A bargain with God?

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Not long after I became a Christian, a friend of mine gave me a collection of sermons by Karl Barth. The collection was appropriately entitled Deliverance to the Captives; all the sermons were preached towards the end of Barth’s life in the city prison in Basel. One sermon in particular shocked and overwhelmed me. It was entitled “The Criminals with Him”, and took as its text a verse from Luke’s passion narrative: “They crucified him with the criminals, one on either side of him” (Luke 23:33). “Do you know what this implies?” asked Barth. “Don’t be too surprised if I tell you that this was the first Christian fellowship.” And Barth went on to conclude: “In reality we all are these crucified criminals. And only one thing matters now. Are we ready to be told what we are? Are we ready to hear the promise given to the condemned, [and] to ‘get in line behind’ [them]?”

“Get in line behind them?” I thought. Hang on a minute, Karl! I know you’re big on grace, but aren’t you getting carried away, isn’t this taking grace a bit too far? I mean isn’t this unjust, criminals at the front of the queue to the kingdom, evil folk ahead of the good? I was particularly miffed at what Barth preached because I myself came to Christ – or rather Christ to me – out of a rather sordid existence, having lived for a time on the streets of Amsterdam and London, homeless and broke, begging, taking drugs, shoplifting just to survive. I knew what kind of people wheeled and dealed there, the crime and the violence. And now Barth tells me that I’m going to have to get in line behind this scum? And, adding insult to injury, observe: Barth made no distinction between the penitent and the impenitent thief – both were going to precede me. And, in fact, these weren’t just thieves, they were what we would now call terrorists.

Can you sympathise with my annoyance and discomfort? I’m sure you can. For my anger and confusion are, I think, typical of Christians – indeed they are the temptation of all good people, especially all good religious people. For here is what religion, at bottom, is all about: it’s about making a bargain with God. And the bargain goes like this: Lord, I give you my faith and all that goes with it: the church-going, the praying, the giving, the rectitude, the extra mile, and so on; and you, God, in return, you’ve got to be fair. If I keep my side of the bargain, I expect you to bless me with good things – health, work, family. I don’t expect life to be all strawberries and cream, but I do expect a sense of proportion – no serious illnesses, traumatic divorce, or kids on crack. Of course if I don’t keep my side of the bargain, if I lapse and behave very badly – hey, nobody’s perfect! – fair enough, I get what’s coming to me. But, Lord, we both keep to the contract. And there is an unwritten codicil to this contract: other people – they too must get what they deserve: as the righteous must prosper, so the sinner must suffer.

This is religion. Isn’t that the way it is? Isn’t that why we get so bloody, viciously vengeful, when criminals and murderers “get off lightly”? That’s not in the contract! May they rot in hell! And isn’t that why suffering, especially seemingly undeserved suffering, especially my underserved suffering, is so faith-threatening? How can it be that my child is crippled in a car accident, or my wife gets ovarian cancer and dies in a matter of months? That’s not part of the bargain!

Well, today I am here to tell you that God doesn’t do bargains. I mean the whole idea, really, is a no-brainer. Why should God do deals with us? What do we have to offer God that he doesn’t already have? And indeed – pardon the sacrilege – why should we trust God to deliver the goods we’re expecting? I mean the deity has form, doesn’t he? Two words should suffice: Good Friday. For heaven’s sake, man, God didn’t deliver his own totally sinless and obedient Son from torture and death, he watched him get strung up between those two thieves, terrorists – so what, am I God’s gift that I am going to be exempted from fortune’s slings and arrows? What makes me a special case? The idea that God might owe me for good – or them for bad – really, folks, it is fairyland. Deserve? As outlaw William Munny (Clint Eastwood) says in that great line from Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

A bargain? Think again. But we can only think again when we abandon religion and accept revelation – which is what Christianity is: revelation. Unlike religion, revelation is not something that confirms the way we think and what we think we know. On the contrary, revelation rudely interrupts the way we go about our existential business, shaking and shattering our conventional norms and complacent assurances. Although revelation is a gift – it is good news – our first response is always recoil, resistance, outrage at such an unexpected and unasked-for invasion of our moral space. In order to be redeemed, our cover must be blown, and our worlds blown away.

Do you know Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled – succinctly – “Revelation”? It is about one Mrs Turpin from the deep South. Mrs Turpin is a hard-working, upright, church-going farmer’s wife. One day, at her doctor’s office, she is bad-mouthing the white trash and lazy blacks she has to put up with. Suddenly a mentally disturbed girl in the waiting room throws a book at her and calls her a “wart hog from hell”. Visibly shaken, Mrs Turpin returns to her farm, unable to get the girl’s offensive words out of her mind. “Wart hog” indeed! For Mrs Turpin knows that she is a good person, certainly far superior to red necks and “niggers”, and she reminds God of her rectitude, as well as of all the good work she does, especially for the church. Then she angrily asks, referring to the girl’s outrageous insult, “What did you send me a message like that for?” And then, suddenly – revelation! As she stares into the pigpen, Mrs Turpin is given a glimpse of “the very heart of mystery,” and she begins to absorb some “abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She has a vision of a parade of souls marching to heaven, with white trash, blacks, freaks, lunatics and other social outcasts up front, leading the way, and, taking up the rear, folk like herself, “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is a gift. We have no rights, we are never owed, and we are never one up on the bastards and undeserving. That “scum” I thought I’d left behind – I didn’t: it was me too, and I took it with me. But no matter: God’s sun shines and his rain falls on the good and the evil without distinction. As Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity Marilyn McCord Adams puts it: “Expecting God to be interested in invidious distinctions among us would be like our judging the ladybugs to see which had paid us the appropriate honour!”

God is sheer, exuberant, overflowing, prodigal love, inside and out, from top to bottom. May God grant us the insight and wisdom that Mrs Turpin takes home with her that fateful night: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

Molnar, McCormack, and more: trinitarian theology after Barth

If you’re down in the Antipodes next year, you might like to come along to this conference: Trinitarian Theology after Barth: An International Symposium.

The symposium will take place 14-15 May 2009, at Carey Baptist College in Auckland, New Zealand. The keynote speakers will be Paul Molnar, Bruce McCormack, Ivor Davidson, and Murray Rae. Other speakers will include Martin Sutherland, Nicola Hoggard Creegan, Andrew Burgess, Myk Habets, Adam McIntosh, and Ben Myers.

Scholars are invited to contribute original essays which deliberately work in the wake of Barth in some area of constructive trinitarian theology. The goal is not to present critical essays on Barth but to work “after Barth” in the doctrine of the Trinity. This may involve drawing directly on aspects of his work or on that of his students such as Jüngel or Torrance.

Expressions of interest should be directed to Myk Habets.

An evangelical manifesto

Michael points us to a fascinating new document, The Evangelical Manifesto. I’ve only read the summary, but it looks as though the manifesto is specifically trying to rescue evangelicalism from the politics of the Religious Right. Signatories include Miroslav Volf, Kevin Vanhoozer, Darrell Bock, Justo Gonzalez, Mark Noll, Alvin Plantinga and Amos Yong.

Valmae Beck: on the care of criminals

A nauseating news story today in my home state of Queensland. Convicted child-murderer Valmae Beck is currently in a coma in hospital, following heart surgery this week. Some members of the public – gleefully spurred on by a certain newspaper – are “calling for authorities to let her die,” since they are “outraged” that taxpayers’ money should be paying for the medical treatment of such a wicked person. (Nearly giddy with moralism, this newspaper adds: “When she dies, taxpayers could also be expected to pay for a cremation under Queensland law” – and the same tabloid ran as its front-page headline: “Let her die with shame.”)

Such vicious moralism is driven by a direct identification of the person with her works. In contrast, the necessary gap between person and works has been highlighted by Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel, in his brilliant book on Justification (pp. 269-72). Jüngel speaks of “the absolute primacy of persons over their works.” The doctrine of justification describes God’s recognition of persons irrespective both of their achievements and of their deficiencies. For that reason, Jüngel writes, a society must be assessed not primarily according to its successes and achievements, but according to its treatment of those persons who contribute nothing to the society’s political and economic life, such as children, the elderly, the infirm – and criminals.

Quote of the day: pride

Stop all this weeping and swallow your pride;
You will not die, it’s not poison.

—Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues” (1965)

On the moral superiority of gays

One of Stanley Hauerwas’s most memorable essays is his 1993 piece, “Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)” (reprinted in the excellent Hauerwas Reader) – an essay in which Hauerwas argues that gays are morally superior to Christians, since they managed to get themselves excluded from military service. His point is simply that the church often fails to take its own identity seriously, and so we pose no real threat to the status quo. But imagine a church that really took itself seriously – it would be an intolerable threat, an unbearable disruption! “Could you trust someone who would think it more important to die thank to kill unjustly? Are these people fit for the military? … Would you want to shower with such people? You never know when they might try to baptize you.”

Further, Hauerwas observes that the real function of society’s “no” to gays is simply to shield ourselves from the painful truth of our own moral confusion. In a culture of drastic moral incoherence, “the moral ‘no’ to gays becomes the necessary symbolic commitment to show that we really do believe in something.” We pronounce this “moral no” precisely in order to convince ourselves of our own security; we exclude someone else in order to reassure ourselves that we are not without a moral norm. But in holding up the gay community as a moral example, Hauerwas turns the tables. He poses a prophetic challenge to the church, a challenge to our complacency and our calm assurance of our own moral superiority.

I think a similar prophetic challenge underlies Rowan Williams’ famous lecture, “The Body’s Grace”, presented to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in 1989. The lecture has been widely discussed – vigorously praised by some, and feverishly condemned by others. But in the first instance, we should realise that Williams was not simply trying to provide a descriptive account of same-sex desire, or a straightforward theological description of human sexuality.

First and foremost, his aim was to provoke a certain kind of response. His lecture was more a prophetic challenge than a didactic analysis: he was concerned precisely with the question of the church’s identity. Like Hauerwas’ essay, Williams’ lecture tries to rouse the church, to provoke us to action – to ask what an authentic Christian community might look like here and now, in an environment of moral confusion and fragmentation.

I have a suspicion that the real heart of Williams’ lecture is disclosed in his humorous offhand remark that, within the church, the ordinary “norm” of male-female intercourse may itself be the exemplary sexual perversion, since such intercourse can involve the action of “one agent [i.e. the husband] … who doesn’t have to wait upon the desire of the other.” As Williams puts it: “in a great many cultural settings, the socially licensed norm of heterosexual intercourse is a ‘perversion’.”

It is at precisely this point that the fundamental intention of Williams’ lecture becomes clear: to disturb the complacency of Christians, characterised as we are by a seemingly invincible aura of moral superiority. Williams is trying to threaten us, to show us that we are not morally safe and secure. Thus his whole lecture turns on the argument that “sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity by satisfying a formal socio-religious criterion” – it’s simply not that easy; we’re not as safe as we thought we were.

As writers like Williams and Hauerwas remind us, then, the task of Christian ethics is not to shore up the status quo, not to reassure us of our own security – and certainly not to naturalise the status quo, so that our own behaviour becomes the self-evident norm against which every deviation can be identified and condemned as such. Instead, the task of Christian ethics is to bring us under the judgment of the gospel, and to remind us that our action is always fraught with danger. In every new decision we are balanced precariously on the edge of a knife. In every decision, we stand under judgment. It is the false prophet who cries “peace, peace – when there is no peace.”