Theology for Women

American culture is endlessly moving through cycles. It emphasizes one end of the spectrum, and then over-compensates by bouncing in the opposite direction. The Republicans are in favor, and then the Democrats take the lead. Spirituality is the flavor of the month, and then atheism has a surge. Even female modesty has experienced a recent rally in the midst of long-term hyper-sexuality.

Cycles are a very real part of the culture we inhabit. And the Church is no exception.

One of the cycles of recent Christian culture has hinged upon the spectrum between personal holiness and social justice. One generation would emphasize the importance of rigorous discipleship and guarding the integrity of the Church. A subsequent generation would find this focus too self-absorbed, and would therefore respond by focusing on the poor and suffering in the world. They would remind the Church of Jesus’ heart for the marginalized, pointing out that the Pharisees emphasized holiness while Jesus emphasized grace.

But the cycle did not end there. Yet another generation would notice a slipping in the area of personal holiness, so it would re-emphasize the significance of one’s lifestyle. What we do with our time, our bodies, our words, our thoughts, what we read and what we listen to–all of these things matter to God and distinguish Christians from secular non-profit organizations. It is our relationship with God through Christ, not our service projects, that make us Christians.

So on the cycle goes. Back and forth and back and forth.

Given this trend of never-ending cycles, where are we right now? In my opinion, we are presently swinging toward the service-oriented end of the spectrum. Our generation has recognized a moral blind spot in the area of social justice, and has begun the necessary work of remedying it.

And let me say that I completely agree with this movement. We need to care for the poor and oppressed so exceptionally that the world takes notice. What’s more, our love for others is an echo of the love God has for the world, and it is our prerogative to reflect that love to the best of our ability.

BUT, let us not swing too far. This is where I fear we are beginning to err. Service to the poor has becomes so trendy that it has come to define the Christian life itself. If you are not supporting certain public policies, if you are not engaged in grass roots ministries to the poor, if you are not volunteering regularly at a soup kitchen or raising awareness about genocide, then you are not walking with Christ.

Now don’t get my wrong–all of those initiatives are fantastic. I support them whole-heartedly. However, at times I am hard-pressed to discern who is more judgmental: proponents of the social justice Gospel, or fundamentalists? Each has their own standards for Christian acceptability–if you are not living the lifestyle that these various camps set forth, then you are not a true Christian. Or at least not a very good one.

With all of this in mind, it’s important that we pause and remember that the most fundamental component of the Gospel is a message of grace, not a requirement of work. The word “Gospel” itself means “good news,” so while we are called to respond to this news, we must be careful not to overshadow the news of God’s love by adding stipulations for His acceptance. God has intervened on our behalf prior to any good work of our own, and for that we praise and follow Him. As my pastor frequently reminds us, religion is about do; the Gospel is about done.

So beware of legalism. There is the typical Pharisaical emphasis on holiness that we all recognize as blatant legalism, but there is a new legalism that is creeping upon us as well. It is far more subtle because it challenges us to love the world to the utmost, but even in this Christ-like action we can compromise the purity of the Gospel.

He was a senior in college and he had been living with his girlfriend for two years. He thought they would get married and live happily ever after. His whole life was ahead of him and everything seemed to be coming together.

But then one afternoon he came home and discovered his girlfriend in bed with his best friend. Blind with rage he left the apartment, got a gun, came back, and shot them both. Thirty years later, he is still in prison serving out his sentence for the two young lives that he cut short.

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The principal of the school never really liked him. He used to have a huge paddle with which he would whack the students upside the back or head whenever they got out of line, but the principal was particularly brutal to this young man. He used to come home with scrapes and bruises from the “punishments” he suffered at the hands of that principal.

Then one day the young man snapped. The principal took the abuse one step too far, and the next thing he knew he had whipped out a knife and was stabbing the principal, over and over and over. He would later learn that he had stabbed the principal over 20 times, so self-defense was not a plausible plea. After having been being found guilty of first degree murder, he had been in prison for decades.

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These are just two of the stories I heard last week. These were also two of the men with whom I worshiped at the prison. Meeting them today, you would never guess that they had committed such heinous crimes. Now they are gentle, loving men, passionate about the Lord and committed to following Him.

These men also know a thing or two about redemption. They are now using their stories to impact the lives of young people around their state. They travel to schools and invite students into the prison, all for the purpose of sharing their tales so that others will not make the same mistakes. God is clearly working through them.

Now in spite of the fact that these men have turned their lives around, I was very much startled by the degree of sympathy I felt for them. As crazy as it may sound, if it were up to me I would probably let them go free! Yes, they had engaged in horrible acts, but now they are different men. They are not the same individuals that they were years ago, and because of that, my heart yearns to show them mercy. Even when I think about the pain and suffering their victim’s families had endured, my heart was still softened toward them.

Strange, right?

At first, I thought my feelings of compassion were misplaced. How could I feel pity for a man who took the life of another? If anything, I should feel pity for the friends and families who were impacted by the crime, but not the perpetrator of the crime.

Well as I have meditated on these feelings more and more, I have come to a wonderful realization. The sympathy and mercy that my heart yearns to show these men, even in the face of profound sin, is a reflection of the very heart of God. Even when confronted with our depraved souls and our selfish lifestyles, God still desires to show us mercy. He still yearns to redeem our lives and give us a second chance.

Mercy in the face of sin: that is the very heartbeat of God. But for me personally, the point at which this divine characteristic becomes the most difficult to embody is in showing that same mercy to myself. How easy it was for me to sympathize with murderers, but I have yet to forgive myself for sins in my past. They still haunt my memory and make me cringe at the thought. I wonder if I will ever let them go.

That said, my experience in that prison was also a lesson in the lavishness of God’s mercy, a mercy we must remember to extend to others, as well as ourselves. Yes, God is a God of justice, and He detests sin more than we can understand, but He also loves us enough to deliver us from it. I think the inmates grasped this concept, and that was the reason for their immense joy. If I could simply wrap my mind around my own forgiveness, then perhaps I might be able to worship with an ecstasy that is comparable to my brothers in chains.

I’ve recently found myself in a number of situations in which preachers and Christians speakers were conveying what, I would call, “half of the Gospel.” By this I mean that they teach parts of the Gospel perfectly, even brilliantly, but also fail to mention key parts of the Gospel. It’s not that these teachers were saying anything wrong, but they were not conveying the whole truth either.

Now this has always bothered me, but I was willing to look past it. After all, God IS love, so it’s great to hear a sermon on loving the poor and caring for the needy. And God IS a God of holiness and judgment, so it’s important to learn about the severe implications that His character has for our lives. Because God is infinite, it would be impossible to encapsulate all that He is into one sermon. And so I rationalized that these messages about “half the Gospel” were ultimately ok. Hearing half the Gospel is better than hearing none of it at all, right?

But recently I’ve started to reconsider this position. In fact, I began to wonder if “half” the Gospel is really even the Gospel at all. Is the Gospel kind of like Math?–I may not know all about Math and its abstracts concepts of calculus and algebra, but I know how to add and subtract, so I can definitively say that I know Math. In the same way, if I only learn one part of the Gospel, can I then claim that I know the Gospel? Or if I preach just one part of the Gospel, can I say that I have actually preached the Gospel?

The answer to this question is a resounding “no.” The Gospel is not like Math at all in that sense. The Gospel, in fact, is more like a cake. As a friend of mine so cleverly put it, if you only have half the ingredients of a cake, you don’t have a cake at all. If you have a couple eggs and some salt, that’s not a cake–that’s scrambled eggs.

And that is what we get when we only preach half the Gospel–we get a scrambled eggs theology that ultimately looks nothing like the Gospel at all.

Some of you may be thinking this is a bit harsh. After all, if God is love, and we preach love, are we not still teaching the heart of God? I would argue no, because preaching God’s love without God’s judgment is to fundamentally misunderstand God’s love in the first place. God’s love is so radical because of the judgment that we deserve. He is a righteous, holy God who has every right to condemn us, yet He does not. Thus to preach a Gospel of love without judgment is to domesticate God into some sort of warm and fuzzy deity in the sky who is devoid of wonder and fear-inspiring awe. It is also to make the cross utterly incoherent. Why would God let His Son endure such a gruesome death if not for his sense of justice?

What’s more, you have to look at the implications of “half the Gospel.” Yes, Jesus cared about the poor, but if our ultimate goal is to feed the poor and clothe the hungry without ever addressing people’s spiritual needs, then what are we left with? Say that we were able to clothe everyone, feed everyone, and heal everyone, would that change eternity one bit? No. Scripture tells us that life on earth is but an instant compared to eternity, so we would be laboring to make one instant better, while ignoring the glaring blind spot of peoples’ eternal needs. As Derek Webb puts it, we would ultimately be clothing corpses.

In this way, half the Gospel is not the Gospel at all–it is either secular social activism, or Pharisaic religiosity, but it is not the Gospel. For that reason, keep your eyes and ears open for these speakers of half-truth. And more importantly, make sure your life preaches the whole truth, because half the truth is actually little more than a dressed up lie.

Over the weekend I went to Camp Caswell for the Summit college leaders retreat. It was a great time to spend with the other leaders I’ll be working with this year, as well as hitting the beach, and talking about our vision.

In addition to those activities, we spent some time in prayer, asking God for revival on the college campuses, and it was during this time that I couldn’t help but feel a little skeptical. I have been to numerous retreats and leadership meetings in which we prayed for spiritual renewal in our region, asking God to do big things for the sake of His name, and that we could be a part of it. And yet, despite all this fervent praying, I haven’t seen much change. Rather than witnessing sweeping revival, it seems more like the Christian culture has barely kept its head above water.

So that got me to thinking–is the church really making a difference? Is all of this praying and laboring really accomplishing anything? Would the world even notice if the church was gone?

In reflecting on this question, I have come to an encouraging realization. Although we don’t always see the kind of radical renewal that we often pray for, the church is still very much at work. Countless social justice organizations are backed by the Christians and funded by churches. So many initiatives to address AIDS in africa and to feed the hungry and to fly in when a natural disaster strikes are all carried out by Christians and their churches.

What’s more, there are a lot of churches throughout the country, and the world, that are growing exponentially. In fact, the largest church in the world is in South Korea, and the number of Christians in China are growing every day. Although the explosion of Christian conversions has not happened right in front of my face, it is nevertheless happening.

But I think that one of the main reasons I feel like the church isn’t doing all that much is because our culture has largely come to take our efforts for granted. I don’t think our nation realizes to what a great extent Christians aid the government in caring for the poor and disenfranchised. If the church suddenly disappeared, there would likely be enormous economic consequences for our country because such a huge financial burden would be placed on the government.

So just because we’ve taken the church’s work for granted, doesn’t mean it’s not at work. Just because I have yet to see sweeping revival does not mean it won’t happen, and that we’re only about keeping our heads above water. On the contrary, the church is very much at work, so I should not lose faith in the church or God’s ability to work through it, simply because I have failed to see the mighty ways in which it is being used.

That leaves us with only one challenge, I suppose. If I, a Christian, am overlooking the church’s presence in this world, then I have no doubt the world is too. How, then, are we to make new marks on this world, and stand out in new ways? How do we continue to be salt in a world that has adjusted to the taste of salt? That is the question…