Christian tribalism, part 2: the god who only loves his friends

I won’t do much summarizing of Part 1. Read it. It’s good. Basically, Christians often claim to have some special access to God’s salvation. But they really shouldn’t not just because it’s kind of mean or “close-minded” but, more importantly, because it defeats their whole purpose for existing.

For several months, I’ve been revisiting and reflecting on this brilliant clip from a lecture given by Pete Rollins at Rob Bell’s Poets, Priests, and Prophets conference:

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I’m still trying to figure out all that has captivated me here, but I know it has to do, at least in part, with how it seems so much the opposite of the always arrogant “I got saved” theology that characterizes so much of North American Christianity.

I need to confess that it hurts a little, and my internal critic goes kind of nutty, anytime someone says to me, “I like you because your one of those calmer sorts of Christians, not like the Bible thumping religious freaks.” I get the sentiment and I have no plans of beating anyone over the head with an annotated NRSV anytime soon. But what hurts is the perception that the difference between me and those “religious freaks” is a difference of degree rather than kind, that they’re simply more intense about Jesus than I am but essentially believe the same things about him.

They don’t.

And if there is a difference of degree—if one of us, said “religious freak” or myself, is more amped about God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ—I’d probably reverse that popular perception. The problem with “I got saved” theology isn’t that it makes too much of God’s salvation but that it makes far too little. It’s not that “religious freaks” are too excited that God is good. It’s that they’re excited about a god who isn’t nearly good enough.

If you haven’t already, watch the short clip above, and I’ll try to show you what I mean.

Anytime someone stands up and says proudly, “I know I’m saved, because I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior,” they’re unwittingly saying, “My god’s ability to save people is so weak and inert that it needs me to activate it through my mental assent.”

This is a far cry from the God of Jesus Christ who, out of radical grace, “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt. 5.45). Their petty, quibbling deity only loves those who love him, something that Jesus says even the craven tax collectors do (v. 46). It seems like this would raise an obvious question: when Jesus asks us to love and forgive our enemies, is he asking us to be better than some small-minded, putz of a god? Or rather, is he telling us to love the unloveable because this is precisely how the real God is (v. 48)?  

Notice the little ironies that occur when we compare the “I got saved” Christian above, who proudly claims, “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior,” to Pete Rollins, who claims, “I deny the resurrection.” The “I got saved” Christian, we might imagine, searches desperately day and night for the perfect apology (a rationalization or explanation for a certain belief or what Rollins calls a “power discourse”[1]) with which he might beat down the arguments of his “secular” friends in order to persuade them (and himself) of the rightness of his thinking. But by making the truth of the resurrection depend so heavily on his own mental agreement—by making his own verbal confirmation the active ingredient in God’s love—he has a funny way of turning “the resurrection” into an outgrowth of his own ego, not an act of God that happened with or without anyone else’s consent.

No wonder so many in our culture become so belligerent and defensive when you question their version of “resurrection faith,” it veritably doesn’t exist outside the chemicals and movements of their mind. I don’t just mean that non-believers would see it this way. These Christians themselves seem wary that their doctrines, their worldview and even their God might just be hanging perilously by a neurological thread.

By way of contrast, Rollins, with his nonchalance about making a “case” for the resurrection but his adamancy about living into its implications (standing up for those who are on their knees, crying out for those whose tongues have been torn out, etc.), has a funny way of letting the resurrection have a reality outside himself.

I once read that the otherwise very pious theologian Karl Barth’s belief in the radical “otherness” of God, the gaping distance that separates God’s ways from humanity’s ways, was precisely what allowed him to have a carefree drink and a cigar in the parlor. Similarly, Rollin’s version of the resurrection story doesn’t seem to depend on him at all for its reality. Yet it can be revealed wherever and whenever he manages to live up to his discipleship calling.

Making no effort to prove his “orthodox” adherence to some bloodless doctrine about the resurrection, Rollins skips right to what resurrection living looks like. He paints a picture of resurrection’s beauty which we already recognize in our hearts when we see it, yet which happens outside of us and regardless of us.

When we learn of a God who made the decision to resurrect and reconcile the world unilaterally, that is, without consulting any of us, that will be the first and biggest step toward the end of Christian tribalism.