The Paradox of Evangelical Conversion
The following was a status I posted on Facebook, but which I thought deserved reposting here, since it's so well in-line with what I've discussed here in the past. I present to you.... a conglomeration of my comments on the status. Also, this is my 100th post on this blog. Horray!
The traditional Christian articulation of the Gospel is that, given the infectiousness of human sin, there is nothing we can do to save, perfect, or even to improve ourselves substantially. Instead, we must lay our trust in the triune God as revealed through Christ's life, his atoning crucifixion/resurrection, and God's Holy Spirit.
It continues to be painfully ironic to me that so many Christians (and apostates) spend so much time struggling through logic puzzles in an attempt to.... perfect, improve, save their faith in this supposedly-simple matrix of paradoxes said to uphold Christianity.
I may be idealistic, but I'd like to think that it means more than that.
A great deal of the tension I have witnessed over the life and death of Christian faith in people's lives, whether on pseudo-evangelical mission trips or surrounding philosophy texts or in high school youth groups or in sermons, has concerned the ability or inability of various individuals to accept certain central dogmas and reject others. Those unable to accept the dogmas presented (as articulated above) are charged by traditional, "orthodox" Christians to "wrestle" with the arguments until their doubt is quenched. For various experiential, philosophical, and theological reasons, many struggle for years and years and years to accept these doctrines and either eventually find themselves unable to or accept them with a kind of guarded agnosticism, saying something like "I will never be able to understand God's mind fully in this lifetime."
I think it's strange at best, if not outright hypocritical, that the central premise of Christianity, over which the religiously-minded so frequently argue, seems to suggest that people *stop* doing so much work attempting to achieve some arbitrary level of "success" necessary for salvation. It seems to me to make no difference whether the criterion for "success" is orthodoxy or righteousness. The 21st-century, millennial zeitgeist makes a philosophical struggle over the personal acceptance of the traditionally-articulated Gospel tantamount to the disciplinary struggle of religious legalism.
With respect to the afterlife or any kind of eternal fate - or even with respect to some kind of God-ordained salvation in this life, most Christians consider it to be necessary to "accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior," regardless of the existential turmoil it might require to get to that point. The existence of this type of turmoil causes me to suggest a fundamental inconsistency between the mechanism of evangelical conversion (and dissuasion against apostasy, usually accompanied by the dogmatic, oft bigoted rejection of anything other than evangelical Christianity) and the stated aim of this same conversion.
(Here a friend proposed that a very prominent focus in sermons is often doctrine because preachers preach from their own bias - that is, that theology speaks to them, but not necessarily to their congregations.)
I don't buy that this is primarily a question of differences in personal disposition. People of a variety of different dispositions will say that this central set of dogmas is the exclusive "rock" upon which a whole and healthy faith may be built, and that outside of these bounds, salvation is impossible. Some universalists open it up by saying that all people will be given an eternity of chance to accept these truths after they die, but it's still all salvation by the affirmation of certain truths.
"Accept what I believe now or accept what I believe later, but eventually you're going to see the glory of the coming of the Lord, and every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord." That's the affirmation. And no matter how well people cover it up with "but I might be wrong about this," or "but I know that I need to listen before I speak," or "but I respect with Christlike respect those that differ," it's still unbearably arrogant.
The most workable way I've found to resolve this tension is to disregard the importance of orthodoxy as a whole - not to recognize our inability to know the truth completely, but to dismiss the relevance of that category of truth completely - and to focus on that which has actual discernible costs and benefits in the here-and-now as an END UNTO ITSELF, not a symptom of sin/salvation/etc. But I wanted to unpack these inconsistencies, first, before getting to a more workable solution to the problem.
The traditional Christian articulation of the Gospel is that, given the infectiousness of human sin, there is nothing we can do to save, perfect, or even to improve ourselves substantially. Instead, we must lay our trust in the triune God as revealed through Christ's life, his atoning crucifixion/resurrection, and God's Holy Spirit.
It continues to be painfully ironic to me that so many Christians (and apostates) spend so much time struggling through logic puzzles in an attempt to.... perfect, improve, save their faith in this supposedly-simple matrix of paradoxes said to uphold Christianity.
I may be idealistic, but I'd like to think that it means more than that.
A great deal of the tension I have witnessed over the life and death of Christian faith in people's lives, whether on pseudo-evangelical mission trips or surrounding philosophy texts or in high school youth groups or in sermons, has concerned the ability or inability of various individuals to accept certain central dogmas and reject others. Those unable to accept the dogmas presented (as articulated above) are charged by traditional, "orthodox" Christians to "wrestle" with the arguments until their doubt is quenched. For various experiential, philosophical, and theological reasons, many struggle for years and years and years to accept these doctrines and either eventually find themselves unable to or accept them with a kind of guarded agnosticism, saying something like "I will never be able to understand God's mind fully in this lifetime."
I think it's strange at best, if not outright hypocritical, that the central premise of Christianity, over which the religiously-minded so frequently argue, seems to suggest that people *stop* doing so much work attempting to achieve some arbitrary level of "success" necessary for salvation. It seems to me to make no difference whether the criterion for "success" is orthodoxy or righteousness. The 21st-century, millennial zeitgeist makes a philosophical struggle over the personal acceptance of the traditionally-articulated Gospel tantamount to the disciplinary struggle of religious legalism.
With respect to the afterlife or any kind of eternal fate - or even with respect to some kind of God-ordained salvation in this life, most Christians consider it to be necessary to "accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior," regardless of the existential turmoil it might require to get to that point. The existence of this type of turmoil causes me to suggest a fundamental inconsistency between the mechanism of evangelical conversion (and dissuasion against apostasy, usually accompanied by the dogmatic, oft bigoted rejection of anything other than evangelical Christianity) and the stated aim of this same conversion.
(Here a friend proposed that a very prominent focus in sermons is often doctrine because preachers preach from their own bias - that is, that theology speaks to them, but not necessarily to their congregations.)
I don't buy that this is primarily a question of differences in personal disposition. People of a variety of different dispositions will say that this central set of dogmas is the exclusive "rock" upon which a whole and healthy faith may be built, and that outside of these bounds, salvation is impossible. Some universalists open it up by saying that all people will be given an eternity of chance to accept these truths after they die, but it's still all salvation by the affirmation of certain truths.
"Accept what I believe now or accept what I believe later, but eventually you're going to see the glory of the coming of the Lord, and every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord." That's the affirmation. And no matter how well people cover it up with "but I might be wrong about this," or "but I know that I need to listen before I speak," or "but I respect with Christlike respect those that differ," it's still unbearably arrogant.
The most workable way I've found to resolve this tension is to disregard the importance of orthodoxy as a whole - not to recognize our inability to know the truth completely, but to dismiss the relevance of that category of truth completely - and to focus on that which has actual discernible costs and benefits in the here-and-now as an END UNTO ITSELF, not a symptom of sin/salvation/etc. But I wanted to unpack these inconsistencies, first, before getting to a more workable solution to the problem.
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