Chapter 6

Nurturing And Encouraging Conservative Christians

Throughout the planning of my first book on lay pastoral care, A Pastor in Every Pew, I asked a lot of questions of a lot of caregivers in a lot of congregations and worked into the final version of the book as many of their care receivers’ concerns as space allowed. One issue that came up in our conversations and correspondence comes up even more forcefully in many of our churches today. From a church leadership perspective, the issue is the divisiveness of conservative and liberal understandings of the Christian faith. Can anything can be done about it besides choosing up sides and hurling epithets at one another, in the misguided interest of keeping the church’s message free from contamination by wrong-headed theologies? From a caregiving perspective, the issue is the healing of hurt in relationships contaminated by demands that every party to them be of one persuasion to the exclusion of the other. Can there be room for acknowledging strengths as well as weaknesses in the opposite point of view? The discussions in this chapter and the next are attempts to answer these questions in a way which respects the theological perspectives of both conservative and liberal Christians.

At the Center of Conservative Christianity

Toni, a very capable lay shepherd, recently shared with her peer group how personal the growing conservative-liberal divide in her congregation had become for her:

I’m one of those so-called “recovering fundamentalists” who was miserable in the ask no questions church I grew up in, but I can’t just all of a sudden throw aside everything I learned there about God and Jesus and other stuff, even though my friends keep pushing me to do just that. Their oh-so-liberal church is driving me as crazy as my be-like-us-or-go-to-hell one almost did. The conservatives I’ve come to know recently are truly wonderful people, but they’re calling up so many bad memories in me that it’s hard to listen to them for very long. I’m a mess, aren’t I?

What provoked her sharing was an impasse to which she and her present care receiver had come, over the question, in Toni’s terms, of how conservative a Christian had to be and still claim to be a Christian. “Pretty clearly,” Toni told the group, “I’m not Christian enough for her, and that is hitting me right where I live, because I’m not sure I’m Christian enough for me either.” The exchange that especially caught the group’s attention was presented by Toni this way:

Care Receiver: I can’t believe that we could actually wind up divorcing over religion. My husband knew how important my church was to me when we got married, but all I hear from him lately is how no thinking person could possibly believe what they hand out there. To him, it’s all mythology; to me it’s revelation. He’s a deep thinker, and I love him for it. But do I have to give up the church and maybe even God to keep my marriage vow to love and cherish him, no matter what?

Toni: Surely it can’t be either-or. Maybe if you were willing to listen more to what it is that’s bugging him specifically about your beliefs, you might be able to find a compromise. Who knows? You might even discover that you actually agree with him about some of his criticisms.

To the group, Toni then interjected: “See what I mean? That response of mine was about as far from what we’ve all been trained to give as I can imagine. I let my own struggle with being a good conservative override my listening to my care receiver, and all of sudden I’m defending my own slant on it rather than helping her clarify hers.”

As Toni later related, the single most important thing that she took away from the discussion which followed in her group was that there are many ways and not just one of expressing faith gratefully, joyfully, and intentionally from a conservative outlook and theology. By way of examples, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Pentecostalists, and Charismatics all consider themselves conservative in belief and practice, even though their respective outlooks contain significant differences, especially in the area of how much room they give their members to think for themselves. For all the diversity that conservative Christianity as a theology represents, conservative Christians themselves share a number of basic affirmations about God’s nature and will, and about human destiny as God continues to make it known throughout the created order. One care receiver, a self-proclaimed conservative Christian, put it this way to a caregiver whom she thought might be too liberal for her: “I think I’m pretty open-minded on a lot of things, but there is still a bottom line for me when it comes to faith, and I don’t think anybody can help me with my questions who can’t or won’t respect it.” As it turned out, her caregiver was in fact more liberal than she in her understanding of the Christian faith, but not too liberal to respect her care receiver’s “bottom line.” That bottom line is the subject of this section. It will be defined in terms of four convictions which are at the very heart of conservative Christian belief and practice.

The Scriptures

The first of these affirmations is that the Bible, in its entirety, is the principal representation of God’s Word to humankind. The emphasis here is deliberate, and crucial. To conservative Christians, it is only by paying attention to all of the Bible—its convoluted genealogies and tendentious law codes included—that anyone can ever hope to grasp all of what God is revealing and doing on behalf of a suffering, desperate, and disconsolate humanity. If people rely only on the passages in it with which they are comfortable, as “modern” (by conservative standards) theologians all tend to do, they cannot possibly come to a full understanding of the whole truth of God, and they will never become the fully mature Christians that God calls every genuine follower of Jesus Christ to become.

One venerable “catholic” way—that is, a way that is both Roman Catholic and Orthodox—of expressing this perspective is in terms of a fetching suggestion by Alexandrian Christians of the third century, that the Spirit of God often hides in the texts of scripture, awaiting careful, respectful, and prayerful searching before making an appearance in petitioners’ lives. What makes this notion especially worth reflecting upon is that it rules out in advance any knowledge of which scriptural texts are the ones in which the Spirit will most likely be found. Believers simply must be open to all of them. A Protestant way of making the same point is in terms of Martin Luther’s teaching that every passage in the Bible can be read both as an expression of new law—e.g., people must show love to their neighbors, or else—and as an expression of divine grace—e.g., God’s love inspires and empowers people to love him and their neighbors in return.

Christianity and Culture

The second major affirmation of Christian conservatism today is that the Christian faith is a unique orientation toward life which must be carefully distinguished from the myriad social, cultural, and religious ideas and practices that distract true believers from furthering the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ. During a particularly heated discussion in a Christianity and Culture class, one of my students, Andy, began gently admonishing his peers this way: “We always need to keep our minds on the church’s real business, of offering the world an alternative to all the other philosophies out there, because they just don’t work.” I appreciated the genuineness with which Andy offered his perspective, and felt more than a little chagrined over several students’ hasty dismissal of it. Andy’s God was the God about whom St. Paul spoke before the Council of the Areopagus in Athens, “the universal giver of life and breath,” who judges all who claim not to know him by the one man, Jesus, whom he raised from the dead. (Acts 17:25, 31) And the “philosophies” which troubled Andy so much were just the sort of embodiments of human naiveté and pride that Tertullian would condemn 150 years later in his famous question about what Athens could possibly have to do with Jerusalem.

Whether Jesus Christ is the inner substance of all culture, as Paul may have believed, or above culture altogether, as Tertullian almost certainly did believe, he is never merely “in” or “of” it, and it is a principal task of Christians in every generation to make plain to all that this is so, and why it is so. Rather than accommodate willy-nilly the Christian message to other value systems and world-views in the service of relevance, conservative Christians believe that the church must instead make plain the unique significance and saving power of the message on its own terms. Then and only then will Christ’s mission to draw all men and women to himself, on his terms and not theirs, be fulfilled. (John 12:32)

Proclaiming and living the Gospel message

Christian conservatism affirms that the church must take a comprehensive approach to communicating the gospel effectively by transmitting sound teaching authoritatively, by conducting worship according to biblical guidelines, and by defining Christ-centered standards for personal decisions and for social action on behalf of people in need everywhere. Central to this approach is the conviction that no one, whether a believer or not, should ever be in any doubt about what makes living as a Christian different from living according to any and every other value-system, philosophy, or religion.

In the aftermath of 9/11, when many of us were working hard to bring about a new level of understanding between Christian and Muslim members of our community, I had a pleasant and informative chat with a Muslim leader about his perceptions of Christian congregations here and around the country. By the end of our time together, he began to trust me enough to tell me what he really thought:

With respect, Leroy, I have to say that sometimes I just don’t know what to make of your churches. Their members look to me like they believe pretty much whatever they want, worship any way that suits them, and argue all the time about what their leaders tell them to do. (With a broad grin) Things are so much simpler at the mosque!

Although I wondered silently whether life at any mosque is ever that simple, I had no doubt that the opinion of this faithful Muslim was wholly congruent with what most of my conservative Christian friends were saying was wrong with our churches today.

From a conservative Christian perspective, insisting upon sound doctrine, biblically-based worship, and clear rules for deciding and acting is the necessary complement to differentiating, as described previously, what is Christian from what is not Christian. Behind both kinds of effort is the common concern to express a distinctive Christian identity that is at once personal, social, and ecclesial. It is very much like the commitment of Jews, past and present, to maintain themselves as one people under difficult and even catastrophic conditions—of captivity and enslavement, of pitched battles with inhabitants of a land believed to have been promised them by God, of invasion by one alien power after another, of seduction by the allurement of foreign cultures within and beyond their own borders and finally, of forced dispersion across an incomprehensively large and hostile Empire. More especially still, it is like the commitment of first century Christians to remove any possibility of their ever being identified with the pagan world to which they had set themselves in strictest opposition, e.g.:

. . . there are many whose way of life makes them enemies of the cross of Christ. They are heading for destruction, they make appetite their god, they take pride in what should bring shame; their minds are set on earthly things. We, by contrast, are citizens of heaven, and from heaven we expect our deliverer to come, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transfigure our humble bodies, and give them a form like that of his own glorious body, by that power which enables him to make all things subject to himself. (Philippians 3:18-21, REB)

Experiential religion

Finally, conservative Christians affirm that all followers of Jesus Christ should actively seek a deeply inward, transforming relationship with him as their personal Savior. Believing with all of one’s mind that Jesus is Lord is necessary. But by itself, it can never be enough. One must also believe with all one’s heart, with a heart kindled by the powerful sense of being known and loved personally by the One who is also about the work of reconciling the whole world to himself. (2 Corinthians 5:18) Believing on the basis of others’ experiences, testimony, and admirable lives—though necessary at the formative stages of faith—nevertheless can never constitute spiritual maturity in its fullness. With the Beloved Disciple, all genuine followers of Christ must be willing to race to the tomb, enter it, and see for themselves that their Lord has been raised from the dead—for all. (John 20:8)

About the interpretation of the three affirmations described previously, I have found very little disagreement among the most articulate conservative Christians that I know. The situation is a little different, however, with respect to this fourth affirmation. For some conservative Christians, personal encounter with God in Christ or as Holy Spirit is an absolutely essential condition of salvation; without it, no one can rightly claim to be fully a Christian. Others, however, do not see it quite this way. For them, what is essential for faith is hoping and praying openly, honestly, and constantly that Christ will enter each person’s heart and mind and re-create him or her in his own image. But experiential confirmation that Christ has in fact done so is faith’s fulfillment, not its necessary condition. Although this difference of opinion about a matter believed vital to faith is important, it nevertheless does not weaken the fundamental conviction underlying both of the positions just described, that the ground of true faith is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. What these differences of opinion best illustrate is that the most adequate theological orientations are those that provide within their premises, inferences, and transitions room for honoring unique experiences of God, diverse levels of relationships with the church, and independent thinking in general. If they did not, they could not help people very much to honor the commandment that we are to love God with all our minds.

When the Center Fails To Hold

It is difficult to imagine that any truly earnest follower of Jesus Christ would find major fault with conservative Christian theologies at their best. Together, they offer a clear path toward keeping the church’s witness of faith centered in what God is revealing about who he is and what he intends for the world. And they offer a solidly-anchored framework for carrying forward the Christian community’s on-going struggle to understand God’s Word as it is disclosed in the scriptures, interpreted by tradition, and communicated effectively in terms of contemporary experience and reasoned reflection.

For all the strengths of conservative theology as theology, however, Christian conservatism in practice sometimes falls short of its promise to embrace people in ever widening circles of genuinely Christ-centered faith and love. Instead, what happens is an erosion into a steadily hardening dogmatism that drives people into warring camps disputing fruitlessly with each other over whose members are and not really Christian. Tragically, some of the warfare is among conservative Christians themselves and not only with liberals, the uncommitted, and the skeptical. For instance, Fundamentalists and Pentecostals remain deeply divided over how best to understand the relationship between the Divine Word and the Holy Spirit in the life of faith. Further, Pentecostals are at odds with one another over how to integrate the gifts and the fruits of the spirit in the life of faith, just as Fundamentalists are in disagreement over how broadly (viz., “moderately”) to interpret the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. There may be nothing wrong with these varieties of understandings in themselves; scripture and tradition offer ample support for all of them. What is wrong is their advocates’ hard-heartedness to anyone who in conscience subscribes to an understanding that differs from their own.

To borrow a famous verse from Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” whenever its center does not hold, conservative Christianity unleashes anarchy both upon itself and its mission to the world. Rather than celebrate God’s great gift of consistently reliable witnesses to him, uncentered conservative Christians cling frantically to increasingly rigid dogmas of biblical literalism, inerrancy, and infallibility. Rather than open themselves in wonder to the possibility of God’s presence in every human society at all times and everywhere, they denigrate other peoples and religions arrogantly and viciously. Rather than strive for ever deepening understanding of the Christian tradition as a whole—its doctrines, its worship practices, its moral and social teaching—they proclaim their own parochial viewpoints to be the only ones that matter because they are the only ones directly revealed by God. Finally, rather than studying the many ways that men and women come to believe in Jesus as the Christ, they judge the validity of other people’s Christianity solely by the presence and absence of some single kind of experience, whether a blinding encounter with Jesus, a pledging of loyalty to a statement of acceptable beliefs, a conversion experience at an identifiable moment in time, baptism by immersion, speaking in tongues, or whatever. Conservative Christians who are struggling with the possibility of remaining conservative while avoiding these excesses deserve caregivers who are able to help them find their way back to what is best in the conservative outlook.

For all of the anarchy that overly doctrinaire conservative Christians set loose upon Christendom today, nothing within conservative Christianity itself demands a combative attitude like theirs. By returning to its central affirmations, and rejecting the many distortions of them that plague church life today, conservative Christianity can continue to proclaim the Christian message and life with transforming power to people everywhere who are yearning for vision and for reason to hope. Constantly returning to its origins for the sake of recovering its originating power is what conservatism most basically is, whether the conservatism is oriented toward art, social and economic policy, philosophy, politics, or religion.

Getting Back to the Basics

In its most carefully considered formulations, Christian conservatism is more than capable of proclaiming the gospel faithfully and convincingly. Its troubles begin when a hastily contrived version of its outlook is wrongly identified with the outlook as a whole, and then hurled at its opponents—conservatives of other varieties, liberals, uncommitted inquirers, and outright de-bunkers of Christianity alike—out of a false sense of certitude that God’s truth is one truth only, and expressed in one way only. Recovering the vital center of conservative Christianity and distinguishing it from the oversimplifications and outright distortions that weaken its credibility unnecessarily, is the subject of this final section.

The parts and the whole of the Scriptures

There is a better way to emphasize the truth of the whole of the Bible than by insisting upon the inerrancy and infallibility of every word in it. This better way is the way of carefully distinguishing the message of the Bible in the Bible and of interpreting every biblical passage according to the Bible’s message as a whole. By way of illustration: as every Christian knows all too well, there are many passages in the Bible that convey a terrifying vision of punishments to be unleashed by an outraged deity, in the name of exacting recompense for the offenses of a sinful humanity. In their terror, or equally often in their revulsion, faithful Christians and disrespectful skeptics and deniers alike all too often fail to ask the single most important and obvious question about any of these passages: Does it represent the central core of the Christian message, as that message emerges by looking at the Bible in its entirety? Or does it play some other role in the life of faith besides that of defining exhaustively who and what God is? It is difficult to believe that biblical texts that describe only unmitigated wrath could possibly express the whole truth about the Bible’s God, as the following samples from the Revised English Bible’s rendering should make plain:

How can I hand you over, Ephraim,
How can I surrender you, Israel?
How can I make you like Admah
or treat you as Zeboyim?
A change of heart moves me,
Tenderness kindles within me.
I am not going to let loose my fury,
I shall not turn and destroy Ephraim,
for I am God, not a mortal;
I am the Holy One in your midst.
I shall not come with threats. (Hosea 11:8-9)

Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God’s proof of his love toward us (Romans 5:8)

. . . as the result of one misdeed was condemnation for all people, so the result of one righteous act is acquittal and life for all. (Romans 5:18)

[God’s will] is that all should find salvation and come to know the truth. (1 Timothy 2:4)

God’s omnipresence

There is a better way to conserve a sense of Christian identity than by rushing to convert everyone else to one’s own religious point of view. It is the way of seeking out God’s presence, power, love, and grace not only among fellow Christians, but also and especially in societies, culture, ideas, and practices that are quite different from those that Christendom has typically embraced and nurtured. To be sure, the church must always remain faithful to its apostolic mission of bringing people to Christ (by persuasion and not by force.) But its mission is seriously compromised whenever its missioners fail to recognize the Christ who is already in the midst of those to whom they presume to bring him. The God whom Christians adore is the Maker of the heavens and the earth—all the earth, and all who have ever dwelled upon it. Before anything else in creation was, the scriptures make plain, God’s eternal son also was. Before we were, other people were, and the Son was among them, too, shining in their darkness as well as in ours. (John 1:3-5)

One time, I had the opportunity to share this perspective with some very able theological students in an extremely conservative seminary. During the discussion period following my final presentation, one student offered what to me was an especially insightful and helpful response to what I had been trying to say:

Here’s where I’m going with what I think you’re getting at: don’t look at Jesus so much, because he’ll blind you. Look at what he’s looking at, from where he’s doing the looking. Then what God is up to everywhere in the world, and not only in us, will be easier to see.

Immediately, another student jumped in to challenge this statement, on the ground that if we were to take it seriously we would in effect be relegating Jesus to the periphery of our faith as Christians: “It’s pretty simple, really,” he said, “if Jesus is everywhere, he’s nowhere.” While I was struggling for the words I wanted to use in responding, still another member of the group contributed an analogy that clarified well the issues that all of a sudden had loomed up before us:

I can see how it might look that way, and it does look that way to an awful lot of people in my church. To me, though, what it comes down to is this: when I’m working on a paper in my dorm room, I don’t pay any attention to my desk lamp unless the bulb goes out in it. I’m too busy paying attention to what I can see by it. I’m hoping to be a missionary overseas someday, but I absolutely don’t want to be the kind of missionary who goes around grabbing everybody else’s light bulbs and taking them away.

The gospel in an age of religious pluralism

There is a better way to bring out the distinctiveness of the Christian faith than by dogmatically (that is, fearfully) insulating the beliefs one holds, the framework within which one worships, and the rules by which one acts from reexamination and revision. It is the way of openness to new perspectives on Christianity’s past, to the possibility of fresh disclosures by God in the present, and to the central role that convictions of conscience play both in a religiously pluralistic world and in the salvation process itself. For some conservative Christians, this kind of openness suggests an indifferentism to the established foundations of a common faith. Nothing could be further from the truth. As envisioned here, openness serves the purpose of discerning rather than negating the vital center of Christian belief, worship, and ministry.

At coffee hour following a worship service one morning, I quietly listened with several others to a brief exchange between two church leaders whom we knew well and respected greatly:

Shirley: I try really hard to get it through my head what theologians are telling us about what we should believe, but I’m lucky to follow even a third of what they say. And the third I do understand is usually somewhere in the middle of their big sentences and paragraphs! So you can imagine the mish-mash I usually end up with.

Tom: I’m with you Shirley. Faith just shouldn’t be as complicated as these guys make it out to be. What is it that hymn says—“faith of our fathers,” and all that? But you know what? I’m just not as sure about what that is as I once was. What I do know is that I can’t talk about it the way I learned it, at least with people like the Hindus and Muslims I work with now. I don’t like all this questioning and changing things around, but what else can we do?

Shirley: I know what you mean. Remember, I joined this church after being a hard-shell fundamentalist all my life, and I still feel guilty even having some of the books we’ve been reading on my desk, not to mention studying them. I guess I haven’t lost all of my faith yet, though, because I’m still trying my best to hold onto what it means to be a Christian, and not something else.

Tom: Me, too. We’ve just got to have some consensus among us about what we believe, and we ought to worship like Christians and not like rock concert patrons or all those New Age types.

Shirley: I’m ready to concede that a lot of our so-called moral absolutes may not be all that absolute anymore, but I still think that there has to be a code of conduct that we can all agree to as Christians, and that we have to keep on studying and arguing until we get it worked out.

Tom: And praying for God’s guidance in the process.

Struggling as they are with modern life’s many challenges to Christian traditions, Shirley and Tom see clearly that the church can have neither identity nor integrity without Christ-inspired core beliefs, without Christ-centered worship, and without Christ-led decisions and actions on behalf of God’s people everywhere. From at least the middle of the first century, Christian communities have relied heavily on Paul’s summary of the Christian message at 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 to represent the core beliefs without which there can be no faithful witness to the saving work of God in Jesus Christ at all. Further, following the example of the first disciples, most Christians take for granted that the remembrance of Jesus and his ministry is the very center of Christian devotional life, from private prayers through agape meals to sacramental observances. Finally, however difficult it may be to apply ethical principles from times past to present-day moral dilemmas, no true Christian fails to hold dear Jesus’ centering of all Christian action in the two-fold obligation to love God with all one’s soul and to love the neighbor as one loves oneself.

It is one of the greatest paradoxes of all for the church that, underlying the many differences in its beliefs, worship practices, and interactions with the world, there nevertheless abides among its most faithful members a sense of being united in the calling to proclaim and embody one message, one God, and one destiny for all humankind. Fulfilling this calling in an ever-changing, increasingly vulnerable world will most certainly require a greater depth of understanding and conviction than many believers now have about what people very different from them really need. Even more importantly, however, it will require a broader range of openness and receptivity to express that understanding and conviction in ways that will help people everywhere to experience God on God’s own terms and not their own.

The varieties of religious experience

Finally, there is a better way to invite people to seek a personal relationship with God than by imposing upon them the idea that their experiences of Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit require validation by some one particular and traditional sign. By way of examples, some have insisted that one must be driven to one’s knees or the ground in ecstasy, or speak in tongues, or be baptized by immersion, or have a warmed heart, or prophesy truthfully, or offer physical and spiritual healing. For conservative Christians, the better way is to acknowledge God’s gracious, unpredictable, and transforming manifestations of himself under conditions and circumstances very different from those under which his son lived all too briefly in what at the time most of the world regarded as history’s backwaters, far distant from its forward-moving currents.

A highlight of my seminary teaching career was a meeting my school hosted with a leader of the Mar Toma Church in India, a community which its members believe was established by Jesus’ disciple, Thomas, in the early fifties of the first century. This much respected and loved man was in our city to visit members of his communion, including several of the seminary’s own students, and he kindly agreed to our holding a luncheon in his honor, to which we also invited a number of faculty members from neighboring colleges and universities. Our conversation with the Bishop was courteous, frank, enlightening, and very much appreciated by those who attended the luncheon—especially by an Indian faculty member who was loyal to his Hindu upbringing. As we left the building that afternoon, I asked him what he thought of the meeting. I got more of an answer than I bargained for:

I liked it, but probably not for the reasons you might think. As I listened to the Bishop, I kept thinking back to my coming to America thirty years ago from India. I didn’t know what to expect, coming as a Hindu to a country so full of Christians. All our neighbors, so many of my colleagues, the kids at our daughter’s school—all Christians. My wife and I figured we’d better find out more about Christianity, and quick. We read your Gospels, and we couldn’t get beyond Jesus’ saying that he came to bring a sword, not peace. A very violent message. Then, we began to see how important peace actually was to this man. Do you really see this? What I took away from studying your religion was that I have really known Jesus all my life, as the principle of non-violence that is at the center of the Hindu faith. When the Bishop talked about St. Thomas’ coming to India, what went through my mind was that he saw your risen Christ there, already.

I continue to think about this brief exchange, as I do another from years later, with a Buddhist I met at an urban renewal meeting. Not too gently, he asked me if I were “one of those Christians who thinks every other religion is wrong.” Before I could answer, he went on to say: “The Buddha taught that craving material things is the source of all suffering. Jesus told his followers to seek the kingdom of heaven first. You know what I think? They are one and the same person!” The better I got to know this socially aware young man, the more strongly convinced I became that he meant exactly what he said, literally and fully. When I shared this exchange with a faculty colleague, whom I knew to espouse a form of Fundamentalism with great passion, he surprised me with his response: “This is a possibility I want to think about some more.” All of a sudden, my colleague’s conservatism seemed less doctrinaire than I had been thinking it was.