Shane Claiborne does indeed have some good things to say (and while I’ll base the rebuttal mainly on the article Zach posted, I want it to be known that I have read his book Irresistible Revolution, so I think I’m allowed to give an opinion on what he has to say without being accused of “not understanding”, or “taking him out of context”). For instance: it’s true that true Christians are sometimes hypocritical and overly judgmental, and even more true that many who call themselves Christians, and even many of those who regularly attend church, display hate and sin and ridiculousness that the world mocks and that God hates. And more significantly (because everyone can see that first point), he points out that there is more to the Gospel than a get-out-of-hell-free-card/ticket-to-heaven. That is a crucial thing to realized, because such a mindset seems to be the prevalent view in both the world and the church as to what Gospel is all about. However, his alternative/response to this false gospel–that “God is love”–is equally misleading and dangerous. I fear that in his eagerness to counter the idea of a vengeful, angry God, he runs the risk of falling into a social gospel (which is not Gospel at all), and perhaps even worse a universalist view of God which demeans His holiness and justice and de-emphasizes the sinfulness and depravity of man, thus taking away from the power and scandal and beauty of the Cross. Because the fundamental point of the Gospel, and the reason why it is such great news, is that we are broken, wicked, and justly damned creatures with no hope of communion with God (which is the only true good we can have), but that through the bloody death of the Son of God, our sin is atoned for and our relationship with the Holy God is restored, so that we can experience Eternal Life (which is to know Him). This is why any Gospel which is not centered on the cross is a false gospel, or at least an incomplete gospel. Whether it falls on the side of hellfire and brimstone or love and unity doesn’t matter–if the focus is not the blood of Christ, we’re missing the whole point.
So here is my rebuttal, in the form of an article titled “What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff”. Rather, this is my edited version of Shane’s article.
To all my non-believing, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have done so much trying to preach the Gospel without words that we have forgotten to ever tell anyone what the Gospel is all about, and have forgotten the Cross of Christ, and the Life and Salvation that He bought for us with His blood.
Forgive us. Forgive us for leading you on to think that being a Christian is about being a good person and not doing bad stuff.
All over Christian television and radio and bookstores, you find people preaching that message. And if you talk to the average American church-goer, you’d probably find a similar perspective. It comes in many different forms, ranging from fundamentalism to mainstream megachurch-ism to hip Christian/New Age combinations, but the message is basically the same. “If you do this, good things will happen for you in this life and in the life to come. If you don’t do bad things, bad things won’t happen to you in this life or the life to come. Here are some simple, easy ways that you can make your life better.”
And while a large portion of America seems to be buying into it, most people can see right through it. They realize that there is no real power there–that that feel-good religion cannot really bring life, or explain the suffering and pain that happens despite all the promises of happiness as a reward for a good life. And so some reject it with bitterness, and spend their lives mocking and insulting Christianity as a whole. Others simply say “well, we can’t ever really know for sure”, and just give up on ever finding truth. Others just laugh and poke fun at everyone who is ‘so weak that they need religion to make themselves feel good about themselves.’ Personally, it breaks my heart that people confuse this watered down and adapted form of New Age spirituality for the Gospel, and occasionally I just want to stand up in the classrooms of my school and the street corners of my city and cry out: “No, that’s not what it’s all about! God is not Santa-Claus!”. Maybe one day I will. But as for now, I just have to take every opportunity that I can create to preach the true Gospel to the people I interact with on a daily basis.
Because more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus and the teaching of the apostles, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through an “unspoken witness” but through bold and unashamed declaration of the beauty and scandal of the Gospel. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less Cross-centered. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the gospel many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like life-giving “good news” and more and more like an banal, lifeless religion that offers only good feelings and inspirational speeches.
Comedian/filmmaker Penn Jillette once said “How much do you have to hate someone to NOT proselytize? How much do you have to hate someone to believe that everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point where I tackle you.” But it would seem that most Christians today are too meek to “tackle” people with the hard truths of the Gospel–that man is sinful and thus rightly damned by a just and holy God–and too shy to declare to people that a rescue is possible–that Eternal Life exists, and is possible for us to attain by the blood of Christ. We have been content to listen to the demands of the ignorant, blind man about to be hit by a truck that we leave him alone and keep our ridiculous beliefs to ourselves, and thus have brought on ourselves a crisis of message–we don’t even know any more what Christianity is all about. And it’s ugly stuff, because to some degree the blood of the man that gets run over because we wanted to avoid the social awkwardness is on our hands. And that’s why I begin by saying that I’m sorry.
Now for the good news.
I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and your “privately Christian” friends are wrong — and that the Gospel really is a matter of life and death. That being a Christian is about being saved from God’s wrath and then given a new heart so that you can love and exult in things that are good for you–namely fellowship with God–instead of ruining your life in pursuit of the fleeting and empty pleasures of sin, and not just about being nice to people and staying away from the taboo fun stuff so that one day when you die you can get a robe and a harp and wings. (If there is anything I have learned from prosperity-gospel preachers and PC-police, it’s that you can seem like you’re really nice to people and preach a very pleasant-sounding message, and yet not be doing what is best for them in the long run… and that true (agape) love a lot of times has to hurt.)
The Bible that I read says that Jesus did not come into the world to bring not peace but division… to separate the light from darkness and reveal the salvation that He brought for all men. The Bible I read says that the Cross is offensive to both religious people and heathens, because to the former it is an affront to self-righteousness and to the latter it seems like sheer folly, but to those who are saved by it, the Cross is the most glorious and powerful and scandalous and beautiful thing. That is the Gospel I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I wanted an enhanced life, or a pick-me-up, or some kind of vague spiritual “comfort”… but because He is the only hope I have for salvation from myself. For those of you who want to believe the Bible but stumble over the seeming emptiness and just-like-every-other-religion-ness of American Christianity, I hope that you do not reject Christ because you misunderstand who Jesus really is and what He really accomplished for you. At the core of our Gospel is the message that Jesus came “not [for] the healthy… but the sick”–that you must realize your dire need before your can embrace your Savior. So if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven, and may it not be simply to make yourself feel better or be more successful, but rather because you understand that you need Him.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that Jesus does save from Hell and get you into Heaven and give you true joy, but too often all churches have done is promise the world small rewards for “converting”, and have neglected to tell people the real good news–that you can know God!. I am convinced that the Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but that God came down to us. And Jesus never promised a better life to believers: in fact, he promised trials and self-sacrifice and even persecution. So it’s not about a better life now, it’s about Eternal Life now.
One of Jesus’ most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A scribe, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan… you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I’m sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine… but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch. But contrary to popular opinion, this parable is not just about being a good person–it is a Messianic prophecy by the Messiah himself about what He did for us. We are the bruised and broken and dying person lying in a ditch. The priest and the scribe represent the world’s approach to how we can be saved–through man’s efforts to get to God by being generally good and not doing bad stuff. And Jesus turns everything upside down. He is despised and/or hated by the religious and secular folks alike (just as Samaritans were hated by both Jews and Gentiles), including the bruised and broken and dying man in the ditch (who was a Jew as well), and yet out of His goodness and love He came and rescued us.
Shane Claiborne has a friend in the UK who talks about “dirty theology” — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man’s eyes to heal him.
In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just stay “out there” but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, “Nothing good could come.” It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. The religious folks and the heathens alike didn’t like Jesus’ claims that He was the only Way to the Father, both because they thought that they could get to God just fine on their own. But the first step to salvation is to give up and simply pray, as Martin Luther learned to: “Save me: I am Yours”.
It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors… a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.
In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend how I could have the right to tell someone who doesn’t believe in the Bible and lives in downright rebellion that they weren’t a Christian, if they claimed to be. And I responded with something like this: “It would seem like the ‘loving’ and ‘nice’ thing to do to let people believe what they like, and not discount their religious beliefs. But it would in reality be something much more like hate, because to leave them alone is to let them just go to hell because I don’t love them enough to tell them the hard truths.” True love picks up the dying man out the ditch even as he curses me for causing him discomfort. True love applies the salve and oil to clean his wounds even as he screams for me to stop. True love takes the man to a place where he can be cared for even as he spits in my face. And the True Lover did that for me. And He did it for You. I pray that if you reject Christ you will stop and consider the true meaning of the Gospel. Accept the bad news that you are in dire straits, and then run to the One who provided the escape, and let Him breath Eternal Life into your soul.
Your brother,
Trey
