Jesus Throws Everything Off Balance

For some evangelicals, a great disappointment of heaven will be the shocking discovery that God has not read John Rawls.  Although it does not require strict equality of outcome, Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness presupposes that just ground rules are rooted in the free, rational self-interest of mutually contracting parties.  

So Rawlsian soteriology would work like this.  Before the foundation of the world, when me, God, and everyone else were establishing the rules of the “salvific contract,” we would agree to a set of principles that would fairly distribute eternal rewards and punishments, since, being behind Rawls’s imagined “veil of ignorance,” none of us (God included) ought to know exactly how things would turn out (e.g., in which religious tradition I might find myself).   

Of course, from a Christian perspective, the difficulty with Rawlsian soteriology is that salvation isn’t a matter of social contract.  Nevertheless, I cannot shake the sense that discomfort with the exclusivity of Christianity is more deeply shaped by applications of late-twentieth century, philosophical accounts of justice to Divine agency than by the witness of Scripture and the Christian tradition.  

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor calls attention to the exclusivity of the Gospel through the actions and words of a murderous nihilist called “the Misfit.”  In the story’s climactic scene, the Misfit speaks frankly to his next victim – a self-centered grandmother whose half-hearted attachment to Christianity is rooted in its perceived socio-economic utility.  The Misfit: “Jesus thrown everything off balance.  If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.”

Quite provocatively, the Misfit articulates the sense in which Jesus came not “to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).  Jesus Christ is the decisive and divisive One in human history precisely because there is no safe place, no middle ground.  As the Misfit understands, every human being must either “throw away everything and follow” Jesus Christ or run the other way.  There’s no other alternative, no neutral space.  In Rawlsian terms, there is no “original position” imagined or otherwise.  

Despite his hopeful inclusivism, C.S. Lewis himself – occasionally regarded as the patron saint of evangelicalism – could not deny the binary nature of salvation history.  In The Last Battle, Emeth is “saved” by Aslan, not Tash.  In Lewis’s Great Divorce, the figure of George MacDonald cautions with eschatological sobriety: “There are only two kinds of people in the end those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done’.”  If Jesus Christ has indeed “thrown everything off  balance,” it is difficult to see how a persistent, deliberate refusal to love and follow Him can, in the end, result in anything other than being on the “wrong” side of the divide beyond the stable door.  

Obviously, this raises the crucial issue of specifying precisely what loving and following Christ amounts to and what it means to be on the “wrong” side in the end.  With respect to the former, many evangelicals have regrettably reduced belief to mere cognition.  This has two unfortunate consequences.  First, if salvation is primarily a function of explicit intellectual apprehension and self-conscious affirmation of the requisite set of propositions, this renders the prospect of redemption unlikely, if not impossible, for a whole range of persons for whom Christ died (e.g., very young children, and the severely disabled).  Second, an over-emphasis on procuring justification by belief-as-transaction tends to minimize the centrality of faithful obedience (John 14:15).  Certainly, one cannot love and follow Christ while explicitly refusing to confess Him.  But perhaps, by grace through faith, one can begin to love and follow Christ without yet fully understanding that it is Christ whom one is loving and following.  Faith is, after all, God’s gift.  

The meaning of hell remains a thorn in the evangelical flesh.  Yet, as distasteful as the biblical imagery may seem to modern sensibilities, the real possibility of eschatological conscious punishment is inseparable from the Gospel that evangelicals profess.   To deny this possibility trivializes the wickedness of a persistent, deliberate refusal to love and follow the One who is at the heart of reality.  If O’Connor’s Misfit is right, we must either surrender or run away.  Either way, Christ’s gravity at the heart of reality is, having been “lifted up” (John 12:32), drawing all things to the consuming fire that He is.  Purification or consumption seems inescapable.  

Does this make evangelism of paramount importance?  Absolutely – provided that the telling does not outstrip the following.  For the urgency created by the traditional doctrine of hell together with the exclusivity of the Christian religion is not the rush to saturation by verbosity.  It is rather the slow, laborious task of gardening – of sowing, tending, and keeping – discipleship by faithful disciples.  The harvest is truly plentiful, but the laborers are few.