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What Would Jesus Like?

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In the 1990s, evangelical reflection on morality was a simulacrum of Joseph’s amazing technicolor dreamcoat.  Only, evangelicals sported the psychedelic colors on wrists instead of backs.  For during this time, the first and greatest moral interrogative was “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD).  

The number of parodies to which the WWJD fad has now been subject undoubtedly suggests to some that the turn of the last century represents the nadir of evangelical reflection on morality.  This conclusion, while tempting, would be hasty.  For the social media revolution has unleashed a formative cultural icon that threatens to undermine the very possibility of moral deliberation among evangelicals: the Facebook “Like” button.   

In 1989, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) delighted moviegoers with their Excellent Adventure.  Their academic foolishness notwithstanding, Bill and Ted illustrated a capacity for human(e) reflection by “philosophizing” with Socrates.  Granted, their attempt to offer existential wisdom on the human condition (“Dust…wind…Dude.”) is hardly the stuff of philosophical legend.  But the rudiments of the Socratic dictum (“The unexamined life is not worth living.”) are there nonetheless.  

Almost 25 years later, it is worth wondering.  Were Socrates to come again (in a telephone booth, of course) would he find reason on the earth?  A quick perusal of any social media platform suggests that the prospects look grim.  For the unexamined status statement is apparently worth liking.  

With respect to morality, the danger that the Like button presents rests in its formative effects.  For starters, the Like button reduces everything to which it is attached to consumer preference – an object of appetitive desire.  To “like” something is to signal a preference lower than intellectual assent or moral conviction.  It is to express mere taste or personal preference.  At best, it signals a fleeting allegiance to an unspecified vibe.  

To employ the Like button (as for example, nearly half a million of the over 25 million viewers did for the “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” video on YouTube) forestalls meaningful conversation about moral matters.  Such silence follows from the internal logic of the Like button itself.  If my moral convictions are merely matters of taste (like my preference for Coke over Pepsi), then what I “like” requires neither rational deliberation nor defense.  Why think?  Just click.

Beyond the obstruction of inquiry, the Like button conditions its users to think of moral conviction as a kind of personal accessory – a way of constructing an identity.  In the techno-consumer society we inhabit, we accessorize to say who we are.  By aligning ourselves with moral perspectives expressed in cyberspace, we use morality as a way of expressing our present profile.  And in so doing, we trivialize moral conviction.

Even more worrisome, however, is the fact that treating morality as a mere expression of one’s persona, as the Like button does, fundamentally subverts the relationship between morality and the individual seeking to live a moral life.  Historically, orthodox Christian belief has been committed to a transcendent understanding of morality, construed as a “Way” to which one ought to conform.  This is, for example, the explicit structure of The Didache – one of the earliest Christian documents expressing the shape of the moral life.  And as C.S. Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man, it is arguably the predominant understanding of morality, Jewish, Christian, Muslim or pagan, before the advent of modernity.  

But the world of the Like button turns this way of thinking on its head.  No longer is morality a transcendent order to which we seek to conform; it is rather a digital drop-down menu from which we select our status.  Instead of seeking pre-existing moral norms that necessarily bind us, we click to create motifs that define us.  And our self-definition has all the contingency of whim.  For we remain attached to particular stances only as long as we continue to feel as though they authentically express who we are at any given moment.  

In a sense, the Like button in social media is the sacrament for the religion that sociologist Christian Smith has identified as defining the present generation: “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  It is a religious stance in which “feeling happy” is the first principle and how one “feels” is the epistemological lens through which everything is assessed.  Of course, Smith’s work does not apply uniquely to evangelicals (rather to U.S. teenagers, generally).  However, as another noteworthy Smith has recently observed, sacraments such as the Like button are embedded in larger, “cultural liturgies” in which the evangelical world is immersed (see James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom).  

Evangelicals should take seriously the formative effects of the prevailing cultural liturgies.  For if the foregoing analysis is right, the overwhelming effect of the liturgies of social media is not to the good.  Rather, they threaten to erode the very foundation on which deliberation, conversation, vision, and formation are built – namely, the assumption that the moral fabric of reality is ontologically prior to the volition of the individual.

This is reason enough for thinking that despite its inherent limitations, the WWJD bracelet, when compared with the liturgies of social media, is a step in a salutary direction.  For starters, the interrogative mood, together with the implied dominical authority, suggests a posture of submission that is the beginning of moral formation.  To be sure, the bracelet is an accessory.  But the content it expresses, while truncated, does not accessorize.  For when properly applied, the WWJD bracelet does not permit the wearer to use the fruits of inquiry as a means of self-expression (except perhaps in choosing a neon color).  Rather, what Jesus would do in a given situation becomes a “Way” to which the faithful evangelical must conform.  Philosophically speaking, as morally formative liturgical acts go, snapping on a bracelet seems superior to clicking a mouse.  Perhaps the renewal of evangelical reflection on morality looks more like a rosary than a blog. 

Sharper than a Two-Edged Sword

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My fellow essayists this month have raised some interesting questions. What are the logical limitations of inerrancy? Are these important? What makes many evangelicals skittish about modern biblical scholarship? Are there valuable lessons to learn? What does it mean to “stand under” the text? Why is understanding original language important? How do we recognize the role of culture in biblical text while guarding against the tendency to read scripture only through our own cultural lenses?

This essay will explore the ways in which many evangelicals use scripture as a rhetorical weapon. In short, scripture is too often used as a conversation-ender and not a means of hearing God speak to all listeners. This rhetorical stance is relatively new in Church history and has distorted the meaning of scriptural authority. In the process, the scripture has become a tool to use on behalf of a position rather than allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us to deeper understandings.

The title of my post comes from Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart (NASB).” This verse, along with others I’ll explore, provides insights into how evangelicals USE the scripture. I have often heard people quote this verse as a declaration of the Bible’s authority. Never mind that commentaries describe the broader Hebrews 4 passage as being about sabbath-keeping as instructed in the Law. The phase “word of God” become synonymous with the Bible and any verse is then a tool used to divide soul and spirit or judge hearts.

Yesterday, Christianity Today posted this story announcing that YouVersion had achieved the 100 million mark in downloads of this popular bible-based mobile app. They also released their newest list of the most popular verses sent via text or twitter or posted as a Facebook status. CT expressed concern that John 3:16 didn’t make the list. The most popular verses were Philippians 4:13 and Jeremiah 29:11.

First of all, the very idea of something called YouVersion is the absolute epitome of the Extreme Individualism which has so colored American Evangelicalism. The scriptures thereby become MY possession, readily available for me to use as necessary. It is just that much easier for my to take these verses and make them about promises TO ME.

Jeremiah 29:11 reads “For I know the plans I have for you … plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future (NIV).”  In spite of all the gifts we give to high school graduates anticipating college and beyond, this verse is written to the people of Israel collectively. Too often, we take the verse as a stand-alone tool to give comfort in anxiety or to somehow make prosper into a guarantee of riches to those who are obedient.

Biblical scholarship would have us recognize the specific role Jeremiah’s words of comfort played to the exiled Israelites. It’s a promise to God’s people collectively not to me individually. As Andre the Giant says in The Princess Bride, “I do not think that means what you think it means.“

The YouVersion list illustrates something very important about evangelicals’ use of scripture. We really don’t know much about the Bible at all. That has been regularly demonstrated in research by Stephen Prothero and many others. Modern biblical scholarship that looks for the context of the biblical narrative isn’t particularly interesting to the folks who’d be attracted to YouVersion.

I’ve often joked that it would be interesting to put together the list of verses most often repeated by evangelicals (so I guess I should thank the YouVersion people). It’s an easy list — Proverbs 3:4-5 (used by Nic Wallenda in walking across the Grand Canyon), Psalm 139:13, Romans 8:28, Romans 5:23, 1 Corinthians 13, Ephesians 5:22, Isaiah 6, Revelation 3:20, and many others including the verses mentioned above. I figure I could publish the Real Evangelical Version is about 22 pages!

So where does this approach to scripture come from? I think it’s based on a misunderstanding of biblical authority combined with a utilitarian view of evangelistic argument.

The latter is a direct expression of enlightenment era rationality. It’s caught up in the phrases”evidence that demands a verdict” and “God said it, I believe it, and that’s good enough for me.” In this sense, scripture is a tool to use. Because it’s God’s Word, it automatically trumps any other appeals. A sword is valuable when it is used, either offensively or defensively.

Fundamentalism has reset definitions so that the only view of biblical authority seems to require a belief in inerrancy. This was a point of conflict at one of my colleges when we thought we’d done a good thing by emphasizing the commitment to the authority of scripture as core institutional values. The immediate response from students and other conservative critics was that we ought to immediately fire the non-creationist faculty members because that’s what authority demands.

Justin Barnard’s post makes great use of C. S. Lewis. I was already thinking about how different Lewis’ rhetorical style in Mere Christianity is from the style of modern apologists. How many scriptures are cited in MC? Why doesn’t his argument include the obvious top ten list from YouVersion?

Not to make C.S. Lewis the model for evangelical rhetoric. Many others have observed his own limitations. But it’s striking that we use that sword as a tool that makes folks in Game of Thrones seem passive.

John’s gospel recounts how Peter responded at the point of Jesus’s arrest. Peter draws a sword and attacks the guard. Jesus rebukes Peter and restores the ear. Shortly thereafter, as he is being interrogated by Pilate, Jesus says “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place (John 1:36 NIV).”

As Amos Young observes, maybe attentiveness to the Spirit can lead to a new rhetorical style, one that seeks to engage the other rather than winning argument. I’m reminded of the two disciples walking the road to Emmaus. They knew their scriptures and had a means of understanding them leading them to believe their side was winning. Now Jesus was dead and their understanding was shattered. When they encounter Jesus on the road, they stop worrying about what they thought. He leads them to understand all of scripture in a new way. Not only are they restored, but they reverse course and return to the scary place that was Jerusalem.

As they follow the Spirit’s lead, the wind up not needing a sword after all. Because Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, they don’t have a need to fight. Modern biblical scholarship, in this view, is not a threat but another means through which the Holy Spirit bears witness.

Inerrancy Is Nonsense

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Evangelical inerrantists are in the apostle Paul’s camp.  They’re sinners (I Timothy 1:15).  But contra Giberson, pointing out the mote in the inerrantist’s eye hardly constitutes a refutation of inerrancy.  (A college student’s failure to find the derivative of a function doesn’t entail that calculus is a “gigantic anchor holding mathematicians back.”)  So, what’s the real concern here?

Inerrancy is all about epistemology.  Giberson knows this.  He rejects “the ‘hypothesis’ of inerrancy [because it] has proven to be ‘degenerate’ because it is too difficult to apply, leads nowhere helpful, has to be propped up with all sorts of ad hoc additional assumptions . . . [and] turns out to lead to error.”  It prevents Christians from holding “sensible positions” [emphasis mine] on many matters.  

Giberson is probably right in thinking that his epistemology of sensibleness is incompatible with his understanding of inerrancy.  Many inerrantists believe that Scripture teaches all sorts of nonsense, often on the basis of their commitment to the Bible’s being without error.  It’s better to believe “sensible” things than nonsense.  Therefore, inerrancy must go.

Whether evangelicals should pull up the anchor of inerrancy and set sail with Giberson turns on whether the epistemology of sensibleness should govern one’s approach to Scripture.  Here’s why it shouldn’t.  

Christianity is fundamentally a religion of nonsense.  Does it make any sense to believe that the death of a first-century rabbi has any bearing on the resurrection of my body to eternal life?  (Does it make any sense to believe in the resurrection of the body to eternal life, period!?)  It is precisely the utterly fantastic nature of the “word of the cross” that led the apostle Paul to call it “foolishness” to the Greeks (I Corinthians 1:18-25).  And as heirs of the disenchanted world of the Enlightenment, we are all, denizens of 21st century West, thoroughly Greek.  

Giberson may be right in claiming that a commitment to inerrancy “requires the rejection and distortion of so much generally accepted knowledge that embracing it forces one onto an ideological Fantasy Island.”  But aside from taking the epistemology of sensibleness as axiomatic, it does not follow from this observation that “Fantasy Island” is uninhabitable.  

C.S. Lewis illustrates the logic of this point delightfully in a marvelous scene in The Silver Chair.  Having been captured by the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the nefarious enchantchress of Underworld, Jill Pole, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle find themselves on the brink of falling under her epistemological spell.  She tries to persuade them that Narnia, Aslan, and life above the surface in “Overland” is all illusory – not real, merely a fantasy.  In a moment of fragile clarity, Puddleglum responds:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

Of course, Giberson is undoubtedly right in pointing out that far too many self-professed inerrantists lack the humility of Puddleglum in their quests to set out in the darkness of inerrancy looking for a young earth, or the anti-Christ, or a biblical worldview.  Far too many are just downright arrogant and mean-spirited.  

But vice is no respecter of epistemological frameworks.  Thus, the epistemology of sensibleness lends itself to being defended with as much “obnoxious vigor” as inerrancy.  So, why favor inerrancy?  

Besides the fact that Christianity is built on the rock of folly, inerrancy matters because at its best, it is designed to posture the reader in precisely the stance that Brown and Roberts so eloquently describe – standing “under” the text.  At its core, inerrancy is a commitment to the idea that the Bible is truthful in all that it says.  It is the spirit of the Psalmist who rejoices, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Psalm 19:7).  One could almost think of inerrancy as an epistemological prayer: “Lord, help me to be faithful to understand all and only those truths expressed herein.”  

In practice, this means that perceived errors (or conflicts between revealed and natural knowledge) should be treated neither as occasions for rejecting Scripture or nature nor as mere puzzles to be solved through interpretation and systematicity.  Rather, perceived errors in the Bible should, first and foremost, drive readers to root out error in themselves (Psalm 139:23-24).  In other words, the perception of error in Scripture (or of conflicts between revealed and natural knowledge) primarily signals that something is wrong with me.  

Sadly, too many inerrantists lack the piety that is built into their epistemological stance – a piety that Augustine himself expressed in a letter to Jerome:

“For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the MS. is faulty or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it . . .”

To the extent that such piety has been lost among evangelicals in their clamor to defend  the veracity of the Bible, rejection is not the remedy.  Remedy rests in remembrance and recovery.  

Perhaps it’s still premature to weigh anchor and “learn to sail” from the Fantasy Isle of Inerrancy.  After all, there’s no assurance of better lands across the Ocean of Disenchantment.

Jesus Throws Everything Off Balance

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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.