Saturday, March 16, 2024

“We Would Not Have You Ignorant, Brothers And Sisters…”

On a recent livestream, Boebert quoted a scripture from 1 Timothy and then opined that God is not pleased with works, but only faith.*
I don’t know what verse she quoted, but I doubt it was this one:

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.
Boebert was ridiculed for her venture into theology, but she’s only repeating what she’s been told.

Growing up in Baptist East Texas, I was raised in the culture of the fierce anti-Catholicism that is our American religious heritage, thanks to the Puritans and English history. That’s a long story, but the short version is the bad blood between Elizabeth I and Rome, and the Puritan determination to always ask the question:  WWPopeD?, and do the opposite. I oversimplify to make a point of avoiding anything that smacks of “popery”. It’s an impulse as American as apple pie.

There is a strain in the Reformed branch of Protestantism that harmonizes, to this day, with the Puritan desire to burn away all hints of similarities to the Roman church (their term, let the reader understand). Catholicism places great importance on helping others as a product of being a disciple. I perhaps put that too Protestantly. But works is as important as faith to Catholic doctrine, as it is in much of Protestantism. The roots of my own denomination on this continent were set down by German immigrants who almost immediately set about establishing an orphanage, a hospital, a mental health institution, even a place for boat workers on the Mississippi. As far as I know, all of them still function, almost 200 years later.

You see, there are two emphases in Christianity, both related to soteriology. One emphasizes works, although that’s a reductionist way to describe it. Like the hospital and orphanage, the point is to care for others. Your faith, if you will (I prefer to say “belief,” but explaining that is another discussion, isn’t it?), is expressed in how you care for others; or at least provide for their care. I said this has to do with soteriology, although I’d prefer to teach that it is the central teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. I mean, we don’t have to entangle it with the doctrine of salvation at all. But that’s another discussion, too.

The other strain of Christianity, a strain strong in American Protestantism, teaches that salvation is not only everything, it is the only thing. And while Christianity entangles soteriology with works, the corrective to that was to declare works a false witness of faithfulness. This was meant to make faith something worked out in fear and trembling, rather than acts of kindness and charity to prove God loved you. The problem is, when salvation is the point of being a Christian, it’s very hard to displace yourself from the center and replace self with other. It’s easier to turn salvation personal, and from there make your obligation saving others, make your salvation dependent on your efforts to save others. It becomes the broken echo of the teaching to care for others. In fact, care for others becomes abstract, metaphysical, and obliges you only to get others to think like you. Which doesn’t displace the self so much as it comfortably displaces the other.

I’d even say it displaces God.

It’s an either/or: either we are here to take care of each other, or we are here to save each other. Dorothy Day lived poor among the poor, and recognized the need to accept them as they were, never to “help” them by bringing even the salvation of good works. Day worked hard to respect the poor as people, to treat them as wholly other rather than objects receiving her charity. It’s much harder to do good works from an approach of humility, than to try to persuade someone to think, or believe, as you do. I grew up and lived through the fervor of my Baptist peers convinced that what they thought of as salvation should not be denied to me. The effect, then and in memory now, was one of being invited into a cult; and if I wouldn’t come, I was dismissed like a used Kleenex. My only value was insofar as I thought like them; and I never did. This doesn’t make me superior; and it didn’t shadow my entire childhood. What I’ve told you did happen, but only once, and only from two girls I barely knew and haven’t seen again. I mean only to present it as an example.

This is where we get back to Boebert. You and I may say her statement is, indeed, the opposite of what Jesus said. But she’s just repeating what she’s been taught: that faith is a thing (I don’t think it is. Faith is only trust.  As I say, I’d replace the term with “belief,” but we still have the problem of “believing what you know ain’t so,” in the words of William James. Which is not what I mean at all. So that’s the other discussion.), and that thing has to be common to others, otherwise what’s the point of them? How many people you get to think like you is the central tenet of modern (v. historical, I mean. Yeah, another discussion.) evangelism. That’s the point of the preacher: the man (typically) who “brings people to Jesus.” What else is the point of a revival? (I attended one once, in my hometown. A friend’s church, the one tout le town attended. 5 nights consecutively. I took notes like an anthropologist in New Guinea. I still remember a girl I knew through her boyfriend, a good friend of mine. She was a member of that church (he wasn’t, either), and I remember one night she leaned over to talk to me, unable to take it anymore. She was terribly concerned I wasn’t “getting it;” that my salvation, in short, was at risk.) The church I grew up in taught us to do for others, and provided opportunities for us to volunteer to do just that. But it was because it was right, not because we would be saved if we did.

So it’s a peculiar chopping off of a limb to forego the extra mile by reducing faith to evangelism and giving works the boot. Works become an obstacle to salvation, not a sign of it. And when that happens, it’s easy to see works as inimical to “real” faith. Discarding works also lets you off the hook. If the salvation pitch doesn’t win you over, well…they tried. And why bother with any works if the object of your charity is already damned? I mean, what can you really do for them? And if they aren’t damned, why aren’t they taking care of themselves? Doesn’t God help those who help themselves? Yeah, that’s Poor Richard, but I’m pretty sure a lot of Xians think it’s from Paul, or certainly Proverbs. Boebert may even imagine it’s found in 1 Timothy.

So Boebert is not actually committing bad theology. She’s just repeating the bad theology she’s been taught. Although considering how many people teach it, and how many it is taught to, it’s arrogant to say they are wrong, but I am right. So I’ll only say I disagree; and that I understand why she said what she said. And that, yes, I think she’s wrong. 

But who am I to judge? I disagree with her idea; I don’t accept it. But that doesn’t mean I want her to agree with me. I just wanted to note what had happened.

*I don’t personally think God is pleased by works or faith, but by us being pleased because we live in the basileia tou theou and are all working to be last of all and servant of all. Because then all is well and all manner of thing is well.

And that’s what Xianity is really all about, Charlie Brown. Much, much, much longer discussion, of course.


at

No comments:

Post a Comment