In “The Recipe to Make Peace,” we continue our exploration into how the gospel saves people. Spoiler alert: It’s by faith.
Martin Luther helped free Christendom from the papal system, but he left a legacy of detached faith. Another look at the New Testament will reveal that while we’re not saved by works, the right faith works to save us from this present evil age.
Salvation is from our corrupt society. That means Jesus sets us free from subjugation to the dynamics of interpersonal control. But corruption doesn’t reside in society except as it inhabits each member. Everyone’s personhood is degrading under the corrosive influence of sin. The need to be integrated has been observed by psychologists as well as theologians. To be saved is to be cured of personal deterioration.
In our vernacular, we almost exclusively use the word, “corruption,” to describe self-serving governments or government officials. When someone describes a politician as corrupt, we can imagine them taking bribes or kickbacks in exchange for special treatment. Political corruption is an abuse of power as well as a moral deficiency within the participants. We think of corruption as a type of white-collar crime, but that’s not the essential meaning of the word.
The English word, “corrupt,” came from a Latin word meaning “to rot or decay.”[i] That’s also the root meaning of the New Testament Greek word for “corrupt.” The ancients didn’t know about microbes; they only knew that something invisible broke down the dead bodies of humans and animals. Corruption started small and invisibly overtook formerly living tissue.
Even though we’ve lost this word picture when we speak of political corruption, the term retains its basic meaning. Political corruption happens in secret and undermines the integrity of governments. When corruption fully spreads through an entire government the society edges near collapse. Bribes are dishonest and immoral, but they’re also corrosive to the fiber of society.
When the Bible talks about corruption on an individual level it describes personal decay. It’s easy for unbelievers to dismiss “sin” as a religious construct, but the psychological fracturing that results from moral compromise can’t be denied. As far as I know, everyone values integrity, but real integrity requires complete consistency between the self we project and our private selves. Even the atheist, Sigmund Freud, observed the existence of competing drives toward selfishness and responsibility within every person.[ii] As long as the “Id” and the “Superego” pull the “Ego” in opposite directions every person undergoes some level of personal disintegration.
An alcoholic joining AA is a case in point. Step One in the AA Twelve Steps is, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.” As anyone who’s been in recovery will tell you, that first step is first for a reason. Most people live in some degree of disintegration, but they’ve learned to rationalize it away. I once had a woman come to the church where I work asking for money as her body convulsed under delirium tremens. She was clearly lying when she said she wanted the money to pay her water bill. Hoping for a moment of honesty, I asked her, “What do you see when you look in the mirror?”
She responded, “I see a basically good person.”
Brennan Manning in his seminal book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, tells the story of a man named Max who had checked into rehab. When one of the members of his group therapy circle asked him to give an example of a time when he had been unkind to one of his kids Max responded:
“Well, I was as little thoughtless with my nine-year-old daughter last Christmas Eve.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t remember. I just get this heavy feeling whenever I think about it.”
To get the details, the therapist called Max’s wife and put her on speakerphone. Over the phone, she told the group that Max had taken his daughter out to buy some shoes for Christmas. On the way back home, he stopped by a bar and told his daughter to wait for him because he would be right out. She went on:
“My husband met some old Army buddies in the tavern. Swept up in the euphoria over the reunion, he lost track of time, purpose, and everything else. He came out of the Cork ‘n’ Bottle at midnight. He was drunk. The motor had stopped running and the car windows were frozen shut. Debbie was badly frostbitten on both ears and on her fingers. When we got her to the hospital, the doctors had to operate. They amputated the thumb and forefinger on her right hand. She will be deaf for the rest of her life.”
Max appeared to be having a coronary. He struggled to his feet making jerky, uncoordinated movements. His glasses flew to the right and his pipe to the left. He collapsed on all fours and sobbed hysterically.[iii]
We humans have a mighty ability to deny the distance between our self-image and the person we really are. Sadly, that distance continues to widen the longer we ignore it. Maybe that’s why so few committed romantic relationships endure. We love the people who believe the lies we tell ourselves. Once they spend a couple of years really getting to know us, though, they begin to reflect the image of our true selves. Rather than face the lie, we reject our partner and move on to someone else who doesn’t know us quite as well.
We love the people who believe the lies we tell ourselves.
We want to believe we’re at least close to as good as we should be, and we want others to believe it too. This personal dishonesty creates a code of silence that strongly discourages interpersonal honesty.
Even if we must confront someone with their shortcomings, we usually understate the problem. Take the wording of the AA Step One as an example: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol…” That’s never been true for anyone. Alcohol is an inanimate substance that has never had the least power over anyone. A truer statement would be, “We admitted that we were powerless to control ourselves…” As hard as it must be for an alcoholic to repeat the wording of Step One, it also excuses their actions. It makes the alcoholic a passive victim of something outside of themselves.
Could it be that some people benefit from the help of a higher power because one exists? Maybe only God can fix human brokenness.
In the case of AA, that Step One admission leads to Step Two: “(We) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” To the chagrin, I’m sure, of the skeptical community, a 2020 Stanford School of Medicine study concluded that AA is the “most effective path to alcohol abstinence.”[iv] Could it be that some people benefit from the help of a higher power because one exists? Maybe only God can fix human brokenness.
Someone might object that AA isn’t Christian. But, isn’t God free to help someone who calls on him without fully understanding his nature? Really, those are the only people who ever call on him. No, AA isn’t Christian, but that’s why it doesn’t work better than it does. AA approximates Christian conversion by calling on addicts to become poor in spirit and to call on God. AA fails in that it remains a system of rules which can never bring a person from “recovering” to “recovered.”
AA only has one rule, “don’t drink,” but that’s one rule too many. That one rule forever ties the AA member to her addiction. Alcoholics Anonymous celebrates what a person hasn’t done and for how long they haven’t done it. But what about all the good we aspire to do? Surely a person needs to move beyond the goal of sobriety to reach their God-given purpose and potential.
Addiction is just one manifestation of the corruption within the human person. Everyone has their issues. Maybe it’s a hated habit. Or it could be serial neglect. Whatever the specifics we suffer from shame, regret, and self-loathing that indicate the disintegration of our being. Just like with AA, Christian conversion has been known to offer serious relief to many people from the oppression of their own compulsions. Also like with AA, those converts often continue to hang in the balance between bondage and freedom because of rules.
Suppose a man has been unfaithful to his wife. To secure her forgiveness he might promise to go to church. A sermon one Sunday resonates with him, and he comes to faith in Christ. He becomes zealous for God and wants to read the Bible. There he discovers a whole host of sins he’s been committing. Not only should he not cheat on his wife, but he also can’t even look lustfully at a woman.[v] While he may have become a better husband on the outside, the distance between his values and his behavior has become even wider. He might be more respectable but he’s less integrated than ever before. He’s more conscientious but just as spiritually dead.
For Paul, personal corruption arose from a spiritual principle that he called, “the law of death.” The Bible describes death as the separation of the spirit from the body.[vi] Paul, like Freud, saw humans as triune, but the apostle spoke of flesh, mind/self, and spirit instead of Id, Ego, and Superego. While Freud would have spoken of the Ego pulled between the urgings of the Id and Superego, Paul spoke of the mind/self at the center of a battle royale between the flesh and the spirit. Rather than think of this division of the self as integral to the human animal, though, Paul recognized the polarization of flesh and spirit as a kind of living death. He recognized it in himself:
I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.
(Romans 7:9-10 ESV)
This state of spiritual death clutches its victims as tightly as does physical death:
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
(Romans 7:9-10; 21-24 ESV)
As far as we know, Paul hadn’t been an especially bad man.[vii] In the immediate context of this passage he evaluates himself as “wretched” based on the victimless sin of lust. His wretchedness didn’t arise so much from the damage his sin caused but from his helplessness against it. He was a respected religious man who was disintegrating according to spiritual law just as a corpse decays according to natural law.
…it stands to reason, this unnamed law is the law of death. It decrees, “When I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.”
Notice there are three spiritual laws mentioned in the passage above. They are the law of God, the law of sin, and an unnamed law interacting with the other two. This law opposed Paul’s moral imperative and enslaved him to the law of sin. Since he calls his tendency to obey sin while aspiring inwardly to obey God, “death,” it stands to reason, this unnamed law is the law of death. It decrees, “When I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.”
We live under the law of death because God’s warning to Adam was, “on the day you eat from it (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) you will die.” According to Genesis 5, Adam didn’t die physically until 930 or so years later. Did God back off his promised punishment or did Adam die in some other way on that fateful day? It looks to me like his actions and his moral center went separate ways. He did surely die according to Paul’s concept of spiritual death.
He could think and plan and move, but his flesh would always resist his inner yearning to do right. Since his physical self, his flesh, resisted God’s spiritual law, that was the part of him that was spiritually dead. Paul walked around in a dead and decaying body. So, he cries out to be saved from “this body of death,” also known as the “dead body.”
There’s a fungus in the rainforests of Brazil referred to as “the zombie-ant fungus.” Here’s how it got that name:
When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend a nearby plant stem. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters—a zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to grow. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a leaf. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing into a bulbous capsule full of spores. And because the ant typically climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn.[viii]
This phenomenon almost stretches credulity. It’s both fascinating and horrifying in equal measure but would surely tip the balance toward the latter if it took place in anything larger than an ant. And yet, it accurately illustrates the spiritual death endemic to every human since the first of us became self-aware. Paul was compelled by sin to act against his will in ways that were harmful to the human collective.
The zombie-ant fungus further illustrates our need to be saved. If that ant could talk as she was ascending the plant stem, what would she say? I think she would share Paul’s plea – “Someone, save me from this dead body!” Neither the ant nor Paul suffered from a lack of willpower. The problem in both cases was a loss of executive function. An alien presence animates the hapless carpenter ant while leaving its brain untouched. The law of sin animated Paul even as his mind longed for the law of God. Paul was no more able to overcome sin than the infected ant could refuse to climb.
See if you relate to Paul’s experience of waking death:
For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
(Romans 7:15-20 ESV)
If you’ve ever done something you’ve regretted, doesn’t that suggest something foreign within you is influencing your actions? We even tend to undermine our own best interests. Forbidden fruit makes us salivate while we despise wholesome fare. I’ve personally never met anyone who subscribes to “Do evil,” as a mission statement, and yet people still do evil. Doesn’t everyone want to be basically good? So, how does society continue to corrupt? Because despite our best intentions we still climb that stem and rain down sinful spores on family members, friends, and acquaintances.
We need to be saved from corruption because we’re dead and dead people can’t save themselves. All they can do on their own is rot and stink. Self-help strategies might mask the smell, but they don’t stop the decay. On our best days, we might overcome one besetting sin only to find three others pop up in its place. Religion can’t save us because its very prohibitions intensify the effects of death on us.
We, like Paul, need a “who” to save us. We need a deliverer who’s greater than Moses because we need to be set free not only from political and social bondage but from existential bondage.
[i] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/corrupt
[ii] Sigmund Freud on the three selves
[iii] The Ragamuffin Gospel p. 127-129
[iv] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/03/alcoholics-anonymous-most-effective-path-to-alcohol-abstinence.html
[v] Matthew 5:27-30
[vi] Ecclesiastes 12:6-7p; James 2:26
[vii] By his accounts he had been exemplary according to Philippians 3, Galatians 1, and Acts 23:1.
[viii] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how-the-zombie-fungus-takes-over-ants-bodies-to-control-their-minds/545864/
Leaders in the church should be more concerned about the use of power than the use of porn. When they resort to worldly methods to gain compliance they become healers with dirty fingers.
A person who seeks to mold the behavior of others will always come under the sway of Satan. I’m not saying we shouldn’t want justice to be done. That desire is part of the divine image in us. Efforts to achieve it through interpersonal control become snake venom in our veins. They stroke our egos while blinding us to our faults. We confuse our personal ambition to be significant for concern for the “right.” Here’s what Jesus’ brother, James, had to say about the justice warriors in his church:
Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.
(James 3:13-15 NIV)
“I’ve got a lot of good ideas, but nobody listens because I’m not in the right clique.”
“I guess it’s about who you know, huh?”
“Why should we listen to _____? I’ve never heard him say anything remotely impressive.”
“They don’t want me in leadership because they know I’ll shake things up.”
We might not think James’ warning applies to us because we think we’re free from “envy and selfish ambition.” But what was the surface-level ambition of the people he was warning? Look at the next three verses:
For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.
(James 3:16-18 NIV)
Notice what James promises them at the end of this section – “a harvest of righteousness (actually “justice” in Greek).” James wrote this letter to Christians who wanted to apply their faith toward making their society fairer. They wanted to reap a harvest of justice, but we can’t plant justice in other people. That is, we can’t convince them they’re being unjust. Even if we can force them to behave justly, they will believe they’ve been treated unfairly and so injustice perpetuates. The only way to harvest justice is by planting peace. That will require us to retain a posture of humility even as we’re being treated unfairly. It’s a divesting of power back into the hands of God where it belongs. Christians don’t fight for justice because they become corrupt in the process. Instead, we absorb injustice in pursuit of peace trusting that justice will spring forth.
The Satanic voice doesn’t say, “Do evil,” but “How can you do nothing when everything is so bad?”
That was the voice Jesus heard in the mouth of his own dear disciple Peter:
From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”
Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
(Matthew 16:21-23 NIV)
Jesus came to save us from the corrupt society by setting us free from the elementary principles of the world. He certainly wouldn’t have resorted to using them to make people do the right thing. In dying, Jesus divested himself of all human power. By ascending to heaven, he rules above the elementary principles of this fallen world. Hear Jesus’ words as quoted by John:
“They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.”
(John 17:16-19 NIV)
When Jesus said he was going to sanctify himself, he meant that he would be set apart from this world. From heaven, he rules over the hearts and minds of each subject. As his subjects on earth, we reject the worldly principles and so are set apart as well. Christ’s disciples must never enslave one another under the elementary principles of the world because Christ has set his people free from them.
Leaders must reject the temptation to resort to them for the “greater good.” Charisma can’t appear among the qualifications for leadership, not even the unwritten ones. Surely our insistence on “hip and cool” or “relevant” does a disservice to him of whom it was written:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
(Isaiah 53:2b NIV)
People want to be accepted by competent and attractive leaders. That’s just the way of the world. You can build a church that way and it will probably become large. But it won’t represent the gospel of Christ and it won’t be predicated on faith. Worldly methods work, but they corrupt those who use them. No wonder scandal emerges from within so many megachurches and international ministries.
It seems to me the avoidance of these methods is at least part of what James meant when he said that pure religion includes keeping oneself unspotted from the world. It’s surely no coincidence that he goes on to forbid interpersonal favoritism beginning in the very next verse.
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
(James 1:27-2:4 NIV)
It’s my hope that anyone who attempts to employ the elementary principles in a church setting would come under strong conviction or that those under their leadership would offer them a loving rebuke.
Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience demonstrated, “the capacity for man to abandon his humanity…into the larger institutional structures.” In other words, when we must be free or be evil. So, Christ died to set us free.
In our previous episode, we discussed the role of law as both a facilitator of the elementary principles of the world and as a limiter of their potential for harm. This week, we’ll consider what happens when the elementary principles come under the control of wicked people.
I recently read about how Johnson and Johnson created a dummy company to absorb losses from a class action suit related to asbestos in their talcum powder products. Once that company was formed it filed chapter 11 bankruptcy nullifying the hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments against Johnson and Johnson. Consequently, thousands of women suffering from ovarian cancer and mesothelioma received zero compensation from the company. This whole maneuver was entirely legal.
Laws exist because people are inherently corrupt and yet it’s people who write, interpret and enforce laws. The best any legal system can do is stop more corruption than it facilitates. Even a law given by God becomes corrupt through human handling. Matthew 23 depicts Jesus barraging the teachers of the Mosaic law with a series of indictments. We saw the one about their being “whitewashed walls” earlier. Here’s another one:
“Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.’ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?”
(Matthew 23:16-17 NIV)
Why would someone stipulate which oaths are binding and which are not? I can think of no other reason than to deceive someone into thinking you’re dealing with them honestly when you’re not. So, the teachers of God’s law used it to sanction fraud. Those who learned this doctrine would not only have continued shady dealings but done so under the presumption of divine endorsement. How much harder would it have been to call such a person to repentance? Back to the example of Johnson and Johnson, how many of those executives salved their conscience with the justification that their actions were legal?
Authority and conformity are the means to power and the pursuit of power tends to corrupt. Proud people think they know best, and they come to feel entitled and/or compelled to bring their inferiors in line. Once they’ve begun to pursue power, they find the path littered with moral compromise. By the time they can influence the actions of other people they’ve become masters of coercion and manipulation. Power and corruption have correlated throughout human history.
Paul confessed that in his pre-converted life he’d served human authority and cultural conformity under the guise of religion. Rather than falling in behind God’s Messiah, he became his enemy. His own recap bears repeating here:
For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.
(Galatians 1:13-14 NIV)
I imagine Saul of Tarsus as he fasted for three days in Damascus[ii] asking, “How did this happen?” According to Galatians 1, his answer emerged, “Because I was seeking to please people. Never again!”
If a deeply pious, conscientious Jew like Saul of Tarsus was capable of mass murder, where does that leave the rest of us? Conformists and rule-followers will conscientiously exterminate their fellow humans under the right circumstances. When laws are civil and society polite, we often fail to recognize our own moral bankruptcy. We retweet a virtuous-sounding platitude and pat ourselves on the back. We work hard, pay our taxes, and keep to ourselves, so we celebrate our status as societies contributing members. None of these actions say one word in favor of our real moral fiber. All that is needed for evil to triumph is for evil to move slowly or for it to appear as the only solution in a time of crisis. Once evil has passed into law it will quickly become a necessary evil and almost everyone will participate.
We must be free to become good. When we do good under external influence, it no longer counts as good. The person who does good under external influence will just as easily do evil under the same master.
I’ve quoted a lot of Bible verses to make my case here, but the moral hazards of serving the elementary principles are plain to the observant eye. About the transition in his subjects from moral individuals to agents of evil Stanley Milgram notes:
Specifically, the person entering an authority system no longer views himself as acting out of his own purposes but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person.[iii]
Milgram goes on to term this transition, “the agentic shift.” He goes on to discuss its moral implications:
The most far-reaching consequence of the agentic shift is that a man feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear but acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by the authority.[iv]
In his epilogue to the book, Milgram allows himself a philosophical analysis of his findings. His words speak poignantly of the need for each person to be set free from the elementary principles of the world:
Men do become angry; they do act hatefully and explode in a rage against others. But not here. Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into the larger institutional structures.
This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.
What is the limit of such obedience? At many points we attempted to establish a boundary. Cries from the victim were inserted; they were not good enough. The victim claimed heart trouble; subject still shocked him on command. The victim pleaded to be let free, and his answers no longer registered on the signal box; subjects continued to shock him.
The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or – more specifically – the kind of character produced in American democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority.[v]
Milgram, as disturbed as he was by his findings, offers no solutions in his book. His work only served to raise an alarm that to my knowledge has yet to be heeded in any way.[vi] Nearly 2000 years before Milgram, Saul of Tarsus saw this capacity for brutality in himself. He became aghast at it and at himself in the blinding light of Jesus. He knew he needed to be saved and he knew exactly what from.
Milgram’s findings and Saul’s reveal the destructive ramifications of living under the elementary principles of the world. Saul’s example further demonstrates the enslaving and corrupting potential of religious belief. People already abdicate their humanity to authority and conformity, but those effects become more pronounced when the supposed authority is divine, and conformity is to a holy norm. I think the apostle Paul would have wholeheartedly agreed with this quote from the late Christopher Hitchens:
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.[vii]
Mr. Hitchens’s words point more clearly to the human need for salvation than any I’ve heard from most pulpits on Sunday morning. Hitchens blamed religion for what Milgram demonstrated to arise from human nature. No doubt religion often intensifies those corrupting influences. But that observation proves the human inability to escape the corrupt society even through our loftiest pursuits.
[i] Article on Johnson and Johnson lawsuit.
[ii] Paul’s conversion story from Acts 9:1-19
[iii] Milgram p.133
[iv] IBID p.145-146
[v] Excerpts from Milgram p.188-189
[vi] A similar study in 2009 confirmed Milgram’s findings
[vii] God is Not Great
The elementary principles of the world are disarmed and dangerous. Jesus disarmed them by nullifying the law and with it rule-based living. Even though this is so, we must beware of them since we tend to resort to them again.
The elementary principles of the world don’t need to be codified to operate, but rules facilitate their reign. Laws define the extent to which authorities can control the actions of the citizens under their purview. Laws facilitate the operation of authority by prescribing governmental power over the citizens. For instance, a person driving over the posted speed limit will have a ready answer for the traffic cop’s, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” Laws governing every detail of this type of interaction reduce the need for force in enforcement. Laws facilitate the operation of authority, but they also limit it. Police officers, judges, representatives, and even the president are all subject to the laws in the United States. We need authority, but it can easily become oppressive, so legal codes attempt to mitigate oppression while retaining the social order.
Rules also streamline the process of conformity. Institutions produce bylaws and policy guides to prescribe acceptable behavior for their participants. POA covenants detail cultural conformity regarding the appearance of individual property within a neighborhood. Employers produce handbooks and work to produce a corporate culture that reflects their brand. I’ve lived most of my life in the shadow of the Walmart home office and I’ve seen firsthand the impact of insisting that everyone in management refers to employees as “associates.” People naturally conform to unspoken norms but when they do get spoken in the form of rules, it helps everyone conform more quickly.
Religions prescribe taboos and rituals for their adherents. These prescriptions can take the form of laws in theocratic societies, or they can be enforced by social censure in more secular ones. The Hebrew scriptures outline civil and cultic requirements in tedious detail. These instructions informed jurisprudence even under a monarchial rule which helped Israel maintain a level of equality and justice for all its people. Ultimate civil authority resided with the Mosaic code. The cultic elements such as in Leviticus produced a vivid cultural salience among Jewish society. The law, as Paul called it, helped the Jews remain a distinct people even through centuries as a dispersed nation.
Rules are so ubiquitous in human society that we might fail to recognize the elementary principles hiding behind them. In our highly litigious and individualistic society, we might come to assume that we obey the law simply because we don’t want to go to jail. Or we might tell ourselves that we obey the policy manual at work just because we don’t want to get fired. Our relationship with rules could make us miss the fact that we obey laws that we could safely ignore or that we buy in to the company line when the boss isn’t around. If Paul is right that rules serve these elementary principles of the world, then the fact that we continually produce rules is proof positive that we live under the sway of invisible social forces.
If rules merely represent the dominion of the elementary principles of the world and yet we’re supposed to be free of them, then we must be free from rules as well. Remember that in Galatians 4:1-3 Paul called the elementary principles of the world a guardian over humankind until the coming of God’s Son. A few verses earlier, he speaks of the Mosaic law as guardian over the nation of Israel “until faith came.” Later in Galatians 4, he warns these Gentile converts that submitting to the law would be a return to subservience to the elementary principles of the world. In chapter 5, he exhorts them to remain in freedom by not submitting to the requirements written in the Old Testament. In other words, rule-keeping is a reversal of the gospel of Christ.
In Colossians, Paul described religious rules as weapons used by the elementary principles of the world to oppress God’s people:
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
(Colossians 2:13-15 NIV)
Since Jesus has “disarmed the powers and authorities,” we mustn’t allow them to influence our actions. As Paul went on to write,
If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!” (which all refer to things destined to perish with use)—in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?
(Colossians 2:20-22 NASB)
Freedom from external pressures and enticements is mandatory to the Christian because Christ died to set us free from the elementary principles of the world. But if these basic principles are essentially benign and if laws aim at keeping them that way, what need could there be for such radical freedom? Why would God pay such an awful cost to free us from our guardian?
We can’t stay under the guardian because God wants grown children. Rules can be comfortable. Religious people often swing towards legalism because they’re looking for structure. They want to know what they should do without having to go through the pain of decision-making. In other words, they want to be treated like children. Unfortunately, such people never develop an authentic ethic beyond, “Do what you’re told.” That might work for small children, but it surely shouldn’t characterize God’s full-grown image bearers.
The elementary principles of the world and the rules they wield work to keep humankind from facing the self-destructive consequences of their own defiance. Their proper role is to restrain human wickedness. According to Paul:
We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers…
(1 Timothy 1:8-9 NIV)
Laws exist to constrain unrighteous people. The application of laws to righteous people is a misuse. It suggests to them that they would do such things if unconstrained and they come to believe it. They become moral infants afraid of their own character. When they encounter the least bit of freedom, they flee to the familiar folds of their nanny’s apron. There, they are once again absolved of tension to make good decisions. This tendency can affect even people we consider very spiritual.
In Galatians 2 Paul recounts a time he had to rebuke the apostle Peter in front of the whole church.[i] It seems that Peter had been eating with Gentiles in Antioch but shunned them after other Jewish believers arrived from Jerusalem. We’re told that Peter’s hypocrisy was due to fear of this Jewish contingent. I assume it regarded the Jewish practice of avoiding ceremonial defilement which would always be present at Gentile feasts. It seems the defilements might have gone beyond ceremonial, though. Paul seems to suggest that Peter may have compromised his morals in some way at one of these Gentile banquets:
“But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.
(Galatians 2:17-18 NIV)
As an observant Palestinian Jew, Peter could rest assured in his personal performance of the law. However, that performance owed greatly to living in an observant society. The real test of Peter’s character would come while surrounded entirely by pagans with their raucous indulgence and casual inter-sex interactions. Did Peter get drunk? Was he acting a bit too familiar with one of the female dinner guests? Whatever he’d done, he felt ashamed enough to cease eating with Gentiles when he came under Jewish scrutiny. Maybe he was afraid to scandalize the name of Christ through his own actions. Paul puts that concern to rest by saying, “Hey, if you messed up, that’s on you.” Then he tells Peter that the real transgression is to build again the law-driven religion which kept Jews and Gentiles apart.
I relay all of this to point out that only those who come out from behind authoritarian religion can discover and develop their true moral core. Children need directives and supervision, but the application of those same controls on adults infantilizes them. Attempts to shelter young adults in the home, youth group, and Christian college retard their moral/spiritual development. In many cases, they come to resent the authority over them and rebel (only to find themselves in the custody of conformity). If they don’t rebel, they will become morally hollow puppets of their church. Such religion produces cowardly conformists. We must be free to become truly conformed to the image of Christ through and through.
Servants of the basic principles not only lack moral fiber, but they grow an immoral alter ego behind the veneer of compliance. Laws and social norms can only address actions. This brings the focus entirely on behaviors and especially the ones which signal insider status with the group. I’ve seen whole churches of people who would never use an instrument on Sunday morning but who were secretly having affairs even with each other.
Jesus called down this curse on the hypocrites of his day:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”
(Matthew 23:27-28 NIV)
I’ve been around long enough to see this illustration as an immutable spiritual law. Wherever you find a shiny behavioral veneer, you can be assured of moral rot hiding just under the surface.
The best that people will become under the elementary principles of the world is outwardly obedient. The worst they’ll become is moral deviants hiding from public scrutiny. We don’t celebrate “yes men,” or conformists. And every kind of hypocrite is universally disdained. We must be free from external control if we are to have any hope of genuine moral development.
Maybe you’re thinking of a good legalist you knew. I’d suggest that you probably didn’t really know them, but let’s pretend you did. Even if a rule-driven person comes to obey from the heart, their morality will always be in question. For instance, suppose they remain faithful to their spouse in thought, word, and deed their entire life. Will that faithfulness be due to a genuine love for their spouse or will it be merely enlightened self-interest for fear of divine retribution? Perhaps they could say that it was both, but wouldn’t that dilute the pure love their spouse would prefer to receive?
We need authority and conformity to keep society on the rails, but we must also rise above the dynamics of control to escape our corrupt generation.
In our previous discussion in this series we said that to qualify as the power of God to save, we must face a clear and present danger. These dynamics of control which the apostle Paul called, “the elementary principles of the world,” are part of that clear and present danger.
These can be seen in the introduction to Paul’s freedom polemic, the book of Galatians:
Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead…
(Galatians 1:1 NIV)
Two things strike me as odd. First, he begins by telling his recipients who he doesn’t represent before telling them who he does. Simply telling them he was an apostle of Jesus Christ, as he does in other letters, would have been plenty to establish his bona fides. Second, he refers to human influence twice – first in the plural, “men,” and then in the singular, “a man.” This sounds uncharacteristically redundant.
Could I suggest that these anomalies indicate the Galatians’ need to be reminded that the gospel saves from society? It might seem implicit that entering the service of God would preclude allegiance to humans, but not everyone connects those dots. Sometimes they need to be explicitly told we must renounce human influence before coming under Christ’s. Not only must they be told to renounce human influence, but the types of influence must be specified lest they think they can straddle the fence. Paul wasn’t being redundant in saying that his apostleship wasn’t from men or a man. He was disassociating himself from both types of human influence – from people as a conforming collective and from any authoritative individual. His apostleship was free from the two principles of interpersonal control – conformity and obedience.
In analyzing the results of his groundbreaking study on obedience to authority, Stanley Milgram[i] named these two principles as the means of interpersonal control. He wrote, “Obedience and conformity both refer to the abdication of initiative to an external source.”[ii]While Milgram studied the influence of authority, his analysis names conformity as a second influence. Milgram’s observations seem to indicate that authority and conforming pressure are empirically recognizable forces in society.
While distinct, these two principles apply continuous pressure in tandem. According to Milgram:
“Conformity”…(means) the action of a subject when he goes along with the peers, people of his own status, who have no special right to direct his behavior. “Obedience” will be restricted to the action of subject who complies with authority. Consider a recruit who enters military service. He scrupulously carries out the orders of his superiors. At the same time, he adopts the habits, routines, and language of his peers. The former represents obedience and the latter, conformity.”[iii]
Dr. Milgram also notes that sometimes conformity and authority oppose one another such as in cases of nonviolent civil disobedience or prison riots.[iv] Group dynamics might help a person resist unjust authority but that doesn’t mean the person becomes free. They’ve just come under new management since conformity to a group requires that individuals abdicate “initiative to an external source.” The pressure to conform can be just as oppressive as a jack-booted authority, but those in its grip often fail to recognize their enslavement. According to Milgram, “Subjects deny conformity and embrace obedience as the explanation of their behavior.”[v] Authority and conformity work together to bring people under the influence of the corrupt society even in their defiance.
For us to be saved from a corrupt society, we must be free from all forms of external control. So, before even mentioning to the Galatians the name of Jesus Christ, Paul dissociated his apostleship from cultural conformity and human authority. He couldn’t represent human interests because his gospel set him free from them. Because of this, his autobiography contains an autopsy of a life under the sway of authority and conformity. Let’s analyze a short description of his pre-converted life, line by line:
Though Paul had been extremely religious and conscientious, his true allegiance was to his society. If you think I’m reading into this description, consider the thesis of his previous life: “If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10b NIV emphasis mine)
I used to read this sentence as an axiom, “He who would seek to please people cannot be a servant of Christ.” That’s probably true, but it’s not Paul’s intention here. He’s not speaking theoretically. He’s saying that he had continuously lived for the pleasure of other people until he met Christ on the Damascus Road. His “Judaism” was just another manifestation of the corrupt society. Religion can’t provide a refuge from the way of the world since religious systems just produce alternative hierarchies and subcultures.
In a post-religious world, some have attempted to escape society’s oppression through political ideologies. Anarchism has endured despite its seemingly fanciful ideas and often violent expressions. Over the past few years, I’ve had several interactions with thoughtful anarchists. It seems there may be more anarchists than ever in the US.[vi] Anarchism persists because it correctly diagnoses a major cause of perennial oppression. According to one modern anarchist website:
The political State exists to uphold a class-divided and settler-colonial society. We believe that a better world can be created in its place, organized from the ground up, where power is spread out horizontally, with human labor going towards human needs, not profit. We act in the spirit of autonomy, mutual aid, and direct action. We have no allegiance to representational, Statist politics.[vii]
Anarchists aren’t wrong about the net result of political states. They always eventually uphold oppression. Unfortunately, revolutions have always empowered new oppressive regimes. Since there’s never been a successful anarchic state or even community for that matter, I’m not optimistic about their chances.
Here’s the dilemma: we need to be saved from interpersonal control, but without it we must either live in isolation or trust others to always behave unselfishly. Milgram, who attributed the holocaust to obedience, wrote:
Submission to authority is a powerful and prepotent condition in man. Why is this so?
Let us begin our analysis by noting that men are not solitary but function within hierarchical structures. In birds, amphibians, and mammals we find dominance structures, and in human beings, structures of authority mediated by symbols rather than direct contests of physical strength. The formation of hierarchically organized groupings lends enormous advantage to those so organized in coping wit dangers of the physical environment, threats posed by competing species, and potential disruption from within.[viii]
So, the forces which threaten our souls exist to preserve our bodies. Authority maintains order and order maximizes our collective efficiency. But authority alone can’t maintain order since that would require enforcers to continuously supervise each person as well as other enforcers to supervise those enforcers and so on. Societies can’t function on authority alone so conforming pressures further encourage individuals to behave according to established norms. Countries that rely heavily on honor and shame don’t tend to be as litigious as those which are more individualistic. We might say that authority and conformity operate along a continuum to ensure full control of the individual by the group.
While Paul’s gospel called for liberation from them, he also lauded them. Consider this advice he gave the Roman church:
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.
(Romans 12:17-18; 13:4-5 NIV)
Paul calls on his fellow Christians to carefully conform to their society’s idea of praiseworthy behavior. Then he tells them to obey the pagan authorities for God’s sake. God ordained authority and conformity to keep society on the rails. In the fall narrative from Genesis 3, the man and his wife naturally feel shame (a conforming pressure) over their rebellion. In proclaiming his curse on the woman, he called forth the principle of authoritarian control: “And you will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16b NLT)
These dynamics of control entered the world early and ubiquitously operate within all human interactions. They are inherent to the fallen human condition and cannot be avoided so long as we live in a fallen world. They are essential to mitigate individual evil. These are what Paul referred to as “the elementary principles of the world.”[ix]
So far, we’ve said that the gospel saves us from the dynamics of control. We’ve also said that those same dynamics keep society from imploding under the collective demands of every individual. These ideas may seem contradictory, so Paul gives an illustration of something that is both benign and controlling:
I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.
(Galatians 4:1-3 ESV)
Paul describes the “elementary principles of the world” as household servants employed to train and supervise wealthy children until they come of age.
This phrase which is translated from three Greek words has caused a lot of debate among New Testament scholars. It has been thought to describe angelic powers. The New International Version for example translates it as “elemental spiritual forces of the world.” This understanding however doesn’t seem to consider the overall context of the Galatian letter or of Pauline salvation doctrine. Until this point in the Galatian letter, Paul has not described some sort of esoteric threat but has dealt at length with the threat of human authority and social pressure. It seems more in line with Paul’s gospel to understand the elementary principles of the world as something akin to the laws of human interaction. To better understand this phrase and its significance to the gospel, I will unpack its constituent words individually.
There are several words in Greek that refer to some aspect of the world. The one used here originally meant “order.” In the 6th century before Christ a philosopher named Heraclitus began using it to refer to the world. That usage stuck and was employed by the writers of the New Testament. While this word is often translated as “world” it doesn’t necessarily refer to the planet or to the natural universe but to the social order. We use the word “world” similarly when we talk about someone being worldly or someone following the way of the world.
In the prevailing thought of the New Testament era, nature and human nature were somewhat enmeshed. For instance, Heraclitus used observances about nature to infer advice on how human beings ought to conduct themselves as individuals and within society. To the ancients, there was a way of conducting oneself that aligned with pre-existing laws just as water evaporates and stars appear at prescribed intervals.
“Elementary principles” is a translation of one Greek word which literally means, “basics” or “fundamentals.” The insertion of “principles” can be readily inferred even in English. When we encourage someone to “stick to basics” we mean they should avoid sophisticated methods for a proven set of best practices. We might, then, think of the elementary principles of the world as the givens or constants upon which all other human interactions are based – a kind of interpersonal inertia.
Even though they are benign in and of themselves they ultimately become the vehicle for interpersonal control. This threat doesn’t need to be identified or even acknowledged to impact individuals. Just like inertia the elementary principles of the world affect every person whether they understand them or not. Neither do these laws need to be enforced because they come with their own set of consequences.
Paul curiously describes the elementary principles of the world in Galatians chapter 4 as having enslaved the pagan Galatians as well as the kosher Jews. For the Galatians to attempt to keep the Torah would be a return to bondage under the same elementary principles of the world even though they had come to believe in Yahweh. Consider the following passage:
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more?
(Galatians 4:8-9 ESV)
I’d like to notice a couple of things about this passage. First, it seems to preclude the interpretation taken by the NIV translators that the elementary principles of the world are spiritual entities. It may have been that those who were outside of Israel were subject to spiritual forces or demonic powers. However, it doesn’t seem that observant Jews would have been subject to the exact same powers.
Whatever the elementary principles of the world are, both Jews and gentiles were subject to them. This would make sense because these principles are fundamental to all social interaction.
Like physical laws, the elementary principles of the world carry their own consequences and do not need to be enforced. The principle of inertia cannot be violated even if all the speed limit laws were immediately repealed. I remember driving an RV on a two-lane highway in East Texas a couple of years ago. The speed limit was 70 mph, but this road was dotted with driveways and blind intersections. I could just see myself summiting a blind hill to encounter a vehicle that had just pulled onto the highway. I could almost hear the shattering of glass and the crunching of metal. It was the first time in my life that I chose to drive under the speed limit. At that moment I was no longer following the laws legislated by the state of Texas but the law of inertia. The penalty for violating that law was way too high for me to risk paying. The same can be said for the elementary principles of the world.
The Bible book of Judges ends with two horrific vignettes. In the first, armed men from one of the Israelite tribes rob a fellow Jew and then murder all the inhabitants of a peaceful city. The second vignette descends even further as a man from another Israelite tribe attempt to rape a traveling member of the priestly tribe almost exactly as the citizens of Sodom had with the angelic visitors to Lot’s house. From here the story digresses further into rape, murder, dismemberment, genocide, and more rape. The book of Judges closes with this commentary, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25 ESV)
Like modern anarchists, we might want to shed human authority, but the outcome will be the same. The elementary principles of the world can’t be violated without consequence to the individual and society. The call to defund the police, for example, doesn’t need to be refuted. It’s self-defeating because we need authority to make society work.
While they may not admit it to themselves, most people know this to be true and they wouldn’t want it any other way. In fact, we’re so accustomed to living under the elementary principles of the world that we default to them when we want to get something done. Churches, though keepers of the liberating message, often insist upon believers signing covenants that stipulate obedience and conformity as requirements for membership. Practical-minded church leaders know that grace might get someone into heaven, but you need an obligation to get them to serve in the nursery. On the other side of the aisle, progressives eagerly assassinate the character of those who fail to sufficiently advocate their own ideology. Most people don’t like being controlled but it’s a price they happily pay to ensure others will fall in line.
[i] https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
[ii] Obedience to Authority, p. 114
[iii] IBID p. 113
[iv] IBID
[v] IBID p. 115
[vi] https://www.csis.org/blogs/examining-extremism/examining-extremism-us-militant-anarchists
[vii] https://itsgoingdown.org/about/
[viii] Obedience to Authority, p. 123-124
[ix] Galatians 4:3; Colossians 2:20 NASB
The threat of hell isn’t something clear or present. The offer of personal improvement doesn’t offer salvation so much as mitigation. Paul’s gospel offers rescue from a clear and present danger which is the corrupt society in which we live.
In Romans 1:16, Paul called the gospel “the power of God for salvation.” Talk about a product! If word got out that the church dispenses God’s power our buildings would overflow, and our ministers would never have a moment’s peace. That was the kind of response Jesus and the apostles encountered. Now we feel like we need to bribe people to listen. What has changed? Many factors have contributed to this cultural moment, but if we preach the same gospel Paul did then God’s power could surely overcome them. But we don’t preach the same gospel.
In this section I will examine the gospel as God’s power to save. I hope that a recovery of this potent message will embolden the church and disrupt the systems of this world.
Before launching into an exploration of gospel as God’s saving power, we should probably all start on the same footing. I’ve found that definitions of the word, “gospel,” differ even among biblically literate Christians. So, before we go further into what the gospel does, I’d like to state what I understand the gospel to be.
I use the word, “gospel,” to mean “the announcement[i] about Jesus Christ crucified, raised to life and reigning at God’s right hand until he returns to restore creation.” This simple list outlines the shape of the gospel. The message is articulated in various configurations throughout the New Testament from the simple, “Jesus Christ and him crucified” in 1 Corinthians 2:2 to the extended sermons in the book of Acts.[1] These versions emphasize and/or explain certain elements of the gospel, but the core message remains consistent throughout.
This simple message is God’s power to save. To understand and appreciate that truth, we’ll need to consider what the gospel saves us from, what it saves us for, and how it achieves this salvation.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life[fn] was a descendant of David, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power[fn] by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.
(Romans 1:1-4)
And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.[fn] 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
(1 Cor. 2:1-2)
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[fn]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
(1 Cor. 15:3-4)
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
(Gal. 1:3-4)
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel, 9 for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained.
(2 Tim. 2:8-9)
I walked the aisle of First Baptist Church when I was seven years old. Back in the ’70s, altar calls were essential at least in the Baptist tradition. The pastor would preach about the antichrist, the rapture, tribulation, and hellfire in explicit detail almost every week. Eventually, it seemed harder to remain at my pew than to respond to the invitation. On that front pew, I prayed the prayer and later was baptized. Nothing really changed but I didn’t expect it to. I was only seven after all. I just wanted to be assured that I would escape the tribulation and eventually hell.
That message of “turn or burn” left no ambiguity about what Jesus could save us from, but it doesn’t work anymore. After the fall of Soviet communism, the threat of imminent rapture and tribulation fizzled out. And today’s more cynical audiences wonder why they should fear hell without any indication that it exists. With all their ready access to a cache of worldview alternatives, they wonder whether any god who would use such threats could even be worthy of worship. I wonder whether they have a point.
I’m not saying we should tailor the gospel to accommodate modern sensibilities, but warnings of impending doom aren’t just unpopular, they’re inadequate. Warnings of imminent doom expire. Warnings of ultimate doom fall flat. Neither threat requires divine power to avert – especially since it is God who is said to bring about these trials. Couldn’t he just change his mind? What if I sent you a letter stating:
Dear [Your Name]
Your actions have made me violently angry. In fact, I was resolved to come to your house and shoot you dead, but I shot my son instead. You are officially forgiven. You’re welcome.
I now expect you to memorialize my son. If you fail to do this, I will become even more angry and come to kill you and your family.
Love,
Me
Would this letter inspire you to worship me, or would it make you think I’m unhinged? Would you be grateful for the “salvation” I’m offering you at such great cost to me? Or maybe you would think that my son died for nothing since I could have just controlled myself and let whatever offense it was pass. I doubt that you would think I had in any way saved you. If our gospel only offers amnesty from God’s definitive angry outburst, it doesn’t save at all. At least not in any way we can authentically appreciate.
I think somewhere in the back of their minds, most Christians struggle with this difficulty themselves. I think it’s why we don’t evangelize more. We’re secretly ashamed of the gospel.
But Paul said that he was eager to preach everywhere because the gospel is God’s power to save. Maybe we chalk his enthusiasm up to naivete on his part and/or on the part of his hearers. But that’s just naïve on our part. His audiences were as incredulous as ours.[ii] And he didn’t even have the benefit of representing an established religion. He was walking around making claims that he knew sounded foolish.[iii] If anything, Paul had more reason for timidity than we do. The difference wasn’t circumstances but in the message he preached. We don’t have Paul’s boldness because we don’t know what the gospel saves people from.
A person might claim that a charm has the power to ward off fairies, but until fairies become an overt threat that claim will ring hollow. The common understanding of salvation as divine forgiveness which rescues people from hell requires no more power and carries no more weight than fairy’s bane. A sinner will need God’s mercy to find forgiveness but not his power. Salvation must be from present circumstances that are not caused directly by God.
Further, that clear and present danger must be insurmountable by human efforts. In recent years popular preachers have veered away peddling pie in the sky to “have your cake and eat it too” pitches. Joel Osteen’s breakout best seller, Your Best Life Now both typifies this approach. The book has obviously been well received having sold over 8 million copies. A quick look at five-star reviews on Amazon would suggest that it has had a positive impact on its readers. The gospel according to Joel Osteen seems to alleviate some suffering in the present, but it doesn’t rise to Paul’s standard since other self-help books seem to provide similar positive benefit without reliance on God. For instance, Tony Robbins’ ironically named book, Unlimited Power, has more positive ratings and equally if not more impressive reviews on Amazon. Motivating people and making them feel better hardly calls for supernatural intervention.
To recap, if the gospel is indeed God’s power to save, then whatever we’re saved from can’t be something God will do to us since he could simply choose not to do it. It also must be recognizable here and now since rescue from an imperceptible or eventual peril can’t be verified. Finally, the painful circumstance or existential threat must require divine intervention to overcome.
Sound fair?
Could the authors of the New Testament conceive of a threat that meets all three of these criteria?
They could and they did.
The very first appeal for people to “get saved” included the answer to “from what?”
With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”
(Acts 2:40 NIV)
Peter called on those observant Jews gathered to celebrate Pentecost to be saved from their corrupt society. You might wonder why they didn’t object to his indictment not only on them but on their people. Look a little up the page:
“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”
(Acts 2:36 NIV)
Was their generation corrupt? Only if you count crucifying the Son of God a sign of corruption. These pious Jews were probably like most religious people. They thought of themselves as a moral cut above irreligious people. Yet when confronted with innocence personified, they conspired with their pagan occupiers to have him executed.
This concept of the corrupt generation wasn’t new with Peter. Moses sang a song about it in Deuteronomy 32:5, “They are corrupt and not his children; to their shame they are a warped and crooked generation.”
According to Scripture, God wanted Moses to teach the song recorded in Deuteronomy 32 to Israel as a safeguard against falling away. This line mentions a two-fold tendency of the Israelites as well as of all humankind – “they are corrupt” and “they are a warped and crooked generation.” Peter compressed the two ideas into one in his appeal, but the concept remains the same. His hearers needed to be saved from the personal disintegration (corruption) that they had contracted from their society. They also needed to be liberated from its coercive and manipulative (warping and twisting) influence.
Sin is contagious. We catch it from others and spread it in turn. As this cycle continues, corruption eventually overtakes humanity until there’s nothing left to save. That’s what happened in Noah’s day.
Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.
(Genesis 6:11-13 NIV)
Yes, God does judge humankind and a cataclysm is coming. But it’s coming on a corrupt generation which is what we need to be saved from. This was true for Noah and the audience in Acts 2 and for us.
Consider this excerpt from 1 Peter 3:20-21:
God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God (NIV)
Wait. Wasn’t the water what Noah needed saving from? I thought it was the ark that saved Noah from the water. Somehow, I always thought baptism was like the ark, but that’s not what Peter said. Water saved Noah and his family from their corrupt generation. In Acts 2, Peter appealed to his hearers to make a public break with the corrupted norms of their old society through the waters of baptism.
In the story of Noah, we see the imperative to be saved from our corrupt generation. That is, we need to get free from the sinful attitudes and habits which pollute our inner selves. But we also need to get free from our corrupt generation. That is, the depersonalizing pressures exerted on us from without by our society.
When we speak of “salvation” we sometimes use the word, “redemption.” This word literally means “to buy back.” It speaks to liberation, to being purchased out of slavery. The word, “redeem,” debuts in the Bible in Exodus 6 with God speaking to Moses:
“Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
(Exodus 6:6-7 NIV)
The Egyptians did have a corrupting influence on Israel, but here God’s primary concern is for their freedom. To be free moral agents, people must be free. Where one person controls another, the former arrogates himself to godhood while the latter becomes objectified. In bringing judgment on Egypt, God delivered Israel not from their own susceptibility to sin but from the conforming influence of other people.
Not coincidentally, their liberation from Egypt went through water at the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus 14 marked their last encounter with the power of Pharaoh. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul calls this crossing a “baptism.”
For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
1 Cor. 10:1-2 NIV
This was again salvation from a corrupt society, but this time it wasn’t so much from the corruption as from the society itself. Salvation for Israel was from the oppressive control of human overlords.
In both the case of Noah and that of the Exodus, the faithful were saved from a corrupt society. But neither of these salvations were final. After the flood, Noah and his family began immediately to corrupt one another.[iv] Several generations after Israel enters the promised land they will demand to be ruled by a human king.[v] God acted powerfully to save Noah from his corrupt society and to save Israel from their corrupt society, but these salvations didn’t stick. According to Paul, the gospel of Christ isn’t just the story about how God powerfully saved people; it is God’s power to save.
[i] As nearly as we can tell, the word euangelion referred to the announcement sent through the empire that a new emperor had ascended the throne in Rome.
[ii] Acts 17 and 1 Corinthians 1 for how the gospel was received by that society.
[iii] 1 Corinthians 1:18-23
[iv] Genesis 9:18-25 contains the strange story of Noah’s getting drunk and Canaan viewing his father naked.
[v] 1 Samuel 8:4-20
The timeshare relies on intensive marketing machinery to sell what they’re offering. That fact alone should alert consumers that timeshares aren’t a good deal. Churches for many years have used similar tactics to get people to participate in weekly 90-minute presentations aimed at pulling people into a lifetime commitment. With instant access to a world of ideas provided by mobile devices, the Christian message is facing unprecedented competition in the market. And it’s falling behind. In “A Christianity That Sells Itself,” the Three Failed Pastors examine these dynamics and compare them with the way the gospel first spread.
You’ve heard of bargain hunters? My wife is a bargain predator. The right deal awakens in her a primal drive to pounce. This instinct used to make her an easy mark for timeshare telemarketers. That offer of free getaway looked and smelled like kippered herring left unattended in the forest. Even after getting snared in multiple high-pressure sales presentations, she’d still take the bait.
It seemed worth it to her since I always kept us from getting fleeced in the end, but I hated sitting through all of that. Even though I knew it was a scam I still felt the pressure to reciprocate for something received. No matter how slimy the salesperson was, I couldn’t help but regret taking their time. I tend to be a pleaser and I hated all ninety minutes of those presentations.
One time, the pressure got to be too much, and I went on the offensive. About an hour into the presentation, I went into a rant about how everything in their lair was designed to manipulate people into buying. Finally, I told the saleslady, “If this was worth having you wouldn’t have to do all of this to get people to buy it.”
I’ve read how people forced to mistreat others often salve their guilt by blaming their victims. I’m not saying that our sales associate was innocent, but my comments were more for my benefit than hers. Even so, I stand by what I said.
As I reflect on our experience with timeshare sales pitches, I wonder whether unbelievers see the Christian faith in much the same way. Do all the programs and perks offered by American churches suggest a deficiency in the faith? Could we envision a church plant succeeding by simply preaching Jesus sans concert-quality music and professional children’s programming? Just last night a local church held an event in a local park that advertised a free food truck. I wonder if the community suspects them of having ulterior motives. Maybe they think they’ll be expected to attend a ninety-minute presentation if they accept.
Church growth strategies have way too much in common with timeshare methods, but there’s one way the two are significantly different – the timeshare industry continues to grow[i] while the church has entered an era of rapid decline.
The portion of American adults who claimed to be Christians dropped from 78% in 2007 to 63% in 2021.[ii] For almost everyone I know, these hard numbers reflect painful personal experiences. I can’t think of anyone among my middle-aged peers without at least one prodigal among their adult children. I also can’t think of one couple who didn’t devote their best efforts to raising Christian adults. Looking back, it seems those who invested the most in their kids’ faith have received the least return. We’ve grieved with couples as they’ve watched each of their kids become vehement critics of the faith. What’s happening?
I’m not a social scientist but those who are don’t seem to know for sure.[iii] A 2018 Pew survey of the religiously unaffiliated[iv] found a majority agreed with statements such as “I question a lot of religious teachings,” and “I don’t like the positions churches take on social/political issues.” But it’s difficult to track how those respondents reached their positions. Certainly, nothing about basic Christian beliefs or practices changed in 2007.
Maybe that was the problem.
Christianity didn’t change in 2007 but the world did. On January 9th Steve Jobs revealed a music player, a phone, and an internet communications device rolled into one. According to some analysts, the iPhone was the most revolutionary invention of all time.[v] Fifteen years later it’s hard to conceive of some aspect of human life that has not been touched by those ubiquitous screens. Surely religion has not been left untouched by them.
The role of the smartphone in the decline of American Christianity parallels the so-called retail apocalypse which has taken place roughly over the same period. Simply put, the smartphone did to faith what it did to retail. E-commerce had already become a dominant force by 2007 but the smartphone put online shopping in everyone’s pocket. Now shoppers can access the whole internet to find what they want at the best price. Whatever other factors have hastened the shuttering of local stores and malls their demise was already ensured by the simple fact that they could never offer the range of products and prices available online. The same can be said of the church. People no longer need to attend a brick-and-mortar facility to find community, affirmation, or guidance. The internet–made immediately accessible through our smartphones–offers a global marketplace of worldviews each with an online community to support it.
While the retail apocalypse and the rise of the “nones” share some dynamics, they don’t necessarily point to the same conclusions. The shift to e-commerce was and is inevitable due to the inherent superiority of the online marketplace. The failure of Christianity to compete in an ideological marketplace reaches farther in its implications. If, as many of its critics would claim, the Christian faith has survived until now because it has enjoyed special status, then it deserves to pass into oblivion. But what if Christianity is failing because of something we’ve done to it? We mustn’t treat the recent decline in faith as an evolution to observe but as a revelation to heed. The rise of the nones is a call to action either for the rest of us to join them or for us to fearlessly assess whether we’ve gotten our own message very wrong.
I’ve written this book to advocate for that second option and to help with the process. I don’t find anything fundamentally wrong with the Christian faith. On the contrary, when all options are brought forth, Christianity continues to stand head and shoulders above its closest competitors. I admit that I’m biased but even my bias argues for the superiority of the Christian system (more on that later). Sadly, the “faith once delivered to the saints” has become obscured behind layers of doctrinal overgrowth. All our mostly well-intentioned modifications have made our message unfit to answer the challenges of a global forum.
Let me offer into evidence the fact that Christianity initially entered an open arena of competing ideas that it overcame. The Roman Empire in the first century CE allowed its populace extraordinary religious freedom. Consequently, a religious seeker could select from a plethora of beliefs and practices. Ideas were discussed openly and frequently. After all, we get our word, “forum,” from the Romans. Far from enjoying special status, early Christians came into the marketplace, synagogues, temples, homes, and colonnades with an offensive and unlikely story. It shouldn’t have been able to displace established religions, self-congratulatory philosophies, or sensuous mystery cults, but it did.
How?
The same way it will in our day.
[i] https://www.hvs.com/article/9121-The-Timeshare-Industrys-Road-to-Recovery
[ii] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/
[iii] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/
[iv] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/08/why-americas-nones-dont-identify-with-a-religion/
[v] Popular Mechanics and History Channel 101 Most Influential Inventions
