do not know you;’ but, ‘Inasmuch as you never helped one of my father’s children, you have done nothing for me.’ Church or chapel is not the place for divine service. It is a place of prayer, a place of praise, a place to feed upon good things, a place to learn of God, as what place is not? It is a place to look in the eyes of your neighbour, and love God along with him. But the world in which you move, the place of your living and loving and labour, not the church you go to on your holiday, is the place of divine service. Serve your neighbour, and you serve him.

by George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3, “Righteousness”

Does your Christian tradition teach or imply that it is better to err on the side of faith than works?

Yesterday I posted a quote from MacDonald that indicted the doctrine of imputed righteousness as an inoculation from pursuing personal holiness. As luck would have it, that same morning a web-only Christianity Today article by Jason Hood pushed back against a modern movement in that same direction, strong especially among the most fiercely monergistic Christians, a group whose predecessors 150 years ago were the subject of MacDonald’s critique. Theirs is an attempt to make sure everyone knows first of all that the gospel is all about what Christ has done on our behalf and nothing about what believers can do. To some degree it is this conviction that is behind a trending preoccupation with the concept of “grace” among the New Calvinists, typified by the Sovereign Grace movement. I sometimes think that if these people could find wriggle room in just one of the so-called “doctrines of grace” (the five points of Calvinism), it would be in “the perseverance of the saints”, just so that they could threaten expulsion from the elect for those who momentarily faltered from trusting “Christ alone” for salvation.

In particular, Hood writes to target a rhetorical device in which the speaker suggests that being accused of antinomianism is a sign that the gospel-centric preacher is doing something right in emphasizing our utter dependence on the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. Now, figuring out what precisely antinomianism (anti-law-ism) means is a huge undertaking, because it means different things depending on who is charging whom with promoting it. Here in the case of the argument Hood is attacking, it refers to a tendency to reject more rules and guidelines of behavior than is spiritually healthy, to be so anti-legalism that you will stop doing good works at all. Hood cites no less a leading light than Martyn Lloyd-Jones as an example of someone who suggests that being accused of favoring too much grace in this way just might be an indication that one is on the right side of the grace/works divide.

Before reading this article, I don’t think I’d heard that meme specifically, but I have recently heard someone preaching his conviction that being charged with advocating “cheap grace” for emphasizing the wholly unmerited nature of God’s grace is offensive, given that 1) it cost Jesus his life, 2) for the rest of us, grace is free, and 3) it’s a dreadful thing to try to add to what Christ has already done. This is the same idea as above, symptomatic of a faulty view of what the gospel is. In the Synoptics especially, Jesus was hardly a critic of “works-based righteousness”: for instance, in Matthew Jesus is shown teaching that the difference between a sheep who inherits life and a goat who inherits destruction was purely and wholly a matter of behavior. As Hood points out, even Paul was more against works of Torah than he was against good works generally.

I do reject the idea that we must earn salvation by jumping through hoops, and I mourn the fatigue and condemnation felt by those who believe that doing enough good things and avoiding enough bad things make the difference between life and death eternal. My hope rests in the belief that God sees and empathizes with our many weaknesses. Yet I am convinced that the particularly and predominantly Protestant emphasis on identifying with Christ’s work through belief (“faith“) alone, entirely passively rather than on a more active and holistic level, has tended toward a deeply problematic lack of emphasis on what early believers thought was one of the primary reasons He created and saved us: “good works in Christ.”

Hood’s point is that we should not be happy either with appearing legalistic or antinomian, since both are dangerous. In fairness, the Christians under Hood’s critique would be sure to make a distinction between working out one’s salvation and working for one’s salvation, but it is tragic that in their fear of the latter they would delight in being accused of underplaying the former.

Indeed, I’d go farther than Hood did and say that between the two, the more dangerous over-emphasis is on “trusting in the finished work of Christ alone”, particularly when that phrase is used as shorthand for “not allowing our focus on Christ to stray too far from our theology of what the cross and the resurrection did for us”. A mandated necessity to believe the right things is hard to locate in Scripture, but commands to do the right things, one of which occasionally includes believing, is positively ubiquitous in both Testaments. We are advised that the hallmark, the telltale fruit of faith is faith-fulness, the outworking of (rather than fervent belief in) heavenly truths within our world — the institution of the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed as “the gospel”. This single-minded obsession with the “finished work” of Christ on the cross cannot help but distract us from the ways in which Christ’s work remains unfinished, and in an important way began at his death.

An exclusive emphasis on trusting that Christ did this, that, or the other on the cross or through his resurrection produces a stillborn faith. It is a belief in too little, after all, in that it has a proclivity for stopping us short of believing that one thing that I believe is the most important: what God wants us to believe about how we should live. I am persuaded that, far from it being a dangerous competitor of the work of Christ on the cross and a possible barrier to salvation, a dominating resolution to participate in those works and teachings of Christ before the cross is the most important instantiation of salvation.

When reading one recent testimony at Religion at the Margins, I was deeply saddened: not for the author, who still seeks to imitate Christ despite his loss of faith, but for those who considered his “wayward” theological beliefs to be of more concern than the hurting ones he sought to serve, and still more for those hurting ones who are still being told that their real problem is not “trusting in Christ’s finished work”. Surely the God described in the New Testament who desires that His followers’ character resemble His own would be far more satisfied with an exceptionally ignorant follower, a silly but obedient child in whose life He is able to cultivate righteous attitudes and behaviors but who is somehow under the impression that she serves a Cosmic Platypus, than He would be with a follower who has come to the right conclusions on every aspect of Jesus’ nature and his atonement for us and who even tries to love his neighbor, but who passionately cautions everyone not to attempt to “add to the finished work of Christ” by being preoccupied with doing the sorts of things that Jesus was concerned with during his life.

The overblown fears of “works-based righteousness” and the “social gospel” are insidious because they encourage us to leave undone the nitty gritty work of personal holiness before God, from the hidden negatives, such as not lusting or coveting your neighbor’s blessings, to the visible positives of our faith, such as alleviating the suffering of those in need. Christianity is a much bigger campaign than many understand it to be: it costs us everything. God shows His grace to the world through our participation in the unfinished work of Christ.