Extremes

In the past three months, my wife and I have seen almost every imaginable extreme of Christianity.


We spent 3 weeks in Visakhapatnam, India--where she worked at an orphanage--and saw the Church flourishing in all its manifestations. It seemed Jesus was everywhere in that Hindu nation--honored in church buildings and billboards, portrayed or quoted on auto rickshaws and trucks, in the hearts of taxi drivers and hotel clerks and chemical engineers and teenage orphans. The gospel is bearing fruit all over India, even in former Hindu strongholds, sometimes in recognizable forms--as in the evangelical faith embraced by Dalits ("untouchables") and tribals, or the Catholic forms that have existed in the south since the arrival of the Apostle Thomas--but sometimes in completely new and even controversial ways, such as the "Hindu followers of Jesus" among the higher castes. We spent Easter morning reading the last 3 chapters of Luke while watching the sun rise over the Bay of Bengal, with tears of emotion flowing like the waves in front of us; we spent the next Sunday worshipping at a Catholic church where we sang Wesleyan hymns and heard the gospel clearly (despite all the adoration of statues afterward). Seeing the crushing effects of caste and superstition firsthand was hard, but the beauty of the culture shone through nonetheless, particularly among those who knew their Creator.


We spent 2 lovely weeks in England and Wales, lands with a glorious Christian history where the Church presently seems to be in a state of long, gradual decline. We attended a Methodist church which had just merged with a Presbyterian church in a mutual effort to deal with declining membership and lack of interest among the young. Life in north England seemed, particularly for the younger crowd, to revolve around pubs, nightclubs, and "sponging" off the government. So much of our spiritual heritage is in England: the Wesleys (whose hometown of Epworth we visited), the Puritans, George Whitefield, John Newton, William Wilberforce, David Livingstone, John Bunyan, William Carey... the list seems endless. Everywhere there were beautiful churches, some nearly 900 years old, magnificent architectural expressions of the glory of God--but most attracted far more tourists than worshippers.


Within 48 hours after returning from England, we landed in Oklahoma, and have now been in Bartlesville, OK, for almost 4 weeks. My wife has been volunteering at Voice Of the Martyrs, a ministry to persecuted Christians headquartered here. You would think that the most bizarre forms of Christianity would have been found in India, where temptations to Hindu syncretism and accomodations to the caste system are common; or in England, where secularism is rampant and the decline of the Anglican Church is overshadowed only by the ridiculous antics of their province in the USA (The Episcopal Church). But here in the Bible Belt, less than an hour's drive from my home state, among fellow volunteers for a respected evangelical ministry that we regularly donate to, my wife encountered some of the worst distortions of the gospel I have ever seen.


"Jenny" and "Jill" (not their real names) are sisters in their late twenties, friendly and fun-loving all-American girls - on the surface. They live at home and have yet to marry, as they are not allowed to date and their father has yet to find a man he thinks is suitable for them. They were home-schooled throughout high school and are not allowed to attend college. Here in Bartlesville they watch TV almost constantly, since they are forbidden to do so at home, but they wouldn't think of listening to rock music--not even contemporary praise and worship--or wearing a skirt that isn't ankle-length. When my wife put on a CD of respected worship artist Chris Tomlin, they responded with utter disgust, as they were taught that anything other than hymns and classical is “worldly.” Their family lives on the outskirts of Houston but never goes into the city because it is "too dangerous." Their Christianity is defined by the list of rules they keep, particularly of things that there particular church tells them they must not do, which they believe makes them more holy. Their oldest brother rebelled against this oppressive life and married an atheist, obtaining his parents' approval only by claiming to have impregnated her.

Jenny and Jill were quite normal compared to some of the other families. In one large family of homeschoolers, the children were so unaccustomed to interacting with others that they could barely function in social situations. Stories of rebellious older siblings abounded alongside resentment of their parents. There were shining examples as well - innovative homeschoolers who taught their children to engage all of God's world. But these were the exceptions. In attempt to protect their children from the corruptions of the world, many of these parents had in fact left them ill-prepared to navigate it. In attempt to be more holy, they had missed the heart of the gospel by substituting stricter rules for deeper and broader relationship.

Note theologian J.I. Packer once summed up the gospel in 3 words: "God saves sinners." The gospel is fundamentally about God Himself, who takes the initiative to save those who cannot dig themselves out of the hole they are in. They in turn respond in love and gratitude, by loving God and loving others. The entire Bible is the story of God's work or redemption, of literally chasing after fallen humanity to bring them back into relationship with Himself. This culminated in a holy God taking on flesh and immersing Himself in His own world, amongst His own rebellious creatures.


Read the Gospels, and look at who hated Jesus--the self-righteous inventors and keepers of man-made rules, those who believed the purpose of man was to follow these rules as strictly as possible and thus be more holy. But if the purpose of life is to not do certain things, then God would have been wiser to not create us, for someone who does not exist cannot do anything wrong. If the purpose of life were simply to follow rules (and hide from or condemn those who didn't), God wouldn't have sent His own Son into the world to redeem it and He wouldn't have given us a book that is mostly stories of real people or descriptions of His own character.

Jesus was called "a glutton and a drunkard" for hanging out with "sinners." He did not shrink from cultural immersion and engagement with the world - yet He lived a perfect life and had a profound effect on all those he encountered. These days Christians are more likely to emphasize Jesus' deity, in response to those would claim that He is just "a good teacher" or "a good man." But we also must avoid the earliest heresy in the Church, the tendency to forget Jesus' humanity. In fact, He not only was fully man, he was more fully human than anyone, for His humanity was undiminished by sin. And He came to redeem our entire selves--not just our spirits--and to redeem the entire world, rather than to take us out of it. As theologian Hans Rookmaaker said, "Jesus did not come to make us Christian; Jesus came to make us fully human".

But to be fully human implies growth towards maturity; the kind of true freedom that comes from being able to choose the hard right over the easier wrong not because someone makes you, but because your own character and integriy compels you; and the flourishing of one's potential in all areas of life. Every parent wants to shield their children from the worst of the world. But in becoming an adult, a child must learn to face the world; in becoming a Christian adult, he or she must learn to engage it for God's glory. When all of someone's decisions are made for them, when their entire life is controlled, then they are ill-prepared for life on their own. They leave home and discover that their faith has no root. They don't know why they believe what they believe, but even worse, following Jesus is not their heart's desire. They have only done what they were told, and now that no one's telling them what to do, they have no deep-seated convictions of their own to guide them.

In Jesus' day, there were two major distortions of the faith. The Sadducees were the liberals, denying all but the first five books of the Scriptures, rejecting the resurrection and most of the supernatural world, and brazen in the pursuit of wealth and political power. The Pharisees were the conservatives - founded upon a genuine desire to preserve true Judaism, apparently very religious and fervent in their rule-keeping, yet Jesus called them hypocrites because they loved money more than God and praise from men more than men themselves. They "knew the Scriptures" (unlike the Sadduccees) but missed the heart of God. We see the same distortions today in Christianity, and true evangelicals strive to avoid either extreme.

I've encountered modern-day Sadducees before, and they were truly pathetic. But few people mistake that for real Christianity. It's the Pharisees that scare me.

Of course, in the end, they both voted to crucify the Lord.