What kind of Jesus do we preach and teach?
No more important answer awaits the church in September as many of us get back to school and back to church. Living between Lynchburg (Jerry Falwell) and Virginia Beach (Pat Robertson) had not awakened me to the urgency of the question like an article by Bill McKibben* in the August Harper’s Magazine called “The Christian Paradox, How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong.” In proper, smug Virginia, we pay scant attention to the mavens of fundamentalist (Jerry) and syncretistic (Pat) political power.
Yet McKibben carefully codifies what many of us perceive anecdotally: that there are quite different “gospels” preached in America, some of which are dangerous and idolatrous. He sees the mainline as “mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions.” Even if McKibben is too bleak in his diagnosis (though not about our numerical decline) he is on target when he writes that while 85% of us Americans call ourselves Christian, 75% of us believe the Bible teaches: “God helps those who help themselves.” That is neither biblical nor Christian. Yet America is a nation saturated in Christian identity.
He links such ignorance to the flamboyant success of the apocalyptics (Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series) and the “salesmen of the television sects” who are feeding the spiritually hungry with a spurious gospel in a culture of unrelenting self-obsession. He writes that the central message of Jesus is the difficult command to love your neighbor as yourself, while the Benjamin Franklin update has become dominant, a theology that undercuts the hard words of Jesus, and allows the success oriented televangelists and the purveyors of America as God’s chosen people to market a disfigured Jesus.
We possess a potent antidote to the mostly Pelagian heresies that dominate Christian America. It is genuinely Reformed, Christian education. This ought to be unifying, not divisive. Surely the parties that vie among us Presbyterians for theological dominance can agree that the success oriented preachers deliver garbage, not Jesus Christ and him crucified, and the apocalyptics, though rich, popular, and powerful, distort the plain sense of scripture.
At church one day [Tom Delay] listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that “the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.” Delay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God.”
On the other hand Jesus said, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.“ (Mt. 24:36.)
Tom Delay and his pastor seem to know more than Jesus! I’m always hearing that preachers should stay out of politics. Now it is equally clear that politicians (and some pastors) ought to refrain from biblical interpretation.
The urgent task was underscored when our Session grappled with how much control to exercise over adult education. As we “develop and supervise the church school and the educational program of the church,” (G-10.0102f) how directive should we be to adults who want to explore questions of faith? The McKibben article makes me believe we will set policies to ensure that all adult study materials strengthen a Reformed confessional understanding, and contribute to a working knowledge of the Scriptures. The criterion: does this study strengthen faith and build up the church?
If the materials (even for the Women’s Literary Circle) do not, then they are trivial and wasteful. The heretics are gaining ground while we are withering. “Back to school and back to church.” Let’s get serious about the Jesus of the gospels and the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. By the way, America, God helps most those who cannot help themselves.
*Bill McKibben identifies himself as an active Methodist who has written for Christianity Today and The Christian Century.
