Despair, the Hard Work of Theology, and Abraham's Test

I have a son. The other day my wife and I went to his first parent-teacher conference as a middle-schooler. We were told what an awesome kid he is. Afterwards, we got ice cream. Then we headed to the theatre to rehearse for a play he and I are in together.

Ice cream. Shared activities. Involvement in his education. These are things I associate with being a parent. Here are some things I don't associate with being a parent: Tying him down to a rock. Gathering kindling. Preparing to slit his throat and set him on fire.

Those are things I associate with being evil.

A couple of weeks back, Rachel Held Evans wrote an essay on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac--you know, that story in which (at least on a straightforward reading) God tests Abraham by asking him to kill his son as a sacrificial offering. Evans declared, up front, that she would have failed that test.

So would I. More importantly, I share Evans' wariness of treating a straightforward reading of this story with anything but suspicion. Here's how Evans puts it:

While I agree we can’t go making demands and bending God into our own image, it doesn’t make sense to me that a God whose defining characteristic is supposed to be love would present Himself to His creation in a way that looks nothing like our understanding of love.  If love can look like abuse, if it can look like genocide, if it can look like rape, if it can look like eternal conscious torture—well, everything is relativized! Our moral compass is rendered totally unreliable.

Of course, there are metaphorical ways to approach the story. You can stress that child-sacrifice was not uncommon in Abraham's day, and treat the moment that God stays Abraham's hand as the key revelatory part in the tale--a kind of divine repudiation of a practice that was accepted at the time. Or you can see the story in terms of its narrative place within a Christian story where God gives His son up to be sacrificed for the sake of all humanity.

But Evans' discussion is about the story when you approach it literally and treat it as an accurate depiction of what God has done. In that case, we are left with an image of God that is starkly at odds with the urgings of a conscience shaped by the Christian ethic of love.

Evans asks whether such a God is worthy of our worship--and sees those who answer yes as forced towards a theology that worships power, that sees omnipotence rather than love as God's defining attribute. And she calls us to a Christian faith that engages our conscience, that allows the richness of our moral experience to shape our reading of the Bible.

Based on this message, Samuel James accuses Evans of being "too tired" to do "the hard work of theology." He likens her to Brittany Maynard, the young woman diagnosed with brain cancer who has recently become a poster child for physician-assisted suicide. In James' analysis, Maynard lacks the perseverance to continue to hope in the face of her grim diagnosis, and so seeks to end her life rather than continue to affirm life's value by fighting to the bitter end. Evans, he thinks, is shaped by a similar despair. But in her case it's her faith, not her life, that's put upon the sacrificial altar.

This strikes me as dead-wrong.

Why? Let me begin by explaining why I can't approach the Abraham story as a straightforward account of what God did in His relationship with Abraham. The story, as it's told in the book of Genesis, takes the following as given: God really did order Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham knew this.

The story asks us to assume that this is true, and to read the story with that assumption in place. For me, this is kind of like someone telling a story about a guy who cuts out a perfectly round square from construction paper and gives it to his girlfriend as a Valentine. If the moral of the story comes out only if one assumes that round squares are real, the storyteller might ask me to assume this for the sake of the story. Maybe, for that purpose, I could momentarily pretend that I believe in round squares. But I could never actually believe in them. And I don't know how long I could sustain the pretense.

Likewise, maybe I can pretend to believe, for the sake of extracting from the story the lessons it intends to teach, that Abraham really knew that God was commanding him to kill his son. But I'm not sure how long I could maintain the pretense.

Someone once asked me to imagine the story of Abraham's testing through Isaac's eyes. I did, and for me the most harrowing part was the trip down the mountain, after Isaac's trust has been violated, his childhood ripped away, his father stolen irreparably from him by an act of treason. Once I imagined it through that perspective, I could never unthink it. In the biblical version of the story, Isaac is incidental. He's just there to serve as the pawn in the test. But if we treat the story as something that really happened, then we can't ignore Isaac's experience. We can't ignore the question of what God would command--and what He wouldn't command--if he genuinely loved not only Abraham, but Abraham's child.

Let me put it this way. Were a voice to thunder from the heavens, "I, the Lord your God, command you to go and kill your son," I would assume I'd gone crazy. And if my sanity wasn't in question, I'd assume I was the object of some high-tech hoax. And if it came down to believing in a supernatural power as the source of the experience, I'd have to conclude something along the following lines: "Satan has taken to thundering commands from the heavens in the name of God."

Under no conditions would I believe that it was actually God who was commanding me to betray my son in defiance of the very meaning of parental love. And why not? Because to do such a thing would be evil. Even if I was sure that God would intervene at the last minute, my child would still be traumatized for life. A good God would not issue commands that, if followed, would inflict such horror. And I have an unwavering faith that God is good.

Put another way, to believe--even in the face of the most astonishing pyrotechnic display of supernatural fireworks--that God was actually commanding me to kill my son, would be to give up my faith in the goodness of God. It would be to stop believing that God is love.

Here is where Samuel James would accuse me of failing to do the "hard work" of theology. Apparently, to do that hard work is to do the hard work of believing the following two things simultaneously:

(a) God is perfectly loving and good.
(b) God might  (and sometimes does) command people to fundamentally betray the trust of the children who love and depend on them, simply as a test or as a sign of loyalty to God.

Sure, I can say the words, "God is love AND God commands people to kill their own children." But I can also say the words, "There is a square that is perfectly round in its shape--but remains wholly a square for all of that." That I can say it doesn't mean I can think it.  

I cannot possibly think it would be anything but evil for me to grab my beloved son, who trusts me and loves me, strap him to a stone, and prepare to slit his throat and set him on fire. I can say the words, but I can't think it.

I could pretend to think it, but such pretense would be hard work--the hard work of pretending to be someone I'm not. The hard work of repeatedly asserting what my conscience thunders against. Sometimes, betraying your integrity is hard work. Is that the "hard work of theology" that Samuel James is talking about? If so, he's turned theology into something ugly.

Let me be clear: Real theology is, indeed, hard work. And that work often includes the effort to determine whether two things that appear to be at odds on the surface are really compatible at a deeper level. When dealing with realities that transcend our limits, we may confront truths that we cannot readily understand. Wrestling with those truths is hard work.

But so is maintaining the pretense that you believe a contradiction. So is pretending to believe in what you can't coherently even think: that round squares exist, for example, or that a God of perfect love lovingly commands us to fundamentally betray the children who put their trust in us.

If James wants us to believe that there is a theological reconciliation that's possible here--a pathway to reconciling the apparent evil of commanding fathers to betray their young sons and the doctrinal commitment to the perfect benevolence of God--then he should do the hard work so that the rest of us can see what he sees. Instead, James simply accuses Evans of giving in to despair.

Presumably, James thinks that, unlike Evans, he has not given in to despair. But this seems wrong to me, too. If Evans has given in to despair, then so has James. And if James hasn't, then neither has Evans.

Why do I say that? Because Evans and James are both confronted with the same theological dilemma--and the difference between them isn't that one gives up in the face of the dilemma and the other does not. The difference is that, while both are forced to give up something to address the dilemma, they choose different things to give up.

Imagine that a parent is confronted with the following horrific dilemma: The house is on fire, and the parent can only bring two of her three kids to safety before it's too late to save the third. The parent who, in the face of this, curls up in a ball and cries while all three children perish has surely given in to despair. The one who charges in and saves as many as she can has not. Do we really think it matters which two the parent saves? If she saves little Billy and Cathy before the house collapses on Mary, she's given in to despair; but if she saves little Billy and Mary, then she hasn't?

Consider the following three claims:

1. The biblical stories that purportedly report God's commands and activities, understood in their straightforward sense, offer an accurate portrait of God's commands and activities.
2. God is perfectly good.
3. My conscience is a product of God's creative work within me, and as such is not profoundly unreliable.

And now imagine that the following is true:

4. My conscience recoils in horror at enough of the things that God purportedly does in biblical stories--at least in their straightforward readings--that I cannot embrace both the resultant portrait of God and the belief in God's perfect goodness unless I treat my conscience as profoundly unreliable.

"4" is like the burning building. It forces us to choose which of 1-3 to give up. And I think it is fair to say that both Evans and James are in this burning building. Unless I'm profoundly mistaken, Samuel James, like me and like Evans, would be deeply hesitant to slash open his son's throat just because a voice claiming to be God told him to. And the reason would be the same one that moves Evans and me: our consciences recoil in horror at the prospect of doing something so unremittingly awful. Surely no God of perfect love and goodness would command something so evil. Like me, I suspect he'd say, "I'm either having delusions or being misled by malicious agents. Surely this is not the voice of God."

And when genocidal maniacs lead campaigns of brutal slaughter and assert a divine mandate, I suspect that Samuel James is just as skeptical of the purported mandate as I am--and as Evans is. And for the same reason: Our conscience recoils.

And this means that 4 is true for all three of us--because the Bible has stories in which God commands genocide, and stories in which He orders child sacrifice.

And given 4, we each have to give up on 1, 2, or 3. It seems that Evans and I have, under these conditions, given up on 1, while James has given up on 3. That is, Evans and I have given up on a certain human theory about how the Bible is related to the revelation of God, while James has given up on a certain human theory about how the human conscience is related to the revelation of God.

How is one of these choices any more a matter of religious despair than the other? Perhaps it would be a matter of despair to give up on all three. I would argue it would be a kind of theological despair to it to give up on #2. But in the choice between 1 and 3, why is one choice any more reflective of despair than the other?

It isn't. Rather, it reflects a difference in theology--a difference in our theology of divine revelation, to be precise. It reflects different answers to the question, "How do we discern the self-disclosure of God?" Developing and defending your own answer to that question in the light of challenging cases that force us to make choices--that is doing the hard work of theology, not giving up on it.

To slap the label of despair on those who develop one theology of revelation rather than another is, it seems to me, simply a refusal to take seriously theologies that differ from one's own. And it seems to me that taking seriously theologies that differ from one's own is part of the hard work of theology.

Zimmerman's Acquittal is not Ours

On the day that George Zimmerman was acquitted of homicide in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, I wrote the following words on my facebook page:

I was not in the courtroom. I did not see and hear the evidence and the testimony. I cannot speak to this verdict based on the evidence. What I can say is that if my son were black, then tonight as I looked in on his sleeping face nestled into his beddings, I would feel an adrenal rush of fear, a heightened anxiety for his future. Because he is an unthreatening shade of pink, I feel instead the shame of my own relief.

And then I fell silent. I didn't rush to this blog, as I sometimes do, to elaborate--and not just because I've been deliberately neglecting this blog this summer to focus on other priorities.

I fell silent because I didn't know what else to say. I didn't know what my perspective could add, what I could say that wasn't already being said better by others or wasn't already expressed in my earlier post in the wake of the shooting. I didn't know how to answer the question that burns for so many in this country:

What now? What do we do to move forward, to help heal the social fault-lines highlighted by this tragedy and its aftermath (including the trial and subsequent acquittal)?

Faith, Doubt, and Sex

Rachel Held Evans has an interesting new blog post, "Is Doubt an STD?", that addresses a worrisome practice she's observed in some evangelical Christian communities: treating the religious doubts of young adults as if they were nothing more than a symptom of a guilty conscience--more often than not guilt about having sex.

Although she does an excellent job of critiquing this practice, there's one point she doesn't make (at least not in this post) that I want to raise here. But first, let's look a bit more closely at the worrisome practice. The idea underlying it is, roughly, this: If you feel guilty about something you did that's condemned by your inherited faith, you may decide to strike back at what's condemning you--by challenging the tenets of the faith. 

And, of course, since we're talking about young adults here, the "something you did" is usually sex.

So, rather than take a young adult's doubts about their inherited faith at face value, a pastor or religious mentor cuts to the chase and asks, "So who have you been sleeping with?" And this, of course, is supposed to uncover the root issue--guilt. The questions will be answered through repentance, the doubts laid to rest once one has confessed to getting laid.

Pastor M Gets Heckled

BACKGROUND: What follows is inspired by recent events in the world of mega-church evangelical preachers and their more progressive Christian critics. For those unfamiliar with these events, here's the lightning speed recap: Mark Driscoll, founding pastor of of the enormous Mars Hill Church (not to be confused with Rob Bell, founding pastor of the enormous Mars Hill BIBLE Church, which is entirely unrelated) posted a Facebook status update inviting people to recall the most effeminate "anatomically male" worship leader they know. Rachel Held Evans, an articulate Christian writer (author of Evolving in Monkey Town), posted on her blog a forceful indictment of what she saw to be Driscoll's pattern of bullying behavior. She also encouraged her readers to write letters to the Mars Hill deacons, expressing concern over this pattern of behavior. Apparently the strength of the response prompted a meeting between the deacons and Driscoll. Driscoll has since issued a nuanced statement which, while not exactly an apology, acknowledges the complexity of the Christian debate concerning gender, and promises more sensitive engagement with these issues in the future.

DISCLAIMER: What follows is a fantasy and a satire. "Pastor M" should not be construed as a fair portrayal of the real, complex person who is being caricatured. Among other things, Mark Driscoll's actual reaction to the critical response was far less pompous and far more thoughtful than "Pastor M's" reaction. Nevertheless, there can be value in caricature. And these events give me a chance to share in a less dry way some ideas about the Bible and gender hierarchies. 

A strange hush fell over the people in the pews as Pastor M--founding pastor of an enormous complex of churches that have absolutely nothing to do, thank you very much, with a similarly-named enormous church founded by a heretic who hates God so much he is prepared to insist that God is radically and extravagantly loving to the point of, maybe, but probably not, bringing all humanity into His eternal embrace--as I was saying, a hush fell over the gathered congregants as their leader (his chest almost popping the buttons of his flannel shirt) walked onto the enormous TV screen (with only an abbreviated electric guitar intro) and prepared to deliver the message which was about to be broadcast into church campuses all across Washington State (and one in the deserts of the southwest for reasons nobody is quite sure of--but absolutely NOT one anywhere in Michigan).

(Yes, that was all one sentence. Sort of.)

Although Pastor M still looked manly (how could he not, given his testosterone levels?), it became immediately clear to those who loved him best (namely Mary Little and her BFF Sarah Iverson, who were sixteen and had birthdays one week apart and practically swooned every time they caught sight of Pastor M from a distance) that something had changed. There was, it seemed, an air of humility about him. 

This caused a collective gasp. While the fine folks of the mega-church were used to seeing feigned humility in their beloved celebrity pastor, the slight bow of his head on this day--and the even slighter frown, the softness in his downcast eyes, the extra-scruffiness of his five o'clock shadow--all of these things suggested either real humility or an even better pretense than usual.

The last time they'd seen anything like this on his face was when he publicly apologized for suggesting that a televangelist's dalliances with gay prostitutes were to be blamed (in part) on the man's wife for letting herself go and not putting out (in other words, for her failure to be a sufficiently godly wife). But all speculation ended abruptly as Pastor M began to speak.

"Not long ago," he began, "I posted the following words on Facebook: 'So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you've ever personally witnessed?' This seemed a great idea. After all, I've built my ministry on reaching out to manly-men, showing them that there is a place for cage fighters and would-be professional wrestlers in God's family. And to be a manly-man means ridiculing those men who aren't. You can't be a manly-man if you think it's okay not to be one. And so, for my ministry to really draw in manly-men and teach them that there is a place for them at the Lord's table, I had to make it clear that there is a place at the Lord's table for those who want to kick effeminate men out on their wimpy a##es."

At this point Pastor M paused. He turned away, swallowing back emotion. When he could finally speak again, his expression was pained. "But now...now I've been singled out for abuse BY A WOMAN, who's likened me to a high school bully. Can you believe it? She is calling me a bully just because I will not tolerate girly-men! Just because I do what every God-fearing man ought to do: ridicule those who are anatomically male but behave like the inferior sex.

"And yes, there are clear gender-specific behavioral guidelines that you must follow if you want to honor the gift of masculinity that God has bestowed on you--or, if you're a woman, honor the masculinity that God has bestowed on your husband. The rule book is RIGHT HERE!" He paused to dramatically pull forth a book. It was quickly plain he was holding up an old home economics textbook. "Right here, in verse--" Pausing, he began to leaf through the pages of the book. His expression went from puzzled to exasperated. He sighed. "Okay, who's the joker?"

A sudden snort of laughter came from off to the left. "Sorry! Little joke." A man in an oxford shirt dashed up to the podium, smiling sheepishly as he traded out the old textbook for a Bible.

Shaking his head, Pastor M went on: "As I was saying, it says here in God's word...hang on here, I've got it bookmarked...Yes, here in... First Timothy 2:12... it says, 'There is neither Jew nor--'" This time he was interrupted by a explosive guffaw from off to the left. Pastor M looked off in the direction of the practical joker. "Wait. This is Galatians. You moved the bookmark, didn't you?"

"Sorry! Couldn't resist!"

"Oh, never mind. Just trust me. The Bible says women should shut up and let men be in charge. But this woman has started a movement against me. As if a woman has the right to chastise me, not just a ROCK STAR mega-church preacher with thousands of loyal followers, but a man!" He almost roared the last, as if all the dignity of being human resided in the possession of his maleness; as if all those men who weren't sufficiently male were failing to affirm this fact; as if all the women who failed to bow and scrape to their husbands were failing to acknowledge the rock-bottom principle upon which Pastor M had made his self worth hinge, as if...sorry. Launched into thinly-disguised progressive philosophizing for a moment there.  Returning you to Pastor M's sermon, now.

"I mean, who does she think she is?" he bellowed. " I've got theme music! What does she have to compare to that? Some little memoir? I bet you she's--excuse my language--a FEMINIST! And if there's anything that's clear as punch in the Bible, it's that God hates feminism."

"Punch is cloudy!" shouted the voice off to the left.

"If you don't shut up, you'll see how clear a punch can be!"

"Yeah. Sure. You're no bully."

Pastor M paused, quirked a lopsided smile, and shook his head. "Don't let anyone tell you we don't have a sense of humor here at Mars Hill."

"Hey, I'm being serious!" said the voice from the left. "I mean, what do you do with Galatians 3:28?"

"How about I give my next sermon on that?"

"Do it! I'd love to see you flail about with that text. I mean, let's be serious. If it's right that in Christ there's neither male nor female, doesn't that mean that within the church, the body of Christ, gender divisions and hierarchies are erased? How do you reconcile that with all your emphasis on masculine and feminine gender roles, with your idea that God wants men to fit some 1950's era masculinity template and avoid at all costs any girly traits? If God wanted THAT, would he inspire Paul to say that in Christ--in the community united by Christ, the BODY of Christ--gender becomes meaningless?"

 As Pastor M stared, dumbstruck, his heckler (another minister, perhaps?) leapt into the silence: "I mean, let's think about this for a moment. Sure, the Bible's full of traditional patriarchal stuff, stories and messages that put all this importance on gender and traditional gender-based hierarchies. But then you also find this luminous passage that says gender and other divisions don't matter for those who belong to Christ." 

"Paul isn't talking about this life," Pastor M cut in, finally finding his voice. "He isn't saying that people in the church should act as if there weren't any difference between men and women, let alone that women shouldn't submit to their husbands. Women submitting to their husbands in Christian marriage is the very definition of there being neither male nor female in Christ!"

"Um...huh?"

"Oh, come on. You really expect us not to pay attention to gender?  That would be nutty! Men are men and women are women!"

"Yeah. But then there's that little verse about God choosing what is foolish in the world to shame the wise." 

"Oh, come on. The Bible's full of stuff that makes it clear that women are subordinate to men, that men are supposed to be one way and women another, and on and on. And there are at least half a dozen ways to interpret the Galatians verse to make it fit with all of that."

"Of course. But don't all those interpretations just sort of, well, do violence to that shining passage in Galatians? It's like you come across this brilliant flower growing out of the dirt and you just crush it underfoot so that it becomes indistinguishable from the dirt.

"Think about it this way." And at this point the interlocutor rose to his feet and stepped onto the raised platform from which Pastor M was used to holding forth alone. "Of course the Bible's going to be full of patriarchal stuff. Every single freaking biblical writer lived in a patriarchal culture. They sucked in patriarchy with their mother's milk. It wouldn't take a divine revelation to inspire them to endorse patriarchy. They'd be writing patriarchal stuff whether or not God had anything to do with the Bible. What would take a divine revelation is getting some biblical writer to BUCK the patriarchal norm. If you have to choose between them--the patriarchal stuff and the Galatians passage--it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which one is more likely to spring from an encounter with the transcendent God, and which is more likely to be nothing more than a regurgitation of the dominant mores of the time."

"Are you suggesting it isn't all inspired by God?" 

"Well, if you're going to insist on that doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration--which, by the way, wasn't invented until after the Protestant Reformation; or, better yet, if you're going to insist on the adulterated version of that doctrine, born out of the fundamentalist movement--well, to put it bluntly, it seems to me that insisting on that doctrine will force you to crush the flowers of divine revelation underfoot in order to make them fit with all the other stuff that's in the Bible.

"But suppose I'm wrong about that. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. Either way, you can't pretend that it's only those who challenge the doctrine of literal inerrancy who risk missing out on God's self-disclosure, while those who insist on inerrancy face no risk of distorting or dismissing divine revelation. If, in one way or another, God has communicated to us through the Bible, then whatever your theory of the Bible you're taking a risk of getting the Bible--and God--wrong.

"If you don't like the flower metaphor, take the one that Martin Luther used. You know Martin Luther, the guy who came up with 'sola scriptura'? He likened the Bible to the manger in which the baby Jesus lay: It contains the gospel, but it also contains straw.

"At one point Luther called the entire epistle of James 'an epistle of straw.' Sure, if inerrantists are right then those who agree with Luther might dismiss as straw things that aren't straw. They might throw out the baby with the bathwater. Maybe they mistakenly think there is bathwater when it's really all baby. (Sorry, shifted metaphors again there.) But if inerrantists are wrong, they risk putting the bathwater in bed with the baby! And they risk not noticing the baby at all amidst all that water. They risk thinking the bathwater is the baby, and so getting everything all confused.

"So here's my challenge to you, Pastor M: Are you prepared to admit that you're taking a risk with your theory of the Bible--that you might just be wrong about the Bible and God, about men and women, about those who don't fit into our gender boxes? Or are you going to live up to the rock star theme music at the start of all your video-taped sermons?"

At this point it became clear to everyone present that what they were witnessing was entirely fictitious, since Pastor M would never have permitted this heckler to go on for so long. And so everyone stopped listening and went home.

Hell, Bell, and Christian Sales Tactics

As most people interested in the Christian universalism-vs-hellism controversy already know, Rob Bell's recent book (and the conservative backlash to it) sparked Time Magazine to do this week's cover article, "Is Hell Dead?", on the topic. As I was reading the article, I was particularly struck by journalist Jon Meacham's account of what lies behind the "traditionalist" resistance to questioning the doctrine of eternal damnation:

If heaven, however defined, is everyone's ultimate destination in any event, then what's the incentive to confess Jesus as Lord in this life? If, in other words, Gandhi is in heaven, then why bother with accepting Christ? If you say the Bible doesn't really say what a lot of people have said it says, then where does that stop? If the verses about hell and judgment aren't literal, what about the ones on adultery, say, or homosexuality? Taken to their logical conclusions, such questions could undermine much of conservative Christianity.

Now the second part of this account covers issues I've discussed before. I've talked quite a bit about biblical inerrancy and literalism on this blog, and my recent RD article about the conservative backlash to Bell focuses mostly on the motivations that spring from a failure to distinguish one's own beliefs about God from the truth about God--a confusion (or deliberate blurring of distinctions) that seems to underlie much of the impetus for treating critical questions as anathema.

But what struck me first when reading this passage was the first part--the part which asks why anyone should bother to accept Christ, to confess Jesus as Lord, if it isn't true that all non-Christians roast for eternity in fiery torment of the most horrific imaginable kind. I mean, why should I bother to tuck my kids in at bedtime if failing to do so doesn't mean eternal anguish in the pits of hell? Why eat breakfast if I could skip breakfast and yet still avoid unremitting agony? Clearly, everything I choose to do would be pointless if the alternative to doing it weren't damnation.

Of course I'm being sarcastic. The point is that we do all kinds of things without being threatened with damnation if we don't do them. I tuck my kids in because I love them and because I enjoy tucking them in, not because I'm trying to avoid some bad result (let alone one of eternal duration and ultimate horror). And while this shows that the rhetorical question Meacham poses is only marginally coherent, it doesn't mean that Meacham is wrong to pose it as part of what lies behind traditionalist resistance to universalism. I've heard rhetorical questions of precisely this sort often enough from Christian conservatives to know that there is something in the vicinity of these questions that truly worries them.

Of course, part of what may really worry them is that Christ is being rendered inessential for salvation--which they think undermines Christ's life and sacrifice, trivializing the Incarnation and Atonement. But this worry is clearly misguided, since Christ is hardly made inessential by supposing that the scope of His success in achieving the salvation of humanity is universal. Christian universalists do not hold that all are saved apart from Christ's saving work, but that all are saved because of it.

Perhaps, then, what is made inessential is our subjective response to Christ--what evangelicals have in mind when they speak about "accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior." But this doesn't follow from universalism either. The universalist could believe (and many Christian universalists do believe) that eventually everyone comes to make this subjective response--if not in this life, then at the moment of death or in a future state when the truth becomes clear to them in all its joyous glory (and the universalist might very well hold that this realization occurs only after a period of denial and rejection, during which they arguably suffer the natural consequences of living in alienation from God--a finite hell--and so come to see the intrinsic undesirability of such a condition).

(I won't pursue the free will arguments for eternal rejection here--if you're interested in why I find them unconvincing, buy John's and my book when it comes out, or look at a briefer version of the argument in my article in Universal Salvation? The Current Debate).

In any event, the point is this: Universalism neither entails that Christ is unnecessary for salvation nor that a subjective response of acceptance is unnecessary. It does, however, seem to entail that conversion to Christianity in this life, participation in Christian life, church attendance, etc., are unnecessary for avoiding eternal hell. If Gandhi--who had nice things to say about Jesus but remained a Hindu all his life--is not in hell, then being a Christian in this life is not necessary for avoiding hell.

But this brings me back to my original sarcastically-expressed point about the rhetorical question, "Why bother becoming a Christian if non-Christians are saved?" This question assumes that the only good reason to convert to Christianity in this life is what happens in the next, and more specifically that becoming a Christian in this life is the only way to avoid damnation in the next. But do Christians really believe that? Do they believe that there is nothing positive to be gained in this life from participation in Church life, nothing worthwhile that is gained during our earthly tenure by being a part of a Christian communion, by living with a sense of God's presence, by meditating on the gospel narrative, etc.?

Do any Christians seriously want to say that? If not, then the rhetorical question collapses on itself--because there are all sorts of reasons why someone might "bother" to embrace a Christian life even if the ultimate destiny of those who embrace a secular life, or a Hindu life, or a Buddhist life, is the same in the end.

For all these reasons, the only sense I can make of the rhetorical question so many conservatives ask is this: What they are really worried about (although they may not be fully conscious of this) is that they will be deprived of a tried-and-true sales gimmick that many Christians have been using for centuries in their efforts to swell the ranks of Christian churches. Specifically, the gimmick of making people scared of the consequences of not participating in Christian communities.

This is not a new conclusion for me--and I think I may have made the same basic point more eloquently in a post from a couple of years back, Selling Christianity. Nevertheless, it is a point worth making again. And if this is what is really going on, then Bell may have realized something that conservative evangelicals like John Piper haven't quite caught onto yet: This sales gimmick isn't working anymore.

Rather than being a selling point for participation in Christian life, the doctrine of eternal damnation is increasingly becoming a liability. In our pluralistic world, to cleave to a religion that says everyone else is going to roast is to cleave to something that is hard to see as anything but ugly. And the old theological arguments that try to paint it as something other than ugly, and that try to represent our uneasiness with the doctrine of hell as nothing more than a suspect side-effect of a demonized "enlightenment philosophy" (as if enlightenment philosophy were entirely divorced from the ethical ideas of the Christian culture in which it was born)--well, those arguments are sounding increasingly implausible.

I'm not suggesting that Rob Bell is just a salesman with a better marketing campaign. Rather, I am suggesting that Bell may better represent the values of the emerging generation of evangelicals--a point that finds support in a great recent essay by Rachel Held Evans. If so, then when the conservative establishment rails against Bell with cries of heresy and excommunications by Tweet, what we may be witnessing is a once-privileged group scrambling desperately to cling to a position of authority that is steadily slipping from their grasp.

I don't know if that is true, but I really think it might be.