MATHETΩN

Match the evangelistic pitch to its denomination:

1. If nothing otherworldly happens in your worship service, then the other world must not approve of it, and you must join our church.

2. If you read and find these stories of prehistoric America credible, then you must join our church.

3. If you do not join our church, then you cannot have this bite of deity’s-flesh to make you immortal.

4. If you do not join our church, then you will be tortured an infinite number of years.

5. Other churches are meanies, and, unless you wish to be bullied by them, you must join our church.

A. Apostolic Church
B. Southern Baptist Church
C. Roman Catholic Church
D. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
E. United Church of Christ

“She told the Seattle Times that her eldest son was a ‘good Christian’ …”

(Reported about the mother of Joe McEnroe, who has admitted to police methodically shooting to death six relatives, including two toddlers.)

The pastor is an affable old man, effortlessly dominant in the way Texans can be, slim and dressed in sharp sports-clothes.

He told me a story about “30,000 people in this area unchurched” and “we got about thirty of us from suburbia and said we’re just gonna do this,” and then he said: “What we do is just, you know, preach The Life. They’re all under sin here, anyhow.”

I do not know Protestant lingo, and so I do not know what he meant, really, but it sounded a little bitter and resigned.

“No! I’m a respectable Christian; I don’t do these things” (Senator Larry Craig, while resisting arrest for soliciting sex in an airport bathroom).

03 January 20—

Dear A——:

Your links page has changed—I happened upon the link to S——’s diary the other day. I didn’t read a lot of it, although I have no doubt he’s interesting and fun as all your friends, but I did read his latest, and it made me think. In it he asks (but of course you’ve read it): “Is it okay for a Christian to listen to secular music?” and answers: “I told my [Sunday school class that] things that were not of God, even if they were not bad per se, were a sin … that I wouldn’t listen to any secular music.” Somehow I’ve conceived a burning desire to opine upon this subject, and as I do not keep a diary, and I am prudent enough not to sign his guestbook—well I apologize in advance for oppressing you with my bloviation. Poor A——. Follows some thoughts, in no particular order, on S——’s Sunday school declamation (and might I specify that I do not think him wrong, nor am I silly enough to suppose myself right):

I suggest that it is unchristian: To call anything sin that Jesus Christ did not call sin—well I am not bold enough to do it.

It strikes me as illogical: To call a song sin, I should suppose to find sin in it: a preponderance of sin—let us say above a certain percent. And, further, perhaps we should calculate this percentage thus: P = sin% – (good% × 2)—for we must always value the good and true and beautiful more. Well this arithmetical illustration has put me in mind of another: God = love (I Joh iv.8); that is certainly worth thought.

It is also impractical: How are we to categorize instrumental music? or the alphabet song or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”? Are poems that are “not of God” sin? What of art? Many paintings do not depict the Passion or the vistas of heaven. And what is the alternative to (alleged) musical sin? “Contemporary Christian” music I presume. But while the producers of CCM perhaps make music righteously, they cannot seem to be bothered to make it well. Is God a god of mediocrity? What is lukewarm, we are told, he spits from his mouth (Rev iii.16).

It is specious: What (merely for example) makes P.O.D. “of God”? Is “I feel so alive” in their mouths a tribute to God’s grace because I say it is? This is the sort of thing that reduces salvation to a parlor trick. I am in and you are out because I know the secret code. Perhaps this is petty and forgivable human nature—but when you who are out are to be tortured forever it becomes macabre. Again—to call salvation or sin or damnation or grace anything but what Jesus and his apostles called it is unchristian and dangerous and often absurd.

Now I daresay if we examine more rigorously S——’s statement: That which is not of God is sin; we will recognize that it begs the question: What is not of God? Indeed that question underlies the entire postulate, and without its answer debate is futile. Thus I abandon my earlier arguments and seek to answer: What is not of God? Of course I cannot tell what answer S—— might propose, but I have a proposition of my own. Firstly: There is nothing not of God—God is all and in all (Rom xi.36); secondly: We have been granted by God the will to do as we please (Jam i.13f), and that which we do and those things which we make in rebellion toward God and contrary to his good nature pain him, and he rejects them—they are not of God (I Joh iii.10), while that which we do and those things which we make in gratitude toward God and in unity with his good nature specially please him, and he asks them of us—they are a glory to him (Php i.11). Thus, that which is not sin is of God, and that which glorifies God is specially of God.

Shall we suppose it is a very particular thing that glorifies God? the reciting of a psalm perhaps? Paul Apostle says: “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to God’s glory” (I Cor x.31). If my eating a sandwich glorifies God, then my speaking of it—nay singing of it—can do no less. I venture that an act, a life without sin and with gratitude toward God is an act, a life that glorifies him.

I will not barrage you further, O A——, with thoughts and arguments and questions. I will finally quote for you an essay of Gerard Hopkins on glorifying God; an essay—and an author—of which I am quite fond:

Doctrine, as it is used in the Bible, means simply “teachings”. “When Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine” (Mat vii.28): Jesus’s doctrine is his teachings and parables and is recorded in the Gospels. When the apostles speak of doctrine in their writings, they speak of these teachings of Jesus’s—as indeed they term it (“doctrine of Christ”: Tit ii.10; Heb vi.1; II Joh i.9). It was, then, the teachings of Jesus for which Paul and Peter and John stood steadfast and to which they would brook no contradiction.

Now the teachings of Jesus (God be thanked in his wisdom) are no more accessible to a theologian than to a twelve-year-old child—perhaps indeed less so. For all that is necessary to grasp them (God be thanked in his mystery) are ears that hear and eyes that see (Mar viii.18). Then “where is the wise? where is the mighty? where is the disputer of this world?” Was not Paul a scholar, trained at the feet of sages? Yet says he: I preach the teachings of Jesus “not with wisdom of words,” for “God has chosen the foolish … to confound the wise; … the weak … to confound the mighty.” (See the first letter to the Corinthian believers, chapter one.)

If there be any merit at all in the argument of so-called religious men, it will show itself in several signs. It will be humble and self-deprecating, as Paul’s, which he termed “foolishness” (I Cor i.21). It will freely admit that the teachings of Jesus are not “of any private interpretation” (II Pet i.20) and thus always yield interpretation of Jesus’s teachings to himself and to his Spirit. It will not deny any who claim Jesus, for (said Jesus) “he who is not against us is for us” (Luk ix.50); nor will it embrace any who repudiate him, for (said Jesus) “he who is not with me is against me” (Luk xi.23). It will not turn the body of Jesus against itself (Gal v.15; Php iii.2) nor recognize another head to it than him (Col i.18). It will not teach “for doctrine the commandments of men” (Mat xv.9; Col ii.22) nor forbid that which God allows (Col ii.21; I Tim iv.3) nor speak in hypocrisy—which things stifle and scar the true conscience, the Spirit of Jesus (I Tim iv.2). It will bring neither titillation to the hearer (II Tim iv.3) nor glory to the speaker (I Cor i.29).

Above all, teaching of any merit will be in the words of Jesus, in the Spirit of Jesus, in the mouth of an imitator of Jesus. “Be you followers of me,” Paul taught, “as I also am of Christ” (I Cor xi.1). Such was not John Calvin, I venture—who confessed not Jesus’s kingdom within us (Luk xvii.21; see also Joh xviii.36: “My kingdom is not of this world”), but assumed dictatorship de facto of Geneva, preaching “[the church] must hold sway over high and low … to accuse and to annihilate the refractory.” Such was not John Calvin—who urged Geneva’s judges to burn alive his theological rival. (“Me auctore [it was my doing],” Calvin wrote a friend when his rival was arrested, “and I pray he is condemned to death.”) Rather heed the martyr than the murderer! (See entries John Calvin and Miguel Servetus in Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge [Baker Book House 1950] for more information.)

The weak soul desires to revere a human person and hear his human words, so that it may handle and gaze upon that in which it believes and so that it may unburden itself of the duties of choice and thought. The proud soul desires to speak arcane teachings and hold contentious doctrines, so that it may contemn duller souls and so that it may gain the Kingdom by words and not deeds. But the wise soul desires to see with a single shining eye (Mat vi.22) and to feel with a burning heart (Luk xxiv.32) and to perceive with Another’s mind (Php ii.5), so that it may hear what cannot be heard and see what cannot be seen—and understand what cannot be explained (Joh v.37; Mat xiii.15), and so that it may learn to love impossibly and die—and live (I Joh iii.16).

Exoristos: “What do you suppose entices people to join Islam? It is one of the fastest-growing religions in North America.”

Anonyma: “Hate.”

Exoristos: “Hate of what?”

Anonyma: “They are converting the Black people.”

Yesterday, I was reading one of my mother’s Evangelicalist tracts:

“Without the preaching of hell, no one could be saved. No man will value grace unless he learns what it has saved him from.”

I wonder how the Latter-Day Saints faith has been, for more than a century, among the fastest-growing faiths in the world when it never once warns the stubborn that, if he does not convert, he will be tortured an infinite passage of time?