Bad Theology: Teaching for Sunday 28 September at St. John's Lancaster

Statue of St. Michael in Mexico City

Tomorrow is the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel.  Taken alongside of a discussion we had in Wednesday morning Bible study last week about the second coming of Christ and the state of the blessed dead, I have decided that today might be a good opportunity to address bad theology.  Bad theology comes in many forms.  Sometimes it grows out of the twisting of Scripture to fit our preconceptions or agenda of how society ought to be.  Sometimes it grows out of the angst of injustice or aloneness which causes a person to reject the authority of the Bible or of the Church.  Sometimes it arises from oversimplification (which we call proof-texting), or over complexity (which we call being nuanced.)  Without doubt, there are other sources of bad theology as well.  But today I would like to focus on what I might call folk theology in modern America.  I'll start with the topic of "Angels, Holiness, and the Sovereignty of God."  My second point will address "The cult of self-esteem and the heresy of universalism."  Finally, I will look at "Hippies and Heroes: redefining the kingdom of heaven in our own image."  My hope is that today's brief introduction will call all of us to re-examine our beliefs about God, the Church, and the World, and help us to reconcile our own beliefs with the teachings of the Bible, which is the Word of God.

Card shops all across America are replete with pictures of angels.  For the most part they are either sweet Victorian cherubs with musical instruments and lots of pastel ribbons, or rather dreamy and androgynous winged creatures with harps sitting on rather non-descript and cloudy backgrounds.  They stand in stark contrast to the heavenly messengers of the Scripture.  On the iconostasis of Holy Cross Carpathian Orthodox Church in Columbus, the angels of God are portrayed as strong Byzantine warriors.  In like manner, at Christ Cathedral in Lexington, Kentucky, the four Archangels of Scripture and pious legend flank the great commission clad in full Flemish plate armor.  The Church artists rightly point out that an angel is a fearful being who serves as the divine messenger and representative.  They are emblematic of God's holiness and his sovereignty, that is of his otherness, purity, and power.  Certainly, there are many places in the Bible which show us the mercy and kindness and peace of God, which the card angels might be thought to represent, but when we focus on the false view of God as Santa and angels as heavenly balladeers, we not only perpetuate wrong beliefs, we teach our children and our neighbors that God is someone other than who he says he is.  The upshot of it all is that God tends to become a last resort, a generous uncle, or an understanding mentor.  We lose sight of the fact that as he is our Redeemer, so is he our Judge.  We forget that while salvation brings relief and forgiveness, it also brings purification and transformation and changed behavior.  We tend to value the significance of our own decisions and thoughts over his place as rightful sovereign ruler of all creation.  In short, we as a culture tend to sentimentalize God into a rather kind hearted and indulgent being who can be summoned in our time of need and who sometimes helps us  get through a tough time.  While our culture sometimes imagines that he can be a formidable bringer of judgment and justice, we imagine that he primarily ought to do so in support of our party or national interests.  He becomes in the minds of so many a deity on a rope, god with a lower case g, to be sported as fashion directs and to be called upon as a last resort. 

That brings me to part two of today's teaching: "The Cult of Self-esteem and the Heresy of Universalism."  As you know, pretty much everything in the world is about me.  Everywhere I go, people look at me and say, "wow, what a font of knowledge and fashion plate that Father Pursley is, with his big ears and his thinning white hair and his clothes (and ideas) straight out of the 1970 JC Penny's catalogue!"  Now I hope you know I am joking when I say these things.  But the joke does illustrate the point that we live in a "me centered" era where personal ideals and individual choice are valued above community identity and the common good.  Somewhere along the line we have forgotten President Kennedy's admonition, drawn from Cicero, his great Roman mentor, that we should "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."  I suppose our focus on feeling good about ourselves, even in the face of scarcity of evidence to justify the same, grows largely out of our very civil desire to be nice and to be liked, and out of our very laudable commitment to equality of opportunity in the social, civil, and educational realms.  But in theology, it has led to a very irrational reluctance to accept scriptural definitions and expectations.  We claim the moral high ground and say "I'm not called to be a judge- that is God's job."  It sounds good, and we imagine it is the ultimate fulfilling of the golden rule, that we do unto others as we would have others to do unto ourselves.  I would argue that in reality it is a rejection of Scriptural authority in our lives, and leads us to an ill-considered and extreme form of libertarianism (and I say that as one who leans to libertarianism) which ignores the reality of evil in the world and seeks to avoid the hard and sometimes unpleasant work of living together in an harmonious and mutually respectful society.  Certainly we are not called to be judgmental, nor to control each other for the sake of control, but we can only live together in peace and mutual prosperity as we determine to submit to and enforce the basic tenets of civility, self-control, and respect for each other.  A corollary of this rather out of context "I'm not called to judge" theology has been our general acceptance as Americans of universalism.  Universalism is the idea that a loving God would not condemn anyone, so we must all eventually get to heaven.  One hears this doctrine in country music in songs like "Come on in, you did the best that you could do," or "Go rest high upon the mountain."  The resurgence of belief in what I must call "unprincipled reincarnation" is another evidence of this basic desire that we have to be nice and assume that everyone is in heaven, even if all of the evidence might seem to indicate otherwise.  Note that there is a "principled re-incarnation" which is a part of the unified field theory of several eastern religions.  Those religions are not Christian, but they have carefully thought out theologies and are logically consistent to a significant degree.  The reincarnation I have heard espoused by nominally Christian Americans is a very different belief from that of our Buddhist or Hindu neighbors.  But perhaps the Universalism that impacts us most in the American churches is the propensity of pastors and priests like myself to preach everyone into heaven.  It is the easiest thing to do at a funeral, and it makes the family feel good, but it is very dishonest to so focus on the good points of a person's life (and everyone does have some good points- even Mussolini made the trains run on time!)  To focus on a false view of the goodness of the deceased leaves everyone present with the false view that there is no hell, no judgment, and no holy God and no need for forgiveness.  According to Scripture, the watchman who proclaims such a message dooms his own soul by leading the multitudes astray and away from God.  This is not to say that every funeral must be doom and gloom, and that we ought never to illustrate the grace and character of God by reference to the life of the deceased, but it is to say that we cannot bless what God has cursed, and that we all must be honest with ourselves and each other.  This must be done in an appropriate, kind, and pastoral way, but it still must be done.

Finally, my diatribe against American pop-religion draws to a close with a brief examination of our propensity to define religion according to our own agendas and images.  Let me give you a couple of common examples.  Contrary to popular belief, St. Francis, who's feast falls on Saturday and which we will celebrate today, was not a wandering hippie committed to socialist ideals and free love and preaching to birds.  He was rather a committed Christian called by God to rebuild the church and convert those outside the kingdom of God.  He saw the special needs of the poor in a society where poverty and insecurity and disease were widespread, and in culturally effective ways prophetically led the Church to understand more clearly that people are the true treasury of the church, and that every man and woman and boy and girl is important to God.  He demonstrated great courage in not only confronting the powerful of his day in Europe, but by traveling to Egypt during the Crusades to tell Islamic leaders about the love of Jesus.  Now, from the other side of the political spectrum, lest any of us be left out, the United States, which I love and served for nearly 23 years as a soldier, is not God's nation, nor God's exclusive instrument in the world.  Ancient Israel filled that role, as the Church does today, but when we attempt to portray America as the Commonwealth of God, we are being unfaithful to our own constitution and to the Bible.  Surely God has used this nation to act in the world, as he has used many other nations in history.  To say this does not imply that there is a moral equivalency between the United States and Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, or Mao's China, or the Islamic State.  But it does underline an important truth.  The Bible tells us that even the kings of Persia and Babylon were mere tools in his hand.  The Sovereign God of Heaven and Earth works through all nations and all human institutions to accomplish his will, whether or not they are willing to acknowledge him or his way.  When we attempt to portray our nation above all others as God's nation, we invariably look down on other people made in his image, and often end up putting a human institution, even if it is a very good human institution, in the place of God.  In both of these ways and in so many others throughout history, we humans have redefined the things of God to match our own agendas and dreams- to justify and sanctify our own policies and actions, and that, my friends, is idolatry.  It reminds us of that observation often credited to the great and cynical Rosseau, that we obviously love God, because we are always trying to remake him in our own images.

And so the end of the matter is this.  Let us all as Christians commit to read, study,  and discuss our Bibles prayerfully and in the historic community of the universal Church, so that we come to know more precisely the character of God, and the implications of that character in our own lives.  Let us see the damage that is done to the people we love when we practice un-scriptural theology.  May God help us to understand how we sometimes lull people into a sentimental agnosticism or push them into a troubled rejection of our Lord because we have misrepresented him by our beliefs, our words, our attitudes, or our actions.  Let us comprehend the eternal significance of our theology believed and lived, and let us all be transformed more perfectly into the image of God the Father, through the love of Jesus the Son, and in the power of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.