The worst evangelist
Some thoughts on the B.S. known as "theology"
Dear L,
I know a lady who failed Evangelism Class. Comically there were no acts of evangelism involved. It reminded me of the health classes I took that never made me work out or change my diet; or the psych classes that never taught me to be “mindful”* — huge expensive tomes to swallow half-chewed; trendy and technical buzzwords to spit back up; a bigger head, a shallow chest, and an empty soul. Thousands spent for neither wisdom nor health. Just a multiple choice test which you pass or fail and move on from there. A curriculum which fails the student but somehow never the teacher.
I asked her what she did to fail. She said they slapped an 800 page textbook on her with almost no time to read it, and the other books in seminary were almost equally obese. So she had to prioritize. She didn't read it and flunked it and I got a good laugh.
In the meantime she's disqualified for a degree in theology**. I would have graded her on whether she brought somebody to church and they got baptized. But this takes actual time and investment in the student — two things anathema to the whole factory process of modern schooling. And who am I to judge? I haven’t read the book either. Maybe it’s a Tolstoy.
The etymologists say “evangelist,” so far from being a cause or an education or a career, just means somebody who shares good news. This means vibe is everything, first of all, and that in order to not come across like a phony or a jackass you have to actually feel what you’re saying***. So you believe God is love. Do you act like you’re loved? You say the Gospel is hope. Do you act like heaven’s around the corner? Evangelize to yourself first — there’s no point sharing the “good news” if it doesn’t make you gush about it. Think about the way you rave about a song or a book or a person you're in love with. Is this the way God makes you feel? Is this the way God makes you talk? And do you think anyone should listen if He doesn’t?
Thus I’d say the first act of evangelism isn’t the words you say — it’s the gleam in your eye**** and the way you bear yourself. Two things that can't be graded on a scale of A to F or by any teacher in general, but only by God, the godless, and your children.
Yours,
-J
*Mindfulness is something everyone should be taught in pre-school. The philosophy behind it is simple: almost all of us live in either the future or the past. Thus we’re almost always living in regrets or missing things we lost or rehashing things we did or looking forward to things we’ll do. We want what we had or what we will have — we rarely focus on what we do have. Thus we’re constantly looking outside ourselves at the great maybe and this tends to make us anxious and unhappy.
Being mindful means reclaiming the only thing we have, which is ourselves in this moment, right now. To most Christians, this means just looking around you and saying Thank You for as many things as you can think of. But even this ignores much of our reality, leaving out many things we take for granted.
What you need to do is focus on your senses. Close your eyes if you can and breathe deeply. Breathe rhythmically: four seconds in, four seconds out. Think about things you physically feel — the breeze in your hair, the breath going in and out of your lungs, the snug feel of your shoes on your feet, etc. Then move on to five things you can hear. Then move on to a few things you can smell. Cycle through these three senses if necessary.
If you can’t close your eyes for this, take a moment and really notice things around you — the color of someone’s eyes, or a light beam coming through a window, or the grass poking out next to the pavement. Almost every time you open your eyes you see something picturesque. Notice it. Enjoy it. Think about it and describe it to yourself and recapture your inner monologue instead of letting it run wild. If you’re physically doing something, focus on what you’re doing by describing it to yourself.
What you have just done is to shut off the universes that don’t exist and claimed the one that does — and when you do, many times you’ll find yourself thanking God for how beautiful it is.
**A degree in theology is probably one of the biggest swindles in the history of schooling. The goal of it should be to lay you flat — to drag you into the presence of God so closely that you realize how small you are and how little you know. What it actually does, over the course of two to four years, is to make you “an authority” about things you can’t understand. But you read the books and passed the tests, and people think this entitles you to a church — to rule people’s souls, in some way, and speak to them in God’s place.
To prove how insane theology books are, consider the Westminster Confession of Faith — a small pamphlet drawn up by a diverse council of Protestant theologians and is said to be backed by 4,000 passages of Scripture. It’s currently the backbone of the Presbyterian Church, most reformed churches, and a creed to many other intellectual failures and kill-joys.
In the short span of a few pages, you’ll find the following statements — technically Biblical, side by side, and many times in the same sentence.
That there are many proofs God wrote the Bible, but none of them prove it unless He makes you believe it. Among these things that don't prove it are people’s testimonies (sidenote: you only heard it was the Word of God from people)(Chapter 1, sections IV and V).
That God has no passions, but He hates sin. That He forgives sin, but “by no means clears the guilty.” That He can’t change, but He’s totally free. That He has no Body, but Jesus Christ existed on earth (Chapter 2, section 1).
That your praise doesn’t actually affect anything, but He created you so He could do good things so you can praise Him (Chapter 2, sect 2).
That God and Jesus are eternal, but that Jesus is begotten (past tense) of God (Chapter 2, sect 3).
That God chooses absolutely everything that comes to pass — but isn’t responsible for evil. That He chose everything that ever happened — and this is how people got free will (Chapter 3, sect 1).
That despite free will, God saves some of us regardless of anything we’d ever think, be, or do. Thus good works can't save you and can’t prove you’re saved. And yet the only way to know if you’re saved is by how you live. (Chapter 3, sects 5, 6, and 8).
That nobody can be saved unless God calls them and changes them; and those damned beyond their control prove God’s justice (Chapter 3, sect 7).
That God created Adam and Eve with “true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness” — and at the same time they had the ability to sin. Despite this knowledge and righteousness, they were forbidden to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Chapter 4, sect 2).
As you can see from a few random passages, each with verses to back them, there are only two acceptable paths left for a theologian. One is to rant like an absolute nutcase, forcing others to swallow absurdities under threat of both earthly penalty and eternal torture. The other is to accept that God is and always has been beyond our understanding — and that the words the Apostles and prophets used to describe Him are inadequate at best. So maybe the contradictions listed above may actually fit together somehow. But it isn’t our place to understand how yet. And yet pretending to understand this mess is the goal of every seminary and every denomination in existence.
This reminds me of a historical “high-point” for the Christian church: the fight between Arius and St. Nicholas. Arius, so far as Gibbon described him in The Decline and Fall, was a gracious and blameless man. St. Nicholas was a zealous man. They got together in a council and Arius couldn’t understand how three could be one and St. Nicholas punched him in the face. We celebrate St. Nicholas’ act to this day. Arius is widely condemned as a heretic. One of them had the Fruit of the Spirit, and the other one only a knuckle sandwich.
Voltaire says Constantine himself got sick of the fighting about the Trinity, and, seeing a civil war on the horizon, wrote them to calm down and make peace. “You're great fools to quarrel about things you don't understand. It's unworthy of the gravity of your ministry to make so much noise about so trifling a matter.”
And Osius, when presenting the Emperor’s letter, embellished the sentiment with more sense than the councils — whose votes we now take as the voice of God Himself:
“My brethren, Christianity is just beginning to enjoy the blessings of peace, and you would plunge it into eternal discord. The emperor has but too much reason to tell you that you quarrel about a very trifling matter. Certainly, had the object of the dispute been essential, Jesus Christ, whom we all acknowledge as our legislator, would have mentioned it. God would not have sent His Son on earth, to return without teaching us our catechism. Whatever He has not expressly told us is the work of men and error is their portion. Jesus has commanded you to love one another, and you begin by hating one another and stirring up discord in the empire.
Pride alone has given birth to these disputes, and Jesus, your Master, has commanded you to be humble. Not one among you can know whether Jesus is made or begotten. And in what does His nature concern you, provided your own is to be just and reasonable? What has the vain science of words to do with the morality which should guide your actions? You cloud our doctrines with mysteries — you, who were designed to strengthen religion by your virtues. Would you leave the Christian religion a mass of sophistry? Did Christ come for this? Cease to dispute, humble yourselves, edify one another, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and pacify the quarrels of families, instead of giving scandal to the whole empire by your dissensions.”
They didn’t listen. The councils had already locked out the fishermen with the Holy Spirit.
***How do you keep a twinkle in your eye? God Himself has to put it there. It happens when you’re dealing with somebody and you really enjoy it. It’s as important in evangelism as it is in romance. People place a lot of stock in a teenage body, but a 40 year-old woman with a good face and a gleam in her eye is still game — and a dead-eyed apologist does more against the church than for it.
P.P.S. I might be asked after this essay whether I think religion can exist without theology. And I would say no, because as R.C. Sproul put it,
No Christian can avoid theology. Every Christian is a theologian. Perhaps not a theologian in the technical or professional sense, but a theologian nonetheless. The issue for Christians is not whether we are going to be theologians but whether we are going to be good theologians or bad ones.
But I remind you that God exists before theology. He also existed before the Bible. Neither Noah nor Abraham had theology as we know it today, and Genesis says Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Theology is what you prize first when you don’t hear a Voice. And ideally you want both. But if you're all Voice and no theology you’re an exclamation point; and if you’re all theology and no Voice you’re a question mark.
The theologians don’t admit it, and I think it makes them dishonest. They claim every Christian has the Holy Spirit, but that He’s been done talking for a long time, and that if you want to see some “real” inspiration you'll have to go back a couple thousand years. I tell you almost the opposite. If God lives, then you’re seeing truths as bold and beautiful as Scripture today — and that they're being spoken and lived out by some of the humblest saints right next to you.