Saturday, February 18, 2017

500, Part 4: More Gospel Errors

One of the gigantic lies of Christian history is "semi-Pelagianism." It no longer exists under the historical garb of the 6th century. It's modern clothing, as one would expect, has a kind of hipster vibe to it.

The pastors who push it are entirely entertaining. They tell lots of stories, and "relate" to their congregations over the stuff of every day life, like shopping at Costco, or the difficulty of finding a tattoo shop that will do Greek, or how awesome thrift stores are. They use the Bible to illustrate their illustrations. 

In my time in Christian education, I have been exposed to many preachers of the "gospel" like this. I give one example from more recent times: This particular youth pastor had the beard, the skinny jeans, the edgy teen vocabulary. He was 26, and apparently had never seen a theology book in his life. He paced around on stage with all the charisma and intensity of a broadway actor doing a one man show, a kind of mix between stand-up and dramatic monologue. The audience was constantly harassed to match his emotional energy.

The essence of this modern semi-pelagianism is "Jesus as Purveyor of Self-Esteem." Jesus was sent to help us see the untapped good that is within us. And when we see the sin within us, He assures us that the cross is there to remind us that He will endure anything for us because He loves us. He came to join us in our sin and to love us there. I once heard the same "gospel" from Bob Goff, bestselling promoter of nice Christianity. 

The essence of this modern semi-Pelagian gospel can be captured as such: 

You have made mistakes.
You keep making mistakes.
Jesus says you are still good. He sees the good in you.
You are so awesome that Jesus died to purchase you.
So don't get down on yourself. Jesus still thinks you are totes amazing.

Like all lies, there is a thread of truth here. The major error in it is that it neglects the ground of God's love. The self-esteem gospel locates the basis of God's love in the beloved. It says we really are lovely, but we make mistakes. We must, however, remember that "God don't make junk!" Forgiveness is all about God looking the other way when an otherwise good and lovely person messes up. Jesus assures a reassessment of how good we are by dying on the cross for us. 

In the self-esteem gospel, the cross becomes a kind of vague background, and the individual and his or her inherent goodness comes to the foreground. The purveyor of self-esteem says that Jesus went to the cross to display the magnitude of God's love for sinners, which involves a radical demonstration of His tolerance for sinful people. In other words, whatever sinful thing you can do, even nailing His own son to the cross, can be absorbed by God. This is known as the moral influence theory of the atonement (so, we get two heresies for the price of one). Christians are to see this radical love of God for His enemies and the goodness within them will be awakened by the noble act of love. In this theory, there really is nothing wrong with sinners; instead, their native goodness is asleep or imprisoned within them. They only require something that will activate their latent goodness. Jesus' death and resurrection awakens the good within people. 

The true gospel grounds the love of God in the incomprehensible love of the lover. God's love is not His capacity to find something lovely about us, but rather it is His inexplicably loving character that grants righteousness to unlovely people, thus making unlovely people lovely. Without this love, we have every reason to have a miserable self-esteem. We are not otherwise lovely people needing to be reminded of the fact. We are wicked, darkened, blinded haters of God, fully deserving of the bottomless wrath of God. The Triune God in love secures the only solution. God's just wrath will be absorbed by God the Son rather than exhausting its unfathomable miseries upon us. 

The true gospel says that whatever good in us remains, it is the residue of Eden, so fully poisoned by sin that God must in justice destroy it. But in His mysterious love He elects to destroy The Son, our substitute. And further He promises to do nothing less than utterly destroy and rebuild those who are found in Christ by faith. In short, the gospel is simply this: When sinful beings and this loving God collide, there can be no other outcome for the sinful being than for him to be made like God. The living God does not admire your latent goodness; He rather supplies all your goodness in Jesus Christ. If you believe that, you are a Christian; if you don't, you are not!