Sermon: Evangelical Theism

A Sermon Based on Psalm 145: 1-5, 18-22

Back at the turn of the century (for some stupid reason I love saying that phrase when I am applying it to myself), I was Director of Education and Outreach at Protestants for the Common Good, in Chicago.  PCG was faith-based political advocacy organization focusing mostly on statewide legislation.  My job included going to as many congregations as I could to discuss not only our legislative issues but also the scriptural and theological foundations for our advocacy.  PCG was what you might call a “mainline” Protestant organization.  The congregations I visited were mostly Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, UCC, and, of course, Disciples.  On two occasions, however, I was invited to speak to the students at Weaton College, one of the most well-known and highly regarded undergraduate institutions within the Evangelical wing of Christianity.

            Both of my visits to Weaton were delightful.  I confess that the first time I visited the campus I was a little worried about how a conversation with Evangelical students would go.  I understood myself to be about as far away from Evangelical Christianity as one could imagine.  What I discovered was something that I rarely found in more mainline churches: people who really, really wanted to know what God thought about issues like poverty and racial injustice.  Let me be clear, the folks in the mainline churches clearly cared, or at least sorta kinda cared, about poverty and racial injustice.  However, their interest in these topics usually seemed grounded in motivations little different from those of an atheist or an agnostic; people who think God has little relevance to the issues.  The Weaton students, on the other hand, knew that if God cared about these issues, then they should, too.  They knew that it would be impossible to affirm belief in God, impossible to love God with all one’s heart, mind, and strength, and not care about the things that mattered to God.  Thus, if God cares about poverty and injustice, then they knew that they must do so, as well.

Inspired in part by the students at Weaton, I consider myself to be an evangelical theist.  However, any time the words “theist” or “theism” show up in an essay, presentation, or sermon, it is fair to say that matters have already become too abstract, too philosophical.  Theism is just a word for affirming the existence of God and a theist is one who makes this affirmation.  I am not sure what to do about this.  While I am happy to call myself an Evangelical theist, I would not call myself an evangelical Christian, despite the example set by the students at Weaton.  I am indeed happy to tell you why I call myself a Christian, but evangelical Christianity has too much associated with it that I disagree with too deeply for me to ever apply the label to myself.  Just as when I visited Weaton for the first time, I still associate evangelical Christianity with unwarranted and irrational convictions about the nature of the Bible and with a dangerous overconfidence in knowing God’s will for us.  This overconfidence in knowing God’s will leads many evangelical Christians to a kind of Christianity rooted in the fear of damnation and in a desire to separate oneself from those to perceived to be sinners and so deserving of damnation.  Such is not my kind of Christianity, nor is it what I understand by evangelical theism.

            As most of you likely already know, the Greek root of evangelical is “euangelion,” meaning “good news” or “good message.”  It can also be translated as “gospel” which is why we use the word Evangelist to describe the anonymous writers of the four gospels.  So, as an evangelical theist, let me share with you the good news, the good message, of God’s reality.  In the time that remains, I will offer a few basics tenets of evangelical theism, and then suggest two very different understandings of Christianity, one rooted in today’s evangelical Christianity, and one that has been rooted for two thousand years in evangelical theism.

            God is the best answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  That is, claiming that the world was created by God is more coherent, more rational, than saying either that it came into being all by itself or that it was always here.  Nothing comes from nothing.  Despite what some people might tell you about quantum vacuums, claiming that reality just popped into existence is ridiculous.  It is certainly not more rational than affirming a divine origin.  Suggesting that the world has always been in existence is also unsatisfactory.  Everything that we find in the world is contingent, that is, it did not have to be.  That means everything that we experience depends on other things coming into existence and so to do those other things.  Sometimes people liken this to an everlasting chain of dominos, and they suggest that the chain can go infinitely into the past.  I once believed this, likening the history of the world to the surface of a sphere.  You will never find a beginning point on the surface of a sphere.  Thus, if the history of the world were like that surface with dominos continuously falling on it, one could go back in time forever and forward in time, as well.  I no longer think this domino analogy works for reasons that probably exceed what should show up in a sermon.  For now, let me just say that if the conditions that make you and I possible are themselves conditions that wait upon something else, and so on and so on, and if this chain of conditions extends backwards toward infinity, then the conditions that make you and me possible never actually come to be and you and I do not come to be.  But here we are.  Therefore, it cannot be the case that we are made of things that depend on other things before they themselves can exist.  Instead, it must be the case that some reality always already exists.  I call that reality God.

            This God is not only responsible for creation “In the beginning,” this God is responsible for maintaining creation at every moment.  In other words, God really does have the whole world in God’s hands.  Right now, you and I are held by God.  We would literally be nothing without God.  I cannot overstate how wonderful this should make us feel.  We all know that we would not be in this world without parents, but how often do we reflect on the fact that we would be nothing without God.  God is our not just our great parent, but our ultimate parent and we are all God’s children.  With the author of today’s Psalm we too can say to God “Every day will I bless you and praise your name forever and ever.”

            While God is the best answer to why anything exists and continues to exist, God is NOT the answer to why this world or that world exists.  In other words, while God makes the course of history possible, God does not determine that course.  The belief that God is in control of history not only remains pervasive among Christians, it is also perhaps the number one reason why people refuse to believe in God.  If God is in control of everything, then everything that happens is God’s will.  That means that everything we think of as evil, everything that we think of as unjust, is all actually part of God’s plan.  This is an entirely appalling idea.  It is certainly not biblical.  The bible is filled with examples of God being unhappy with the choices that people make and the outcomes caused by those choices.  If God were actually in charge of everything, then God would only have Godself to blame for the choices and outcomes.  This would be a very strange God, indeed, one more in need of therapy than worship.

            This side of evangelical theism, the side that exalts God while not making God in charge of everything, allows people to return to God when they have turned away from God as a result of the crazy ideas about God they have been asked to believe.  A student once came up to me and told me that, as a result of what we had been discussing in class, he was no longer mad at God for taking his father away from him when he was a young boy.  He told me that for so long he had been mad at God after his dad had died from a heart attack.  As a young boy he had correctly reasoned that if God decides when people live and die, then God had decided it was his father’s time to die.  For years, the unfairness of this was obvious to the young boy.  Why were the fathers of other children allowed to live when his father had to die?  This sense of unfairness rightly produced anger toward God.  Discussing the possibility that God could both exist and not decide who lives and dies gave this student a chance to reconsider his relationship with God.  He explained to me that it was now clear him that too many Big Macs and cigarettes were the cause of is father’s heart attack, not God.  Likewise, anyone who has experienced great trauma in their lives and was raised with a robust notion of God being in charge of the world would have very good reason to wonder why God had allowed that trauma to happen.  So many Christians face this dilemma today.  They are left either with the sense that the trauma was a punishment for something that they had done, or that God cannot be trusted.  Evangelical theism insists that God has nothing to do with causing the trauma that occurs in people’s lives and that God can be trusted to be a loving presence in the path toward healing after trauma.

            In addition to being the best answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” God is also the best answer to the question “What makes something good or bad?”  In other words, God creates and God judges.  Evangelical theism insists that goodness is revealed at the heart of reality and that it is from this foundational goodness that all other goodness, and so too the opposite of goodness, is compared.  Again, I think this is not only true, but also rational.  With the Psalmist, I affirm “The Lord is righteous in all his ways, and loving in all his works” (although, to be clear, I would update the Psalmist and avoid using masculine pronouns for God, since God is not a male).  Nontheists, whether of the atheist or agnostic variety, will insist that goodness and badness, right and wrong, can simply be an aspect of reality without any foundational explanation.  Somehow these things just are.  Yet presumably goodness and badness did not just become a part of the world when humans came upon the scene.  Presumably, goodness and badness were always a part of reality.  Additionally, if something is judged rightly to be good or bad here on earth, then it would be judged to be good or bad on Mars, or Alpha Centauri, or any other corner of the universe, as well.  This means that the foundation of goodness and badness must be something that exists always and everywhere.  I know of only one reality in the history of ideas that is affirmed to exist always and everywhere, and that is God.  For this and other reasons, I think that God is the best explanation for what makes our actions right or wrong, and it is to God that we should look for guidance in our choices.

            Let me be very clear.  I think that there are many very good atheists and agnostics.  Theism is not at all required to do good, but I do think it is required to explain why anything is good in the first place.  However, just as evangelical theism affirms that God creates and holds the world in existence from moment to moment, but does not affirm that God determines everything that happens, so too evangelical theists should affirm that God is the source of all goodness and so judges both good and bad, but they should not affirm that what things are good and bad are as obvious as many Christians have insisted they are.  The history of Christianity is replete with examples of Christians insisting that every one of their cultural biases are rooted in God’s will.  Thus, God is used to defend persecuting non-Christians, God is used to defend patriarchy and racial hierarchies, and God is used to defend shunning those who are not heterosexual.  I don’t think God supports any of these things.  That is, while I agree that God is the measure of all things good and bad, I find that most Christians throughout history have done a terrible job of getting that measure correct.

            Given my contention that people have failed to understand the goodness of God, you might rightly ask how this goodness should be understood.  You might rightly wonder what reason I have for not thinking I am just the next example of someone using God as the justification for their own privately held moral beliefs.  Finally, you might wonder what evangelical theism has to do with Christianity.  These are all legitimate concerns, and I am running out of time in this sermon, so let me try to be both clear and concise.

            I think the answer to all of these questions can be found in reflection on the idea that humans are created in “the image” of God.  Lots of theological ink has been spent trying to figure out what this means.  I think the original meaning of this literally had to do with our bodies.  I think there is good reason to believe that the authors of the first chapter of Genesis, not to mention the older second and third chapters, really did think that God had a body, and that our bodies were in the image and likeness of God’s body.  However, over time, this idea of the image of God became less about a literal body image and more about characteristics that we shared with God.  There has been much disagreement about what these characteristics are.  Some say it is love, others say intelligence.

I like both of those answers, but I want to start with the start of this world.  If God is a creator, then we can be like God when we create.  When God is generous to all of reality, enabling it to be even when it did not have to be, then we can be like God, we can live in the image of God, when we are generous.  The generosity of God’s creation is how we differentiate good creating from bad creating.  When we create a future that brings more opportunity to people’s lives, we, like God, are doing what did not have to be done, but which nonetheless is good to do.

We also know that God does not create once and for all, rather God continues to create from moment to moment.  As God holds the world in God’s hands, God cherishes the world, God understands what is good about every corner of creation.  We are like God, living in the image of God, when we cherish creation, when we notice its beauty and its wonder.  Unlike God, we cannot be generous everywhere and all the time, nor can we appreciate every part of the world.  We are limited in our time and abilities.  Unlike God, who is perfect in creation and generosity, and so perfect in love, we are both imperfect and sinful.  We cannot do it all at once and we should not try.  We should not burn ourselves out trying to serve others such that we fail to take care of ourselves and fail to experience the glory of the world around us.  Yet, our imperfection is not an excuse for our failures.  We fail to live in the image of God when we make it harder for others to live in the world.  No doubt, the easiest and most biblical expression of this failure is the rich getting richer on the backs of the poor.  But it also happens in all forms of hatred and in all the false ways that we elevate some people and oppress others.  We decidedly fail to live in the image of God when we get rich off the backs of the poor and when we think that some people are worse than others simply because of their skin color, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation.

For almost the entire history of Christianity, there were two great strands of Christian thought: Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity.  Western Christianity had a peculiar emphasis on crime and punishment.  It placed the idea of original sin at the heart of its theological understanding of Jesus Christ and of the world.  It gave us a Jesus who had to die on the cross just so that God could love us again.  It created Christians who thought it was their business to police the world and punish sinners.  In the process, it created Christians who made themselves feel better only by condemning others.  It is Western Christianity that gives us a Christianity of fear – fear of believing the wrong things, fear of the wrong kind of people, and fear of damnation. 

Unbeknownst to those of us under the influence of this crime and punishment Christianity, another version of Christianity has flourished for as long as Western Christianity has been around.  In Eastern Christianity, the Christianity of the Eastern Orthodox churches, the idea of original sin never took off.  Instead, the central idea of Eastern Orthodoxy is theosis, or divinization.  For these Christians, the incarnation of Jesus Christ makes it possible for all humans to become more and more like God.  I do not see eye to eye with the Eastern Orthodox on the necessity of the incarnation, but I am with them all the way on the idea that we can slowly but surely live more and more in the image of God and so transform our lives to be more like the divine life.

Too many Christians today want to be God’s deputies.  They want to enforce what they think are God’s laws and they have little interest in the flourishing of all of God’s children.  Too many of these Christians want to be ICE agents for Christianity.  These deputies are the natural byproduct of crime and punishment Christianity.  Evangelical theism, on the other hand, asks us to become God’s apprentices.  It encourages us to focus more on the way we can each transform our own lives, rather than imposing and enforcing our beliefs on others.  In the choice between being God’s deputy and God’s apprentice, I encourage you to choose apprenticeship.  You are already created in the image of God.  Use all the days that you have remaining to you to realize more and more what this means.