Post-Partisan Faith

Christians seem to be extremely partisan, more so than other religious groups. I recently saw a report on Fox News where the commentators expressed their concern about Obama’s supporters elevating him to the status of savior. I find this a bit ironic since many of Bush’s supporters claim that he was placed their by God. Bush was God’s chosen vessel in their eyes. That should be much more concerning. I’ve never claimed that God chose Obama, nor do I know anyone else who has. I do think he is a genuinely good guy who is trying to do what is right, rather than just playing the God card. It seems the former president did just that. He and his constituents used Christians in order to increase their power. It didn’t turn out so well. We ended up with two ongoing wars (Did God tell Bush to start those two? If so, God hasn’t read the sermon on the Mount.), and a ruined economy.
The solution to the alliance of the North American Protestant Church with the right cannot be fixed by younger generations of Christians allying ourselves with the left. We can work with all people and groups with common goals. This means we may work with both parties on different issues. Christians should join liberals and radicals in the streets to protest war. We should join libertarians when the government oversteps it’s boundaries. We should join conservatives in protecting the unborn. In other ways, we should join with feminists in asserting the equal rights of both sexes. We should join with labor unions, and even socialists and communists if need be, in asserting workers’ rights. We should join with hippies and deep ecologists to protect the environment. We rarely do such things, however. Instead, we focus internally and embrace a gospel of selfishness, wealth, and apathy. We shut out the “evil” world and pray for God’s judgment. How stupid we are!
Where is love if we shut the world out? How can we proclaim the victory of God in Christ if we know no one outside our church? How can we claim anything that can be legitimately called salvation if it’s all about us? Jesus never taught selfishness. We certainly didn’t tell us to shut ourselves off from the world. He enjoyed the company of whores, traitors, bastards, outcasts, and lepers. The church has become no better than those who opposed Jesus’ message. We have sold out. WE have become the enemies of God in our arrogance and hatred. For as I John tells us if we cannot love our neighbors, how can we love God?

What the Church Can Learn from the Justice League

In the amazingly well done cartoon “Justice League Unlimited,” there is an episode where the Justice League saves several small towns from an alien weapon. Ultimately undoing it from the inside, they attempt to buy some time by using a large laser cannon to create a barrier between the expanding alien weapon and the towns in danger. After defeating the alien technology, the United States army keeps the weapon, in case they ever need to use it against the Justice League. Why because the Justice League is a loose cannon. True, they only do good, but they do not hold a strict allegiance to the United States government. This makes them dangerous.
The Church would do good to remember its roots. It was originally a small persecuted movement within the Roman Empire, only doing good as it spread among women and slaves, but a threat to the Pax Romana, a peace dependent upon predatory violence and exploitation. How legitimate is the peace that America is trying to secure? Is the means by which it does so contrary to God’s kingdom? What kind of allegiance, if any, can Christians have to a government that demands unquestioning obedience to its arbitrary mission. Doesn’t the Church’s ecumenical and universal nature transcend national allegiances? The Church should take a lesson from the Justice League. We work for God’s good, which means the good of the world, not the petty interests and power plays of nation-states. Christians must remain independent of such claims. We must be, in a sense, anarchists.

The Irony of My Universalism

My journey toward universalism is a bit ironic, I think. I first began to flirt with the idea in grad school while studying Paul. Reading E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright gave me a wholly different understanding of covenant. Reading Paul, especially Romans gave me an understanding of God’s grace that was, in fact, gracious. At that point, I rejected the idea of hell all together. God’s faithfulness to us was greater than humanity’s unfaithfulness.
Later on, as I struggled with the idea of evil, I rejected universalism in favor of annhilitionism. I took a more material view of it. Some understand it to mean that the unrepentant suffer in hell for a while and are finally destroyed. I took it to mean that they just die, but the those who commit themselves to God’s ways are raised up in the resurrection.
After the death of my brother, I began to see that God’s love is greater than our baggage. My brother was a sinner, he was steeped in it. Despite that, despite choices for which some might label him “wicked,” my family and I still loved him. Despite the fact that he took his own life, we still deeply cared for him and would have done anything to bring him back to us. I began to see that if we cared about my “wicked” brother, if we did not reject him, if we loved him without condition, how much more did God love him? How much more was God’s love for him unconditional. And so I was a universalist again. Though it was not purposeful (my parents are not universalists) this is the greatest lesson they have taught me.
At this point, I still rejected hell and so discarded the parts of the Bible that mentioned it, while emphasizing the parts of the Bible that talked about God’s love. I didn’t think I could reconcile the two. However, when I began reading some books about the subject I discovered that many Christian Universalists do believe in hell. They just believe that it is temporary and purgatorial in nature. Furthermore, they made a strong biblical case for their belief. The irony of the position I now find myself in is that as a universalist I am now more orthodox and more biblical than I was when I wasn’t a universalist. My universalism is a matter of being more conservative, not more liberal. And I find myself in good company. Origen, Clement, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, Hans Urs Von Balthasaar, Karl Barth, and many more throughout the Church’s history have been universalists. Into the 5th century it was actually pretty common. Strange now how it’s considered heresy while the idea of a loving God condemning billions of people to hell, most on a technicality, is considered true and good. What perverse morality. Thank God it isn’t true.