Secular Ethics? Think Again.

It often happens that my casual reading and my preaching schedule curiously overlap. Recently, an overlap happened between George Carlin’s irreverent, absurdist, and at times shockingly foul 2004 book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? and the sermon series in which I’ve been describing the characteristics of our secular age. Without further ado, here’s the relevant snippet from Carlin’s book: 

I’m in the Moral Minority

“I don’t think there’s really such a thing as morality. I think it’s a human construct designed to facilitate the control of people. Values, ethics, legal standards—all of these things are human-generated, and they’re lumped under some vague idea called morality. But suppose humans got it wrong? Suppose there’s no actual, objective morality? Suppose there’s just a natural, worldly, secular, common-sense standard of behavior whose purpose is what’s best for getting along and what’s best for survival? That would be a good system. Why should a system like that be overlaid with a sense of spooky, mystical, judgmental oversight?” (Carlin, George, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, 282) 

Carlin, George, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? p282

One has to be very careful in responding to anything that Carlin writes. A kind of modern, secularist Kierkegaard, he inhabits a series of characters in his prose that may or may not voice what he thinks. One of his characters voices the darkest kind of thoughts he can imagine. Another character spews out the foulest things he can think up. A third character even combines the two in an exposé of absurdism. Sometimes it’s merely shocking, at other times it’s quite funny. On rare occasions, it can be shockingly funny. 

But there is also a baseline voice—what I think comes closest to Carlin’s true voice—and this is when he angrily addresses what he perceives to be absurdity—in this particular book, the absurdities of language and religion. (Note: anger is the common thread through all of Carlin’s comedy.) In this respect, Carlin is never more contemptuous, dismissive, and derisive than when he speaks about religion, and about Christianity in particular. Given this disposition, it is reasonable to assume that the above quote comes about as close as we get to Carlin’s actual thoughts on something. 

Carlin claims that a secular morality is superior to a religious one, and I don’t think he’s alone in claiming this. So, how do we respond to his claim? Well, in one respect, Carlin is merely voicing a quite common attack on Christianity, namely, that the atheist does not need religion to be good. Carlin isn’t wrong, but what he (and many others) may not understand is that Christianity has long held that goodness is not the property of the redeemed alone. There are morally good atheists, and morally good Buddhists, and morally good Muslims. So far so good, but I should note that there is also a more cutting version of the above claim. Not infrequently, I encounter the atheist claim that they “don’t need a sky-daddy to be good.” The suggestion here is that Christian morality is based on fear of punishment, rather than any objective criteria of goodness. The secularist, then, in contrast to the Christian, styles himself or herself as good because he or she is good by intrinsic motivation, rather than any extrinsic factor. “I’m good because goodness is good; not because I’m afraid.” 

These are catchy and appealing claims, and they have rhetorical power inasmuch as they make oneself look good at the humorous expense of another. But the truth of the matter is that Christians have never believed that Christianity’s primary purpose was to make us good. Rather, Christianity saves us from sin and death. We do, however, believe that a consequence of that salvation ought to be moral and spiritual transformation. Where Christianity has been reduced to a project of behavioural modification, it has always done harm. 

But we can dig still deeper into Carlin’s claim that a secular morality would be superior. In this, it is important to recognize that his argument has traction precisely because it fits so nicely within the modern, secularist mindset. This is where my casual reading overlapped with my preaching, because one of the hallmarks of secularism is its conviction that the material world is all there is. Put in other terms, there is no supernatural reality sitting alongside or above our universe. Carl Sagan, in the opening to his science show Cosmos, states it elegantly: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” In this respect, secularism carries with it an attitude not merely of myopic focus on the material, it also espouses an ethic of anti-transcendence. The idea that anything would be above or beyond the material is not only un-testable, it is abhorrent, and the idea that such a transcendent overlay ought to have formative impact on policies and decisions in the present world is laughable, if not evil. Modern secularism is thus an affirmation of the primacy of the material world, combined with a rejection of any authoritative transcendence. 

In light of this secularist mindset, there are two ways I want to query Carlin’s “Moral Minority” quip. The first is to ask where he gets his idea of the good, and the second is to investigate his suggestion of a secular morality—what would it look like? 

First, then, where does he get his idea of good? In the subtext of Carlin’s claim is an idea that there is, indeed, goodness: that some people are good and some are not, and that, furthermore, a purely secular goodness is just as adequate as a ‘subjective’ moral goodness. But what makes one person good and another person not-good? By what standard is one person to be measured against another? 

In any judgment of value—this is the question of good, better, and best—the measurement of one person requires a standard against which to measure that person. Now, it may be easy to identify the good in distinction with, say, radical evil. Most of us would consider ourselves better than Jeffrey Dahmer precisely because we have not murdered, dismembered, and eaten other people. But I’m afraid it’s not so simple, because we need to ask why. Why am I better than Dahmer? Is it because eating people is wrong? Why? What, in the purely secular landscape, actually determines that murder and cannibalism are wrong? I think that the committed secularist will likely appeal to three things: survivability, sociality, and common sense. Cannibalism is wrong because it does not contribute to survivability, is anti-social, and goes against common sense. But a closer examination reveals, unfortunately, that all three considered on the purely secular model, are absurd. 

Survivability is absurd because the universe is winding down to a state of entropic chaos. The endgame of the universe is universal death, and since there is no transcendent (i.e., nothing above or beyond the universe), it follows that there is nothing to escape into in even the wildest dreams of science fiction. If the material universe communicates anything to us about life, it is that it is inexorably planning to wipe it out completely and viciously. If the secularist wants to elevate survival as a motivating factor for practical ethics, we must always ask, “Why?” We’re all going to die, anyway, and everything is ultimately meaningless. 

Sociality is similarly absurd because for as long as humans have existed we have killed one another. If human nature is on the same level of evidence as any other material for scientific study—i.e., as a data set to which we are prohibited from ascribing value—then we have no recourse to good/better/best in describing humanity’s violent tendencies. The best we can say is that sometimes society serves as a temporary holdout to our inner violence. However, on the historic, evidential scale, this holdout is not infrequently mobilized to guide an entire society to attempt the murder and eradication of another. In other words, one common characteristic of human societies is that while they don’t murder within the society, they are happy to murder those outside the society. Often in the name of ‘survivability.’ 

Lastly, common sense is absurd because, on the purely secular model, our thoughts themselves are a rather inconvenient accident of human existence. The universe existed for nearly 13 billion years without our thoughts to influence it, and our thinking is one of the most momentary, startling, and irrelevant features of that timeline. What has common sense, the thinking of minute and ephemeral beings planted on a tiny, obscure, and insignificant wing of the Milky Way, to do with anything? 

Image from the James Webb telescope, each point of light an entire Galaxy. In the words of Douglas Adams, “Space is Big. Really Big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

All this to say, the secular landscape is a landscape that is fundamentally without value—it cannot, by definition, communicate the values of what is right and what is wrong. This is, in fact, the most serious problem with any concept of “secular” goodness, because the concept of good/better/best is itself a fundamentally transcendent idea. To ascribe value to life, or people within life, requires a standard from above them, outside of them. Therefore, to determine whether or not a man or woman is good, simple comparison on the human timeline will always be inadequate—the driving question will be “Good with reference to what? Bad with reference to what?” Survivability, sociality, and common-sense cannot provide such a standard. The only hope for a moral standard that can be applied to all people and all times is an appeal to a transcendent moral standard.  

As I said, there are two lines of inquiry into Carlin’s claim about a secular ethic, and the second is to ask, “What does a purely secular moral ethic look like?” Carlin suggests in his writing that such an ethic would favour ‘survivability.’ I’ve just spent some time, of course, describing how this is an absurdity—the kind of claim the secularist cannot logically make—but for the sake of argument let’s give this one as a freebie. Let’s agree for the moment that surviving is a good, and work out the ethics that follow as a consequence. What happens? 

“Sanctuary!”

An ethic of survivability would need to make decisions about human conduct from the perspective of what maximizes human survivability—not individual human survivability, but the survivability of the race. This distinction is important, because we will be forced to make some very hard decisions that impact individuals, Knowing, however, that they will be done for the race as a whole will allay any outmoded moral hesitations about these decisions. One area where we will have to make these kinds of decisions will be regarding overpopulation. The ultimate survivability of the human race will require regulation of the birth rate. Since humans are terrible at self-regulation, the state will be required to enforce strict policies of birth control. For example, policies that limit how many children a family can have, and then commensurate policies that terminate all pregnancies that fall outside of those limits. 

Survivability will also require a reassessment of resource allocation. Humans that have a higher chance of facilitating the survival of our species ought to be given preferential treatment—they should perhaps be allowed to have more than the standard allotment of children. It follows almost naturally that any sub-optimal human (of below average intelligence, for example) ought to be prohibited from bearing children at all. From this, it follows almost naturally again that any crippled, handicapped, or mentally unstable humans ought to be terminated—ideally before, but occasionally and of necessity after, birth. Lastly, those people who do not contribute to the advancement (and survivability) of the human species will need to be, at minimum, ostracised, and in more serious cases, terminated. This of course includes the elderly, who occasion and outsized drain on resources that can better serve the strong, and also extends to the sexually deviant, those whose orientations by definition do not contribute to survivability. 

The point is this: a commitment to a purely secular ethics that focuses on survivability inevitably descends into eugenics, where a self-selected and self-perpetuating group of human ‘elites’ craft and enforce policies that favour their preservation at the inevitable expense of the rest of the human race. If this sounds suspiciously like Nazism, you’re right to think so. Malcolm Muggeridge, in his essay “The Humane Holocaust,” traces the beginnings of Nazi extermination programmes to the ready experimentation with policies of survivability and eugenics. He writes that “the origins of the holocaust lay, not in Nazi terrorism and anti-semitism, but in pre-Nazi Weimar Germany’s acceptance of euthanasia and mercy-killing as humane and estimable.” What a relief that no such similar policies exist in modern countries today (!). 

Carlin’s thinking, motivated as it is in kneejerk criticism of Christianity, nevertheless voices something many people feel today—that Christian morality is passé, outmoded, and even an active hindrance to the progress of society. The formulation can even take on quite an alarming cast: “The Christian ideas are going to prevent our survival as a species!” But, as I hope is relatively clear from the above, people can only say this if they haven’t thought through the facts. What is more, secular ethics can give no value to human life; it can only be used by certain people to attempt the preservation and prolongation of their own lives—often at the expense of everyone else. 

Progressivism’s Powerless Jesus

I float around a lot of online groups—some of them funny, some of them wholesome, some of them so I can maintain professional connections. But some of the groups I follow are wretched, and I continue to follow the wretched ones because they give me insight into how people very different from me like to think. Several years ago—quite by accident, I assure you!—I joined what turned out to be a group of nationalist white supremacists, located in Australia. I was able to observe, as a fly on the wall, what things got people fired up and motivated. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, and at about the same time, I also joined a group of highly progressive ‘Christians.’ I put the word Christian in scare-quotes because it is not at all clear that any of the members, although they claim church affiliation, retain any real semblance to Christianity. Again, a fly on the wall, I have been able to observe the radically ‘woke’ church from within. 

It is often the case, in my group of progressive Christians, that individual members bemoan the fact that there are inadequate resources for their belief structures. They seem honestly surprised, having bucked the trend of 2000 years of biblical and ecclesiological history, that their replacements are inadequate, underdeveloped, and even unsatisfying. One such moment happened after Easter, when a moderator asked how members had spent their Easter season. This request—made with all the requisite nods to trigger warnings and the need to respect various theological perspectives—led to a discussion of the real meaning of Easter. The following quote, taken from Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether and correcting distortions from the ‘real’ meaning of Easter, was gratefully posted and received: 

This Jesus did not come to suffer and die, to masochistically offer his blood to a sadistic God to pay for our sins, but to liberate us into a new community of joyful life. 

Jesus died on the cross because the mighty of religion and state did not accept his call to repentance and solidarity with the poor, but sought to shore up their system of power and its ideological justifications by silencing the voice of the prophet. His resurrection means that they did not succeed in silencing him. He rose and continues to rise wherever prophets rise, breaking through the system of lies and offering a glimpse of the true God of life who stands against the systems of worldly power. The cross is not a payment for sin or a required sacrifice of our well-being, but the risk Jesus and all people take when they unmask the idols and announce the good news that God is with those who struggle for justice and communicate loving life.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women and Redemption (2012)

Ostensibly, Ruether is redressing perceived errors in theories of substitutionary atonement—and, to her credit, there are frequently gross distortions in how that atonement model is presented. The Jesus she presents in contrast to this more traditional model bears the hallmarks of a revolutionary. He is a “liberator,” opposing the “mighty of religion,” those who rejected his summons to “solidarity with the poor,” because they wanted to defend their own “power.” His revolutionary spirit continues to rise whenever “prophets” (like Ruether?) rise up to stand with Christ—or at least with Christ’s God—against “systems of worldly power.” In summary, the cross has not to do with personal sin but with standing for God against earthly injustice. From my experience, Ruether’s account reads as par for the course in progressive atonement theology. 

It was a few days after reading Ruether’s quote that I had occasion to reread one of Malcolm Muggeridge’s lectures from Christ and the Media. In that lecture, Muggeridge presents a thought-experiment. What if archaeologists, a thousand years from now, uncover a massive cache of our current media? From the evidence of our media and consumption habits, what would they conclude about our society? Of the Christian story and its distortions, Muggeridge surmises the following: 

If any of the archaeologists were interested enough, they could trace the adjustments and distortions of the original Christian texts—always, it goes without saying, ostensibly in the interests of clarification—to conform with the concept of Jesus as a revolutionary leader and reformer, a superior Barabbas or Che Guevara, whose kingdom indubitably was of this world, finding in this textual and doctrinal adjustment an example of the infinite ingenuity of the human mind in shaping everlasting truths to conform with temporal exigencies.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, 55.

To me it is fascinating that Muggeridge, writing in 1976, perceived the trend toward crafting Jesus as a theological revolutionary which bears such evident fruit in the thinking of someone like Ruether. But that middle sentence, almost a throwaway comment, bears further reflection and attention—Jesus as “a superior Barabbas or Che Guevara, whose kingdom indubitably was of this world.” In the Q&A that followed the original lecture, Muggeridge expands on this idea. There he says, 

If you make Christ a revolutionary, then you associate him with power, and there is nothing I can find in the Gospels, that has ever been attributed to him, or that any of the Christian mystics have ever conveyed, which conceivably suggests that his Kingdom could be brought to pass through the exercise of power.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, 91.

The logic may appear opaque at first glance, but this is actually a quite simple—and I believe compelling—claim that Muggeridge is making: if you remove Christ’s spiritual work, you are left with a purely earthly gospel. If you excise Christ’s work to resolve the spiritual problem of sin that stands between humanity and God, then what remains is for Christ to become a merely human revolutionary whose targets are not the redemption of human persons, but the condemnation of earthly injustice alone. If you remove spiritual power, you are left only with categories of earthly power. 

There is no doubt that a critique of power is contained within the Christian narrative; but the witness of our tradition is that the critique of human power is sourced in the supernatural wisdom of God—in the cross that is foolishness to Greeks and an offence to Jews. If we criticize power (and we do, and should, and must!), we critique it from the perspective of the Kingdom of God, that reality inaugurated by the resurrection power of Christ through which He has saved a people for Himself. 

The spiritually neutered gospel of progressive Christians reveals itself to be overly concerned with earthly power. This is the best it can offer humanity, since it has distanced itself from the gospel’s own critique of power. In this way, it trades a greater power for a lesser one; the real, for a shadow of the real. As a result, the best that progressive theology can offer is a critique of earthly power that itself relies on earthly power. Far from escaping the cycle of power and oppression and offering a genuine critique of the world from the perspective of an Eternal Kingdom, progressivism is forced to make use of the inadequate and corrupted tools of earthly power to advance its agenda. In my experience, the most reliable and frequently utilized tool in its kit is that of shame. Note how progressivism’s targeted sting of traditional theology focuses on the shame you ought to feel for believing such outmoded, harmful things. How dare you think religious thoughts that make God a masochist! How dare you espouse a theology that might harm people! How dare you perpetuate corrupted systems of power in your thinking and actions! In so many cases, a simple outrage at traditionalism becomes a surrogate for good arguments. But the deeper criticism remains, because progressivism’s strongest arguments are not birthed from the supernatural love of God, but from the condemning voice of earthly power. 

Karl Popper, in his 1944 critique of Totalitarianism, The Open Society, writes that “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” Popper is speaking of the utopianism created by following figures like Marx and Hegel, but beneath his insight lies the truth to which we are speaking now: that human power is inadequate for the creation of a just society, a heaven on earth. Not only is it inadequate, human power will actively poison the effort. The only power capable of creating just conditions, of bringing the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth, is that power rooted in the cross and resurrection of Christ—foolish, scandalous, otherworldly—which demands an accounting for personal sin. We require supernatural power for our supernatural problems. Without it, there can be no hope for change. 

Spiritual Abuse

I spoke with a young woman recently about a tough situation in her home church. To describe her situation, she utilized the language of ‘spiritual abuse,’ and something about those words made me hesitate. It’s not language I typically use, or appeal to, and the more I reflected on our conversation, a series of questions began to work their way through my mind: What is spiritual abuse? Have I ever experienced it? Why do I feel like it is language that needs special nuance?

The last question is probably the best place to start. I think the language of ‘spiritual abuse,’ like the language of ‘spiritual warfare,’ may be misused in the church. What I mean is that when I encounter a difficult situation, I hesitate to explain those situations by an appeal to spiritual abuse in the same way I hesitate to account for difficult situations in the church by appeal to spiritual warfare. Don’t get me wrong—I believe that spiritual warfare is real, but I think we should look to natural sources of a problem before we appeal to explicitly supernatural sources. In other words, I feel like we should arrive at warfare as an explanation for difficult people and situations by means of a process of elimination. If something goes wrong, it might be spiritual warfare, but it also might be bad planning, or bad timing, or human error. To put it even more bluntly, sometimes the devil made me do it, but it’s far more likely that you were an idiot. Jumping too quickly to the overtly ‘spiritual’ explanation short-circuits the process by which we need to carefully examine our own motives and culpability in a given set of circumstances.

“See, the demons made me do it!”

I also hesitate to use the term ‘spiritual abuse’ because the language of abuse is freighted with quite strong cultural implications. To be labelled an ‘abuser’ is one of the worst things you can be called in today’s world. It implies intentionality and malice, suggesting that the person accused of spiritual abuse has willfully and consciously abused the people under his or her care. While this is sometimes the case (and I will return to these cases at the end), I don’t think most people who perform actions of spiritual abuse in the Church do so willfully, or maliciously, or even intentionally. I think most spiritual abuse can be accounted for by appeal to incompetence. To put this even more specifically, I believe that most spiritual abuse in the church is born from a lack of self-knowledge. This is a claim that may require some explanation.

What is spiritual abuse, and why do I think it comes from a lack of self-knowledge? I think spiritual abuse is, quite simply, the misuse of spiritual authority. Let’s begin by taking a closer look at the concept of authority, because authority is an intrinsic part of our relationships. Some people have been authorized to teach, guide, discipline, correct, model, and love others. The right use of their authority results in the proper teaching, guidance, discipline, correction, modeling, and love of others, while the mis-use of their authority results in vacuous, inept, or abusive relationships between those parties. In every relationship of authority there is an ever-present danger, because every entrusted matter can be misused, resulting in abuse. The authority invested in parents may be the clearest example of this—a parent has been authorized (by virtue of his or her parental role) to do all of the above tasks for their children. They are good parents when they utilize their authority appropriately, and mediocre or bad parents when they fail to use their authority properly (whether it be through neglect or excessive control).

Yes, parental authority even extends to explaining the facts of life!

What, then, is ‘spiritual’ authority? Spiritual authority is the natural authority of relationships as it manifests in a religious context. Speaking as a Christian, we have a religious text (the Bible), a body of dogma (theology), and a historic body of people who steward that book and dogma (the Church). Together these three factors comprise the primary sources of spiritual authority. Within the Church, specific members are authorized to utilize that authority in specific contexts. For example, parents are authorized to raise up their children in the Lord; pastors and elders are authorized to teach, rebuke, and disciple; and every member of the Church is authorized to call one another to greater faithfulness. But in each of these contexts we encounter the ever-present danger of authority—that is, every matter of spiritual authority can be abused. Additional dangers emerge when we contrast earthly authority and spiritual authority. If I am a prison warden, authorized to keep order and peace in a cell block, I may use physical force to enforce my will; as a pastor, I may not beat people into spiritual submission. If I am a parent, authorized to train up and discipline my children, I may hide their toys, or ground them, or take away their allowances; as a pastor, I may not rob or manipulate my people into spiritual submission. If I am a property owner, I may demand that people stay off my lawn, or park away from my drive, or sue them for property damage; but as a pastor, I may not demand or coerce people into doing anything spiritually. Whatever the context and privileges of an earthly authority, when it comes to spiritual matters we who are tasked to act in spiritual authority will find that our hands are uniquely tied. As a pastor I may not bribe, bully, or beat my people into submission; all that I can do is exhort them, and, moreover, when I exhort them, I may not manipulate them through guilt, fear, or shame. Spiritual authority always goes wrong when we make use of worldly tools of authority in its service.

Why, then, do I think that spiritual abuse tied to a lack of self-knowledge? This explanation may appear complex but hang with me for a moment. At the heart of the matter, a spiritual abuser has confused what I want with what God wants. In other words, the spiritual abuser lacks the self-awareness required to distinguish between his or her personal desires and the mandates of ministry. This is why I can, if I am an abuser, appeal so easily to spiritual rhetoric in the service of earthly agenda; in order to get what I want, I slave the Kingdom of God to my personal desires. Spirituality then serves as a tool for manipulation. Examples abound: If you really loved God, you’d obey me. If you really had faith, you’d tithe more. If you were really humble, you’d agree with me. If you knew Jesus, you wouldn’t act like that. In each case spiritual rhetoric is employed to drive someone to do what I want; it is a rhetoric that shows up in building projects and vision statements, in marriage seminars, revivals, conference programs, and elder board minutes. It’s pervasive.

Behind this confusion (between what I want and what God wants) lies a deeper unacknowledged issue—namely, that the situation faced by people with spiritual authority produces anxiety. In short, spiritual authority comes with a deep mandate to powerlessness. It is God and God alone who changes people, not preachers, parents, or Sunday School teachers. But as ministers who are charged with communicating the good news of Jesus Christ, it is all too easy to take on the life-changing aspect of that message as our task. When we do that—forgetting that it is not our job—we revert to worldly methods of power; we manipulate through our words, we bully our people through our actions, we attempt to bribe them. It is in this way that spiritual abuse is born form this gap our self-knowledge, because no minister consciously wants to manipulate or abuse his people into action. But to men and women who haven’t come to terms with this powerlessness—who haven’t permitted that look in the mirror where they begin to come to terms with their own weakness and ineptitude—then such people must rely on their own power. Oblivious to the innate powerlessness of the call to ministry, we utilize the tools of earthly authority in our spiritual mission. Feeling powerless, such a person appeals to methods that ‘work’, even if they are wrong. The result is inevitably a form of abuse.

There are perhaps four more things I want to say about spiritual abusers—each rooted in this lack of self-knowledge. In the first place, I think it is very important to acknowledge the fact that abuse begets abuse. Men and women who abuse spirituality most often learned their habits from other ministers, who themselves didn’t know they were being spiritually abusive. We should not be surprised that ministers who lack self-knowledge struggle to lead others into greater self-knowledge. In some respects this means that spiritual abuse is nothing more than a bad habit—albeit a very bad one. Nevertheless, this situation raises some alarming reflections: if a given pastor models spiritual abuse from the pulpit, in his personal life, and in relationships, then the congregation will begin to learn those lessons tacitly. The pastor who abuses his congregation spiritually will give permission to associate pastors, elders, deacons, lay leaders, and parents to utilize those techniques in the authority they exercise over their wards. (To my mind, this raises again the seriousness of a passage like James 3:1, “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, for we will be judged more harshly.”)

Students at Heritage Christian school dress like their teacher once a week. To be clear, this isn’t abuse–it’s proper formation!

Second, I think it is terribly important to recognize that a spiritual abuser doesn’t know that he or she is abusive. This is, in a way, unsurprising—if spiritual abuse is a product of ignorance, how can you possibly know you’re doing it? This fundamental gap in self-knowledge makes it all the more difficult to grow out of the habits of abuse. But there are a few additional reasons that make this situation even more troublesome. In the first place, to the abuser’s thinking, spiritual abuse works. More often than not, bullying and manipulation can succeed at getting people to change—at least on the surface. (After all, the abuser is someone who has in all likelihood himself or herself been abused spiritually—“It worked for me, didn’t it?”). To this situation is added a troubling logic—if I do something in ministry and it works, that means my ministry is blessed by God. If God has blessed what I am doing, how could it be wrong? In this way, my earthly metric of success reinforces my bad habits. It becomes far more difficult to self-examine when everything appears, on the surface, to be successful and ‘blessed.’ But in the second place, and more importantly, to admit that I am a spiritual abuser will mean admitting my powerlessness. This is a deeply alarming prospect, because it invites a confrontation with anxiety, with sin, with my own history, my wounds, and those places where I am appealing to spiritual matters to control my own anxiety. Growth in self-knowledge is painful, and willful ignorance is a wonderful way to keep that pain at bay.

Third, because the spiritual abuser does not know the boundaries of her self, her sense of spiritual authority has been collapsed into her sense of self. Because I don’t know where I end and God’s authority begins, this is why I can so easily confuse my agenda with God’s agenda—this is the root of the thinking that “my way is Yahweh.” But the more, in ignorance, I am committed to this collapse, the more I can be convinced that I am doing the right thing. Once again, where an idea of success is linked to a concept of blessing, then success in abusive methods will be interpreted as a blessing upon those methods. Because it works, I am right, and God loves me and agrees with me. This situation also produces a wonderful sense of confidence—even an imperviousness to criticism. God is for me, who can be against me? All of this leads to a further side-effect. For many spiritual abusers, they have so deeply identified with their authority that they perceive opposition to that authority as direct opposition to the self. To disagree with or oppose a person in spiritual authority who thinks this way is to violate their sense of self. Oppose the abuser, and they will respond in the strongest possible terms.

The Blues Brothers had some terrifying nuns…

This, in fact, is the fourth observation, because if you stand up to a spiritual abuser, you will be accused on spiritual terms. In fact, the most alarming thing to a spiritual abuser—who at core doesn’t know who she is—is the presence of a person who does know who she is. To the person who has become accustomed to bullying as a way to get what they want, it is deeply alarming to encounter a person who cannot be bullied. In response, they will pull out all the stops, “You’re so prideful!” “You’re not even very spiritual!” “I suspect that she is under the influence of demonic powers!” Sadly, many good people in the Church have been slandered by others, simply because they wouldn’t cave to the unacknowledged anxieties of their spiritual leaders.

I believe that spiritual abuse is a uniquely difficult problem in the church today (perhaps it is the case in all religious contexts, but I can only speak with authority about the Christian one). The unique difficulty is that to break the cycles of abuse we must grow in self-knowledge. But, as I’ve suggested, spiritual abusers are often by disposition immune to such growth in self-knowledge! I can offer only a few provisional suggestions. First, we’ve got to advocate for good theology of ministry—that is, a theology of ministry that properly emphasizes the power of God and the role of our own powerlessness. Second, we’ve got to encourage growth in the baseline of self-knowledge throughout the Church. Since spiritual abuse is a problem in the exercise of authority, I suspect that change in this area will need to begin with ministers, then work its way down into the pews. Third, and most difficultly, spiritual abusers must be answered by men and women who know who they are and cannot be bullied. This is a painful recommendation to make—it means encouraging faithful men and women to be accused of the worst kind of spiritual offenses, to be ostracized, shamed, and manipulated, but, being confident of who they are and who God is, standing firm.

Addendum: I said at the beginning that there are, indeed, situations of malicious spiritual abuse. These are people who manipulate others through spiritual means, and consciously know that they are manipulating others through spiritual means. Such people are psychopaths, and while there are occasionally psychopathic ministers in the Church, I believe such situations are rare (although newsworthy, when they are outed).

The Gospel, Seven Ways (Or, What is the Gospel?)

There’s a Vietnamese dish called “beef seven ways.” It serves beef in a series of, you guessed it, seven different courses: fried, boiled, minced, souped, and so forth. It’s all beef, but presented in a variety of mouth-watering preparations and courses. I am always reminded of this dish when I am asked to tell people what the Gospel is. It’s a question I like—not only because I’m a preacher committed to the Word, but because it gives opportunity to show how there is something of a magnificent variety in the Gospel itself. The Gospel, like beef seven ways, is too big to be served only one way; it can be presented to us in a variety that is spiritually mouth-watering.

Photo Credit: vietvisiontravel.com

“Gospel” is a word that means “Good News.” It is a report, a telling. When the messenger running from the battle of Marathon finished his 26.2-mile sprint (and before he collapsed, dead!), he announced victory. His message was an instance of euangelion—evangelism. He was bringing good news. The church also bears witness to good news. The content of that good news is our Gospel.

But the good news we have to tell isn’t just one thing. I fear that for many people in the church today, the Gospel message is limited to something like the Four Spiritual Laws, or what some have called the Romans Road. You are a sinner, God has sent Christ, Christ died for sin, through faith in Christ you will be saved from sin. For others, the to state the Gospel means to tell a story about a specific model of atonement (often, the model that is called “penal substitutionary atonement”). There is no disputing that these features are part of the good news, but I want to suggest to you that they aren’t the whole of it. The Gospel—the good news of God in Jesus Christ—is bigger than just personal salvation.

Like beef seven ways, I think the Gospel can be presented in a wide variety of ways—all while still being the Gospel! For the remainder of this piece, I want to offer you seven ways we can serve the Gospel. (Might there be more than seven? Of course! But these are my seven favourites!) So, without further ado, here is the Gospel, Seven Ways:  

1) The Gospel, as Jesus preached it, is the good news that the Kingdom of God was at hand. The most common oversight when we talk about the Gospel today is to neglect the fact that our reproductions of the Romans Road look so little like Christ’s Gospel in the New Testament. Consider again what Mark says about Jesus’s preaching at Mark 1:14-15, “Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel.’” This is explicit—that before there was a cross and resurrection there was a Gospel to be believed, and that Gospel is good news about the coming Kingdom of God. What is God’s Kingdom? It is God’s reign, God’s justice, and God’s will for the earth. It is the inbreaking power of God for change, and its coming is fundamentally good news. Because God’s reign is coming, we should repent now of those ways that characterize the earthly kingdoms. To put this good news in other words, “God is coming, so get your act together!”

2) The Gospel, as the apostles preached it, was the good news that God has raised Jesus from the dead. It is an astonishing thing to realize that the apostles, when they preach the Gospel, also don’t talk very much about personal sin and salvation—instead, they talk about the resurrection. For them, this was the good news—good news first carried by the women who were watching the tomb, announced to them first by an angel of God (Luke 24:5-6), “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he is risen!” The resurrection is the Astonishing Fact—that a man came back from the dead, raised to life by the Spirit of God, that in his resurrection lies the firstfruits of the end of the world. Jesus announced that the Kingdom of God was near, in the resurrection of Christ the Kingdom is now here.

3) The Gospel, as the apostles preached it, was the good news that Jesus is King. Once again, there are striking differences between the preaching of the apostles and our modern presentations of the Gospel. Consider again Peter’s summary argument from his Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:36), “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified.” In this presentation of the Gospel we are not yet at personal salvation—here, Peter is announcing the Lordship of King Jesus. Jesus is the anointed one, the promised King of Israel. Jesus is kurios—the Lord Himself—that in encountering Jesus we are encountering the person of very God. Mortimer Arias noted that while Jesus preached the Kingdom, the disciples preach the King. Jesus is King; Christ is the Lord—and it is good news that in him evil has been judged and will be judged; in him will be found freedom for prisoners, release for captives, healing for the sick, freedom for the oppressed. In the Lordship of King Jesus every earthly lordship is judged—all politics and powers and systems and nationalisms are subject to his supreme lordship—so that (Phil 2:10-11) “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The letters at the top of the cross stand for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” (In Latin, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Ioudaeorum.) Pilate, of course, meant it as an insult–but he spoke truer than he imagined.

4) The Gospel is the good news that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, our alienation from God has been removed. We come at last to that element of the Gospel which is most commonly preached—that our sin, which stood between mankind and God, has been eliminated in Christ. This is a message that Paul states clearly in Ephesians 2:1-10—that formerly we were dead in our transgressions, but now in Christ we have been granted new life through his resurrection. This is the good news that Christ’s obedience and death have cancelled out our transgressions, while his resurrection life enables our new life in right relationship to God. Moreover, Paul is keen to note that this Gospel is also the good news that this transaction is effected by means of God’s power, and God’s gift, and not our effort. We don’t earn salvation, nor do we inherit it by means of our genetics. God has given us the gift of salvation in the person and work of Christ—this is the good news that we receive it by faith!

When God declares all foods clean to Peter, Peter gets the message clearly: the Gentiles are now welcome at God’s table!

5) The Gospel is the good news that in the physical body of Jesus a new way for unity has been made for all people—both Jews and Gentiles. When the apostles began their preaching on Pentecost Sunday, they didn’t yet seem to have a vision for how expansive the message of the Gospel was to be—Peter even targets his preaching solely to “the house of Israel.” But God had a bigger plan—His Kingdom, and His King, would be for the whole world, for all people. Interestingly enough, the second half of Ephesians chapter two is also the Gospel. In that passage—verses 11-21, Paul describes how ‘formerly’ we were a divided people—divided by the law—but now we are now, in Christ, a unified people, a new humanity. This new humanity every bit as much the good news for Paul as is the language of personal salvation. This is the good news of the Church, that God has called from out of the world a people for Himself, that through His Spirit they will be made one, perfected, and purified for His purposes—agents and ambassadors of the Kingdom of God.

6) The Gospel is the good news of the Incarnation. Although I began this list with the preaching of the Gospel in Mark, the real beginning of the Gospel was the good news announced to Mary at the Annunciation (Luke 2:31): “Behold,” Gabriel said, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” To Mary, God first announced His plan to invade the world (and a close look at the Magnificat will reveal how politically Mary perceived this announcement!). But in addition to marking the fulfillment of God’s long plan for humanity, embedded in Christ’s birth there is a more fundamental good news: God Himself has taken on flesh, the world which we see around us, material reality, is good enough for God. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis on this point, God likes matter; He made it. It was His idea in the first place. And when Christ took on flesh he condemned once and for all any theology that views the material world as worthless. Subjected to frustration? Yes. Requiring submission and management? Of course. But what must not be missed is that, from day one of creation until now, God’s world is good, and in the incarnation of our Lord God affirms that goodness for all time. There is no greater condemnation of the evils of the world than that God declares the world to be good.

Rublev’s Trinity is a remarkable piece of artwork–note especially the posture of invitation!

7) The Gospel is the good news of the Trinity. I have saved, for last, what is perhaps the most important aspect of all—but since it is the most explicitly theological, I wanted to present those more explicitly biblical elements, first. Before Christ’s coming we knew God to be One, perfect, and holy. He was a monad; solitary, powerful, but alone. With the coming of Christ we have learned that while God is still One, He is also mysteriously Three. The ‘mystery’ here is not a kind of hand-waving over a difficulty, but rather our acknowledgement that God is greater than our concepts. Whether or not we understand the Trinity is immaterial—what matters at this moment is that this revealed doctrine is incredibly good news. Why? Because in God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have access to know and experience God. That because of Christ’s sacrifice, death and resurrection, we receive the Spirit as a deposit and gift—the Spirit makes a way for us to become like Christ, so that we can live in right relationship with the Father. In other words, it is the Trinity that makes it possible for us to know, love, and experience God! And if that isn’t good news, nothing is.

Doubtless there are more ways I could have carved up the Gospel—but these are the seven that are on my heart this week. I could easily have broken some of them into parts—for example, I could have made salvation by faith its own course on the menu. But maybe I’ll ask you, reader. Are there any you would add?

A Long Erosion in the Same Direction: Trump, Evangelicals, and the Poison of Conspiracy Theories

Throughout the past five years I have regularly criticized Donald Trump, and while it remains true that I personally dislike him, that personal dislike has been neither the substance nor source of my criticisms. Instead, my attention has focused on what his presidency and actions have meant for, and within, the community of Christians of which I am a member. I am an Evangelical, and these past years—under the explicit influence and impact of Trump—have revealed many things about Evangelicals that reflect poorly on the Gospel we claim to advocate.

I think we’ve made a bad deal.

I have found, speaking as a Christian to Christians, something deeply troubling in the easy alliance between our tribe and this president. This president has been a Bad Moral Example—he speaks and acts in ways in which we would not allow for our children. The ready defense of his many indiscretions makes a mockery of our public witness—we who claim to uphold the importance of integrity in our public officers have, strangely, given this man a pass. In the end, we look like people who are more hungry for power than for justice. We are the inevitable losers in this exchange.

To pour salt on these wounds, in recent years Christians have increasingly turned upon one another when they criticize Trump. Certain members of the Evangelical world are all too ready to question the credentials and faithfulness of anyone who dares to publicly criticize this particular president. The rhetoric of divisiveness (us/them, conservatives/the libs), the sloganeering and name calling (snowflake, libtard, MAGA), and the all-or-nothing thinking (“Trump’s presidency is the last hope for America!”), have combined in such a way that the Good Guys and Bad Guys are now determined not by their faithfulness or clear thinking but by—ironically enough—a form of political correctness. These factors bear a strange fruit indeed when an upright figure like John Piper becomes an enemy of Evangelicalism for daring to criticize Trump.

Nietzsche once ironically wrote of a “long obedience in the same direction.” His words were ironic because, despiser of Christian rules and regulations as he was, he recognized in them a consistent source of beauty and goodness in the world. But now I fear that we Evangelicals stand together at the end of a long erosion in the same direction—that we Christians, who for so long have warned of the dangers of the slippery slope, have become the victims of one; that, having cozied up to a form of power, we have allowed that power to corrupt our witness.

This corruption has reached a peak in the last weeks. Despite all of the alarming characteristics within Evangelicalism that have been exposed by the Trump presidency, none has been more dangerous—or more toxic to our faith and witness—than those that have emerged in the conclusion of his presidency. I speak specifically with regard to the claims of widespread conspiracy and election fraud. These claims, and our belief in these claims, present perhaps the gravest threat of all to our Christian witness. Allow me to explain why.

I should begin by noting that I grew up near Chicago, and Illinois basically wrote the book on election fraud. It is, indeed, a Thing. It happens, and when corruption reaches a certain stage in civic operations, it becomes difficult to accomplish anything without corruption. But I also know that the resources required to commit a fraud at the level required to hoodwink an entire national election beggars belief—organization, secrecy, money, they simply aren’t there. I’ll tell you why I think this way. When I was young and driving at night—especially late at night—I used to listen to a syndicated radio program called Coast to Coast AM. The program was great fun. They regularly interviewed alien abductees, discussed the Kennedy assassination, and talked endlessly about the mysteries of Area 51. The content was absurd, but at night, driving alone in your car, the voice through the radio worked its comforting magic and became strangely believable. One night, the host was interviewing a former CIA agent. The host was asking questions about government conspiracies, about cover-ups and secrets, and in two short sentences the former agent put a pin to the balloon that is basis of many U.S. Government Conspiracy theories. He said, “The people who run the CIA are basically like the Post Office. Do you think they’re organized enough to keep a thing like this secret?” With that, the absurdity of a nationwide, massive coverup became clear as day. It’s impossible. Nobody knows how to keep quiet about these things. Nobody is organized enough. And therefore it is far more likely that the conspiracy theory is just that—an interesting but ultimately flimsy theory.

Here, with the 2020 election, we face a similar set of incredulous claims—and they are in-credulous in that they defy credulity. And yet we are challenged by many prominent Christian figures to believe that there are widespread conspiracies of election fraud. Eric Metaxas is a prominent example of this, and in articulating his convictions he has quite clearly linked support for Trump to support for the Christian faith. About a month ago, participating in an event called “Global Prayer for US Election Integrity,” Metaxas offered the following comments, drawing first on the distinction between the natural and supernatural,

If we’re going through a time of darkness where in the natural we’re not getting the evidence—or whatever—we need, there is no doubt that we must stand firm. It’s like somebody saying, ‘Oh, you don’t have enough evidence to believe in Jesus.’ We have enough evidence in our hearts. We know him and the enemy is trying harder than anything we have seen in our lives to get us to roll over, to forget about it. (video timestamp 11:52)

This is an astonishing train of thought, because in it something of the very structure of Christian belief has been coopted for political purposes. Metaxas is arguing that belief in election fraud is of a kind with belief in the resurrection of Jesus; that faith might mean knowing a thing is true first and then finding the evidence later; that the nature of faith is belief in the absence of evidence; and with all these there is the suggestion that the nature of belief is a kind of inner fervor. This, to my thinking, is the most troubling development of all, the most dangerous yet to our Evangelical witness.

There are many things to address here. In the first place, Christian faith is not a feeling, it is not a fervor, nor is it a kind of conviction in the absence of evidence. One of the most mis-read verses among Christians is Hebrews 11:1, which states “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In my experience, Christian readers undergo a kind of hypnosis when reading these words—they read, “Now faith,” then gloss the middle of the sentence, and hear, “is unseen.” Faith is invisible, it is like the “leap of faith” in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he doesn’t see the invisible bridge, but must step on it anyway. See? Faith is unseen. But that isn’t what the author of Hebrews says—he says that faith is the assurance, the substance, the material reality of things hoped for. If we look closely we will see that it is, in fact, hope that is unseen. Faith is most definitely seen.

This is, of course, not a new problem. American Christian teaching on faith and the nature of faith in has for too long relied on a misplaced understanding of faith—our theology has been formed more by Stephen Spielberg than by the Bible—and we have allowed ourselves to believe that faith means clinging to things without evidence. This kind of belief—faith as fervor, faith as belief without evidence—characterizes not Christianity, but Mormonism. The book of Mormon documents rivers, cities, and events that don’t’ exist and never happened. No external evidence corroborates the events of the Book of Mormon, and therefore faith for Mormons very much means believing in things without evidence. When Christians ask us to believe in election fraud, even when there is no evidence, then the structure of their ‘faith’ looks more Mormon than Christian.

And yet evidence is at the heart and soul of the Christian faith. On this, 1 John 1:1-3 is explicit, and I will attempt to make it even more explicit by highlighting the words of evidence in bold:  

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us—what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.

The New Testament contains the writings of people who were eyewitnesses to the Christ event. They met him, touched him, heard him, sat with him, watched him die, and met him after he rose from the dead. The whole business of Christianity hangs precipitously on whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead, and even the early Christians knew the stakes. Paul himself, writing in 1 Corinthians 15:16-19, makes this explicit,

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.

Do you see that? If it didn’t happen, we’re the stupidest people on the planet. Everything—and I mean everything—for Christians hangs on the testimony of these eyewitnesses.

This means that, extending from our belief in the evidence of the resurrection, we are a people who care a great deal about evidence, and along with evidence we care about truth. Our commitment is, in fact, uncompromising. Josef Pieper, in his book Happiness and Contemplation, puts it succinctly: “We want to know the truth at any cost, even if the truth should be frightful.” I want to know God, not my idea of God. I want to know the real Jesus, not my idea of Jesus. And if it were indisputably proved tomorrow that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead—if they produced without doubt the desiccated bones of Jesus Christ—then the nature of our faith is such that everything we Christians believe would be over. It would be a frightful truth, but it would be true; and we who have committed to the truth could do no other.

This is the quite the opposite, of course, to the tone set by many public Christians of late—who appear to be measuring the value of a news source based on its agreement with what I already believe. Upset with Fox News for reporting, well, the news—the news that Trump had lost and that no fraud was forthcoming—many conservatives have turned on Fox! The new measure of a news source’s worthiness is whether or not it agrees with me, and apparently masses of conservative Christians have migrated from Fox News to Newsmax, from Facebook to Parler. It begins to look as if agreement means more than information. We have truly entered into strange waters when a media figure like Metaxas wields more authority among Christians than a seasoned pastor like Piper.

But a further reason why claims like Metaxas’s are so damaging is precisely because as Christians we ask other people to believe things. We are in the business of faith, of belief—that’s arguably our main business in the world. What we do is ask people to believe—things like our testimony, our witness to the resurrection of Jesus, the trustworthiness of our tradition, and our commitment to goodness, and truth, and virtue.

But all this is at risk, because what we ask people to believe are real things. Thing that really happened. The basis of the Christian faith is the belief that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, bodily, on the third day after his crucifixion. We believe this because eleven men and three women saw him that day, and then most of them died violently never abandoning their conviction that Christ was alive. They handed their testimony on to others, who met and experienced the risen Jesus, so that today—two thousand years after the event—we believe in the resurrection of Jesus in the same kind of way that we believe Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on the 15^th of April, 1865. It happened. People saw it, and told us about it, passing it on.

Christian faith is not a conspiracy theory. The conspiracy depends upon secrets, deception, hidden evidence, and suggestive connections between events. Christian faith depends on openness, clarity, sound reasoning, and an unbroken line of eyewitness testimony. Consider the words of Chuck Colson, one of Nixon’s advisors, and the only one of his associates who was tried and convicted for the events related to the Watergate scandal. Reflecting on these events years later, he wrote the following in his autobiography, Born Again:

I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world—and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.

Colson has nicely outlined the difference between conspiracy-faith, and Christian-faith—the conspiracy cannot sustain itself, it will break, and under pressure the truth will out; Christian faith is ongoing, it doesn’t break, and under pressure its original adherents refused to break. Their testimony was proved true. So should it be with us who claim Christ.

Therefore when we—whose entire eternity is wagered on the belief in the trustworthiness of these events—when we abuse our belief by associating it with baseless conspiracy theories, when we allow our cultural fears to override overwhelming evidence, then this promises immeasurable damage. What is at stake is more than an election, more than our rights, more than America; what is at stake is our ability to ask people to trust us when we tell them that a man rose bodily from the dead and that belief in him is the means of salvation for humans.

In the end, the more incredible the beliefs we demand of people, the more incredulously they will regard our actual beliefs. It was bad enough when society began to associate the term ‘Evangelical’ with Trump; now, because of our tarnishing of belief, they will associate our disposition of faith with Trump’s fraudulent election claims. Inasmuch as Trump will inevitably fail to execute this particular lie, our faith will be tarnished alongside him. That’s why our evangelical association with conspiracy theories is so very dangerous: because if you are ever again going to ask someone to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a condition for their salvation, you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror about what other things you have linked to that belief.